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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14021 ***
+
+LORD OF THE WORLD
+
+BY ROBERT HUGH BENSON
+
+Dedication
+
+CLAVI DOMUS DAVID
+
+PREFACE
+
+I am perfectly aware that this is a terribly sensational book, and open
+to innumerable criticisms on that account, as well as on many others.
+But I did not know how else to express the principles I desired (and
+which I passionately believe to be true) except by producing their lines
+to a sensational point. I have tried, however, not to scream unduly
+loud, and to retain, so far as possible, reverence and consideration for
+the opinions of other people. Whether I have succeeded in that attempt
+is quite another matter.
+
+Robert Hugh Benson.
+
+CAMBRIDGE 1907.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+PROLOGUE
+
+BOOK I
+
+THE ADVENT
+
+BOOK II
+
+THE ENCOUNTER
+
+BOOK III
+
+THE VICTORY
+
+
+Persons who do not like tiresome prologues, need not read this one. It
+is essential only to the situation, not to the story.
+
+
+
+
+PROLOGUE
+
+“You must give me a moment,” said the old man, leaning back.
+
+Percy resettled himself in his chair and waited, chin on hand.
+
+It was a very silent room in which the three men sat, furnished with the
+extreme common sense of the period. It had neither window nor door; for
+it was now sixty years since the world, recognising that space is not
+confined to the surface of the globe, had begun to burrow in earnest.
+Old Mr. Templeton’s house stood some forty feet below the level of the
+Thames embankment, in what was considered a somewhat commodious
+position, for he had only a hundred yards to walk before he reached the
+station of the Second Central Motor-circle, and a quarter of a mile to
+the volor-station at Blackfriars. He was over ninety years old, however,
+and seldom left his house now. The room itself was lined throughout with
+the delicate green jade-enamel prescribed by the Board of Health, and
+was suffused with the artificial sunlight discovered by the great Reuter
+forty years before; it had the colour-tone of a spring wood, and was
+warmed and ventilated through the classical frieze grating to the exact
+temperature of 18 degrees Centigrade. Mr. Templeton was a plain man,
+content to live as his father had lived before him. The furniture, too,
+was a little old-fashioned in make and design, constructed however
+according to the prevailing system of soft asbestos enamel welded over
+iron, indestructible, pleasant to the touch, and resembling mahogany. A
+couple of book-cases well filled ran on either side of the bronze
+pedestal electric fire before which sat the three men; and in the
+further corners stood the hydraulic lifts that gave entrance, the one to
+the bedroom, the other to the corridor fifty feet up which opened on to
+the Embankment.
+
+Father Percy Franklin, the elder of the two priests, was rather a
+remarkable-looking man, not more than thirty-five years old, but with
+hair that was white throughout; his grey eyes, under black eyebrows,
+were peculiarly bright and almost passionate; but his prominent nose and
+chin and the extreme decisiveness of his mouth reassured the observer as
+to his will. Strangers usually looked twice at him.
+
+Father Francis, however, sitting in his upright chair on the other side
+of the hearth, brought down the average; for, though his brown eyes were
+pleasant and pathetic, there was no strength in his face; there was even
+a tendency to feminine melancholy in the corners of his mouth and the
+marked droop of his eyelids.
+
+Mr. Templeton was just a very old man, with a strong face in folds,
+clean-shaven like the rest of the world, and was now lying back on his
+water-pillows with the quilt over his feet.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At last he spoke, glancing first at Percy, on his left.
+
+“Well,” he said, “it is a great business to remember exactly; but this
+is how I put it to myself.”
+
+“In England our party was first seriously alarmed at the Labour
+Parliament of 1917. That showed us how deeply Herveism had impregnated
+the whole social atmosphere. There had been Socialists before, but none
+like Gustave Herve in his old age--at least no one of the same power.
+He, perhaps you have read, taught absolute Materialism and Socialism
+developed to their logical issues. Patriotism, he said, was a relic of
+barbarism; and sensual enjoyment was the only certain good. Of course,
+every one laughed at him. It was said that without religion there could
+be no adequate motive among the masses for even the simplest social
+order. But he was right, it seemed. After the fall of the French Church
+at the beginning of the century and the massacres of 1914, the
+bourgeoisie settled down to organise itself; and that extraordinary
+movement began in earnest, pushed through by the middle classes, with no
+patriotism, no class distinctions, practically no army. Of course,
+Freemasonry directed it all. This spread to Germany, where the influence
+of Karl Marx had already---”
+
+“Yes, sir,” put in Percy smoothly, “but what of England, if you don’t
+mind---”
+
+“Ah, yes; England. Well, in 1917 the Labour party gathered up the reins,
+and Communism really began. That was long before I can remember, of
+course, but my father used to date it from then. The only wonder was
+that things did not go forward more quickly; but I suppose there was a
+good deal of Tory leaven left. Besides, centuries generally run slower
+than is expected, especially after beginning with an impulse. But the
+new order began then; and the Communists have never suffered a serious
+reverse since, except the little one in ’25. Blenkin founded ‘The New
+People’ then; and the ‘Times’ dropped out; but it was not, strangely
+enough, till ’35 that the House of Lords fell for the last time. The
+Established Church had gone finally in ’29.”
+
+“And the religious effect of that?” asked Percy swiftly, as the old man
+paused to cough slightly, lifting his inhaler. The priest was anxious to
+keep to the point.
+
+“It was an effect itself,” said the other, “rather than a cause. You
+see, the Ritualists, as they used to call them, after a desperate
+attempt to get into the Labour swim, came into the Church after the
+Convocation of ’19, when the Nicene Creed dropped out; and there was no
+real enthusiasm except among them. But so far as there was an effect
+from the final Disestablishment, I think it was that what was left of
+the State Church melted into the Free Church, and the Free Church was,
+after all, nothing more than a little sentiment. The Bible was
+completely given up as an authority after the renewed German attacks in
+the twenties; and the Divinity of our Lord, some think, had gone all but
+in name by the beginning of the century. The Kenotic theory had provided
+for that. Then there was that strange little movement among the Free
+Churchmen even earlier; when ministers who did no more than follow the
+swim--who were sensitive to draughts, so to speak--broke off from their
+old positions. It is curious to read in the history of the time how they
+were hailed as independent thinkers. It was just exactly what they were
+not.... Where was I? Oh, yes.... Well, that cleared the ground for us,
+and the Church made extraordinary progress for a while--extraordinary,
+that is, under the circumstances, because you must remember, things were
+very different from twenty, or even ten, years before. I mean that,
+roughly speaking, the severing of the sheep and the goats had begun. The
+religious people were practically all Catholics and Individualists; the
+irreligious people rejected the supernatural altogether, and were, to a
+man, Materialists and Communists. But we made progress because we had a
+few exceptional men--Delaney the philosopher, McArthur and Largent, the
+philanthropists, and so on. It really seemed as if Delaney and his
+disciples might carry everything before them. You remember his
+‘Analogy’? Oh, yes, it is all in the text-books....
+
+“Well, then, at the close of the Vatican Council, which had been called
+in the nineteenth century, and never dissolved, we lost a great number
+through the final definitions. The ‘Exodus of the Intellectuals’ the
+world called it---”
+
+“The Biblical decisions,” put in the younger priest.
+
+“That partly; and the whole conflict that began with the rise of
+Modernism at the beginning of the century but much more the condemnation
+of Delaney, and of the New Transcendentalism generally, as it was then
+understood. He died outside the Church, you know. Then there was the
+condemnation of Sciotti’s book on Comparative Religion.... After that
+the Communists went on by strides, although by very slow ones. It seems
+extraordinary to you, I dare say, but you cannot imagine the excitement
+when the _Necessary Trades Bill_ became law in ’60. People thought that
+all enterprise would stop when so many professions were nationalised;
+but, you know, it didn’t. Certainly the nation was behind it.”
+
+“What year was the _Two-Thirds Majority Bill_ passed?” asked Percy.
+
+“Oh! long before--within a year or two of the fall of the House of
+Lords. It was necessary, I think, or the Individualists would have gone
+raving mad.... Well, the _Necessary Trades Bill_ was inevitable: people
+had begun to see that even so far back as the time when the railways
+were municipalised. For a while there was a burst of art; because all
+the Individualists who could went in for it (it was then that the Toller
+school was founded); but they soon drifted back into Government
+employment; after all, the six-per-cent limit for all individual
+enterprise was not much of a temptation; and Government paid well.”
+
+Percy shook his head.
+
+“Yes; but I cannot understand the present state of affairs. You said
+just now that things went slowly?”
+
+“Yes,” said the old man, “but you must remember the Poor Laws. That
+established the Communists for ever. Certainly Braithwaite knew his
+business.”
+
+The younger priest looked up inquiringly.
+
+“The abolition of the old workhouse system,” said Mr. Templeton. “It is
+all ancient history to you, of course; but I remember as if it was
+yesterday. It was that which brought down what was still called the
+Monarchy and the Universities.”
+
+“Ah,” said Percy. “I should like to hear you talk about that, sir.”
+
+“Presently, father.... Well, this is what Braithwaite did. By the old
+system all paupers were treated alike, and resented it. By the new
+system there were the three grades that we have now, and the
+enfranchisement of the two higher grades. Only the absolutely worthless
+were assigned to the third grade, and treated more or less as
+criminals--of course after careful examination. Then there was the
+reorganisation of the Old Age Pensions. Well, don’t you see how strong
+that made the Communists? The Individualists--they were still called
+Tories when I was a boy--the Individualists have had no chance since.
+They are no more than a worn-out drag now. The whole of the working
+classes--and that meant ninety-nine of a hundred--were all against
+them.”
+
+Percy looked up; but the other went on.
+
+“Then there was the Prison Reform Bill under Macpherson, and the
+abolition of capital punishment; there was the final Education Act of
+’59, whereby dogmatic secularism was established; the practical
+abolition of inheritance under the reformation of the Death Duties---”
+
+“I forget what the old system was,” said Percy.
+
+“Why, it seems incredible, but the old system was that all paid alike.
+First came the Heirloom Act, and then the change by which inherited
+wealth paid three times the duty of earned wealth, leading up to the
+acceptance of Karl Marx’s doctrines in ’89--but the former came in
+’77.... Well, all these things kept England up to the level of the
+Continent; she had only been just in time to join in with the final
+scheme of Western Free Trade. That was the first effect, you remember,
+of the Socialists’ victory in Germany.”
+
+“And how did we keep out of the Eastern War?” asked Percy anxiously.
+
+“Oh! that’s a long story; but, in a word, America stopped us; so we lost
+India and Australia. I think that was the nearest to the downfall of the
+Communists since ’25. But Braithwaite got out of it very cleverly by
+getting us the protectorate of South Africa once and for all. He was an
+old man then, too.”
+
+Mr. Templeton stopped to cough again. Father Francis sighed and shifted
+in his chair.
+
+“And America?” asked Percy.
+
+“Ah! all that is very complicated. But she knew her strength and annexed
+Canada the same year. That was when we were at our weakest.”
+
+Percy stood up.
+
+“Have you a Comparative Atlas, sir?” he asked.
+
+The old man pointed to a shelf.
+
+“There,” he said.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Percy looked at the sheets a minute or two in silence, spreading them on
+his knees.
+
+“It is all much simpler, certainly,” he murmured, glancing first at the
+old complicated colouring of the beginning of the twentieth century, and
+then at the three great washes of the twenty-first.
+
+He moved his finger along Asia. The words EASTERN EMPIRE ran across the
+pale yellow, from the Ural Mountains on the left to the Behring Straits
+on the right, curling round in giant letters through India, Australia,
+and New Zealand. He glanced at the red; it was considerably smaller, but
+still important enough, considering that it covered not only Europe
+proper, but all Russia up to the Ural Mountains, and Africa to the
+south. The blue-labelled AMERICAN REPUBLIC swept over the whole of that
+continent, and disappeared right round to the left of the Western
+Hemisphere in a shower of blue sparks on the white sea.
+
+“Yes, it’s simpler,” said the old man drily.
+
+Percy shut the book and set it by his chair.
+
+“And what next, sir? What will happen?”
+
+The old Tory statesman smiled.
+
+“God knows,” he said. “If the Eastern Empire chooses to move, we can do
+nothing. I don’t know why they have not moved. I suppose it is because
+of religious differences.”
+
+“Europe will not split?” asked the priest.
+
+“No, no. We know our danger now. And America would certainly help us.
+But, all the same, God help us--or you, I should rather say--if the
+Empire does move! She knows her strength at last.”
+
+There was silence for a moment or two. A faint vibration trembled
+through the deep-sunk room as some huge machine went past on the broad
+boulevard overhead.
+
+“Prophesy, sir,” said Percy suddenly. “I mean about religion.”
+
+Mr. Templeton inhaled another long breath from his instrument. Then
+again he took up his discourse.
+
+“Briefly,” he said, “there are three forces--Catholicism,
+Humanitarianism, and the Eastern religions. About the third I cannot
+prophesy, though I think the Sufis will be victorious. Anything may
+happen; Esotericism is making enormous strides--and that means
+Pantheism; and the blending of the Chinese and Japanese dynasties throws
+out all our calculations. But in Europe and America, there is no doubt
+that the struggle lies between the other two. We can neglect everything
+else. And, I think, if you wish me to say what I think, that, humanly
+speaking, Catholicism will decrease rapidly now. It is perfectly true
+that Protestantism is dead. Men do recognise at last that a supernatural
+Religion involves an absolute authority, and that Private Judgment in
+matters of faith is nothing else than the beginning of disintegration.
+And it is also true that since the Catholic Church is the only
+institution that even claims supernatural authority, with all its
+merciless logic, she has again the allegiance of practically all
+Christians who have any supernatural belief left. There are a few
+faddists left, especially in America and here; but they are negligible.
+That is all very well; but, on the other hand, you must remember that
+Humanitarianism, contrary to all persons’ expectations, is becoming an
+actual religion itself, though anti-supernatural. It is Pantheism; it is
+developing a ritual under Freemasonry; it has a creed, ‘God is Man,’ and
+the rest. It has therefore a real food of a sort to offer to religious
+cravings; it idealises, and yet it makes no demand upon the spiritual
+faculties. Then, they have the use of all the churches except ours, and
+all the Cathedrals; and they are beginning at last to encourage
+sentiment. Then, they may display their symbols and we may not: I think
+that they will be established legally in another ten years at the
+latest.
+
+“Now, we Catholics, remember, are losing; we have lost steadily for more
+than fifty years. I suppose that we have, nominally, about one-fortieth
+of America now--and that is the result of the Catholic movement of the
+early twenties. In France and Spain we are nowhere; in Germany we are
+less. We hold our position in the East, certainly; but even there we
+have not more than one in two hundred--so the statistics say--and we are
+scattered. In Italy? Well, we have Rome again to ourselves, but nothing
+else; here, we have Ireland altogether and perhaps one in sixty of
+England, Wales and Scotland; but we had one in forty seventy years ago.
+Then there is the enormous progress of psychology--all clean against us
+for at least a century. First, you see, there was Materialism, pure and
+simple that failed more or less--it was too crude--until psychology came
+to the rescue. Now psychology claims all the rest of the ground; and the
+supernatural sense seems accounted for. That’s the claim. No, father, we
+are losing; and we shall go on losing, and I think we must even be ready
+for a catastrophe at any moment.”
+
+“But---” began Percy.
+
+“You think that weak for an old man on the edge of the grave. Well, it
+is what I think. I see no hope. In fact, it seems to me that even now
+something may come on us quickly. No; I see no hope until---”
+
+Percy looked up sharply.
+
+“Until our Lord comes back,” said the old statesman.
+
+Father Francis sighed once more, and there fell a silence.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+“And the fall of the Universities?” said Percy at last.
+
+“My dear father, it was exactly like the fall of the Monasteries under
+Henry VIII--the same results, the same arguments, the same incidents.
+They were the strongholds of Individualism, as the Monasteries were the
+strongholds of Papalism; and they were regarded with the same kind of
+awe and envy. Then the usual sort of remarks began about the amount of
+port wine drunk; and suddenly people said that they had done their work,
+that the inmates were mistaking means for ends; and there was a great
+deal more reason for saying it. After all, granted the supernatural,
+Religious Houses are an obvious consequence; but the object of secular
+education is presumably the production of something visible--either
+character or competence; and it became quite impossible to prove that
+the Universities produced either--which was worth having. The
+distinction between ου and με is not an end in itself;
+and the kind of person produced by its study was not one which appealed
+to England in the twentieth century. I am not sure that it appealed even
+to me much (and I was always a strong Individualist)--except by way of
+pathos---”
+
+“Yes?” said Percy.
+
+“Oh, it was pathetic enough. The Science Schools of Cambridge and the
+Colonial Department of Oxford were the last hope; and then those went.
+The old dons crept about with their books, but nobody wanted them--they
+were too purely theoretical; some drifted into the poorhouses, first or
+second grade; some were taken care of by charitable clergymen; there was
+that attempt to concentrate in Dublin; but it failed, and people soon
+forgot them. The buildings, as you know, were used for all kinds of
+things. Oxford became an engineering establishment for a while, and
+Cambridge a kind of Government laboratory. I was at King’s College, you
+know. Of course it was all as horrible as it could be--though I am glad
+they kept the chapel open even as a museum. It was not nice to see the
+chantries filled with anatomical specimens. However, I don’t think it
+was much worse than keeping stoves and surplices in them.”
+
+“What happened to you?”
+
+“Oh! I was in Parliament very soon; and I had a little money of my own,
+too. But it was very hard on some of them; they had little pensions, at
+least all who were past work. And yet, I don’t know: I suppose it had
+to come. They were very little more than picturesque survivals, you
+know; and had not even the grace of a religious faith about them.”
+
+Percy sighed again, looking at the humorously reminiscent face of the
+old man. Then he suddenly changed the subject again.
+
+“What about this European parliament?” he said.
+
+The old man started.
+
+“Oh!... I think it will pass,” he said, “if a man can be found to push
+it. All this last century has been leading up to it, as you see.
+Patriotism has been dying fast; but it ought to have died, like slavery
+and so forth, under the influence of the Catholic Church. As it is, the
+work has been done without the Church; and the result is that the world
+is beginning to range itself against us: it is an organised antagonism--
+a kind of Catholic anti-Church. Democracy has done what the Divine
+Monarchy should have done. If the proposal passes I think we may expect
+something like persecution once more.... But, again, the Eastern
+invasion may save us, if it comes off.... I do not know....”
+
+Percy sat still yet a moment; then he stood up suddenly.
+
+“I must go, sir,” he said, relapsing into Esperanto. “It is past
+nineteen o’clock. Thank you so much. Are you coming, father?”
+
+Father Francis stood up also, in the dark grey suit permitted to
+priests, and took up his hat.
+
+“Well, father,” said the old man again, “come again some day, if I
+haven’t been too discursive. I suppose you have to write your letter
+yet?”
+
+Percy nodded.
+
+“I did half of it this morning,” he said, “but I felt I wanted another
+bird’s-eye view before I could understand properly: I am so grateful to
+you for giving it me. It is really a great labour, this daily letter to
+the Cardinal-Protector. I am thinking of resigning if I am allowed.”
+
+“My dear father, don’t do that. If I may say so to your face, I think
+you have a very shrewd mind; and unless Rome has balanced information
+she can do nothing. I don’t suppose your colleagues are as careful as
+yourself.”
+
+Percy smiled, lifting his dark eyebrows deprecatingly.
+
+“Come, father,” he said.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The two priests parted at the steps of the corridor, and Percy stood for
+a minute or two staring out at the familiar autumn scene, trying to
+understand what it all meant. What he had heard downstairs seemed
+strangely to illuminate that vision of splendid prosperity that lay
+before him.
+
+The air was as bright as day; artificial sunlight had carried all before
+it, and London now knew no difference between dark and light. He stood
+in a kind of glazed cloister, heavily floored with a preparation of
+rubber on which footsteps made no sound. Beneath him, at the foot of the
+stairs, poured an endless double line of persons severed by a partition,
+going to right and left, noiselessly, except for the murmur of Esperanto
+talking that sounded ceaselessly as they went. Through the clear,
+hardened glass of the public passage showed a broad sleek black roadway,
+ribbed from side to side, and puckered in the centre, significantly
+empty, but even as he stood there a note sounded far away from Old
+Westminster, like the hum of a giant hive, rising as it came, and an
+instant later a transparent thing shot past, flashing from every angle,
+and the note died to a hum again and a silence as the great Government
+motor from the south whirled eastwards with the mails. This was a
+privileged roadway; nothing but state-vehicles were allowed to use it,
+and those at a speed not exceeding one hundred miles an hour.
+
+Other noises were subdued in this city of rubber; the passenger-circles
+were a hundred yards away, and the subterranean traffic lay too deep for
+anything but a vibration to make itself felt. It was to remove this
+vibration, and silence the hum of the ordinary vehicles, that the
+Government experts had been working for the last twenty years.
+
+Once again before he moved there came a long cry from overhead,
+startlingly beautiful and piercing, and, as he lifted his eyes from the
+glimpse of the steady river which alone had refused to be transformed,
+he saw high above him against the heavy illuminated clouds, a long
+slender object, glowing with soft light, slide northwards and vanish on
+outstretched wings. That musical cry, he told himself, was the voice of
+one of the European line of volors announcing its arrival in the capital
+of Great Britain.
+
+“Until our Lord comes back,” he thought to himself; and for an instant
+the old misery stabbed at his heart. How difficult it was to hold the
+eyes focussed on that far horizon when this world lay in the foreground
+so compelling in its splendour and its strength! Oh, he had argued with
+Father Francis an hour ago that size was not the same as greatness, and
+that an insistent external could not exclude a subtle internal; and he
+had believed what he had then said; but the doubt yet remained till he
+silenced it by a fierce effort, crying in his heart to the Poor Man of
+Nazareth to keep his heart as the heart of a little child.
+
+Then he set his lips, wondering how long Father Francis would bear the
+pressure, and went down the steps.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I-THE ADVENT
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+I
+
+Oliver Brand, the new member for Croydon (4), sat in his study, looking
+out of the window over the top of his typewriter.
+
+His house stood facing northwards at the extreme end of a spur of the
+Surrey Hills, now cut and tunnelled out of all recognition; only to a
+Communist the view was an inspiriting one. Immediately below the wide
+windows the embanked ground fell away rapidly for perhaps a hundred
+feet, ending in a high wall, and beyond that the world and works of men
+were triumphant as far as eye could see. Two vast tracks like streaked
+race-courses, each not less than a quarter of a mile in width, and sunk
+twenty feet below the surface of the ground, swept up to a meeting a
+mile ahead at the huge junction. Of those, that on his left was the
+First Trunk road to Brighton, inscribed in capital letters in the
+Railroad Guide, that to the right the Second Trunk to the Tunbridge and
+Hastings district. Each was divided length-ways by a cement wall, on one
+side of which, on steel rails, ran the electric trams, and on the other
+lay the motor-track itself again divided into three, on which ran, first
+the Government coaches at a speed of one hundred and fifty miles an
+hour, second the private motors at not more than sixty, third the cheap
+Government line at thirty, with stations every five miles. This was
+further bordered by a road confined to pedestrians, cyclists and
+ordinary cars on which no vehicle was allowed to move at more than
+twelve miles an hour.
+
+Beyond these great tracks lay an immense plain of house-roofs, with
+short towers here and there marking public buildings, from the Caterham
+district on the left to Croydon in front, all clear and bright in
+smokeless air; and far away to the west and north showed the low
+suburban hills against the April sky.
+
+There was surprisingly little sound, considering the pressure of the
+population; and, with the exception of the buzz of the steel rails as a
+train fled north or south, and the occasional sweet chord of the great
+motors as they neared or left the junction, there was little to be heard
+in this study except a smooth, soothing murmur that filled the air like
+the murmur of bees in a garden.
+
+Oliver loved every hint of human life--all busy sights and sounds--and
+was listening now, smiling faintly to himself as he stared out into the
+clear air. Then he set his lips, laid his fingers on the keys once more,
+and went on speech-constructing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He was very fortunate in the situation of his house. It stood in an
+angle of one of those huge spider-webs with which the country was
+covered, and for his purposes was all that he could expect. It was close
+enough to London to be extremely cheap, for all wealthy persons had
+retired at least a hundred miles from the throbbing heart of England;
+and yet it was as quiet as he could wish. He was within ten minutes of
+Westminster on the one side, and twenty minutes of the sea on the other,
+and his constituency lay before him like a raised map. Further, since
+the great London termini were but ten minutes away, there were at his
+disposal the First Trunk lines to every big town in England. For a
+politician of no great means, who was asked to speak at Edinburgh on one
+evening and in Marseilles on the next, he was as well placed as any man
+in Europe.
+
+He was a pleasant-looking man, not much over thirty years old; black
+wire-haired, clean-shaven, thin, virile, magnetic, blue-eyed and
+white-skinned; and he appeared this day extremely content with himself
+and the world. His lips moved slightly as he worked, his eyes enlarged
+and diminished with excitement, and more than once he paused and stared
+out again, smiling and flushed.
+
+Then a door opened; a middle-aged man came nervously in with a bundle of
+papers, laid them down on the table without a word, and turned to go
+out. Oliver lifted his hand for attention, snapped a lever, and spoke.
+
+“Well, Mr. Phillips?” he said.
+
+“There is news from the East, sir,” said the secretary.
+
+Oliver shot a glance sideways, and laid his hand on the bundle.
+
+“Any complete message?” he asked.
+
+“No, sir; it is interrupted again. Mr. Felsenburgh’s name is mentioned.”
+
+Oliver did not seem to hear; he lifted the flimsy printed sheets with a
+sudden movement, and began turning them.
+
+“The fourth from the top, Mr. Brand,” said the secretary.
+
+Oliver jerked his head impatiently, and the other went out as if at a
+signal.
+
+The fourth sheet from the top, printed in red on green, seemed to absorb
+Oliver’s attention altogether, for he read it through two or three
+times, leaning back motionless in his chair. Then he sighed, and stared
+again through the window.
+
+Then once more the door opened, and a tall girl came in.
+
+“Well, my dear?” she observed.
+
+Oliver shook his head, with compressed lips.
+
+“Nothing definite,” he said. “Even less than usual. Listen.”
+
+He took up the green sheet and began to read aloud as the girl sat down
+in a window-seat on his left.
+
+She was a very charming-looking creature, tall and slender, with
+serious, ardent grey eyes, firm red lips, and a beautiful carriage of
+head and shoulders. She had walked slowly across the room as Oliver took
+up the paper, and now sat back in her brown dress in a very graceful and
+stately attitude. She seemed to listen with a deliberate kind of
+patience; but her eyes flickered with interest.
+
+“‘Irkutsk--April fourteen--Yesterday--as--usual--But--rumoured--
+defection--from--Sufi--party--Troops--continue--gathering--
+Felsenburgh--addressed--Buddhist--crowd--Attempt--on--Llama--last--
+Friday--work--of--Anarchists--Felsenburgh--leaving--for--Moscow--as
+--arranged--he....’ There--that is absolutely all,” ended Oliver
+dispiritedly. “It’s interrupted as usual.”
+
+The girl began to swing a foot.
+
+“I don’t understand in the least,” she said. “Who is Felsenburgh, after
+all?”
+
+“My dear child, that is what all the world is asking. Nothing is known
+except that he was included in the American deputation at the last
+moment. The _Herald_ published his life last week; but it has been
+contradicted. It is certain that he is quite a young man, and that he
+has been quite obscure until now.”
+
+“Well, he is not obscure now,” observed the girl.
+
+“I know; it seems as if he were running the whole thing. One never hears
+a word of the others. It’s lucky he’s on the right side.”
+
+“And what do you think?”
+
+Oliver turned vacant eyes again out of the window.
+
+“I think it is touch and go,” he said. “The only remarkable thing is
+that here hardly anybody seems to realise it. It’s too big for the
+imagination, I suppose. There is no doubt that the East has been
+preparing for a descent on Europe for these last five years. They have
+only been checked by America; and this is one last attempt to stop them.
+But why Felsenburgh should come to the front---” he broke off. “He must
+be a good linguist, at any rate. This is at least the fifth crowd he has
+addressed; perhaps he is just the American interpreter. Christ! I wonder
+who he is.”
+
+“Has he any other name?”
+
+“Julian, I believe. One message said so.”
+
+“How did this come through?”
+
+Oliver shook his head.
+
+“Private enterprise,” he said. “The European agencies have stopped work.
+Every telegraph station is guarded night and day. There are lines of
+volors strung out on every frontier. The Empire means to settle this
+business without us.”
+
+“And if it goes wrong?”
+
+“My dear Mabel--if hell breaks loose---” he threw out his hands
+deprecatingly.
+
+“And what is the Government doing?”
+
+“Working night and day; so is the rest of Europe. It’ll be Armageddon
+with a vengeance if it comes to war.”
+
+“What chance do you see?”
+
+“I see two chances,” said Oliver slowly: “one, that they may be afraid
+of America, and may hold their hands from sheer fear; the other that
+they may be induced to hold their hands from charity; if only they can
+be made to understand that co-operation is the one hope of the world.
+But those damned religions of theirs---”
+
+The girl sighed, and looked out again on to the wide plain of
+house-roofs below the window.
+
+The situation was indeed as serious as it could be. That huge Empire,
+consisting of a federalism of States under the Son of Heaven (made
+possible by the merging of the Japanese and Chinese dynasties and the
+fall of Russia), had been consolidating its forces and learning its own
+power during the last thirty-five years, ever since, in fact, it had
+laid its lean yellow hands upon Australia and India. While the rest of
+the world had learned the folly of war, ever since the fall of the
+Russian republic under the combined attack of the yellow races, the last
+had grasped its possibilities. It seemed now as if the civilisation of
+the last century was to be swept back once more into chaos. It was not
+that the mob of the East cared very greatly; it was their rulers who had
+begun to stretch themselves after an almost eternal lethargy, and it was
+hard to imagine how they could be checked at this point. There was a
+touch of grimness too in the rumour that religious fanaticism was behind
+the movement, and that the patient East proposed at last to proselytise
+by the modern equivalents of fire and sword those who had laid aside for
+the most part all religious beliefs except that in Humanity. To Oliver
+it was simply maddening. As he looked from his window and saw that vast
+limit of London laid peaceably before him, as his imagination ran out
+over Europe and saw everywhere that steady triumph of common sense and
+fact over the wild fairy-stories of Christianity, it seemed intolerable
+that there should be even a possibility that all this should be swept
+back again into the barbarous turmoil of sects and dogmas; for no less
+than this would be the result if the East laid hands on Europe. Even
+Catholicism would revive, he told himself, that strange faith that had
+blazed so often as persecution had been dashed to quench it; and, of all
+forms of faith, to Oliver’s mind Catholicism was the most grotesque and
+enslaving. And the prospect of all this honestly troubled him, far more
+than the thought of the physical catastrophe and bloodshed that would
+fall on Europe with the advent of the East. There was but one hope on
+the religious side, as he had told Mabel a dozen times, and that was
+that the Quietistic Pantheism which for the last century had made such
+giant strides in East and West alike, among Mohammedans, Buddhists,
+Hindus, Confucianists and the rest, should avail to check the
+supernatural frenzy that inspired their exoteric brethren. Pantheism, he
+understood, was what he held himself; for him “God” was the developing
+sum of created life, and impersonal Unity was the essence of His being;
+competition then was the great heresy that set men one against another
+and delayed all progress; for, to his mind, progress lay in the merging
+of the individual in the family, of the family in the commonwealth, of
+the commonwealth in the continent, and of the continent in the world.
+Finally, the world itself at any moment was no more than the mood of
+impersonal life. It was, in fact, the Catholic idea with the
+supernatural left out, a union of earthly fortunes, an abandonment of
+individualism on the one side, and of supernaturalism on the other. It
+was treason to appeal from God Immanent to God Transcendent; there was
+no God transcendent; God, so far as He could be known, was man.
+
+Yet these two, husband and wife after a fashion--for they had entered
+into that terminable contract now recognised explicitly by the
+State--these two were very far from sharing in the usual heavy dulness
+of mere materialists. The world, for them, beat with one ardent life
+blossoming in flower and beast and man, a torrent of beautiful vigour
+flowing from a deep source and irrigating all that moved or felt. Its
+romance was the more appreciable because it was comprehensible to the
+minds that sprang from it; there were mysteries in it, but mysteries
+that enticed rather than baffled, for they unfolded new glories with
+every discovery that man could make; even inanimate objects, the fossil,
+the electric current, the far-off stars, these were dust thrown off by
+the Spirit of the World--fragrant with His Presence and eloquent of His
+Nature. For example, the announcement made by Klein, the astronomer,
+twenty years before, that the inhabitation of certain planets had become
+a certified fact--how vastly this had altered men’s views of themselves.
+But the one condition of progress and the building of Jerusalem, on the
+planet that happened to be men’s dwelling place, was peace, not the
+sword which Christ brought or that which Mahomet wielded; but peace that
+arose from, not passed, understanding; the peace that sprang from a
+knowledge that man was all and was able to develop himself only by
+sympathy with his fellows. To Oliver and his wife, then, the last
+century seemed like a revelation; little by little the old superstitions
+had died, and the new light broadened; the Spirit of the World had
+roused Himself, the sun had dawned in the west; and now with horror and
+loathing they had seen the clouds gather once more in the quarter whence
+all superstition had had its birth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mabel got up presently and came across to her husband.
+
+“My dear,” she said, “you must not be downhearted. It all may pass as it
+passed before. It is a great thing that they are listening to America at
+all. And this Mr. Felsenburgh seems to be on the right side.”
+
+Oliver took her hand and kissed it.
+
+
+II
+
+Oliver seemed altogether depressed at breakfast, half an hour later. His
+mother, an old lady of nearly eighty, who never appeared till noon,
+seemed to see it at once, for after a look or two at him and a word, she
+subsided into silence behind her plate.
+
+It was a pleasant little room in which they sat, immediately behind
+Oliver’s own, and was furnished, according to universal custom, in light
+green. Its windows looked out upon a strip of garden at the back, and
+the high creeper-grown wall that separated that domain from the next.
+The furniture, too, was of the usual sort; a sensible round table stood
+in the middle, with three tall arm-chairs, with the proper angles and
+rests, drawn up to it; and the centre of it, resting apparently on a
+broad round column, held the dishes. It was thirty years now since the
+practice of placing the dining-room above the kitchen, and of raising
+and lowering the courses by hydraulic power into the centre of the
+dining-table, had become universal in the houses of the well-to-do. The
+floor consisted entirely of the asbestos cork preparation invented in
+America, noiseless, clean, and pleasant to both foot and eye.
+
+Mabel broke the silence.
+
+“And your speech to-morrow?” she asked, taking up her fork.
+
+Oliver brightened a little, and began to discourse.
+
+It seemed that Birmingham was beginning to fret. They were crying out
+once more for free trade with America: European facilities were not
+enough, and it was Oliver’s business to keep them quiet. It was useless,
+he proposed to tell them, to agitate until the Eastern business was
+settled: they must not bother the Government with such details just now.
+He was to tell them, too, that the Government was wholly on their side;
+that it was bound to come soon.
+
+“They are pig-headed,” he added fiercely; “pig-headed and selfish; they
+are like children who cry for food ten minutes before dinner-time: it is
+bound to come if they will wait a little.”
+
+“And you will tell them so?”
+
+“That they are pig-headed? Certainly.”
+
+Mabel looked at her husband with a pleased twinkle in her eyes. She knew
+perfectly well that his popularity rested largely on his outspokenness:
+folks liked to be scolded and abused by a genial bold man who danced and
+gesticulated in a magnetic fury; she liked it herself.
+
+“How shall you go?” she asked.
+
+“Volor. I shall catch the eighteen o’clock at Blackfriars; the meeting
+is at nineteen, and I shall be back at twenty-one.”
+
+He addressed himself vigorously to his _entree_, and his mother looked
+up with a patient, old-woman smile.
+
+Mabel began to drum her fingers softly on the damask.
+
+“Please make haste, my dear,” she said; “I have to be at Brighton at
+three.”
+
+Oliver gulped his last mouthful, pushed his plate over the line, glanced
+to see if all plates were there, and then put his hand beneath the
+table.
+
+Instantly, without a sound, the centre-piece vanished, and the three
+waited unconcernedly while the clink of dishes came from beneath.
+
+Old Mrs. Brand was a hale-looking old lady, rosy and wrinkled, with the
+mantilla head-dress of fifty years ago; but she, too, looked a little
+depressed this morning. The _entree_ was not very successful, she
+thought; the new food-stuff was not up to the old, it was a trifle
+gritty: she would see about it afterwards. There was a clink, a soft
+sound like a push, and the centre-piece snapped into its place, bearing
+an admirable imitation of a roasted fowl.
+
+Oliver and his wife were alone again for a minute or two after breakfast
+before Mabel started down the path to catch the 14¹⁄₂ o’clock 4th grade
+sub-trunk line to the junction.
+
+“What’s the matter with mother?” he said.
+
+“Oh! it’s the food-stuff again: she’s never got accustomed to it; she
+says it doesn’t suit her.”
+
+“Nothing else?”
+
+“No, my dear, I am sure of it. She hasn’t said a word lately.”
+
+Oliver watched his wife go down the path, reassured. He had been a
+little troubled once or twice lately by an odd word or two that his
+mother had let fall. She had been brought up a Christian for a few
+years, and it seemed to him sometimes as if it had left a taint. There
+was an old “Garden of the Soul” that she liked to keep by her, though
+she always protested with an appearance of scorn that it was nothing but
+nonsense. Still, Oliver would have preferred that she had burned it:
+superstition was a desperate thing for retaining life, and, as the brain
+weakened, might conceivably reassert itself. Christianity was both wild
+and dull, he told himself, wild because of its obvious grotesqueness and
+impossibility, and dull because it was so utterly apart from the
+exhilarating stream of human life; it crept dustily about still, he
+knew, in little dark churches here and there; it screamed with
+hysterical sentimentality in Westminster Cathedral which he had once
+entered and looked upon with a kind of disgusted fury; it gabbled
+strange, false words to the incompetent and the old and the half-witted.
+But it would be too dreadful if his own mother ever looked upon it again
+with favour.
+
+Oliver himself, ever since he could remember, had been violently opposed
+to the concessions to Rome and Ireland. It was intolerable that these
+two places should be definitely yielded up to this foolish, treacherous
+nonsense: they were hot-beds of sedition; plague-spots on the face of
+humanity. He had never agreed with those who said that it was better
+that all the poison of the West should be gathered rather than
+dispersed. But, at any rate, there it was. Rome had been given up wholly
+to that old man in white in exchange for all the parish churches and
+cathedrals of Italy, and it was understood that mediaeval darkness
+reigned there supreme; and Ireland, after receiving Home Rule thirty
+years before, had declared for Catholicism, and opened her arms to
+Individualism in its most virulent form. England had laughed and
+assented, for she was saved from a quantity of agitation by the
+immediate departure of half her Catholic population for that island, and
+had, consistently with her Communist-colonial policy, granted every
+facility for Individualism to reduce itself there _ad absurdum_. All
+kinds of funny things were happening there: Oliver had read with a
+bitter amusement of new appearances there, of a Woman in Blue and
+shrines raised where her feet had rested; but he was scarcely amused at
+Rome, for the movement to Turin of the Italian Government had deprived
+the Republic of quite a quantity of sentimental prestige, and had haloed
+the old religious nonsense with all the meretriciousness of historical
+association. However, it obviously could not last much longer: the world
+was beginning to understand at last.
+
+He stood a moment or two at the door after his wife had gone, drinking
+in reassurance from that glorious vision of solid sense that spread
+itself before his eyes: the endless house-roofs; the high glass vaults
+of the public baths and gymnasiums; the pinnacled schools where
+Citizenship was taught each morning; the spider-like cranes and
+scaffoldings that rose here and there; and even the few pricking spires
+did not disconcert him. There it stretched away into the grey haze of
+London, really beautiful, this vast hive of men and women who had
+learned at least the primary lesson of the gospel that there was no God
+but man, no priest but the politician, no prophet but the schoolmaster.
+
+Then he went back once more to his speech-constructing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mabel, too, was a little thoughtful as she sat with her paper on her
+lap, spinning down the broad line to Brighton. This Eastern news was
+more disconcerting to her than she allowed her husband to see; yet it
+seemed incredible that there could be any real danger of invasion. This
+Western life was so sensible and peaceful; folks had their feet at last
+upon the rock, and it was unthinkable that they could ever be forced
+back on to the mud-flats: it was contrary to the whole law of
+development. Yet she could not but recognise that catastrophe seemed one
+of nature’s methods....
+
+She sat very quiet, glancing once or twice at the meagre little scrap
+of news, and read the leading article upon it: that too seemed
+significant of dismay. A couple of men were talking in the
+half-compartment beyond on the same subject; one described the
+Government engineering works that he had visited, the breathless haste
+that dominated them; the other put in interrogations and questions.
+There was not much comfort there. There were no windows through which
+she could look; on the main lines the speed was too great for the eyes;
+the long compartment flooded with soft light bounded her horizon. She
+stared at the moulded white ceiling, the delicious oak-framed paintings,
+the deep spring-seats, the mellow globes overhead that poured out
+radiance, at a mother and child diagonally opposite her. Then the great
+chord sounded; the faint vibration increased ever so slightly; and an
+instant later the automatic doors ran back, and she stepped out on to
+the platform of Brighton station.
+
+As she went down the steps leading to the station square she noticed a
+priest going before her. He seemed a very upright and sturdy old man,
+for though his hair was white he walked steadily and strongly. At the
+foot of the steps he stopped and half turned, and then, to her surprise,
+she saw that his face was that of a young man, fine-featured and strong,
+with black eyebrows and very bright grey eyes. Then she passed on and
+began to cross the square in the direction of her aunt’s house.
+
+Then without the slightest warning, except one shrill hoot from
+overhead, a number of things happened.
+
+A great shadow whirled across the sunlight at her feet, a sound of
+rending tore the air, and a noise like a giant’s sigh; and, as she
+stopped bewildered, with a noise like ten thousand smashed kettles, a
+huge thing crashed on the rubber pavement before her, where it lay,
+filling half the square, writhing long wings on its upper side that beat
+and whirled like the flappers of some ghastly extinct monster, pouring
+out human screams, and beginning almost instantly to crawl with broken
+life.
+
+Mabel scarcely knew what happened next; but she found herself a moment
+later forced forward by some violent pressure from behind, till she
+stood shaking from head to foot, with some kind of smashed body of a man
+moaning and stretching at her feet. There was a sort of articulate
+language coming from it; she caught distinctly the names of Jesus and
+Mary; then a voice hissed suddenly in her ears:
+
+“Let me through. I am a priest.”
+
+She stood there a moment longer, dazed by the suddenness of the whole
+affair, and watched almost unintelligently the grey-haired young priest
+on his knees, with his coat torn open, and a crucifix out; she saw him
+bend close, wave his hand in a swift sign, and heard a murmur of a
+language she did not know. Then he was up again, holding the crucifix
+before him, and she saw him begin to move forward into the midst of the
+red-flooded pavement, looking this way and that as if for a signal. Down
+the steps of the great hospital on her right came figures running now,
+hatless, each carrying what looked like an old-fashioned camera. She
+knew what those men were, and her heart leaped in relief. They were the
+ministers of euthanasia. Then she felt herself taken by the shoulder and
+pulled back, and immediately found herself in the front rank of a crowd
+that was swaying and crying out, and behind a line of police and
+civilians who had formed themselves into a cordon to keep the pressure
+back.
+
+
+III
+
+Oliver was in a panic of terror as his mother, half an hour later, ran
+in with the news that one of the Government volors had fallen in the
+station square at Brighton just after the 14¹⁄₂ train had discharged
+its passengers. He knew quite well what that meant, for he remembered
+one such accident ten years before, just after the law forbidding
+private volors had been passed. It meant that every living creature in
+it was killed and probably many more in the place where it fell--and
+what then? The message was clear enough; she would certainly be in the
+square at that time.
+
+He sent a desperate wire to her aunt asking for news; and sat, shaking
+in his chair, awaiting the answer. His mother sat by him.
+
+“Please God---” she sobbed out once, and stopped confounded as he turned
+on her.
+
+But Fate was merciful, and three minutes before Mr. Phillips toiled up
+the path with the answer, Mabel herself came into the room, rather pale
+and smiling.
+
+“Christ!” cried Oliver, and gave one huge sob as he sprang up.
+
+She had not a great deal to tell him. There was no explanation of the
+disaster published as yet; it seemed that the wings on one side had
+simply ceased to work.
+
+She described the shadow, the hiss of sound, and the crash.
+
+Then she stopped.
+
+“Well, my dear?” said her husband, still rather white beneath the eyes
+as he sat close to her patting her hand.
+
+“There was a priest there,” said Mabel. “I saw him before, at the
+station.”
+
+Oliver gave a little hysterical snort of laughter.
+
+“He was on his knees at once,” she said, “with his crucifix, even before
+the doctors came. My dear, do people really believe all that?”
+
+“Why, they think they do,” said her husband.
+
+“It was all so--so sudden; and there he was, just as if he had been
+expecting it all. Oliver, how can they?”
+
+“Why, people will believe anything if they begin early enough.”
+
+“And the man seemed to believe it, too--the dying man, I mean. I saw his
+eyes.”
+
+She stopped.
+
+“Well, my dear?”
+
+“Oliver, what do you say to people when they are dying?”
+
+“Say! Why, nothing! What can I say? But I don’t think I’ve ever seen any
+one die.”
+
+“Nor have I till to-day,” said the girl, and shivered a little. “The
+euthanasia people were soon at work.”
+
+Oliver took her hand gently.
+
+“My darling, it must have been frightful. Why, you’re trembling still.”
+
+“No; but listen.... You know, if I had had anything to say I could have
+said it too. They were all just in front of me: I wondered; then I knew
+I hadn’t. I couldn’t possibly have talked about Humanity.”
+
+“My dear, it’s all very sad; but you know it doesn’t really matter. It’s
+all over.”
+
+“And--and they’ve just stopped?”
+
+“Why, yes.”
+
+Mabel compressed her lips a little; then she sighed. She had an agitated
+sort of meditation in the train. She knew perfectly that it was sheer
+nerves; but she could not just yet shake them off. As she had said, it
+was the first time she had seen death.
+
+“And that priest--that priest doesn’t think so?”
+
+“My dear, I’ll tell you what he believes. He believes that that man whom
+he showed the crucifix to, and said those words over, is alive
+somewhere, in spite of his brain being dead: he is not quite sure where;
+but he is either in a kind of smelting works being slowly burned; or, if
+he is very lucky, and that piece of wood took effect, he is somewhere
+beyond the clouds, before Three Persons who are only One although They
+are Three; that there are quantities of other people there, a Woman in
+Blue, a great many others in white with their heads under their arms,
+and still more with their heads on one side; and that they’ve all got
+harps and go on singing for ever and ever, and walking about on the
+clouds, and liking it very much indeed. He thinks, too, that all these
+nice people are perpetually looking down upon the aforesaid
+smelting-works, and praising the Three Great Persons for making them.
+That’s what the priest believes. Now you know it’s not likely; that kind
+of thing may be very nice, but it isn’t true.”
+
+Mabel smiled pleasantly. She had never heard it put so well.
+
+“No, my dear, you’re quite right. That sort of thing isn’t true. How can
+he believe it? He looked quite intelligent!”
+
+“My dear girl, if I had told you in your cradle that the moon was green
+cheese, and had hammered at you ever since, every day and all day, that
+it was, you’d very nearly believe it by now. Why, you know in your heart
+that the euthanatisers are the real priests. Of course you do.”
+
+Mabel sighed with satisfaction and stood up.
+
+“Oliver, you’re a most comforting person. I do like you! There! I must
+go to my room: I’m all shaky still.”
+
+Half across the room she stopped and put out a shoe.
+
+“Why---” she began faintly.
+
+There was a curious rusty-looking splash upon it; and her husband saw
+her turn white. He rose abruptly.
+
+“My dear,” he said, “don’t be foolish.”
+
+She looked at him, smiled bravely, and went out.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When she was gone, he still sat on a moment where she had left him. Dear
+me! how pleased he was! He did not like to think of what life would have
+been without her. He had known her since she was twelve--that was seven
+years ago-and last year they had gone together to the district official
+to make their contract. She had really become very necessary to him. Of
+course the world could get on without her, and he supposed that he could
+too; but he did not want to have to try. He knew perfectly well, for it
+was his creed of human love, that there was between them a double
+affection, of mind as well as body; and there was absolutely nothing
+else: but he loved her quick intuitions, and to hear his own thought
+echoed so perfectly. It was like two flames added together to make a
+third taller than either: of course one flame could burn without the
+other--in fact, one would have to, one day--but meantime the warmth and
+light were exhilarating. Yes, he was delighted that she happened to be
+clear of the falling volor.
+
+He gave no more thought to his exposition of the Christian creed; it was
+a mere commonplace to him that Catholics believed that kind of thing; it
+was no more blasphemous to his mind so to describe it, than it would be
+to laugh at a Fijian idol with mother-of-pearl eyes, and a horse-hair
+wig; it was simply impossible to treat it seriously. He, too, had
+wondered once or twice in his life how human beings could believe such
+rubbish; but psychology had helped him, and he knew now well enough that
+suggestion will do almost anything. And it was this hateful thing that
+had so long restrained the euthanasia movement with all its splendid
+mercy.
+
+His brows wrinkled a little as he remembered his mother’s exclamation,
+“Please God”; then he smiled at the poor old thing and her pathetic
+childishness, and turned once more to his table, thinking in spite of
+himself of his wife’s hesitation as she had seen the splash of blood on
+her shoe. Blood! Yes; that was as much a fact as anything else. How was
+it to be dealt with? Why, by the glorious creed of Humanity--that
+splendid God who died and rose again ten thousand times a day, who had
+died daily like the old cracked fanatic Saul of Tarsus, ever since the
+world began, and who rose again, not once like the Carpenter’s Son, but
+with every child that came into the world. That was the answer; and was
+it not overwhelmingly sufficient?
+
+Mr. Phillips came in an hour later with another bundle of papers.
+
+“No more news from the East, sir,” he said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+I
+
+Percy Franklin’s correspondence with the Cardinal-Protector of England
+occupied him directly for at least two hours every day, and for nearly
+eight hours indirectly.
+
+For the past eight years the methods of the Holy See had once more been
+revised with a view to modern needs, and now every important province
+throughout the world possessed not only an administrative metropolitan
+but a representative in Rome whose business it was to be in touch with
+the Pope on the one side and the people he represented on the other. In
+other words, centralisation had gone forward rapidly, in accordance with
+the laws of life; and, with centralisation, freedom of method and
+expansion of power. England’s Cardinal-Protector was one Abbot Martin, a
+Benedictine, and it was Percy’s business, as of a dozen more bishops,
+priests and laymen (with whom, by the way, he was forbidden to hold any
+formal consultation), to write a long daily letter to him on affairs
+that came under his notice.
+
+It was a curious life, therefore, that Percy led. He had a couple of
+rooms assigned to him in Archbishop’s House at Westminster, and was
+attached loosely to the Cathedral staff, although with considerable
+liberty. He rose early, and went to meditation for an hour, after which
+he said his mass. He took his coffee soon after, said a little office,
+and then settled down to map out his letter. At ten o’clock he was ready
+to receive callers, and till noon he was generally busy with both those
+who came to see him on their own responsibility and his staff of
+half-a-dozen reporters whose business it was to bring him marked
+paragraphs in the newspapers and their own comments. He then breakfasted
+with the other priests in the house, and set out soon after to call on
+people whose opinion was necessary, returning for a cup of tea soon
+after sixteen o’clock. Then he settled down, after the rest of his
+office and a visit to the Blessed Sacrament, to compose his letter,
+which though short, needed a great deal of care and sifting. After
+dinner he made a few notes for next day, received visitors again, and
+went to bed soon after twenty-two o’clock. Twice a week it was his
+business to assist at Vespers in the afternoon, and he usually sang high
+mass on Saturdays.
+
+It was, therefore, a curiously distracting life, with peculiar dangers.
+
+It was one day, a week or two after his visit to Brighton, that he was
+just finishing his letter, when his servant looked in to tell him that
+Father Francis was below.
+
+“In ten minutes,” said Percy, without looking up.
+
+He snapped off his last lines, drew out the sheet, and settled down to
+read it over, translating it unconsciously from Latin to English.
+
+“WESTMINSTER, May 14th.
+
+“EMINENCE: Since yesterday I have a little more information. It appears
+certain that the Bill establishing Esperanto for all State purposes will
+be brought in in June. I have had this from Johnson. This, as I have
+pointed out before, is the very last stone in our consolidation with the
+continent, which, at present, is to be regretted.... A great access of
+Jews to Freemasonry is to be expected; hitherto they have held aloof to
+some extent, but the ‘abolition of the Idea of God’ is tending to draw
+in those Jews, now greatly on the increase once more, who repudiate all
+notion of a personal Messiah. It is ‘Humanity’ here, too, that is at
+work. To-day I heard the Rabbi Simeon speak to this effect in the City,
+and was impressed by the applause he received.... Yet among others an
+expectation is growing that a man will presently be found to lead the
+Communist movement and unite their forces more closely. I enclose a
+verbose cutting from the _New People_ to that effect; and it is echoed
+everywhere. They say that the cause must give birth to one such soon;
+that they have had prophets and precursors for a hundred years past, and
+lately a cessation of them. It is strange how this coincides
+superficially with Christian ideas. Your Eminence will observe that a
+simile of the ‘ninth wave’ is used with some eloquence.... I hear to-day
+of the secession of an old Catholic family, the Wargraves of Norfolk,
+with their chaplain Micklem, who it seems has been busy in this
+direction for some while. The _Epoch_ announces it with satisfaction,
+owing to the peculiar circumstances; but unhappily such events are not
+uncommon now.... There is much distrust among the laity. Seven priests
+in Westminster diocese have left us within the last three months; on the
+other hand, I have pleasure in telling your Eminence that his Grace
+received into Catholic Communion this morning the ex-Anglican Bishop of
+Carlisle, with half-a-dozen of his clergy. This has been expected for
+some weeks past. I append also cuttings from the _Tribune_, the _London
+Trumpet_, and the _Observer_, with my comments upon them. Your Eminence
+will see how great the excitement is with regard to the last.
+
+“_Recommendation._ That formal excommunication of the Wargraves and
+these eight priests should be issued in Norfolk and Westminster
+respectively, and no further notice taken.”
+
+Percy laid down the sheet, gathered up the half dozen other papers that
+contained his extracts and running commentary, signed the last, and
+slipped the whole into the printed envelope that lay ready.
+
+Then he took up his biretta and went to the lift.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The moment he came into the glass-doored parlour he saw that the crisis
+was come, if not passed already. Father Francis looked miserably ill,
+but there was a curious hardness, too, about his eyes and mouth, as he
+stood waiting. He shook his head abruptly.
+
+“I have come to say good-bye, father. I can bear it no more.”
+
+Percy was careful to show no emotion at all. He made a little sign to a
+chair, and himself sat down too. “It is an end of everything,” said the
+other again in a perfectly steady voice. “I believe nothing. I have
+believed nothing for a year now.”
+
+“You have felt nothing, you mean,” said Percy.
+
+“That won’t do, father,” went on the other. “I tell you there is nothing
+left. I can’t even argue now. It is just good-bye.”
+
+Percy had nothing to say. He had talked to this man during a period of
+over eight months, ever since Father Francis had first confided in him
+that his faith was going. He understood perfectly what a strain it had
+been; he felt bitterly compassionate towards this poor creature who had
+become caught up somehow into the dizzy triumphant whirl of the New
+Humanity. External facts were horribly strong just now; and faith,
+except to one who had learned that Will and Grace were all and emotion
+nothing, was as a child crawling about in the midst of some huge
+machinery: it might survive or it might not; but it required nerves of
+steel to keep steady. It was hard to know where blame could be assigned;
+yet Percy’s faith told him that there was blame due. In the ages of
+faith a very inadequate grasp of religion would pass muster; in these
+searching days none but the humble and the pure could stand the test for
+long, unless indeed they were protected by a miracle of ignorance. The
+alliance of Psychology and Materialism did indeed seem, looked at from
+one angle, to account for everything; it needed a robust supernatural
+perception to understand their practical inadequacy. And as regards
+Father Francis’s personal responsibility, he could not help feeling that
+the other had allowed ceremonial to play too great a part in his
+religion, and prayer too little. In him the external had absorbed the
+internal.
+
+So he did not allow his sympathy to show itself in his bright eyes.
+
+“You think it my fault, of course,” said the other sharply.
+
+“My dear father,” said Percy, motionless in his chair, “I know it is
+your fault. Listen to me. You say Christianity is absurd and impossible.
+Now, you know, it cannot be that! It may be untrue--I am not speaking of
+that now, even though I am perfectly certain that it is absolutely
+true--but it cannot be absurd so long as educated and virtuous people
+continue to hold it. To say that it is absurd is simple pride; it is to
+dismiss all who believe in it as not merely mistaken, but unintelligent
+as well---”
+
+“Very well, then,” interrupted the other; “then suppose I withdraw that,
+and simply say that I do not believe it to be true.”
+
+“You do not withdraw it,” continued Percy serenely; “you still really
+believe it to be absurd: you have told me so a dozen times. Well, I
+repeat, that is pride, and quite sufficient to account for it all. It is
+the moral attitude that matters. There may be other things too---”
+
+Father Francis looked up sharply.
+
+“Oh! the old story!” he said sneeringly.
+
+“If you tell me on your word of honour that there is no woman in the
+case, or no particular programme of sin you propose to work out, I shall
+believe you. But it is an old story, as you say.”
+
+“I swear to you there is not,” cried the other.
+
+“Thank God then!” said Percy. “There are fewer obstacles to a return of
+faith.”
+
+There was silence for a moment after that. Percy had really no more to
+say. He had talked to him of the inner life again and again, in which
+verities are seen to be true, and acts of faith are ratified; he had
+urged prayer and humility till he was almost weary of the names; and had
+been met by the retort that this was to advise sheer self-hypnotism; and
+he had despaired of making clear to one who did not see it for himself
+that while Love and Faith may be called self-hypnotism from one angle,
+yet from another they are as much realities as, for example, artistic
+faculties, and need similar cultivation; that they produce a conviction
+that they are convictions, that they handle and taste things which when
+handled and tasted are overwhelmingly more real and objective than the
+things of sense. Evidences seemed to mean nothing to this man.
+
+So he was silent now, chilled himself by the presence of this crisis,
+looking unseeingly out upon the plain, little old-world parlour, its
+tall window, its strip of matting, conscious chiefly of the dreary
+hopelessness of this human brother of his who had eyes but did not see,
+ears and was deaf. He wished he would say good-bye, and go. There was no
+more to be done.
+
+Father Francis, who had been sitting in a lax kind of huddle, seemed to
+know his thoughts, and sat up suddenly.
+
+“You are tired of me,” he said. “I will go.”
+
+“I am not tired of you, my dear father,” said Percy simply. “I am only
+terribly sorry. You see I know that it is all true.”
+
+The other looked at him heavily.
+
+“And I know that it is not,” he said. “It is very beautiful; I wish I
+could believe it. I don’t think I shall be ever happy again--but--but
+there it is.”
+
+Percy sighed. He had told him so often that the heart is as divine a
+gift as the mind, and that to neglect it in the search for God is to
+seek ruin, but this priest had scarcely seen the application to himself.
+He had answered with the old psychological arguments that the
+suggestions of education accounted for everything.
+
+“I suppose you will cast me off,” said the other.
+
+“It is you who are leaving me,” said Percy. “I cannot follow, if you
+mean that.”
+
+“But--but cannot we be friends?”
+
+A sudden heat touched the elder priest’s heart.
+
+“Friends?” he said. “Is sentimentality all you mean by friendship? What
+kind of friends can we be?”
+
+The other’s face became suddenly heavy.
+
+“I thought so.”
+
+“John!” cried Percy. “You see that, do you not? How can we pretend
+anything when you do not believe in God? For I do you the honour of
+thinking that you do not.”
+
+Francis sprang up.
+
+“Well---” he snapped. “I could not have believed--I am going.”
+
+He wheeled towards the door.
+
+“John!” said Percy again. “Are you going like this? Can you not shake
+hands?”
+
+The other wheeled again, with heavy anger in his face.
+
+“Why, you said you could not be friends with me!”
+
+Percy’s mouth opened. Then he understood, and smiled. “Oh! that is all
+you mean by friendship, is it?--I beg your pardon. Oh! we can be polite
+to one another, if you like.”
+
+He still stood holding out his hand. Father Francis looked at it a
+moment, his lips shook: then once more he turned, and went out without a
+word.
+
+
+II
+
+Percy stood motionless until he heard the automatic bell outside tell
+him that Father Francis was really gone, then he went out himself and
+turned towards the long passage leading to the Cathedral. As he passed
+out through the sacristy he heard far in front the murmur of an organ,
+and on coming through into the chapel used as a parish church he
+perceived that Vespers were not yet over in the great choir. He came
+straight down the aisle, turned to the right, crossed the centre and
+knelt down.
+
+It was drawing on towards sunset, and the huge dark place was lighted
+here and there by patches of ruddy London light that lay on the gorgeous
+marble and gildings finished at last by a wealthy convert. In front of
+him rose up the choir, with a line of white surpliced and furred canons
+on either side, and the vast baldachino in the midst, beneath which
+burned the six lights as they had burned day by day for more than a
+century; behind that again lay the high line of the apse-choir with the
+dim, window-pierced vault above where Christ reigned in majesty. He let
+his eyes wander round for a few moments before beginning his deliberate
+prayer, drinking in the glory of the place, listening to the thunderous
+chorus, the peal of the organ, and the thin mellow voice of the priest.
+There on the left shone the refracted glow of the lamps that burned
+before the Lord in the Sacrament, on the right a dozen candles winked
+here and there at the foot of the gaunt images, high overhead hung the
+gigantic cross with that lean, emaciated Poor Man Who called all who
+looked on Him to the embraces of a God.
+
+Then he hid his face in his hands, drew a couple of long breaths, and
+set to work.
+
+He began, as his custom was in mental prayer, by a deliberate act of
+self-exclusion from the world of sense. Under the image of sinking
+beneath a surface he forced himself downwards and inwards, till the peal
+of the organ, the shuffle of footsteps, the rigidity of the chair-back
+beneath his wrists--all seemed apart and external, and he was left a
+single person with a beating heart, an intellect that suggested image
+after image, and emotions that were too languid to stir themselves. Then
+he made his second descent, renounced all that he possessed and was, and
+became conscious that even the body was left behind, and that his mind
+and heart, awed by the Presence in which they found themselves, clung
+close and obedient to the will which was their lord and protector. He
+drew another long breath, or two, as he felt that Presence surge about
+him; he repeated a few mechanical words, and sank to that peace which
+follows the relinquishment of thought.
+
+There he rested for a while. Far above him sounded the ecstatic music,
+the cry of trumpets and the shrilling of the flutes; but they were as
+insignificant street-noises to one who was falling asleep. He was within
+the veil of things now, beyond the barriers of sense and reflection, in
+that secret place to which he had learned the road by endless effort, in
+that strange region where realities are evident, where perceptions go to
+and fro with the swiftness of light, where the swaying will catches now
+this, now that act, moulds it and speeds it; where all things meet,
+where truth is known and handled and tasted, where God Immanent is one
+with God Transcendent, where the meaning of the external world is
+evident through its inner side, and the Church and its mysteries are
+seen from within a haze of glory.
+
+So he lay a few moments, absorbing and resting.
+
+Then he aroused himself to consciousness and began to speak.
+
+“Lord, I am here, and Thou art here. I know Thee. There is nothing else
+but Thou and I.... I lay this all in Thy hands--Thy apostate priest, Thy
+people, the world, and myself. I spread it before Thee--I spread it
+before Thee.”
+
+He paused, poised in the act, till all of which he thought lay like a
+plain before a peak.
+
+... “Myself, Lord--there but for Thy grace should I be going, in
+darkness and misery. It is Thou Who dost preserve me. Maintain and
+finish Thy work within my soul. Let me not falter for one instant. If
+Thou withdraw Thy hand I fall into utter nothingness.”
+
+So his soul stood a moment, with outstretched appealing hands, helpless
+and confident. Then the will flickered in self-consciousness, and he
+repeated acts of faith, hope and love to steady it. Then he drew another
+long breath, feeling the Presence tingle and shake about him, and began
+again.
+
+“Lord; look on Thy people. Many are falling from Thee. _Ne in aeternum
+irascaris nobis. Ne in aeternum irascaris nobis_.... I unite myself with
+all saints and angels and Mary Queen of Heaven; look on them and me, and
+hear us. _Emitte lucem tuam et veritatem tuam._ Thy light and Thy truth!
+Lay not on us heavier burdens than we can bear. Lord, why dost Thou not
+speak!”
+
+He writhed himself forward in a passion of expectant desire, hearing his
+muscles crack in the effort. Once more he relaxed himself; and the swift
+play of wordless acts began which he knew to be the very heart of
+prayer. The eyes of his soul flew hither and thither, from Calvary to
+heaven and back again to the tossing troubled earth. He saw Christ dying
+of desolation while the earth rocked and groaned; Christ reigning as a
+priest upon His Throne in robes of light, Christ patient and inexorably
+silent within the Sacramental species; and to each in turn he directed
+the eyes of the Eternal Father....
+
+Then he waited for communications, and they came, so soft and delicate,
+passing like shadows, that his will sweated blood and tears in the
+effort to catch and fix them and correspond....
+
+He saw the Body Mystical in its agony, strained over the world as on a
+cross, silent with pain; he saw this and that nerve wrenched and
+twisted, till pain presented it to himself as under the guise of flashes
+of colour; he saw the life-blood drop by drop run down from His head and
+hands and feet. The world was gathered mocking and good-humoured
+beneath. “_He saved others: Himself He cannot save.... Let Christ come
+down from the Cross and we will believe._” Far away behind bushes and
+in holes of the ground the friends of Jesus peeped and sobbed; Mary
+herself was silent, pierced by seven swords; the disciple whom He loved
+had no words of comfort.
+
+He saw, too, how no word would be spoken from heaven; the angels
+themselves were bidden to put sword into sheath, and wait on the eternal
+patience of God, for the agony was hardly yet begun; there were a
+thousand horrors yet before the end could come, that final sum of
+crucifixion.... He must wait and watch, content to stand there and do
+nothing; and the Resurrection must seem to him no more than a dreamed-of
+hope. There was the Sabbath yet to come, while the Body Mystical must
+lie in its sepulchre cut off from light, and even the dignity of the
+Cross must be withdrawn and the knowledge that Jesus lived. That inner
+world, to which by long effort he had learned the way, was all alight
+with agony; it was bitter as brine, it was of that pale luminosity that
+is the utmost product of pain, it hummed in his ears with a note that
+rose to a scream ... it pressed upon him, penetrated him, stretched him
+as on a rack.... And with that his will grew sick and nerveless.
+
+“Lord! I cannot bear it!” he moaned....
+
+In an instant he was back again, drawing long breaths of misery. He
+passed his tongue over his lips, and opened his eyes on the darkening
+apse before him. The organ was silent now, and the choir was gone, and
+the lights out. The sunset colour, too, had faded from the walls, and
+grim cold faces looked down on him from wall and vault. He was back
+again on the surface of life; the vision had melted; he scarcely knew
+what it was that he had seen.
+
+But he must gather up the threads, and by sheer effort absorb them. He
+must pay his duty, too, to the Lord that gave Himself to the senses as
+well as to the inner spirit. So he rose, stiff and constrained, and
+passed across to the Chapel of the Holy Sacrament.
+
+As he came out from the block of chairs, very upright and tall, with his
+biretta once more on his white hair, he saw an old woman watching him
+very closely. He hesitated an instant, wondering whether she were a
+penitent, and as he hesitated she made a movement towards him.
+
+“I beg your pardon, sir,” she began.
+
+She was not a Catholic then. He lifted his biretta.
+
+“Can I do anything for you?” he asked.
+
+“I beg your pardon, sir, but were you at Brighton, at the accident two
+months ago?”
+
+“I was.”
+
+“Ah! I thought so: my daughter-in-law saw you then.”
+
+Percy had a spasm of impatience: he was a little tired of being
+identified by his white hair and young face.
+
+“Were you there, madam?”
+
+She looked at him doubtfully and curiously, moving her old, eyes up and
+down his figure. Then she recollected herself.
+
+“No, sir; it was my daughter-in-law--I beg your pardon, sir, but---”
+
+“Well?” asked Percy, trying to keep the impatience out of his voice.
+
+“Are you the Archbishop, sir?”
+
+The priest smiled, showing his white teeth.
+
+“No, madam; I am just a poor priest. Dr. Cholmondeley is Archbishop. I
+am Father Percy Franklin.”
+
+She said nothing, but still looking at him made a little old-world
+movement of a bow; and Percy passed on to the dim, splendid chapel to
+pay his devotions.
+
+
+III
+
+There was great talk that night at dinner among the priests as to the
+extraordinary spread of Freemasonry. It had been going on for many years
+now, and Catholics perfectly recognised its dangers, for the profession
+of Masonry had been for some centuries rendered incompatible with
+religion through the Church’s unswerving condemnation of it. A man must
+choose between that and his faith. Things had developed extraordinarily
+during the last century. First there had been the organised assault upon
+the Church in France; and what Catholics had always suspected then
+became a certainty in the revelations of 1918, when P. Gerome, the
+Dominican and ex-Mason, had made his disclosures with regard to the
+Mark-Masons. It had become evident then that Catholics had been right,
+and that Masonry, in its higher grades at least, had been responsible
+throughout the world for the strange movement against religion. But he
+had died in his bed, and the public had been impressed by that fact.
+Then came the splendid donations in France and Italy--to hospitals,
+orphanages, and the like; and once more suspicion began to disappear.
+After all, it seemed--and continued to seem--for seventy years and more
+that Masonry was nothing more than a vast philanthropical society. Now
+once more men had their doubts.
+
+“I hear that Felsenburgh is a Mason,” observed Monsignor Macintosh, the
+Cathedral Administrator. “A Grand-Master or something.”
+
+“But who is Felsenburgh?” put in a young priest.
+
+Monsignor pursed his lips and shook his head. He was one of those humble
+persons as proud of ignorance as others of knowledge. He boasted that he
+never read the papers nor any book except those that had received the
+_imprimatur_; it was a priest’s business, he often remarked, to preserve
+the faith, not to acquire worldly knowledge. Percy had occasionally
+rather envied his point of view.
+
+“He’s a mystery,” said another priest, Father Blackmore; “but he seems
+to be causing great excitement. They were selling his ‘Life’ to-day on
+the Embankment.”
+
+“I met an American senator,” put in Percy, “three days ago, who told me
+that even there they know nothing of him, except his extraordinary
+eloquence. He only appeared last year, and seems to have carried
+everything before him by quite unusual methods. He is a great linguist,
+too. That is why they took him to Irkutsk.”
+
+“Well, the Masons---” went on Monsignor. “It is very serious. In the
+last month four of my penitents have left me because of it.”
+
+“Their inclusion of women was their master-stroke,” growled Father
+Blackmore, helping himself to claret.
+
+“It is extraordinary that they hesitated so long about that,” observed
+Percy.
+
+A couple of the others added their evidence. It appeared that they, too,
+had lost penitents lately through the spread of Masonry. It was rumoured
+that a Pastoral was a-preparing upstairs on the subject.
+
+Monsignor shook his head ominously.
+
+“More is wanted than that,” he said.
+
+Percy pointed out that the Church had said her last word several
+centuries ago. She had laid her excommunication on all members of secret
+societies, and there was really no more that she could do.
+
+“Except bring it before her children again and again,” put in Monsignor.
+“I shall preach on it next Sunday.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Percy dotted down a note when he reached his room, determining to say
+another word or two on the subject to the Cardinal-Protector. He had
+mentioned Freemasonry often before, but it seemed time for another
+remark. Then he opened his letters, first turning to one which he
+recognised as from the Cardinal.
+
+It seemed a curious coincidence, as he read a series of questions that
+Cardinal Martin’s letter contained, that one of them should be on this
+very subject. It ran as follows:
+
+“What of Masonry? Felsenburgh is said to be one. Gather all the gossip
+you can about him. Send any English or American biographies of him. Are
+you still losing Catholics through Masonry?”
+
+He ran his eyes down the rest of the questions. They chiefly referred to
+previous remarks of his own, but twice, even in them, Felsenburgh’s name
+appeared.
+
+He laid the paper down and considered a little.
+
+It was very curious, he thought, how this man’s name was in every one’s
+mouth, in spite of the fact that so little was known about him. He had
+bought in the streets, out of curiosity, three photographs that
+professed to represent this strange person, and though one of them might
+be genuine they all three could not be. He drew them out of a
+pigeon-hole, and spread them before him.
+
+One represented a fierce, bearded creature like a Cossack, with round
+staring eyes. No; intrinsic evidence condemned this: it was exactly how
+a coarse imagination would have pictured a man who seemed to be having a
+great influence in the East.
+
+The second showed a fat face with little eyes and a chin-beard. That
+might conceivably be genuine: he turned it over and saw the name of a
+New York firm on the back. Then he turned to the third. This presented a
+long, clean-shaven face with pince-nez, undeniably clever, but scarcely
+strong: and Felsenburgh was obviously a strong man.
+
+Percy inclined to think the second was the most probable; but they were
+all unconvincing; and he shuffled them carelessly together and replaced
+them.
+
+Then he put his elbows on the table, and began to think.
+
+He tried to remember what Mr. Varhaus, the American senator, had told
+him of Felsenburgh; yet it did not seem sufficient to account for the
+facts. Felsenburgh, it seemed, had employed none of those methods common
+in modern politics. He controlled no newspapers, vituperated nobody,
+championed nobody: he had no picked underlings; he used no bribes; there
+were no monstrous crimes alleged against him. It seemed rather as if his
+originality lay in his clean hands and his stainless past--that, and his
+magnetic character. He was the kind of figure that belonged rather to
+the age of chivalry: a pure, clean, compelling personality, like a
+radiant child. He had taken people by surprise, then, rising out of the
+heaving dun-coloured waters of American socialism like a vision--from
+those waters so fiercely restrained from breaking into storm over since
+the extraordinary social revolution under Mr. Hearst’s disciples, a
+century ago. That had been the end of plutocracy; the famous old laws of
+1914 had burst some of the stinking bubbles of the time; and the
+enactments of 1916 and 1917 had prevented their forming again in any
+thing like their previous force. It had been the salvation of America,
+undoubtedly, even if that salvation were of a dreary and uninspiring
+description; and now out of the flat socialistic level had arisen this
+romantic figure utterly unlike any that had preceded it.... So the
+senator had hinted.... It was too complicated for Percy just now, and he
+gave it up.
+
+It was a weary world, he told himself, turning his eyes homewards.
+Everything seemed so hopeless and ineffective. He tried not to reflect
+on his fellow-priests, but for the fiftieth time he could not help
+seeing that they were not the men for the present situation. It was not
+that he preferred himself; he knew perfectly well that he, too, was
+fully as incompetent: had he not proved to be so with poor Father
+Francis, and scores of others who had clutched at him in their agony
+during the last ten years? Even the Archbishop, holy man as he was, with
+all his childlike faith--was that the man to lead English Catholics and
+confound their enemies? There seemed no giants on the earth in these
+days. What in the world was to be done? He buried his face in his
+hands....
+
+Yes; what was wanted was a new Order in the Church; the old ones were
+rule-bound through no fault of their own. An Order was wanted without
+habit or tonsure, without traditions or customs, an Order with nothing
+but entire and whole-hearted devotion, without pride even in their most
+sacred privileges, without a past history in which they might take
+complacent refuge. They must be _franc-tireurs_ of Christ’s Army; like
+the Jesuits, but without their fatal reputation, which, again, was no
+fault of their own. ... But there must be a Founder--Who, in God’s Name?
+--a Founder _nudus sequens Christum nudum_.... Yes--_Franc-tireurs_
+--priests, bishops, laymen and women--with the three vows of course, and
+a special clause forbidding utterly and for ever their ownership of
+corporate wealth.--Every gift received must be handed to the bishop of
+the diocese in which it was given, who must provide them himself with
+necessaries of life and travel. Oh!--what could they not do?... He was
+off in a rhapsody.
+
+Presently he recovered, and called himself a fool. Was not that scheme
+as old as the eternal hills, and as useless for practical purposes? Why,
+it had been the dream of every zealous man since the First Year of
+Salvation that such an Order should be founded!... He was a fool....
+
+Then once more he began to think of it all over again.
+
+Surely it was this which was wanted against the Masons; and women,
+too.--Had not scheme after scheme broken down because men had forgotten
+the power of women? It was that lack that had ruined Napoleon: he had
+trusted Josephine, and she had failed him; so he had trusted no other
+woman. In the Catholic Church, too, woman had been given no active work
+but either menial or connected with education: and was there not room
+for other activities than those? Well, it was useless to think of it. It
+was not his affair. If _Papa Angelicus_ who now reigned in Rome had not
+thought of it, why should a foolish, conceited priest in Westminster set
+himself up to do so?
+
+So he beat himself on the breast once more, and took up his office-book.
+
+He finished in half an hour, and again sat thinking; but this time it
+was of poor Father Francis. He wondered what he was doing now; whether
+he had taken off the Roman collar of Christ’s familiar slaves? The poor
+devil! And how far was he, Percy Franklin, responsible?
+
+When a tap came at his door presently, and Father Blackmore looked in
+for a talk before going to bed, Percy told him what had happened.
+
+Father Blackmore removed his pipe and sighed deliberately.
+
+“I knew it was coming,” he said. “Well, well.”
+
+“He has been honest enough,” explained Percy. “He told me eight months
+ago he was in trouble.”
+
+Father Blackmore drew upon his pipe thoughtfully.
+
+“Father Franklin,” he said, “things are really very serious. There is
+the same story everywhere. What in the world is happening?”
+
+Percy paused before answering.
+
+“I think these things go in waves,” he said.
+
+“Waves, do you think?” said the other.
+
+“What else?”
+
+Father Blackmore looked at him intently.
+
+“It is more like a dead calm, it seems to me,” he said. “Have you ever
+been in a typhoon?”
+
+Percy shook his head.
+
+“Well,” went on the other, “the most ominous thing is the calm. The sea
+is like oil; you feel half-dead: you can do nothing. Then comes the
+storm.”
+
+Percy looked at him, interested. He had not seen this mood in the priest
+before.
+
+“Before every great crash there comes this calm. It is always so in
+history. It was so before the Eastern War; it was so before the French
+Revolution. It was so before the Reformation. There is a kind of oily
+heaving; and everything is languid. So everything has been in America,
+too, for over eighty years.... Father Franklin, I think something is
+going to happen.”
+
+“Tell me,” said Percy, leaning forward.
+
+“Well, I saw Templeton a week before he died, and he put the idea in my
+head.... Look here, father. It may be this Eastern affair that is coming
+on us; but somehow I don’t think it is. It is in religion that something
+is going to happen. At least, so I think.... Father, who in God’s name
+is Felsenburgh?”
+
+Percy was so startled at the sudden introduction of this name again,
+that he stared a moment without speaking.
+
+Outside, the summer night was very still. There was a faint vibration
+now and again from the underground track that ran twenty yards from the
+house where they sat; but the streets were quiet enough round the
+Cathedral. Once a hoot rang far away, as if some ominous bird of passage
+were crossing between London and the stars, and once the cry of a woman
+sounded thin and shrill from the direction of the river. For the rest
+there was no more than the solemn, subdued hum that never ceased now
+night or day.
+
+“Yes; Felsenburgh,” said Father Blackmore once more. “I cannot get that
+man out of my head. And yet, what do I know of him? What does any one
+know of him?”
+
+Percy licked his lips to answer, and drew a breath to still the beating
+of his heart. He could not imagine why he felt excited. After all, who
+was old Blackmore to frighten him? But old Blackmore went on before he
+could speak.
+
+“See how people are leaving the Church! The Wargraves, the Hendersons,
+Sir James Bartlet, Lady Magnier, and then all the priests. Now they’re
+not all knaves--I wish they were; it would be so much easier to talk of
+it. But Sir James Bartlet, last month! Now, there’s a man who has spent
+half his fortune on the Church, and he doesn’t resent it even now. He
+says that any religion is better than none, but that, for himself, he
+just can’t believe any longer. Now what does all that mean?... I tell
+you something is going to happen. God knows what! And I can’t get
+Felsenburgh out of my head.... Father Franklin---”
+
+“Yes?”
+
+“Have you noticed how few great men we’ve got? It’s not like fifty years
+ago, or even thirty. Then there were Mason, Selborne, Sherbrook, and
+half-a-dozen others. There was Brightman, too, as Archbishop: and now!
+Then the Communists, too. Braithwaite is dead fifteen years. Certainly
+he was big enough; but he was always speaking of the future, not of the
+present; and tell me what big man they have had since then! And now
+there’s this new man, whom no one knows, who came forward in America a
+few months ago, and whose name is in every one’s mouth. Very well,
+then!”
+
+Percy knitted his forehead.
+
+“I am not sure that I understand,” he said.
+
+Father Blackmore knocked his pipe out before answering.
+
+“Well, this,” he said, standing up. “I can’t help thinking Felsenburgh
+is going to do something. I don’t know what; it may be for us or against
+us. But he is a Mason, remember that.... Well, well; I dare say I’m an
+old fool. Good-night.”
+
+“One moment, father,” said Percy slowly. “Do you mean--? Good Lord! What
+do you mean?” He stopped, looking at the other.
+
+The old priest stared back under his bushy eyebrows; it seemed to Percy
+as if he, too, were afraid of something in spite of his easy talk; but
+he made no sign.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Percy stood perfectly still a moment when the door was shut. Then he
+moved across to his _prie-dieu_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+I
+
+Old Mrs. Brand and Mabel were seated at a window of the new Admiralty
+Offices in Trafalgar Square to see Oliver deliver his speech on the
+fiftieth anniversary of the passing of the Poor Laws Reform.
+
+It was an inspiriting sight, this bright June morning, to see the crowds
+gathering round Braithwaite’s statue. That politician, dead fifteen
+years before, was represented in his famous attitude, with arms
+outstretched and down dropped, his head up and one foot slightly
+advanced, and to-day was decked, as was becoming more and more usual on
+such occasions, in his Masonic insignia. It was he who had given
+immense impetus to that secret movement by his declaration in the House
+that the key of future progress and brotherhood of nations was in the
+hands of the Order. It was through this alone that the false unity of
+the Church with its fantastic spiritual fraternity could be
+counteracted. St. Paul had been right, he declared, in his desire to
+break down the partition-walls between nations, and wrong only in his
+exaltation of Jesus Christ. Thus he had preluded his speech on the Poor
+Law question, pointing to the true charity that existed among Masons
+apart from religious motive, and appealing to the famous benefactions on
+the Continent; and in the enthusiasm of the Bill’s success the Order had
+received a great accession of members.
+
+Old Mrs. Brand was in her best to-day, and looked out with considerable
+excitement at the huge throng gathered to hear her son speak. A platform
+was erected round the bronze statue at such a height that the statesman
+appeared to be one of the speakers, though at a slightly higher
+elevation, and this platform was hung with roses, surmounted by a
+sounding-board, and set with a chair and table.
+
+The whole square round about was paved with heads and resonant with
+sound, the murmurs of thousands of voices, overpowered now and again by
+the crash of brass and thunder of drums as the Benefit Societies and
+democratic Guilds, each headed by a banner, deployed from North, South,
+East and West, and converged towards the wide railed space about the
+platform where room was reserved for them. The windows on every side
+were packed with faces; tall stands were erected along the front of the
+National Gallery and St. Martin’s Church, garden-beds of colour behind
+the mute, white statues that faced outwards round the square; from
+Braithwaite in front, past the Victorians--John Davidson, John Burns,
+and the rest--round to Hampden and de Montfort towards the north. The
+old column was gone, with its lions. Nelson had not been found
+advantageous to the _Entente Cordiale_, nor the lions to the new art;
+and in their place stretched a wide pavement broken by slopes of steps
+that led up to the National Gallery.
+
+Overhead the roofs showed crowded friezes of heads against the blue
+summer sky. Not less than one hundred thousand persons, it was estimated
+in the evening papers, were collected within sight and sound of the
+platform by noon.
+
+As the clocks began to tell the hour, two figures appeared from behind
+the statue and came forward, and, in an instant, the murmurs of talk
+rose into cheering.
+
+Old Lord Pemberton came first, a grey-haired, upright man, whose father
+had been active in denouncing the House of which he was a member on the
+occasion of its fall over seventy years ago, and his son had succeeded
+him worthily. This man was now a member of the Government, and sat for
+Manchester (3); and it was he who was to be chairman on this auspicious
+occasion. Behind him came Oliver, bareheaded and spruce, and even at
+that distance his mother and wife could see his brisk movement, his
+sudden smile and nod as his name emerged from the storm of sound that
+surged round the platform. Lord Pemberton came forward, lifted his hand
+and made a signal; and in a moment the thin cheering died under the
+sudden roll of drums beneath that preluded the Masonic Hymn.
+
+There was no doubt that these Londoners could sing. It was as if a giant
+voice hummed the sonorous melody, rising to enthusiasm till the music of
+massed bands followed it as a flag follows a flag-stick. The hymn was
+one composed ten years before, and all England was familiar with it.
+Old Mrs. Bland lifted the printed paper mechanically to her eyes, and
+saw the words that she knew so well:
+
+“_The Lord that dwells in earth and sea._” ...
+
+She glanced down the verses, that from the Humanitarian point of view
+had been composed with both skill and ardour. They had a religious ring;
+the unintelligent Christian could sing them without a qualm; yet their
+sense was plain enough--the old human creed that man was all. Even
+Christ’s, words themselves were quoted. The kingdom of God, it was said,
+lay within the human heart, and the greatest of all graces was Charity.
+
+She glanced at Mabel, and saw that the girl was singing with all her
+might, with her eyes fixed on her husband’s dark figure a hundred yards
+away, and her soul pouring through them. So the mother, too, began to
+move her lips in chorus with that vast volume of sound.
+
+As the hymn died away, and before the cheering could begin again, old
+Lord Pemberton was standing forward on the edge of the platform, and his
+thin, metallic voice piped a sentence or two across the tinkling splash
+of the fountains behind him. Then he stepped back, and Oliver came
+forward.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was too far for the two to hear what was said, but Mabel slipped a
+paper, smiling tremulously, into the old lady’s hand, and herself bent
+forward to listen.
+
+Old Mrs. Brand looked at that, too, knowing that it was an analysis of
+her son’s speech, and aware that she would not be able to hear his
+words.
+
+There was an exordium first, congratulating all who were present to do
+honour to the great man who presided from his pedestal on the occasion
+of this great anniversary. Then there came a retrospect, comparing the
+old state of England with the present. Fifty years ago, the speaker
+said, poverty was still a disgrace, now it was so no longer. It was in
+the causes that led to poverty that the disgrace or the merit lay. Who
+would not honour a man worn out in the service of his country, or
+overcome at last by circumstances against which his efforts could not
+prevail?... He enumerated the reforms passed fifty years before on this
+very day, by which the nation once and for all declared the glory of
+poverty and man’s sympathy with the unfortunate.
+
+So he had told them he was to sing the praise of patient poverty and its
+reward, and that, he supposed, together with a few periods on the reform
+of the prison laws, would form the first half of his speech.
+
+The second part was to be a panegyric of Braithwaite, treating him as
+the Precursor of a movement that even now had begun.
+
+Old Mrs. Brand leaned back in her seat, and looked about her.
+
+The window where they sat had been reserved for them; two arm-chairs
+filled the space, but immediately behind there were others, standing
+very silent now, craning forward, watching, too, with parted lips: a
+couple of women with an old man directly behind, and other faces visible
+again behind them. Their obvious absorption made the old lady a little
+ashamed of her distraction, and she turned resolutely once more to the
+square.
+
+Ah! he was working up now to his panegyric! The tiny dark figure was
+back, a yard nearer the statue, and as she looked, his hand went up and
+he wheeled, pointing, as a murmur of applause drowned for an instant the
+minute, resonant voice. Then again he was forward, half crouching--for
+he was a born actor--and a storm of laughter rippled round the throng of
+heads. She heard an indrawn hiss behind her chair, and the next instant
+an exclamation from Mabel.... What was that?
+
+There was a sharp crack, and the tiny gesticulating figure staggered
+back a step. The old man at the table was up in a moment, and
+simultaneously a violent commotion bubbled and heaved like water about a
+rock at a point in the crowd immediately outside the railed space where
+the bands were massed, and directly opposite the front of the platform.
+
+Mrs. Brand, bewildered and dazed, found herself standing up, clutching
+the window rail, while the girl gripped her, crying out something she
+could not understand. A great roaring filled the square, the heads
+tossed this way and that, like corn under a squall of wind. Then Oliver
+was forward again, pointing and crying out, for she could see his
+gestures; and she sank back quickly, the blood racing through her old
+veins, and her heart hammering at the base of her throat.
+
+“My dear, my dear, what is it?” she sobbed.
+
+But Mabel was up, too, staring out at her husband; and a quick babble of
+talk and exclamations from behind made itself audible in spite of the
+roaring tumult of the square.
+
+
+II
+
+Oliver told them the explanation of the whole affair that evening at
+home, leaning back in his chair, with one arm bandaged and in a sling.
+
+They had not been able to get near him at the time; the excitement in
+the square had been too fierce; but a messenger had come to his wife
+with the news that her husband was only slightly wounded, and was in the
+hands of the doctors.
+
+“He was a Catholic,” explained the drawn-faced Oliver. “He must have
+come ready, for his repeater was found loaded. Well, there was no chance
+for a priest this time.”
+
+Mabel nodded slowly: she had read of the man’s fate on the placards.
+
+“He was killed--trampled and strangled instantly,” said Oliver. “I did
+what I could: you saw me. But--well, I dare say it was more merciful.”
+
+“But you did what you could, my dear?” said the old lady, anxiously,
+from her corner.
+
+“I called out to them, mother, but they wouldn’t hear me.”
+
+Mabel leaned forward---
+
+“Oliver, I know this sounds stupid of me; but--but I wish they had not
+killed him.”
+
+Oliver smiled at her. He knew this tender trait in her.
+
+“It would have been more perfect if they had not,” she said. Then she
+broke off and sat back.
+
+“Why did he shoot just then?” she asked.
+
+Oliver turned his eyes for an instant towards his mother, but she was
+knitting tranquilly.
+
+Then he answered with a curious deliberateness.
+
+“I said that Braithwaite had done more for the world by one speech than
+Jesus and all His saints put together.” He was aware that the
+knitting-needles stopped for a second; then they went on again as
+before.
+
+“But he must have meant to do it anyhow,” continued Oliver.
+
+“How do they know he was a Catholic?” asked the girl again.
+
+“There was a rosary on him; and then he just had time to call on his
+God.”
+
+“And nothing more is known?”
+
+“Nothing more. He was well dressed, though.”
+
+Oliver leaned back a little wearily and closed his eyes; his arm still
+throbbed intolerably. But he was very happy at heart. It was true that
+he had been wounded by a fanatic, but he was not sorry to bear pain in
+such a cause, and it was obvious that the sympathy of England was with
+him. Mr. Phillips even now was busy in the next room, answering the
+telegrams that poured in every moment. Caldecott, the Prime Minister,
+Maxwell, Snowford and a dozen others had wired instantly their
+congratulations, and from every part of England streamed in message
+after message. It was an immense stroke for the Communists; their
+spokesman had been assaulted during the discharge of his duty, speaking
+in defence of his principles; it was an incalculable gain for them, and
+loss for the Individualists, that confessors were not all on one side
+after all. The huge electric placards over London had winked out the
+facts in Esperanto as Oliver stepped into the train at twilight.
+
+“_Oliver Brand wounded.... Catholic assailant.... Indignation of the
+country.... Well-deserved fate of assassin_.”
+
+He was pleased, too, that he honestly had done his best to save the man.
+Even in that moment of sudden and acute pain he had cried out for a fair
+trial; but he had been too late. He had seen the starting eyes roll up
+in the crimson face, and the horrid grin come and go as the hands had
+clutched and torn at his throat. Then the face had vanished and a heavy
+trampling began where it had disappeared. Oh! there was some passion and
+loyalty left in England!
+
+His mother got up presently and went out, still without a word; and
+Mabel turned to him, laying a hand on his knee.
+
+“Are you too tired to talk, my dear?”
+
+He opened his eyes.
+
+“Of course not, my darling. What is it?”
+
+“What do you think will be the effect?”
+
+He raised himself a little, looking out as usual through the darkening
+windows on to that astonishing view. Everywhere now lights were
+glowing, a sea of mellow moons just above the houses, and above the
+mysterious heavy blue of a summer evening.
+
+“The effect?” he said. “It can be nothing but good. It was time that
+something happened. My dear, I feel very downcast sometimes, as you
+know. Well, I do not think I shall be again. I have been afraid
+sometimes that we were losing all our spirit, and that the old Tories
+were partly right when they prophesied what Communism would do. But
+after this---”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“Well; we have shown that we can shed our blood too. It is in the nick
+of time, too, just at the crisis. I don’t want to exaggerate; it is only
+a scratch--but it was so deliberate, and--and so dramatic. The poor
+devil could not have chosen a worse moment. People won’t forget it.”
+
+Mabel’s eyes shone with pleasure.
+
+“You poor dear!” she said. “Are you in pain?”
+
+“Not much. Besides, Christ! what do I care? If only this infernal
+Eastern affair would end!”
+
+He knew he was feverish and irritable, and made a great effort to drive
+it down.
+
+“Oh, my dear!” he went on, flushed a little. “If they would not be such
+heavy fools: they don’t understand; they don’t understand.”
+
+“Yes, Oliver?”
+
+“They don’t understand what a glorious thing it all is: Humanity, Life,
+Truth at last, and the death of Folly! But haven’t I told them a hundred
+times?”
+
+She looked at him with kindling eyes. She loved to see him like this,
+his confident, flushed face, the enthusiasm in his blue eyes; and the
+knowledge of his pain pricked her feeling with passion. She bent forward
+and kissed him suddenly.
+
+“My dear, I am so proud of you. Oh, Oliver!”
+
+He said nothing; but she could see what she loved to see, that response
+to her own heart; and so they sat in silence while the sky darkened yet
+more, and the click of the writer in the next room told them that the
+world was alive and that they had a share in its affairs.
+
+Oliver stirred presently.
+
+“Did you notice anything just now, sweetheart--when I said that about
+Jesus Christ?”
+
+“She stopped knitting for a moment,” said the girl.
+
+He nodded.
+
+“You saw that too, then.... Mabel, do you think she is falling back?”
+
+“Oh! she is getting old,” said the girl lightly. “Of course she looks
+back a little.”
+
+“But you don’t think--it would be too awful!”
+
+She shook her head.
+
+“No, no, my dear; you’re excited and tired. It’s just a little
+sentiment.... Oliver, I don’t think I would say that kind of thing
+before her.”
+
+“But she hears it everywhere now.”
+
+“No, she doesn’t. Remember she hardly ever goes out. Besides, she hates
+it. After all, she was brought up a Catholic.”
+
+Oliver nodded, and lay back again, looking dreamily out.
+
+“Isn’t it astonishing the way in which suggestion lasts? She can’t get
+it out of her head, even after fifty years. Well, watch her, won’t
+you?... By the way ...”
+
+“Yes?”
+
+“There’s a little more news from the East. They say Felsenburgh’s
+running the whole thing now. The Empire is sending him everywhere--
+Tobolsk, Benares, Yakutsk--everywhere; and he’s been to Australia.”
+
+Mabel sat up briskly.
+
+“Isn’t that very hopeful?”
+
+“I suppose so. There’s no doubt that the Sufis are winning; but for how
+long is another question. Besides, the troops don’t disperse.”
+
+“And Europe?”
+
+“Europe is arming as fast as possible. I hear we are to meet the Powers
+next week at Paris. I must go.”
+
+“Your arm, my dear?”
+
+“My arm must get well. It will have to go with me, anyhow.”
+
+“Tell me some more.”
+
+“There is no more. But it is just as certain as it can be that this is
+the crisis. If the East can be persuaded to hold its hand now, it will
+never be likely to raise it again. It will mean free trade all over the
+world, I suppose, and all that kind of thing. But if not---”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“If not, there will be a catastrophe such as never has been even
+imagined. The whole human race will be at war, and either East or West
+will be simply wiped out. These new Benninschein explosives will make
+certain of that.”
+
+“But is it absolutely certain that the East has got them?”
+
+“Absolutely. Benninschein sold them simultaneously to East and West;
+then he died, luckily for him.”
+
+Mabel had heard this kind of talk before, but her imagination simply
+refused to grasp it. A duel of East and West under these new conditions
+was an unthinkable thing. There had been no European war within living
+memory, and the Eastern wars of the last century had been under the old
+conditions. Now, if tales were true, entire towns would be destroyed
+with a single shell. The new conditions were unimaginable. Military
+experts prophesied extravagantly, contradicting one another on vital
+points; the whole procedure of war was a matter of theory; there were no
+precedents with which to compare it. It was as if archers disputed as to
+the results of cordite. Only one thing was certain--that the East had
+every modern engine, and, as regards male population, half as much
+again as the rest of the world put together; and the conclusion to be
+drawn from these premisses was not reassuring to England.
+
+But imagination simply refused to speak. The daily papers had a short,
+careful leading article every day, founded upon the scraps of news that
+stole out from the conferences on the other side of the world;
+Felsenburgh’s name appeared more frequently than ever: otherwise there
+seemed to be a kind of hush. Nothing suffered very much; trade went on;
+European stocks were not appreciably lower than usual; men still built
+houses, married wives, begat sons and daughters, did their business and
+went to the theatre, for the mere reason that there was no good in
+anything else. They could neither save nor precipitate the situation; it
+was on too large a scale. Occasionally people went mad--people who had
+succeeded in goading their imagination to a height whence a glimpse of
+reality could be obtained; and there was a diffused atmosphere of
+tenseness. But that was all. Not many speeches were made on the subject;
+it had been found inadvisable. After all, there was nothing to do but to
+wait.
+
+
+III
+
+Mabel remembered her husband’s advice to watch, and for a few days did
+her best. But there was nothing that alarmed her. The old lady was a
+little quiet, perhaps, but went about her minute affairs as usual. She
+asked the girl to read to her sometimes, and listened unblenching to
+whatever was offered her; she attended in the kitchen daily, organised
+varieties of food, and appeared interested in all that concerned her
+son. She packed his bag with her own hands, set out his furs for the
+swift flight to Paris, and waved to him from the window as he went down
+the little path towards the junction. He would be gone three days, he
+said.
+
+It was on the evening of the second day that she fell ill; and Mabel,
+running upstairs, in alarm at the message of the servant, found her
+rather flushed and agitated in her chair.
+
+“It is nothing, my dear,” said the old lady tremulously; and she added
+the description of a symptom or two.
+
+Mabel got her to bed, sent for the doctor, and sat down to wait.
+
+She was sincerely fond of the old lady, and had always found her
+presence in the house a quiet sort of delight. The effect of her upon
+the mind was as that of an easy-chair upon the body. The old lady was so
+tranquil and human, so absorbed in small external matters, so
+reminiscent now and then of the days of her youth, so utterly without
+resentment or peevishness. It seemed curiously pathetic to the girl to
+watch that quiet old spirit approach its extinction, or rather, as Mabel
+believed, its loss of personality in the reabsorption into the Spirit of
+Life which informed the world. She found less difficulty in
+contemplating the end of a vigorous soul, for in that case she imagined
+a kind of energetic rush of force back into the origin of things; but in
+this peaceful old lady there was so little energy; her whole point, so
+to speak, lay in the delicate little fabric of personality, built out of
+fragile things into an entity far more significant than the sum of its
+component parts: the death of a flower, reflected Mabel, is sadder than
+the death of a lion; the breaking of a piece of china more irreparable
+than the ruin of a palace.
+
+“It is syncope,” said the doctor when he came in. “She may die at any
+time; she may live ten years.”
+
+“There is no need to telegraph for Mr. Brand?”
+
+He made a little deprecating movement with his hands.
+
+“It is not certain that she will die--it is not imminent?” she asked.
+
+“No, no; she may live ten years, I said.”
+
+He added a word or two of advice as to the use of the oxygen injector,
+and went away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The old lady was lying quietly in bed, when the girl went up, and put
+out a wrinkled hand.
+
+“Well, my dear?” she asked.
+
+“It is just a little weakness, mother. You must lie quiet and do
+nothing. Shall I read to you?”
+
+“No, my dear; I will think a little.”
+
+It was no part of Mabel’s idea to duty to tell her that she was in
+danger, for there was no past to set straight, no Judge to be
+confronted. Death was an ending, not a beginning. It was a peaceful
+Gospel; at least, it became peaceful as soon as the end had come.
+
+So the girl went downstairs once more, with a quiet little ache at her
+heart that refused to be still.
+
+What a strange and beautiful thing death was, she told herself--this
+resolution of a chord that had hung suspended for thirty, fifty or
+seventy years--back again into the stillness of the huge Instrument that
+was all in all to itself. Those same notes would be struck again, were
+being struck again even now all over the world, though with an infinite
+delicacy of difference in the touch; but that particular emotion was
+gone: it was foolish to think that it was sounding eternally elsewhere,
+for there was no elsewhere. She, too, herself would cease one day, let
+her see to it that the tone was pure and lovely.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mr. Phillips arrived the next morning as usual, just as Mabel had left
+the old lady’s room, and asked news of her.
+
+“She is a little better, I think,” said Mabel. “She must be very quiet
+all day.”
+
+The secretary bowed and turned aside into Oliver’s room, where a heap of
+letters lay to be answered.
+
+A couple of hours later, as Mabel went upstairs once more, she met Mr.
+Phillips coming down. He looked a little flushed under his sallow skin.
+
+“Mrs. Brand sent for me,” he said. “She wished to know whether Mr.
+Oliver would be back to-night.”
+
+“He will, will he not? You have not heard?”
+
+“Mr. Brand said he would be here for a late dinner. He will reach London
+at nineteen.”
+
+“And is there any other news?”
+
+He compressed his lips.
+
+“There are rumours,” he said. “Mr. Brand wired to me an hour ago.”
+
+He seemed moved at something, and Mabel looked at him in astonishment.
+
+“It is not Eastern news?” she asked.
+
+His eyebrows wrinkled a little.
+
+“You must forgive me, Mrs. Brand,” he said. “I am not at liberty to say
+anything.”
+
+She was not offended, for she trusted her husband too well; but she went
+on into the sick-room with her heart beating.
+
+The old lady, too, seemed excited. She lay in bed with a clear flush in
+her white cheeks, and hardly smiled at all to the girl’s greeting.
+
+“Well, you have seen Mr. Phillips, then?” said Mabel.
+
+Old Mrs. Brand looked at her sharply an instant, but said nothing.
+
+“Don’t excite yourself, mother. Oliver will be back to-night.”
+
+The old lady drew a long breath.
+
+“Don’t trouble about me, my dear,” she said. “I shall do very well now.
+He will be back to dinner, will he not?”
+
+“If the volor is not late. Now, mother, are you ready for breakfast?”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mabel passed an afternoon of considerable agitation. It was certain that
+something had happened. The secretary, who breakfasted with her in the
+parlour looking on to the garden, had appeared strangely excited. He had
+told her that he would be away the rest of the day: Mr. Oliver had given
+him his instructions. He had refrained from all discussion of the
+Eastern question, and he had given her no news of the Paris Convention;
+he only repeated that Mr. Oliver would be back that night. Then he had
+gone of in a hurry half-an-hour later.
+
+The old lady seemed asleep when the girl went up afterwards, and Mabel
+did not like to disturb her. Neither did she like to leave the house; so
+she walked by herself in the garden, thinking and hoping and fearing,
+till the long shadow lay across the path, and the tumbled platform of
+roofs was bathed in a dusty green haze from the west.
+
+As she came in she took up the evening paper, but there was no news
+there except to the effect that the Convention would close that
+afternoon.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Twenty o’clock came, but there was no sign of Oliver. The Paris volor
+should have arrived an hour before, but Mabel, staring out into the
+darkening heavens had seen the stars come out like jewels one by one,
+but no slender winged fish pass overhead. Of course she might have
+missed it; there was no depending on its exact course; but she had seen
+it a hundred times before, and wondered unreasonably why she had not
+seen it now. But she would not sit down to dinner, and paced up and
+down in her white dress, turning again and again to the window,
+listening to the soft rush of the trains, the faint hoots from the
+track, and the musical chords from the junction a mile away. The lights
+were up by now, and the vast sweep of the towns looked like fairyland
+between the earthly light and the heavenly darkness. Why did not Oliver
+come, or at least let her know why he did not?
+
+Once she went upstairs, miserably anxious herself, to reassure the old
+lady, and found her again very drowsy.
+
+“He is not come,” she said. “I dare say he may be kept in Paris.”
+
+The old face on the pillow nodded and murmured, and Mabel went down
+again. It was now an hour after dinner-time.
+
+Oh! there were a hundred things that might have kept him. He had often
+been later than this: he might have missed the volor he meant to catch;
+the Convention might have been prolonged; he might be exhausted, and
+think it better to sleep in Paris after all, and have forgotten to wire.
+He might even have wired to Mr. Phillips, and the secretary have
+forgotten to pass on the message.
+
+She went at last, hopelessly, to the telephone, and looked at it. There
+it was, that round silent mouth, that little row of labelled buttons.
+She half decided to touch them one by one, and inquire whether anything
+had been heard of her husband: there was his club, his office in
+Whitehall, Mr. Phillips’s house, Parliament-house, and the rest. But she
+hesitated, telling herself to be patient. Oliver hated interference, and
+he would surely soon remember and relieve her anxiety.
+
+Then, even as she turned away, the bell rang sharply, and a white label
+flashed into sight.--WHITEHALL.
+
+She pressed the corresponding button, and, her hand shaking so much that
+she could scarcely hold the receiver to her ear, she listened.
+
+“Who is there?”
+
+Her heart leaped at the sound of her husband’s voice, tiny and minute
+across the miles of wire.
+
+“I--Mabel,” she said. “Alone here.”
+
+“Oh! Mabel. Very well. I am back: all is well. Now listen. Can you
+hear?”
+
+“Yes, yes.”
+
+“The best has happened. It is all over in the East. Felsenburgh has done
+it. Now listen. I cannot come home to-night. It will be announced in
+Paul’s House in two hours from now. We are communicating with the Press.
+Come up here to me at once. You must be present.... Can you hear?”
+
+“Oh, yes.”
+
+“Come then at once. It will be the greatest thing in history. Tell no
+one. Come before the rush begins. In half-an-hour the way will be
+stopped.”
+
+“Oliver.”
+
+“Yes? Quick.”
+
+“Mother is ill. Shall I leave her?”
+
+“How ill?”
+
+“Oh, no immediate danger. The doctor has seen her.”
+
+There was silence for a moment.
+
+“Yes; come then. We will go back to-night anyhow, then. Tell her we
+shall be late.”
+
+“Very well.”
+
+“... Yes, you must come. Felsenburgh will be there.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+I
+
+On the same afternoon Percy received a visitor.
+
+There was nothing exceptional about him; and Percy, as he came
+downstairs in his walking-dress and looked at him in the light from the
+tall parlour-window, came to no conclusion at all as to his business and
+person, except that he was not a Catholic.
+
+“You wished to see me,” said the priest, indicating a chair.
+
+“I fear I must not stop long.”
+
+“I shall not keep you long,” said the stranger eagerly. “My business is
+done in five minutes.”
+
+Percy waited with his eyes cast down.
+
+“A--a certain person has sent me to you. She was a Catholic once; she
+wishes to return to the Church.”
+
+Percy made a little movement with his head. It was a message he did not
+very often receive in these days.
+
+“You will come, sir, will you not? You will promise me?”
+
+The man seemed greatly agitated; his sallow face showed a little shining
+with sweat, and his eyes were piteous.
+
+“Of course I will come,” said Percy, smiling.
+
+“Yes, sir; but you do not know who she is. It--it would make a great
+stir, sir, if it was known. It must not be known, sir; you will promise
+me that, too?”
+
+“I must not make any promise of that kind,” said the priest gently. “I
+do not know the circumstances yet.”
+
+The stranger licked his lips nervously.
+
+“Well, sir,” he said hastily, “you will say nothing till you have seen
+her? You can promise me that.”
+
+“Oh! certainly,” said the priest.
+
+“Well, sir, you had better not know my name. It--it may make it easier
+for you and for me. And--and, if you please, sir, the lady is ill; you
+must come to-day, if you please, but not until the evening. Will
+twenty-two o’clock be convenient, sir?”
+
+“Where is it?” asked Percy abruptly.
+
+“It--it is near Croydon junction. I will write down the address
+presently. And you will not come until twenty-two o’clock, sir?”
+
+“Why not now?”
+
+“Because the--the others may be there. They will be away then; I know
+that.”
+
+This was rather suspicious, Percy thought: discreditable plots had been
+known before. But he could not refuse outright.
+
+“Why does she not send for her parish-priest?” he asked.
+
+“She she does not know who he is, sir; she saw you once in the
+Cathedral, sir, and asked you for your name. Do you remember, sir?--an
+old lady?”
+
+Percy did dimly remember something of the kind a month or two before;
+but he could not be certain, and said so.
+
+“Well, sir, you will come, will you not?”
+
+“I must communicate with Father Dolan,” said the priest. “If he gives me
+permission---”
+
+“If you please, sir, Father--Father Dolan must not know her name. You
+will not tell him?”
+
+“I do not know it myself yet,” said the priest, smiling.
+
+The stranger sat back abruptly at that, and his face worked.
+
+“Well, sir, let me tell you this first. This old lady’s son is my
+employer, and a very prominent Communist. She lives with him and his
+wife. The other two will be away to-night. That is why I am asking you
+all this. And now, you will come, sir?”
+
+Percy looked at him steadily for a moment or two. Certainly, if this was
+a conspiracy, the conspirators were feeble folk. Then he answered:
+
+“I will come, sir; I promise. Now the name.”
+
+The stranger again licked his lips nervously, and glanced timidly from
+side to side. Then he seemed to gather his resolution; he leaned forward
+and whispered sharply.
+
+“The old lady’s name is Brand, sir--the mother of Mr. Oliver Brand.”
+
+For a moment Percy was bewildered. It was too extraordinary to be true.
+He knew Mr. Oliver Brand’s name only too well; it was he who, by God’s
+permission, was doing more in England at this moment against the
+Catholic cause than any other man alive; and it was he whom the
+Trafalgar Square incident had raised into such eminent popularity. And
+now, here was his mother---
+
+He turned fiercely upon the man.
+
+“I do not know what you are, sir--whether you believe in God or not; but
+will you swear to me on your religion and your honour that all this is
+true?”
+
+The timid eyes met his, and wavered; but it was the wavering of
+weakness, not of treachery.
+
+“I--I swear it, sir; by God Almighty.”
+
+“Are you a Catholic?”
+
+The man shook his head.
+
+“But I believe in God,” he said. “At least, I think so.”
+
+Percy leaned back, trying to realise exactly what it all meant. There
+was no triumph in his mind--that kind of emotion was not his weakness;
+there was fear of a kind, excitement, bewilderment, and under all a
+satisfaction that God’s grace was so sovereign. If it could reach this
+woman, who could be too far removed for it to take effect? Presently he
+noticed the other looking at him anxiously.
+
+“You are afraid, sir? You are not going back from your promise?”
+
+That dispersed the cloud a little, and Percy smiled.
+
+“Oh! no,” he said. “I will be there at twenty-two o’clock. ... Is death
+imminent?”
+
+“No, sir; it is syncope. She is recovered a little this morning.”
+
+The priest passed his hand over his eyes and stood up.
+
+“Well, I will be there,” he said. “Shall you be there, sir?”
+
+The other shook his head, standing up too.
+
+“I must be with Mr. Brand, sir; there is to be a meeting to-night; but I
+must not speak of that.... No, sir; ask for Mrs. Brand, and say that she
+is expecting you. They will take you upstairs at once.”
+
+“I must not say I am a priest, I suppose?”
+
+“No, sir; if you please.”
+
+He drew out a pocket-book, scribbled in it a moment, tore out the sheet,
+and handed it to the priest.
+
+“The address, sir. Will you kindly destroy that when you have copied it?
+I--I do not wish to lose my place, sir, if it can be helped.”
+
+Percy stood twisting the paper in his fingers a moment.
+
+“Why are you not a Catholic yourself?” he asked.
+
+The man shook his head mutely. Then he took up his hat, and went towards
+the door.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Percy passed a very emotional afternoon.
+
+For the last month or two little had happened to encourage him. He had
+been obliged to report half-a-dozen more significant secessions, and
+hardly a conversion of any kind. There was no doubt at all that the tide
+was setting steadily against the Church. The mad act in Trafalgar
+Square, too, had done incalculable harm last week: men were saying more
+than ever, and the papers storming, that the Church’s reliance on the
+supernatural was belied by every one of her public acts. “Scratch a
+Catholic and find an assassin” had been the text of a leading article in
+the _New People_, and Percy himself was dismayed at the folly of the
+attempt. It was true that the Archbishop had formally repudiated both
+the act and the motive from the Cathedral pulpit, but that too had only
+served as an opportunity hastily taken up by the principal papers, to
+recall the continual policy of the Church to avail herself of violence
+while she repudiated the violent. The horrible death of the man had in
+no way appeased popular indignation; there were not even wanting
+suggestions that the man had been seen coming out of Archbishop’s House
+an hour before the attempt at assassination had taken place.
+
+And now here, with dramatic swiftness, had come a message that the
+hero’s own mother desired reconciliation with the Church that had
+attempted to murder her son.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Again and again that afternoon, as Percy sped northwards on his visit to
+a priest in Worcester, and southwards once more as the lights began to
+shine towards evening, he wondered whether this were not a plot after
+all--some kind of retaliation, an attempt to trap him. Yet he had
+promised to say nothing, and to go.
+
+He finished his daily letter after dinner as usual, with a curious sense
+of fatality; addressed and stamped it. Then he went downstairs, in his
+walking-dress, to Father Blackmore’s room.
+
+“Will you hear my confession, father?” he said abruptly.
+
+
+II
+
+Victoria Station, still named after the great nineteenth-century Queen,
+was neither more nor less busy than usual as he came into it
+half-an-hour later. The vast platform, sunk now nearly two hundred feet
+below the ground level, showed the double crowd of passengers entering
+and leaving town. Those on the extreme left, towards whom Percy began to
+descend in the open glazed lift, were by far the most numerous, and the
+stream at the lift-entrance made it necessary for him to move slowly.
+
+He arrived at last, walking in the soft light on the noiseless ribbed
+rubber, and stood by the door of the long car that ran straight through
+to the Junction. It was the last of a series of a dozen or more, each of
+which slid off minute by minute. Then, still watching the endless
+movement of the lifts ascending and descending between the entrances of
+the upper end of the station, he stepped in and sat down.
+
+He felt quiet now that he had actually started. He had made his
+confession, just in order to make certain of his own soul, though
+scarcely expecting any definite danger, and sat now, his grey suit and
+straw hat in no way distinguishing him as a priest (for a general leave
+was given by the authorities to dress so for any adequate reason). Since
+the case was not imminent, he had not brought stocks or pyx--Father
+Dolan had wired to him that he might fetch them if he wished from St.
+Joseph’s, near the Junction. He had only the violet thread in his
+pocket, such as was customary for sick calls.
+
+He was sliding along peaceably enough, fixing his eyes on the empty seat
+opposite, and trying to preserve complete collectedness when the car
+abruptly stopped. He looked out, astonished, and saw by the white
+enamelled walks twenty feet from the window that they were already in
+the tunnel. The stoppage might arise from many causes, and he was not
+greatly excited, nor did it seem that others in the carriage took it
+very seriously; he could hear, after a moment’s silence, the talking
+recommence beyond the partition.
+
+Then there came, echoed by the walls, the sound of shouting from far
+away, mingled with hoots and chords; it grew louder. The talking in the
+carriage stopped. He heard a window thrown up, and the next instant a
+car tore past, going back to the station although on the down line. This
+must be looked into, thought Percy: something certainly was happening;
+so he got up and went across the empty compartment to the further
+window. Again came the crying of voices, again the signals, and once
+more a car whirled past, followed almost immediately by another. There
+was a jerk--a smooth movement. Percy staggered and fell into a seat, as
+the carriage in which he was seated itself began to move backwards.
+
+There was a clamour now in the next compartment, and Percy made his way
+there through the door, only to find half-a-dozen men with their heads
+thrust from the windows, who paid absolutely no attention to his
+inquiries. So he stood there, aware that they knew no more than himself,
+waiting for an explanation from some one. It was disgraceful, he told
+himself, that any misadventure should so disorganise the line.
+
+Twice the car stopped; each time it moved on again after a hoot or two,
+and at last drew up at the platform whence it had started, although a
+hundred yards further out.
+
+Ah! there was no doubt that something had happened! The instant he
+opened the door a great roar met his ears, and as he sprang on to the
+platform and looked up at the end of the station, he began to
+understand.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From right to left of the huge interior, across the platforms, swelling
+every instant, surged an enormous swaying, roaring crowd. The flight of
+steps, twenty yards broad, used only in cases of emergency, resembled a
+gigantic black cataract nearly two hundred feet in height. Each car as
+it drew up discharged more and more men and women, who ran like ants
+towards the assembly of their fellows. The noise was indescribable, the
+shouting of men, the screaming of women, the clang and hoot of the huge
+machines, and three or four times the brazen cry of a trumpet, as an
+emergency door was flung open overhead, and a small swirl of crowd
+poured through it towards the streets beyond. But after one look Percy
+looked no more at the people; for there, high up beneath the clock, on
+the Government signal board, flared out monstrous letters of fire,
+telling in Esperanto and English, the message for which England had
+grown sick. He read it a dozen times before he moved, staring, as at a
+supernatural sight which might denote the triumph of either heaven or
+hell.
+
+“EASTERN CONVENTION DISPERSED.
+
+PEACE, NOT WAR.
+
+UNIVERSAL BROTHERHOOD ESTABLISHED.
+
+FELSENBURGH IN LONDON TO-NIGHT.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+III
+
+It was not until nearly two hours later that Percy was standing at the
+house beyond the Junction.
+
+He had argued, expostulated, threatened, but the officials were like
+men possessed. Half of them had disappeared in the rush to the City, for
+it had leaked out, in spite of the Government’s precautions, that Paul’s
+House, known once as St. Paul’s Cathedral, was to be the scene of
+Felsenburgh’s reception. The others seemed demented; one man on the
+platform had dropped dead from nervous exhaustion, but no one appeared
+to care; and the body lay huddled beneath a seat. Again and again Percy
+had been swept away by a rush, as he struggled from platform to platform
+in his search for a car that would take him to Croydon. It seemed that
+there was none to be had, and the useless carriages collected like
+drift-wood between the platforms, as others whirled up from the country
+bringing loads of frantic, delirious men, who vanished like smoke from
+the white rubber-boards. The platforms were continually crowded, and as
+continually emptied, and it was not until half-an-hour before midnight
+that the block began to move outwards again.
+
+Well, he was here at last, dishevelled, hatless and exhausted, looking
+up at the dark windows.
+
+He scarcely knew what he thought of the whole matter. War, of course,
+was terrible. And such a war as this would have been too terrible for
+the imagination to visualise; but to the priest’s mind there were other
+things even worse. What of universal peace--peace, that is to say,
+established by others than Christ’s method? Or was God behind even this?
+The questions were hopeless.
+
+Felsenburgh--it was he then who had done this thing--this thing
+undoubtedly greater than any secular event hitherto known in
+civilisation. What manner of man was he? What was his character, his
+motive, his method? How would he use his success?... So the points flew
+before him like a stream of sparks, each, it might be, harmless; each,
+equally, capable of setting a world on fire. Meanwhile here was an old
+woman who desired to be reconciled with God before she died....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He touched the button again, three or four times, and waited. Then a
+light sprang out overhead, and he knew that he was heard.
+
+“I was sent for,” he exclaimed to the bewildered maid. “I should have
+been here at twenty-two: I was prevented by the rush.”
+
+She babbled out a question at him.
+
+“Yes, it is true, I believe,” he said. “It is peace, not war. Kindly
+take me upstairs.”
+
+He went through the hall with a curious sense of guilt. This was Brand’s
+house then--that vivid orator, so bitterly eloquent against God; and
+here was he, a priest, slinking in under cover of night. Well, well, it
+was not of his appointment.
+
+At the door of an upstairs room the maid turned to him.
+
+“A doctor, sir?” she said.
+
+“That is my affair,” said Percy briefly, and opened the door.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A little wailing cry broke from the corner, before he had time to close
+the door again.
+
+“Oh! thank God! I thought He had forgotten me. You are a priest,
+father?”
+
+“I am a priest. Do you not remember seeing me in the Cathedral?”
+
+“Yes, yes, sir; I saw you praying, father. Oh! thank God, thank God!”
+
+Percy stood looking down at her a moment, seeing her flushed old face in
+the nightcap, her bright sunken eyes and her tremulous hands. Yes; this
+was genuine enough.
+
+“Now, my child,” he said, “tell me.”
+
+“My confession, father.”
+
+Percy drew out the purple thread, slipped it over his shoulders, and sat
+down by the bed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But she would not let him go for a while after that.
+
+“Tell me, father. When will you bring me Holy Communion?”
+
+He hesitated.
+
+“I understand that Mr. Brand and his wife know nothing of all this?”
+
+“No, father.”
+
+“Tell me, are you very ill?”
+
+“I don’t know, father. They will not tell me. I thought I was gone last
+night.”
+
+“When would you wish me to bring you Holy Communion? I will do as you
+say.”
+
+“Shall I send to you in a day or two? Father, ought I to tell him?”
+
+“You are not obliged.”
+
+“I will if I ought.”
+
+“Well, think about it, and let me know.... You have heard what has
+happened?”
+
+She nodded, but almost uninterestedly; and Percy was conscious of a tiny
+prick of compunction at his own heart. After all, the reconciling of a
+soul to God was a greater thing than the reconciling of East to West.
+
+“It may make a difference to Mr. Brand,” he said. “He will be a great
+man, now, you know.”
+
+She still looked at him in silence, smiling a little. Percy was
+astonished at the youthfulness of that old face. Then her face changed.
+
+“Father, I must not keep you; but tell me this--Who is this man?”
+
+“Felsenburgh?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“No one knows. We shall know more to-morrow. He is in town to-night.”
+
+She looked so strange that Percy for an instant thought it was a
+seizure. Her face seemed to fall away in a kind of emotion, half
+cunning, half fear.
+
+“Well, my child?”
+
+“Father, I am a little afraid when I think of that man. He cannot harm
+me, can he? I am safe now? I am a Catholic--?”
+
+“My child, of course you are safe. What is the matter? How can this man
+injure you?”
+
+But the look of terror was still there, and Percy came a step nearer.
+
+“You must not give way to fancies,” he said. “Just commit yourself to
+our Blessed Lord. This man can do you no harm.”
+
+He was speaking now as to a child; but it was of no use. Her old mouth
+was still sucked in, and her eyes wandered past him into the gloom of
+the room behind.
+
+“My child, tell me what is the matter. What do you know of Felsenburgh?
+You have been dreaming.”
+
+She nodded suddenly and energetically, and Percy for the first time felt
+his heart give a little leap of apprehension. Was this old woman out of
+her mind, then? Or why was it that that name seemed to him sinister?
+Then he remembered that Father Blackmore had once talked like this. He
+made an effort, and sat down once more.
+
+“Now tell me plainly,” he said. “You have been dreaming. What have you
+dreamt?”
+
+She raised herself a little in bed, again glancing round the room; then
+she put out her old ringed hand for one of his, and he gave it,
+wondering.
+
+“The door is shut, father? There is no one listening?”
+
+“No, no, my child. Why are you trembling? You must not be
+superstitious.”
+
+“Father, I will tell you. Dreams are nonsense, are they not? Well, at
+least, this is what I dreamt.
+
+“I was somewhere in a great house; I do not know where it was. It was a
+house I have never seen. It was one of the old houses, and it was very
+dark. I was a child, I thought, and I was ... I was afraid of something.
+The passages were all dark, and I went crying in the dark, looking for a
+light, and there was none. Then I heard a voice talking, a great way
+off. Father---”
+
+Her hand gripped his more tightly, and again her eyes went round the
+room.
+
+With great difficulty Percy repressed a sigh. Yet he dared not leave her
+just now. The house was very still; only from outside now and again
+sounded the clang of the cars, as they sped countrywards again from the
+congested town, and once the sound of great shouting. He wondered what
+time it was.
+
+“Had you better tell me now?” he asked, still talking with a patient
+simplicity. “What time will they be back?”
+
+“Not yet,” she whispered. “Mabel said not till two o’clock. What time
+is it now, father?”
+
+He pulled out his watch with his disengaged hand.
+
+“It is not yet one,” he said.
+
+“Very well, listen, father.... I was in this house; and I heard that
+talking; and I ran along the passages, till I saw light below a door;
+and then I stopped.... Nearer, father.”
+
+Percy was a little awed in spite of himself. Her voice had suddenly
+dropped to a whisper, and her old eyes seemed to hold him strangely.
+
+“I stopped, father; I dared not go in. I could hear the talking, and I
+could see the light; and I dared not go in. Father, it was Felsenburgh
+in that room.”
+
+From beneath came the sudden snap of a door; then the sound of
+footsteps. Percy turned his head abruptly, and at the same moment heard
+a swift indrawn breath from the old woman.
+
+“Hush!” he said. “Who is that?”
+
+Two voices were talking in the hall below now, and at the sound the old
+woman relaxed her hold.
+
+“I--I thought it to be him,” she murmured.
+
+Percy stood up; he could see that she did not understand the situation.
+
+“Yes, my child,” he said quietly, “but who is it?”
+
+“My son and his wife,” she said; then her face changed once more.
+“Why--why, father---”
+
+Her voice died in her throat, as a step vibrated outside. For a moment
+there was complete silence; then a whisper, plainly audible, in a girl’s
+voice.
+
+“Why, her light is burning. Come in, Oliver, but softly.”
+
+Then the handle turned.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+I
+
+There was an exclamation, then silence, as a tall, beautiful girl with
+flushed face and shining grey eyes came forward and stopped, followed by
+a man whom Percy knew at once from his pictures. A little whimpering
+sounded from the bed, and the priest lifted his hand instinctively to
+silence it.
+
+“Why,” said Mabel; and then stared at the man with the young face and
+the white hair.
+
+Oliver opened his lips and closed them again. He, too, had a strange
+excitement in his face. Then he spoke.
+
+“Who is this?” he said deliberately.
+
+“Oliver,” cried the girl, turning to him abruptly, “this is the priest I
+saw---”
+
+“A priest!” said the other, and came forward a step. “Why, I thought---”
+
+
+Percy drew a breath to steady that maddening vibration in his throat.
+
+“Yes, I am a priest,” he said.
+
+Again the whimpering broke out from the bed; and Percy, half turning
+again to silence it, saw the girl mechanically loosen the clasp of the
+thin dust cloak over her white dress.
+
+“You sent for him, mother?” snapped the man, with a tremble in his
+voice, and with a sudden jerk forward of his whole body. But the girl
+put out her hand.
+
+“Quietly, my dear,” she said. “Now, sir---”
+
+“Yes, I am a priest,” said Percy again, strung up now to a desperate
+resistance of will, hardly knowing what he said.
+
+“And you come to my house!” exclaimed the man. He came a step nearer,
+and half recoiled. “You swear you are a priest?” he said. “You have been
+here all this evening?”
+
+“Since midnight.”
+
+“And you are not---” he stopped again.
+
+Mabel stepped straight between them.
+
+“Oliver,” she said, still with that air of suppressed excitement, “we
+must not have a scene here. The poor dear is too ill. Will you come
+downstairs, sir?”
+
+Percy took a step towards the door, and Oliver moved slightly aside.
+Then the priest stopped, turned and lifted his hand.
+
+“God bless you!” he said simply, to the muttering figure in the bed.
+Then he went out, and waited outside the door.
+
+He could hear a low talking within; then a compassionate murmur from the
+girl’s voice; then Oliver was beside him, trembling all over, as white
+as ashes, and made a silent gesture as he went past him down the stairs.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The whole thing seemed to Percy like some incredible dream; it was all
+so unexpected, so untrue to life. He felt conscious of an enormous shame
+at the sordidness of the affair, and at the same time of a kind of
+hopeless recklessness. The worst had happened and the best--that was his
+sole comfort.
+
+Oliver pushed a door open, touched a button, and went through into the
+suddenly lit room, followed by Percy. Still in silence, he pointed to a
+chair, Percy sat down, and Oliver stood before the fireplace, his hands
+deep in the pockets of his jacket, slightly turned away.
+
+Percy’s concentrated senses became aware of every detail of the
+room--the deep springy green carpet, smooth under his feet, the straight
+hanging thin silk curtains, the half-dozen low tables with a wealth of
+flowers upon them, and the books that lined the walls. The whole room
+was heavy with the scent of roses, although the windows were wide, and
+the night-breeze stirred the curtains continually. It was a woman’s
+room, he told himself. Then he looked at the man’s figure, lithe, tense,
+upright; the dark grey suit not unlike his own, the beautiful curve of
+the jaw, the clear pale complexion, the thin nose, the protruding curve
+of idealism over the eyes, and the dark hair. It was a poet’s face, he
+told himself, and the whole personality was a living and vivid one. Then
+he turned a little and rose as the door opened, and Mabel came in,
+closing it behind her.
+
+She came straight across to her husband, and put a hand on his shoulder.
+
+“Sit down, my dear,” she said. “We must talk a little. Please sit down,
+sir.”
+
+The three sat down, Percy on one side, and the husband and wife on a
+straight-backed settle opposite.
+
+The girl began again.
+
+“This must be arranged at once,” she said, “but we must have no tragedy.
+Oliver, do you understand? You must not make a scene. Leave this to me.”
+
+She spoke with a curious gaiety; and Percy to his astonishment saw that
+she was quite sincere: there was not the hint of cynicism.
+
+“Oliver, my dear,” she said again, “don’t mouth like that! It is all
+perfectly right. I am going to manage this.”
+
+Percy saw a venomous look directed at him by the man; the girl saw it
+too, moving her strong humorous eyes from one to the other. She put her
+hand on his knee.
+
+“Oliver, attend! Don’t look at this gentleman so bitterly. He has done
+no harm.”
+
+“No harm!” whispered the other.
+
+“No--no harm in the world. What does it matter what that poor dear
+upstairs thinks? Now, sir, would you mind telling us why you came here?”
+
+Percy drew another breath. He had not expected this line.
+
+“I came here to receive Mrs. Brand back into the Church,” he said.
+
+“And you have done so?”
+
+“I have done so.”
+
+“Would you mind telling us your name? It makes it so much more
+convenient.”
+
+Percy hesitated. Then he determined to meet her on her own ground.
+
+“Certainly. My name is Franklin.”
+
+“Father Franklin?” asked the girl, with just the faintest tinge of
+mocking emphasis on the first word.
+
+“Yes. Father Percy Franklin, from Archbishop’s House, Westminster,” said
+the priest steadily.
+
+“Well, then, Father Percy Franklin; can you tell us why you came here? I
+mean, who sent for you?”
+
+“Mrs. Brand sent for me.”
+
+“Yes, but by what means?”
+
+“That I must not say.”
+
+“Oh, very good.... May we know what good comes of being ‘received into
+the Church?’”
+
+“By being received into the Church, the soul is reconciled to God.”
+
+“Oh! (Oliver, be quiet.) And how do you do it, Father Franklin?”
+
+Percy stood up abruptly.
+
+“This is no good, madam,” he said. “What is the use of these questions?”
+
+The girl looked at him in open-eyed astonishment, still with her hand on
+her husband’s knee.
+
+“The use, Father Franklin! Why, we want to know. There is no church law
+against your telling us, is there?”
+
+Percy hesitated again. He did not understand in the least what she was
+after. Then he saw that he would give them an advantage if he lost his
+head at all: so he sat down again.
+
+“Certainly not. I will tell you if you wish to know. I heard Mrs.
+Brand’s confession, and gave her absolution.”
+
+“Oh! yes; and that does it, then? And what next?”
+
+“She ought to receive Holy Communion, and anointing, if she is in danger
+of death.”
+
+Oliver twitched suddenly.
+
+“Christ!” he said softly.
+
+“Oliver!” cried the girl entreatingly. “Please leave this to me. It is
+much better so.--And then, I suppose, Father Franklin, you want to give
+those other things to my mother, too?”
+
+“They are not absolutely necessary,” said the priest, feeling, he did
+not know why, that he was somehow playing a losing game.
+
+“Oh! they are not necessary? But you would like to?”
+
+“I shall do so if possible. But I have done what is necessary.”
+
+It required all his will to keep quiet. He was as a man who had armed
+himself in steel, only to find that his enemy was in the form of a
+subtle vapour. He simply had not an idea what to do next. He would have
+given anything for the man to have risen and flown at his throat, for
+this girl was too much for them both.
+
+“Yes,” she said softly. “Well, it is hardly to be expected that my
+husband should give you leave to come here again. But I am very glad
+that you have done what you think necessary. No doubt it will be a
+satisfaction to you, Father Franklin, and to the poor old thing
+upstairs, too. While we--- _we_--” she pressed her husband’s knee--“we
+do not mind at all. Oh!--but there is one thing more.”
+
+“If you please,” said Percy, wondering what on earth was coming.
+
+“You Christians--forgive me if I say anything rude--but, you know, you
+Christians have a reputation for counting heads, and making the most of
+converts. We shall be so much obliged, Father Franklin, if you will
+give us your word not to advertise this--this incident. It would
+distress my husband, and give him a great deal of trouble.”
+
+“Mrs. Brand---” began the priest.
+
+“One moment.... You see, we have not treated you badly. There has been
+no violence. We will promise not to make scenes with my mother. Will you
+promise us that?”
+
+Percy had had time to consider, and he answered instantly.
+
+“Certainly, I will promise that.”
+
+Mabel sighed contentedly.
+
+“Well, that is all right. We are so much obliged.... And I think we may
+say this, that perhaps after consideration my husband may see his way to
+letting you come here again to do Communion and--and the other thing---”
+
+Again that spasm shook the man beside her.
+
+“Well, we will see about that. At any rate, we know your address, and
+can let you know.... By the way, Father Franklin, are you going back to
+Westminster to-night?”
+
+He bowed.
+
+“Ah! I hope you will get through. You will find London very much
+excited. Perhaps you heard---”
+
+“Felsenburgh?” said Percy.
+
+“Yes. Julian Felsenburgh,” said the girl softly, again with that strange
+excitement suddenly alight in her eyes. “Julian Felsenburgh,” she
+repeated. “He is there, you know. He will stay in England for the
+present.”
+
+Again Percy was conscious of that slight touch of fear at the mention of
+that name.
+
+“I understand there is to be peace,” he said.
+
+The girl rose and her husband with her.
+
+“Yes,” she said, almost compassionately, “there is to be peace. Peace at
+last.” (She moved half a step towards him, and her face glowed like a
+rose of fire. Her hand rose a little.) “Go back to London, Father
+Franklin, and use your eyes. You will see him, I dare say, and you will
+see more besides.” (Her voice began to vibrate.) “And you will
+understand, perhaps, why we have treated you like this--why we are no
+longer afraid of you--why we are willing that my mother should do as
+she pleases. Oh! you will understand, Father Franklin if not to-night,
+to-morrow; or if not to-morrow, at least in a very short time.”
+
+“Mabel!” cried her husband.
+
+The girl wheeled, and threw her arms round him, and kissed him on the
+mouth.
+
+“Oh! I am not ashamed, Oliver, my dear. Let him go and see for himself.
+Good-night, Father Franklin.”
+
+As he went towards the door, hearing the ping of the bell that some one
+touched in the room behind him, he turned once more, dazed and
+bewildered; and there were the two, husband and wife, standing in the
+soft, sunny light, as if transfigured. The girl had her arm round the
+man’s shoulder, and stood upright and radiant as a pillar of fire; and
+even on the man’s face there was no anger now--nothing but an almost
+supernatural pride and confidence. They were both smiling.
+
+Then Percy passed out into the soft, summer night.
+
+
+II
+
+Percy understood nothing except that he was afraid, as he sat in the
+crowded car that whirled him up to London. He scarcely even heard the
+talk round him, although it was loud and continuous; and what he heard
+meant little to him. He understood only that there had been strange
+scenes, that London was said to have gone suddenly mad, that Felsenburgh
+had spoken that night in Paul’s House.
+
+He was afraid at the way in which he had been treated, and he asked
+himself dully again and again what it was that had inspired that
+treatment; it seemed that he had been in the presence of the
+supernatural; he was conscious of shivering a little, and of the
+symptoms of an intolerable sleepiness. It was scarcely strange to him
+that he should be sitting in a crowded car at two o’clock of a summer
+dawn.
+
+Thrice the car stopped, and he stared out at the signs of confusion that
+were everywhere; at the figures that ran in the twilight between the
+tracks, at a couple of wrecked carriages, a tumble of tarpaulins; he
+listened mechanically to the hoots and cries that sounded everywhere.
+
+As he stepped out at last on to the platform, he found it very much as
+he had left it two hours before. There was the same desperate rush as
+the car discharged its load, the same dead body beneath the seat; and
+above all, as he ran helplessly behind the crowd, scarcely knowing
+whither he ran or why, above him burned the same stupendous message
+beneath the clock. Then he found himself in the lift, and a minute later
+he was out on the steps behind the station.
+
+There, too, was an astonishing sight. The lamps still burned overhead,
+but beyond them lay the first pale streaks of the false dawn. The street
+that ran now straight to the old royal palace, uniting there, as at the
+centre of a web, with those that came from Westminster, the Mall and
+Hyde Park, was one solid pavement of heads. On this side and that rose
+up the hotels and “Houses of Joy,” the windows all ablaze with light,
+solemn and triumphant as if to welcome a king; while far ahead against
+the sky stood the monstrous palace outlined in fire, and alight from
+within like all other houses within view. The noise was bewildering. It
+was impossible to distinguish one sound from another. Voices, horns,
+drums, the tramp of a thousand footsteps on the rubber pavements, the
+sombre roll of wheels from the station behind--all united in one
+overwhelmingly solemn booming, overscored by shriller notes.
+
+It was impossible to move.
+
+He found himself standing in a position of extraordinary advantage, at
+the very top of the broad flight of steps that led down into the old
+station yard, now a wide space that united, on the left the broad road
+to the palace, and on the right Victoria Street, that showed like all
+else one vivid perspective of lights and heads. Against the sky on his
+right rose up the illuminated head of the Cathedral Campanile. It
+appeared to him as if he had known that in some previous existence.
+
+He edged himself mechanically a foot or two to his left, till he clasped
+a pillar; then he waited, trying not to analyse his emotions, but to
+absorb them.
+
+Gradually he became aware that this crowd was as no other that he had
+ever seen. To his psychical sense it seemed to him that it possessed a
+unity unlike any other. There was magnetism in the air. There was a
+sensation as if a creative act were in process, whereby thousands of
+individual cells were being welded more and more perfectly every instant
+into one huge sentient being with one will, one emotion, and one head.
+The crying of voices seemed significant only as the stirrings of this
+creative power which so expressed itself. Here rested this giant
+humanity, stretching to his sight in living limbs so far as he could see
+on every side, waiting, waiting for some consummation--stretching, too,
+as his tired brain began to guess, down every thoroughfare of the vast
+city.
+
+He did not even ask himself for what they waited. He knew, yet he did
+not know. He knew it was for a revelation--for something that should
+crown their aspirations, and fix them so for ever.
+
+He had a sense that he had seen all this before; and, like a child, he
+began to ask himself where it could have happened, until he remembered
+that it was so that he had once dreamt of the Judgment Day--of humanity
+gathered to meet Jesus Christ--Jesus Christ! Ah! how tiny that Figure
+seemed to him now--how far away--real indeed, but insignificant to
+himself--how hopelessly apart from this tremendous life! He glanced up
+at the Campanile. Yes; there was a piece of the True Cross there, was
+there not?--a little piece of the wood on which a Poor Man had died
+twenty centuries ago.... Well, well. It was a long way off....
+
+He did not quite understand what was happening to him. “Sweet Jesus, be
+to me not a Judge but a Saviour,” he whispered beneath his breath,
+gripping the granite of the pillar; and a moment later knew how futile
+was that prayer. It was gone like a breath in this vast, vivid
+atmosphere of man. He had said mass, had he not? this morning--in white
+vestments.--Yes; he had believed it all then--desperately, but truly;
+and now....
+
+To look into the future was as useless as to look into the past. There
+was no future, and no past: it was all one eternal instant, present and
+final....
+
+Then he let go of effort, and again began to see with his bodily eyes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The dawn was coming up the sky now, a steady soft brightening that
+appeared in spite of its sovereignty to be as nothing compared with the
+brilliant light of the streets. “We need no sun,” he whispered, smiling
+piteously; “no sun or light of a candle. We have our light on earth--the
+light that lighteneth every man....”
+
+The Campanile seemed further away than ever now, in that ghostly glimmer
+of dawn--more and more helpless every moment, compared with the
+beautiful vivid shining of the streets.
+
+Then he listened to the sounds, and it seemed to him as if somewhere,
+far down eastwards, there was a silence beginning. He jerked his head
+impatiently, as a man behind him began to talk rapidly and confusedly.
+Why would he not be silent, and let silence be heard?... The man stopped
+presently, and out of the distance there swelled up a roar, as soft as
+the roll of a summer tide; it passed up towards him from the right; it
+was about him, dinning in his ears. There was no longer any individual
+voice: it was the breathing of the giant that had been born; he was
+crying out too; he did not know what he said, but he could not be
+silent. His veins and nerves seemed alight with wine; and as he stared
+down the long street, hearing the huge cry ebb from him and move toward
+the palace, he knew why he had cried, and why he was now silent.
+
+A slender, fish-shaped thing, as white as milk, as ghostly as a shadow,
+and as beautiful as the dawn, slid into sight half-a-mile away, turned
+and came towards him, floating, as it seemed, on the very wave of
+silence that it created, up, up the long curving street on outstretched
+wings, not twenty feet above the heads of the crowd. There was one great
+sigh, and then silence once more.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Percy could think consciously again--for his will was only capable
+of efforts as a clock of ticks--the strange white thing was nearer. He
+told himself that he had seen a hundred such before; and at the same
+instant that this was different from all others.
+
+Then it was nearer still, floating slowly, slowly, like a gull over the
+sea; he could make out its smooth nose, its low parapet beyond, the
+steersman’s head motionless; he could even hear now the soft winnowing
+of the screw--and then he saw that for which he had waited.
+
+High on the central deck there stood a chair, draped, too, in white,
+with some insignia visible above its back; and in the chair sat the
+figure of a man, motionless and lonely. He made no sign as he came; his
+dark dress showed vividedly against the whiteness; his head was raised,
+and he turned it gently now and again from side to side.
+
+It came nearer still, in the profound stillness; the head turned, and
+for an instant the face was plainly visible in the soft, radiant light.
+
+It was a pale face, strongly marked, as of a young man, with arched,
+black eyebrows, thin lips, and white hair.
+
+Then the face turned once more, the steersman shifted his head, and the
+beautiful shape, wheeling a little, passed the corner, and moved up
+towards the palace.
+
+There was an hysterical yelp somewhere, a cry, and again the tempestuous
+groan broke out.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II-THE ENCOUNTER
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+I
+
+Oliver Brand was seated at his desk, on the evening of the next day,
+reading the leading article of the _New People_, evening edition.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+“We have had time,” he read, “to recover ourselves a little from the
+intoxication of last night. Before embarking on prophecy, it will be as
+well to recall the facts. Up to yesterday evening our anxiety with
+regard to the Eastern crisis continued; and when twenty-one o’clock
+struck there were not more than forty persons in London--the English
+delegates, that is to say--who knew positively that the danger was over.
+Between that moment and half-an-hour later the Government took a few
+discreet steps: a select number of persons were informed; the police
+were called out, with half-a-dozen regiments, to preserve order; Paul’s
+House was cleared; the railroad companies were warned; and at the half
+hour precisely the announcement was made by means of the electric
+placards in every quarter of London, as well as in all large provincial
+towns. We have not space now to adequately describe the admirable manner
+in which the public authorities did their duty; it is enough to say that
+not more than seventy fatalities took place in the whole of London; nor
+is it our business to criticise the action of the Government, in
+choosing this mode of making the announcement.
+
+“By twenty-two o’clock Paul’s House was filled in every corner, the Old
+Choir was reserved for members of Parliament and public officials, the
+quarter-dome galleries were filled with ladies, and to the rest of the
+floor the public was freely admitted. The volor-police also inform us
+now that for about the distance of one mile in every direction round
+this centre every thoroughfare was blocked with pedestrians, and, two
+hours later, as we all know, practically all the main streets of the
+whole of London were in the same condition.
+
+“It was an excellent choice by which Mr. OLIVER BRAND was selected as
+the first speaker. His arm was still in bandages; and the appeal of his
+figure as well as his passionate words struck the first explicit note of
+the evening. A report of his words will be found in another column. In
+their turns, the PRIME MINISTER, Mr. SNOWFORD, the FIRST MINISTER OF THE
+ADMIRALTY, THE SECRETARY FOR EASTERN AFFAIRS, and LORD PEMBERTON, all
+spoke a few words, corroborating the extraordinary news. At a quarter
+before twenty-three, the noise of cheering outside announced the arrival
+of the American delegates from Paris, and one by one these ascended the
+platform by the south gates of the Old Choir. Each spoke in turn. It is
+impossible to appreciate words spoken at such a moment as this; but
+perhaps it is not invidious to name Mr. MARKHAM as the orator who above
+all others appealed to those who were privileged to hear him. It was he,
+too, who told us explicitly what others had merely mentioned, to the
+effect that the success of the American efforts was entirely due to Mr.
+JULIAN FELSENBURGH. As yet Mr. FELSENBURGH had not arrived; but in
+answer to a roar of inquiry, Mr. MARKHAM announced that this gentleman
+would be amongst them in a few minutes. He then proceeded to describe to
+us, so far as was possible in a few sentences, the methods by which Mr.
+FELSENBURGH had accomplished what is probably the most astonishing task
+known to history. It seems from his words that Mr. FELSENBURGH (whose
+biography, so far as it is known, we give in another column) is probably
+the greatest orator that the world has ever known--we use these words
+deliberately. All languages seem the same to him; he delivered speeches
+during the eight months through which the Eastern Convention lasted, in
+no less than fifteen tongues. Of his manner in speaking we shall have a
+few remarks to make presently. He showed also, Mr. MARKHAM told us, the
+most astonishing knowledge, not only of human nature, but of every trait
+under which that divine thing manifests itself. He appeared acquainted
+with the history, the prejudices, the fears, the hopes, the expectations
+of all the innumerable sects and castes of the East to whom it was his
+business to speak. In fact, as Mr. MARKHAM said, he is probably the
+first perfect product of that new cosmopolitan creation to which the
+world has laboured throughout its history. In no less than nine
+places--Damascus, Irkutsk, Constantinople, Calcutta, Benares, Nanking,
+among them--he was hailed as Messiah by a Mohammedan mob. Finally, in
+America, where this extraordinary figure has arisen, all speak well of
+him. He has been guilty of none of those crimes--there is not one that
+convicts him of sin--those crimes of the Yellow Press, of corruption, of
+commercial or political bullying which have so stained the past of all
+those old politicians who made the sister continent what she has become.
+Mr. FELSENBURGH has not even formed a party. He, and not his underlings,
+have conquered. Those who were present in Paul’s House on this occasion
+will understand us when we say that the effect of those words was
+indescribable.
+
+“When Mr. MARKHAM sat down, there was a silence; then, in order to quiet
+the rising excitement, the organist struck the first chords of the
+Masonic Hymn; the words were taken up, and presently not only the whole
+interior of the building rang with it, but outside, too, the people
+responded, and the city of London for a few moments became indeed a
+temple of the Lord.
+
+“Now indeed we come to the most difficult part of our task, and it is
+better to confess at once that anything resembling journalistic
+descriptiveness must be resolutely laid aside. The greatest things are
+best told in the simplest words.
+
+“Towards the close of the fourth verse, a figure in a plain dark suit
+was observed ascending the steps of the platform. For a moment this
+attracted no attention, but when it was seen that a sudden movement had
+broken out among the delegates, the singing began to falter; and it
+ceased altogether as the figure, after a slight inclination to right and
+left, passed up the further steps that led to the rostrum. Then occurred
+a curious incident. The organist aloft at first did not seem to
+understand, and continued playing, but a sound broke out from the crowd
+resembling a kind of groan, and instantly he ceased. But no cheering
+followed. Instead a profound silence dominated in an instant the huge
+throng; this, by some strange magnetism, communicated itself to those
+without the building, and when Mr. FELSENBURGH uttered his first words,
+it was in a stillness that was like a living thing. We leave the
+explanation of this phenomenon to the expert in psychology.
+
+“Of his actual words we have nothing to say. So far as we are aware no
+reporter made notes at the moment; but the speech, delivered in
+Esperanto, was a very simple one, and very short. It consisted of a
+brief announcement of the great fact of Universal Brotherhood, a
+congratulation to all who were yet alive to witness this consummation of
+history; and, at the end, an ascription of praise to that Spirit of the
+World whose incarnation was now accomplished.
+
+“So much we can say; but we can say nothing as to the impression of the
+personality who stood there. In appearance the man seemed to be about
+thirty-three years of age, clean-shaven, upright, with white hair and
+dark eyes and brows; he stood motionless with his hands on the rail, he
+made but one gesture that drew a kind of sob from the crowd, he spoke
+these words slowly, distinctly, and in a clear voice; then he stood
+waiting.
+
+“There was no response but a sigh which sounded in the ears of at least
+one who heard it as if the whole world drew breath for the first time;
+and then that strange heart-shaking silence fell again. Many were
+weeping silently, the lips of thousands moved without a sound, and all
+faces were turned to that simple figure, as if the hope of every soul
+were centred there. So, if we may believe it, the eyes of many,
+centuries ago, were turned on one known now to history as JESUS OF
+NAZARETH.
+
+“Mr. FELSENBURGH stood so a moment longer, then he turned down the
+steps, passed across the platform and disappeared.
+
+“Of what took place outside we have received the following account from
+an eye-witness. The white volor, so well known now to all who were in
+London that night, had remained stationary outside the little south door
+of the Old Choir aisle, poised about twenty feet above the ground.
+Gradually it became known to the crowd, in those few minutes, who it was
+who had arrived in it, and upon Mr. FELSENBURGH’S reappearance that same
+strange groan sounded through the whole length of Paul’s Churchyard,
+followed by the same silence. The volor descended; the master stepped on
+board, and once more the vessel rose to a height of twenty feet. It was
+thought at first that some speech would be made, but none was necessary;
+and after a moment’s pause, the volor began that wonderful parade which
+London will never forget. Four times during the night Mr. FELSENBURGH
+went round the enormous metropolis, speaking no word; and everywhere the
+groan preceded and followed him, while silence accompanied his actual
+passage. Two hours after sunrise the white ship rose over Hampstead and
+disappeared towards the North; and since then he, whom we call, in
+truth, the Saviour of the world, has not been seen.
+
+“And now what remains to be said?
+
+“Comment is useless. It is enough to say in one short sentence that the
+new era has begun, to which prophets and kings, and the suffering, the
+dying, all who labour and are heavy-laden, have aspired in vain. Not
+only has intercontinental rivalry ceased to exist, but the strife of
+home dissensions has ceased also. Of him who has been the herald of its
+inauguration we have nothing more to say. Time alone can show what is
+yet left for him to do.
+
+“But what has been done is as follows. The Eastern peril has been for
+ever dissipated. It is understood now, by fanatic barbarians as well as
+by civilised nations, that the reign of War is ended. ‘Not peace but a
+sword,’ said CHRIST; and bitterly true have those words proved to be.
+‘Not a sword but peace’ is the retort, articulate at last, from those
+who have renounced CHRIST’S claims or have never accepted them. The
+principle of love and union learned however falteringly in the West
+during the last century, has been taken up in the East as well. There
+shall be no more an appeal to arms, but to justice; no longer a crying
+after a God Who hides Himself, but to Man who has learned his own
+Divinity. The Supernatural is dead; rather, we know now that it never
+yet has been alive. What remains is to work out this new lesson, to
+bring every action, word and thought to the bar of Love and Justice; and
+this will be, no doubt, the task of years. Every code must be reversed;
+every barrier thrown down; party must unite with party, country with
+country, and continent with continent. There is no longer the fear of
+fear, the dread of the hereafter, or the paralysis of strife. Man has
+groaned long enough in the travails of birth; his blood has been poured
+out like water through his own foolishness; but at length he understands
+himself and is at peace.
+
+“Let it be seen at least that England is not behind the nations in this
+work of reformation; let no national isolation, pride of race, or
+drunkenness of wealth hold her hands back from this enormous work. The
+responsibility is incalculable, but the victory certain. Let us go
+softly, humbled by the knowledge of our crimes in the past, confident in
+the hope of our achievements in the future, towards that reward which is
+in sight at last--the reward hidden so long by the selfishness of men,
+the darkness of religion, and the strife of tongues--the reward promised
+by one who knew not what he said and denied what he asserted--Blessed
+are the meek, the peacemakers, the merciful, for they shall inherit the
+earth, be named the children of God, and find mercy.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Oliver, white to the lips, with his wife kneeling now beside him, turned
+the page and read one more short paragraph, marked as being the latest
+news.
+
+“It is understood that the Government is in communication with Mr.
+Felsenburgh.”
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+“Ah! it is journalese,” said Oliver, at last, leaning back. “Tawdry
+stuff! But--but the thing!”
+
+Mabel got up, passed across to the window-seat, and sat down. Her lips
+opened once or twice, but she said nothing.
+
+“My darling,” cried the man, “have you nothing to say?”
+
+She looked at him tremulously a moment.
+
+“Say!” she said. “As you said, What is the use of words?”
+
+“Tell me again,” said Oliver. “How do I know it is not a dream?”
+
+“A dream,” she said. “Was there ever a dream like this?”
+
+Again she got up restlessly, came across the floor, and knelt down by
+her husband once more, taking his hands in hers.
+
+“My dear,” she said, “I tell you it is not a dream. It is reality at
+last. I was there too--do you not remember? You waited for me when all
+was over--when He was gone out--we saw Him together, you and I. We heard
+Him--you on the platform and I in the gallery. We saw Him again pass up
+the Embankment as we stood in the crowd. Then we came home and we found
+the priest.”
+
+Her face was transfigured as she spoke. It was as of one who saw a
+Divine Vision. She spoke very quietly, without excitement or hysteria.
+Oliver stared at her a moment; then he bent forward and kissed her
+gently.
+
+“Yes, my darling; it is true. But I want to hear it again and again.
+Tell me again what you saw.”
+
+“I saw the Son of Man,” she said. “Oh! there is no other phrase. The
+Saviour of the world, as that paper says. I knew Him in my heart as soon
+as I saw Him--as we all did--as soon as He stood there holding the rail.
+It was like a glory round his head. I understand it all now. It was He
+for whom we have waited so long; and He has come, bringing Peace and
+Goodwill in His hands. When He spoke, I knew it again. His voice was
+as--as the sound of the sea--as simple as that--as--as lamentable--as
+strong as that.--Did you not hear it?”
+
+Oliver bowed his head.
+
+“I can trust Him for all the rest,” went on the girl softly. “I do not
+know where He is, nor when He will come back, nor what He will do. I
+suppose there is a great deal for Him to do, before He is fully
+known--laws, reforms--that will be your business, my dear. And the rest
+of us must wait, and love, and be content.”
+
+Oliver again lifted his face and looked at her.
+
+“Mabel, my dear---”
+
+“Oh! I knew it even last night,” she said, “but I did not know that I
+knew it till I awoke to-day and remembered. I dreamed of Him all
+night.... Oliver, where is He?”
+
+He shook his head.
+
+“Yes, I know where He is, but I am under oath---”
+
+She nodded quickly, and stood up.
+
+“Yes. I should not have asked that. Well, we are content to wait.”
+
+There was silence for a moment or two. Oliver broke it.
+
+“My dear, what do you mean when you say that He is not yet known?”
+
+“I mean just that,” she said. “The rest only know what He has done--not
+what He is; but that, too, will come in time.”
+
+“And meanwhile---”
+
+“Meanwhile, you must work; the rest will come by and bye. Oh! Oliver, be
+strong and faithful.”
+
+She kissed him quickly, and went out.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Oliver sat on without moving, staring, as his habit was, out at the wide
+view beyond his windows. This time yesterday he was leaving Paris,
+knowing the fact indeed--for the delegates had arrived an hour
+before--but ignorant of the Man. Now he knew the Man as well--at least
+he had seen Him, heard Him, and stood enchanted under the glow of His
+personality. He could explain it to himself no more than could any one
+else--unless, perhaps, it were Mabel. The others had been as he had
+been: awed and overcome, yet at the same time kindled in the very depths
+of their souls. They had come out--Snowford, Cartwright, Pemberton, and
+the rest--on to the steps of Paul’s House, following that strange
+figure. They had intended to say something, but they were dumb as they
+saw the sea of white faces, heard the groan and the silence, and
+experienced that compelling wave of magnetism that surged up like
+something physical, as the volor rose and started on that indescribable
+progress.
+
+Once more he had seen Him, as he and Mabel stood together on the deck of
+the electric boat that carried them south. The white ship had passed
+along overhead, smooth and steady, above the heads of that vast
+multitude, bearing Him who, if any had the right to that title, was
+indeed the Saviour of the world. Then they had come home, and found the
+priest.
+
+That, too, had been a shock to him; for, at first sight, it seemed that
+this priest was the very man he had seen ascend the rostrum two hours
+before. It was an extraordinary likeness--the same young face and white
+hair. Mabel, of course, had not noticed it; for she had only seen
+Felsenburgh at a great distance; and he himself had soon been reassured.
+And as for his mother--it was terrible enough; if it had not been for
+Mabel there would have been violence done last night. How collected and
+reasonable she had been! And, as for his mother--he must leave her alone
+for the present. By and bye, perhaps, something might be done. The
+future! It was that which engrossed him--the future, and the absorbing
+power of the personality under whose dominion he had fallen last night.
+All else seemed insignificant now--even his mother’s defection, her
+illness--all paled before this new dawn of an unknown sun. And in an
+hour he would know more; he was summoned to Westminster to a meeting of
+the whole House; their proposals to Felsenburgh were to be formulated;
+it was intended to offer him a great position.
+
+Yes, as Mabel had said; this was now their work--to carry into
+effect the new principle that had suddenly become incarnate in this
+grey-haired young American--the principle of Universal Brotherhood.
+It would mean enormous labour; all foreign relations would have to
+be readjusted--trade, policy, methods of government--all demanded
+re-statement. Europe was already organised internally on a basis of
+mutual protection: that basis was now gone. There was no more any
+protection, because there was no more any menace. Enormous labour,
+too, awaited the Government in other directions. A Blue-book must be
+prepared, containing a complete report of the proceedings in the East,
+together with the text of the Treaty which had been laid before them
+in Paris, signed by the Eastern Emperor, the feudal kings, the Turkish
+Republic, and countersigned by the American plenipotentiaries....
+Finally, even home politics required reform: the friction of old strife
+between centre and extremes must cease forthwith--there must be but one
+party now, and that at the Prophet’s disposal.... He grew bewildered
+as he regarded the prospect, and saw how the whole plane of the world
+was shifted, how the entire foundation of western life required
+readjustment. It was a Revolution indeed, a cataclysm more stupendous
+than even invasion itself; but it was the conversion of darkness into
+light, and chaos into order.
+
+He drew a deep breath, and so sat pondering.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mabel came down to him half-an-hour later, as he dined early before
+starting for Whitehall.
+
+“Mother is quieter,” she said. “We must be very patient, Oliver. Have
+you decided yet as to whether the priest is to come again?”
+
+He shook his head.
+
+“I can think of nothing,” he said, “but of what I have to do. You
+decide, my dear; I leave it in your hands.”
+
+She nodded.
+
+“I will talk to her again presently. Just now she can understand very
+little of what has happened.... What time shall you be home?”
+
+“Probably not to-night. We shall sit all night.”
+
+“Yes, dear. And what shall I tell Mr. Phillips?”
+
+“I will telephone in the morning.... Mabel, do you remember what I told
+you about the priest?”
+
+“His likeness to the other?”
+
+“Yes. What do you make of that?”
+
+She smiled.
+
+“I make nothing at all of it. Why should they not be alike?”
+
+He took a fig from the dish, and swallowed it, and stood up.
+
+“It is only very curious,” he said. “Now, good-night, my dear.”
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+“Oh, mother,” said Mabel, kneeling by the bed; “cannot you understand
+what has happened?”
+
+She had tried desperately to tell the old lady of the extraordinary
+change that had taken place in the world--and without success. It seemed
+to her that some great issue depended on it; that it would be piteous if
+the old woman went out into the dark unconscious of what had come. It
+was as if a Christian knelt by the death-bed of a Jew on the first
+Easter Monday. But the old lady lay in her bed, terrified but obdurate.
+
+“Mother,” said the girl, “let me tell you again. Do you not understand
+that all which Jesus Christ promised has come true, though in another
+way? The reign of God has really begun; but we know now who God is. You
+said just now you wanted the Forgiveness of Sins; well, you have that;
+we all have it, because there is no such thing as sin. There is only
+Crime. And then Communion. You used to believe that that made you a
+partaker of God; well, we are all partakers of God, because we are human
+beings. Don’t you see that Christianity is only one way of saying all
+that? I dare say it was the only way, for a time; but that is all over
+now. Oh! and how much better this is! It is true--true. You can see it
+to be true!”
+
+She paused a moment, forcing herself to look at that piteous old face,
+the flushed wrinkled cheeks, the writhing knotted hands on the coverlet.
+
+“Look how Christianity has failed--how it has divided people; think of
+all the cruelties--the Inquisition, the Religious Wars; the separations
+between husband and wife and parents and children--the disobedience to
+the State, the treasons. Oh! you cannot believe that these were right.
+What kind of a God would that be! And then Hell; how could you ever have
+believed in that?... Oh! mother, don’t believe anything so frightful....
+Don’t you understand that that God has gone--that He never existed at
+all--that it was all a hideous nightmare; and that now we all know at
+last what the truth is.... Mother! think of what happened last
+night--how He came--the Man of whom you were so frightened. I told you
+what He was like--so quiet and strong--how every one was silent--of
+the--the extraordinary atmosphere, and how six millions of people saw
+Him. And think what He has done--how He has healed all the old
+wounds--how the whole world is at peace at last--and of what is going to
+happen. Oh! mother, give up those horrible old lies; give them up; be
+brave.”
+
+“The priest, the priest!” moaned the old woman at last.
+
+“Oh! no, no, no--not the priest; he can do nothing. He knows it’s all
+lies, too!”
+
+“The priest! the priest!” moaned the other again. “He can tell you; he
+knows the answer.”
+
+Her face was convulsed with effort, and her old fingers fumbled and
+twisted with the rosary. Mabel grew suddenly frightened, and stood up.
+
+“Oh! mother!” She stooped and kissed her. “There! I won’t say any more
+now. But just think about it quietly. Don’t be in the least afraid; it
+is all perfectly right.”
+
+She stood a moment, still looking compassionately down; torn by sympathy
+and desire. No! it was no use now; she must wait till the next day.
+
+“I’ll look in again presently,” she said, “when you have had dinner.
+Mother! don’t look like that! Kiss me!”
+
+It was astonishing, she told herself that evening, how any one could be
+so blind. And what a confession of weakness, too, to call only for the
+priest! It was ludicrous, absurd! She herself was filled with an
+extraordinary peace. Even death itself seemed now no longer terrible,
+for was not death swallowed up in victory? She contrasted the selfish
+individualism of the Christian, who sobbed and shrank from death, or, at
+the best, thought of it only as the gate to his own eternal life, with
+the free altruism of the New Believer who asked no more than that Man
+should live and grow, that the Spirit of the World should triumph and
+reveal Himself, while he, the unit, was content to sink back into that
+reservoir of energy from which he drew his life. At this moment she
+would have suffered anything, faced death cheerfully--she contemplated
+even the old woman upstairs with pity--for was it not piteous that death
+should not bring her to herself and reality?
+
+She was in a quiet whirl of intoxication; it was as if the heavy veil of
+sense had rolled back at last and shown a sweet, eternal landscape
+behind--a shadowless land of peace where the lion lay down with the
+lamb, and the leopard with the kid. There should be war no more: that
+bloody spectre was dead, and with him the brood of evil that lived in
+his shadow--superstition, conflict, terror, and unreality. The idols
+were smashed, and rats had run out; Jehovah was fallen; the wild-eyed
+dreamer of Galilee was in his grave; the reign of priests was ended. And
+in their place stood a strange, quiet figure of indomitable power and
+unruffled tenderness.... He whom she had seen--the Son of Man, the
+Saviour of the world, as she had called Him just now--He who bore these
+titles was no longer a monstrous figure, half God and half man, claiming
+both natures and possessing neither; one who was tempted without
+temptation, and who conquered without merit, as his followers said. Here
+was one instead whom she could follow, a god indeed and a man as well--a
+god because human, and a man because so divine.
+
+She said no more that night. She looked into the bedroom for a few
+minutes, and saw the old woman asleep. Her old hand lay out on the
+coverlet, and still between the fingers was twisted the silly string of
+beads. Mabel went softly across in the shaded light, and tried to detach
+it; but the wrinkled fingers writhed and closed, and a murmur came from
+the half-open lips. Ah! how piteous it was, thought the girl, how
+hopeless that a soul should flow out into such darkness, unwilling to
+make the supreme, generous surrender, and lay down its life because life
+itself demanded it!
+
+Then she went to her own room.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The clocks were chiming three, and the grey dawn lay on the walls, when
+she awoke to find by her bed the woman who had sat with the old lady.
+
+“Come at once, madam; Mrs. Brand is dying.”
+
+
+IV
+
+Oliver was with them by six o’clock; he came straight up into his
+mother’s room to find that all was over.
+
+The room was full of the morning light and the clean air, and a bubble
+of bird-music poured in from the lawn. But his wife knelt by the bed,
+still holding the wrinkled hands of the old woman, her face buried in
+her arms. The face of his mother was quieter than he had ever seen it,
+the lines showed only like the faintest shadows on an alabaster mask;
+her lips were set in a smile. He looked for a moment, waiting until the
+spasm that caught his throat had died again. Then he put his hand on his
+wife’s shoulder.
+
+“When?” he said.
+
+Mabel lifted her face.
+
+“Oh! Oliver,” she murmured. “It was an hour ago. ... Look at this.”
+
+She released the dead hands and showed the rosary still twisted there;
+it had snapped in the last struggle, and a brown bead lay beneath the
+fingers.
+
+“I did what I could,” sobbed Mabel. “I was not hard with her. But she
+would not listen. She kept on crying out for the priest as long as she
+could speak.”
+
+“My dear....” began the man. Then he, too, went down on his knees by
+his wife, leaned forward and kissed the rosary, while tears blinded him.
+
+“Yes, yes,” he said. “Leave her in peace. I would not move it for the
+world: it was her toy, was it not?”
+
+The girl stared at him, astonished.
+
+“We can be generous, too,” he said. “We have all the world at last. And
+she--she has lost nothing: it was too late.”
+
+“I did what I could.”
+
+“Yes, my darling, and you were right. But she was too old; she could not
+understand.”
+
+He paused.
+
+“Euthanasia?” he whispered with something very like tenderness.
+
+She nodded.
+
+“Yes,” she said; “just as the last agony began. She resisted, but I knew
+you would wish it.”
+
+They talked together for an hour in the garden before Oliver went to his
+room; and he began to tell her presently of all that had passed.
+
+“He has refused,” he said. “We offered to create an office for Him; He
+was to have been called Consultor, and he refused it two hours ago. But
+He has promised to be at our service.... No, I must not tell you where
+He is.... He will return to America soon, we think; but He will not
+leave us. We have drawn up a programme, and it is to be sent to Him
+presently.... Yes, we were unanimous.”
+
+“And the programme?”
+
+“It concerns the Franchise, the Poor Laws and Trade. I can tell you no
+more than that. It was He who suggested the points. But we are not sure
+if we understand Him yet.”
+
+“But, my dear---”
+
+“Yes; it is quite extraordinary. I have never seen such things. There
+was practically no argument.”
+
+“Do the people understand?”
+
+“I think so. We shall have to guard against a reaction. They say that
+the Catholics will be in danger. There is an article this morning in the
+_Era_. The proofs were sent to us for sanction. It suggests that means
+must be taken to protect the Catholics.”
+
+Mabel smiled.
+
+“It is a strange irony,” he said. “But they have a right to exist. How
+far they have a right to share in the government is another matter. That
+will come before us, I think, in a week or two.”
+
+“Tell me more about Him.”
+
+“There is really nothing to tell; we know nothing, except that He is the
+supreme force in the world. France is in a ferment, and has offered him
+Dictatorship. That, too, He has refused. Germany has made the same
+proposal as ourselves; Italy, the same as France, with the title of
+Perpetual Tribune. America has done nothing yet, and Spain is divided.”
+
+“And the East?”
+
+“The Emperor thanked Him; no more than that.”
+
+Mabel drew a long breath, and stood looking out across the heat haze
+that was beginning to rise from the town beneath. These were matters so
+vast that she could not take them in. But to her imagination Europe lay
+like a busy hive, moving to and fro in the sunshine. She saw the blue
+distance of France, the towns of Germany, the Alps, and beyond them the
+Pyrenees and sun-baked Spain; and all were intent on the same business,
+to capture if they could this astonishing figure that had risen over the
+world. Sober England, too, was alight with zeal. Each country desired
+nothing better than that this man should rule over them; and He had
+refused them all.
+
+“He has refused them all!” she repeated breathlessly.
+
+“Yes, all. We think He may be waiting to hear from America. He still
+holds office there, you know.”
+
+“How old is He?”
+
+“Not more than thirty-two or three. He has only been in office a few
+months. Before that He lived alone in Vermont. Then He stood for the
+Senate; then He made a speech or two; then He was appointed delegate,
+though no one seems to have realised His power. And the rest we know.”
+
+Mabel shook her head meditatively.
+
+“We know nothing,” she said. “Nothing; nothing! Where did He learn His
+languages?”
+
+“It is supposed that He travelled for many years. But no one knows. He
+has said nothing.”
+
+She turned swiftly to her husband.
+
+“But what does it all mean? What is His power? Tell me, Oliver?”
+
+He smiled back, shaking his head.
+
+“Well, Markham said that it was his incorruption--that and his oratory;
+but that explains nothing.”
+
+“No, it explains nothing,” said the girl.
+
+“It is just personality,” went on Oliver, “at least, that’s the label to
+use. But that, too, is only a label.”
+
+“Yes, just a label. But it is that. They all felt it in Paul’s House,
+and in the streets afterwards. Did you not feel it?”
+
+“Feel it!” cried the man, with shining eyes. “Why, I would die for Him!”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They went back to the house presently, and it was not till they reached
+the door that either said a word about the dead old woman who lay
+upstairs.
+
+“They are with her now,” said Mabel softly. “I will communicate with the
+people.”
+
+He nodded gravely.
+
+“It had better be this afternoon,” he said. “I have a spare hour at
+fourteen o’clock. Oh! by the way, Mabel, do you know who took the
+message to the priest?”
+
+“I think so.”
+
+“Yes, it was Phillips. I saw him last night. He will not come here
+again.”
+
+“Did he confess it?”
+
+“He did. He was most offensive.”
+
+But Oliver’s face softened again as he nodded to his wife at the foot of
+the stairs, and turned to go up once more to his mother’s room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+I
+
+It seemed to Percy Franklin as he drew near Rome, sliding five hundred
+feet high through the summer dawn, that he was approaching the very
+gates of heaven, or, still better, he was as a child coming home. For
+what he had left behind him ten hours before in London was not a bad
+specimen, he thought, of the superior mansions of hell. It was a world
+whence God seemed to have withdrawn Himself, leaving it indeed in a
+state of profound complacency--a state without hope or faith, but a
+condition in which, although life continued, there was absent the one
+essential to well-being. It was not that there was not expectation--for
+London was on tip-toe with excitement. There were rumours of all kinds:
+Felsenburgh was coming back; he was back; he had never gone. He was to
+be President of the Council, Prime Minister, Tribune, with full
+capacities of democratic government and personal sacro-sanctity, even
+King--if not Emperor of the West. The entire constitution was to be
+remodelled, there was to be a complete rearrangement of the pieces;
+crime was to be abolished by the mysterious power that had killed war;
+there was to be free food--the secret of life was discovered, there was
+to be no more death--so the rumours ran.... Yet that was lacking, to the
+priest’s mind, which made life worth living....
+
+In Paris, while the volor waited at the great station at Montmartre,
+once known as the Church of the Sacred Heart, he had heard the roaring
+of the mob in love with life at last, and seen the banners go past. As
+it rose again over the suburbs he had seen the long lines of trains
+streaming in, visible as bright serpents in the brilliant glory of the
+electric globes, bringing the country folk up to the Council of the
+Nation which the legislators, mad with drama, had summoned to decide the
+great question. At Lyons it had been the same. The night was as clear as
+the day, and as full of sound. Mid France was arriving to register its
+votes.
+
+He had fallen asleep as the cold air of the Alps began to envelop the
+car, and had caught but glimpses of the solemn moonlit peaks below him,
+the black profundities of the gulfs, the silver glint of the shield-like
+lakes, and the soft glow of Interlaken and the towns in the Rhone
+valley. Once he had been moved in spite of himself, as one of the huge
+German volors had passed in the night, a blaze of ghostly lights and
+gilding, resembling a huge moth with antennae of electric light, and the
+two ships had saluted one another through half a league of silent air,
+with a pathetic cry as of two strange night-birds who have no leisure to
+pause. Milan and Turin had been quiet, for Italy was organised on other
+principles than France, and Florence was not yet half awake. And now the
+Campagna was slipping past like a grey-green rug, wrinkled and tumbled,
+five hundred feet beneath, and Rome was all but in sight. The indicator
+above his seat moved its finger from one hundred to ninety miles.
+
+He shook off the doze at last, and drew out his office book; but as he
+pronounced the words his attention was elsewhere, and, when Prime was
+said, he closed the book once more, propped himself more comfortably,
+drawing the furs round him, and stretching his feet on the empty seat
+opposite. He was alone in his compartment; the three men who had come in
+at Paris had descended at Turin.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He had been remarkably relieved when the message had come three days
+before from the Cardinal-Protector, bidding him make arrangements for a
+long absence from England, and, as soon as that was done, to come to
+Rome. He understood that the ecclesiastical authorities were really
+disturbed at last.
+
+He reviewed the last day or two, considering the report he would have to
+present. Since his last letter, three days before, seven notable
+apostasies had taken place in Westminster diocese alone, two priests and
+five important laymen. There was talk of revolt on all sides; he had
+seen a threatening document, called a “petition,” demanding the right to
+dispense with all ecclesiastical vestments, signed by one hundred and
+twenty priests from England and Wales. The “petitioners” pointed out
+that persecution was coming swiftly at the hands of the mob; that the
+Government was not sincere in the promises of protection; they hinted
+that religious loyalty was already strained to breaking-point even in
+the case of the most faithful, and that with all but those it had
+already broken.
+
+And as to his comments Percy was clear. He would tell the authorities,
+as he had already told them fifty times, that it was not persecution
+that mattered; it was this new outburst of enthusiasm for Humanity--an
+enthusiasm which had waxed a hundredfold more hot since the coming of
+Felsenburgh and the publication of the Eastern news--which was melting
+the hearts of all but the very few. Man had suddenly fallen in love with
+man. The conventional were rubbing their eyes and wondering why they had
+ever believed, or even dreamed, that there was a God to love, asking one
+another what was the secret of the spell that had held them so long.
+Christianity and Theism were passing together from the world’s mind as a
+morning mist passes when the sun comes up. His recommendations--? Yes,
+he had those clear, and ran them over in his mind with a sense of
+despair.
+
+For himself, he scarcely knew if he believed what he professed. His
+emotions seemed to have been finally extinguished in the vision of the
+white car and the silence of the crowd that evening three weeks before.
+It had been so horribly real and positive; the delicate aspirations and
+hopes of the soul appeared so shadowy when compared with that burning,
+heart-shaking passion of the people. He had never seen anything like it;
+no congregation under the spell of the most kindling preacher alive had
+ever responded with one-tenth of the fervour with which that irreligious
+crowd, standing in the cold dawn of the London streets, had greeted the
+coming of their saviour. And as for the man himself--Percy could not
+analyse what it was that possessed him as he had stared, muttering the
+name of Jesus, on that quiet figure in black with features and hair so
+like his own. He only knew that a hand had gripped his heart--a hand
+warm, not cold--and had quenched, it seemed, all sense of religious
+conviction. It had only been with an effort that sickened him to
+remember, that he had refrained from that interior act of capitulation
+that is so familiar to all who have cultivated an inner life and
+understand what failure means. There had been one citadel that had not
+flung wide its gates--all else had yielded. His emotions had been
+stormed, his intellect silenced, his memory of grace obscured, a
+spiritual nausea had sickened his soul, yet the secret fortress of the
+will had, in an agony, held fast the doors and refused to cry out and
+call Felsenburgh king.
+
+Ah! how he had prayed during those three weeks! It appeared to him that
+he had done little else; there had been no peace. Lances of doubt thrust
+again and again through door and window; masses of argument had crashed
+from above; he had been on the alert day and night, repelling this,
+blindly, and denying that, endeavouring to keep his foothold on the
+slippery plane of the supernatural, sending up cry after cry to the Lord
+Who hid Himself. He had slept with his crucifix in his hand, he had
+awakened himself by kissing it; while he wrote, talked, ate, walked, and
+sat in cars, the inner life had been busy-making frantic speechless acts
+of faith in a religion which his intellect denied and from which his
+emotions shrank. There had been moments of ecstasy--now in a crowded
+street, when he recognised that God was all, that the Creator was the
+key to the creature’s life, that a humble act of adoration was
+transcendently greater than the most noble natural act, that the
+Supernatural was the origin and end of existence there had come to him
+such moments in the night, in the silence of the Cathedral, when the
+lamp flickered, and a soundless air had breathed from the iron door of
+the tabernacle. Then again passion ebbed, and left him stranded on
+misery, but set with a determination (which might equally be that of
+pride or faith) that no power in earth or hell should hinder him from
+professing Christianity even if he could not realise it. It was
+Christianity alone that made life tolerable.
+
+Percy drew a long vibrating breath, and changed his position; for far
+away his unseeing eyes had descried a dome, like a blue bubble set on a
+carpet of green; and his brain had interrupted itself to tell him that
+this was Rome. He got up presently, passed out of his compartment, and
+moved forward up the central gangway, seeing, as he went, through the
+glass doors to right and left his fellow-passengers, some still asleep,
+some staring out at the view, some reading. He put his eye to the glass
+square in the door, and for a minute or two watched, fascinated, the
+steady figure of the steerer at his post. There he stood motionless, his
+hands on the steel circle that directed the vast wings, his eyes on the
+wind-gauge that revealed to him as on the face of a clock both the force
+and the direction of the high gusts; now and again his hands moved
+slightly, and the huge fans responded, now lifting, now lowering.
+Beneath him and in front, fixed on a circular table, were the glass
+domes of various indicators--Percy did not know the meaning of half--one
+seemed a kind of barometer, intended, he guessed, to declare the height
+at which they were travelling, another a compass. And beyond, through
+the curved windows, lay the enormous sky. Well, it was all very
+wonderful, thought the priest, and it was with the force of which all
+this was but one symptom that the supernatural had to compete.
+
+He sighed, turned, and went back to his compartment.
+
+It was an astonishing vision that began presently to open before
+him--scarcely beautiful except for its strangeness, and as unreal as a
+raised map. Far to his right, as he could see through the glass doors,
+lay the grey line of the sea against the luminous sky, rising and
+falling ever so slightly as the car, apparently motionless, tilted
+imperceptibly against the western breeze; the only other movement was
+the faint pulsation of the huge throbbing screw in the rear. To the left
+stretched the limitless country, flitting beneath, in glimpses seen
+between the motionless wings, with here and there the streak of a
+village, flattened out of recognition, or the flash of water, and
+bounded far away by the low masses of the Umbrian hills; while in front,
+seen and gone again as the car veered, lay the confused line of Rome and
+the huge new suburbs, all crowned by the great dome growing every
+instant. Around, above and beneath, his eyes were conscious of wide
+air-spaces, overhead deepening into lapis-lazuli down to horizons of
+pale turquoise. The only sound, of which he had long ceased to be
+directly conscious, was that of the steady rush of air, less shrill now
+as the speed began to drop down--down--to forty miles an hour. There was
+a clang of a bell, and immediately he was aware of a sense of faint
+sickness as the car dropped in a glorious swoop, and he staggered a
+little as he grasped his rugs together. When he looked again the motion
+seemed to have ceased; he could see towers ahead, a line of house-roofs,
+and beneath he caught a glimpse of a road and more roofs with patches of
+green between. A bell clanged again, and a long sweet cry followed. On
+all sides he could hear the movement of feet; a guard in uniform passed
+swiftly along the glazed corridor; again came the faint nausea; and as
+he looked up once more from his luggage for an instant he saw the dome,
+grey now and lined, almost on a level with his own eyes, huge against
+the vivid sky. The world span round for a moment; he shut his eyes, and
+when he looked again walls seemed to heave up past him and stop,
+swaying. There was the last bell, a faint vibration as the car grounded
+in the steel-netted dock; a line of faces rocked and grew still outside
+the windows, and Percy passed out towards the doors, carrying his bags.
+
+
+II
+
+He still felt a sense of insecure motion as he sat alone over coffee an
+hour later in one of the remote rooms of the Vatican; but there was a
+sense of exhilaration as well, as his tired brain realised where he was.
+It had been strange to drive over the rattling stones in the weedy
+little cab, such as he remembered ten years ago when he had left Rome,
+newly ordained. While the world had moved on, Rome had stood still; she
+had other affairs to think of than physical improvements, now that the
+spiritual weight of the earth rested entirely upon her shoulders. All
+had seemed unchanged--or rather it had reverted to the condition of
+nearly one hundred and fifty years ago. Histories related how the
+improvements of the Italian government had gradually dropped out of use
+as soon as the city, eighty years before, had been given her
+independence; the trains ceased to run; volors were not allowed to enter
+the walls; the new buildings, permitted to remain, had been converted to
+ecclesiastical use; the Quirinal became the offices of the “Red Pope”;
+the embassies, huge seminaries; even the Vatican itself, with the
+exception of the upper floor, had become the abode of the Sacred
+College, who surrounded the Supreme Pontiff as stars their sun.
+
+It was an extraordinary city, said antiquarians--the one living example
+of the old days. Here were to be seen the ancient inconveniences, the
+insanitary horrors, the incarnation of a world given over to dreaming.
+The old Church pomp was back, too; the cardinals drove again in gilt
+coaches; the Pope rode on his white mule; the Blessed Sacrament went
+through the ill-smelling streets with the sound of bells and the light
+of lanterns. A brilliant description of it had interested the civilised
+world immensely for about forty-eight hours; the appalling retrogression
+was still used occasionally as the text for violent denunciations by the
+poorly educated; the well-educated had ceased to do anything but take
+for granted that superstition and progress were irreconcilable enemies.
+
+Yet Percy, even in the glimpses he had had in the streets, as he drove
+from the volor station outside the People’s Gate, of the old peasant
+dresses, the blue and red-fringed wine carts, the cabbage-strewn
+gutters, the wet clothes flapping on strings, the mules and
+horses--strange though these were, he had found them a refreshment. It
+had seemed to remind him that man was human, and not divine as the rest
+of the world proclaimed--human, and therefore careless and
+individualistic; human, and therefore occupied with interests other than
+those of speed, cleanliness, and precision.
+
+The room in which he sat now by the window with shading blinds, for the
+sun was already hot, seemed to revert back even further than to a
+century-and-a-half. The old damask and gilding that he had expected was
+gone, and its absence gave the impression of great severity. There was a
+wide deal table running the length of the room, with upright wooden arm
+chairs set against it; the floor was red-tiled, with strips of matting
+for the feet, the white, distempered walls had only a couple of old
+pictures hung upon them, and a large crucifix flanked by candles stood
+on a little altar by the further door. There was no more furniture than
+that, with the exception of a writing-desk between the windows, on which
+stood a typewriter. That jarred somehow on his sense of fitness, and he
+wondered at it.
+
+He finished the last drop of coffee in the thick-rimmed white cup, and
+sat back in his chair.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Already the burden was lighter, and he was astonished at the swiftness
+with which it had become so. Life looked simpler here; the interior
+world was taken more for granted; it was not even a matter of debate.
+There it was, imperious and objective, and through it glimmered to the
+eyes of the soul the old Figures that had become shrouded behind the
+rush of worldly circumstance. The very shadow of God appeared to rest
+here; it was no longer impossible to realise that the saints watched and
+interceded, that Mary sat on her throne, that the white disc on the
+altar was Jesus Christ. Percy was not yet at peace after all, he had
+been but an hour in Rome; and air, charged with never so much grace,
+could scarcely do more than it had done. But he felt more at ease, less
+desperately anxious, more childlike, more content to rest on the
+authority that claimed without explanation, and asserted that the world,
+as a matter of fact, proved by evidences without and within, was made
+this way and not that, for this purpose and not the other. Yet he had
+used the conveniences which he hated; he had left London a bare twelve
+hours before, and now here he sat in a place which was either a stagnant
+backwater of life, or else the very mid-current of it; he was not yet
+sure which.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a step outside, a handle was turned; and the
+Cardinal-Protector came through.
+
+Percy had not seen him for four years, and for a moment scarcely
+recognised him.
+
+It was a very old man that he saw now, bent and feeble, his face
+covered with wrinkles, crowned by very thin, white hair, and the little
+scarlet cap on top; he was in his black Benedictine habit with a plain
+abbatial cross on his breast, and walked hesitatingly, with a black
+stick. The only sign of vigour was in the narrow bright slit of his
+eyes showing beneath drooping lids. He held out his hand, smiling, and
+Percy, remembering in time that he was in the Vatican, bowed low only
+as he kissed the amethyst.
+
+“Welcome to Rome, father,” said the old man, speaking with an unexpected
+briskness. “They told me you were here half-an-hour ago; I thought I
+would leave you to wash and have your coffee.”
+
+Percy murmured something.
+
+“Yes; you are tired, no doubt,” said the Cardinal, pulling out a chair.
+
+“Indeed not, your Eminence. I slept excellently.”
+
+The Cardinal made a little gesture to a chair.
+
+“But I must have a word with you. The Holy Father wishes to see you at
+eleven o’clock.”
+
+Percy started a little.
+
+“We move quickly in these days, father.... There is no time to dawdle.
+You understand that you are to remain in Rome for the present?”
+
+“I have made all arrangements for that, your Eminence.”
+
+“That is very well.... We are pleased with you here, Father Franklin.
+The Holy Father has been greatly impressed by your comments. You have
+foreseen things in a very remarkable manner.”
+
+Percy flushed with pleasure. It was almost the first hint of
+encouragement he had had. Cardinal Martin went on.
+
+“I may say that you are considered our most valuable
+correspondent--certainly in England. That is why you are summoned. You
+are to help us here in future--a kind of consultor: any one can relate
+facts; not every one can understand them.... You look very young,
+father. How old are you?”
+
+“I am thirty-three, your Eminence.”
+
+“Ah! your white hair helps you.... Now, father, will you come with me
+into my room? It is now eight o’clock. I will keep you till nine--no
+longer. Then you shall have some rest, and at eleven I shall take you up
+to his Holiness.”
+
+Percy rose with a strange sense of elation, and ran to open the door for
+the Cardinal to go through.
+
+
+III
+
+At a few minutes before eleven Percy came out of his little white-washed
+room in his new ferraiuola, soutane and buckle shoes, and tapped at the
+door of the Cardinal’s room.
+
+He felt a great deal more self-possessed now. He had talked to the
+Cardinal freely and strongly, had described the effect that Felsenburgh
+had had upon London, and even the paralysis that had seized upon
+himself. He had stated his belief that they were on the edge of a
+movement unparalleled in history: he related little scenes that he had
+witnessed--a group kneeling before a picture of Felsenburgh, a dying man
+calling him by name, the aspect of the crowd that had waited in
+Westminster to hear the result of the offer made to the stranger. He
+showed him half-a-dozen cuttings from newspapers, pointing out their
+hysterical enthusiasm; he even went so far as to venture upon prophecy,
+and to declare his belief that persecution was within reasonable
+distance.
+
+“The world seems very oddly alive,” he said; “it is as if the whole
+thing was flushed and nervous.”
+
+The Cardinal nodded.
+
+“We, too,” he said, “even we feel it.”
+
+For the rest the Cardinal had sat watching him out of his narrow eyes,
+nodding from time to time, putting an occasional question, but listening
+throughout with great attention.
+
+“And your recommendations, father---” he had said, and then interrupted
+himself. “No, that is too much to ask. The Holy Father will speak of
+that.”
+
+He had congratulated him upon his Latin then--for they had spoken in
+that language throughout this second interview; and Percy had explained
+how loyal Catholic England had been in obeying the order, given ten
+years before, that Latin should become to the Church what Esperanto was
+becoming to the world.
+
+“That is very well,” said the old man. “His Holiness will be pleased at
+that.”
+
+At his second tap the door opened and the Cardinal came out, taking him
+by the arm without a word; and together they turned to the lift
+entrance.
+
+Percy ventured to make a remark as they slid noiselessly up towards the
+papal apartment.
+
+“I am surprised at the lift, your Eminence, and the typewriter in the
+audience-room.”
+
+“Why, father?”
+
+“Why, all the rest of Rome is back in the old days.”
+
+The Cardinal looked at him, puzzled.
+
+“Is it? I suppose it is. I never thought of that.”
+
+A Swiss guard flung back the door of the lift, saluted and went before
+them along the plain flagged passage to where his comrade stood. Then he
+saluted again and went back. A Pontifical chamberlain, in all the sombre
+glory of purple, black, and a Spanish ruff, peeped from the door, and
+made haste to open it. It really seemed almost incredible that such
+things still existed.
+
+“In a moment, your Eminence,” he said in Latin. “Will your Eminence wait
+here?”
+
+It was a little square room, with half-a-dozen doors, plainly contrived
+out of one of the huge old halls, for it was immensely high, and the
+tarnished gilt cornice vanished directly in two places into the white
+walls. The partitions, too, seemed thin; for as the two men sat down
+there was a murmur of voices faintly audible, the shuffling of
+footsteps, and the old eternal click of the typewriter from which Percy
+hoped he had escaped. They were alone in the room, which was furnished
+with the same simplicity as the Cardinal’s--giving the impression of a
+curious mingling of ascetic poverty and dignity by its red-tiled floor,
+its white walls, its altar and two vast bronze candlesticks of
+incalculable value that stood on the dais. The shutters here, too, were
+drawn; and there was nothing to distract Percy from the excitement that
+surged up now tenfold in heart and brain.
+
+It was _Papa Angelicus_ whom he was about to see; that amazing old man
+who had been appointed Secretary of State just fifty years ago, at the
+age of thirty, and Pope nine years previously. It was he who had carried
+out the extraordinary policy of yielding the churches throughout the
+whole of Italy to the Government, in exchange for the temporal lordship
+of Rome, and who had since set himself to make it a city of saints. He
+had cared, it appeared, nothing whatever for the world’s opinion; his
+policy, so far as it could be called one, consisted in a very simple
+thing: he had declared in Epistle after Epistle that the object of the
+Church was to do glory to God by producing supernatural virtues in man,
+and that nothing at all was of any significance or importance except so
+far as it effected this object. He had further maintained that since
+Peter was the Rock, the City of Peter was the Capital of the world, and
+should set an example to its dependency: this could not be done unless
+Peter ruled his City, and therefore he had sacrificed every church and
+ecclesiastical building in the country for that one end. Then he had set
+about ruling his city: he had said that on the whole the latter-day
+discoveries of man tended to distract immortal souls from a
+contemplation of eternal verities--not that these discoveries could be
+anything but good in themselves, since after all they gave insight into
+the wonderful laws of God--but that at present they were too exciting to
+the imagination. So he had removed the trams, the volors, the
+laboratories, the manufactories--saying that there was plenty of room
+for them outside Rome--and had allowed them to be planted in the
+suburbs: in their place he had raised shrines, religious houses and
+Calvaries. Then he had attended further to the souls of his subjects.
+Since Rome was of limited area, and, still more because the world
+corrupted without its proper salt, he allowed no man under the age of
+fifty to live within its walls for more than one month in each year,
+except those who received his permit. They might live, of course,
+immediately outside the city (and they did, by tens of thousands), but
+they were to understand that by doing so they sinned against the spirit,
+though not the letter, of their Father’s wishes. Then he had divided the
+city into national quarters, saying that as each nation had its peculiar
+virtues, each was to let its light shine steadily in its proper place.
+Rents had instantly begun to rise, so he had legislated against that by
+reserving in each quarter a number of streets at fixed prices, and had
+issued an ipso facto excommunication against all who erred in this
+respect. The rest were abandoned to the millionaires. He had retained
+the Leonine City entirely at his own disposal. Then he had restored
+Capital Punishment, with as much serene gravity as that with which he
+had made himself the derision of the civilised world in other matters,
+saying that though human life was holy, human virtue was more holy
+still; and he had added to the crime of murder, the crimes of adultery,
+idolatry and apostasy, for which this punishment was theoretically
+sanctioned. There had not been, however, more than two such executions
+in the eight years of his reign, since criminals, of course, with the
+exception of devoted believers, instantly made their way to the suburbs,
+where they were no longer under his jurisdiction.
+
+But he had not stayed here. He had sent once more ambassadors to every
+country in the world, informing the Government of each of their arrival.
+No attention was paid to this, beyond that of laughter; but he had
+continued, undisturbed, to claim his rights, and, meanwhile, used his
+legates for the important work of disseminating his views. Epistles
+appeared from time to time in every town, laying down the principles of
+the papal claims with as much tranquillity as if they were everywhere
+acknowledged. Freemasonry was steadily denounced, as well as democratic
+ideas of every kind; men were urged to remember their immortal souls and
+the Majesty of God, and to reflect upon the fact that in a few years all
+would be called to give their account to Him Who was Creator and Ruler
+of the world, Whose Vicar was John XXIV, P.P., whose name and seal were
+appended.
+
+That was a line of action that took the world completely by surprise.
+People had expected hysteria, argument, and passionate exhortation;
+disguised emissaries, plots, and protests. There were none of these. It
+was as if progress had not yet begun, and volors were uninvented, as if
+the entire universe had not come to disbelieve in God, and to discover
+that itself was God. Here was this silly old man, talking in his sleep,
+babbling of the Cross, and the inner life and the forgiveness of sins,
+exactly as his predecessors had talked two thousand years before. Well,
+it was only one sign more that Rome had lost not only its power, but its
+common sense as well. It was really time that something should be done.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And this was the man, thought Percy, _Papa Angelicus_, whom he was to
+see in a minute or two.
+
+The Cardinal put his hand on the priest’s knee as the door opened, and a
+purple prelate appeared, bowing.
+
+“Only this,” he said. “Be absolutely frank.”
+
+Percy stood up, trembling. Then he followed his patron towards the inner
+door.
+
+
+IV
+
+A white figure sat in the green gloom, beside a great writing-table,
+three or four yards away, but with the chair wheeled round to face the
+door by which the two entered. So much Percy saw as he performed the
+first genuflection. Then he dropped his eyes, advanced, genuflected
+again with the other, advanced once more, and for the third time
+genuflected, lifting the thin white hand, stretched out, to his lips. He
+heard the door close as he stood up.
+
+“Father Franklin, Holiness,” said the Cardinal’s voice at his ear.
+
+A white-sleeved arm waved to a couple of chairs set a yard away, and the
+two sat down.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+While the Cardinal, talking in slow Latin, said a few sentences,
+explaining that this was the English priest whose correspondence had
+been found so useful, Percy began to look with all his eyes.
+
+He knew the Pope’s face well, from a hundred photographs and moving
+pictures; even his gestures were familiar to him, the slight bowing of
+the head in assent, the tiny eloquent movement of the hands; but Percy,
+with a sense of being platitudinal, told himself that the living
+presence was very different.
+
+It was a very upright old man that he saw in the chair before him, of
+medium height and girth, with hands clasping the bosses of his
+chair-arms, and an appearance of great and deliberate dignity. But it
+was at the face chiefly that he looked, dropping his gaze three or four
+times, as the Pope’s blue eyes turned on him. They were extraordinary
+eyes, reminding him of what historians said of Pius X.; the lids drew
+straight lines across them, giving him the look of a hawk, but the rest
+of the face contradicted them. There was no sharpness in that. It was
+neither thin nor fat, but beautifully modelled in an oval outline: the
+lips were clean-cut, with a look of passion in their curves; the nose
+came down in an aquiline sweep, ending in chiselled nostrils; the chin
+was firm and cloven, and the poise of the whole head was strangely
+youthful. It was a face of great generosity and sweetness, set at an
+angle between defiance and humility, but ecclesiastical from ear to ear
+and brow to chin; the forehead was slightly compressed at the temples,
+and beneath the white cap lay white hair. It had been the subject of
+laughter at the music-halls nine years before, when the composite face
+of well-known priests had been thrown on a screen, side by side with the
+new Pope’s, for the two were almost indistinguishable.
+
+Percy found himself trying to sum it up, but nothing came to him except
+the word “priest.” It was that, and that was all. _Ecce sacerdos
+magnus!_ He was astonished at the look of youth, for the Pope was
+eighty-eight this year; yet his figure was as upright as that of a man
+of fifty, his shoulders unbowed, his head set on them like an athlete’s,
+and his wrinkles scarcely perceptible in the half light. _Papa
+Angelicus!_ reflected Percy.
+
+The Cardinal ceased his explanations, and made a little gesture. Percy
+drew up all his faculties tense and tight to answer the questions that
+he knew were coming.
+
+“I welcome you, my son,” said a very soft, resonant voice.
+
+Percy bowed, desperately, from the waist.
+
+The Pope dropped his eyes again, lifted a paper-weight with his left
+hand, and began to play with it gently as he talked.
+
+“Now, my son, deliver a little discourse. I suggest to you three
+heads--what has happened, what is happening, what will happen, with a
+peroration as to what should happen.”
+
+Percy drew a long breath, settled himself back, clasped the fingers of
+his left hand in the fingers of his right, fixed his eyes firmly upon
+the cross-embroidered red shoe opposite, and began. (Had he not
+rehearsed this a hundred times!)
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He first stated his theme; to the effect that all the forces of the
+civilised world were concentrating into two camps--the world and God. Up
+to the present time the forces of the world had been incoherent and
+spasmodic, breaking out in various ways--revolutions and wars had been
+like the movements of a mob, undisciplined, unskilled, and unrestrained.
+To meet this, the Church, too, had acted through her Catholicity--
+dispersion rather than concentration: _franc-tireurs_ had been opposed
+to _franc-tireurs_. But during the last hundred years there had been
+indications that the method of warfare was to change. Europe, at any
+rate, had grown weary of internal strife; the unions first of Labour,
+then of Capital, then of Labour and Capital combined, illustrated this
+in the economic sphere; the peaceful partition of Africa in the
+political sphere; the spread of Humanitarian religion in the spiritual
+sphere. Over against this must be placed the increased centralisation of
+the Church. By the wisdom of her pontiffs, over-ruled by God Almighty,
+the lines had been drawing tighter every year. He instanced the
+abolition of all local usages, including those so long cherished by the
+East, the establishment of the Cardinal-Protectorates in Rome, the
+enforced merging of all friars into one Order, though retaining their
+familiar names, under the authority of the supreme General; all monks,
+with the exception of the Carthusians, the Carmelites and the Trappists,
+into another; of the three excepted into a third; and the classification
+of nuns after the same plan. Further, he remarked on the more recent
+decrees, establishing the sense of the Vatican decision on
+infallibility, the new version of Canon Law, the immense simplification
+that had taken place in ecclesiastical government, the hierarchy,
+rubrics and the affairs of missionary countries, with the new and
+extraordinary privileges granted to mission priests. At this point he
+became aware that his self-consciousness had left him, and he began,
+even with little gestures, and a slightly raised voice, to enlarge on
+the significance of the last month’s events.
+
+All that had gone before, he said, pointed to what had now actually
+taken place--namely, the reconciliation of the world on a basis other
+than that of Divine Truth. It was the intention of God and of His Vicars
+to reconcile all men in Christ Jesus; but the corner-stone had once more
+been rejected, and instead of the chaos that the pious had prophesied,
+there was coming into existence a unity unlike anything known in
+history. This was the more deadly from the fact that it contained so
+many elements of indubitable good. War, apparently, was now extinct, and
+it was not Christianity that had done it; union was now seen to be
+better than disunion, and the lesson had been learned apart from the
+Church. In fact, natural virtues had suddenly waxed luxuriant, and
+supernatural virtues were despised. Friendliness took the place of
+charity, contentment the place of hope, and knowledge the place of
+faith.
+
+Percy stopped, he had become conscious that he was preaching a kind of
+sermon.
+
+“Yes, my son,” said the kind voice. “What else?”
+
+What else?... Very well, continued Percy, movements such as these
+brought forth men, and the Man of this movement was Julian Felsenburgh.
+He had accomplished a work that--apart from God--seemed miraculous. He
+had broken down the eternal division between East and West, coming
+himself from the continent that alone could produce such powers; he had
+prevailed by sheer force of personality over the two supreme tyrants of
+life--religious fanaticism and party government. His influence over the
+impassive English was another miracle, yet he had also set on fire
+France, Germany, and Spain. Percy here described one or two of his
+little scenes, saying that it was like the vision of a god: and he
+quoted freely some of the titles given to the Man by sober, unhysterical
+newspapers. Felsenburgh was called the Son of Man, because he was so
+pure-bred a cosmopolitan; the Saviour of the World, because he had slain
+war and himself survived--even--even--here Percy’s voice faltered--even
+Incarnate God, because he was the perfect representative of divine man.
+
+The quiet, priestly face watching opposite never winced or moved; and he
+went on.
+
+Persecution, he said, was coming. There had been a riot or two already.
+But persecution was not to be feared. It would no doubt cause
+apostasies, as it had always done, but these were deplorable only on
+account of the individual apostates. On the other hand, it would
+reassure the faithful; and purge out the half-hearted. Once, in the
+early ages, Satan’s attack had been made on the bodily side, with whips
+and fire and beasts; in the sixteenth century it had been on the
+intellectual side; in the twentieth century on the springs of moral and
+spiritual life. Now it seemed as if the assault was on all three planes
+at once. But what was chiefly to be feared was the positive influence of
+Humanitarianism: it was coming, like the kingdom of God, with power; it
+was crushing the imaginative and the romantic, it was assuming rather
+than asserting its own truth; it was smothering with bolsters instead of
+wounding and stimulating with steel or controversy. It seemed to be
+forcing its way, almost objectively, into the inner world. Persons who
+had scarcely heard its name were professing its tenets; priests absorbed
+it, as they absorbed God in Communion--he mentioned the names of the
+recent apostates--children drank it in like Christianity itself. The
+soul “naturally Christian” seemed to be becoming “the soul naturally
+infidel.” Persecution, cried the priest, was to be welcomed like
+salvation, prayed for, and grasped; but he feared that the authorities
+were too shrewd, and knew the antidote and the poison apart. There might
+be individual martyrdoms--in fact there would be, and very many--but
+they would be in spite of secular government, not because of it.
+Finally, he expected, Humanitarianism would presently put on the dress
+of liturgy and sacrifice, and when that was done, the Church’s cause,
+unless God intervened, would be over.
+
+Percy sat back, trembling.
+
+“Yes, my son. And what do you think should be done?”
+
+Percy flung out his hands.
+
+“Holy Father--the mass, prayer, the rosary. These first and last. The
+world denies their power: it is on their power that Christians must
+throw all their weight. All things in Jesus Christ--in Jesus Christ,
+first and last. Nothing else can avail. He must do all, for we can do
+nothing.”
+
+The white head bowed. Then it rose erect.
+
+“Yes, my son.... But so long as Jesus Christ deigns to use us, we must
+be used. He is Prophet and King as well as Priest. We then, too, must be
+prophet and king as well as priest. What of Prophecy and Royalty?”
+
+The voice thrilled Percy like a trumpet.
+
+“Yes, Holiness.... For prophecy, then, let us preach charity; for
+Royalty, let us reign on crosses. We must love and suffer....” (He drew
+one sobbing breath.) “Your Holiness has preached charity always. Let
+charity then issue in good deeds. Let us be foremost in them; let us
+engage in trade honestly, in family life chastely, in government
+uprightly. And as for suffering--ah! Holiness!”
+
+His old scheme leaped back to his mind, and stood poised there
+convincing and imperious.
+
+“Yes, my son, speak plainly.”
+
+“Your Holiness--it is old--old as Rome--every fool has desired it: a new
+Order, Holiness--a new Order,” he stammered.
+
+The white hand dropped the paper-weight; the Pope leaned forward,
+looking intently at the priest.
+
+“Yes, my son?”
+
+Percy threw himself on his knees.
+
+“A new Order, Holiness--no habit or badge--subject to your Holiness
+only--freer than Jesuits, poorer than Franciscans, more mortified than
+Carthusians: men and women alike--the three vows with the intention of
+martyrdom; the Pantheon for their Church; each bishop responsible for
+their sustenance; a lieutenant in each country.... (Holiness, it is the
+thought of a fool.) ... And Christ Crucified for their patron.”
+
+The Pope stood up abruptly--so abruptly that Cardinal Martin sprang up
+too, apprehensive and terrified. It seemed that this young man had gone
+too far.
+
+Then the Pope sat down again, extending his hand.
+
+“God bless you, my son. You have leave to go.... Will your Eminence stay
+for a few minutes?”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+I
+
+The Cardinal said very little to Percy when they met again that evening,
+beyond congratulating him on the way he had borne himself with the Pope.
+It seemed that the priest had done right by his extreme frankness. Then
+he told him of his duties.
+
+Percy was to retain the couple of rooms that had been put at his
+disposal; he was to say mass, as a rule, in the Cardinal’s oratory; and
+after that, at nine, he was to present himself for instructions: he was
+to dine at noon with the Cardinal, after which he was to consider
+himself at liberty till _Ave Maria_: then, once more he was to be at his
+master’s disposal until supper. The work he would principally have to do
+would be the reading of all English correspondence, and the drawing up
+of a report upon it.
+
+Percy found it a very pleasant and serene life, and the sense of home
+deepened every day. He had an abundance of time to himself, which he
+occupied resolutely in relaxation. From eight to nine he usually walked
+abroad, going sedately through the streets with his senses passive,
+looking into churches, watching the people, and gradually absorbing the
+strange naturalness of life under ancient conditions. At times it
+appeared to him like an historical dream; at times it seemed that there
+was no other reality; that the silent, tense world of modern
+civilisation was itself a phantom, and that here was the simple
+naturalness of the soul’s childhood back again. Even the reading of the
+English correspondence did not greatly affect him, for the stream of his
+mind was beginning to run clear again in this sweet old channel; and he
+read, dissected, analysed and diagnosed with a deepening tranquillity.
+
+There was not, after all, a great deal of news. It was a kind of lull
+after storm. Felsenburgh was still in retirement; he had refused the
+offers made to him by France and Italy, as that of England; and,
+although nothing definite was announced, it seemed that he was confining
+himself at present to an unofficial attitude. Meanwhile the Parliaments
+of Europe were busy in the preliminary stages of code-revision. Nothing
+would be done, it was understood, until the autumn sessions.
+
+Life in Rome was very strange. The city had now become not only the
+centre of faith but, in a sense, a microcosm of it. It was divided into
+four huge quarters--Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Teutonic and Eastern--besides
+Trastevere, which was occupied almost entirely by Papal offices,
+seminaries, and schools. Anglo-Saxondom occupied the southwestern
+quarter, now entirely covered with houses, including the Aventine, the
+Celian and Testaccio. The Latins inhabited old Rome, between the Course
+and the river; the Teutons the northeastern quarter, bounded on the
+south by St. Laurence’s Street; and the Easterns the remaining quarter,
+of which the centre was the Lateran. In this manner the true Romans were
+scarcely conscious of intrusion; they possessed a multitude of their own
+churches, they were allowed to revel in narrow, dark streets and hold
+their markets; and it was here that Percy usually walked, in a passion
+of historical retrospect. But the other quarters were strange enough,
+too. It was curious to see how a progeny of Gothic churches, served by
+northern priests, had grown up naturally in the Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic
+districts, and how the wide, grey streets, the neat pavements, the
+severe houses, showed how the northerns had not yet realised the
+requirements of southern life. The Easterns, on the other hand,
+resembled the Latins; their streets were as narrow and dark, their
+smells as overwhelming, their churches as dirty and as homely, and their
+colours even more brilliant.
+
+Outside the walls the confusion was indescribable. If the city
+represented a carved miniature of the world, the suburbs represented the
+same model broken into a thousand pieces, tumbled in a bag and shot out
+at random. So far as the eye could see, on all sides from the roof of
+the Vatican, there stretched an endless plain of house-roofs, broken by
+spires, towers, domes and chimneys, under which lived human beings of
+every race beneath the sun. Here were the great manufactories, the
+monster buildings of the new world, the stations, the schools, the
+offices, all under secular dominion, yet surrounded by six millions of
+souls who lived here for love of religion. It was these who had
+despaired of modern life, tired out with change and effort, who had fled
+from the new system for refuge to the Church, but who could not obtain
+leave to live in the city itself. New houses were continually springing
+up in all directions. A gigantic compass, fixed by one leg in Rome, and
+with a span of five miles, would, if twirled, revolve through packed
+streets through its entire circle. Beyond that too houses stretched into
+the indefinite distance.
+
+But Percy did not realise the significance of all that he saw, until the
+occasion of the Pope’s name-day towards the end of August.
+
+It was yet cool and early, when he followed his patron, whom he was to
+serve as chaplain, along the broad passages of the Vatican towards the
+room where the Pope and Cardinals were to assemble. Through a window, as
+he looked out into the Piazza, the crowd was yet more dense, if that
+were possible, than it had been an hour before. The huge oval square was
+cobbled with heads, through which ran a broad road, kept by papal troops
+for the passage of the carriages; and up the broad ribbon, white in the
+eastern light, came monstrous vehicles, a blaze of gilding and colour
+and cream tint; slow cheers swelled up and died, and through all came
+the rush and patter of wheels over the stones, like the sound of a
+tide-swept pebbly beach.
+
+As they waited in an ante-chamber, halted by the pressure in front and
+behind--a pack of scarlet and white and purple--he looked out again, and
+realised what he had known only intellectually before, that here before
+his eyes was the royalty of the old world assembled--and he began to
+perceive its significance.
+
+Round the steps of the basilica spread a great fan of coaches, each
+yoked to eight horses--the white of France and Spain, the black of
+Germany, Italy and Russia, and the cream-coloured of England. Those
+stood out in the near half-circle, and beyond was the sweep of the
+lesser powers: Greece, Norway, Sweden, Roumania and the Balkan States.
+One, the Turk, was alone wanting, he reminded himself. The emblems of
+some were visible--eagles, lions, leopards--guarding the royal crown
+above the roof of each. From the foot of the steps to the head ran a
+broad scarlet carpet, lined with soldiers.
+
+Percy leaned against the shutter, and began to meditate. Here was all
+that was left of Royalty. He had seen their palaces before, here and
+there in the various quarters, with standards flying, and
+scarlet-liveried men lounging on the steps. He had raised his hat a
+dozen times as a landau thundered past him up the Course; he had even
+seen the lilies of France and the leopards of England pass together in
+the solemn parade of the Pincian Hill. He had read in the papers every
+now and again during the last five years that family after family had
+made its way to Rome, after papal recognition had been granted; he had
+been told by the Cardinal on the previous evening that William of
+England, with his Consort, had landed at Ostia in the morning and that
+the tale of the Powers was complete. But he had never before realised
+the stupendous, overwhelming fact of the assembly of the world’s royalty
+under the shadow of Peter’s Throne, nor the appalling danger that its
+presence constituted in the midst of a democratic world. That world, he
+knew, affected to laugh at the folly and the childishness of it all--at
+the desperate play-acting of Divine Right on the part of fallen and
+despised families; but the same world, he knew very well, had not yet
+lost quite all its sentiment; and if that sentiment should happen to
+become resentful---
+
+The pressure relaxed; Percy slipped out of the recess, and followed in
+the slow-moving stream.
+
+Half-an-hour later he was in his place among the ecclesiastics, as the
+papal procession came out through the glimmering dusk of the chapel of
+the Blessed Sacrament into the nave of the enormous church; but even
+before he had entered the chapel he heard the quiet roar of recognition
+and the cry of the trumpets that greeted the Supreme Pontiff as he came
+out, a hundred yards ahead, borne on the _sedia gestatoria_, with the
+fans going behind him. When Percy himself came out, five minutes later,
+walking in his quaternion, and saw the sight that was waiting, he
+remembered with a sudden throb at his heart that other sight he had seen
+in London in a summer dawn three months before....
+
+Far ahead, seeming to cleave its way through the surging heads, like the
+poop of an ancient ship, moved the canopy beneath which sat the Lord of
+the world, and between him and the priest, as if it were the wake of
+that same ship, swayed the gorgeous procession--Protonotaries Apostolic,
+Generals of Religious Orders and the rest--making its way along with
+white, gold, scarlet and silver foam between the living banks on either
+side. Overhead hung the splendid barrel of the roof, and far in front
+the haven of God’s altar reared its monstrous pillars, beneath which
+burned the seven yellow stars that were the harbour lights of sanctity.
+It was an astonishing sight, but too vast and bewildering to do anything
+but oppress the observers with a consciousness of their own futility.
+The enormous enclosed air, the giant statues, the dim and distant roofs,
+the indescribable concert of sound--of the movement of feet, the murmur
+of ten thousand voices, the peal of organs like the crying of gnats, the
+thin celestial music--the faint suggestive smell of incense and men and
+bruised bay and myrtle--and, supreme above all, the vibrant atmosphere
+of human emotion, shot with supernatural aspiration, as the Hope of the
+World, the holder of Divine Vice-Royalty, passed on his way to stand
+between God and man--this affected the priest as the action of a drug
+that at once lulls and stimulates, that blinds while it gives new
+vision, that deafens while it opens stopped ears, that exalts while it
+plunges into new gulfs of consciousness. Here, then, was the other
+formulated answer to the problem of life. The two Cities of Augustine
+lay for him to choose. The one was that of a world self-originated,
+self-organised and self-sufficient, interpreted by such men as Marx and
+Herve, socialists, materialists, and, in the end, hedonists, summed up
+at last in Felsenburgh. The other lay displayed in the sight he saw
+before him, telling of a Creator and of a creation, of a Divine purpose,
+a redemption, and a world transcendent and eternal from which all sprang
+and to which all moved. One of the two, John and Julian, was the Vicar,
+and the other the Ape, of God.... And Percy’s heart in one more spasm of
+conviction made its choice....
+
+But the summit was not yet reached.
+
+As Percy came at last out from the nave beneath the dome, on his way to
+the tribune beyond the papal throne, he became aware of a new element.
+
+A great space was cleared about the altar and confession, extending, as
+he could see at least on his side, to the point that marked the entrance
+to the transepts; at this point ran rails straight across from side to
+side, continuing the lines of the nave. Beyond this red-hung barrier lay
+a gradual slope of faces, white and motionless; a glimmer of steel
+bounded it, and above, a third of the distance down the transept, rose
+in solemn serried array a line of canopies. These were of scarlet, like
+cardinalitial baldachini, but upon the upright surface of each burned
+gigantic coats supported by beasts and topped by crowns. Under each was
+a figure or two--no more--in splendid isolation, and through the
+interspaces between the thrones showed again a misty slope of faces.
+
+His heart quickened as he saw it--as he swept his eyes round and across
+to the right and saw as in a mirror the replica of the left in the right
+transept. It was there then that they sat--those lonely survivors of
+that strange company of persons who, till half-a-century ago, had
+reigned as God’s temporal Vicegerents with the consent of their
+subjects. They were unrecognised, now, save by Him from whom they drew
+their sovereignty--pinnacles clustering and hanging from a dome, from
+which the walls had been withdrawn. These were men and women who had
+learned at last that power comes from above, and their title to rule
+came not from their subjects but from the Supreme Ruler of
+all--shepherds without sheep, captains without soldiers to command. It
+was piteous--horribly piteous, yet inspiring. The act of faith was so
+sublime; and Percy’s heart quickened as he understood it. These, then,
+men and women like himself, were not ashamed to appeal from man to God,
+to assume insignia which the world regarded as playthings, but which to
+them were emblems of supernatural commission. Was there not mirrored
+here, he asked himself, some far-off shadow of One Who rode on the colt
+of an ass amid the sneers of the great and the enthusiasm of
+children?...
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was yet more kindling as the mass went on, and he saw the male
+sovereigns come down to do their services at the altar, and to go to and
+fro between it and the Throne. There they went bareheaded, the stately
+silent figures. The English king, once again _Fidei Defensor_, bore the
+train in place of the old king of Spain, who, with the Austrian Emperor,
+alone of all European sovereigns, had preserved the unbroken continuity
+of faith. The old man leaned over his fald-stool, mumbling and weeping,
+even crying out now and again in love and devotion, as, like Simeon, he
+saw his Salvation. The Austrian Emperor twice administered the Lavabo;
+the German sovereign, who had lost his throne and all but his life upon
+his conversion four years before, by a new privilege placed and withdrew
+the cushion, as his Lord kneeled before the Lord of them both. So
+movement by movement the gorgeous drama was enacted; the murmuring of
+the crowds died to a stillness that was but one wordless prayer as the
+tiny White Disc rose between the white hands, and the thin angelic music
+pealed in the dome. For here was the one hope of these thousands, as
+mighty and as little as once within the Manger. There was none other
+that fought for them but only God. Surely then, if the blood of men and
+the tears of women could not avail to move the Judge and Observer of all
+from His silence, surely at least here the bloodless Death of His only
+Son, that once on Calvary had darkened heaven and rent the earth,
+pleaded now with such sorrowful splendour upon this island of faith amid
+a sea of laughter and hatred--this at least must avail! How could it
+not?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Percy had just sat down, tired out with the long ceremonies, when the
+door opened abruptly, and the Cardinal, still in his robes, came in
+swiftly, shutting the door behind him.
+
+“Father Franklin,” he said, in a strange breathless voice, “there is the
+worst of news. Felsenburgh is appointed President of Europe.”
+
+
+II
+
+It was late that night before Percy returned, completely exhausted by
+his labours. For hour after hour he had sat with the Cardinal, opening
+despatches that poured into the electric receivers from all over Europe,
+and were brought in one by one into the quiet sitting-room. Three times
+in the afternoon the Cardinal had been sent for, once by the Pope and
+twice to the Quirinal.
+
+There was no doubt at all that the news was true; and it seemed that
+Felsenburgh must have waited deliberately for the offer. All others he
+had refused. There had been a Convention of the Powers, each of whom had
+been anxious to secure him, and each of whom had severally failed; these
+private claims had been withdrawn, and an united message sent. The new
+proposal was to the effect that Felsenburgh should assume a position
+hitherto undreamed of in democracy; that he should receive a House of
+Government in every capital of Europe; that his veto of any measure
+should be final for three years; that any measure he chose to introduce
+three times in three consecutive years should become law; that his title
+should be that of President of Europe. From his side practically nothing
+was asked, except that he should refuse any other official position
+offered him that did not receive the sanction of all the Powers. And all
+this, Percy saw very well, involved the danger of an united Europe
+increased tenfold. It involved all the stupendous force of Socialism
+directed by a brilliant individual. It was the combination of the
+strongest characteristics of the two methods of government. The offer
+had been accepted by Felsenburgh after eight hours’ silence.
+
+It was remarkable, too, to observe how the news had been accepted by the
+two other divisions of the world. The East was enthusiastic; America was
+divided. But in any case America was powerless: the balance of the world
+was overwhelmingly against her.
+
+Percy threw himself, as he was, on to his bed, and lay there with
+drumming pulses, closed eyes and a huge despair at his heart. The world
+indeed had risen like a giant over the horizons of Rome, and the holy
+city was no better now than a sand castle before a tide. So much he
+grasped. As to how ruin would come, in what form and from what
+direction, he neither knew nor cared. Only he knew now that it would
+come.
+
+He had learned by now something of his own temperament; and he turned
+his eyes inwards to observe himself bitterly, as a doctor in mortal
+disease might with a dreadful complacency diagnose his own symptoms. It
+was even a relief to turn from the monstrous mechanism of the world to
+see in miniature one hopeless human heart. For his own religion he no
+longer feared; he knew, as absolutely as a man may know the colour of
+his eyes, that it was secure again and beyond shaking. During those
+weeks in Rome the cloudy deposit had run clear and the channel was once
+more visible. Or, better still, that vast erection of dogma, ceremony,
+custom and morals in which he had been educated, and on which he had
+looked all his life (as a man may stare upon some great set-piece that
+bewilders him), seeing now one spark of light, now another, flare and
+wane in the darkness, had little by little kindled and revealed itself
+in one stupendous blaze of divine fire that explains itself. Huge
+principles, once bewildering and even repellent, were again luminously
+self-evident; he saw, for example, that while Humanity-Religion
+endeavoured to abolish suffering the Divine Religion embraced it, so
+that the blind pangs even of beasts were within the Father’s Will and
+Scheme; or that while from one angle one colour only of the web of life
+was visible--material, or intellectual, or artistic--from another the
+Supernatural was as eminently obvious. Humanity-Religion could only be
+true if at least half of man’s nature, aspirations and sorrows were
+ignored. Christianity, on the other hand, at least included and
+accounted for these, even if it did not explain them. This ... and this
+... and this ... all made the one and perfect whole. There was the
+Catholic Faith, more certain to him than the existence of himself: it
+was true and alive. He might be damned, but God reigned. He might go
+mad, but Jesus Christ was Incarnate Deity, proving Himself so by death
+and Resurrection, and John his Vicar. These things were as the bones of
+the Universe--facts beyond doubting--if they were not true, nothing
+anywhere was anything but a dream.
+
+Difficulties?--Why, there were ten thousand. He did not in the least
+understand why God had made the world as it was, nor how Hell could be
+the creation of Love, nor how bread was transubstantiated into the Body
+of God but--well, these things were so. He had travelled far, he began
+to see, from his old status of faith, when he had believed that divine
+truth could be demonstrated on intellectual grounds. He had learned now
+(he knew not how) that the supernatural cried to the supernatural; the
+Christ without to the Christ within; that pure human reason indeed could
+not contradict, yet neither could it adequately prove the mysteries of
+faith, except on premisses visible only to him who receives Revelation
+as a fact; that it is the moral state, rather than the intellectual, to
+which the Spirit of God speaks with the greater certitude. That which he
+had both learned and taught he now knew, that Faith, having, like man
+himself, a body and a spirit--an historical expression and an inner
+verity--speaks now by one, now by another. This man believes because he
+sees--accepts the Incarnation or the Church from its credentials; that
+man, perceiving that these things are spiritual facts, yields himself
+wholly to the message and authority of her who alone professes them, as
+well as to the manifestation of them upon the historical plane; and in
+the darkness leans upon her arm. Or, best of all, because he has
+believed, now he sees.
+
+So he looked with a kind of interested indolence at other tracts of his
+nature.
+
+First, there was his intellect, puzzled beyond description, demanding,
+Why, why, why? Why was it allowed? How was it conceivable that God did
+not intervene, and that the Father of men could permit His dear world to
+be so ranged against Him? What did He mean to do? Was this eternal
+silence never to be broken? It was very well for those that had the
+Faith, but what of the countless millions who were settling down in
+contented blasphemy? Were these not, too, His children and the sheep of
+His pasture? What was the Catholic Church made for if not to convert the
+world, and why then had Almighty God allowed it, on the one side, to
+dwindle to a handful, and, on the other, the world to find its peace
+apart from Him?
+
+He considered his emotions, but there was no comfort there, no stimulus.
+Oh! yes; he could pray still, by mere cold acts of the will, and his
+theology told him that God accepted such. He could say “_Adveniat regnum
+tuum. ... Fiat voluntas tua_,” five thousand times a day, if God wanted
+that; but there was no sting or touch, no sense of vibration through the
+cords that his will threw up to the Heavenly Throne. What in the world
+then did God want him to do? Was it just then to repeat formulas, to lie
+still, to open despatches, to listen through the telephone, and to
+suffer?
+
+And then the rest of the world--the madness that had seized upon the
+nations; the amazing stories that had poured in that day of the men in
+Paris, who, raving like Bacchantes, had stripped themselves naked in the
+Place de Concorde, and stabbed themselves to the heart, crying out to
+thunders of applause that life was too enthralling to be endured; of the
+woman who sang herself mad last night in Spain, and fell laughing and
+foaming in the concert hall at Seville; of the crucifixion of the
+Catholics that morning in the Pyrenees, and the apostasy of three
+bishops in Germany.... And this ... and this ... and a thousand more
+horrors were permitted, and God made no sign and spoke no word....
+
+There was a tap, and Percy sprang up as the Cardinal came in.
+
+He looked horribly worn; and his eyes had a kind of sunken brilliance
+that revealed fever. He made a little motion to Percy to sit down, and
+himself sat in the deep chair, trembling a little, and gathering his
+buckled feet beneath his red-buttoned cassock.
+
+“You must forgive me, father,” he said. “I am anxious for the Bishop’s
+safety. He should be here by now.”
+
+This was the Bishop of Southwark, Percy remembered, who had left England
+early that morning.
+
+“He is coming straight through, your Eminence?”
+
+“Yes; he should have been here by twenty-three. It is after midnight, is
+it not?”
+
+As he spoke, the bells chimed out the half-hour.
+
+It was nearly quiet now. All day the air had been full of sound; mobs
+had paraded the suburbs; the gates of the City had been barred, yet that
+was only an earnest of what was to be expected when the world understood
+itself.
+
+The Cardinal seemed to recover himself after a few minutes’ silence.
+
+“You look tired out, father,” he said kindly.
+
+Percy smiled.
+
+“And your Eminence?” he said.
+
+The old man smiled too.
+
+“Why, yes,” he said. “I shall not last much longer, father. And then it
+will be you to suffer.”
+
+Percy sat up, suddenly, sick at heart.
+
+“Why, yes,” said the Cardinal. “The Holy Father has arranged it. You are
+to succeed me, you know. It need be no secret.”
+
+Percy drew a long trembling breath.
+
+“Eminence,” he began piteously.
+
+The other lifted a thin old hand.
+
+“I understand all that,” he said softly. “You wish to die, is it not
+so?--and be at peace. There are many who wish that. But we must suffer
+first. _Et pati et mori_. Father Franklin, there must be no faltering.”
+
+There was a long silence.
+
+The news was too stunning to convey anything to the priest but a sense
+of horrible shock. The thought had simply never entered his mind that
+he, a man under forty, should be considered eligible to succeed this
+wise, patient old prelate. As for the honour--Percy was past that now,
+even had he thought of it. There was but one view before him--of a long
+and intolerable journey, on a road that went uphill, to be traversed
+with a burden on his shoulders that he could not support.
+
+Yet he recognised its inevitability. The fact was announced to him as
+indisputable; it was to be; there was nothing to be said. But it was as
+if one more gulf had opened, and he stared into it with a dull, sick
+horror, incapable of expression.
+
+The Cardinal first broke the silence.
+
+“Father Franklin,” he said, “I have seen to-day a picture of
+Felsenburgh. Do you know whom I at first took it for?”
+
+Percy smiled listlessly.
+
+“Yes, father, I took it for you. Now, what do you make of that?”
+
+“I don’t understand, Eminence.”
+
+“Why---” He broke off, suddenly changing the subject.
+
+“There was a murder in the City to-day,” he said. “A Catholic stabbed a
+blasphemer.”
+
+Percy glanced at him again.
+
+“Oh! yes; he has not attempted to escape,” went on the old man. “He is
+in gaol.”
+
+“And---”
+
+“He will be executed. The trial will begin to-morrow.... It is sad
+enough. It is the first murder for eight months.”
+
+The irony of the position was evident enough to Percy as he sat
+listening to the deepening silence outside in the starlit night. Here
+was this poor city pretending that nothing was the matter, quietly
+administering its derided justice; and there, outside, were the forces
+gathering that would put an end to all. His enthusiasm seemed dead.
+There was no thrill from the thought of the splendid disregard of
+material facts of which this was one tiny instance, none of despairing
+courage or drunken recklessness. He felt like one who watches a fly
+washing his face on the cylinder of an engine--the huge steel slides
+along bearing the tiny life towards enormous death--another moment and
+it will be over; and yet the watcher cannot interfere. The supernatural
+thus lay, perfect and alive, but immeasurably tiny; the huge forces were
+in motion, the world was heaving up, and Percy could do nothing but
+stare and frown. Yet, as has been said, there was no shadow on his
+faith; the fly he knew was greater than the engine from the superiority
+of its order of life; if it were crushed, life would not be the final
+sufferer; so much he knew, but how it was so, he did not know.
+
+As the two sat there, again came a step and a tap; and a servant’s face
+looked in.
+
+“His Lordship is come, Eminence,” he said.
+
+The Cardinal rose painfully, supporting himself by the table. Then he
+paused, seeming to remember something, and fumbled in his pocket.
+
+“See that, father,” he said, and pushed a small silver disc towards the
+priest. “No; when I am gone.”
+
+Percy closed the door and came back, taking up the little round object.
+
+It was a coin, fresh from the mint. On one side was the familiar wreath
+with the word “fivepence” in the midst, with its Esperanto equivalent
+beneath, and on the other the profile of a man, with an inscription.
+Percy turned it to read:
+
+“JULIAN FELSENBURGH, LA PREZIDANTE DE UROPO.”
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+It was at ten o’clock on the following morning that the Cardinals were
+summoned to the Pope’s presence to hear the allocution.
+
+Percy, from his seat among the Consultors, watched them come in, men of
+every nation and temperament and age--the Italians all together,
+gesticulating, and flashing teeth; the Anglo-Saxons steady-faced and
+serious; an old French Cardinal leaning on his stick, walking with the
+English Benedictine. It was one of the great plain stately rooms of
+which the Vatican now chiefly consisted, seated length wise like a
+chapel. At the lower end, traversed by the gangway, were the seats of
+the Consultors; at the upper end, the dais with the papal throne. Three
+or four benches with desks before them, standing out beyond the
+Consultors’ seats, were reserved for the arrivals of the day before
+--prelates and priests who had poured into Rome from every European
+country on the announcement of the amazing news.
+
+Percy had not an idea as to what would be said. It was scarcely possible
+that nothing but platitudes would be uttered, yet what else could be
+said in view of the complete doubtfulness of the situation? All that was
+known even this morning was that the Presidentship of Europe was a fact;
+the little silver coin he had seen witnessed to that; that there had
+been an outburst of persecution, repressed sternly by local authorities;
+and that Felsenburgh was to-day to begin his tour from capital to
+capital. He was expected in Turin by the end of the week. From every
+Catholic centre throughout the world had come in messages imploring
+guidance; it was said that apostasy was rising like a tidal wave, that
+persecution threatened everywhere, and that even bishops were beginning
+to yield.
+
+As for the Holy Father, all was doubtful. Those who knew, said nothing;
+and the only rumour that escaped was to the effect that he had spent all
+night in prayer at the tomb of the Apostle....
+
+The murmur died suddenly to a rustle and a silence; there was a ripple
+of sinking heads along the seats as the door beside the canopy opened,
+and a moment later John, _Pater Patrum_, was on his throne.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At first Percy understood nothing. He stared only, as at a picture,
+through the dusty sunlight that poured in through the shrouded windows,
+at the scarlet lines to right and left, up to the huge scarlet canopy,
+and the white figure that sat there. Certainly, these southerners
+understood the power of effect. It was as vivid and impressive as a
+vision of the Host in a jewelled monstrance. Every accessory was
+gorgeous, the high room, the colour of the robes, the chains and
+crosses, and as the eye moved along to its climax it was met by a piece
+of dead white--as if glory was exhausted and declared itself impotent to
+tell the supreme secret. Scarlet and purple and gold were well enough
+for those who stood on the steps of the throne--they needed it; but for
+Him who sat there nothing was needed. Let colours die and sounds faint
+in the presence of God’s Viceroy. Yet what expression was required found
+itself adequately provided in that beautiful oval face, the poised
+imperious head, the sweet brilliant eyes and the clean-curved lips that
+spoke so strongly. There was not a sound in the room, not a rustle, nor
+a breathing--even without it seemed as if the world were allowing the
+supernatural to state its defence uninterruptedly, before summing up and
+clamouring condemnation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Percy made a violent effort at self-repression, clenched his hands and
+listened.
+
+“... Since this then is so, sons in Jesus Christ, it is for us to
+answer. We wrestle not, as the Doctor of the Gentiles teaches us,
+_against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against
+the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of
+wickedness in the high places. Wherefore_, he continues, _take unto you
+the armour of God_; and he further declares to us its nature--_the
+girdle of truth, the breastplate of justice, the shoes of peace, the
+shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit._
+
+“By this, therefore, the Word of God bids us to war, but not with the
+weapons of this world, for neither is His kingdom of this world; and it
+is to remind you of the principles of this warfare that we have summoned
+you to Our Presence.”
+
+The voice paused, and there was a rustling sigh along the seats. Then
+the voice continued on a slightly higher note.
+
+“It has ever been the wisdom of Our predecessors, as is also their duty,
+while keeping silence at certain seasons, at others to speak freely the
+whole counsel of God. From this duty We Ourself must not be deterred by
+the knowledge of Our own weakness and ignorance, but to trust rather
+that He Who has placed Us on this throne will deign to speak through Our
+mouth and use Our words to His glory.
+
+“First, then, it is necessary to utter Our sentence as to the new
+movement, as men call it, which has latterly been inaugurated by the
+rulers of this world.
+
+“We are not unmindful of the blessings of peace and unity, nor do We
+forget that the appearance of these things has been the fruit of much
+that we have condemned. It is this appearance of peace that has deceived
+many, causing them to doubt the promise of the Prince of Peace that it
+is through Him alone that we have access to the Father. That true peace,
+passing understanding, concerns not only the relations of men between
+themselves, but, supremely, the relations of men with their Maker; and
+it is in this necessary point that the efforts of the world are found
+wanting. It is not indeed to be wondered at that in a world which has
+rejected God this necessary matter should be forgotten. Men have
+thought--led astray by seducers--that the unity of nations was the
+greatest prize of this life, forgetting the words of our Saviour, Who
+said that He came to bring not peace but a sword, and that it is through
+many tribulations that we enter God’s Kingdom. First, then, there should
+be established the peace of man with God, and after that the unity of
+man with man will follow. _Seek ye first_, said Jesus Christ, _the
+kingdom of God--and then all these things shall be added unto you._
+
+“First, then, We once more condemn and anathematise the opinions of
+those who teach and believe the contrary of this; and we renew once more
+all the condemnations uttered by Ourself or Our predecessors against all
+those societies, organisations and communities that have been formed for
+the furtherance of an unity on another than a divine foundation; and We
+remind Our children throughout the world that it is forbidden to them to
+enter or to aid or to approve in any manner whatsoever any of those
+bodies named in such condemnations.”
+
+Percy moved in his seat, conscious of a touch of impatience.... The
+manner was superb, tranquil and stately as a river; but the matter a
+trifle banal. Here was this old reprobation of Freemasonry, repeated in
+unoriginal language.
+
+“Secondly,” went on the steady voice, “We wish to make known to you Our
+desires for the future; and here We tread on what many have considered
+dangerous ground.”
+
+Again came that rustle. Percy saw more than one cardinal lean forward
+with hand crooked at ear to hear the better. It was evident that
+something important was coming.
+
+“There are many points,” went on the high voice, “of which it is not Our
+intention to speak at this time, for of their own nature they are
+secret, and must be treated of on another occasion. But what We say
+here, We say to the world. Since the assaults of Our enemies are both
+open and secret, so too must be Our defences. This then is Our
+intention.”
+
+The Pope paused again, lifted one hand as if mechanically to his breast,
+and grasped the cross that hung there.
+
+“While the army of Christ is one, it consists of many divisions, each of
+which has its proper function and object. In times past God has raised
+up companies of His servants to do this or that particular work--the
+sons of St. Francis to preach poverty, those of St. Bernard to labour in
+prayer with all holy women dedicating themselves to this purpose, the
+Society of Jesus for the education of youth and the conversion of the
+heathen--together with all the other Religious Orders whose names are
+known throughout the world. Each such company was raised up at a
+particular season of need, and each has corresponded nobly with the
+divine vocation. It has also been the especial glory of each, for the
+furtherance of its intention, while pursuing its end, to cut off from
+itself all such activities (good in themselves) which would hinder that
+work for which God had called it into being--following in this matter
+the words of our Redeemer, _Every branch that beareth fruit, He purgeth
+it that it may bring forth more fruit._ At this present season, then, it
+appears to Our Humility that all such Orders (which once more We commend
+and bless) are not perfectly suited by the very conditions of their
+respective Rules to perform the great work which the time requires. Our
+warfare lies not with ignorance in particular, whether of the heathens
+to whom the Gospel has not yet come, or of those whose fathers have
+rejected it, nor with _the deceitful riches of this world_, nor with
+_science falsely so-called_, nor indeed with any one of those
+strongholds of infidelity against whom We have laboured in the past.
+Rather it appears as if at last the time was come of which the apostle
+spoke when he said that _that day shall not come, except there come a
+falling away first, and that Man of Sin be revealed, the Son of
+Perdition, who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called
+God._
+
+“It is not with this or that force that we are concerned, but rather
+with the unveiled immensity of that power whose time was foretold, and
+whose destruction is prepared.”
+
+The voice paused again, and Percy gripped the rail before him to stay
+the trembling of his hands. There was no rustle now, nothing but a
+silence that tingled and shook. The Pope drew a long breath, turned his
+head slowly to right and left, and went on more deliberately than ever.
+
+“It seems good, then, to Our Humility, that the Vicar of Christ should
+himself invite God’s children to this new warfare; and it is Our
+intention to enroll under the title of the Order of Christ Crucified the
+names of all who offer themselves to this supreme service. In doing this
+We are aware of the novelty of Our action, and the disregard of all such
+precautions as have been necessary in the past. We take counsel in this
+matter with none save Him Who we believe has inspired it.
+
+“First, then, let Us say, that although obedient service will be
+required from all who shall be admitted to this Order, Our primary
+intention in instituting it lies in God’s regard rather than in man’s,
+in appealing to Him Who asks our generosity rather than to those who
+deny it, and dedicating once more by a formal and deliberate act our
+souls and bodies to the heavenly Will and service of Him Who alone can
+rightly claim such offering, and will accept our poverty.
+
+“Briefly, we dictate only the following conditions.
+
+“None shall be capable of entering the Order except such as shall be
+above the age of seventeen years.
+
+“No badge, habit, nor insignia shall be attached to it.
+
+“The Three Evangelical Counsels shall be the foundation of the Rule, to
+which we add a fourth intention, namely, that of a desire to receive the
+crown of martyrdom and a purpose of embracing it.
+
+“The bishop of every diocese, if he himself shall enter the Order, shall
+be the superior within the limits of his own jurisdiction, and alone
+shall be exempt from the literal observance of the Vow of Poverty so
+long as he retains his see. Such bishops as do not feel the vocation to
+the Order shall retain their sees under the usual conditions, but shall
+have no Religious claim on the members of the Order.
+
+“Further, We announce Our intention of Ourself entering the Order as its
+supreme prelate, and of making Our profession within the course of a few
+days.
+
+“Further, We declare that in Our Own pontificate none shall be elevated
+to the Sacred College save those who have made their profession in the
+Order; and We shall dedicate shortly the Basilica of St. Peter and St.
+Paul as the central church of the Order, in which church We shall raise
+to the altars without any delay those happy souls who shall lay down
+their lives in the pursuance of their vocation.
+
+“Of that vocation it is unnecessary to speak beyond indicating that it
+may be pursued under any conditions laid down by the Superiors. As
+regards the novitiate, its conditions and requirements, we shall shortly
+issue the necessary directions. Each diocesan superior (for it is Our
+hope that none will hold back) shall have all such rights as usually
+appertain to Religious Superiors, and shall be empowered to employ his
+subjects in any work that, in his opinion, shall subserve the glory of
+God and the salvation of souls. It is Our Own intention to employ in Our
+service none except those who shall make their profession.”
+
+He raised his eyes once more, seemingly without emotion, then he
+continued:
+
+“So far, then, We have determined. On other matters We shall take
+counsel immediately; but it is Our wish that these words shall be
+communicated to all the world, that there may be no delay in making
+known what it is that Christ through His Vicar asks of all who profess
+the Divine Name. We offer no rewards except those which God Himself has
+promised to those that love Him, and lay down their life for Him; no
+promise of peace, save of that which passeth understanding; no home save
+that which befits pilgrims and sojourners who seek a City to come; no
+honour save the world’s contempt; no life, save that which is hid with
+Christ in God.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+I
+
+Oliver Brand, seated in his little private room at Whitehall, was
+expecting a visitor. It was already close upon ten o’clock, and at
+half-past he must be in the House. He had hoped that Mr. Francis,
+whoever he might be, would not detain him long. Even now, every moment
+was a respite, for the work had become simply prodigious during the last
+weeks.
+
+But he was not reprieved for more than a minute, for the last boom from
+the Victoria Tower had scarcely ceased to throb when the door opened and
+a clerkly voice uttered the name he was expecting.
+
+Oliver shot one quick look at the stranger, at his drooping lids and
+down-turned mouth, summed him up fairly and accurately in the moments
+during which they seated themselves, and went briskly to business.
+
+“At twenty-five minutes past, sir, I must leave this room,” he said.
+“Until then---” he made a little gesture.
+
+Mr. Francis reassured him.
+
+“Thank you, Mr. Brand--that is ample time. Then, if you will excuse
+me---” He groped in his breast-pocket, and drew out a long envelope.
+
+“I will leave this with you,” he said, “when I go. It sets out our
+desires at length and our names. And this is what I have to say, sir.”
+
+He sat back, crossed his legs, and went on, with a touch of eagerness in
+his voice.
+
+“I am a kind of deputation, as you know,” he said. “We have something
+both to ask and to offer. I am chosen because it was my own idea. First,
+may I ask a question?”
+
+Oliver bowed.
+
+“I wish to ask nothing that I ought not. But I believe it is practically
+certain, is it not?--that Divine Worship is to be restored throughout
+the kingdom?”
+
+Oliver smiled.
+
+“I suppose so,” he said. “The bill has been read for the third time,
+and, as you know, the President is to speak upon it this evening.”
+
+“He will not veto it?”
+
+“We suppose not. He has assented to it in Germany.”
+
+“Just so,” said Mr. Francis. “And if he assents here, I suppose it will
+become law immediately.”
+
+Oliver leaned over this table, and drew out the green paper that
+contained the Bill.
+
+“You have this, of course---” he said. “Well, it becomes law at once;
+and the first feast will be observed on the first of October.
+‘Paternity,’ is it not? Yes, Paternity.”
+
+“There will be something of a rush then,” said the other eagerly. “Why,
+that is only a week hence.”
+
+“I have not charge of this department,” said Oliver, laying back the
+Bill. “But I understand that the ritual will be that already in use in
+Germany. There is no reason why we should be peculiar.”
+
+“And the Abbey will be used?”
+
+“Why, yes.”
+
+“Well, sir,” said Mr. Francis, “of course I know the Government
+Commission has studied it all very closely, and no doubt has its own
+plans. But it appears to me that they will want all the experience they
+can get.”
+
+“No doubt.”
+
+“Well, Mr. Brand, the society which I represent consists entirely of men
+who were once Catholic priests. We number about two hundred in London. I
+will leave a pamphlet with you, if I may, stating our objects, our
+constitution, and so on. It seemed to us that here was a matter in which
+our past experience might be of service to the Government. Catholic
+ceremonies, as you know, are very intricate, and some of us studied them
+very deeply in old days. We used to say that Masters of Ceremonies were
+born, not made, and we have a fair number of those amongst us. But
+indeed every priest is something of a ceremonialist.”
+
+He paused.
+
+“Yes, Mr. Francis?”
+
+“I am sure the Government realises the immense importance of all going
+smoothly. If Divine Service was at all grotesque or disorderly, it would
+largely defeat its own object. So I have been deputed to see you, Mr.
+Brand, and to suggest to you that here is a body of men--reckon it as at
+least twenty-five--who have had special experience in this kind of
+thing, and are perfectly ready to put themselves at the disposal of the
+Government.”
+
+Oliver could not resist a faint flicker of a smile at the corner of his
+mouth. It was a very grim bit of irony, he thought, but it seemed
+sensible enough.
+
+“I quite understand, Mr. Francis. It seems a very reasonable suggestion.
+But I do not think I am the proper person. Mr. Snowford---”
+
+“Yes, yes, sir, I know. But your speech the other day inspired us all.
+You said exactly what was in all our hearts--that the world could not
+live without worship; and that now that God was found at last---”
+
+Oliver waved his hand. He hated even a touch of flattery.
+
+“It is very good of you, Mr. Francis. I will certainly speak to Mr.
+Snowford. I understand that you offer yourselves as--as Masters of
+Ceremonies--?”
+
+“Yes, sir; and sacristans. I have studied the German ritual very
+carefully; it is more elaborate than I had thought it. It will need a
+good deal of adroitness. I imagine that you will want at least a dozen
+_Ceremoniarii_ in the Abbey; and a dozen more in the vestries will
+scarcely be too much.”
+
+Oliver nodded abruptly, looking curiously at the eager pathetic face of
+the man opposite him; yet it had something, too, of that mask-like
+priestly look that he had seen before in others like him. This was
+evidently a devotee.
+
+“You are all Masons, of course?” he said.
+
+“Why, of course, Mr. Brand.”
+
+“Very good. I will speak to Mr. Snowford to-day if I can catch him.”
+
+He glanced at the clock. There were yet three or four minutes.
+
+“You have seen the new appointment in Rome, sir,” went on Mr. Francis.
+
+Oliver shook his head. He was not particularly interested in Rome just
+now.
+
+“Cardinal Martin is dead--he died on Tuesday--and his place is already
+filled.”
+
+“Indeed, sir?”
+
+“Yes--the new man was once a friend of mine--Franklin, his name
+is--Percy Franklin.”
+
+“Eh?”
+
+“What is the matter, Mr. Brand? Did you know him?”
+
+Oliver was eyeing him darkly, a little pale.
+
+“Yes; I knew him,” he said quietly. “At least, I think so.”
+
+“He was at Westminster until a month or two ago.”
+
+“Yes, yes,” said Oliver, still looking at him. “And you knew him, Mr.
+Francis?”
+
+“I knew him--yes.”
+
+“Ah!--well, I should like to have a talk some day about him.”
+
+He broke off. It yet wanted a minute to his time.
+
+“And that is all?” he asked.
+
+“That is all my actual business, sir,” answered the other. “But I hope
+you will allow me to say how much we all appreciate what you have done,
+Mr. Brand. I do not think it is possible for any, except ourselves, to
+understand what the loss of worship means to us. It was very strange at
+first---”
+
+His voice trembled a little, and he stopped. Oliver felt interested, and
+checked himself in his movement to rise.
+
+“Yes, Mr. Francis?”
+
+The melancholy brown eyes turned on him full.
+
+“It was an illusion, of course, sir--we know that. But I, at any rate,
+dare to hope that it was not all wasted--all our aspirations and
+penitence and praise. We mistook our God, but none the less it reached
+Him--it found its way to the Spirit of the World. It taught us that the
+individual was nothing, and that He was all. And now---”
+
+“Yes, sir,” said the other softly. He was really touched.
+
+The sad brown eyes opened full.
+
+“And now Mr. Felsenburgh is come.” He swallowed in his throat. “Julian
+Felsenburgh!” There was a world of sudden passion in his gentle voice,
+and Oliver’s own heart responded.
+
+“I know, sir,” he said; “I know all that you mean.”
+
+“Oh! to have a Saviour at last!” cried Francis. “One that can be seen
+and handled and praised to His Face! It is like a dream--too good to be
+true!”
+
+Oliver glanced at the clock, and rose abruptly, holding out his hand.
+
+“Forgive me, sir. I must not stay. You have touched me very deeply.... I
+will speak to Snowford. Your address is here, I understand?”
+
+He pointed to the papers.
+
+“Yes, Mr. Brand. There is one more question.”
+
+“I must not stay, sir,” said Oliver, shaking his head.
+
+“One instant--is it true that this worship will be compulsory?”
+
+Oliver bowed as he gathered up his papers.
+
+
+II
+
+Mabel, seated in the gallery that evening behind the President’s chair,
+had already glanced at her watch half-a-dozen times in the last hour,
+hoping each time that twenty-one o’clock was nearer than she feared. She
+knew well enough by now that the President of Europe would not be
+half-a-minute either before or after his time. His supreme punctuality
+was famous all over the continent. He had said Twenty-One, so it was to
+be twenty-one.
+
+A sharp bell-note impinged from beneath, and in a moment the drawling
+voice of the speaker stopped. Once more she lifted her wrist, saw that
+it wanted five minutes of the hour; then she leaned forward from her
+corner and stared down into the House.
+
+A great change had passed over it at the metallic noise. All down the
+long brown seats members were shifting and arranging themselves more
+decorously, uncrossing their legs, slipping their hats beneath the
+leather fringes. As she looked, too, she saw the President of the House
+coming down the three steps from his chair, for Another would need it in
+a few moments.
+
+The house was full from end to end; a late comer ran in from the
+twilight of the south door and looked distractedly about him in the full
+light before he saw his vacant place. The galleries at the lower end
+were occupied too, down there, where she had failed to obtain a seat.
+Yet from all the crowded interior there was no sound but a sibilant
+whispering; from the passages behind she could hear again the quick
+bell-note repeat itself as the lobbies were cleared; and from Parliament
+Square outside once more came the heavy murmur of the crowd that had
+been inaudible for the last twenty minutes. When that ceased she would
+know that he was come.
+
+How strange and wonderful it was to be here--on this night of all, when
+the President was to speak! A month ago he had assented to a similar
+Bill in Germany, and had delivered a speech on the same subject at
+Turin. To-morrow he was to be in Spain. No one knew where he had been
+during the past week. A rumour had spread that his volor had been seen
+passing over Lake Como, and had been instantly contradicted. No one knew
+either what he would say to-night. It might be three words or twenty
+thousand. There were a few clauses in the Bill--notably those bearing on
+the point as to when the new worship was to be made compulsory on all
+subjects over the age of seven--it might be he would object and veto
+these. In that case all must be done again, and the Bill re-passed,
+unless the House accepted his amendment instantly by acclamation.
+
+Mabel herself was inclined to these clauses. They provided that,
+although worship was to be offered in every parish church of England on
+the ensuing first day of October, this was not to be compulsory on all
+subjects till the New Year; whereas, Germany, who had passed the Bill
+only a month before, had caused it to come into full force immediately,
+thus compelling all her Catholic subjects either to leave the country
+without delay or suffer the penalties. These penalties were not
+vindictive: on a first offence a week’s detention only was to be given;
+on the second, one month’s imprisonment; on the third, one year’s; and
+on the fourth, perpetual imprisonment until the criminal yielded. These
+were merciful terms, it seemed; for even imprisonment itself meant no
+more than reasonable confinement and employment on Government works.
+There were no mediaeval horrors here; and the act of worship demanded
+was so little, too; it consisted of no more than bodily presence in the
+church or cathedral on the four new festivals of Maternity, Life,
+Sustenance and Paternity, celebrated on the first day of each quarter.
+Sunday worship was to be purely voluntary.
+
+She could not understand how any man could refuse this homage. These
+four things were facts--they were the manifestations of what she called
+the Spirit of the World--and if others called that Power God, yet surely
+these ought to be considered as His functions. Where then was the
+difficulty? It was not as if Christian worship were not permitted, under
+the usual regulations. Catholics could still go to mass. And yet
+appalling things were threatened in Germany: not less than twelve
+thousand persons had already left for Rome; and it was rumoured that
+forty thousand would refuse this simple act of homage a few days hence.
+It bewildered and angered her to think of it.
+
+For herself the new worship was a crowning sign of the triumph of
+Humanity. Her heart had yearned for some such thing as this--some
+public corporate profession of what all now believed. She had so
+resented the dulness of folk who were content with action and never
+considered its springs. Surely this instinct within her was a true one;
+she desired to stand with her fellows in some solemn place, consecrated
+not by priests but by the will of man; to have as her inspirers sweet
+singing and the peal of organs; to utter her sorrow with thousands
+beside her at her own feebleness of immolation before the Spirit of all;
+to sing aloud her praise of the glory of life, and to offer by sacrifice
+and incense an emblematic homage to That from which she drew her being,
+and to whom one day she must render it again. Ah! these Christians had
+understood human nature, she had told herself a hundred times: it was
+true that they had degraded it, darkened light, poisoned thought,
+misinterpreted instinct; but they had understood that man must worship
+--must worship or sink.
+
+For herself she intended to go at least once a week to the little old
+church half-a-mile away from her home, to kneel there before the sunlit
+sanctuary, to meditate on sweet mysteries, to present herself to That
+which she was yearning to love, and to drink, it might be, new draughts
+of life and power.
+
+Ah! but the Bill must pass first.... She clenched her hands on the rail,
+and stared steadily before her on the ranks of heads, the open gangways,
+the great mace on the table, and heard, above the murmur of the crowd
+outside and the dying whispers within, her own heart beat.
+
+She could not see Him, she knew. He would come in from beneath through
+the door that none but He might use, straight into the seat beneath the
+canopy. But she would hear His voice--that must be joy enough for
+her....
+
+Ah! there was silence now outside; the soft roar had died. He had come
+then. And through swimming eyes she saw the long ridges of heads rise
+beneath her, and through drumming ears heard the murmur of many feet.
+All faces looked this way; and she watched them as a mirror to see the
+reflected light of His presence. There was a gentle sobbing somewhere in
+the air--was it her own or another’s? ... the click of a door; a great
+mellow booming over-head, shock after shock, as the huge tenor bells
+tolled their three strokes; and, in an instant, over the white faces
+passed a ripple, as if some breeze of passion shook the souls within;
+there was a swaying here and there; and a passionless voice spoke half a
+dozen words in Esperanto, out of sight:
+
+“Englishmen, I assent to the Bill of Worship.”
+
+
+III
+
+It was not until mid-day breakfast on the following morning that husband
+and wife met again. Oliver had slept in town and telephoned about eleven
+o’clock that he would be home immediately, bringing a guest with him:
+and shortly before noon she heard their voices in the hall.
+
+Mr. Francis, who was presently introduced to her, seemed a harmless kind
+of man, she thought, not interesting, though he seemed in earnest about
+this Bill. It was not until breakfast was nearly over that she
+understood who he was.
+
+“Don’t go, Mabel,” said her husband, as she made a movement to rise.
+“You will like to hear about this, I expect. My wife knows all that I
+know,” he added.
+
+Mr. Francis smiled and bowed.
+
+“I may tell her about you, sir?” said Oliver again.
+
+“Why, certainly.”
+
+Then she heard that he had been a Catholic priest a few months before,
+and that Mr. Snowford was in consultation with him as to the ceremonies
+in the Abbey. She was conscious of a sudden interest as she heard this.
+
+“Oh! do talk,” she said. “I want to hear everything.”
+
+It seemed that Mr. Francis had seen the new Minister of Public Worship
+that morning, and had received a definite commission from him to take
+charge of the ceremonies on the first of October. Two dozen of his
+colleagues, too, were to be enrolled among the _ceremoniarii_, at least
+temporarily--and after the event they were to be sent on a lecturing
+tour to organise the national worship throughout the country.
+
+Of course things would be somewhat sloppy at first, said Mr. Francis;
+but by the New Year it was hoped that all would be in order, at least in
+the cathedrals and principal towns.
+
+“It is important,” he said, “that this should be done as soon as
+possible. It is very necessary to make a good impression. There are
+thousands who have the instinct of worship, without knowing how to
+satisfy it.”
+
+“That is perfectly true,” said Oliver. “I have felt that for a long
+time. I suppose it is the deepest instinct in man.”
+
+“As to the ceremonies---” went on the other, with a slightly important
+air. His eyes roved round a moment; then he dived into his
+breast-pocket, and drew out a thin red-covered book.
+
+“Here is the Order of Worship for the Feast of Paternity,” he said. “I
+have had it interleaved, and have made a few notes.”
+
+He began to turn the pages, and Mabel, with considerable excitement,
+drew her chair a little closer to listen.
+
+“That is right, sir,” said the other. “Now give us a little lecture.”
+
+Mr. Francis closed the book on his finger, pushed his plate aside, and
+began to discourse.
+
+“First,” he said, “we must remember that this ritual is based almost
+entirely upon that of the Masons. Three-quarters at least of the entire
+function will be occupied by that. With that the _ceremoniarii_ will not
+interfere, beyond seeing that the insignia are ready in the vestries and
+properly put on. The proper officials will conduct the rest.... I need
+not speak of that then. The difficulties begin with the last quarter.”
+
+He paused, and with a glance of apology began arranging forks and
+glasses before him on the cloth.
+
+“Now here,” he said, “we have the old sanctuary of the abbey. In the
+place of the reredos and Communion table there will be erected the large
+altar of which the ritual speaks, with the steps leading up to it from
+the floor. Behind the altar--extending almost to the old shrine of the
+Confessor--will stand the pedestal with the emblematic figure upon it;
+and--so far as I understand from the absence of directions--each such
+figure will remain in place until the eve of the next quarterly feast.”
+
+“What kind of figure?” put in the girl.
+
+Francis glanced at her husband.
+
+“I understand that Mr. Markenheim has been consulted,” he said. “He will
+design and execute them. Each is to represent its own feast. This for
+Paternity---”
+
+He paused again.
+
+“Yes, Mr. Francis?”
+
+“This one, I understand, is to be the naked figure of a man.”
+
+“A kind of Apollo--or Jupiter, my dear,” put in Oliver.
+
+Yes--that seemed all right, thought Mabel. Mr. Francis’s voice moved on
+hastily.
+
+“A new procession enters at this point, after the discourse,” he said.
+“It is this that will need special marshalling. I suppose no rehearsal
+will be possible?”
+
+“Scarcely,” said Oliver, smiling.
+
+The Master of Ceremonies sighed.
+
+“I feared not. Then we must issue very precise printed instructions.
+Those who take part will withdraw, I imagine, during the hymn, to the
+old chapel of St. Faith. That is what seems to me the best.”
+
+He indicated the chapel.
+
+“After the entrance of the procession all will take their places on
+these two sides--here--and here--while the celebrant with the sacred
+ministers---”
+
+“Eh?”
+
+Mr. Francis permitted a slight grimace to appear on his face; he flushed
+a little.
+
+“The President of Europe---” He broke off. “Ah! that is the point. Will
+the President take part? That is not made clear in the ritual.”
+
+“We think so,” said Oliver. “He is to be approached.”
+
+“Well, if not, I suppose the Minister of Public Worship will officiate.
+He with his supporters pass straight up to the foot of the altar.
+Remember that the figure is still veiled, and that the candles have been
+lighted during the approach of the procession. There follow the
+Aspirations printed in the ritual with the responds. These are sung by
+the choir, and will be most impressive, I think. Then the officiant
+ascends the altar alone, and, standing, declaims the Address, as it is
+called. At the close of it--at the point, that is to say, marked here
+with a star, the thurifers will leave the chapel, four in number. One
+ascends the altar, leaving the others swinging their thurifers at its
+foot--hands his to the officiant and retires. Upon the sounding of a
+bell the curtains are drawn back, the officiant tenses the image in
+silence with four double swings, and, as he ceases the choir sings the
+appointed antiphon.”
+
+He waved his hands.
+
+“The rest is easy,” he said. “We need not discuss that.”
+
+To Mabel’s mind even the previous ceremonies seemed easy enough. But she
+was undeceived.
+
+“You have no idea, Mrs. Brand,” went on the _ceremoniarius_, “of the
+difficulties involved even in such a simple matter as this. The
+stupidity of people is prodigious. I foresee a great deal of hard work
+for us all.... Who is to deliver the discourse, Mr. Brand?”
+
+Oliver shook his head.
+
+“I have no idea,” he said. “I suppose Mr. Snowford will select.”
+
+Mr. Francis looked at him doubtfully.
+
+“What is your opinion of the whole affair, sir?” he said.
+
+Oliver paused a moment.
+
+“I think it is necessary,” he began. “There would not be such a cry for
+worship if it was not a real need. I think too--yes, I think that on the
+whole the ritual is impressive. I do not see how it could be
+bettered....”
+
+“Yes, Oliver?” put in his wife, questioningly.
+
+“No--there is nothing--except ... except I hope the people will
+understand it.”
+
+Mr. Francis broke in.
+
+“My dear sir, worship involves a touch of mystery. You must remember
+that. It was the lack of that that made Empire Day fail in the last
+century. For myself, I think it is admirable. Of course much must depend
+on the manner in which it is presented. I see many details at present
+undecided--the colour of the curtains, and so forth. But the main plan
+is magnificent. It is simple, impressive, and, above all, it is
+unmistakable in its main lesson---”
+
+“And that you take to be--?”
+
+“I take it that it is homage offered to Life,” said the other slowly.
+“Life under four aspects--Maternity corresponds to Christmas and the
+Christian fable; it is the feast of home, love, faithfulness. Life
+itself is approached in spring, teeming, young, passionate. Sustenance
+in midsummer, abundance, comfort, plenty, and the rest, corresponding
+somewhat to the Catholic Corpus Christi; and Paternity, the protective,
+generative, masterful idea, as winter draws on.... I understand it was a
+German thought.”
+
+Oliver nodded.
+
+“Yes,” he said. “And I suppose it will be the business of the speaker to
+explain all this.”
+
+“I take it so. It appears to me far more suggestive than the alternative
+plan--Citizenship, Labour, and so forth. These, after all, are
+subordinate to Life.”
+
+Mr. Francis spoke with an extraordinary suppressed enthusiasm, and the
+priestly look was more evident than ever. It was plain that his heart at
+least demanded worship.
+
+Mabel clasped her hands suddenly.
+
+“I think it is beautiful,” she said softly, “and--and it is so real.”
+
+Mr. Francis turned on her with a glow in his brown eyes.
+
+“Ah! yes, madam. That is it. There is no Faith, as we used to call it:
+it is the vision of Facts that no one can doubt; and the incense
+declares the sole divinity of Life as well as its mystery.”
+
+“What of the figures?” put in Oliver.
+
+“A stone image is impossible, of course. It must be clay for the
+present. Mr. Markenheim is to set to work immediately. If the figures
+are approved they can then be executed in marble.”
+
+Again Mabel spoke with a soft gravity.
+
+“It seems to me,” she said, “that this is the last thing that we needed.
+It is so hard to keep our principles clear--we must have a body for
+them--some kind of expression---”
+
+She paused.
+
+“Yes, Mabel?”
+
+“I do not mean,” she went on, “that some cannot live without it, but
+many cannot. The unimaginative need concrete images. There must be some
+channel for their aspirations to flow through--- Ah! I cannot express
+myself!”
+
+Oliver nodded slowly. He, too, seemed to be in a meditative mood.
+
+“Yes,” he said. “And this, I suppose, will mould men’s thoughts too: it
+will keep out all danger of superstition.”
+
+Mr. Francis turned on him abruptly.
+
+“What do you think of the Pope’s new Religious Order, sir?”
+
+Oliver’s face took on it a tinge of grimness.
+
+“I think it is the worst step he ever took--for himself, I mean. Either
+it is a real effort, in which case it will provoke immense
+indignation--or it is a sham, and will discredit him. Why do you ask?”
+
+“I was wondering whether any disturbance will be made in the abbey.”
+
+“I should be sorry for the brawler.”
+
+A bell rang sharply from the row of telephone labels. Oliver rose and
+went to it. Mabel watched him as he touched a button--mentioned his
+name, and put his ear to the opening.
+
+“It is Snowford’s secretary,” he said abruptly to the two expectant
+faces. “Snowford wants to--ah!”
+
+Again he mentioned his name and listened. They heard a sentence or two
+from him that seemed significant.
+
+“Ah! that is certain, is it? I am sorry.... Yes.... Oh! but that is
+better than nothing.... Yes; he is here.... Indeed. Very well; we will
+be with you directly.”
+
+He looked on the tube, touched the button again, and came back to them.
+
+“I am sorry,” he said. “The President will take no part at the Feast.
+But it is uncertain whether he will not be present. Mr. Snowford wants
+to see us both at once, Mr. Francis. Markenheim is with him.”
+
+But though Mabel was herself disappointed, she thought he looked graver
+than the disappointment warranted.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+I
+
+Percy Franklin, the new Cardinal-Protector of England, came slowly along
+the passage leading from the Pope’s apartments, with Hans Steinmann,
+Cardinal-Protector of Germany, blowing at his side. They entered the
+lift, still in silence, and passed out, two splendid vivid figures, one
+erect and virile, the other bent, fat, and very German from spectacles
+to flat buckled feet.
+
+At the door of Percy’s suite, the Englishman paused, made a little
+gesture of reverence, and went in without a word.
+
+A secretary, young Mr. Brent, lately from England, stood up as his
+patron came in.
+
+“Eminence,” he said, “the English papers are come.”
+
+Percy put out a hand, took a paper, passed on into his inner room, and
+sat down.
+
+There it all was--gigantic headlines, and four columns of print broken
+by startling title phrases in capital letters, after the fashion set by
+America a hundred years ago. No better way even yet had been found of
+misinforming the unintelligent.
+
+He looked at the top. It was the English edition of the _Era_. Then he
+read the headlines. They ran as follows:
+
+“THE NATIONAL WORSHIP. BEWILDERING SPLENDOUR. RELIGIOUS ENTHUSIASM. THE
+ABBEY AND GOD. CATHOLIC FANATIC. EX-PRIESTS AS FUNCTIONARIES.”
+
+He ran his eyes down the page, reading the vivid little phrases, and
+drawing from the whole a kind of impressionist view of the scenes in the
+Abbey on the previous day, of which he had already been informed by the
+telegraph, and the discussion of which had been the purpose of his
+interview just now with the Holy Father.
+
+There plainly was no additional news; and he was laying the paper down
+when his eye caught a name.
+
+“It is understood that Mr. Francis, the _ceremoniarius_ (to whom the
+thanks of all are due for his reverent zeal and skill), will proceed
+shortly to the northern towns to lecture on the Ritual. It is
+interesting to reflect that this gentleman only a few months ago was
+officiating at a Catholic altar. He was assisted in his labours by
+twenty-four confreres with the same experience behind them.”
+
+“Good God!” said Percy aloud. Then he laid the paper down.
+
+But his thoughts had soon left this renegade behind, and once more he
+was running over in his mind the significance of the whole affair, and
+the advice that he had thought it his duty to give just now upstairs.
+
+Briefly, there was no use in disputing the fact that the inauguration of
+Pantheistic worship had been as stupendous a success in England as in
+Germany. France, by the way, was still too busy with the cult of human
+individuals, to develop larger ideas.
+
+But England was deeper; and, somehow, in spite of prophecy, the affair
+had taken place without even a touch of bathos or grotesqueness. It had
+been said that England was too solid and too humorous. Yet there had
+been extraordinary scenes the day before. A great murmur of enthusiasm
+had rolled round the Abbey from end to end as the gorgeous curtains ran
+back, and the huge masculine figure, majestic and overwhelming, coloured
+with exquisite art, had stood out above the blaze of candles against the
+tall screen that shrouded the shrine. Markenheim had done his work well;
+and Mr. Brand’s passionate discourse had well prepared the popular mind
+for the revelation. He had quoted in his peroration passage after
+passage from the Jewish prophets, telling of the City of Peace whose
+walls rose now before their eyes.
+
+“_Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is
+risen upon thee.... For behold I create new heavens and a new earth; and
+the former shall not be remembered nor come into mind.... Violence shall
+no more be heard in thy land, wasting nor destruction within thy
+borders. O thou so long afflicted, tossed with tempest and not
+comforted; behold I will lay thy stones with fair colours, and thy
+foundations with sapphires.... I will make thy windows of agates and thy
+gates of carbuncles, and all thy borders of pleasant stones. Arise,
+shine, for thy light is come._”
+
+As the chink of the censer-chains had sounded in the stillness, with one
+consent the enormous crowd had fallen on its knees, and so remained, as
+the smoke curled up from the hands of the rebel figure who held the
+thurible. Then the organ had begun to blow, and from the huge massed
+chorus in the transepts had rolled out the anthem, broken by one
+passionate cry, from some mad Catholic. But it had been silenced in an
+instant....
+
+It was incredible--utterly incredible, Percy had told himself. Yet the
+incredible had happened; and England had found its worship once
+more--the necessary culmination of unimpeded subjectivity. From the
+provinces had come the like news. In cathedral after cathedral had been
+the same scenes. Markenheim’s masterpiece, executed in four days after
+the passing of the bill, had been reproduced by the ordinary machinery,
+and four thousand replicas had been despatched to every important
+centre. Telegraphic reports had streamed into the London papers that
+everywhere the new movement had been received with acclamation, and that
+human instincts had found adequate expression at last. If there had not
+been a God, mused Percy reminiscently, it would have been necessary to
+invent one. He was astonished, too, at the skill with which the new cult
+had been framed. It moved round no disputable points; there was no
+possibility of divergent political tendencies to mar its success, no
+over-insistence on citizenship, labour and the rest, for those who were
+secretly individualistic and idle. Life was the one fount and centre of
+it all, clad in the gorgeous robes of ancient worship. Of course the
+thought had been Felsenburgh’s, though a German name had been mentioned.
+It was Positivism of a kind, Catholicism without Christianity, Humanity
+worship without its inadequacy. It was not man that was worshipped but
+the Idea of man, deprived of his supernatural principle. Sacrifice,
+too, was recognised--the instinct of oblation without the demand made by
+transcendent Holiness upon the blood-guiltiness of man.... In fact,--in
+fact, said Percy, it was exactly as clever as the devil, and as old as
+Cain.
+
+The advice he had given to the Holy Father just now was a counsel of
+despair, or of hope; he really did not know which. He had urged that a
+stringent decree should be issued, forbidding any acts of violence on
+the part of Catholics. The faithful were to be encouraged to be patient,
+to hold utterly aloof from the worship, to say nothing unless they were
+questioned, to suffer bonds gladly. He had suggested, in company with
+the German Cardinal, that they two should return to their respective
+countries at the close of the year, to encourage the waverers; but the
+answer had been that their vocation was to remain in Rome, unless
+something unforeseen happened.
+
+As for Felsenburgh, there was little news. It was said that he was in
+the East; but further details were secret. Percy understood quite well
+why he had not been present at the worship as had been expected. First,
+it would have been difficult to decide between the two countries that
+had established it; and, secondly, he was too brilliant a politician to
+risk the possible association of failure with his own person; thirdly,
+there was something the matter with the East.
+
+This last point was difficult to understand; it had not yet become
+explicit, but it seemed as if the movement of last year had not yet run
+its course. It was undoubtedly difficult to explain the new President’s
+constant absences from his adopted continent, unless there was something
+that demanded his presence elsewhere; but the extreme discretion of the
+East and the stringent precautions taken by the Empire made it
+impossible to know any details. It was apparently connected with
+religion; there were rumours, portents, prophets, ecstatics there.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Upon Percy himself had fallen a subtle change which he himself was
+recognising. He no longer soared to confidence or sank to despair. He
+said his mass, read his enormous correspondence, meditated strictly;
+and, though he felt nothing he knew everything. There was not a tinge of
+doubt upon his faith, but neither was there emotion in it. He was as one
+who laboured in the depths of the earth, crushed even in imagination,
+yet conscious that somewhere birds sang, and the sun shone, and water
+ran. He understood his own state well enough, and perceived that he had
+come to a reality of faith that was new to him, for it was sheer
+faith--sheer apprehension of the Spiritual--without either the dangers
+or the joys of imaginative vision. He expressed it to himself by saying
+that there were three processes through which God led the soul: the
+first was that of external faith, which assents to all things presented
+by the accustomed authority, practises religion, and is neither
+interested nor doubtful; the second follows the quickening of the
+emotional and perceptive powers of the soul, and is set about with
+consolations, desires, mystical visions and perils; it is in this plane
+that resolutions are taken and vocations found and shipwrecks
+experienced; and the third, mysterious and inexpressible, consists in
+the re-enactment in the purely spiritual sphere of all that has preceded
+(as a play follows a rehearsal), in which God is grasped but not
+experienced, grace is absorbed unconsciously and even distastefully, and
+little by little the inner spirit is conformed in the depths of its
+being, far within the spheres of emotion and intellectual perception, to
+the image and mind of Christ.
+
+So he lay back now, thinking, a long, stately, scarlet figure, in his
+deep chair, staring out over Holy Rome seen through the misty September
+haze. How long, he wondered, would there be peace? To his eyes even
+already the air was black with doom.
+
+He struck his hand-bell at last.
+
+“Bring me Father Blackmore’s Last report,” he said, as his secretary
+appeared.
+
+
+II
+
+Percy’s intuitive faculties were keen by nature and had been vastly
+increased by cultivation. He had never forgotten Father Blackmore’s
+shrewd remarks of a year ago; and one of his first acts as
+Cardinal-Protector had been to appoint that priest on the list of
+English correspondents. Hitherto he had received some dozen letters, and
+not one of them had been without its grain of gold. Especially he had
+noticed that one warning ran through them all, namely, that sooner or
+later there would be some overt act of provocation on the part of
+English Catholics; and it was the memory of this that had inspired his
+vehement entreaties to the Pope this morning. As in the Roman and
+African persecutions of the first three centuries, so now, the greatest
+danger to the Catholic community lay not in the unjust measures of the
+Government but in the indiscreet zeal of the faithful themselves. The
+world desired nothing better than a handle to its blade. The scabbard
+was already cast away.
+
+When the young man had brought the four closely written sheets, dated
+from Westminster, the previous evening, Percy turned at once to the last
+paragraph before the usual Recommendations.
+
+“Mr. Brand’s late secretary, Mr. Phillips, whom your Eminence commended
+to me, has been to see me two or three times. He is in a curious state.
+He has no faith; yet, intellectually, he sees no hope anywhere but in
+the Catholic Church. He has even begged for admission to the Order of
+Christ Crucified, which of course is impossible. But there is no doubt
+he is sincere; otherwise he would have professed Catholicism. I have
+introduced him to many Catholics in the hope that they may help him. I
+should much wish your Eminence to see him.”
+
+Before leaving England, Percy had followed up the acquaintance he had
+made so strangely over Mrs. Brand’s reconciliation to God, and, scarcely
+knowing why, had commended him to the priest. He had not been
+particularly impressed by Mr. Phillips; he had thought him a timid,
+undecided creature, yet he had been struck by the extremely unselfish
+action by which the man had forfeited his position. There must surely be
+a good deal behind.
+
+And now the impulse had come to send for him. Perhaps the spiritual
+atmosphere of Rome would precipitate faith. In any case, the
+conversation of Mr. Brand’s late secretary might be instructive.
+
+He struck the bell again.
+
+“Mr. Brent,” he said, “in your next letter to Father Blackmore, tell him
+that I wish to see the man whom he proposed to send--Mr. Phillips.”
+
+“Yes, Eminence.”
+
+“There is no hurry. He can send him at his leisure.”
+
+“Yes, Eminence.”
+
+“But he must not come till January. That will be time enough, unless
+there is urgent reason.”
+
+“Yes, Eminence.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The development of the Order of Christ Crucified had gone forward with
+almost miraculous success. The appeal issued by the Holy Father
+throughout Christendom had been as fire among stubble. It seemed as if
+the Christian world had reached exactly that point of tension at which a
+new organisation of this nature was needed, and the response had
+startled even the most sanguine. Practically the whole of Rome with its
+suburbs--three millions in all--had run to the enrolling stations in
+St. Peter’s as starving men run to food, and desperate to the storming
+of a breach. For day after day the Pope himself had sat enthroned below
+the altar of the Chair, a glorious, radiant figure, growing ever white
+and weary towards evening, imparting his Blessing with a silent sign to
+each individual of the vast crowd that swarmed up between the barriers,
+fresh from fast and Communion, to kneel before his new Superior and kiss
+the Pontifical ring. The requirements had been as stringent as
+circumstances allowed. Each postulant was obliged to go to confession to
+a specially authorised priest, who examined sharply into motives and
+sincerity, and only one-third of the applicants had been accepted. This,
+the authorities pointed out to the scornful, was not an excessive
+proportion; for it was to be remembered that most of those who had
+presented themselves had already undergone a sifting fierce as fire. Of
+the three millions in Rome, two millions at least were exiles for their
+faith, preferring to live obscure and despised in the shadow of God
+rather than in the desolate glare of their own infidel countries.
+
+On the fifth evening of the enrolment of novices an astonishing incident
+had taken place. The old King of Spain (Queen Victoria’s second son),
+already on the edge of the grave, had just risen and tottered before his
+Ruler; it seemed for an instant as if he would fall, when the Pope
+himself, by a sudden movement, had risen, caught him in his arms and
+kissed him; and then, still standing, had spread his arms abroad and
+delivered a _fervorino_ such as never had been heard before in the
+history of the basilica.
+
+“_Benedictus Dominus!_” he cried, with upraised face and shining eyes.
+“Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for He hath visited and redeemed His
+people. I, John, Vicar of Christ, Servant of Servants, and sinner among
+sinners, bid you be of good courage in the Name of God. By Him Who hung
+on the Cross, I promise eternal life to all who persevere in His Order.
+He Himself has said it. _To him that overcometh I will give a crown of
+life._
+
+“Little children; fear not him that killeth the body. There is no more
+that he can do. God and His Mother are amongst us....”
+
+So his voice had poured on, telling the enormous awe-stricken crowd of
+the blood that already had been shed on the place where they stood, of
+the body of the Apostle that lay scarcely fifty yards away, urging,
+encouraging, inspiring. They had vowed themselves to death, if that were
+God’s Will; and if not, the intention would be taken for the deed. They
+were under obedience now; their wills were no longer theirs but God’s;
+under chastity--for their bodies were bought with a price; under
+poverty, and theirs was the kingdom of heaven.
+
+He had ended by a great silent Benediction of the City and the World:
+and there were not wanting a half-dozen of the faithful who had seen,
+they thought, a white shape in the form of a bird that hung in the air
+while he spoke white as a mist, translucent as water....
+
+The consequent scenes in the city and suburbs had been unparalleled, for
+thousands of families had with one consent dissolved human ties.
+Husbands had found their way to the huge houses on the Quirinal set
+apart for them; wives to the Aventine; while the children, as confident
+as their parents, had swarmed over to the Sisters of St. Vincent who had
+received at the Pope’s orders the gift of three streets to shelter them
+in. Everywhere the smoke of burning went up in the squares where
+household property, rendered useless by the vows of poverty, were
+consumed by their late owners; and daily long trains moved out from the
+station outside the walls carrying jubilant loads of those who were
+despatched by the Pope’s delegates to be the salt of men, consumed in
+their function, and leaven plunged in the vast measures of the infidel
+world. And that infidel world welcomed their coming with bitter
+laughter.
+
+From the rest of Christendom had poured in news of success. The same
+precautions had been observed as in Rome, for the directions issued were
+precise and searching; and day after day came in the long rolls of the
+new Religious drawn up by the diocesan superiors.
+
+Within the last few days, too, other lists had arrived, more glorious
+than all. Not only did reports stream in that already the Order was
+beginning its work and that already broken communications were being
+re-established, that devoted missioners were in process of organising
+themselves, and that hope was once more rising in the most desperate
+hearts; but better than all this was the tidings of victory in another
+sphere. In Paris forty of the new-born Order had been burned alive in
+one day in the Latin quarter, before the Government intervened. From
+Spain, Holland, Russia had come in other names. In Dusseldorf eighteen
+men and boys, surprised at their singing of Prime in the church of Saint
+Laurence, had been cast down one by one into the city-sewer, each
+chanting as he vanished:
+
+“_Christi Fili Dei vivi miserere nobis,_”
+
+and from the darkness had come up the same broken song till it was
+silenced with stones. Meanwhile, the German prisons were thronged with
+the first batches of recusants. The world shrugged its shoulders, and
+declared that they had brought it on themselves, while yet it deprecated
+mob-violence, and requested the attention of the authorities and the
+decisive repression of this new conspiracy of superstition. And within
+St. Peter’s Church the workmen were busy at the long rows of new altars,
+affixing to the stone diptychs the brass-forged names of those who had
+already fulfilled their vows and gained their crowns.
+
+It was the first word of God’s reply to the world’s challenge.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As Christmas drew on it was announced that the Sovereign pontiff would
+sing mass on the last day of the year, at the papal altar of Saint
+Peter’s, on behalf of the Order; and preparations began to be made.
+
+It was to be a kind of public inauguration of the new enterprise; and,
+to the astonishment of all, a special summons was issued to all members
+of the Sacred College throughout the world to be present, unless
+hindered by sickness. It seemed as if the Pope were determined that
+the world should understand that war was declared; for, although the
+command would not involve the absence of any Cardinal from his province
+for more than five days, yet many inconveniences must surely result.
+However, it had been said, and it was to be done.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was a strange Christmas.
+
+Percy was ordered to attend the Pope at his second mass, and himself
+said his three at midnight in his own private oratory. For the first
+time in his life he saw that of which he had heard so often, the
+wonderful old-world Pontifical procession, lit by torches, going through
+the streets from the Lateran to St. Anastasia, where the Pope for the
+last few years had restored the ancient custom discontinued for nearly a
+century-and-a-half. The little basilica was reserved, of course, in
+every corner for the peculiarly privileged; but the streets outside
+along the whole route from the Cathedral to the church--and, indeed, the
+other two sides of the triangle as well, were one dense mass of silent
+heads and flaming torches. The Holy Father was attended at the altar by
+the usual sovereigns; and Percy from his place watched the heavenly
+drama of Christ’s Passion enacted through the veil of His nativity at
+the hands of His old Angelic Vicar. It was hard to perceive Calvary
+here; it was surely the air of Bethlehem, the celestial light, not the
+supernatural darkness, that beamed round the simple altar. It was the
+Child called Wonderful that lay there beneath the old hands, rather than
+the stricken Man of Sorrows.
+
+_Adeste fideles_ sang the choir from the tribune.--Come, let us adore,
+rather than weep; let us exult, be content, be ourselves like little
+children. As He for us became a child, let us become childlike for Him.
+Let us put on the garments of infancy and the shoes of peace. _For the
+Lord hath reigned; He is clothed with beauty: the Lord is clothed with
+strength and hath girded Himself. He hath established the world which
+shall not be moved: His throne is prepared from of old. He is from
+everlasting. Rejoice greatly then, O daughter of Zion, shout for joy, O
+daughter of Jerusalem; behold thy King cometh, to thee, the Holy One,
+the Saviour of the world._ It will be time, then, to suffer by and bye,
+when the Prince of this world cometh upon the Prince of Heaven.
+
+So Percy mused, standing apart in his gorgeousness, striving to make
+himself little and simple. Surely nothing was too hard for God! Might
+not this mystic Birth once more do what it had done before--bring into
+subjection through the might of its weakness every proud thing that
+exalts itself above all that is called God? It had drawn wise Kings once
+across the desert, as well as shepherds from their flocks. It had kings
+about it now, kneeling with the poor and foolish, kings who had laid
+down their crowns, who brought the gold of loyal hearts, the myrrh of
+desired martyrdom, and the incense of a pure faith. Could not republics,
+too, lay aside their splendour, mobs be tamed, selfishness deny itself,
+and wisdom confess its ignorance?...
+
+Then he remembered Felsenburgh; and his heart sickened within him.
+
+
+III
+
+Six days later, Percy rose as usual, said his mass, breakfasted, and
+sat down to say office until his servant should summon him to vest for
+the Pontifical mass.
+
+He had learned to expect bad news now so constantly--of apostasies,
+deaths, losses--that the lull of the previous week had come to him with
+extraordinary refreshment. It appeared to him as if his musings in St.
+Anastasia had been truer than he thought, and that the sweetness of the
+old feast had not yet wholly lost its power even over a world that
+denied its substance. For nothing at all had happened of importance. A
+few more martyrdoms had been chronicled, but they had been isolated
+cases; and of Felsenburgh there had been no tidings at all. Europe
+confessed its ignorance of his business.
+
+On the other hand, to-morrow, Percy knew very well, would be a day of
+extraordinary moment in England and Germany at any rate; for in England
+it was appointed as the first occasion of compulsory worship throughout
+the country, while it was the second in Germany. Men and women would
+have to declare themselves now.
+
+He had seen on the previous evening a photograph of the image that was
+to be worshipped next day in the Abbey; and, in a fit of loathing, had
+torn it to shreds. It represented a nude woman, huge and majestic,
+entrancingly lovely, with head and shoulders thrown back, as one who
+sees a strange and heavenly vision, arms downstretched and hands a
+little raised, with wide fingers, as in astonishment--the whole
+attitude, with feet and knees pressed together, suggestive of
+expectation, hope and wonder; in devilish mockery her long hair was
+crowned with twelve stars. This, then, was the spouse of the other, the
+embodiment of man’s ideal maternity, still waiting for her child....
+
+When the white scraps lay like poisonous snow at his feet, he had sprung
+across the room to his _prie-dieu_, and fallen there in an agony of
+reparation.
+
+“Oh! Mother, Mother!” he cried to the stately Queen of Heaven who, with
+Her true Son long ago in Her arms, looked down on him from Her
+bracket--no more than that.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But he was still again this morning, and celebrated Saint Silvester,
+Pope and Martyr, the last saint in the procession of the Christian year,
+with tolerable equanimity. The sights of last night, the throng of
+officials, the stately, scarlet, unfamiliar figures of the Cardinals who
+had come in from north, south, east and west--these helped to reassure
+him again--unreasonably, as he knew, yet effectually. The very air was
+electric with expectation. All night the piazza had been crowded by a
+huge, silent mob waiting till the opening of the doors at seven o’clock.
+Now the church itself was full, and the piazza full again. Far down the
+street to the river, so far as he could see as he had leaned from his
+window just now, lay that solemn motionless pavement of heads. The roof
+of the colonnade showed a fringe of them, the house-tops were black--and
+this in the bitter cold of a clear, frosty morning, for it was announced
+that after mass and the proceeding of the members of the Order past the
+Pontifical Throne, the Pope would give Apostolic Benediction to the City
+and the World.
+
+Percy finished Terce, closed his book and lay back; his servant would be
+here in a minute now.
+
+His mind began to run over the function, and he reflected that the
+entire Sacred College (with the exception of the Cardinal-Protector of
+Jerusalem, detained by sickness), numbering sixty-four members, would
+take part. This would mean an unique sight by and bye. Eight years
+before, he remembered, after the freedom of Rome, there had been a
+similar assembly; but the Cardinals at that time amounted to no more
+than fifty-three all told, and four had been absent.
+
+Then he heard voices in his ante-room, a quick step, and a loud English
+expostulation. That was curious, and he sat up.
+
+Then he heard a sentence.
+
+“His Eminence must go to vest; it is useless.”
+
+There was a sharp answer, a faint scuffle, and a snatch at the handle.
+This was indecent; so Percy stood up, made three strides of it to the
+door, and tore it open.
+
+A man stood there, whom at first he did not recognise, pale and
+disordered.
+
+“Why---” began Percy, and recoiled.
+
+“Mr. Phillips!” he said.
+
+The other threw out his hands.
+
+“It is I, sir--your Eminence--this moment arrived. It is life and death.
+Your servant tells me---”
+
+“Who sent you?”
+
+“Father Blackmore.”
+
+“Good news or bad?”
+
+The man rolled his eyes towards the servant, who still stood erect and
+offended a yard away; and Percy understood.
+
+He put his hand on the other’s arm, drawing him through the doorway.
+
+“Tap upon this door in two minutes, James,” he said.
+
+They passed across the polished floor together; Percy went to his usual
+place in the window, leaned against the shutter, and spoke.
+
+“Tell me in one sentence, sir,” he said to the breathless man.
+
+“There is a plot among the Catholics. They intend destroying the Abbey
+to-morrow with explosives. I knew that the Pope---”
+
+Percy cut him short with a gesture.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+I
+
+The volor-stage was comparatively empty this afternoon, as the little
+party of six stepped out on to it from the lift. There was nothing to
+distinguish these from ordinary travellers. The two Cardinals of Germany
+and England were wrapped in plain furs, without insignia of any kind;
+their chaplains stood near them, while the two men-servants hurried
+forward with the bags to secure a private compartment.
+
+The four kept complete silence, watching the busy movements of the
+officials on board, staring unseeingly at the sleek, polished monster
+that lay netted in steel at their feet, and the great folded fins that
+would presently be cutting the thin air at a hundred and fifty miles an
+hour.
+
+Then Percy, by a sudden movement, turned from the others, went to the
+open window that looked over Rome, and leaned there with his elbows on
+the sill, looking.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was a strange view before him.
+
+It was darkening now towards sunset, and the sky, primrose-green
+overhead, deepened to a clear tawny orange above the horizon, with a
+sanguine line or two at the edge, and beneath that lay the deep evening
+violet of the city, blotted here and there by the black of cypresses and
+cut by the thin leafless pinnacles of a poplar grove that aspired
+without the walls. But right across the picture rose the enormous dome,
+of an indescribable tint; it was grey, it was violet--it was what the
+eye chose to make it--and through it, giving its solidity the air of a
+bubble, shone the southern sky, flushed too with faint orange. It was
+this that was supreme and dominant; the serrated line of domes, spires
+and pinnacles, the crowded roofs beneath, in the valley dell’ Inferno,
+the fairy hills far away--all were but the annexe to this mighty
+tabernacle of God. Already lights were beginning to shine, as for thirty
+centuries they had shone; thin straight skeins of smoke were ascending
+against the darkening sky. The hum of this Mother of cities was
+beginning to be still, for the keen air kept folks indoors; and the
+evening peace was descending that closed another day and another year.
+Beneath in the narrow streets Percy could see tiny figures, hurrying
+like belated ants; the crack of a whip, the cry of a woman, the wail of
+a child came up to this immense elevation like details of a murmur from
+another world. They, too, would soon be quiet, and there would be peace.
+
+A heavy bell beat faintly from far away, and the drowsy city turned to
+murmur its good-night to the Mother of God. From a thousand towers came
+the tiny melody, floating across the great air spaces, in a thousand
+accents, the solemn bass of St. Peter’s, the mellow tenor of the
+Lateran, the rough cry from some old slum church, the peevish tinkle
+of convents and chapels--all softened and made mystical in this grave
+evening air--it was the wedding of delicate sound and clear light.
+Above, the liquid orange sky; beneath, this sweet, subdued ecstasy of
+bells.
+
+“_Alma Redemptoris Mater_,” whispered Percy, his eyes wet with tears.
+“_Gentle Mother of the Redeemer--the open door of the sky, star of the
+sea--have mercy on sinners._ _The Angel of the Lord announced it to
+Mary, and she conceived of the Holy Ghost_.... _Pour, therefore, Lord,
+Thy grace into our hearts. Let us, who know Christ’s incarnation, rise
+through passion and cross to the glory of Resurrection--through the
+same Christ our Lord._”
+
+Another bell clanged sharply close at hand, calling him down to earth,
+and wrong, and labour and grief; and he turned to see the motionless
+volor itself one blaze of brilliant internal light, and the two priests
+following the German Cardinal across the gangway.
+
+It was the rear compartment that the men had taken; and when he had seen
+that the old man was comfortable, still without a word he passed out
+again into the central passage to see the last of Rome.
+
+The exit-door had now been snapped, and as Percy stood at the opposite
+window looking out at the high wall that would presently sink beneath
+him, throughout the whole of the delicate frame began to run the
+vibration of the electric engine. There was the murmur of talking
+somewhere, a heavy step shook the floor, a bell clanged again, twice,
+and a sweet wind-chord sounded. Again it sounded; the vibration ceased,
+and the edge of the high wall against the tawny sky on which he had
+fixed his eyes sank suddenly like a dropped bar, and he staggered a
+little in his place. A moment later the dome rose again, and itself
+sank, the city, a fringe of towers and a mass of dark roofs, pricked
+with light, span like a whirlpool; the jewelled stars themselves sprang
+this way and that; and with one more long cry the marvellous machine
+righted itself, beat with its wings, and settled down, with the note of
+the flying air passing through rising shrillness into vibrant silence,
+to its long voyage to the north.
+
+Further and further sank the city behind; it was a patch now: greyness
+on black. The sky seemed to grow more huge and all-containing as the
+earth relapsed into darkness; it glowed like a vast dome of wonderful
+glass, darkening even as it glowed; and as Percy dropped his eyes once
+more round the extreme edge of the car the city was but a line and a
+bubble--a line and a swelling--a line, and nothingness.
+
+He drew a long breath, and went back to his friends.
+
+
+II
+
+“Tell me again,” said the old Cardinal, when the two were settled down
+opposite to one another, and the chaplains were gone to another
+compartment. “Who is this man?”
+
+“This man? He was secretary to Oliver Brand, one of our politicians. He
+fetched me to old Mrs. Brand’s death bed, and lost his place in
+consequence. He is in journalism now. He is perfectly honest. No, he is
+not a Catholic, though he longs to be one. That is why they confided in
+him.”
+
+“And they?”
+
+“I know nothing of them, except that they are a desperate set. They have
+enough faith to act, but not enough to be patient.... I suppose they
+thought this man would sympathise. But unfortunately he has a
+conscience, and he also sees that any attempt of this kind would be the
+last straw on the back of toleration. Eminence, do you realise how
+violent the feeling is against us?”
+
+The old man shook his head lamentably.
+
+“Do I not?” he murmured. “And my Germans are in it? Are you sure?”
+
+“Eminence, it is a vast plot. It has been simmering for months. There
+have been meetings every week. They have kept the secret marvellously.
+Your Germans only delayed that the blow might be more complete. And now,
+to-morrow---” Percy drew back with a despairing gesture.
+
+“And the Holy Father?”
+
+“I went to him as soon as mass was over. He withdrew all opposition, and
+sent for you. It is our one chance, Eminence.”
+
+“And you think our plan will hinder it?”
+
+“I have no idea, but I can think of nothing else. I shall go straight to
+the Archbishop and tell him all. We arrive, I believe, at three o’clock,
+and you in Berlin about seven, I suppose, by German time. The function
+is fixed for eleven. By eleven, then, we shall have done all that is
+possible. The Government will know, and they will know, too, that we are
+innocent in Rome. I imagine they will cause it to be announced that the
+Cardinal-Protector and the Archbishop, with his coadjutors, will be
+present in the sacristies. They will double every guard; they will
+parade volors overhead--and then--well! in God’s hands be the rest.”
+
+“Do you think the conspirators will attempt it?”
+
+“I have no idea,” said Percy shortly.
+
+“I understand they have alternative plans.”
+
+“Just so. If all is clear, they intend dropping the explosive from
+above; if not, at least three men have offered to sacrifice themselves
+by taking it into the Abbey themselves.... And you, Eminence?”
+
+The old man eyed him steadily.
+
+“My programme is yours,” he said. “Eminence, have you considered the
+effect in either case? If nothing happens---”
+
+“If nothing happens we shall be accused of a fraud, of seeking to
+advertise ourselves. If anything happens--well, we shall all go before
+God together. Pray God it may be the second,” he added passionately.
+
+“It will be at least easier to bear,” observed the old man.
+
+“I beg your pardon, Eminence. I should not have said that.”
+
+There fell a silence between the two, in which no sound was heard but
+the faint untiring vibration of the screw, and the sudden cough of a man
+in the next compartment. Percy leaned his head wearily on his hand, and
+stared from the window.
+
+The earth was now dark beneath them--an immense emptiness; above, the
+huge engulfing sky was still faintly luminous, and through the high
+frosty mist through which they moved stars glimmered now and again, as
+the car swayed and tacked across the wind.
+
+“It will be cold among the Alps,” murmured Percy. Then he broke off.
+“And I have not one shred of evidence,” he said; “nothing but the word
+of a man.”
+
+“And you are sure?”
+
+“I am sure.”
+
+“Eminence,” said the German suddenly, staring straight into his face,
+“the likeness is extraordinary.”
+
+Percy smiled listlessly. He was tired of bearing that.
+
+“What do you make of it?” persisted the other.
+
+“I have been asked that before,” said Percy. “I have no views.”
+
+“It seems to me that God means something,” murmured the German heavily,
+still staring at him.
+
+“Well, Eminence?”
+
+“A kind of antithesis--a reverse of the medal. I do not know.”
+
+Again there was silence. A chaplain looked in through the glazed door, a
+homely, blue-eyed German, and was waved away once more.
+
+“Eminence,” said the old man abruptly, “there is surely more to speak
+of. Plans to be made.”
+
+Percy shook his head.
+
+“There are no plans to be made,” he said. “We know nothing but the
+fact--no names--nothing. We--we are like children in a tiger’s cage. And
+one of us has just made a gesture in the tiger’s face.”
+
+“I suppose we shall communicate with one another?”
+
+“If we are in existence.”
+
+It was curious how Percy took the lead. He had worn his scarlet for
+about three months, and his companion for twelve years; yet it was the
+younger who dictated plans and arranged. He was scarcely conscious of
+its strangeness, however. Ever since the shocking news of the morning,
+when a new mine had been sprung under the shaking Church, and he had
+watched the stately ceremonial, the gorgeous splendour, the dignified,
+tranquil movements of the Pope and his court, with a secret that burned
+his heart and brain--above all, since that quick interview in which old
+plans had been reversed and a startling decision formed, and a blessing
+given and received, and a farewell looked not uttered--all done in
+half-an-hour--his whole nature had concentrated itself into one keen
+tense force, like a coiled spring. He felt power tingling to his
+finger-tips--power and the dulness of an immense despair. Every prop had
+been cut, every brace severed; he, the City of Rome, the Catholic
+Church, the very supernatural itself, seemed to hang now on one single
+thing--the Finger of God. And if that failed--well, nothing would ever
+matter any more....
+
+He was going now to one of two things--ignominy or death. There was no
+third thing--unless, indeed, the conspirators were actually taken with
+their instruments upon them. But that was impossible. Either they would
+refrain, knowing that God’s ministers would fall with them, and in that
+case there would be the ignominy of a detected fraud, of a miserable
+attempt to win credit. Or they would not refrain; they would count the
+death of a Cardinal and a few bishops a cheap price to pay for
+revenge--and in that case well, there was Death and Judgment. But Percy
+had ceased to fear. No ignominy could be greater than that which he
+already bore--the ignominy of loneliness and discredit. And death could
+be nothing but sweet--it would at least be knowledge and rest. He was
+willing to risk all on God.
+
+The other, with a little gesture of apology, took out his office book
+presently, and began to read.
+
+Percy looked at him with an immense envy. Ah! if only he were as old as
+that! He could bear a year or two more of this misery, but not fifty
+years, he thought. It was an almost endless vista that (even if things
+went well) opened before him, of continual strife, self-repression,
+energy, misrepresentation from his enemies. The Church was sinking
+further every day. What if this new spasm of fervour were no more than
+the dying flare of faith? How could he bear that? He would have to see
+the tide of atheism rise higher and more triumphant every day;
+Felsenburgh had given it an impetus of whose end there was no
+prophesying. Never before had a single man wielded the full power of
+democracy. Then once more he looked forward to the morrow. Oh! if it
+could but end in death!... _Beati mortui qui in Domino moriuntur!_ ...
+
+It was no good; it was cowardly to think in this fashion. After all, God
+was God--He takes up the isles as a very little thing.
+
+Percy took out his office book, found Prime and St. Sylvester, signed
+himself with the cross, and began to pray. A minute later the two
+chaplains slipped in once more, and sat down; and all was silent, save
+for that throb of the screw, and the strange whispering rush of air
+outside.
+
+
+III
+
+It was about nineteen o’clock that the ruddy English conductor looked in
+at the doorway, waking Percy from his doze.
+
+“Dinner will be served in half-an-hour, gentlemen,” he said (speaking
+Esperanto, as the rule was on international cars). “We do not stop at
+Turin to-night.”
+
+He shut the door and went out, and the sound of closing doors came down
+the corridor as he made the same announcement to each compartment.
+
+There were no passengers to descend at Turin, then, reflected Percy; and
+no doubt a wireless message had been received that there were none to
+come on board either. That was good news: it would give him more time in
+London. It might even enable Cardinal Steinmann to catch an earlier
+volor from Paris to Berlin; but he was not sure how they ran. It was a
+pity that the German had not been able to catch the thirteen o’clock
+from Rome to Berlin direct. So he calculated, in a kind of superficial
+insensibility.
+
+He stood up presently to stretch himself. Then he passed out and along
+the corridor to the lavatory to wash his hands.
+
+He became fascinated by the view as he stood before the basin at the
+rear of the car, for even now they were passing over Turin. It was a
+blur of light, vivid and beautiful, that shone beneath him in the midst
+of this gulf of darkness, sweeping away southwards into the gloom as the
+car sped on towards the Alps. How little, he thought, seemed this great
+city seen from above; and yet, how mighty it was! It was from that
+glimmer, already five miles behind, that Italy was controlled; in one of
+these dolls’ houses of which he had caught but a glimpse, men sat in
+council over souls and bodies, and abolished God, and smiled at His
+Church. And God allowed it all, and made no sign. It was there that
+Felsenburgh had been, a month or two ago--Felsenburgh, his double! And
+again the mental sword tore and stabbed at his heart.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A few minutes later, the four ecclesiastics were sitting at their round
+table in a little screened compartment of the dining-room in the bows of
+the air-ship. It was an excellent dinner, served, as usual, from the
+kitchen in the bowels of the volor, and rose, course by course, with a
+smooth click, into the centre of the table. There was a bottle of red
+wine to each diner, and both table and chairs swung easily to the very
+slight motion of the ship. But they did not talk much, for there was
+only one subject possible to the two cardinals, and the chaplains had
+not yet been admitted into the full secret.
+
+It was growing cold now, and even the hot-air foot-rests did not quite
+compensate for the deathly iciness of the breath that began to stream
+down from the Alps, which the ship was now approaching at a slight
+incline. It was necessary to rise at least nine thousand feet from the
+usual level, in order to pass the frontier of the Mont Cenis at a safe
+angle; and at the same time it was necessary to go a little slower over
+the Alps themselves, owing to the extreme rarity of the air, and the
+difficulty in causing the screw to revolve sufficiently quickly to
+counteract it.
+
+“There will be clouds to-night,” said a voice clear and distinct from
+the passage, as the door swung slightly to a movement of the car.
+
+Percy got up and closed it.
+
+The German Cardinal began to grow a little fidgety towards the end of
+dinner.
+
+“I shall go back,” he said at last. “I shall be better in my fur rug.”
+
+His chaplain dutifully went after him, leaving his own dinner
+unfinished, and Percy was left alone with Father Corkran, his English
+chaplain lately from Scotland.
+
+He finished his wine, ate a couple of figs, and then sat staring out
+through the plate-glass window in front.
+
+“Ah!” he said. “Excuse me, father. There are the Alps at last.”
+
+The front of the car consisted of three divisions, in the centre of one
+of which stood the steersman, his eyes looking straight ahead, and his
+hands upon the wheel. On either side of him, separated from him by
+aluminium walls, was contrived a narrow slip of a compartment, with a
+long curved window at the height of a man’s eyes, through which a
+magnificent view could be obtained. It was to one of these that Percy
+went, passing along the corridor, and seeing through half-opened doors
+other parties still over their wine. He pushed the spring door on the
+left and went through.
+
+He had crossed the Alps three times before in his life, and well
+remembered the extraordinary effect they had had on him, especially as
+he had once seen them from a great altitude upon a clear day--an
+eternal, immeasurable sea of white ice, broken by hummocks and wrinkles
+that from below were soaring peaks named and reverenced; and, beyond,
+the spherical curve of the earth’s edge that dropped in a haze of air
+into unutterable space. But this time they seemed more amazing than
+ever, and he looked out on them with the interest of a sick child.
+
+The car was now ascending; rapidly towards the pass up across the huge
+tumbled slopes, ravines, and cliffs that lie like outworks of the
+enormous wall. Seen from this great height they were in themselves
+comparatively insignificant, but they at least suggested the vastness of
+the bastions of which they were no more than buttresses. As Percy
+turned, he could see the moonless sky alight with frosty stars, and the
+dimness of the illumination made the scene even more impressive; but as
+he turned again, there was a change. The vast air about him seemed now
+to be perceived through frosted glass. The velvet blackness of the pine
+forests had faded to heavy grey, the pale glint of water and ice seen
+and gone again in a moment, the monstrous nakedness of rock spires and
+slopes, rising towards him and sliding away again beneath with a
+crawling motion--all these had lost their distinctness of outline, and
+were veiled in invisible white. As he looked yet higher to right and
+left the sight became terrifying, for the giant walls of rock rushing
+towards him, the huge grotesque shapes towering on all sides, ran upward
+into a curtain of cloud visible only from the dancing radiance thrown
+upon it by the brilliantly lighted car. Even as he looked, two straight
+fingers of splendour, resembling horns, shot out, as the bow
+searchlights were turned on; and the car itself, already travelling at
+half-speed, dropped to quarter-speed, and began to sway softly from side
+to side as the huge air-planes beat the mist through which they moved,
+and the antennae of light pierced it. Still up they went, and on--yet
+swift enough to let Percy see one great pinnacle rear itself, elongate,
+sink down into a cruel needle, and vanish into nothingness a thousand
+feet below. The motion grew yet more nauseous, as the car moved up at a
+sharp angle preserving its level, simultaneously rising, advancing and
+swaying. Once, hoarse and sonorous, an unfrozen torrent roared like a
+beast, it seemed within twenty yards, and was dumb again on the instant.
+Now, too, the horns began to cry, long, lamentable hootings, ringing
+sadly in that echoing desolation like the wail of wandering souls; and
+as Percy, awed beyond feeling, wiped the gathering moisture from the
+glass, and stared again, it appeared as if he floated now, motionless
+except for the slight rocking beneath his feet, in a world of whiteness,
+as remote from earth as from heaven, poised in hopeless infinite space,
+blind, alone, frozen, lost in a white hell of desolation.
+
+
+Once, as he stared, a huge whiteness moved towards him through the veil,
+slid slowly sideways and down, disclosing, as the car veered, a gigantic
+slope smooth as oil, with one cluster of black rock cutting it like the
+fingers of a man’s hand groping from a mountainous wave.
+
+Then, as once more the car cried aloud like a lost sheep, there answered
+it, it seemed scarcely ten yards away, first one windy scream of dismay,
+another and another; a clang of bells, a chorus broke out; and the air
+was full of the beating of wings.
+
+
+IV
+
+There was one horrible instant before a clang of a bell, the answering
+scream, and a whirling motion showed that the steersman was alert. Then
+like a stone the car dropped, and Percy clutched at the rail before him
+to steady the terrible sensation of falling into emptiness. He could
+hear behind him the crash of crockery, the bumping of heavy bodies, and
+as the car again checked on its wide wings, a rush of footsteps broke
+out and a cry or two of dismay. Outside, but high and far away, the
+hooting went on; the air was full of it, and in a flash he recognised
+that it could not be one or ten or twenty cars, but at least a hundred
+that had answered the call, and that somewhere overhead were hooting and
+flapping. The invisible ravines and cliffs on all sides took up the
+crying; long wails whooped and moaned and died amid a clash of bells,
+further and further every instant, but now in every direction, behind,
+above, in front, and far to right and left. Once more the car began to
+move, sinking in a long still curve towards the face of the mountain;
+and as it checked, and began to sway again on its huge wings, he turned
+to the door, seeing as he did so, through the cloudy windows in the
+glow of light, a spire of rock not thirty feet below rising from the
+mist, and one smooth shoulder of snow curving away into invisibility.
+
+Within, the car shewed brutal signs of the sudden check: the doors of
+the dining compartments, as he passed along, were flung wide; glasses,
+plates, pools of wine and tumbled fruit rolled to and fro on the heaving
+floors; one man, sitting helplessly on the ground, rolled vacant,
+terrified eyes upon the priest. He glanced in at the door through which
+he had come just now, and Father Corkran staggered up from his seat and
+came towards him, reeling at the motion underfoot; simultaneously there
+was a rush from the opposite door, where a party of Americans had been
+dining; and as Percy, beckoning with his head, turned again to go down
+to the stern-end of the ship, he found the narrow passage blocked with
+the crowd that had run out. A babble of talking and cries made questions
+impossible; and Percy, with his chaplain behind him, gripped the
+aluminium panelling, and step by step began to make his way in search of
+his friends.
+
+Half-way down the passage, as he pushed and struggled, a voice made
+itself heard above the din; and in the momentary silence that followed,
+again sounded the far-away crying of the volors overhead.
+
+“Seats, gentlemen, seats,” roared the voice. “We are moving
+immediately.”
+
+Then the crowd melted as the conductor came through, red-faced and
+determined, and Percy, springing into his wake, found his way clear to
+the stern.
+
+The Cardinal seemed none the worse. He had been asleep, he explained,
+and saved himself in time from rolling on to the floor; but his old face
+twitched as he talked.
+
+“But what is it?” he said. “What is the meaning?”
+
+Father Bechlin related how he had actually seen one of the troop of
+volors within five yards of the window; it was crowded with faces, he
+said, from stem to stern. Then it had soared suddenly, and vanished in
+whorls of mist.
+
+Percy shook his head, saying nothing. He had no explanation.
+
+“They are inquiring, I understand,” said Father Bechlin again. “The
+conductor was at his instrument just now.”
+
+There was nothing to be seen from the windows now. Only, as Percy stared
+out, still dazed with the shock, he saw the cruel needle of rock
+wavering beneath as if seen through water, and the huge shoulder of snow
+swaying softly up and down. It was quieter outside. It appeared that the
+flock had passed, only somewhere from an infinite height still sounded a
+fitful wailing, as if a lonely bird were wandering, lost in space.
+
+“That is the signalling volor,” murmured Percy to himself.
+
+He had no theory--no suggestion. Yet the matter seemed an ominous one.
+It was unheard of that an encounter with a hundred volors should take
+place, and he wondered why they were going southwards. Again the name of
+Felsenburgh came to his mind. What if that sinister man were still
+somewhere overhead?
+
+“Eminence,” began the old man again. But at that instant the car began
+to move.
+
+A bell clanged, a vibration tingled underfoot, and then, soft as a
+flake of snow, the great ship began to rise, its movement perceptible
+only by the sudden drop and vanishing of the spire of rock at which
+Percy still stared. Slowly the snowfield too began to flit downwards, a
+black cleft, whisked smoothly into sight from above, and disappeared
+again below, and a moment later once more the car seemed poised in white
+space as it climbed the slope of air down which it had dropped just now.
+Again the wind-chord rent the atmosphere; and this time the answer was
+as faint and distant as a cry from another world. The speed quickened,
+and the steady throb of the screw began to replace the swaying motion of
+the wings. Again came the hoot, wild and echoing through the barren
+wilderness of rock walls beneath, and again with a sudden impulse the
+car soared. It was going in great circles now, cautious as a cat,
+climbing, climbing, punctuating the ascent with cry after cry, searching
+the blind air for dangers. Once again a vast white slope came into
+sight, illuminated by the glare from the windows, sinking ever more and
+more swiftly, receding and approaching--until for one instant a jagged
+line of rocks grinned like teeth through the mist, dropped away and
+vanished, and with a clash of bells, and a last scream of warning, the
+throb of the screw passed from a whirr to a rising note, and the note to
+stillness, as the huge ship, clear at last of the frontier peaks, shook
+out her wings steady once more, and set out for her humming flight
+through space.... Whatever it was, was behind them now, vanished into
+the thick night.
+
+There was a sound of talking from the interior of the car, hasty,
+breathless voices, questioning, exclaiming, and the authoritative terse
+answer of the guard. A step came along outside, and Percy sprang to meet
+it, but, as he laid his hand on the door, it was pushed from without,
+and to his astonishment the English guard came straight through, closing
+it behind him.
+
+He stood there, looking strangely at the four priests, with compressed
+lips and anxious eyes.
+
+“Well?” cried Percy.
+
+“All right, gentlemen. But I’m thinking you’d better descend at Paris. I
+know who you are, gentlemen--and though I’m not a Catholic---”
+
+He stopped again.
+
+“For God’s sake, man---” began Percy.
+
+“Oh! the news, gentlemen. Well, it was two hundred cars going to Rome.
+There is a Catholic plot, sir, discovered in London---”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“To wipe out the Abbey. So they’re going---”
+
+“Ah!”
+
+“Yes, sir--to wipe out Rome.”
+
+Then he was gone again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+I
+
+It was nearly sixteen o’clock on the same day, the last day of the year,
+that Mabel went into the little church that stood in the street beneath
+her house.
+
+The dark was falling softly layer on layer; across the roofs to westward
+burned the smouldering fire of the winter sunset, and the interior was
+full of the dying light. She had slept a little in her chair that
+afternoon, and had awakened with that strange cleansed sense of spirit
+and mind that sometimes follows such sleep. She wondered later how she
+could have slept at such a time, and above all, how it was that she had
+perceived nothing of that cloud of fear and fury that even now was
+falling over town and country alike. She remembered afterwards an
+unusual busy-ness on the broad tracks beneath her as she had looked out
+on them from her windows, and an unusual calling of horns and whistles;
+but she thought nothing of it, and passed down an hour later for a
+meditation in the church.
+
+She had grown to love the quiet place, and came in often like this to
+steady her thoughts and concentrate them on the significance that lay
+beneath the surface of life--the huge principles upon which all lived,
+and which so plainly were the true realities. Indeed, such devotion was
+becoming almost recognised among certain classes of people. Addresses
+were delivered now and then; little books were being published as guides
+to the interior life, curiously resembling the old Catholic books on
+mental prayer.
+
+She went to-day to her usual seat, sat down, folded her hands, looked
+for a minute or two upon the old stone sanctuary, the white image and
+the darkening window. Then she closed her eyes and began to think,
+according to the method she followed.
+
+First she concentrated her attention on herself, detaching it from all
+that was merely external and transitory, withdrawing it inwards ...
+inwards, until she found that secret spark which, beneath all frailties
+and activities, made her a substantial member of the divine race of
+humankind.
+
+This then was the first step.
+
+The second consisted in an act of the intellect, followed by one of the
+imagination. All men possessed that spark, she considered.... Then she
+sent out her powers, sweeping with the eyes of her mind the seething
+world, seeing beneath the light and dark of the two hemispheres, the
+countless millions of mankind--children coming into the world, old men
+leaving it, the mature rejoicing in it and their own strength. Back
+through the ages she looked, through those centuries of crime and
+blindness, as the race rose through savagery and superstition to a
+knowledge of themselves; on through the ages yet to come, as generation
+followed generation to some climax whose perfection, she told herself,
+she could not fully comprehend because she was not of it. Yet, she told
+herself again, that climax had already been born; the birthpangs were
+over; for had not He come who was the heir of time?...
+
+Then by a third and vivid act she realised the unity of all, the central
+fire of which each spark was but a radiation--that vast passionless
+divine being, realising Himself up through these centuries, one yet
+many, Him whom men had called God, now no longer unknown, but recognised
+as the transcendent total of themselves--Him who now, with the coming of
+the new Saviour, had stirred and awakened and shown Himself as One.
+
+And there she stayed, contemplating the vision of her mind, detaching
+now this virtue, now that for particular assimilation, dwelling on her
+deficiencies, seeing in the whole the fulfilment of all aspirations, the
+sum of all for which men had hoped--that Spirit of Peace, so long
+hindered yet generated too perpetually by the passions of the world,
+forced into outline and being by the energy of individual lives,
+realising itself in pulse after pulse, dominant at last, serene,
+manifest, and triumphant. There she stayed, losing the sense of
+individuality, merging it by a long sustained effort of the will,
+drinking, as she thought, long breaths of the spirit of life and
+love....
+
+Some sound, she supposed afterwards, disturbed her, and she opened her
+eyes; and there before her lay the quiet pavement, glimmering through
+the dusk, the step of the sanctuary, the rostrum on the right, and the
+peaceful space of darkening air above the white Mother-figure and
+against the tracery of the old window. It was here that men had
+worshipped Jesus, that blood-stained Man of Sorrow, who had borne, even
+on His own confession, not peace but a sword. Yet they had knelt, those
+blind and hopeless Christians.... Ah! the pathos of it all, the
+despairing acceptance of any creed that would account for sorrow, the
+wild worship of any God who had claimed to bear it!
+
+And again came the sound, striking across her peace, though as yet she
+did not understand why.
+
+It was nearer now; and she turned in astonishment to look down the dusky
+nave.
+
+It was from without that the sound had come, that strange murmur, that
+rose and fell again as she listened.
+
+She stood up, her heart quickening a little--only once before had she
+heard such a sound, once before, in a square, where men raged about a
+point beneath a platform....
+
+She stepped swiftly out of her seat, passed down the aisle, drew back
+the curtains beneath the west window, lifted the latch and stepped out.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The street, from where she looked over the railings that barred the
+entrance to the church, seemed unusually empty and dark. To right and
+left stretched the houses, overhead the darkening sky was flushed with
+rose; but it seemed as if the public lights had been forgotten. There
+was not a living being to be seen.
+
+She had put her hand on the latch of the gate, to open it and go out,
+when a sudden patter of footsteps made her hesitate; and the next
+instant a child appeared panting, breathless and terrified, running with
+her hands before her.
+
+“They’re coming, they’re coming,” sobbed the child, seeing the face
+looking at her. Then she clung to the bars, staring over her shoulder.
+
+Mabel lifted the latch in an instant; the child sprang in, ran to the
+door and beat against it, then turning, seized her dress and cowered
+against her. Mabel shut the gate.
+
+“There, there,” she said. “Who is it? Who are coming?”
+
+But the child hid her face, drawing at the kindly skirts; and the next
+moment came the roar of voices and the trampling of footsteps.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was not more than a few seconds before the heralds of that grim
+procession came past. First came a flying squadron of children,
+laughing, terrified, fascinated, screaming, turning their heads as they
+ran, with a dog or two yelping among them, and a few women drifting
+sideways along the pavements. A face of a man, Mabel saw as she glanced
+in terror upwards, had appeared at the windows opposite, pale and
+eager--some invalid no doubt dragging himself to see. One group--a
+well-dressed man in grey, a couple of women carrying babies, a
+solemn-faced boy--halted immediately before her on the other side of the
+railings, all talking, none listening, and these too turned their faces
+to the road on the left, up which every instant the clamour and
+trampling grew. Yet she could not ask. Her lips moved; but no sound came
+from them. She was one incarnate apprehension. Across her intense fixity
+moved pictures of no importance of Oliver as he had been at breakfast,
+of her own bedroom with its softened paper, of the dark sanctuary and
+the white figure on which she had looked just now.
+
+They were coming thicker now; a troop of young men with their arms
+linked swayed into sight, all talking or crying aloud, none
+listening--all across the roadway, and behind them surged the crowd,
+like a wave in a stone-fenced channel, male scarcely distinguishable
+from female in that pack of faces, and under that sky that grew darker
+every instant. Except for the noise, which Mabel now hardly noticed, so
+thick and incessant it was, so complete her concentration in the sense
+of sight--except for that, it might have been, from its suddenness and
+overwhelming force, some mob of phantoms trooping on a sudden out of
+some vista of the spiritual world visible across an open space, and
+about to vanish again in obscurity. That empty street was full now on
+this side and that so far as she could see; the young men were
+gone--running or walking she hardly knew--round the corner to the right,
+and the entire space was one stream of heads and faces, pressing so
+fiercely that the group at the railings were detached like weeds and
+drifted too, sideways, clutching at the bars, and swept away too and
+vanished. And all the while the child tugged and tore at her skirts.
+
+Certain things began to appear now above the heads of the crowd--objects
+she could not distinguish in the failing light--poles, and fantastic
+shapes, fragments of stuff resembling banners, moving as if alive,
+turning from side to side, borne from beneath.
+
+Faces, distorted with passion, looked at her from time to time as the
+moving show went past, open mouths cried at her; but she hardly saw
+them. She was watching those strange emblems, straining her eyes through
+the dusk, striving to distinguish the battered broken shapes,
+half-guessing, yet afraid to guess.
+
+Then, on a sudden, from the hidden lamps beneath the eaves, light leaped
+into being--that strong, sweet, familiar light, generated by the great
+engines underground that, in the passion of that catastrophic day, all
+men had forgotten; and in a moment all changed from a mob of phantoms
+and shapes into a pitiless reality of life and death.
+
+Before her moved a great rood, with a figure upon it, of which one arm
+hung from the nailed hand, swinging as it went; an embroidery streamed
+behind with the swiftness of the motion.
+
+And next after it came the naked body of a child, impaled, white and
+ruddy, the head fallen upon the breast, and the arms, too, dangling and
+turning.
+
+And next the figure of a man, hanging by the neck, dressed, it seemed,
+in a kind of black gown and cape, with its black-capped head twisting
+from the twisting rope.
+
+
+II
+
+The same night Oliver Brand came home about an hour before midnight.
+
+For himself, what he had heard and seen that day was still too vivid and
+too imminent for him to judge of it coolly. He had seen, from his
+windows in Whitehall, Parliament Square filled with a mob the like of
+which had not been known in England since the days of Christianity--a
+mob full of a fury that could scarcely draw its origin except from
+sources beyond the reach of sense. Thrice during the hours that followed
+the publication of the Catholic plot and the outbreak of mob-law he had
+communicated with the Prime Minister asking whether nothing could be
+done to allay the tumult; and on both occasions he had received the
+doubtful answer that what could be done would be done, that force was
+inadmissible at present; but that the police were doing all that was
+possible.
+
+As regarded the despatch of the volors to Rome, he had assented by
+silence, as had the rest of the Council. That was, Snowford had said, a
+judicial punitive act, regrettable but necessary. Peace, in this
+instance, could not be secured except on terms of war--or rather, since
+war was obsolete--by the sternness of justice. These Catholics had shown
+themselves the avowed enemies of society; very well, then society must
+defend itself, at least this once. Man was still human. And Oliver had
+listened and said nothing.
+
+As he passed in one of the Government volors over London on his way
+home, he had caught more than one glimpse of what was proceeding beneath
+him. The streets were as bright as day, shadowless and clear in the
+white light, and every roadway was a crawling serpent. From beneath rose
+up a steady roar of voices, soft and woolly, punctuated by cries. From
+here and there ascended the smoke of burning; and once, as he flitted
+over one of the great squares to the south of Battersea, he had seen as
+it were a scattered squadron of ants running as if in fear or
+pursuit.... He knew what was happening.... Well, after all, man was not
+yet perfectly civilised.
+
+He did not like to think of what awaited him at home. Once, about five
+hours earlier, he had listened to his wife’s voice through the
+telephone, and what he had heard had nearly caused him to leave all and
+go to her. Yet he was scarcely prepared for what he found.
+
+As he came into the sitting-room, there was no sound, except that
+far-away hum from the seething streets below. The room seemed strangely
+dark and cold; the only light that entered was through one of the
+windows from which the curtains were withdrawn, and, silhouetted against
+the luminous sky beyond, was the upright figure of a woman, looking and
+listening....
+
+He pressed the knob of the electric light; and Mabel turned slowly
+towards him. She was in her day-dress, with a cloak thrown over her
+shoulders, and her face was almost as that of a stranger. It was
+perfectly colourless, her lips were compressed and her eyes full of an
+emotion which he could not interpret. It might equally have been anger,
+terror or misery.
+
+She stood there in the steady light, motionless, looking at him.
+
+For a moment he did not trust himself to speak. He passed across to the
+window, closed it and drew the curtains. Then he took that rigid figure
+gently by the arm.
+
+“Mabel,” he said, “Mabel.”
+
+She submitted to be drawn towards the sofa, but there was no response to
+his touch. He sat down and looked up at her with a kind of despairing
+apprehension.
+
+“My dear, I am tired out,” he said.
+
+Still she looked at him. There was in her pose that rigidity that actors
+simulate; yet he knew it for the real thing. He had seen that silence
+once or twice before in the presence of a horror--once at any rate, at
+the sight of a splash of blood on her shoe.
+
+“Well, my darling, sit down, at least,” he said.
+
+She obeyed him mechanically--sat, and still stared at him. In the
+silence once more that soft roar rose and died from the invisible world
+of tumult outside the windows. Within here all was quiet. He knew
+perfectly that two things strove within her, her loyalty to her faith
+and her hatred of those crimes in the name of justice. As he looked on
+her he saw that these two were at death grips, that hatred was
+prevailing, and that she herself was little more than a passive
+battlefield. Then, as with a long-drawn howl of a wolf, there surged and
+sank the voices of the mob a mile away, the tension broke.... She threw
+herself forward towards him, he caught her by the wrists, and so she
+rested, clasped in his arms, her face and bosom on his knees, and her
+whole body torn by emotion.
+
+For a full minute neither spoke. Oliver understood well enough, yet at
+present he had no words. He only drew her a little closer to himself,
+kissed her hair two or three times, and settled himself to hold her. He
+began to rehearse what he must say presently.
+
+Then she raised her flushed face for an instant, looked at him
+passionately, dropped her head again and began to sob out broken words.
+
+He could only catch a sentence here and there, yet he knew what she was
+saying....
+
+It was the ruin of all her hopes, she sobbed, the end of her religion.
+Let her die, die and have done with it! It was all gone, gone, swept
+away in this murderous passion of the people of her faith ... they were
+no better than Christians, after all, as fierce as the men on whom they
+avenged themselves, as dark as though the Saviour, Julian, had never
+come; it was all lost ... War and Passion and Murder had returned to the
+body from which she had thought them gone forever.... The burning
+churches, the hunted Catholics, the raging of the streets on which she
+had looked that day, the bodies of the child and the priest carried on
+poles, the burning churches and convents. ... All streamed out,
+incoherent, broken by sobs, details of horror, lamentations, reproaches,
+interpreted by the writhing of her head and hands upon his knees. The
+collapse was complete.
+
+He put his hands again beneath her arms and raised her. He was worn out
+by his work, yet he knew he must quiet her. This was more serious than
+any previous crisis. Yet he knew her power of recovery.
+
+“Sit down, my darling,” he said. “There ... give me your hands. Now
+listen to me.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He made really an admirable defence, for it was what he had been
+repeating to himself all day. Men were not yet perfect, he said; there
+ran in their veins the blood of men who for twenty centuries had been
+Christians.... There must be no despair; faith in man was of the very
+essence of religion, faith in man’s best self, in what he would become,
+not in what at present he actually was. They were at the beginning of
+the new religion, not in its maturity; there must be sourness in the
+young fruit. ... Consider, too, the provocation! Remember the appalling
+crime that these Catholics had contemplated; they had set themselves to
+strike the new Faith in its very heart....
+
+“My darling,” he said, “men are not changed in an instant. What if those
+Christians had succeeded!... I condemn it all as strongly as you. I saw
+a couple of newspapers this afternoon that are as wicked as anything
+that the Christians have ever done. They exulted in all these crimes. It
+will throw the movement back ten years.... Do you think that there are
+not thousands like yourself who hate and detest this violence?... But
+what does faith mean, except that we know that mercy will prevail?
+Faith, patience and hope--these are our weapons.”
+
+He spoke with passionate conviction, his eyes fixed on hers, in a fierce
+endeavour to give her his own confidence, and to reassure the remnants
+of his own doubtfulness. It was true that he too hated what she hated,
+yet he saw things that she did not.... Well, well, he told himself, he
+must remember that she was a woman.
+
+The look of frantic horror passed slowly out of her eyes, giving way to
+acute misery as he talked, and as his personality once more began to
+dominate her own. But it was not yet over.
+
+“But the volors,” she cried, “the volors! That is deliberate; that is
+not the work of the mob.”
+
+“My darling, it is no more deliberate than the other. We are all human,
+we are all immature. Yes, the Council permitted it, ... permitted it,
+remember. The German Government, too, had to yield. We must tame nature
+slowly, we must not break it.”
+
+He talked again for a few minutes, repeating his arguments, soothing,
+reassuring, encouraging; and he saw that he was beginning to prevail.
+But she returned to one of his words.
+
+“Permitted it! And you permitted it.”
+
+“Dear; I said nothing, either for it or against. I tell you that if we
+had forbidden it there would have been yet more murder, and the people
+would have lost their rulers. We were passive, since we could do
+nothing.”
+
+“Ah! but it would have been better to die.... Oh, Oliver, let me die at
+least! I cannot bear it.”
+
+By her hands which he still held he drew her nearer yet to himself.
+
+“Sweetheart,” he said gravely, “cannot you trust me a little? If I could
+tell you all that passed to-day, you would understand. But trust me that
+I am not heartless. And what of Julian Felsenburgh?”
+
+For a moment he saw hesitation in her eyes; her loyalty to him and her
+loathing of all that had happened strove within her. Then once again
+loyalty prevailed, the name of Felsenburgh weighed down the balance, and
+trust came back with a flood of tears.
+
+“Oh, Oliver,” she said, “I know I trust you. But I am so weak, and all
+is so terrible. And He so strong and merciful. And will He be with us
+to-morrow?”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It struck midnight from the clock-tower a mile away as they yet sat and
+talked. She was still tremulous from the struggle; but she looked at him
+smiling, still holding his hands. He saw that the reaction was upon her
+in full force at last.
+
+“The New Year, my husband,” she said, and rose as she said it, drawing
+him after her.
+
+“I wish you a happy New Year,” she said. “Oh help me, Oliver.”
+
+She kissed him, and drew back, still holding his hands, looking at him
+with bright tearful eyes.
+
+“Oliver,” she cried again, “I must tell you this.... Do you know what I
+thought before you came?”
+
+He shook his head, staring at her greedily. How sweet she was! He felt
+her grip tighten on his hands.
+
+“I thought I could not bear it,” she whispered--“that I must end it
+all--ah! you know what I mean.”
+
+His heart flinched as he heard her; and he drew her closer again to
+himself.
+
+“It is all over! it is all over,” she cried. “Ah! do not look like that!
+I could not tell you if it was not.”’
+
+As their lips met again there came the vibration of an electric bell
+from the next room, and Oliver, knowing what it meant, felt even in that
+instant a tremor shake his heart. He loosed her hands, and still smiled
+at her.
+
+“The bell!” she said, with a flash of apprehension.
+
+“But it is all well between us again?”
+
+Her face steadied itself into loyalty and confidence.
+
+“It is all well,” she said; and again the impatient bell tingled. “Go,
+Oliver; I will wait here.”
+
+A minute later he was back again, with a strange look on his white face,
+and his lips compressed. He came straight up to her, taking her once
+more by the hands, and looking steadily into her steady eyes. In the
+hearts of both of them resolve and faith were holding down the emotion
+that was not yet dead. He drew a long breath.
+
+“Yes,” he said in an even voice, “it is over.”
+
+Her lips moved; and that deadly paleness lay on her cheeks. He gripped
+her firmly.
+
+“Listen,” he said. “You must face it. It is over. Rome is gone. Now we
+must build something better.”
+
+She threw herself sobbing into his arms.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+I
+
+Long before dawn on the first morning of the New Year the approaches to
+the Abbey were already blocked. Victoria Street, Great George Street,
+Whitehall--even Millbank Street itself--were full and motionless. Broad
+Sanctuary, divided by the low-walled motor-track, was itself cut into
+great blocks and wedges of people by the ways which the police kept open
+for the passage of important personages, and Palace Yard was kept
+rigidly clear except for one island, occupied by a stand which was
+itself full from top to bottom and end to end. All roofs and parapets
+which commanded a view of the Abbey were also one mass of heads.
+Overhead, like solemn moons, burned the white lights of the electric
+globes.
+
+It was not known at exactly what hour the tumult had steadied itself to
+definite purpose, except to a few weary controllers of the temporary
+turnstiles which had been erected the evening before. It had been
+announced a week previously that, in consideration of the enormous
+demand for seats, all persons who presented their worship-ticket at an
+authorised office, and followed the directions issued by the police,
+would be accounted as having fulfilled the duties of citizenship in that
+respect, and it was generally made known that it was the Government’s
+intention to toll the great bell of the Abbey at the beginning of the
+ceremony and at the incensing of the image, during which period silence
+must be as far as possible preserved by all those within hearing.
+
+London had gone completely mad on the announcement of the Catholic plot
+on the afternoon before. The secret had leaked out about fourteen
+o’clock, an hour after the betrayal of the scheme to Mr. Snowford; and
+practically all commercial activities had ceased on the instant. By
+fifteen-and-a-half all stores were closed, the Stock Exchange, the City
+offices, the West End establishments--all had as by irresistible impulse
+suspended business, and from within two hours after noon until nearly
+midnight, when the police had been adequately reinforced and enabled to
+deal with the situation, whole mobs and armies of men, screaming
+squadrons of women, troops of frantic youths, had paraded the streets,
+howling, denouncing, and murdering. It was not known how many deaths had
+taken place, but there was scarcely a street without the signs of
+outrage. Westminster Cathedral had been sacked, every altar overthrown,
+indescribable indignities performed there. An unknown priest had
+scarcely been able to consume the Blessed Sacrament before he was seized
+and throttled; the Archbishop with eleven priests and two bishops had
+been hanged at the north end of the church, thirty-five convents had
+been destroyed, St. George’s Cathedral burned to the ground; and it was
+reported even, by the evening papers, that it was believed that, for the
+first time since the introduction of Christianity into England, there
+was not one Tabernacle left within twenty miles of the Abbey. “London,”
+explained the _New People_, in huge headlines, “was cleansed at last of
+dingy and fantastic nonsense.”
+
+It was known at about fifteen-and-a-half o’clock that at least seventy
+volors had left for Rome, and half-an-hour later that Berlin had
+reinforced them by sixty more. At midnight, fortunately at a time when
+the police had succeeded in shepherding the crowds into some kind of
+order, the news was flashed on to cloud and placard alike that the grim
+work was done, and that Rome had ceased to exist. The early morning
+papers added a few details, pointing out, of course, the coincidence of
+the fall with the close of the year, relating how, by an astonishing
+chance, practically all the heads of the hierarchy throughout the world
+had been assembled in the Vatican which had been the first object of
+attack, and how these, in desperation, it was supposed, had refused to
+leave the City when the news came by wireless telegraphy that the
+punitive force was on its way. There was not a building left in Rome;
+the entire place, Leonine City, Trastevere, suburbs--everything was
+gone; for the volors, poised at an immense height, had parcelled out the
+City beneath them with extreme care, before beginning to drop the
+explosives; and five minutes after the first roar from beneath and the
+first burst of smoke and flying fragments, the thing was finished. The
+volors had then dispersed in every direction, pursuing the motor and
+rail-tracks along which the population had attempted to escape so soon
+as the news was known; and it was supposed that not less than thirty
+thousand belated fugitives had been annihilated by this foresight. It
+was true, remarked the _Studio_, that many treasures of incalculable
+value had been destroyed, but this was a cheap price to pay for the
+final and complete extermination of the Catholic pest. “There comes a
+point,” it remarked, “when destruction is the only cure for a
+vermin-infested house,” and it proceeded to observe that now that the
+Pope with the entire College of Cardinals, all the ex-Royalties of
+Europe, all the most frantic religionists from the inhabited world who
+had taken up their abode in the “Holy City” were gone at a stroke, a
+recrudescence of the superstition was scarcely to be feared elsewhere.
+Yet care must even now be taken against any relenting. Catholics (if any
+were left bold enough to attempt it) must no longer be allowed to take
+any kind of part in the life of any civilised country. So far as
+messages had come in from other countries, there was but one chorus of
+approval at what had been done.
+
+A few papers regretted the incident, or rather the spirit which had lain
+behind it. It was not seemly, they said, that Humanitarians should have
+recourse to violence; yet not one pretended that anything could be felt
+but thanksgiving for the general result. Ireland, too, must be brought
+into line; they must not dally any longer.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was now brightening slowly towards dawn, and beyond the river through
+the faint wintry haze a crimson streak or two began to burn. But all was
+surprisingly quiet, for this crowd, tired out with an all-night watch,
+chilled by the bitter cold, and intent on what lay before them, had no
+energy left for useless effort. Only from packed square and street and
+lane went up a deep, steady murmur like the sound of the sea a mile
+away, broken now and again by the hoot and clang of a motor and the rush
+of its passage as it tore eastwards round the circle through Broad
+Sanctuary and vanished citywards. And the light broadened and the
+electric globes sickened and paled, and the haze began to clear a
+little, showing, not the fresh blue that had been hoped for from the
+cold of the night, but a high, colourless vault of cloud, washed with
+grey and faint rose-colour, as the sun came up, a ruddy copper disc,
+beyond the river.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At nine o’clock the excitement rose a degree higher. The police between
+Whitehall and the Abbey, looking from their high platforms strung along
+the route, whence they kept watch and controlled the wire palisadings,
+showed a certain activity, and a minute later a police-car whirled
+through the square between the palings, and vanished round the Abbey
+towers. The crowd murmured and shuffled and began to expect, and a cheer
+was raised when a moment later four more cars appeared, bearing the
+Government insignia, and disappeared in the same direction. These were
+the officials, they said, going to Dean’s Yard, where the procession
+would assemble.
+
+At about a quarter to ten the crowd at the west end of Victoria Street
+began to raise its voice in a song, and by the time that was over, and
+the bells had burst out from the Abbey towers, a rumour had somehow made
+its entrance that Felsenburgh was to be present at the ceremony. There
+was no assignable reason for this, neither then nor afterwards; in fact,
+the _Evening Star_ declared that it was one more instance of the
+astonishing instinct of human beings _en masse_; for it was not until an
+hour later that even the Government were made aware of the facts. Yet
+the truth remained that at half-past ten one continuous roar went up,
+drowning even the brazen clamour of the bells, reaching round to
+Whitehall and the crowded pavements of Westminster Bridge, demanding
+Julian Felsenburgh. Yet there had been absolutely no news of the
+President of Europe for the last fortnight, beyond an entirely
+unsupported report that he was somewhere in the East.
+
+And all the while the motors poured from all directions towards the
+Abbey and disappeared under the arch into Dean’s Yard, bearing those
+fortunate persons whose tickets actually admitted them to the church
+itself. Cheers ran and rippled along the lines as the great men were
+recognised--Lord Pemberton, Oliver Brand and his wife, Mr. Caldecott,
+Maxwell, Snowford, with the European delegates--even melancholy-faced
+Mr. Francis himself, the Government _ceremoniarius_, received a
+greeting. But by a quarter to eleven, when the pealing bells paused, the
+stream had stopped, the barriers issued out to stop the roads, the wire
+palisadings vanished, and the crowd for an instant, ceasing its roaring,
+sighed with relief at the relaxed pressure, and surged out into the
+roadways. Then once more the roaring began for Julian Felsenburgh.
+
+The sun was now high, still a copper disc, above the Victoria Tower, but
+paler than an hour ago; the whiteness of the Abbey, the heavy greys of
+Parliament House, the ten thousand tints of house-roofs, heads,
+streamers, placards began to disclose themselves.
+
+A single bell tolled five minutes to the hour, and the moments slipped
+by, until once more the bell stopped, and to the ears of those within
+hearing of the great west doors came the first blare of the huge organ,
+reinforced by trumpets. And then, as sudden and profound as the hush of
+death, there fell an enormous silence.
+
+
+II
+
+As the five-minutes bell began, sounding like a continuous wind-note in
+the great vaults overhead, solemn and persistent, Mabel drew a long
+breath and leaned back in her seat from the rigid position in which for
+the last half-hour she had been staring out at the wonderful sight. She
+seemed to herself to have assimilated it at last, to be herself once
+more, to have drunk her fill of the triumph and the beauty. She was as
+one who looks upon a summer sea on the morning after a storm. And now
+the climax was at hand.
+
+From end to end and side to side the interior of the Abbey presented a
+great broken mosaic of human faces; living slopes, walls, sections and
+curves. The south transept directly opposite to her, from pavement to
+rose window, was one sheet of heads; the floor was paved with them, cut
+in two by the scarlet of the gangway leading from the chapel of St.
+Faith--on the right, the choir beyond the open space before the
+sanctuary was a mass of white figures, scarved and surpliced; the high
+organ gallery, beneath which the screen had been removed, was crowded
+with them, and, far down beneath, the dim nave stretched the same
+endless pale living pavement to the shadow beneath the west window.
+Between every group of columns behind the choir-stalls, before her, to
+right, left, and behind, were platforms contrived in the masonry; and
+the exquisite roof, fan-tracery and soaring capital, alone gave the eye
+an escape from humanity. The whole vast space was full, it seemed, of
+delicate sunlight that streamed in from the artificial light set outside
+each window, and poured the ruby and the purple and the blue from the
+old glass in long shafts of colour across the dusty air, and in broken
+patches on the faces and dresses behind. The murmur of ten thousand
+voices filled the place, supplying, it seemed, a solemn accompaniment to
+that melodious note that now pulsed above it. And finally, more
+significant than all, was the empty carpeted sanctuary at her feet, the
+enormous altar with its flight of steps, the gorgeous curtain and the
+great untenanted sedilia.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mabel needed some such reassurance, for last night, until the coming of
+Oliver, had passed for her as a kind of appalling waking dream. From the
+first shock of what she had seen outside the church, through those hours
+of waiting, with the knowledge that this was the way in which the Spirit
+of Peace asserted its superiority, up to that last moment when, in her
+husband’s arms, she had learned of the Fall of Rome, it had appeared to
+her as if her new world had suddenly corrupted about her. It was
+incredible, she told herself, that this ravening monster, dripping blood
+from claws and teeth, that had arisen roaring in the night, could be the
+Humanity that had become her God. She had thought revenge and cruelty
+and slaughter to be the brood of Christian superstition, dead and buried
+under the new-born angel of light, and now it seemed that the monsters
+yet stirred and lived. All the evening she had sat, walked, lain about
+her quiet house with the horror heavy about her, flinging open a window
+now and again in the icy air to listen with clenched hands to the cries
+and the roarings of the mob that raged in the streets beneath, the
+clanks, the yells and the hoots of the motor-trains that tore up from
+the country to swell the frenzy of the city--to watch the red glow of
+fire, the volumes of smoke that heaved up from the burning chapels and
+convents.
+
+She had questioned, doubted, resisted her doubts, flung out frantic acts
+of faith, attempted to renew the confidence that she attained in her
+meditation, told herself that traditions died slowly; she had knelt,
+crying out to the spirit of peace that lay, as she knew so well, at the
+heart of man, though overwhelmed for the moment by evil passion. A line
+or two ran in her head from one of the old Victorian poets:
+
+You doubt If any one Could think or bid it? How could it come about?...
+Who did it? Not men! Not here! Oh! not beneath the sun.... The torch
+that smouldered till the cup o’er-ran The wrath of God which is the
+wrath of Man!
+
+She had even contemplated death, as she had told her husband--the taking
+of her own life, in a great despair with the world. Seriously she had
+thought of it; it was an escape perfectly in accord with her morality.
+The useless and agonising were put out of the world by common consent;
+the Euthanasia houses witnessed to it. Then why not she?... For she
+could not bear it!... Then Oliver had come, she had fought her way back
+to sanity and confidence; and the phantom had gone again.
+
+How sensible and quiet he had been, she was beginning to tell herself
+now, as the quiet influence of this huge throng in this glorious place
+of worship possessed her once more--how reasonable in his explanation
+that man was even now only convalescent and therefore liable to relapse.
+She had told herself that again and again during the night, but it had
+been different when he had said so. His personality had once more
+prevailed; and the name of Felsenburgh had finished the work.
+
+“If He were but here!” she sighed. But she knew He was far away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was not until a quarter to eleven that she understood that the crowds
+outside were clamouring for Him too, and that knowledge reassured her
+yet further. They knew, then, these wild tigers, where their redemption
+lay; they understood what was their ideal, even if they had not attained
+to it. Ah! if He were but here, there would be no more question: the
+sullen waves would sink beneath His call of peace, the hazy clouds lift,
+the rumble die to silence. But He was away--away on some strange
+business. Well; He knew His work. He would surely come soon again to His
+children who needed Him so terribly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She had the good fortune to be alone in a crowd. Her neighbour, a
+grizzled old man with his daughters beyond, was her only neighbour, and
+a stranger. At her left rose up the red-covered barricade over which she
+could see the sanctuary and the curtain; and her seat in the tribune,
+raised some eight feet above the floor, removed her from any possibility
+of conversation. She was thankful for that: she did not want to talk;
+she wanted only to control her faculties in silence, to reassert her
+faith, to look out over this enormous throng gathered to pay homage to
+the great Spirit whom they had betrayed, to renew her own courage and
+faithfulness. She wondered what the preacher would say, whether there
+would be any note of penitence. Maternity was his subject--that benign
+aspect of universal life--tenderness, love, quiet, receptive, protective
+passion, the spirit that soothes rather than inspires, that busies
+itself with peaceful tasks, that kindles the lights and fires of home,
+that gives sleep, food and welcome....
+
+The bell stopped, and in the instant before the music began she heard,
+clear above the murmur within, the roar of the crowds outside, who still
+demanded their God. Then, with a crash, the huge organ awoke, pierced by
+the cry of the trumpets and the maddening throb of drums. There was no
+delicate prelude here, no slow stirring of life rising through
+labyrinths of mystery to the climax of sight--here rather was full-orbed
+day, the high noon of knowledge and power, the dayspring from on high,
+dawning in mid-heaven. Her heart quickened to meet it, and her reviving
+confidence, still convalescent, stirred and smiled, as the tremendous
+chords blared overhead, telling of triumph full-armed. God was man,
+then, after all--a God who last night had faltered for an hour, but who
+rose again on this morning of a new year, scattering mists, dominant
+over his own passion, all-compelling and all-beloved. God was man, and
+Felsenburgh his Incarnation! Yes, she must believe that! She did
+believe that!
+
+Then she saw how already the long procession was winding up beneath the
+screen, and by imperceptible art the light grew yet more acutely
+beautiful. They were coming, then, those ministers of a pure worship;
+grave men who knew in what they believed, and who, even if they did not
+at this moment thrill with feeling (for she knew that in this respect
+her husband for one did not), yet believed the principles of this
+worship and recognised their need of expression for the majority of
+mankind--coming slowly up in fours and pairs and units, led by robed
+vergers, rippling over the steps, and emerging again into the coloured
+sunlight in all their bravery of Masonic apron, badge and jewel. Surely
+here was reassurance enough.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The sanctuary now held a figure or two. Anxious-faced Mr. Francis, in
+his robes of office, came gravely down the steps and stood awaiting the
+procession, directing with almost imperceptible motions his satellites
+who hovered about the aisles ready to point this way and that to the
+advancing stream; and the western-most seats were already beginning to
+fill, when on a sudden she recognised that something had happened.
+
+Just now the roaring of the mob outside had provided a kind of underbass
+to the music within, imperceptible except to sub-consciousness, but
+clearly discernible in its absence; and this absence was now a fact.
+
+At first she thought that the signal of beginning worship had hushed
+them; and then, with an indescribable thrill, she remembered that in all
+her knowledge only one thing had ever availed to quiet a turbulent
+crowd. Yet she was not sure; it might be an illusion. Even now the mob
+might be roaring still, and she only deaf to it; but again with an
+ecstasy that was very near to agony she perceived that the murmur of
+voices even within the building had ceased, and that some great wave of
+emotion was stirring the sheets and slopes of faces before her as a wind
+stirs wheat. A moment later, and she was on her feet, gripping the rail,
+with her heart like an over-driven engine beating pulses of blood,
+furious and insistent, through every vein; for with great rushing surge
+that sounded like a sigh, heard even above the triumphant tumult
+overhead, the whole enormous assemblage had risen to its feet.
+
+Confusion seemed to break out in the orderly procession. She saw Mr.
+Francis run forward quickly, gesticulating like a conductor, and at his
+signal the long line swayed forward, split, recoiled, and again slid
+swiftly forward, breaking as it did so into twenty streams that poured
+along the seats and filled them in a moment. Men ran and pushed, aprons
+flapped, hands beckoned, all without coherent words. There was a
+knocking of feet, the crash of an overturned chair, and then, as if a
+god had lifted his hand for quiet, the music ceased abruptly, sending a
+wild echo that swooned and died in a moment; a great sigh filled its
+place, and, in the coloured sunshine that lay along the immense length
+of the gangway that ran open now from west to east, far down in the
+distant nave, a single figure was seen advancing.
+
+
+III
+
+What Mabel saw and heard and felt from eleven o’clock to half-an-hour
+after noon on that first morning of the New Year she could never
+adequately remember. For the time she lost the continuous consciousness
+of self, the power of reflection, for she was still weak from her
+struggle; there was no longer in her the process by which events are
+stored, labelled and recorded; she was no more than a being who observed
+as it were in one long act, across which considerations played at
+uncertain intervals. Eyes and ear seemed her sole functions,
+communicating direct with a burning heart.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She did not even know at what point her senses told her that this was
+Felsenburgh. She seemed to have known it even before he entered, and she
+watched Him as in complete silence He came deliberately up the red
+carpet, superbly alone, rising a step or two at the entrance of the
+choir, passing on and up before her. He was in his English judicial
+dress of scarlet and black, but she scarcely noticed it. For her, too,
+no one else existed but, He; this vast assemblage was gone, poised and
+transfigured in one vibrating atmosphere of an immense human emotion.
+There was no one, anywhere, but Julian Felsenburgh. Peace and light
+burned like a glory about Him.
+
+For an instant after passing he disappeared beyond the speaker’s
+tribune, and the instant after reappeared once more, coming up the
+steps. He reached his place--she could see His profile beneath her and
+slightly to the left, pure and keen as the blade of a knife, beneath His
+white hair. He lifted one white-furred sleeve, made a single motion, and
+with a surge and a rumble, the ten thousand were seated. He motioned
+again and with a roar they were on their feet.
+
+Again there was a silence. He stood now, perfectly still, His hands laid
+together on the rail, and His face looking steadily before Him; it
+seemed as if He who had drawn all eyes and stilled all sounds were
+waiting until His domination were complete, and there was but one will,
+one desire, and that beneath His hand. Then He began to speak....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In this again, as Mabel perceived afterwards, there was no precise or
+verbal record within her of what he said; there was no conscious process
+by which she received, tested, or approved what she heard. The nearest
+image under which she could afterwards describe her emotions to herself,
+was that when He spoke it was she who was speaking. Her own thoughts,
+her predispositions, her griefs, her disappointment, her passion, her
+hopes--all these interior acts of the soul known scarcely even to
+herself, down even, it seemed, to the minutest whorls and eddies of
+thought, were, by this man, lifted up, cleansed, kindled, satisfied and
+proclaimed. For the first time in her life she became perfectly aware of
+what human nature meant; for it was her own heart that passed out upon
+the air, borne on that immense voice. Again, as once before for a few
+moments in Paul’s House, it seemed that creation, groaning so long, had
+spoken articulate words at last--had come to growth and coherent thought
+and perfect speech. Yet then He had spoken to men; now it was Man
+Himself speaking. It was not one man who spoke there, it was Man--Man
+conscious of his origin, his destiny, and his pilgrimage between, Man
+sane again after a night of madness--knowing his strength, declaring his
+law, lamenting in a voice as eloquent as stringed instruments his own
+failure to correspond. It was a soliloquy rather than an oration. Rome
+had fallen, English and Italian streets had run with blood, smoke and
+flame had gone up to heaven, because man had for an instant sunk back to
+the tiger. Yet it was done, cried the great voice, and there was no
+repentance; it was done, and ages hence man must still do penance and
+flush scarlet with shame to remember that once he turned his back on
+the risen light.
+
+There was no appeal to the lurid, no picture of the tumbling palaces,
+the running figures, the coughing explosions, the shaking of the earth
+and the dying of the doomed. It was rather with those hot hearts
+shouting in the English and German streets, or aloft in the winter air
+of Italy, the ugly passions that warred there, as the volors rocked at
+their stations, generating and fulfilling revenge, paying back plot with
+plot, and violence with violence. For there, cried the voice, was man as
+he had been, fallen in an instant to the cruel old ages before he had
+learned what he was and why.
+
+There was no repentance, said the voice again, but there was something
+better; and as the hard, stinging tones melted, the girl’s dry eyes of
+shame filled in an instant with tears. There was something better--the
+knowledge of what crimes man was yet capable of, and the will to use
+that knowledge. Rome was gone, and it was a lamentable shame; Rome was
+gone, and the air was the sweeter for it; and then in an instant, like
+the soar of a bird, He was up and away--away from the horrid gulf where
+He had looked just now, from the fragments of charred bodies, and
+tumbled houses and all the signs of man’s disgrace, to the pure air and
+sunlight to which man must once more set his face. Yet He bore with Him
+in that wonderful flight the dew of tears and the aroma of earth. He had
+not spared words with which to lash and whip the naked human heart, and
+He did not spare words to lift up the bleeding, shrinking thing, and
+comfort it with the divine vision of love....
+
+Historically speaking, it was about forty minutes before He turned to
+the shrouded image behind the altar.
+
+“Oh! Maternity!” he cried. “Mother of us all---”
+
+And then, to those who heard Him, the supreme miracle took place.... For
+it seemed now in an instant that it was no longer man who spoke, but One
+who stood upon the stage of the superhuman. The curtain ripped back, as
+one who stood by it tore, panting, at the strings; and there, it seemed,
+face to face stood the Mother above the altar, huge, white and
+protective, and the Child, one passionate incarnation of love, crying to
+her from the tribune.
+
+“Oh! Mother of us all, and Mother of Me!”
+
+So He praised her to her face, that sublime principle of life, declared
+her glories and her strength, her Immaculate Motherhood, her seven
+swords of anguish driven through her heart by the passion and the
+follies of her Son--He promised her great things, the recognition of her
+countless children, the love and service of the unborn, the welcome of
+those yet quickening within the womb. He named her the Wisdom of the
+Most High, that sweetly orders all things, the Gate of Heaven, House of
+Ivory, Comforter of the afflicted, Queen of the World; and, to the
+delirious eyes of those who looked on her it seemed that the grave face
+smiled to hear Him....
+
+A great panting as of some monstrous life began to fill the air as the
+mob swayed behind Him, and the torrential voice poured on. Waves of
+emotion swept up and down; there were cries and sobs, the yelping of a
+man beside himself at last, from somewhere among the crowded seats, the
+crash of a bench, and another and another, and the gangways were full,
+for He no longer held them passive to listen; He was rousing them to
+some supreme act. The tide crawled nearer, and the faces stared no
+longer at the Son but the Mother; the girl in the gallery tore at the
+heavy railing, and sank down sobbing upon her knees. And above all the
+voice pealed on--and the thin hands blanched to whiteness strained from
+the wide and sumptuous sleeves as if to reach across the sanctuary
+itself.
+
+It was a new tale He was telling now, and all to her glory. He was from
+the East, now they knew, come from some triumph. He had been hailed as
+King, adored as Divine, as was meet and right--He, the humble superhuman
+son of a Human Mother--who bore not a sword but peace, not a cross but a
+crown. So it seemed He was saying; yet no man there knew whether He said
+it or not--whether the voice proclaimed it, or their hearts asserted it.
+He was on the steps of the sanctuary now, still with outstretched hands
+and pouring words, and the mob rolled after him to the rumble of ten
+thousand feet and the sighing of ten thousand hearts.... He was at the
+altar; He was upon it. Again in one last cry, as the crowd broke against
+the steps beneath, He hailed her Queen and Mother.
+
+The end came in a moment, swift and inevitable. And for an instant,
+before the girl in the gallery sank down, blind with tears, she saw the
+tiny figure poised there at the knees of the huge image, beneath the
+expectant hands, silent and transfigured in the blaze of light. The
+Mother, it seemed, had found her Son at last.
+
+For an instant she saw it, the soaring columns, the gilding and the
+colours, the swaying heads, the tossing hands. It was a sea that heaved
+before her, lights went up and down, the rose window whirled overhead,
+presences filled the air, heaven flashed away, and the earth shook it
+ecstasy. Then in the heavenly light, to the crash of drums, above the
+screaming of the women and the battering of feet, in one thunder-peal of
+worship ten thousand voices hailed Him Lord and God.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III-THE VICTORY
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+I
+
+The little room where the new Pope sat reading was a model of
+simplicity. Its walls were whitewashed, its roof unpolished rafters, and
+its floor beaten mud. A square table stood in the centre, with a chair
+beside it; a cold brazier laid for lighting, stood in the wide hearth; a
+bookshelf against the wall held a dozen volumes. There were three doors,
+one leading to the private oratory, one to the ante-room, and the third
+to the little paved court. The south windows were shuttered, but through
+the ill-fitting hinges streamed knife-blades of fiery light from the hot
+Eastern day outside.
+
+It was the time of the mid-day siesta, and except for the brisk scything
+of the _cicade_ from the hill-slope behind the house, all was in deep
+silence.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Pope, who had dined an hour before, had hardly shifted His attitude
+in all that time, so intent was He upon His reading. For the while, all
+was put away, His own memory of those last three months, the bitter
+anxiety, the intolerable load of responsibility. The book He held was a
+cheap reprint of the famous biography of Julian Felsenburgh, issued a
+month before, and He was now drawing to an end.
+
+It was a terse, well-written book, composed by an unknown hand, and some
+even suspected it to be the disguised work of Felsenburgh himself. More,
+however, considered that it was written at least with Felsenburgh’s
+consent by one of that small body of intimates whom he had admitted to
+his society--that body which under him now conducted the affairs of West
+and East. From certain indications in the book it had been argued that
+its actual writer was a Westerner.
+
+The main body of the work dealt with his life, or rather with those two
+or three years known to the world, from his rapid rise in American
+politics and his mediation in the East down to the event of five months
+ago, when in swift succession he had been hailed Messiah in Damascus,
+had been formally adored in London, and finally elected by an
+extraordinary majority to the Tribuniciate of the two Americas.
+
+The Pope had read rapidly through these objective facts, for He knew
+them well enough already, and was now studying with close attention the
+summary of his character, or rather, as the author rather sententiously
+explained, the summary of his self-manifestation to the world. He read
+the description of his two main characteristics, his grasp upon words
+and facts; “words, the daughters of earth, were wedded in this man to
+facts, the sons of heaven, and Superman was their offspring.” His minor
+characteristics, too, were noticed, his appetite for literature, his
+astonishing memory, his linguistic powers. He possessed, it appeared,
+both the telescopic and the microscopic eye--he discerned world-wide
+tendencies and movements on the one hand; he had a passionate capacity
+for detail on the other. Various anecdotes illustrated these remarks,
+and a number of terse aphorisms of his were recorded. “No man forgives,”
+he said; “he only understands.” “It needs supreme faith to renounce a
+transcendent God.” “A man who believes in himself is almost capable of
+believing in his neighbour.” Here was a sentence that to the Pope’s mind
+was significant of that sublime egotism that is alone capable of
+confronting the Christian spirit: and again, “To forgive a wrong is to
+condone a crime,” and “The strong man is accessible to no one, but all
+are accessible to him.”
+
+There was a certain pompousness in this array of remarks, but it lay, as
+the Pope saw very well, not in the speaker but in the scribe. To him who
+had seen the speaker it was plain how they had been uttered--with no
+pontifical solemnity, but whirled out in a fiery stream of eloquence, or
+spoken with that strangely moving simplicity that had constituted his
+first assault on London. It was possible to hate Felsenburgh, and to
+fear him; but never to be amused at him.
+
+But plainly the supreme pleasure of the writer was to trace the analogy
+between his hero and nature. In both there was the same apparent
+contradictoriness--the combination of utter tenderness and utter
+ruthlessness. “The power that heals wounds also inflicts them: that
+clothes the dungheap with sweet growths and grasses, breaks, too, into
+fire and earthquake; that causes the partridge to die for her young,
+also makes the shrike with his living larder.” So, too, with
+Felsenburgh; He who had wept over the Fall of Rome, a month later had
+spoken of extermination as an instrument that even now might be
+judicially used in the service of humanity. Only it must be used with
+deliberation, not with passion.
+
+The utterance had aroused extraordinary interest, since it seemed so
+paradoxical from one who preached peace and toleration; and argument
+had broken out all over the world. But beyond enforcing the dispersal of
+the Irish Catholics, and the execution of a few individuals, so far that
+utterance had not been acted upon. Yet the world seemed as a whole to
+have accepted it, and even now to be waiting for its fulfilment.
+
+As the biographer pointed out, the world enclosed in physical nature
+should welcome one who followed its precepts, one who was indeed the
+first to introduce deliberately and confessedly into human affairs such
+laws as those of the Survival of the Fittest and the immorality of
+forgiveness. If there was mystery in the one, there was mystery in the
+other, and both must be accepted if man was to develop.
+
+And the secret of this, it seemed, lay in His personality. To see Him
+was to believe in Him, or rather to accept Him as inevitably true. “We
+do not explain nature or escape from it by sentimental regrets: the hare
+cries like a child, the wounded stag weeps great tears, the robin kills
+his parents; life exists only on condition of death; and these things
+happen however we may weave theories that explain nothing. Life must be
+accepted on those terms; we cannot be wrong if we follow nature; rather
+to accept them is to find peace--our great mother only reveals her
+secrets to those who take her as she is.” So, too, with Felsenburgh. “It
+is not for us to discriminate: His personality is of a kind that does
+not admit it. He is complete and sufficing for those who trust Him and
+are willing to suffer; an hostile and hateful enigma to those who are
+not. We must prepare ourselves for the logical outcome of this doctrine.
+Sentimentality must not be permitted to dominate reason.”
+
+Finally, then, the writer showed how to this Man belonged properly all
+those titles hitherto lavished upon imagined Supreme Beings. It was in
+preparation for Him that these types came into the realms of thought and
+influenced men’s lives.
+
+He was the _Creator_, for it was reserved for Him to bring into being
+the perfect life of union to which all the world had hitherto groaned in
+vain; it was in His own image and likeness that He had made man.
+
+Yet He was the _Redeemer_ too, for that likeness had in one sense always
+underlain the tumult of mistake and conflict. He had brought man out of
+darkness and the shadow of death, guiding their feet into the way of
+peace. He was the _Saviour_ for the same reason--the _Son of Man_, for
+He alone was perfectly human; He was the _Absolute_, for He was the
+content of Ideals; the _Eternal_, for He had lain always in nature’s
+potentiality and secured by His being the continuity of that order; the
+_Infinite_, for all finite things fell short of Him who was more than
+their sum.
+
+He was _Alpha_, then, and _Omega_, the beginning and the end, the first
+and the last. He was _Dominus et Deus noster_ (as Domitian had been, the
+Pope reflected). He was as simple and as complex as life itself--simple
+in its essence, complex in its activities.
+
+And last of all, the supreme proof of His mission lay in the immortal
+nature of His message. There was no more to be added to what He had
+brought to light--for in Him all diverging lines at last found their
+origin and their end. As to whether or no He would prove to be
+personally immortal was an wholly irrelevant thought; it would be indeed
+fitting if through His means the vital principle should disclose its
+last secret; but no more than fitting. Already His spirit was in the
+world; the individual was no more separate from his fellows; death no
+more than a wrinkle that came and went across the inviolable sea. For
+man had learned at last that the race was all and self was nothing; the
+cell had discovered the unity of the body; even, the greatest thinkers
+declared, the consciousness of the individual had yielded the title of
+Personality to the corporate mass of man--and the restlessness of the
+unit had sunk into the peace of a common Humanity, for nothing but this
+could explain the cessation of party strife and national
+competition--and this, above all, had been the work of Felsenburgh.
+
+“_Behold I am with you always_,” quoted the writer in a passionate
+peroration, “_even now in the consummation of the world; and, the
+Comforter is come unto you. I am the Door--the Way, the Truth and the
+Life--the Bread of Life and the Water of Life. My name is Wonderful, the
+Prince of Peace, the Father Everlasting. It is I who am the Desire of
+all nations, the fairest among the children of men--and of my Kingdom
+there shall be no end_.”
+
+The Pope laid down the book, and leaned back, closing his eyes.
+
+
+II
+
+And as for Himself, what had He to say to all this? A Transcendent God
+Who hid Himself, a Divine Saviour Who delayed to come, a Comforter heard
+no longer in wind nor seen in fire!
+
+There, in the next room, was a little wooden altar, and above it an iron
+box, and within that box a silver cup, and within that cup--Something.
+Outside the house, a hundred yards away, lay the domes and plaster roofs
+of a little village called Nazareth; Carmel was on the right, a mile or
+two away, Thabor on the left, the plain of Esdraelon in front; and
+behind, Cana and Galilee, and the quiet lake, and Hermon. And far away
+to the south lay Jerusalem....
+
+It was to this tiny strip of holy land that the Pope had come--the land
+where a Faith had sprouted two thousand years ago, and where, unless God
+spoke in fire from heaven, it would presently be cut down as a cumberer
+of the ground. It was here on this material earth that One had walked
+Whom all men had thought to have been He Who would redeem Israel--in
+this village that He had fetched water and made boxes and chairs, on
+that long lake that His Feet had walked, on that high hill that He had
+flamed in glory, on that smooth, low mountain to the north that He had
+declared that the meek were blessed and should inherit the earth, that
+peacemakers were the children of God, that they who hungered and
+thirsted should be satisfied.
+
+And now it was come to this. Christianity had smouldered away from
+Europe like a sunset on darkening peaks; Eternal Rome was a heap of
+ruins; in East and West alike a man had been set upon the throne of God,
+had been acclaimed as divine. The world had leaped forward; social
+science was supreme; men had learned consistency; they had learned, too,
+the social lessons of Christianity apart from a Divine Teacher, or,
+rather, they said, in spite of Him. There were left, perhaps, three
+millions, perhaps five, at the utmost ten millions--it was impossible to
+know--throughout the entire inhabited globe who still worshipped Jesus
+Christ as God. And the Vicar of Christ sat in a whitewashed room in
+Nazareth, dressed as simply as His master, waiting for the end.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He had done what He could. There had been a week five months ago when
+it had been doubtful whether anything at all could be done. There were
+left three Cardinals alive, Himself, Steinmann, and the Patriarch of
+Jerusalem; the rest lay mangled somewhere in the ruins of Rome. There
+was no precedent to follow; so the two Europeans had made their way out
+to the East, and to the one town in it where quiet still reigned. With
+the disappearance of Greek Christianity there had also vanished the last
+remnants of internecine war in Christendom; and by a kind of tacit
+consent of the world, Christians were allowed a moderate liberty in
+Palestine. Russia, which now held the country as a dependency, had
+sufficient sentiment left to leave it alone; it was true that the holy
+places had been desecrated, and remained now only as spots of
+antiquarian interest; the altars were gone but the sites were yet
+marked, and, although mass could no longer be said there, it was
+understood that private oratories were not forbidden.
+
+It was in this state that the two European Cardinals had found the Holy
+City; it was not thought wise to wear insignia of any description in
+public; and it was practically certain even now that the civilised world
+was unaware of their existence; for within three days of their arrival
+the old Patriarch had died, yet not before Percy Franklin, surely under
+the strangest circumstances since those of the first century, had been
+elected to the Supreme Pontificate. It had all been done in a few
+minutes by the dying man’s bedside. The two old men had insisted. The
+German had even recurred once more to the strange resemblance between
+Percy and Julian Felsenburgh, and had murmured his old half-heard
+remarks about the antithesis, and the Finger of God; and Percy,
+marvelling at his superstition, had accepted, and the election was
+recorded. He had taken the name of Silvester, the last saint in the
+year, and was the third of that title. He had then retired to Nazareth
+with his chaplain; Steinmann had gone back to Germany, and been hanged
+in a riot within a fortnight of his arrival.
+
+The next matter was the creation of new cardinals, and to twenty
+persons, with infinite precautions, briefs had been conveyed. Of these,
+nine had declined; three more had been approached, of whom only one had
+accepted. There were therefore at this moment twelve persons in the
+world who constituted the Sacred College--two Englishmen, of whom
+Corkran was one; two Americans, a Frenchman, a German, an Italian, a
+Spaniard, a Pole, a Chinaman, a Greek, and a Russian. To these were
+entrusted vast districts over which their control was supreme, subject
+only to the Holy Father Himself.
+
+As regarded the Pope’s own life very little need be said. It resembled,
+He thought, in its outward circumstances that of such a man as Leo the
+Great, without His worldly importance or pomp. Theoretically, the
+Christian world was under His dominion; practically, Christian affairs
+were administered by local authorities. It was impossible for a hundred
+reasons for Him to do what He wished with regard to the exchange of
+communications. An elaborate cypher had been designed, and a private
+telegraphic station organised on His roof communicating with another in
+Damascus where Cardinal Corkran had fixed his residence; and from that
+centre messages occasionally were despatched to ecclesiastical
+authorities elsewhere; but, for the most part, there was little to be
+done. The Pope, however, had the satisfaction of knowing that, with
+incredible difficulty, a little progress had been made towards the
+reorganisation of the hierarchy in all countries. Bishops were being
+consecrated freely; there were not less than two thousand of them all
+told, and of priests an unknown number. The Order of Christ Crucified
+was doing excellent work, and the tales of not less than four hundred
+martyrdoms had reached Nazareth during the last two months, accomplished
+mostly at the hands of the mobs.
+
+In other respects, also, as well as in the primary object of the Order’s
+existence (namely, the affording of an opportunity to all who loved God
+to dedicate themselves to Him more perfectly), the new Religious were
+doing good work. The more perilous tasks--the work of communication
+between prelates, missions to persons of suspected integrity--all the
+business, in fact, which was carried on now at the vital risk of the
+agent were entrusted solely to members of the Order. Stringent
+instructions had been issued from Nazareth that no bishop was to expose
+himself unnecessarily; each was to regard himself as the heart of his
+diocese to be protected at all costs save that of Christian honour, and
+in consequence each had surrounded himself with a group of the new
+Religious--men and women--who with extraordinary and generous obedience
+undertook such dangerous tasks as they were capable of performing. It
+was plain enough by now that had it not been for the Order, the Church
+would have been little better than paralysed under these new conditions.
+
+Extraordinary facilities were being issued in all directions. Every
+priest who belonged to the Order received universal jurisdiction subject
+to the bishop, if any, of the diocese in which he might be; mass might
+be said on any day of the year of the Five Wounds, or the Resurrection,
+or Our Lady; and all had the privilege of the portable altar, now
+permitted to be wood. Further ritual requirements were relaxed; mass
+might be said with any decent vessels of any material capable of
+destruction, such as glass or china; bread of any description might be
+used; and no vestments were obligatory except the thin thread that now
+represented the stole; lights were non-essential; none need wear the
+clerical habit; and rosary, even without beads, was always permissible
+instead of the Office.
+
+In this manner priests were rendered capable of giving the sacraments
+and offering the holy sacrifice at the least possible risk to
+themselves; and these relaxations had already proved of enormous benefit
+in the European prisons, where by this time many thousands of Catholics
+were undergoing the penalty of refusing public worship.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Pope’s private life was as simple as His room. He had one Syrian
+priest for His chaplain, and two Syrian servants. He said His mass each
+morning, Himself wearing vestments and His white habit beneath, and
+heard a mass after. He then took His coffee, after changing into the
+tunic and burnous of the country, and spent the morning over business.
+He dined at noon, slept, and rode out, for the country by reason of its
+indeterminate position was still in the simplicity of a hundred years
+ago. He returned at dusk, supped, and worked again till late into the
+night.
+
+That was all. His chaplain sent what messages were necessary to
+Damascus; His servants, themselves ignorant of His dignity, dealt with
+the secular world so far as was required, and the utmost that seemed to
+be known to His few neighbours was that there lived in the late Sheikh’s
+little house on the hill an eccentric European with a telegraph office.
+His servants, themselves devout Catholics, knew Him for a bishop, but no
+more than that. They were told only that there was yet a Pope alive, and
+with that and the sacraments were content.
+
+To sum up, therefore--the Catholic world knew that their Pope lived
+under the name of Silvester; and thirteen persons of the entire human
+race knew that Franklin had been His name, and that the throne of Peter
+rested for the time in Nazareth.
+
+It was, as a Frenchman had said, just a hundred years ago. Catholicism
+survived; but no more.
+
+
+III
+
+And as for His inner life, what can be said of that? He lay now back in
+his wooden chair, thinking with closed eyes.
+
+He could not have described it consistently even to Himself, for indeed
+He scarcely knew it: He acted rather than indulged in reflex thought.
+But the centre of His position was simple faith. The Catholic Religion,
+He knew well enough, gave the only adequate explanation of the universe;
+it did not unlock all mysteries, but it unlocked more than any other key
+known to man; He knew, too, perfectly well, that it was the only system
+of thought that satisfied man as a whole, and accounted for him in his
+essential nature. Further, He saw well enough that the failure of
+Christianity to unite all men one to another rested not upon its
+feebleness but its strength; its lines met in eternity, not in time.
+Besides, He happened to believe it.
+
+But to this foreground there were other moods whose shifting was out of
+his control. In his _exalt_ moods, which came upon Him like a breeze
+from Paradise, the background was bright with hope and drama--He saw
+Himself and His companions as Peter and the Apostles must have regarded
+themselves, as they proclaimed through the world, in temples, slums,
+market-places and private houses, the faith that was to shake and
+transform the world. They had handled the Lord of Life, seen the empty
+sepulchre, grasped the pierced hands of Him Who was their brother and
+their God. It was radiantly true, though not a man believed it; the huge
+superincumbent weight of incredulity could not disturb a fact that was
+as the sun in heaven. Moreover, the very desperateness of the cause was
+their inspiration. There was no temptation to lean upon the arm of
+flesh, for there was none that fought for them but God. Their nakedness
+was their armour, their slow tongues their persuasiveness, their
+weakness demanded God’s strength, and found it. Yet there was this
+difference, and it was a significant one. For Peter the spiritual world
+had an interpretation and a guarantee in the outward events he had
+witnessed. He had handled the Risen Christ, the external corroborated
+the internal. But for Silvester it was not so. For Him it was necessary
+so to grasp spiritual truths in the supernatural sphere that the
+external events of the Incarnation were proved by rather than proved the
+certitude of His spiritual apprehension. Certainly, historically
+speaking, Christianity was true--proved by its records--yet to see that
+needed illumination. He apprehended the power of the Resurrection,
+therefore Christ was risen.
+
+Therefore in heavier moods it was different with him. There were
+periods, lasting sometimes for days together, clouding Him when He
+awoke, stifling Him as He tried to sleep, dulling the very savour of the
+Sacrament and the thrill of the Precious Blood; times in which the
+darkness was so intolerable that even the solid objects of faith
+attenuated themselves to shadow, when half His nature was blind not only
+to Christ, but to God Himself, and the reality of His own
+existence--when His own awful dignity seemed as the insignia of a fool.
+And was it conceivable, His earthly mind demanded, that He and His
+college of twelve and His few thousands should be right, and the entire
+consensus of the civilised world wrong? It was not that the world had
+not heard the message of the Gospel; it had heard little else for two
+thousand years, and now pronounced it false--false in its external
+credentials, and false therefore in its spiritual claims. It was a lost
+cause for which He suffered; He was not the last of an august line, He
+was the smoking wick of a candle of folly; He was the _reductio ad
+absurdam_ of a ludicrous syllogism based on impossible premises. He was
+not worth killing, He and His company of the insane--they were no more
+than the crowned dunces of the world’s school. Sanity sat on the solid
+benches of materialism. And this heaviness waxed so dark sometimes that
+He almost persuaded Himself that His faith was gone; the clamours of
+mind so loud that the whisper of the heart was unheard, the desires for
+earthly peace so fierce that supernatural ambitions were silenced--so
+dense was the gloom, that, hoping against hope, believing against
+knowledge, and loving against truth, He cried as One other had cried on
+another day like this--_Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!_ ... But that, at
+least, He never failed to cry.
+
+One thing alone gave Him power to go on, so far at least as His
+consciousness was concerned, and that was His meditation. He had
+travelled far in the mystical life since His agonies of effort. Now He
+used no deliberate descents into the spiritual world: He threw, as it
+were, His hands over His head, and dropped into spacelessness.
+Consciousness would draw Him up, as a cork, to the surface, but He would
+do no more than repeat His action, until by that cessation of activity,
+which is the supreme energy, He floated in the twilight realm of
+transcendence; and there God would deal with Him--now by an articulate
+sentence, now by a sword of pain, now by an air like the vivifying
+breath of the sea. Sometimes after Communion He would treat Him so,
+sometimes as He fell asleep, sometimes in the whirl of work. Yet His
+consciousness did not seem to retain for long such experiences; five
+minutes later, it might be, He would be wrestling once more with the all
+but sensible phantoms of the mind and the heart.
+
+There He lay, then, in the chair, revolving the intolerable blasphemies
+that He had read. His white hair was thin upon His browned temples, His
+hands were as the hands of a spirit, and His young face lined and
+patched with sorrow. His bare feet protruded from beneath His stained
+tunic, and His old brown burnous lay on the floor beside Him....
+
+It was an hour before He moved, and the sun had already lost half its
+fierceness, when the steps of the horses sounded in the paved court
+outside. Then He sat up, slipped His feet into their shoes, and lifted
+the burnous from the floor, as the door opened and the lean sun-burned
+priest came through.
+
+“The horses, Holiness,” said the man.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Pope spoke not one word that afternoon, until the two came towards
+sunset up the bridle-path that leads between Thabor and Nazareth. They
+had taken their usual round through Cana, mounting a hillock from which
+the long mirror of Gennesareth could be seen, and passing on, always
+bearing to the right, under the shadow of Thabor until once more
+Esdraelon spread itself beneath like a grey-green carpet, a vast circle,
+twenty miles across, sprinkled sparsely with groups of huts, white walls
+and roofs, with Nain visible on the other side, Carmel heaving its long
+form far off on the right, and Nazareth nestling a mile or two away on
+the plateau on which they had halted.
+
+It was a sight of extraordinary peace, and seemed an extract from some
+old picture-book designed centuries ago. Here was no crowd of roofs, no
+pressure of hot humanity, no terrible evidences of civilisation and
+manufactory and strenuous, fruitless effort. A few tired Jews had come
+back to this quiet little land, as old people may return to their native
+place, with no hope of renewing their youth, or refinding their ideals,
+but with a kind of sentimentality that prevails so often over more
+logical motives, and a few more barrack-like houses had been added here
+and there to the obscure villages in sight. But it was very much as it
+had been a hundred years ago.
+
+The plain was half shadowed by Carmel, and half in dusty golden light.
+Overhead the clear Eastern sky was flushed with rose, as it had flushed
+for Abraham, Jacob, and the Son of David. There was no little cloud
+here, as a man’s hand, over the sea, charged with both promise and
+terror; no sound of chariot-wheels from earth or heaven, no vision of
+heavenly horses such as a young man had seen thirty centuries ago in
+this very sky. Here was the old earth and the old heaven, unchanged and
+unchangeable; the patient, returning spring had starred the thin soil
+with flowers of Bethlehem, and those glorious lilies to which Solomon’s
+scarlet garments might not be compared. There was no whisper from the
+Throne as when Gabriel had once stooped through this very air to hail
+Her who was blessed among women, no breath of promise or hope beyond
+that which God sends through every movement of His created robe of life.
+
+As the two halted, and the horses looked out with steady, inquisitive
+eyes at the immensity of light and air beneath them, a soft hooting cry
+broke out, and a shepherd passed below along the hillside a hundred
+yards away, trailing his long shadow behind him, and to the mellow
+tinkle of bells his flock came after, a troop of obedient sheep and
+wilful goats, cropping and following and cropping again as they went on
+to the fold, called by name in that sad minor voice of him who knew
+each, and led instead of driving. The soft clanking grew fainter, the
+shadow of the shepherd shot once to their very feet, as he topped the
+rise, and vanished again as he stepped down once more; and the call grew
+fainter yet, and ceased.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Pope lifted His hand to His eyes for an instant, then smoothed it
+down His face.
+
+He nodded across to a dim patch of white walls glimmering through the
+violet haze of the falling twilight.
+
+“That place, father,” He said, “what is its name?”
+
+The Syrian priest looked across, back once more at the Pope, and across
+again.
+
+“That among the palms, Holiness?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“That is Megiddo,” he said. “Some call it Armageddon.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+I
+
+At twenty-three o’clock that night the Syrian priest went out to watch
+for the coming of the messenger from Tiberias. Nearly two hours
+previously he had heard the cry of the Russian volor that plied from
+Damascus to Tiberias, and Tiberias to Jerusalem, and even as it was the
+messenger was a little late.
+
+These were very primitive arrangements, but Palestine was out of the
+world--a slip of useless country--and it was necessary for a man to ride
+from Tiberias to Nazareth each night with papers from Cardinal Corkran
+to the Pope, and to return with correspondence. It was a dangerous task,
+and the members of the New Order who surrounded the Cardinal undertook
+it by turns. In this manner all matters for which the Pope’s personal
+attention was required, and which were too long and not too urgent,
+could be dealt with at leisure by him, and an answer returned within the
+twenty-four hours.
+
+It was a brilliant moonlit night. The great golden shield was riding
+high above Thabor, shedding its strange metallic light down the long
+slopes and over the moor-like country that rose up from before the
+house-door--casting too heavy black shadows that seemed far more
+concrete and solid than the brilliant pale surfaces of the rock slabs or
+even than the diamond flashes from the quartz and crystal that here and
+there sparkled up the stony pathway. Compared with this clear splendour,
+the yellow light from the shuttered house seemed a hot and tawdry thing;
+and the priest, leaning against the door-post, his eyes alone alight in
+his dark face, sank down at last with a kind of Eastern sensuousness to
+bathe himself in the glory, and to spread his lean, brown hands out to
+it.
+
+This was a very simple man, in faith as well as in life. For him there
+were neither the ecstasies nor the desolations of his master. It was an
+immense and solemn joy to him to live here at the spot of God’s
+Incarnation and in attendance upon His Vicar. As regarded the movements
+of the world, he observed them as a man in a ship watches the heaving of
+the waves far beneath. Of course the world was restless, he half
+perceived, for, as the Latin Doctor had said, all hearts were restless
+until they found their rest in God. _Quare fremuerunt gentes?...
+Adversus Dominum, et adversus Christum ejus!_ As to the end--he was not
+greatly concerned. It might well be that the ship would be overwhelmed,
+but the moment of the catastrophe would be the end of all things
+earthly. The gates of hell shall not prevail: when Rome falls, the world
+falls; and when the world falls, Christ is manifest in power. For
+himself, he imagined that the end was not far away. When he had named
+Megiddo this afternoon it had been in his mind; to him it seemed natural
+that at the consummation of all things Christ’s Vicar should dwell at
+Nazareth where His King had come on earth--and that the Armageddon of
+the Divine John should be within sight of the scene where Christ had
+first taken His earthly sceptre and should take it again. After all, it
+would not be the first battle that Megiddo had seen. Israel and Amalek
+had met here; Israel and Assyria; Sesostris had ridden here and
+Sennacherib. Christian and Turk had contended here, like Michael and
+Satan, over the place where God’s Body had lain. As to the exact method
+of that end, he had no clear views; it would be a battle of some kind,
+and what field could be found more evidently designed for that than this
+huge flat circular plain of Esdraelon, twenty miles across, sufficient
+to hold all the armies of the earth in its embrace? To his view once
+more, ignorant as he was of present statistics, the world was divided
+into two large sections, Christians and heathens, and he supposed them
+very much of a size. Something would happen, troops would land at
+Khaifa, they would stream southwards from Tiberias, Damascus and remote
+Asia, northwards from Jerusalem, Egypt and Africa; eastwards from
+Europe; westwards from Asia again and the far-off Americas. And, surely,
+the time could not be far away, for here was Christ’s Vicar; and, as He
+Himself had said in His gospel of the Advent, _Ubicumque fuerit corpus,
+illie congregabuntur et aquilae._ Of more subtle interpretations of
+prophecy he had no knowledge. For him words were things, not merely
+labels upon ideas. What Christ and St. Paul and St. John had said--these
+things were so. He had escaped, owing chiefly to his isolation from the
+world, that vast expansion of Ritschlian ideas that during the last
+century had been responsible for the desertion by so many of any
+intelligible creed. For others this had been the supreme struggle--the
+difficulty of decision between the facts that words were not things, and
+yet that the things they represented were in themselves objective. But
+to this man, sitting now in the moonlight, listening to the far-off tap
+of hoofs over the hill as the messenger came up from Cana, faith was as
+simple as an exact science. Here Gabriel had descended on wide feathered
+wings from the Throne of God set beyond the stars, the Holy Ghost had
+breathed in a beam of ineffable light, the Word had become Flesh as Mary
+folded her arms and bowed her head to the decree of the Eternal. And
+here once more, he thought, though it was no more than a guess--yet he
+thought that already the running of chariot-wheels was audible--the
+tumult of the hosts of God gathering about the camp of the saints--he
+thought that already beyond the bars of the dark Gabriel set to his lips
+the trumpet of doom and heaven was astir. He might be wrong at this
+time, as others had been wrong at other times, but neither he nor they
+could be wrong for ever; there must some day be an end to the patience
+of God, even though that patience sprang from the eternity of His
+nature. He stood up, as down the pale moonlit path a hundred yards away
+came a pale figure of one who rode, with a leather bag strapped to his
+girdle.
+
+
+II
+
+It would be about three o’clock in the morning that the priest awoke in
+his little mud-walled room next to that of the Holy Father’s, and heard
+a footstep coming up the stairs. Last evening he had left his master as
+usual beginning to open the pile of letters arrived from Cardinal
+Corkran, and himself had gone straight to his bed and slept. He lay now
+a moment or two, still drowsy, listening to the pad of feet, and an
+instant later sat up abruptly, for a deliberate tap had sounded on the
+door. Again it came; he sprang out of bed in his long night-tunic, drew
+it up hastily in his girdle, went to the door and opened it.
+
+The Pope was standing there, with a little lamp in one hand, for the
+dawn had scarcely yet begun, and a paper in the other.
+
+“I beg your pardon, Father; but there is a message I must have sent at
+once to his Eminence.”
+
+Together they went out through the Pope’s room, the priest, still
+half-blind with sleep, passed up the stairs, and emerged into the clear
+cold air of the upper roof. The Pope blew out His lamp, and set it on
+the parapet.
+
+“You will be cold, Father; fetch your cloak.”
+
+“And you, Holiness?”
+
+The other made a little gesture of denial, and went across to the tiny
+temporary shed where the wireless telegraphic instrument stood.
+
+“Fetch your cloak, Father,” He said again over His shoulder. “I will
+ring up meanwhile.”
+
+When the priest came back three minutes later, in his slippers and
+cloak, carrying another cloak also for his master, the Pope was still
+seated at the table. He did not even move His head as the other came up,
+but once more pressed on the lever that, communicating with the
+twelve-foot pole that rose through the pent-house overhead, shot out the
+quivering energy through the eighty miles of glimmering air that lay
+between Nazareth and Damascus.
+
+This simple priest had scarcely even by now become accustomed to this
+extraordinary device invented a century ago and perfected through all
+those years to this precise exactness--that device by which with the
+help of a stick, a bundle of wires, and a box of wheels, something, at
+last established to be at the root of all matter, if not at the very
+root of physical life, spoke across the spaces of the world to a tiny
+receiver tuned by a hair’s breadth to the vibration with which it was
+set in relations.
+
+The air was surprisingly cold, considering the heat that had preceded
+and would follow it, and the priest shivered a little as he stood clear
+of the roof, and stared, now at the motionless figure in the chair
+before him, now at the vast vault of the sky passing, even as he looked,
+from a cold colourless luminosity to a tender tint of yellow, as far
+away beyond Thabor and Moab the dawn began to deepen. From the village
+half-a-mile away arose the crowing of a cock, thin and brazen as a
+trumpet; a dog barked once and was silent again; and then, on a sudden,
+a single stroke upon a bell hung in the roof recalled him in an instant,
+and told him that his work was to begin.
+
+The Pope pressed the lever again at the sound, twice, and then, after a
+pause, once more--waited a moment for an answer, and then when it came,
+rose and signed to the priest to take his place.
+
+The Syrian sat down, handing the extra cloak to his master, and waited
+until the other had settled Himself in a chair set in such a position at
+the side of the table that the face of each was visible to the other.
+Then he waited, with his brown fingers poised above the row of keys,
+looking at the other’s face as He arranged himself to speak. That face,
+he thought, looking out from the hood, seemed paler than ever in this
+cold light of dawn; the black arched eyebrows accentuated this, and even
+the steady lips, preparing to speak, seemed white and bloodless. He had
+His paper in His hand, and His eyes were fixed upon this.
+
+“Make sure it is the Cardinal,” he said abruptly.
+
+The priest tapped off an enquiry, and, with moving lips, raid off the
+printed message, as like magic it precipitated itself on to the tall
+white sheet of paper that faced him.
+
+“It is his Eminence, Holiness,” he said softly. “He is alone at the
+instrument.”
+
+“Very well. Now then; begin.”
+
+“We have received your Eminence’s letter, and have noted the news.... It
+should have been forwarded by telegraphy--why was that not done?”
+
+The voice paused, and the priest who had snapped off the message, more
+quickly than a man could write it, read aloud the answer.
+
+“‘I did not understand that it was urgent. I thought it was but one
+more assault. I had intended to communicate more so soon as I heard
+more.”’
+
+“Of course it was urgent,” came the voice again in the deliberate
+intonation that was used between these two in the case of messages for
+transmission. “Remember that all news of this kind is always urgent.”
+
+“‘I will remember,’ read the priest. ‘I regret my mistake.’”
+
+“You tell us,” went on the Pope, His eyes still downcast on the paper,
+“that this measure is decided upon; you name only three authorities.
+Give me, now, all the authorities you have, if you have more.”
+
+There was a moment’s pause. Then the priest began to read off the names.
+
+“Besides the three Cardinals whose names I sent, the Archbishops of
+Thibet, Cairo, Calcutta and Sydney have all asked if the news was true,
+and for directions if it is true; besides others whose names I can
+communicate if I may leave the table for a moment.’”
+
+“Do so,” said the Pope.
+
+Again there was a pause. Then once more the names began.
+
+“‘The Bishops of Bukarest, the Marquesas Islands and Newfoundland. The
+Franciscans in Japan, the Crutched Friars in Morocco, the Archbishops of
+Manitoba and Portland, and the Cardinal-Archbisbop of Pekin. I have
+despatched two members of Christ Crucified to England.’”
+
+“Tell us when the news first arrived, and how.”
+
+“‘I was called up to the instrument yesterday evening at about twenty
+o’clock. The Archbishop of Sydney was asking, through our station at
+Bombay, whether the news was true. I replied I had heard nothing of it.
+Within ten minutes four more inquiries had come to the same effect; and
+three minutes later Cardinal Ruspoli sent the positive news from Turin.
+This was accompanied by a similar message from Father Petrovski in
+Moscow. Then--- ’”
+
+“Stop. Why did not Cardinal Dolgorovski communicate it?”
+
+“‘He did communicate it three hours later.’”
+
+“Why not at once?”
+
+“‘His Eminence had not heard it.’”
+
+“Find out at what hour the news reached Moscow--not now, but within the
+day.”
+
+“‘I will.’”
+
+“Go on, then.”
+
+“‘Cardinal Malpas communicated it within five minutes of Cardinal
+Ruspoli, and the rest of the inquiries arrived before midnight. China
+reported it at twenty-three.’”
+
+“Then when do you suppose the news was made public?”
+
+“‘It was decided first at the secret London conference, yesterday, at
+about sixteen o’clock by our time. The Plenipotentiaries appear to have
+signed it at that hour. After that it was communicated to the world. It
+was published here half an hour past midnight.’”
+
+“Then Felsenburgh was in London?”
+
+“‘I am not yet sure. Cardinal Malpas tells me that Felsenburgh gave his
+provisional consent on the previous day.’”
+
+“Very good. That is all you know, then?”
+
+“‘I was called up an hour ago by Cardinal Ruspoli again. He tells me
+that he fears a riot in Florence; it will be the first of many
+revolutions, he says.’”
+
+“Does he ask for anything?”
+
+“‘Only for directions.’”
+
+“Tell him that we send him the Apostolic Benediction, and will forward
+directions within the course of two hours. Select twelve members of the
+Order for immediate service.”
+
+“‘I will.’”
+
+“Communicate that message also, as soon as we have finished, to all the
+Sacred College, and bid them communicate it with all discretion to all
+metropolitans and bishops, that priests and people may know that We bear
+them in our heart.”
+
+“‘I will, Holiness.’”
+
+“Tell them, finally, that We had foreseen this long ago; that We commend
+them to the Eternal Father without Whose Providence no sparrow falls to
+the ground. Bid them be quiet and confident; to do nothing, save confess
+their faith when they are questioned. All other directions shall be
+issued to their pastors immediately!”
+
+“‘I will, Holiness.’”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was again a pause.
+
+The Pope had been speaking with the utmost tranquillity as one in a
+dream. His eyes were downcast upon the paper, His whole body as
+motionless as an image. Yet to the priest who listened, despatching the
+Latin messages, and reading aloud the replies, it seemed, although so
+little intelligible news had reached him, as if something very strange
+and great was impending. There was the sense of a peculiar strain in the
+air, and although he drew no deductions from the fact that apparently
+the whole Catholic world was in frantic communication with Damascus, yet
+he remembered his meditations of the evening before as he had waited for
+the messenger. It seemed as if the powers of this world were
+contemplating one more step--with its nature he was not greatly
+concerned.
+
+The Pope spoke again in His natural voice.
+
+“Father,” he said, “what I am about to say now is as if I told it in
+confession. You understand?--Very well. Now begin.”
+
+Then again the intonation began.
+
+“Eminence. We shall say mass of the Holy Ghost in one hour from now. At
+the end of that time, you will cause that all the Sacred College shall
+be in touch with yourself, and waiting for our commands. This new
+decision is unlike any that have preceded it. Surely you understand
+that now. Two or three plans are in our mind, yet We are not sure yet
+which it is that our Lord intends. After mass We shall communicate to
+you that which He shall show Us to be according to His Will. We beg of
+you to say mass also, immediately, for Our intention. Whatever must be
+done must be done quickly. The matter of Cardinal Dolgorovski you may
+leave until later. But we wish to hear the result of your inquiries,
+especially in London, before mid-day. _Benedicat te Omnipotens Deus,
+Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus._”
+
+“‘Amen!’” murmured the priest, reading it from the sheet.
+
+
+III
+
+The little chapel in the house below was scarcely more dignified than
+the other rooms. Of ornaments, except those absolutely essential to
+liturgy and devotion, there were none. In the plaster of the walls were
+indented in slight relief the fourteen stations of the Cross; a small
+stone image of the Mother of God stood in a corner, with an iron-work
+candlestick before it, and on the solid uncarved stone altar, raised on
+a stone step, stood six more iron candlesticks and an iron crucifix. A
+tabernacle, also of iron, shrouded by linen curtains, stood beneath the
+cross; a small stone slab projecting from the wall served as a credence.
+There was but one window, and this looked into the court, so that the
+eyes of strangers might not penetrate.
+
+It seemed to the Syrian priest as he went about his business--laying out
+the vestments in the little sacristy that opened out at one side of the
+altar, preparing the cruets and stripping the covering from the
+altar-cloth--that even that slight work was wearying. There seemed a
+certain oppression in the air. As to how far that was the result of his
+broken rest he did not know, but he feared that it was one more of those
+scirocco days that threatened. That yellowish tinge of dawn had not
+passed with the sun-rising; even now, as he went noiselessly on his bare
+feet between the predella and the _prie-dieu_ where the silent white
+figure was still motionless, he caught now and again, above the roof
+across the tiny court, a glimpse of that faint sand-tinged sky that was
+the promise of beat and heaviness.
+
+He finished at last, lighted the candles, genuflected, and stood with
+bowed head waiting for the Holy Father to rise from His knees. A
+servant’s footstep sounded in the court, coming across to hear mass, and
+simultaneously the Pope rose and went towards the sacristy, where the
+red vestments of God who came by fire were laid ready for the Sacrifice.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Silvester’s bearing at mass was singularly unostentatious. He moved as
+swiftly as any young priest, His voice was quite even and quite low, and
+his pace neither rapid nor pompous. According to tradition, He occupied
+half-an-hour _ab amictu ad amictum_; and even in the tiny empty chapel
+He observed to keep His eyes always downcast. And yet this Syrian never
+served His mass without a thrill of something resembling fear; it was
+not only his knowledge of the awful dignity of this simple celebrant;
+but, although he could not have expressed it so, there was an aroma of
+an emotion about the vestmented figure that affected him almost
+physically--an entire absence of self-consciousness, and in its place
+the consciousness of some other Presence, a perfection of manner even in
+the smallest details that could only arise from absolute recollection.
+Even in Rome in the old days it had been one of the sights of Rome to
+see Father Franklin say mass; seminary students on the eve of ordination
+were sent to that sight to learn the perfect manner and method.
+
+To-day all was as usual, but at the Communion the priest looked up
+suddenly at the moment when the Host had been consumed, with a half
+impression that either a sound or a gesture had invited it; and, as he
+looked, his heart began to beat thick and convulsive at the base of his
+throat. Yet to the outward eyes there was nothing unusual. The figure
+stood there with bowed head, the chin resting on the tips of the long
+fingers, the body absolutely upright, and standing with that curious
+light poise as if no weight rested upon the feet. But to the inner sense
+something was apparent the Syrian could not in the least formulate it to
+himself; but afterwards he reflected that he had stared expecting some
+visible or audible manifestation to take place. It was an impression
+that might be described under the terms of either light or sound; at any
+instant that delicate vivid force, that to the eyes of the soul burned
+beneath the red chasuble and the white alb, might have suddenly welled
+outwards under the appearance of a gush of radiant light rendering
+luminous not only the clear brown flesh seen beneath the white hair, but
+the very texture of the coarse, dead, stained stuffs that swathed the
+rest of the body. Or it might have shown itself in the strain of a long
+chord on strings or wind, as if the mystical union of the dedicated soul
+with the ineffable Godhead and Humanity of Jesus Christ generated such a
+sound as ceaselessly flows out with the river of life from beneath the
+Throne of the Lamb. Or yet once more it might have declared itself under
+the guise of a perfume--the very essence of distilled sweetness--such a
+scent as that which, streaming out through the gross tabernacle of a
+saint’s body, is to those who observe it as the breath of heavenly
+roses....
+
+The moments passed in that hush of purity and peace; sounds came and
+went outside, the rattle of a cart far away, the sawing of the first
+cicada in the coarse grass twenty yards away beyond the wall; some one
+behind the priest was breathing short and thick as under the pressure of
+an intolerable emotion, and yet the figure stood there still, without a
+movement or sway to break the carved motionlessness of the alb-folds or
+the perfect poise of the white-shod feet. When He moved at last to
+uncover the Precious Blood, to lay His hands on the altar and adore, it
+was as if a statue had stirred into life; to the server it was very
+nearly as a shock.
+
+Again, when the chalice was empty, that first impression reasserted
+itself; the human and the external died in the embrace of the Divine and
+Invisible, and once more silence lived and glowed.... And again as the
+spiritual energy sank back again into its origin, Silvester stretched
+out the chalice.
+
+With knees that shook and eyes wide in expectation, the priest rose,
+adored, and went to the credence.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was customary after the Pope’s mass that the priest himself should
+offer the Sacrifice in his presence, but to-day so soon as the vestments
+had been laid one by one on the rough chest, Silvester turned to the
+priest.
+
+“Presently,” he said softly. “Go up, father, at once to the roof, and
+tell the Cardinal to be ready. I shall come in five minutes.”
+
+It was surely a scirocco-day, thought the priest, as he came up on to
+the flat roof. Overhead, instead of the clear blue proper to that hour
+of the morning, lay a pale yellow sky darkening even to brown at the
+horizon. Thabor, before him, hung distant and sombre seen through the
+impalpable atmosphere of sand, and across the plain, as he glanced
+behind him, beyond the white streak of Nain nothing was visible except
+the pale outline of the tops of the hills against the sky. Even at this
+morning hour, too, the air was hot and breathless, broken only by the
+slow-stifling lift of the south-western breeze that, blowing across
+countless miles of sand beyond far-away Egypt, gathered up the heat of
+the huge waterless continent and was pouring it, with scarcely a streak
+of sea to soften its malignity, on this poor strip of land. Carmel, too,
+as he turned again, was swathed about its base with mist, half dry and
+half damp, and above showed its long bull-head running out defiantly
+against the western sky. The very table as he touched it was dry and hot
+to the hand, by mid-day the steel would be intolerable.
+
+He pressed the lever, and waited; pressed it again, and waited again.
+There came the answering ring, and he tapped across the eighty miles of
+air that his Eminence’s presence was required at once. A minute or two
+passed, and then, after another rap of the bell, a line flicked out on
+the new white sheet.
+
+“‘I am here. Is it his Holiness?’”
+
+He felt a hand upon his shoulder, and turned to see Silvester, hooded
+and in white, behind his chair.
+
+“Tell him yes. Ask him if there is further news.”
+
+The Pope went to the chair once more and sat down, and a minute later
+the priest, with growing excitement, read out the answer.
+
+“‘Inquiries are pouring in. Many expect your Holiness to issue a
+challenge. My secretaries have been occupied since four o’clock. The
+anxiety is indescribable. Some are denying that they have a Pope.
+Something must be done at once.’”
+
+“Is that all?” asked the Pope.
+
+Again the priest read out the answer. “‘Yes and no. The news is true. It
+will be inforced immediately. Unless a step is taken immediately there
+will be widespread and final apostasy.’”
+
+“Very good,” murmured the Pope, in his official voice. “Now listen
+carefully, Eminence.” He was silent for a moment, his fingers joined
+beneath his chin as just now at mass. Then he spoke.
+
+“We are about to place ourselves unreservedly in the hands of God. Human
+prudence must no longer restrain us. We command you then, using all
+discretion that is possible, to communicate these wishes of ours to the
+following persons under the strictest secrecy, and to no others
+whatsoever. And for this service you are to employ messengers, taken
+from the Order of Christ Crucified, two for each message, which is not
+to be committed to writing in any form. The members of the Sacred
+College, numbering twelve; the metropolitans and Patriarchs through the
+entire world, numbering twenty-two; the Generals of the Religious
+Orders: the Society of Jesus, the Friars, the Monks Ordinary, and the
+Monks Contemplative four. These persons, thirty-eight in number, with
+the chaplain of your Eminence, who shall act as notary, and my own who
+shall assist him, and Ourself--forty-one all told--these persons are to
+present themselves here at our palace of Nazareth not later than the Eve
+of Pentecost. We feel Ourselves unwilling to decide the steps necessary
+to be taken with reference to the new decree, except we first hear the
+counsel of our advisers, and give them an opportunity of communicating
+freely one with another. These words, as we have spoken them, are to be
+forwarded to all those persons whom we have named; and your Eminence
+will further inform them that our deliberations will not occupy more
+than four days.
+
+“As regards the questions of provisioning the council and all matters of
+that kind, your Eminence will despatch to-day the chaplain of whom we
+have spoken, who with my own chaplain will at once set about
+preparations, and your Eminence will yourself follow, appointing Father
+Marabout to act in your absence, not later than four days hence.
+
+“Finally, to all who have asked explicit directions in the face of this
+new decree, communicate this one sentence, and no more.
+
+“_Lose not your confidence which hath a great reward. For yet a little
+while, and, He that is to come will come and will not delay_.--Silvester
+the Bishop, Servant of the Servants of God.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+I
+
+Oliver Brand stepped out from the Conference Hall in Westminster on the
+Friday evening, so soon as the business was over and the
+Plenipotentiaries had risen from the table, more concerned as to the
+effect of the news upon his wife than upon the world.
+
+He traced the beginning of the change to the day five months ago when
+the President of the World had first declared the development of his
+policy, and while Oliver himself had yielded to that development, and
+from defending it in public had gradually convinced himself of its
+necessity, Mabel, for the first time in her life, had shown herself
+absolutely obstinate.
+
+The woman to his mind seemed to him to have fallen into some kind of
+insanity. Felsenburgh’s declaration had been made a week or two after
+his Acclamation at Westminster, and Mabel had received the news of it at
+first with absolute incredulity.
+
+Then, when there was no longer any doubt that he had declared the
+extermination of the Supernaturalists to be a possible necessity, there
+had been a terrible scene between husband and wife. She had said that
+she had been deceived; that the world’s hope was a monstrous mockery;
+that the reign of universal peace was as far away as ever; that
+Felsenburgh had betrayed his trust and broken his word. There had been
+an appalling scene. He did not even now like to recall it to his
+imagination. She had quieted after a while, but his arguments, delivered
+with infinite patience, seemed to produce very little effect. She
+settled down into silence, hardly answering him. One thing only seemed
+to touch her, and that was when he spoke of the President himself. It
+was becoming plain to him that she was but a woman after all at the
+mercy of a strong personality, but utterly beyond the reach of logic. He
+was very much disappointed. Yet he trusted to time to cure her.
+
+The Government of England had taken swift and skilful steps to reassure
+those who, like Mabel, recoiled from the inevitable logic of the new
+policy. An army of speakers traversed the country, defending and
+explaining; the press was engineered with extraordinary adroitness, and
+it was possible to say that there was not a person among the millions of
+England who had not easy access to the Government’s defence.
+
+Briefly, shorn of rhetoric, their arguments were as follows, and there
+was no doubt that, on the whole, they had the effect of quieting the
+amazed revolt of the more sentimental minds.
+
+Peace, it was pointed out, had for the first time in the world’s history
+become an universal fact. There was no longer one State, however small,
+whose interests were not identical with those of one of the three
+divisions of the world of which it was a dependency, and that first
+stage had been accomplished nearly half-a-century ago. But the second
+stage--the reunion of these three divisions under a common head--an
+infinitely greater achievement than the former, since the conflicting
+interests were incalculably more vast--this had been consummated by a
+single Person, Who, it appeared, had emerged from humanity at the very
+instant when such a Character was demanded. It was surely not much to
+ask that those on whom these benefits had come should assent to the will
+and judgment of Him through whom they had come. This, then, was an
+appeal to faith.
+
+The second main argument was addressed to reason. Persecution, as all
+enlightened persons confessed, was the method of a majority of savages
+who desired to force a set of opinions upon a minority who did not
+spontaneously share them. Now the peculiar malevolence of persecution in
+the past lay, not in the employment of force, but in the abuse of it.
+That any one kingdom should dictate religious opinions to a minority of
+its members was an intolerable tyranny, for no one State possessed the
+right to lay down universal laws, the contrary to which might be held by
+its neighbour. This, however, disguised, was nothing else than the
+Individualism of Nations, a heresy even more disastrous to the
+commonwealth of the world than the Individualism of the Individual. But
+with the arrival of the universal community of interests the whole
+situation was changed. The single personality of the human race had
+succeeded to the incoherence of divided units, and with that
+consummation--which might be compared to a coming of age, an entirely
+new set of rights had come into being. The human race was now a single
+entity with a supreme responsibility towards itself; there were no
+longer any private rights at all, such as had certainly existed, in the
+period previous to this. Man now possessed dominion over every cell
+which composed His Mystical Body, and where any such cell asserted
+itself to the detriment of the Body, the rights of the whole were
+unqualified.
+
+And there was no religion but one that claimed the equal rights of
+universal jurisdiction--and that the Catholic. The sects of the East,
+while each retained characteristics of its own, had yet found in the New
+Man the incarnation of their ideals, and had therefore given in their
+allegiance to the authority of the whole Body of whom He was Head. But
+the very essence of the Catholic Religion was treason to the very idea
+of man. Christians directed their homage to a supposed supernatural
+Being who was not only--so they claimed--outside of the world but
+positively transcended it. Christians, then--leaving aside the mad fable
+of the Incarnation, which might very well be suffered to die of its own
+folly--deliberately severed themselves from that Body of which by human
+generation they had been made members. They were as mortified limbs
+yielding themselves to the domination of an outside force other than
+that which was their only life, and by that very act imperilled the
+entire Body. This madness, then, was the one crime which still deserved
+the name. Murder, theft, rape, even anarchy itself, were as trifling
+faults compared to this monstrous sin, for while these injured indeed
+the Body they did not strike at its heart--individuals suffered, and
+therefore those minor criminals deserved restraint; but the very Life
+was not struck at. But in Christianity there was a poison actually
+deadly. Every cell that became infected with it was infected in that
+very fibre that bound it to the spring of life. This, and this alone,
+was the supreme crime of High Treason against man--and nothing but
+complete removal from the world could be an adequate remedy.
+
+These, then, were the main arguments addressed to that section of the
+world which still recoiled from the deliberate utterance of Felsenburgh,
+and their success had been remarkable. Of course, the logic, in itself
+indisputable, had been dressed in a variety of costumes gilded with
+rhetoric, flushed with passion, and it had done its work in such a
+manner that as summer drew on Felsenburgh had announced privately that
+he proposed to introduce a bill which should carry out to its logical
+conclusion the policy of which he had spoken.
+
+Now, this too, had been accomplished.
+
+
+II
+
+Oliver let himself into his house, and went straight upstairs to Mabel’s
+room. It would not do to let her hear the news from any but his own
+lips. She was not there, and on inquiry he heard that she had gone out
+an hour before.
+
+He was disconcerted at this. The decree had been signed half-an-hour
+earlier, and in answer to an inquiry from Lord Pemberton it had been
+stated that there was no longer any reason for secrecy, and that the
+decision might be communicated to the press. Oliver had hurried away
+immediately in order to make sure that Mabel should hear the news from
+him, and now she was out, and at any moment the placards might tell her
+of what had been done.
+
+He felt extremely uneasy, but for another hour or so was ashamed to act.
+Then he went to the tube and asked another question or two, but the
+servant had no idea of Mabel’s movements; it might be she had gone to
+the church; sometimes she did at this hour. He sent the woman off to
+see, and himself sat down again in the window-seat of his wife’s room,
+staring out disconsolately at the wide array of roofs in the golden
+sunset light, that seemed to his eyes to be strangely beautiful this
+evening. The sky was not that pure gold which it had been every night
+during this last week; there was a touch of rose in it, and this
+extended across the entire vault so far as he could see from west to
+east. He reflected on what he had lately read in an old book to the
+effect that the abolition of smoke had certainly changed evening colours
+for the worse.... There had been a couple of severe earthquakes, too, in
+America--he wondered whether there was any connection.... Then his
+thoughts flew back to Mabel....
+
+It was about ten minutes before he heard her footstep on the stairs, and
+as he stood up she came in.
+
+There was something in her face that told him that she knew everything,
+and his heart sickened at her pale rigidity. There was no fury
+there--nothing but white, hopeless despair, and an immense
+determination. Her lips showed a straight line, and her eyes, beneath
+her white summer hat, seemed contracted to pinpricks. She stood there,
+closing the door mechanically behind her, and made no further movement
+towards him.
+
+“Is it true?” she said.
+
+Oliver drew one steady breath, and sat down again.
+
+“Is what true, my dear?”
+
+“Is it true,” she said again, “that all are to be questioned as to
+whether they believe in God, and to be killed if they confess it?”
+
+Oliver licked his dry lips.
+
+“You put it very harshly,” he said. “The question is, whether the world
+has a right---”
+
+She made a sharp movement with her head.
+
+“It is true then. And you signed it?”
+
+“My dear, I beg you not to make a scene. I am tired out. And I will not
+answer that until you have heard what I have to say.”
+
+“Say it, then.”
+
+“Sit down, then.”
+
+She shook her head.
+
+“Very well, then.... Well, this is the point. The world is one now, not
+many. Individualism is dead. It died when Felsenburgh became President
+of the World. You surely see that absolutely new conditions prevail
+now--there has never been anything like it before. You know all this as
+well as I do.”
+
+Again came that jerk of impatience.
+
+“You will please to hear me out,” he said wearily. “Well, now that this
+has happened, there is a new morality; it is exactly like a child coming
+to the age of reason. We are obliged, therefore, to see that this
+continues--that there is no going back--no mortification--that all the
+limbs are in good health. ‘If thy hand offend thee, cut it off,’ said
+Jesus Christ. Well, that is what we say.... Now, for any one to say that
+they believe in God--I doubt very much whether there is any one who
+really does believe, or understand what it means--but for any one even
+to say so is the very worst crime conceivable: it is high treason. But
+there is going to be no violence; it will all be quite quiet and
+merciful. Why, you have always approved of Euthanasia, as we all do.
+Well, it is that that will be used; and---”
+
+Once more she made a little movement with her hand. The rest of her was
+like an image.
+
+“Is this any use?” she asked.
+
+Oliver stood up. He could not bear the hardness of her voice.
+
+“Mabel, my darling---”
+
+For an instant her lips shook; then again she looked at him with eyes of
+ice.
+
+“I don’t want that,” she said. “It is of no use. Then you did sign it?”
+
+Oliver had a sense of miserable desperation as he looked back at her.
+He would infinitely have preferred that she had stormed and wept.
+
+“Mabel---” he cried again.
+
+“Then you did sign it?”
+
+“I did sign it,” he said at last.
+
+She turned and went towards the door. He sprang after her.
+
+“Mabel, where are you going?”
+
+Then, for the first time in her life, she lied to her husband frankly
+and fully.
+
+“I am going to rest a little,” she said. “I shall see you presently at
+supper.”
+
+He still hesitated, but she met his eyes, pale indeed, but so honest
+that he fell back.
+
+“Very well, my dear.... Mabel, try to understand.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He came down to supper half-an-hour later, primed with logic, and even
+kindled with emotion. The argument seemed to him now so utterly
+convincing; granted the premises that they both accepted and lived by,
+the conclusion was simply inevitable.
+
+He waited a minute or two, and at last went to the tube that
+communicated with the servants’ quarters.
+
+“Where is Mrs. Brand?” he asked.
+
+There was an instant’s silence, and then the answer came:
+
+“She left the house half-an-hour ago, sir. I thought you knew.”
+
+
+III
+
+That same evening Mr. Francis was very busy in his office over the
+details connected with the festival of Sustenance that was to be
+celebrated on the first of July. It was the first time that the
+particular ceremony had taken place, and he was anxious that it should
+be as successful as its predecessors. There were a few differences
+between this and the others, and it was necessary that the
+_ceremoniarii_ should be fully instructed.
+
+So, with his model before him--a miniature replica of the interior of
+the Abbey, with tiny dummy figures on blocks that could be shifted this
+way and that, he was engaged in adding in a minute ecclesiastical hand
+rubrical notes to his copy of the Order of Proceedings.
+
+When the porter therefore rang up a little after twenty-one o’clock,
+that a lady wished to see him, he answered rather brusquely down the
+tube that it was impossible. But the bell rang again, and to his
+impatient question, the reply came up that it was Mrs. Brand below, and
+that she did not ask for more than ten minutes’ conversation. This was
+quite another matter. Oliver Brand was an important personage, and his
+wife therefore had significance, and Mr. Francis apologised, gave
+directions that she was to come to his ante-room, and rose, sighing,
+from his dummy Abbey and officials.
+
+She seemed very quiet this evening, he thought, as he shook hands with
+her a minute later; she wore her veil down, so that he could not see her
+face very well, but her voice seemed to lack its usual vivacity.
+
+“I am so sorry to interrupt you, Mr. Francis,” she said. “I only want to
+ask you one or two questions.”
+
+He smiled at her encouragingly.
+
+“Mr. Brand, no doubt---”
+
+“No,” she said, “Mr. Brand has not sent me. It is entirely my own
+affair. You will see my reasons presently. I will begin at once. I know
+I must not keep you.”
+
+It all seemed rather odd, he thought, but no doubt he would understand
+soon.
+
+“First,” she said, “I think you used to know Father Franklin. He became
+a Cardinal, didn’t he?”
+
+Mr. Francis assented, smiling.
+
+“Do you know if he is alive?”
+
+“No,” he said. “He is dead. He was in Rome, you know, at the time of its
+destruction.”
+
+“Ah! You are sure?”
+
+“Quite sure. Only one Cardinal escaped--Steinmann. He was hanged in
+Berlin; and the Patriarch of Jerusalem died a week or two later.”
+
+“Ah! very well. Well, now, here is a very odd question. I ask for a
+particular reason, which I cannot explain, but you will soon
+understand.... It is this--Why do Catholics believe in God?”
+
+He was so much taken aback that for a moment he sat staring.
+
+“Yes,” she said tranquilly, “it is a very odd question. But---” she
+hesitated. “Well, I will tell you,” she said. “The fact is, that I have
+a friend who is--is in danger from this new law. I want to be able to
+argue with her; and I must know her side. You are the only priest--I
+mean who has been a priest--whom I ever knew, except Father Franklin. So
+I thought you would not mind telling me.”
+
+Her voice was entirely natural; there was not a tremor or a falter in
+it. Mr. Francis smiled genially, rubbing his hands softly together.
+
+“Ah!” he said. “Yes, I see.... Well, that is a very large question.
+Would not to-morrow, perhaps---?”
+
+“I only want just the shortest answer,” she said. “It is really
+important for me to know at once. You see, this new law comes into
+force---”
+
+He nodded.
+
+“Well--very briefly, I should say this: Catholics say that God can be
+perceived by reason; that from the arrangements of the world they can
+deduce that there must have been an Arranger--a Mind, you understand.
+Then they say that they deduce other things about God--that He is Love,
+for example, because of happiness---”
+
+“And the pain?” she interrupted.
+
+He smiled again.
+
+“Yes. That is the point--that is the weak point.”
+
+“But what do they say about that?”
+
+“Well, briefly, they say that pain is the result of sin---”
+
+“And sin? You see, I know nothing at all, Mr. Francis.”
+
+“Well, sin is the rebellion of man’s will against God’s.”
+
+“What do they mean by that?”
+
+“Well, you see, they say that God wanted to be loved by His creatures,
+so He made them free; otherwise they could not really love. But if they
+were free, it means that they could if they liked refuse to love and
+obey God; and that is what is called Sin. You see what nonsense---”
+
+She jerked her head a little.
+
+“Yes, yes,” she said. “But I really want to get at what they think....
+Well, then, that is all?”
+
+Mr. Francis pursed his lips.
+
+“Scarcely,” he said; “that is hardly more than what they call Natural
+Religion. Catholics believe much more than that.”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“My dear Mrs. Brand, it is impossible to put it in a few words. But, in
+brief, they believe that God became man--that Jesus was God, and that He
+did this in order to save them from sin by dying---”
+
+“By bearing pain, you mean?”
+
+“Yes; by dying. Well, what they call the Incarnation is really the
+point. Everything else flows from that. And, once a man believes that, I
+must confess that all the rest follows--even down to scapulars and holy
+water.”
+
+“Mr. Francis, I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”
+
+He smiled indulgently.
+
+“Of course not,” he said; “it is all incredible nonsense. But, you know,
+I did really believe it all once.”
+
+“But it’s unreasonable,” she said.
+
+He made a little demurring sound.
+
+“Yes,” he said, “in one sense, of course it is--utterly unreasonable.
+But in another sense---”
+
+She leaned forward suddenly, and he could catch the glint of her eyes
+beneath her white veil.
+
+“Ah!” she said, almost breathlessly. “That is what I want to hear. Now,
+tell me how they justify it.”
+
+He paused an instant, considering.
+
+“Well,” he said slowly, “as far as I remember, they say that there are
+other faculties besides those of reason. They say, for example, that
+the heart sometimes finds out things that the reason cannot--intuitions,
+you see. For instance, they say that all things such as self-sacrifice
+and chivalry and even art--all come from the heart, that Reason comes
+with them--in rules of technique, for instance--but that it cannot prove
+them; they are quite apart from that.”
+
+“I think I see.”
+
+“Well, they say that Religion is like that--in other words, they
+practically confess that it is merely a matter of emotion.” He paused
+again, trying to be fair. “Well, perhaps they would not say
+that--although it is true. But briefly---”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“Well, they say there is a thing called Faith--a kind of deep conviction
+unlike anything else--supernatural--which God is supposed to give to
+people who desire it--to people who pray for it, and lead good lives,
+and so on---”
+
+“And this Faith?”
+
+“Well, this Faith, acting upon what they call Evidences--this Faith
+makes them absolutely certain that there is a God, that He was made man
+and so on, with the Church and all the rest of it. They say too that
+this is further proved by the effect that their religion has had in the
+world, and by the way it explains man’s nature to himself. You see, it
+is just a case of self-suggestion.”
+
+He heard her sigh, and stopped.
+
+“Is that any clearer, Mrs. Brand?”
+
+“Thank you very much,” she said, “it certainly is clearer. ... And it is
+true that Christians have died for this Faith, whatever it is?”
+
+“Oh! yes. Thousands and thousands. Just as Mohammedans have for theirs.”
+
+“The Mohammedans believe in God, too, don’t they?”
+
+“Well, they did, and I suppose that a few do now. But very few: the rest
+have become esoteric, as they say.”
+
+“And--and which would you say were the most highly evolved people--East
+or West?”
+
+“Oh! West undoubtedly. The East thinks a good deal, but it doesn’t act
+much. And that always leads to confusion--even to stagnation of
+thought.”
+
+“And Christianity certainly has been the Religion of the West up to a
+hundred years ago?”
+
+“Oh! yes.”
+
+She was silent then, and Mr. Francis had time again to reflect how very
+odd all this was. She certainly must be very much attached to this
+Christian friend of hers.
+
+Then she stood up, and he rose with her.
+
+“Thank you so much, Mr. Francis.... Then that is the kind of outline?”
+
+“Well, yes; so far as one can put it in a few words.”
+
+“Thank you.... I mustn’t keep you.”
+
+He went with her towards the door. But within a yard of it she stopped.
+
+“And you, Mr. Francis. You were brought up in all this. Does it ever
+come back to you?”
+
+He smiled.
+
+“Never,” he said, “except as a dream.”
+
+“How do you account for that, then? If it is all self-suggestion, you
+have had thirty years of it.”
+
+She paused; and for a moment he hesitated what to answer.
+
+“How would your old fellow-Catholics account for it?”
+
+“They would say that I had forfeited light--that Faith was withdrawn.”
+
+“And you?”
+
+Again he paused.
+
+“I should say that I had made a stronger self-suggestion the other way.”
+
+“I see.... Good-night, Mr. Francis.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She would not let him come down the lift with her, so when he had seen
+the smooth box drop noiselessly below the level, he went back again to
+his model of the Abbey and the little dummy figures. But, before he
+began to move these about again, he sat for a moment or two with pursed
+lips, staring.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+I
+
+A week later Mabel awoke about dawn; and for a moment or two forgot
+where she was. She even spoke Oliver’s name aloud, staring round the
+unfamiliar room, wondering what she did here. Then she remembered, and
+was silent....
+
+It was the eighth day she had spent in this Home; her probation was
+finished: to-day she was at liberty to do that for which she had come.
+On the Saturday of the previous week she had gone through her private
+examination before the magistrate, stating under the usual conditions of
+secrecy her name, age and home, as well as her reasons for making the
+application for Euthanasia; and all had passed off well. She had
+selected Manchester as being sufficiently remote and sufficiently large
+to secure her freedom from Oliver’s molestation; and her secret had been
+admirably kept. There was not a hint that her husband knew anything of
+her intentions; for, after all, in these cases the police were bound to
+assist the fugitive. Individualism was at least so far recognised as to
+secure to those weary of life the right of relinquishing it. She
+scarcely knew why she had selected this method, except that any other
+seemed impossible. The knife required skill and resolution; firearms
+were unthinkable, and poison, under the new stringent regulations, was
+hard to obtain. Besides, she seriously wished to test her own
+intentions, and to be quite sure that there was no other way than
+this....
+
+Well, she was as certain as ever. The thought had first come to her in
+the mad misery of the outbreak of violence on the last day of the old
+year. Then it had gone again, soothed away by the arguments that man was
+still liable to relapse. Then once more it had recurred, a cold and
+convincing phantom, in the plain daylight revealed by Felsenburgh’s
+Declaration. It had taken up its abode with her then, yet she controlled
+it, hoping against hope that the Declaration would not be carried into
+action, occasionally revolting against its horror. Yet it had never been
+far away; and finally when the policy sprouted into deliberate law, she
+had yielded herself resolutely to its suggestion. That was eight days
+ago; and she had not had one moment of faltering since that.
+
+Yet she had ceased to condemn. The logic had silenced her. All that she
+knew was that she could not bear it; that she had misconceived the New
+Faith; that for her, whatever it was for others, there was no hope....
+She had not even a child of her own.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Those eight days, required by law, had passed very peacefully. She had
+taken with her enough money to enter one of the private homes furnished
+with sufficient comfort to save from distractions those who had been
+accustomed to gentle living: the nurses had been pleasant and
+sympathetic; she had nothing to complain of.
+
+She had suffered, of course, to some degree from reactions. The second
+night after her arrival had been terrible, when, as she lay in bed in
+the hot darkness, her whole sentient life had protested and struggled
+against the fate her will ordained. It had demanded the familiar
+things--the promise of food and breath and human intercourse; it had
+writhed in horror against the blind dark towards which it moved so
+inevitably; and, in the agony had been pacified only by the half-hinted
+promise of some deeper voice suggesting that death was not the end. With
+morning light sanity had come back; the will had reassumed the mastery,
+and, with it, had withdrawn explicitly the implied hope of continued
+existence. She had suffered again for an hour or two from a more
+concrete fear; the memory came back to her of those shocking revelations
+that ten years ago had convulsed England and brought about the
+establishment of these Homes under Government supervision--those
+evidences that for years in the great vivisection laboratories human
+subjects had been practised upon--persons who with the same intentions
+as herself had cut themselves off from the world in private
+euthanasia-houses, to whom had been supplied a gas that suspended
+instead of destroying animation.... But this, too, had passed with the
+return of light. Such things were impossible now under the new
+system--at least, in England. She had refrained from making an end upon
+the Continent for this very reason. There, where sentiment was weaker,
+and logic more imperious, materialism was more consistent. Since men
+were but animals--the conclusion was inevitable.
+
+There had been but one physical drawback, the intolerable heat of the
+days and nights. It seemed, scientists said, that an entirely unexpected
+heat-wave had been generated; there were a dozen theories, most of which
+were mutually exclusive one of another. It was humiliating, she thought,
+that men who professed to have taken the earth under their charge should
+be so completely baffled. The conditions of the weather had of course
+been accompanied by disasters; there had been earthquakes of astonishing
+violence, a ripple had wrecked not less than twenty-five towns in
+America; an island or two had disappeared, and that bewildering Vesuvius
+seemed to be working up for a denouement. But no one knew really the
+explanation. One man had been wild enough to say that some cataclysm had
+taken place in the centre of the earth.... So she had heard from her
+nurse; but she was not greatly interested. It was only tiresome that she
+could not walk much in the garden, and had to be content with sitting in
+her own cool shaded room on the second floor.
+
+There was only one other matter of which she had asked, namely, the
+effect of the new decree; but the nurse did not seem to know much about
+that. It appeared that there had been an outrage or two, but the law had
+not yet been enforced to any great extent; a week, after all, was a
+short time, even though the decree had taken effect at once, and
+magistrates were beginning the prescribed census.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It seemed to her as she lay awake this morning, staring at the tinted
+ceiling, and out now and again at the quiet little room, that the heat
+was worse than ever. For a minute she thought she must have overslept;
+but, as she touched her repeater, it told her that it was scarcely after
+four o’clock. Well, well; she would not have to bear it much longer; she
+thought that about eight it would be time to make an end. There was her
+letter to Oliver yet to be written; and one or two final arrangements to
+be made.
+
+As regarded the morality of what she was doing-the relation, that is to
+say, which her act bore to the common life of man--she had no shadow of
+doubt. It was her belief, as of the whole Humanitarian world, that just
+as bodily pain occasionally justified this termination of life, so also
+did mental pain. There was a certain pitch of distress at which the
+individual was no longer necessary to himself or the world; it was the
+most charitable act that could be performed. But she had never thought
+in old days that that state could ever be hers; Life had been much too
+interesting. But it had come to this: there was no question of it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Perhaps a dozen times in that week she had thought over her conversation
+with Mr. Francis. Her going to him had been little more than
+instinctive; she did just wish to hear what the other side was--whether
+Christianity was as ludicrous as she had always thought. It seemed that
+it was not ludicrous; it was only terribly pathetic. It was just a
+lovely dream--an exquisite piece of poetry. It would be heavenly to
+believe it, but she did not. No--a transcendent God was unthinkable,
+although not quite so unthinkable as a merely immeasurable Man. And as
+for the Incarnation--well, well!
+
+There seemed no way out of it. The Humanity-Religion was the only one.
+Man was God, or at least His highest manifestation; and He was a God
+with which she did not wish to have anything more to do. These faint new
+instincts after something other than intellect and emotion were, she
+knew perfectly well, nothing but refined emotion itself.
+
+She had thought a great deal of Felsenburgh, however, and was astonished
+at her own feelings. He was certainly the most impressive man she had
+ever seen; it did seem very probable indeed that He was what He claimed
+to be--the Incarnation of the ideal Man the first perfect product of
+humanity. But the logic of his position was too much for her. She saw
+now that He was perfectly logical--that He had not been inconsistent in
+denouncing the destruction of Rome and a week later making His
+declaration. It was the passion of one man against another that He
+denounced--of kingdom against kingdom, and sect against sect--for this
+was suicidal for the race. He denounced passion, too, not judicial
+action. Therefore, this new decree was as logical as Himself--it was a
+judicial act on the part of an united world against a tiny majority that
+threatened the principle of life and faith: and it was to be carried out
+with supreme mercy; there was no revenge or passion or partisan spirit
+in it from beginning to end; no more than a man is revengeful or
+passionate when he amputates a diseased limb--Oliver had convinced her
+of that.
+
+Yes, it was logical and sound. And it was because it was so that she
+could not bear it.... But ah! what a sublime man Felsenburgh was; it was
+a joy to her even to recall his speeches and his personality. She would
+have liked to see him again. But it was no good. She had better be done
+with it as tranquilly as possible. And the world must go forward without
+her. She was just tired out with Facts.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She dozed off again presently, and it seemed scarcely five minutes
+before she looked up to see a gentle smiling face of a white-capped
+nurse bending over her.
+
+“It is nearly six o’clock, my dear--the time you told me. I came to see
+about breakfast.”
+
+Mabel drew a long breath. Then she sat up suddenly, throwing back the
+sheet.
+
+
+II
+
+It struck a quarter-past six from the little clock on the mantel-shelf
+as she laid down her pen. Then she took up the closely written sheets,
+leaned back in her deep chair, and began to read.
+
+“HOME OF REST,
+
+“NO 3A MANCHESTER WEST.
+
+“MY DEAR: I am very sorry, but it has come back to me. I really cannot
+go on any longer, so I am going to escape in the only way left, as I
+once told you. I have had a very quiet and happy time here; they have
+been most kind and considerate. You see, of course, from the heading on
+this paper, what I mean....
+
+“Well, you have always been very dear to me; you are still, even at this
+moment. So you have a right to know my reasons so far as I know them
+myself. It is very difficult to understand myself; but it seems to me
+that I am not strong enough to live. So long as I was pleased and
+excited it was all very well--especially when He came. But I think I had
+expected it to be different; I did not understand as I do now how it
+must come to this--how it is all quite logical and right. I could bear
+it, when I thought that they had acted through passion, but this is
+deliberate. I did not realise that Peace must have its laws, and must
+protect itself. And, somehow, that Peace is not what I want. It is being
+alive at all that is wrong.
+
+“Then there is this difficulty. I know how absolutely in agreement you
+are with this new state of affairs; of course you are, because you are
+so much stronger and more logical than I am. But if you have a wife she
+must be of one mind with you. And I am not, any more, at least not with
+my heart, though I see you are right.... Do you understand, my dear?
+
+“If we had had a child, it might have been different. I might have liked
+to go on living for his sake. But Humanity, somehow--Oh! Oliver! I
+can’t--I can’t.
+
+“I know I am wrong, and that you are right--but there it is; I cannot
+change myself. So I am quite sure that I must go.
+
+“Then I want to tell you this--that I am not at all frightened. I never
+can understand why people are--unless, of course, they are Christians. I
+should be horribly frightened if I was one of them. But, you see, we
+both know that there is nothing beyond. It is life that I am frightened
+of--not death. Of course, I should be frightened if there was any pain;
+but the doctors tell me there is absolutely none. It is simply going to
+sleep. The nerves are dead before the brain. I am going to do it myself.
+I don’t want any one else in the room. In a few minutes the nurse
+here--Sister Anne, with whom I have made great friends--will bring in
+the thing, and then she will leave me.
+
+“As regards what happens afterwards, I do not mind at all. Please do
+exactly what you wish. The cremation will take place to-morrow morning
+at noon, so that you can be here if you like. Or you can send
+directions, and they will send on the urn to you. I know you liked to
+have your mother’s urn in the garden; so perhaps you will like mine.
+Please do exactly what you like. And with all my things too. Of course I
+leave them to you.
+
+“Now, my dear, I want to say this--that I am very sorry indeed now that
+I was so tiresome and stupid. I think I did really believe your
+arguments all along. But I did not want to believe them. Do you see now
+why I was so tiresome?
+
+“Oliver, my darling, you have been extraordinarily good to me.... Yes, I
+know I am crying, but I am really very happy. This is such a lovely
+ending. I wish I hadn’t been obliged to make you so anxious during this
+last week: but I had to--I knew you would persuade me against it, if you
+found me, and that would have been worse than ever. I am sorry I told
+you that lie, too. Indeed, it is the first I ever did tell you.
+
+“Well, I don’t think there is much more to say. Oliver, my dear,
+good-bye. I send you my love with all my heart.
+
+“MABEL.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She sat still when she had read it through, and her eyes were still wet
+with tears. Yet it was all perfectly true. She was far happier than she
+could be if she had still the prospect of going back. Life seemed
+entirely blank: death was so obvious an escape; her soul ached for it,
+as a body for sleep.
+
+She directed the envelope, still with a perfectly steady hand, laid it
+on the table, and leaned back once more, glancing again at her untasted
+breakfast.
+
+Then she suddenly began to think of her conversation with Mr. Francis;
+and, by a strange association of ideas, remembered the fall of the volor
+in Brighton, the busy-ness of the priest, and the Euthanasia boxes....
+
+When Sister Anne came in a few minutes later, she was astonished at what
+she saw. The girl crouched at the window, her hands on the sill, staring
+out at the sky in an attitude of unmistakable horror.
+
+Sister Anne came across the room quickly, setting down something on the
+table as she passed. She touched the girl on the shoulder.
+
+“My dear, what is it?”
+
+There was a long sobbing breath, and Mabel turned, rising as she turned,
+and clutched the nurse with one shaking hand, pointing out with the
+other.
+
+“There!” she said. “There--look!”
+
+“Well, my dear, what is it? I see nothing. It is a little dark!”
+
+“Dark!” said the other. “You call that dark! Why, why, it is
+black--black!”
+
+The nurse drew her softly backwards to the chair, turning her from the
+window. She recognised nervous fear; but no more than that. But Mabel
+tore herself free, and wheeled again.
+
+“You call that a little dark,” she said. “Why, look, sister, look!”
+
+Yet there was nothing remarkable to be seen. In front rose up the
+feathery hand of an elm, then the shuttered windows across the court,
+the roof, and above that the morning sky, a little heavy and dusky as
+before a storm; but no more than that.
+
+“Well, what is it, my dear? What do you see?”
+
+“Why, why ... look! look!--There, listen to that.”
+
+A faint far-away rumble sounded as the rolling of a waggon--so faint
+that it might almost be an aural delusion. But the girl’s hands were at
+her ears, and her face was one white wide-eyed mask of terror. The nurse
+threw her arms round her.
+
+“My dear,” she said, “you are not yourself. That is nothing but a little
+heat-thunder. Sit down quietly.”
+
+She could feel the girl’s body shaking beneath her hands, but there was
+no resistance as she drew her to the chair.
+
+“The lights! the lights!” sobbed Mabel.
+
+“Will you promise me to sit quietly, then?”
+
+She nodded; and the nurse went across to the door, smiling tenderly; she
+had seen such things before. A moment later the room was full of
+exquisite sunlight, as she switched the handle. As she turned, she saw
+that Mabel had wheeled herself round in the chair, and with clasped
+hands was still staring out at the sky above the roofs; but she was
+plainly quieter again now. The nurse came back, and put her hand on her
+shoulder.
+
+“You are overwrought, my dear.... Now you must believe me. There is
+nothing to be frightened of. It is just nervous excitement.... Shall I
+pull down the blind?”
+
+Mabel turned her face.... Yes, certainly the light had reassured her.
+Her face was still white and bewildered, but the steady look was coming
+back to her eyes, though, even as she spoke, they wandered back more
+than once to the window.
+
+“Nurse,” she said more quietly, “please look again and tell me if you
+see nothing. If you say there is nothing I will believe that I am going
+mad. No; you must not touch the blind.”
+
+No; there was nothing. The sky was a little dark, as if a blight were
+coming on; but there was hardly more than a veil of cloud, and the light
+was scarcely more than tinged with gloom. It was just such a sky as
+precedes a spring thunderstorm. She said so, clearly and firmly.
+
+Mabel’s face steadied still more.
+
+“Very well, nurse.... Then---”
+
+She turned to the little table by the side on which Sister Anne had set
+down what she had brought into the room.
+
+“Show me, please.”
+
+The nurse still hesitated.
+
+“Are you sure you are not too frightened, my dear? Shall I get you
+anything?”
+
+“I have no more to say,” said Mabel firmly. “Show me, please.”
+
+Sister Anne turned resolutely to the table.
+
+There rested upon it a white-enamelled box, delicately painted with
+flowers. From this box emerged a white flexible tube with a broad
+mouthpiece, fitted with two leather-covered steel clasps. From the side
+of the box nearest the chair protruded a little china handle.
+
+“Now, my dear,” began the nurse quietly, watching the other’s eyes turn
+once again to the window, and then back--“now, my dear, you sit there,
+as you are now. Your head right back, please. When you are ready, you
+put this over your mouth, and clasp the springs behind your head....
+So.... it works quite easily. Then you turn this handle, round that way,
+as far as it will go. And that is all.”
+
+Mabel nodded. She had regained her self-command, and understood plainly
+enough, though even as she spoke once again her eyes strayed away to the
+window.
+
+“That is all,” she said. “And what then?”
+
+The nurse eyed her doubtfully for a moment.
+
+“I understand perfectly,” said Mabel. “And what then?”
+
+“There is nothing more. Breathe naturally. You will feel sleepy almost
+directly. Then you close your eyes, and that is all.”
+
+Mabel laid the tube on the table and stood up. She was completely
+herself now.
+
+“Give me a kiss, sister,” she said.
+
+The nurse nodded and smiled to her once more at the door. But Mabel
+hardly noticed it; again she was looking towards the window.
+
+“I shall come back in half-an-hour,” said Sister Anne.
+
+Then her eyes caught a square of white upon the centre table. “Ah! that
+letter!” she said.
+
+“Yes,” said the girl absently. “Please take it.”
+
+The nurse took it up, glanced at the address, and again at Mabel. Still
+she hesitated.
+
+“In half-an-hour,” she repeated. “There is no hurry at all. It doesn’t
+take five minutes.... Good-bye, my dear.”
+
+But Mabel was still looking out of the window, and made no answer.
+
+
+III
+
+Mabel stood perfectly still until she heard the locking of the door and
+the withdrawal of the key. Then once more she went to the window and
+clasped the sill.
+
+From where she stood there was visible to her first the courtyard
+beneath, with its lawn in the centre, and a couple of trees growing
+there--all plain in the brilliant light that now streamed from her
+window, and secondly, above the roofs, a tremendous pall of ruddy black.
+It was the more terrible from the contrast. Earth, it seemed, was
+capable of light; heaven had failed.
+
+It appeared, too, that there was a curious stillness. The house was,
+usually, quiet enough at this hour: the inhabitants of that place were
+in no mood for bustle: but now it was more than quiet; it was deathly
+still: it was such a hush as precedes the sudden crash of the sky’s
+artillery. But the moments went by, and there was no such crash: only
+once again there sounded a solemn rolling, as of some great wain far
+away; stupendously impressive, for with it to the girl’s ears there
+seemed mingled a murmur of innumerable voices, ghostly crying and
+applause. Then again the hush settled down like wool.
+
+She had begun to understand now. The darkness and the sounds were not
+for all eyes and ears. The nurse had seen and heard nothing
+extraordinary, and the rest of the world of men saw and heard nothing.
+To them it was no more than the hint of a coming storm.
+
+Mabel did not attempt to distinguish between the subjective and the
+objective. It was nothing to her as to whether the sights and sounds
+were generated by her own brain or perceived by some faculty hitherto
+unknown. She seemed to herself to be standing already apart from the
+world which she had known; it was receding from her, or, rather, while
+standing where it had always done, it was melting, transforming itself,
+passing to some other mode of existence. The strangeness seemed no more
+strange than anything else than that ... that little painted box upon
+the table.
+
+Then, hardly knowing what she said, looking steadily upon that appalling
+sky, she began to speak....
+
+“O God!” she said. “If You are really there really there---”
+
+Her voice faltered, and she gripped the sill to steady herself. She
+wondered vaguely why she spoke so; it was neither intellect nor emotion
+that inspired her. Yet she continued....
+
+“O God, I know You are not there--of course You are not. But if You were
+there, I know what I would say to You. I would tell You how puzzled and
+tired I am. No--No--I need not tell You: You would know it. But I would
+say that I was very sorry for all this. Oh! You would know that too. I
+need not say anything at all. O God! I don’t know what I want to say. I
+would like You to look after Oliver, of course, and all Your poor
+Christians. Oh! they will have such a hard time.... God. God--You would
+understand, wouldn’t You?” ...
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Again came the heavy rumble and the solemn bass of a myriad voices; it
+seemed a shade nearer, she thought.... She never liked thunderstorms or
+shouting crowds. They always gave her a headache ...
+
+“Well, well,” she said. “Good-bye, everything---”
+
+Then she was in the chair. The mouthpiece--yes; that was it....
+
+She was furious at the trembling of her hands; twice the spring slipped
+from her polished coils of hair.... Then it was fixed ... and as if a
+breeze fanned her, her sense came back....
+
+She found she could breathe quite easily; there was no resistance--that
+was a comfort; there would be no suffocation about it.... She put out
+her left hand and touched the handle, conscious less of its sudden
+coolness than of the unbearable heat in which the room seemed almost
+suddenly plunged. She could hear the drumming pulses in her temples and
+the roaring of the voices.... She dropped the handle once more, and with
+both hands tore at the loose white wrapper that she had put on this
+morning....
+
+Yes, that was a little easier; she could breathe better so. Again her
+fingers felt for and found the handle, but the sweat streamed from her
+fingers, and for an instant she could not turn the knob. Then it yielded
+suddenly....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For one instant the sweet languid smell struck her consciousness like a
+blow, for she knew it as the scent of death. Then the steady will that
+had borne her so far asserted itself, and she laid her hands softly in
+her lap, breathing deeply and easily.
+
+She had closed her eyes at the turning of the handle, but now opened
+them again, curious to watch the aspect of the fading world. She had
+determined to do this a week ago: she would at least miss nothing of
+this unique last experience.
+
+It seemed at first that there was no change. There was the feathery head
+of the elm, the lead roof opposite, and the terrible sky above. She
+noticed a pigeon, white against the blackness, soar and swoop again out
+of sight in an instant....
+
+... Then the following things happened....
+
+There was a sudden sensation of ecstatic lightness in all her limbs; she
+attempted to lift a hand, and was aware that it was impossible; it was
+no longer hers. She attempted to lower her eyes from that broad strip of
+violet sky, and perceived that that too was impossible. Then she
+understood that the will had already lost touch with the body, that the
+crumbling world had receded to an infinite distance--that was as she had
+expected, but what continued to puzzle her was that her mind was still
+active. It was true that the world she had known had withdrawn itself
+from the dominion of consciousness, as her body had done, except, that
+was, in the sense of hearing, which was still strangely alert; yet there
+was still enough memory to be aware that there was such a world--that
+there were other persons in existence; that men went about their
+business, knowing nothing of what had happened; but faces, names,
+places had all alike gone. In fact, she was conscious of herself in such
+a manner as she had never been before; it seemed as if she had
+penetrated at last into some recess of her being into which hitherto she
+had only looked as through clouded glass. This was very strange, and yet
+it was familiar, too; she had arrived, it seemed, at a centre, round the
+circumference of which she had been circling all her life; and it was
+more than a mere point: it was a distinct space, walled and enclosed....
+At the same instant she knew that hearing, too, was gone....
+
+Then an amazing thing happened--yet it appeared to her that she had
+always known it would happen, although her mind had never articulated
+it. This is what happened.
+
+The enclosure melted, with a sound of breaking, and a limitless space
+was about her--limitless, different to everything else, and alive, and
+astir. It was alive, as a breathing, panting body is alive--self-evident
+and overpowering--it was one, yet it was many; it was immaterial, yet
+absolutely real--real in a sense in which she never dreamed of
+reality....
+
+Yet even this was familiar, as a place often visited in dreams is
+familiar; and then, without warning, something resembling sound or
+light, something which she knew in an instant to be unique, tore across
+it....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then she saw, and understood....
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+I
+
+Oliver had passed the days since Mabel’s disappearance in an
+indescribable horror. He had done all that was possible: he had traced
+her to the station and to Victoria, where he lost her clue; he had
+communicated with the police, and the official answer, telling him
+nothing, had arrived to the effect that there was no news: and it was
+not until the Tuesday following her disappearance that Mr. Francis,
+hearing by chance of his trouble, informed him by telephone that he had
+spoken with her on the Friday night. But there was no satisfaction to be
+got from him--indeed, the news was bad rather than good, for Oliver
+could not but be dismayed at the report of the conversation, in spite of
+Mr. Francis’s assurances that Mrs. Brand had shown no kind of
+inclination to defend the Christian cause.
+
+Two theories gradually emerged, in his mind; either she was gone to the
+protection of some unknown Catholic, or--and he grew sick at the
+thought--she had applied somewhere for Euthanasia as she had once
+threatened, and was now under the care of the Law; such an event was
+sufficiently common since the passing of the Release Act in 1998. And it
+was frightful that he could not condemn it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the Tuesday evening, as he sat heavily in his room, for the hundredth
+time attempting to trace out some coherent line through the maze of
+intercourse he had had with his wife during these past months, his bell
+suddenly rang. It was the red label of Whitehall that had made its
+appearance; and for an instant his heart leaped with hope that it was
+news of her. But at the first words it sank again.
+
+“Brand,” came the sharp fairy voice, “is that you?... Yes, I am
+Snowford. You are wanted at once--at once, you understand. There is an
+extraordinary meeting of the Council at twenty o’clock. The President
+will be there. You understand the urgency. No time for more. Come
+instantly to my room.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Even this message scarcely distracted him. He, with the rest of the
+world, was no longer surprised at the sudden descents of the President.
+He came and vanished again without warning, travelling and working with
+incredible energy, yet always, as it seemed, retaining his personal
+calm.
+
+It was already after nineteen; Oliver supped immediately, and a
+quarter-of-an-hour before the hour presented himself in Snowford’s room,
+where half a dozen of his colleagues were assembled.
+
+That minister came forward to meet him, with a strange excitement in his
+face. He drew him aside by a button.
+
+“See here, Brand, you are wanted to speak first--immediately after the
+President’s Secretary who will open; they are coming from Paris. It is
+about a new matter altogether. He has had information of the whereabouts
+of the Pope.... It seems that there is one.... Oh, you will understand
+presently. Oh, and by the way,” he went on, looking curiously at the
+strained face, “I am sorry to hear of your anxiety. Pemberton told me
+just now.”
+
+Oliver lifted a hand abruptly.
+
+“Tell me,” he said. “What am I wanted to say?”
+
+“Well, the President will have a proposal, we imagine. You know our
+minds well enough. Just explain our attitude towards the Catholics.”
+
+Oliver’s eyes shrank suddenly to two bright lines beneath the lids. He
+nodded.
+
+Cartwright came up presently, an immense, bent old man with a face of
+parchment, as befitted the Lord Chief Justice.
+
+“By the way, Brand, what do you know of a man called Phillips? He seems
+to have mentioned your name.”
+
+“He was my secretary,” said Oliver slowly. “What about him?”
+
+“I think he must be mad. He has given himself up to a magistrate,
+entreating to be examined at once. The magistrate has applied for
+instructions. You see, the Act has scarcely begun to move yet.”
+
+“But what has he done?”
+
+“That’s the difficulty. He says he cannot deny God, neither can he
+affirm Him.--He was your secretary, then?”
+
+“Certainly. I knew he was inclined to Christianity. I had to get rid of
+him for that.”
+
+“Well, he is to be remanded for a week. Perhaps he will be able to make
+up his mind.”
+
+Then the talk shifted off again. Two or three more came up, and all eyed
+Oliver with a certain curiosity; the story was gone about that his wife
+had left him. They wished to see how he took it.
+
+At five minutes before the hour a bell rang, and the door into the
+corridor was thrown open.
+
+“Come, gentlemen,” said the Prime Minister.
+
+The Council Chamber was a long high room on the first floor; its walls
+from floor to ceiling were lined with books. A noiseless rubber carpet
+was underfoot. There were no windows; the room was lighted artificially.
+A long table, set round with armed chairs, ran the length of the floor,
+eight on either side; and the Presidential chair, raised on a dais,
+stood at the head.
+
+Each man went straight to his chair in silence, and remained there,
+waiting.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The room was beautifully cool, in spite of the absence of windows, and
+was a pleasant contrast to the hot evening outside through which most of
+these men had come. They, too, had wondered at the surprising weather,
+and had smiled at the conflict of the infallible. But they were not
+thinking about that now: the coming of the President was a matter which
+always silenced the most loquacious. Besides, this time, they understood
+that the affair was more serious than usual.
+
+At one minute before the hour, again a bell sounded, four times, and
+ceased; and at the signal each man turned instinctively to the high
+sliding door behind the Presidential chair. There was dead silence
+within and without: the huge Government offices were luxuriously
+provided with sound-deadening apparatus, and not even the rolling of the
+vast motors within a hundred yards was able to send a vibration through
+the layers of rubber on which the walls rested. There was only one noise
+that could penetrate, and that the sound of thunder. The experts were at
+present unable to exclude this.
+
+Again the silence seemed to fall in one yet deeper veil. Then the door
+opened, and a figure came swiftly through, followed by Another in black
+and scarlet.
+
+
+II
+
+He passed straight up to the chair, followed by two secretaries, bowed
+slightly to this side and that, sat down and made a little gesture. Then
+they, too, were in their chairs, upright and intent. For perhaps the
+hundredth time, Oliver, staring upon the President, marvelled at the
+quietness and the astounding personality of Him. He was in the English
+judicial dress that had passed down through centuries--black and scarlet
+with sleeves of white fur and a crimson sash--and that had lately been
+adopted as the English presidential costume of him who stood at the head
+of the legislature. But it was in His personality, in the atmosphere
+that flowed from Him, that the marvel lay. It was as the scent of the
+sea to the physical nature--it exhilarated, cleansed, kindled,
+intoxicated. It was as inexplicably attractive as a cherry orchard in
+spring, as affecting as the cry of stringed instruments, as compelling
+as a storm. So writers had said. They compared it to a stream of clear
+water, to the flash of a gem, to the love of woman. They lost all
+decency sometimes; they said it fitted all moods, as the voice of many
+waters; they called it again and again, as explicitly as possible, the
+Divine Nature perfectly Incarnate at last....
+
+Then Oliver’s reflections dropped from him like a mantle, for the
+President, with downcast eyes and head thrown back, made a little
+gesture to the ruddy-faced secretary on His right; and this man, without
+a movement, began to speak like an impersonal actor repeating his part.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+“Gentlemen,” he said, in an even, resonant voice, “the President is come
+direct from Paris. This afternoon His Honour was in Berlin; this
+morning, early, in Moscow. Yesterday in New York. To-night His Honour
+must be in Turin; and to-morrow will begin to return through Spain,
+North Africa, Greece and the southeastern states.”
+
+This was the usual formula for such speeches. The President spoke but
+little himself now; but was careful for the information of his subjects
+on occasions like this. His secretaries were perfectly trained, and this
+speaker was no exception. After a slight pause, he continued:
+
+“This is the business, gentlemen.
+
+“Last Thursday, as you are aware, the Plenipotentaries signed the Test
+Act in this room, and it was immediately communicated all over the
+world. At sixteen o’clock His Honour received a message from a man named
+Dolgorovski--who is, it is understood, one of the Cardinals of the
+Catholic Church. This he claimed; and on inquiry it was found to be a
+fact. His information confirmed what was already suspected--namely, that
+there was a man claiming to be Pope, who had created (so the phrase is)
+other cardinals, shortly after the destruction of Rome, subsequent to
+which his own election took place in Jerusalem. It appears that this
+Pope, with a good deal of statesmanship, has chosen to keep his own name
+and place of residence a secret from even his own followers, with the
+exception of the twelve cardinals; that he has done a great deal,
+through the instrumentality of one of his cardinals in particular, and
+through his new Order in general, towards the reorganisation of the
+Catholic Church; and that at this moment he is living, apart from the
+world, in complete security.
+
+“His Honour blames Himself that He did not do more than suspect
+something of the kind--misled, He thinks, by a belief that if there had
+been a Pope, news would have been heard of it from other quarters, for,
+as is well known, the entire structure of the Christian Church rests
+upon him as upon a rock. Further, His Honour thinks inquiries should
+have been made in the very place where now it is understood that this
+Pope is living.
+
+“The man’s name, gentlemen, is Franklin---”
+
+Oliver started uncontrollably, but relapsed again to bright-eyed
+intelligence as for an instant the President glanced up from his
+motionlessness.
+
+“Franklin,” repeated the secretary, “and he is living in Nazareth,
+where, it is said, the Founder of Christianity passed His youth.
+
+“Now this, gentlemen, His Honour heard on Thursday in last week. He
+caused inquiries to be made, and on Friday morning received further
+intelligence from Dolgorovski that this Pope had summoned to Nazareth a
+meeting of his cardinals, and certain other officials, from all over the
+world, to consider what steps should be taken in view of the new Test
+Act. This His Honour takes to show an extreme want of statesmanship
+which seems hard to reconcile with his former action. These persons are
+summoned by special messengers to meet on Saturday next, and will begin
+their deliberations after some Christian ceremonies on the following
+morning.
+
+“You wish, gentlemen, no doubt, to know Dolgorovski’s motives in making
+all this known. His Honour is satisfied that they are genuine. The man
+has been losing belief in his religion; in fact, he has come to see that
+this religion is the supreme obstacle to the consolidation of the race.
+He has esteemed it his duty, therefore, to lay this information before
+His Honour. It is interesting as an historical parallel to reflect that
+the same kind of incident marked the rise of Christianity as will mark,
+it is thought, its final extinction--namely, the informing on the part
+of one of the leaders of the place and method by which the principal
+personage may be best approached. It is also, surely, very significant
+that the scene of the extinction of Christianity is identical with that
+of its inauguration....
+
+“Well, gentlemen, His Honour’s proposal is as follows, carrying out the
+Declaration to which you all acceded. It is that a force should proceed
+during the night of Saturday next to Palestine, and on the Sunday
+morning, when these men will be all gathered together, that this force
+should finish as swiftly and mercifully as possible the work to which
+the Powers have set their hands. So far, the comment of the Governments
+which have been consulted has been unanimous, and there is little doubt
+that the rest will be equally so. His Honour felt that He could not act
+in so grave a matter on His own responsibility; it is not merely local;
+it is a catholic administration of justice, and will have results wider
+than it is safe minutely to prophesy.
+
+“It is not necessary to enter into His Honour’s reasons. They are
+already well known to you; but before asking for your opinion, He
+desires me to indicate what He thinks, in the event of your approval,
+should be the method of action.
+
+“Each Government, it is proposed, should take part in the final scene,
+for it is something of a symbolic action; and for this purpose it is
+thought well that each of the three Departments of the World should
+depute volors, to the number of the constituting States, one hundred and
+twenty-two all told, to set about the business. These volors should have
+no common meeting-ground, otherwise the news will surely penetrate to
+Nazareth, for it is understood that, this new Order of Christ Crucified
+has a highly organised system of espionage. The rendezvous, then, should
+be no other than Nazareth itself; and the time of meeting should be, it
+is thought, not later than nine o’clock according to Palestine
+reckoning. These details, however, can be decided and communicated as
+soon as a determination has been formed as regards the entire scheme.
+
+“With respect to the exact method of carrying out the conclusion, His
+Honour is inclined to think it will be more merciful to enter into no
+negotiations with the persons concerned. An opportunity should be given
+to the inhabitants of the village to make their escape if they so desire
+it, and then, with the explosives that the force should carry, the end
+can be practically instantaneous.
+
+“For Himself, His Honour proposes to be there in person, and further
+that the actual discharge should take place from His own car. It seems
+but suitable that the world which has done His Honour the goodness to
+elect Him to its Presidentship should act through His hands; and this
+would be at least some slight token of respect to a superstition which,
+however infamous, is yet the one and only force capable of withstanding
+the true progress of man.
+
+“His Honour promises you, gentlemen, that in the event of this plan
+being carried out, we shall be no more troubled with Christianity.
+Already the moral effect of the Test Act has been prodigious. It is
+understood that, by tens of thousands, Catholics, numbering among them
+even members of this new fanatical Religious Order, have been renouncing
+their follies even in these few days; and a final blow struck now at the
+very heart and head of the Catholic Church, eliminating, as it would do,
+the actual body on which the entire organisation subsists, would render
+its resurrection impossible. It is a well-known fact that, granted the
+extinction of the line of Popes, together with those necessary for its
+continuance, there could be no longer any question amongst even the most
+ignorant that the claim of Jesus had ceased to be either reasonable or
+possible. Even the Order that has provided the sinews for this new
+movement must cease to exist.
+
+“Dolgorovski, of course, is the difficulty, for it is not certainly
+known whether one Cardinal would be considered sufficient for the
+propagation of the line; and, although reluctantly, His Honour feels
+bound to suggest that at the conclusion of the affair, Dolgorovski,
+also, who will not, of course, be with his fellows at Nazareth, should
+be mercifully removed from even the danger of a relapse....
+
+“His Honour, then, asks you, gentlemen, as briefly as possible, to state
+your views on the points of which I have had the privilege of speaking.”
+
+The quiet business-like voice ceased.
+
+He had spoken throughout in the manner with which he had begun; his eyes
+had been downcast throughout; his voice had been tranquil and
+restrained. His deportment had been admirable.
+
+There was an instant’s silence, and all eyes settled steadily again upon
+the motionless figure in black and scarlet and the ivory face.
+
+Then Oliver stood up. His face was as white as paper; his eyes bright
+and dilated.
+
+“Sir,” he said, “I have no doubt that we are all of one mind. I need say
+no more than that, so far as I am a representative of my colleagues, we
+assent to the proposal, and leave all details in your Honour’s hands.”
+
+The President lifted his eyes, and ran them swiftly along the rigid
+faces turned to him.
+
+Then, in the breathless hush, he spoke for the first time in his strange
+voice, now as passionless as a frozen river.
+
+“Is there any other proposal?”
+
+There was a murmur of assent as the men rose to their feet.
+
+“Thank you, gentlemen,” said the secretary.
+
+
+III
+
+It was a little before seven o’clock on the morning of Saturday that
+Oliver stepped out of the motor that had carried him to Wimbledon
+Common, and began to go up the steps of the old volor-stage, abandoned
+five years ago. It had been thought better, in view of the extreme
+secrecy that was to be kept, that England’s representative in the
+expedition should start from a comparatively unknown point, and this old
+stage, in disuse now, except for occasional trials of new Government
+machines, had been selected. Even the lift had been removed, and it was
+necessary to climb the hundred and fifty steps on foot.
+
+It was with a certain unwillingness that he had accepted this post among
+the four delegates, for nothing had been heard of his wife, and it was
+terrible to him to leave London while her fate was as yet doubtful. On
+the whole, he was less inclined than ever now to accept the Euthanasia
+theory; he had spoken to one or two of her friends, all of whom declared
+that she had never even hinted at such an end. And, again, although he
+was well aware of the eight-day law in the matter, even if she had
+determined on such a step there was nothing to show that she was yet in
+England, and, in fact, it was more than likely that if she were bent on
+such an act she would go abroad for it, where laxer conditions
+prevailed. In short, it seemed that he could do no good by remaining in
+England, and the temptation to be present at the final act of justice in
+the East by which land, and, in fact, it was more than likely that if
+she were to be wiped out, and Franklin, too, among them--Franklin, that
+parody of the Lord of the World--this, added to the opinion of his
+colleagues in the Government, and the curious sense, never absent from
+him now, that Felsenburgh’s approval was a thing to die for if
+necessary--these things had finally prevailed. He left behind him at
+home his secretary, with instructions that no expense was to be spared
+in communicating with him should any news of his wife arrive during his
+absence.
+
+It was terribly hot this morning, and, by the time that he reached the
+top he noticed that the monster in the net was already fitted into its
+white aluminium casing, and that the fans within the corridor and saloon
+were already active. He stepped inside to secure a seat in the saloon,
+set his bag down, and after a word or two with the guard, who, of
+course, had not yet been informed of their destination, learning that
+the others were not yet come, he went out again on to the platform for
+coolness’ sake, and to brood in peace.
+
+London looked strange this morning, he thought. Here beneath him was the
+common, parched somewhat with the intense heat of the previous week,
+stretching for perhaps half-a-mile--tumbled ground, smooth stretches of
+turf, and the heads of heavy trees up to the first house-roofs, set,
+too, it seemed, in bowers of foliage. Then beyond that began the serried
+array, line beyond line, broken in one spot by the gleam of a
+river-reach, and then on again fading beyond eyesight. But what
+surprised him was the density of the air; it was now, as old books
+related it had been in the days of smoke. There was no freshness, no
+translucence of morning atmosphere; it was impossible to point in any
+one direction to the source of this veiling gloom, for on all sides it
+was the same. Even the sky overhead lacked its blue; it appeared painted
+with a muddy brush, and the sun shewed the same faint tinge of red. Yes,
+it was like that, he said wearily to himself--like a second-rate sketch;
+there was no sense of mystery as of a veiled city, but rather unreality.
+The shadows seemed lacking in definiteness, the outlines and grouping in
+coherence. A storm was wanted, he reflected; or even, it might be, one
+more earthquake on the other side of the world would, in wonderful
+illustration of the globe’s unity, relieve the pressure on this side.
+Well, well; the journey would be worth taking even for the interest of
+observing climatic changes; but it would be terribly hot, he mused, by
+the time the south of France was reached.
+
+Then his thoughts leaped back to their own gnawing misery.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was another ten minutes before he saw the scarlet Government motor,
+with awnings out, slide up the road from the direction of Fulham; and
+yet five minutes more before the three men appeared with their servants
+behind them--Maxwell, Snowford and Cartwright, all alike, as was Oliver,
+in white duck from head to foot.
+
+They did not speak one word of their business, for the officials were
+going to and fro, and it was advisable to guard against even the
+smallest possibility of betrayal. The guard had been told that the volor
+was required for a three days’ journey, that provisions were to be taken
+in for that period, and that the first point towards which the course
+was to lie was the centre of the South Downs. There would be no stopping
+for at least a day and a night.
+
+Further instructions had reached them from the President on the previous
+morning, by which time He had completed His visitation, and received the
+assent of the Emergency Councils of the world. This Snowford commented
+upon in an undertone, and added a word or two as to details, as the four
+stood together looking out over the city.
+
+Briefly, the plan was as follows, at least so far as it concerned
+England. The volor was to approach Palestine from the direction of the
+Mediterranean, observing to get into touch with France on her left and
+Spain on her right within ten miles of the eastern end of Crete. The
+approximate hour was fixed at twenty-three (eastern time). At this point
+she was to show her night signal, a scarlet line on a white field; and
+in the event of her failing to observe her neighbours was to circle at
+that point, at a height of eight hundred feet, until either the two were
+sighted or further instructions were received. For the purpose of
+dealing with emergencies, the President’s car, which would finally make
+its entrance from the south, was to be accompanied by an _aide-de-camp_
+capable of moving at a very high speed, whose signals were to be taken
+as Felsenburgh’s own.
+
+So soon as the circle was completed, having Esdraelon as its centre with
+a radius of five hundred and forty miles, the volors were to advance,
+dropping gradually to within five hundred feet of sea-level, and
+diminishing their distance one from another from the twenty-five miles
+or so at which they would first find themselves, until they were as near
+as safety allowed. In this manner the advance at a pace of fifty miles
+an hour from the moment that the circle was arranged would bring them
+within sight of Nazareth at about nine o’clock on the Sunday morning.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The guard came up to the four as they stood there silent.
+
+“We are ready, gentlemen,” he said.
+
+“What do you think of the weather?” asked Snowford abruptly.
+
+The guard pursed his lips.
+
+“A little thunder, I expect, sir,” he said.
+
+Oliver looked at him curiously.
+
+“No more than that?” he asked.
+
+“I should say a storm, sir,” observed the guard shortly.
+
+Snowford turned towards the gangway.
+
+“Well, we had best be off: we can lose time further on, if we wish.”
+
+It was about five minutes more before all was ready. From the stern of
+the boat came a faint smell of cooking, for breakfast would be served
+immediately, and a white-capped cook protruded his head for an instant,
+to question the guard. The four sat down in the gorgeous saloon in the
+bows; Oliver silent by himself, the other three talking in low voices
+together. Once more the guard passed through to his compartment at the
+prow, glancing as he went to see that all were seated; and an instant
+later came the clang of the signal. Then through all the length of the
+boat--for she was the fastest ship that England possessed--passed the
+thrill of the propeller beginning to work up speed; and simultaneously
+Oliver, staring sideways through the plate-glass window, saw the rail
+drop away, and the long line of London, pale beneath the tinged sky,
+surge up suddenly. He caught a glimpse of a little group of persons
+staring up from below, and they, too, dropped in a great swirl, and
+vanished. Then, with a flash of dusty green, the Common had vanished,
+and a pavement of house-roofs began to stream beneath, the long lines of
+streets on this side and that turning like spokes of a gigantic wheel;
+once more this pavement thinned, showing green again as between
+infrequently laid cobble-stones; then they, too, were gone, and the
+country was open beneath.
+
+Snowford rose, staggering a little.
+
+“I may as well tell the guard now,” he said. “Then we need not be
+interrupted again.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+I
+
+The Syrian awoke from a dream that a myriad faces were looking into his
+own, eager, attentive and horrible, in his corner of the roof-top, and
+sat up sweating and gasping aloud for breath. For an instant he thought
+that he was really dying, and that the spiritual world was about him.
+Then, as he struggled, sense came back, and he stood up, drawing long
+breaths of the stifling night air.
+
+Above him the sky was as the pit, black and empty; there was not a
+glimmer of light, though the moon was surely up. He had seen her four
+hours before, a red sickle, swing slowly out from Thabor. Across the
+plain, as he looked from the parapet, there was nothing. For a few yards
+there lay across the broken ground a single crooked lance of light from
+a half-closed shutter; and beneath that, nothing. To the north again,
+nothing; to the west a glimmer, pale as a moth’s wing, from the
+house-roofs of Nazareth; to the east, nothing. He might be on a
+tower-top in space, except for that line of light and that grey glimmer
+that evaded the eye.
+
+On the roof, however, it was possible to make out at least outlines, for
+the dormer trap had been left open at the head of the stairs, and from
+somewhere within the depths of the house there stole up a faint
+refracted light.
+
+There was a white bundle in that corner; that would be the pillow of the
+Benedictine abbot. He had seen him lay himself down there some time--was
+it four hours or four centuries ago? There was a grey shape stretched
+along that pale wall--the Friar, he thought; there were other irregular
+outlines breaking the face of the parapet, here and there along the
+sides.
+
+Very softly, for he knew the caprices of sleep, he stepped across the
+paved roof to the opposite parapet and looked over, for there yet hung
+about him a desire for reassurance that he was still in company with
+flesh and blood. Yes, indeed he was still on earth; for there was a real
+and distinct light burning among the tumbled rocks, and beside it,
+delicate as a miniature, the head and shoulders of a man, writing. And
+in the circle of light were other figures, pale, broken patches on which
+men lay; a pole or two, erected with the thought of a tent to follow; a
+little pile of luggage with a rug across it; and beyond the circle other
+outlines and shapes faded away into the stupendous blackness.
+
+Then the writing man moved his head, and a monstrous shadow fled across
+the ground; a yelp as of a strangling dog broke out suddenly close
+behind him, and, as he turned, a moaning figure sat up on the roof,
+sobbing itself awake. Another moved at the sound, and then as, sighing,
+the former relapsed heavily against the wall, once more the priest went
+back to his place, still doubtful as to the reality of all that he saw,
+and the breathless silence came down again as a pall.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He woke again from dreamless sleep, and there was a change. From his
+corner, as he raised his heavy eyes, there met them what seemed an
+unbearable brightness; then, as he looked, it resolved itself into a
+candle-flame, and beyond it a white sleeve, and higher yet a white face
+and throat. He understood, and rose reeling; it was the messenger come
+to fetch him as had been arranged.
+
+As he passed across the space, once he looked round him, and it seemed
+that the dawn must have come, for that appalling sky overhead was
+visible at last. An enormous vault, smoke-coloured and opaque, seemed to
+curve away to the ghostly horizons on either side where the far-away
+hills raised sharp shapes as if cut in paper. Carmel was before him; at
+least he thought it was that--a bull head and shoulders thrusting itself
+forward and ending in an abrupt descent, and beyond that again the
+glimmering sky. There were no clouds, no outlines to break the huge,
+smooth, dusky dome beneath the centre of which this house-roof seemed
+poised. Across the parapet, as he glanced to the right before descending
+the steps, stretched Esdraelon, sad-coloured and sombre, into the
+metallic distance. It was all as unreal as some fantastic picture by one
+who had never looked upon clear sunlight. The silence was complete and
+profound.
+
+Straight down through the wheeling shadows he went, following the
+white-hooded head and figure down the stairs, along the tiny passage,
+stumbling once against the feet of one who slept with limbs tossed loose
+like a tired dog; the feet drew back mechanically, and a little moan
+broke from the shadows. Then he went on, passing the servant who stood
+aside, and entered.
+
+There were half-a-dozen men gathered here, silent, white figures
+standing apart one from the other, who genuflected as the Pope came in
+simultaneously through the opposite door, and again stood white-faced
+and attentive. He ran his eyes over them as he stopped, waiting behind
+his master’s chair--there were two he knew, remembering them from last
+night--dark-faced Cardinal Ruspoli, and the lean Australian Archbishop,
+besides Cardinal Corkran, who stood by his chair at the Pope’s own
+table, with papers laid ready.
+
+Silvester sat down, and with a little gesture caused the others to sit
+too. Then He began at once in that quiet tired voice that his servant
+knew so well.
+
+“Eminences-we are all here, I think. We need lose no more time, then....
+Cardinal Corkran has something to communicate---” He turned a little.
+“Father, sit down, if you please. This will occupy a little while.”
+
+The priest went across to the stone window-seat, whence he could watch
+the Pope’s face in the light of the two candles that now stood on the
+table between him and the Cardinal-Secretary. Then the Cardinal began,
+glancing up from his papers.
+
+“Holiness. I had better begin a little way back. Their Eminences have
+not heard the details properly....
+
+“I received at Damascus, on last Friday week, inquiries from various
+prelates in different parts of the world, as to the actual measure
+concerning the new policy of persecution. At first I could tell them
+nothing positively, for it was not until after twenty o’clock that
+Cardinal Ruspoli, in Turin, informed me of the facts. Cardinal Malpas
+confirmed them a few minutes later, and the Cardinal Archbishop of Pekin
+at twenty-three. Before mid-day on Saturday I received final
+confirmation from my messengers in London.
+
+“I was at first surprised that Cardinal Dolgorovski did not communicate
+it; for almost simultaneously with the Turin message I received one from
+a priest of the Order of Christ Crucified in Moscow, to which, of
+course, I paid no attention. (It is our rule, Eminences, to treat
+unauthorised communications in that way.) His Holiness, however, bade me
+make inquiries, and I learned from Father Petrovoski and others that the
+Government placards published the news at twenty o’clock--by our time.
+It was curious, therefore, that the Cardinal had not seen it; if he had
+seen it, it was, of course, his duty to acquaint me immediately.
+
+“Since that time, however, the following facts have come out. It is
+established beyond a doubt that Cardinal Dolgorovski received a visitor
+in the course of the evening. His own chaplain, who, your Eminences are
+perhaps aware, has been very active in Russia on behalf of the Church,
+informs me of this privately. Yet the Cardinal asserts, in explanation
+of his silence, that he was alone during those hours, and had given
+orders that no one was to be admitted to his presence without urgent
+cause. This, of course, confirmed His Holiness’s opinion, but I received
+orders from Him to act as if nothing had happened, and to command the
+Cardinal’s presence here with the rest of the Sacred College. To this I
+received an intimation that he would be present. Yesterday, however, a
+little before mid-day, I received a further message that his Eminency
+had met with a slight accident, but that he yet hoped to present himself
+in time for the deliberations. Since then no further news has arrived.”
+
+There was a dead silence.
+
+Then the Pope turned to the Syrian priest.
+
+“Father,” he said, “it was you who received his Eminency’s messages.
+Have you anything to add to this?”
+
+“No, Holiness.”
+
+He turned again.
+
+“My son,” he said, “report to Us publicly what you have already
+reported to Us in private.”
+
+A small, bright-eyed man moved out of the shadows.
+
+“Holiness, it was I who conveyed the message to Cardinal Dolgorovski. He
+refused at first to receive me. When I reached his presence and
+communicated the command he was silent; then he smiled; then he told me
+to carry back the message that he would obey.”
+
+Again the Pope was silent.
+
+Then suddenly the tall Australian stood up.
+
+“Holiness,” he said, “I was once intimate with that man. It was partly
+through my means that he sought reception into the Catholic Church. This
+was not less than fourteen years ago, when the fortunes of the Church
+seemed about to prosper.... Our friendly relations ceased two years ago,
+and I may say that, from what I know of him, I find no difficulty in
+believing---”
+
+As his voice shook with passion and he faltered, Silvester raised his
+hand.
+
+“We desire no recriminations. Even the evidence is now useless, for what
+was to be done has been done. For ourselves, we have no doubt as to its
+nature.... It was to this man that Christ gave the morsel through our
+hands, saying _Quod faces, fac cities. Cum ergo accepisset Me buccellam,
+exivit continuo. Erat autem nox._”
+
+Again fell the silence, and in the pause sounded a long half-vocal sigh
+from without the door. It came and went as a sleeper turned, for the
+passage was crowded with exhausted men--as a soul might sigh that passed
+from light to darkness.
+
+Then Silvester spoke again. And as He spoke He began, as if
+mechanically, to tear up a long paper, written with lists of names, that
+lay before Him.
+
+“Eminences, it is three hours after dawn. In two hours more We shall say
+mass in your presence, and give Holy Communion. During those two hours
+We commission you to communicate this news to all who are assembled
+here; and further, We bestow on each and all of you jurisdiction apart
+from all previous rules of time and place; we give a Plenary Indulgence
+to all who confess and communicate this day. Father--” he turned to the
+Syrian--“Father, you will now expose the Blessed Sacrament in the
+chapel, after which you will proceed to the village and inform the
+inhabitants that if they wish to save their lives they had best be gone
+immediately--immediately, you understand.”
+
+The Syrian started from his daze.
+
+“Holiness,” he stammered, stretching out a hand, “the lists, the lists!”
+
+(He had seen what these were.)
+
+But Silvester only smiled as He tossed the fragments on to the table.
+Then He stood up.
+
+“You need not trouble, my son.... We shall not need these any more....
+
+“One last word, Eminences.... If there is one heart here that doubts or
+is afraid, I have a word to say.”
+
+He paused, with an extraordinarily simple deliberateness, ran the eyes
+round the tense faces turned to Him.
+
+“I have had a Vision of God,” He said softly. “I walk no more by faith,
+but by sight.”
+
+
+II
+
+An hour later the priest toiled back in the hot twilight up the path
+from the village, followed by half-a-dozen silent men, twenty yards
+behind, whose curiosity exceeded their credulousness. He had left a few
+more standing bewildered at the doors of the little mud-houses; and had
+seen perhaps a hundred families, weighted with domestic articles, pour
+like a stream down the rocky path that led to Khaifa. He had been cursed
+by some, even threatened; stared upon by others; mocked by a few. The
+fanatical said that the Christians had brought God’s wrath upon the
+place, and the darkness upon the sky: the sun was dying, for these
+hounds were too evil for him to look upon and live. Others again seemed
+to see nothing remarkable in the state of the weather....
+
+There was no change in that sky from its state an hour before, except
+that perhaps it had lightened a little as the sun climbed higher behind
+that impenetrable dusky shroud. Hills, grass, men’s faces--all bore to
+the priest’s eyes the look of unreality; they were as things seen in a
+dream by eyes that roll with sleep through lids weighted with lead. Even
+to other physical senses that unreality was present; and once more he
+remembered his dream, thankful that that horror at least was absent. But
+silence seemed other than a negation of sound, it was a thing in itself,
+an affirmation, unruffled by the sound of footsteps, the thin barking of
+dogs, the murmur of voices. It appeared as if the stillness of eternity
+had descended and embraced the world’s activities, and as if that world,
+in a desperate attempt to assert its own reality, was braced in a set,
+motionless, noiseless, breathless effort to hold itself in being. What
+Silvester had said just now was beginning to be true of this man also.
+The touch of the powdery soil and the warm pebbles beneath the priest’s
+bare feet seemed something apart from the consciousness that usually
+regards the things of sense as more real and more intimate than the
+things of spirit. Matter still had a reality, still occupied space, but
+it was of a subjective nature, the result of internal rather than
+external powers. He appeared to himself already to be scarcely more than
+a soul, intent and steady, united by a thread only to the body and the
+world with which he was yet in relations. He knew that the appalling
+heat was there; once even, before his eyes a patch of beaten ground
+cracked and lisped as water that touches hot iron, as he trod upon it.
+He could feel the heat upon his forehead and hands, his whole body was
+swathed and soaked in it; yet he regarded it as from an outside
+standpoint, as a man with neuritis perceives that the pain is no longer
+in his hand but in the pillow which supports it. So, too, with what his
+eyes looked upon and his ears heard; so, too, with that faint bitter
+taste that lay upon his lips and nostrils. There was no longer in him
+fear or even hope--he regarded himself, the world, and even the
+enshrouding and awful Presence of spirit as facts with which he had but
+little to do. He was scarcely even interested; still less was he
+distressed. There was Thabor before him--at least what once had been
+Thabor, now it was no more than a huge and dusky dome-shape which
+impressed itself upon his retina and informed his passive brain of its
+existence and outline, though that existence seemed no better than that
+of a dissolving phantom.
+
+It seemed then almost natural--or at least as natural as all else--as he
+came in through the passage and opened the chapel-door, to see that the
+floor was crowded with prostrate motionless figures. There they lay, all
+alike in the white burnous which he had given out last night; and, with
+forehead on arms, as during the singing of the Litany of the Saints at
+an ordination, lay the figure he knew best and loved more than all the
+world, the shoulders and white hair at a slight elevation upon the
+single altar step. Above the plain altar itself burned the six tall
+candles; and in the midst, on the mean little throne, stood the
+white-metal monstrance, with its White Centre....
+
+Then he, too, dropped, and lay as he was....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He did not know how long it was before the circling observant
+consciousness, the flow of slow images, the vibration of particular
+thoughts, ceased and stilled as a pool rocks quietly to peace after the
+dropped stone has long lain still. But it came at last--that superb
+tranquillity, possible only when the senses are physically awake, with
+which God, perhaps once in a lifetime, rewards the aspiring trustful
+soul--that point of complete rest in the heart of the Fount of all
+existence with which one day He will reward eternally the spirits of His
+children. There was no thought in him of articulating this experience,
+of analysing its elements, or fingering this or that strain of ecstatic
+joy. The time for self-regarding was passed. It was enough that the
+experience was there, although he was not even self-reflective enough to
+tell himself so. He had passed from that circle whence the soul looks
+within, from that circle, too, whence it looks upon objective glory, to
+that very centre where it reposes--and the first sign to him that time
+had passed was the murmur of words, heard distinctly and understood,
+although with that apartness with which a drowsy man perceives a message
+from without--heard as through a veil through which nothing but thinnest
+essence could transpire.
+
+_Spiritus Domini replevit orbem terrarum.... The Spirit of the Lord hath
+fulfilled all things, alleluia: and that which contains all things hath
+knowledge of the voice, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia._
+
+_Exsurgat Deus_ (and the voice rose ever so slightly). “_Let God arise
+and let His enemies be scattered; and let them who hate Him flee before
+His face._”
+
+_Gloria Patri...._
+
+Then he raised his heavy head; and a phantom figure stood there in red
+vestments, seeming to float rather than to stand, with thin hands
+outstretched, and white cap on white hair seen in the gleam of the
+steady candle-flames; another, also in white, kneeled on the step....
+
+_Kyrie eleison ... Gloria in excelsis Deo ..._ those things passed like
+a shadow-show, with movements and rustlings, but he perceived rather the
+light which cast them. He heard _Deus qui in hodierna die ..._ but his
+passive mind gave no pulse of reflex action, no stir of understanding
+until these words. _Cum complerentur dies Pentecostes...._
+
+“_When the day of Pentecost was fully come, all the disciples were with
+one accord in the same place; and there came from heaven suddenly a
+sound, as of a mighty wind approaching, and it filled the house where
+they were sitting...._”
+
+Then he remembered and understood.... It was Pentecost then! And with
+memory a shred of reflection came back. Where then was the wind, and the
+flame, and the earthquake, and the secret voice? Yet the world was
+silent, rigid in its last effort at self-assertion: there was no tremor
+to show that God remembered; no actual point of light, yet, breaking the
+appalling vault of gloom that lay over sea and land to reveal that He
+burned there in eternity, transcendent and dominant; not even a voice;
+and at that he understood yet more. He perceived that that world, whose
+monstrous parody his sleep had presented to him in the night, was other
+than that he had feared it to be; it was sweet, not terrible; friendly,
+not hostile; clear, not stifling; and home, not exile. There were
+presences here, but not those gluttonous, lustful things that had looked
+on him last night.... He dropped his head again upon his hands, at once
+ashamed and content; and again he sank down to depths of glimmering
+inner peace....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Not again, for a while, did he perceive what he did or thought, or what
+passed there, five yards away on the low step. Once only a ripple passed
+across that sea of glass, a ripple of fire and sound like a rising star
+that flicks a line of light across a sleeping lake, like a thin thread
+of vibration streaming from a quivering string across the stillness of a
+deep night--and be perceived for an instant as in a formless mirror that
+a lower nature was struck into existence and into union with the Divine
+nature at the same moment.... And then no more again but the great
+encompassing hush, the sense of the innermost heart of reality, till he
+found himself kneeling at the rail, and knew that That which alone truly
+existed on earth approached him with the swiftness of thought and the
+ardour of Divine Love....
+
+Then, as the mass ended, and he raised his passive happy soul to receive
+the last gift of God, there was a cry, a sudden clamour in the passage,
+and a man stood in the doorway, gabbling Arabic.
+
+
+III
+
+Yet even at that sound and sight his soul scarcely tightened the languid
+threads that united it through every fibre of his body with the world of
+sense. He saw and heard the tumult in the passage, frantic eyes and
+mouths crying aloud, and, in strange contrast, the pale ecstatic faces
+of those princes who turned and looked; even within the tranquil
+presence-chamber of the spirit where two beings, Incarnate God and all
+but Discarnate Man, were locked in embrace, a certain mental process
+went on. Yet all was still as apart from him as a lighted stage and its
+drama from a self-contained spectator. In the material world, now as
+attenuated as a mirage, events were at hand; but to his soul, balanced
+now on reality and awake to facts, these things were but a spectacle....
+
+He turned to the altar again, and there, as he had known it would be, in
+the midst of clear light, all was at peace: the celebrant, seen as
+through molten glass, adored as He murmured the mystery of the
+Word-made-Flesh, and once more passing to the centre, sank upon His
+knees.
+
+Again the priest understood; for thought was no longer the process of a
+mind, rather it was the glance of a spirit. He knew all now; and, by an
+inevitable impulse, his throat began to sing aloud words that, as he
+sang, opened for the first time as flowers telling their secret to the
+sun.
+
+_O Salutaris Hostia
+Qui coeli pandis ostium. . . ._
+
+They were all singing now; even the Mohammedan catechumen who had burst
+in a moment ago sang with the rest, his lean head thrust out and his
+arms tight across his breast; the tiny chapel rang with the forty
+voices, and the vast world thrilled to hear it....
+
+Still singing, the priest saw the veil laid as by a phantom upon the
+Pontiff’s shoulders; there was a movement, a surge of figures--shadows
+only in the midst of substance,
+
+_... Uni Trinoque Domino ...._
+
+--and the Pope stood erect, Himself a pallor in the heart of light, with
+spectral folds of silk dripping from His shoulders, His hands swathed in
+them, and His down-bent head hidden by the silver-rayed monstrance and
+That which it bore....
+
+_... Qui vitam sine termino
+Nobis donet in patria ...._
+
+... They were moving now, and the world of life swung with them; of so
+much was he aware. He was out in the passage, among the white, frenzied
+faces that with bared teeth stared up at that sight, silenced at last by
+the thunder of _Pange Lingua_, and the radiance of those who passed out
+to eternal life.... At the corner he turned for an instant to see the
+six pale flames move along a dozen yards behind, as spear-heads about a
+King, and in the midst the silver rays and the White Heart of God....
+Then he was out, and the battle lay in array....
+
+That sky on which he had looked an hour ago had passed from darkness
+charged with light to light overlaid with darkness--from glimmering
+night to Wrathful Day--and that light was red....
+
+From behind Thabor on the left to Carmel on the far right, above the
+hills twenty miles away rested an enormous vault of colour; here were no
+gradations from zenith to horizon; all was the one deep smoulder of
+crimson as of the glow of iron. It was such a colour as men have seen at
+sunsets after rain, while the clouds, more translucent each instant,
+transmit the glory they cannot contain. Here, too, was the sun, pale as
+the Host, set like a fragile wafer above the Mount of Transfiguration,
+and there, far down in the west where men had once cried upon Baal in
+vain, hung the sickle of the white moon. Yet all was no more than
+stained light that lies broken across carven work of stone....
+
+_... In suprema nocte coena,_
+
+sang the myriad voices,
+
+_Recumbens cum fratribus
+Observata lege plena
+Cibis in legalibus
+Cibum turbae duodenae
+Se dat suis manibus ...._
+
+He saw, too, poised as motes in light, that ring of strange
+fish-creatures, white as milk, except where the angry glory turned their
+backs to flame, white-winged like floating moths, from the tiny shape
+far to the south to the monster at hand scarcely five hundred yards
+away; and even as he looked, singing as he looked, he understood that
+the circle was nearer, and perceived that these as yet knew nothing....
+
+_Verbum caro, panem verum
+Verbo carnem efficit ....
+
+They were nearer still, until now even at his feet there slid along the
+ground the shadow of a monstrous bird, pale and undefined, as between
+the wan sun and himself moved out the vast shape that a moment ago hung
+above the Hill.... Then again it backed across and waited ...
+
+_Et si census deficit
+Ad formandum cor sincerum
+Sola fides sufficit ...._
+
+He had halted and turned, going in the midst of his fellows, hearing,
+he thought, the thrill of harping and the throb of heavenly drums; and,
+across the space, moved now the six flames, steady as if cut of steel in
+that stupendous poise of heaven and earth; and in their centre the
+silver-rayed glory and the Whiteness of God made Man....
+
+... Then, with a roar, came the thunder again, pealing in circle beyond
+circle of those tremendous Presences--Thrones and Powers--who,
+themselves to the world as substance to shadow, are but shadows again
+beneath the apex and within the ring of Absolute Deity.... The thunder
+broke loose, shaking the earth that now cringed on the quivering edge of
+dissolution....
+
+TANTUM ERGO SACRAMENTUM
+VENEREMUR CERNUI
+ET ANTIQUUM DOCUMENTUM
+NOVO CEDAT RITUI.
+
+Ah! yes; it was He for whom God waited now--He who far up beneath that
+trembling shadow of a dome, itself but the piteous core of unimagined
+splendour, came in His swift chariot, blind to all save that on which He
+had fixed His eyes so long, unaware that His world corrupted about Him,
+His shadow moving like a pale cloud across the ghostly plain where
+Israel had fought and Sennacherib boasted--that plain lighted now with a
+yet deeper glow, as heaven, kindling to glory beyond glory of yet
+fiercer spiritual flame, still restrained the power knit at last to the
+relief of final revelation, and for the last time the voices sang....
+
+PRAESTET FIDES SUPPLEMENTUM
+SENSUUM DEFECTUI ....
+
+... He was coming now, swifter than ever, the heir of temporal ages and
+the Exile of eternity, the final piteous Prince of rebels, the creature
+against God, blinder than the sun which paled and the earth that shook;
+and, as He came, passing even then through the last material stage to
+the thinness of a spirit-fabric, the floating circle swirled behind Him,
+tossing like phantom birds in the wake of a phantom ship.... He was
+coming, and the earth, rent once again in its allegiance, shrank and
+reeled in the agony of divided homage....
+
+... He was coming--and already the shadow swept off the plain and
+vanished, and the pale netted wings were rising to the cheek; and the
+great bell clanged, and the long sweet chord rang out--not more than
+whispers heard across the pealing storm of everlasting praise....
+
+.... GENITORI GENITOQUE
+LAUS ET JUBILATIO
+SALUS HONOR VIRTUS QUOQUE
+SIT ET BENEDICTIO
+PROCEDENTI AB UTROQUE
+COMPAR SIT LAUDATIO.
+
+and once more
+
+PROCEDENTI AB UTROQUE
+COMPAR SIT LAUDATIO ....
+
+Then this world passed, and the glory of it.
+
+THE END
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14021 ***
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+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14021 ***</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h1 class="nobreak" id="LORD_OF_THE_WORLD">LORD OF THE WORLD</h1>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center p2">BY<br> <span class="big">ROBERT HUGH BENSON</span></p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2>Dedication</h2>
+
+<p class="center">CLAVI DOMUS DAVID</p>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2>PREFACE</h2>
+
+<p>I am perfectly aware that this is a terribly sensational book, and open
+to innumerable criticisms on that account, as well as on many others.
+But I did not know how else to express the principles I desired (and
+which I passionately believe to be true) except by producing their lines
+to a sensational point. I have tried, however, not to scream unduly
+loud, and to retain, so far as possible, reverence and consideration for
+the opinions of other people. Whether I have succeeded in that attempt
+is quite another matter.</p>
+
+<p class="right">Robert Hugh Benson.</p>
+
+<p class="right">CAMBRIDGE 1907.</p>
+
+</div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CONTENTS">CONTENTS</h2>
+</div>
+
+<table class="autotable">
+<tr><td>
+<a href="#PROLOGUE">PROLOGUE</a>
+</td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+<a href="#BOOK_I-THE_ADVENT">BOOK I</a>
+</td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+THE ADVENT
+</td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+<a href="#BOOK_II-THE_ENCOUNTER">BOOK II</a>
+</td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+THE ENCOUNTER
+</td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+<a href="#BOOK_III-THE_VICTORY">BOOK III</a>
+</td></tr>
+<tr><td>THE VICTORY
+</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="PROLOGUE">PROLOGUE</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<p class="center">Persons who do not like tiresome prologues, need not read this one. It
+is essential only to the situation, not to the story.</p>
+
+
+<p class="p2">“You must give me a moment,” said the old man, leaning back.</p>
+
+<p>Percy resettled himself in his chair and waited, chin on hand.</p>
+
+<p>It was a very silent room in which the three men sat, furnished with the
+extreme common sense of the period. It had neither window nor door; for
+it was now sixty years since the world, recognising that space is not
+confined to the surface of the globe, had begun to burrow in earnest.
+Old Mr. Templeton’s house stood some forty feet below the level of the
+Thames embankment, in what was considered a somewhat commodious
+position, for he had only a hundred yards to walk before he reached the
+station of the Second Central Motor-circle, and a quarter of a mile to
+the volor-station at Blackfriars. He was over ninety years old, however,
+and seldom left his house now. The room itself was lined throughout with
+the delicate green jade-enamel prescribed by the Board of Health, and
+was suffused with the artificial sunlight discovered by the great Reuter
+forty years before; it had the colour-tone of a spring wood, and was
+warmed and ventilated through the classical frieze grating to the exact
+temperature of 18 degrees Centigrade. Mr. Templeton was a plain man,
+content to live as his father had lived before him. The furniture, too,
+was a little old-fashioned in make and design, constructed however
+according to the prevailing system of soft asbestos enamel welded over
+iron, indestructible, pleasant to the touch, and resembling mahogany. A
+couple of book-cases well filled ran on either side of the bronze
+pedestal electric fire before which sat the three men; and in the
+further corners stood the hydraulic lifts that gave entrance, the one to
+the bedroom, the other to the corridor fifty feet up which opened on to
+the Embankment.</p>
+
+<p>Father Percy Franklin, the elder of the two priests, was rather a
+remarkable-looking man, not more than thirty-five years old, but with
+hair that was white throughout; his grey eyes, under black eyebrows,
+were peculiarly bright and almost passionate; but his prominent nose and
+chin and the extreme decisiveness of his mouth reassured the observer as
+to his will. Strangers usually looked twice at him.</p>
+
+<p>Father Francis, however, sitting in his upright chair on the other side
+of the hearth, brought down the average; for, though his brown eyes were
+pleasant and pathetic, there was no strength in his face; there was even
+a tendency to feminine melancholy in the corners of his mouth and the
+marked droop of his eyelids.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Templeton was just a very old man, with a strong face in folds,
+clean-shaven like the rest of the world, and was now lying back on his
+water-pillows with the quilt over his feet.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>At last he spoke, glancing first at Percy, on his left.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” he said, “it is a great business to remember exactly; but this
+is how I put it to myself.”</p>
+
+<p>“In England our party was first seriously alarmed at the Labour
+Parliament of 1917. That showed us how deeply Herveism had impregnated
+the whole social atmosphere. There had been Socialists before, but none
+like Gustave Herve in his old age—at least no one of the same power.
+He, perhaps you have read, taught absolute Materialism and Socialism
+developed to their logical issues. Patriotism, he said, was a relic of
+barbarism; and sensual enjoyment was the only certain good. Of course,
+every one laughed at him. It was said that without religion there could
+be no adequate motive among the masses for even the simplest social
+order. But he was right, it seemed. After the fall of the French Church
+at the beginning of the century and the massacres of 1914, the
+bourgeoisie settled down to organise itself; and that extraordinary
+movement began in earnest, pushed through by the middle classes, with no
+patriotism, no class distinctions, practically no army. Of course,
+Freemasonry directed it all. This spread to Germany, where the influence
+of Karl Marx had already—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, sir,” put in Percy smoothly, “but what of England, if you don’t
+mind—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, yes; England. Well, in 1917 the Labour party gathered up the reins,
+and Communism really began. That was long before I can remember, of
+course, but my father used to date it from then. The only wonder was
+that things did not go forward more quickly; but I suppose there was a
+good deal of Tory leaven left. Besides, centuries generally run slower
+than is expected, especially after beginning with an impulse. But the
+new order began then; and the Communists have never suffered a serious
+reverse since, except the little one in ’25. Blenkin founded ‘The New
+People’ then; and the ‘Times’ dropped out; but it was not, strangely
+enough, till ’35 that the House of Lords fell for the last time. The
+Established Church had gone finally in ’29.”</p>
+
+<p>“And the religious effect of that?” asked Percy swiftly, as the old man
+paused to cough slightly, lifting his inhaler. The priest was anxious to
+keep to the point.</p>
+
+<p>“It was an effect itself,” said the other, “rather than a cause. You
+see, the Ritualists, as they used to call them, after a desperate
+attempt to get into the Labour swim, came into the Church after the
+Convocation of ’19, when the Nicene Creed dropped out; and there was no
+real enthusiasm except among them. But so far as there was an effect
+from the final Disestablishment, I think it was that what was left of
+the State Church melted into the Free Church, and the Free Church was,
+after all, nothing more than a little sentiment. The Bible was
+completely given up as an authority after the renewed German attacks in
+the twenties; and the Divinity of our Lord, some think, had gone all but
+in name by the beginning of the century. The Kenotic theory had provided
+for that. Then there was that strange little movement among the Free
+Churchmen even earlier; when ministers who did no more than follow the
+swim—who were sensitive to draughts, so to speak—broke off from their
+old positions. It is curious to read in the history of the time how they
+were hailed as independent thinkers. It was just exactly what they were
+not.... Where was I? Oh, yes.... Well, that cleared the ground for us,
+and the Church made extraordinary progress for a while—extraordinary,
+that is, under the circumstances, because you must remember, things were
+very different from twenty, or even ten, years before. I mean that,
+roughly speaking, the severing of the sheep and the goats had begun. The
+religious people were practically all Catholics and Individualists; the
+irreligious people rejected the supernatural altogether, and were, to a
+man, Materialists and Communists. But we made progress because we had a
+few exceptional men—Delaney the philosopher, McArthur and Largent, the
+philanthropists, and so on. It really seemed as if Delaney and his
+disciples might carry everything before them. You remember his
+‘Analogy’? Oh, yes, it is all in the text-books....</p>
+
+<p>“Well, then, at the close of the Vatican Council, which had been called
+in the nineteenth century, and never dissolved, we lost a great number
+through the final definitions. The ‘Exodus of the Intellectuals’ the
+world called it—-”</p>
+
+<p>“The Biblical decisions,” put in the younger priest.</p>
+
+<p>“That partly; and the whole conflict that began with the rise of
+Modernism at the beginning of the century but much more the condemnation
+of Delaney, and of the New Transcendentalism generally, as it was then
+understood. He died outside the Church, you know. Then there was the
+condemnation of Sciotti’s book on Comparative Religion.... After that
+the Communists went on by strides, although by very slow ones. It seems
+extraordinary to you, I dare say, but you cannot imagine the excitement
+when the <i>Necessary Trades Bill</i> became law in ’60. People thought that
+all enterprise would stop when so many professions were nationalised;
+but, you know, it didn’t. Certainly the nation was behind it.”</p>
+
+<p>“What year was the <i>Two-Thirds Majority Bill</i> passed?” asked Percy.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! long before—within a year or two of the fall of the House of
+Lords. It was necessary, I think, or the Individualists would have gone
+raving mad.... Well, the <i>Necessary Trades Bill</i> was inevitable: people
+had begun to see that even so far back as the time when the railways
+were municipalised. For a while there was a burst of art; because all
+the Individualists who could went in for it (it was then that the Toller
+school was founded); but they soon drifted back into Government
+employment; after all, the six-per-cent limit for all individual
+enterprise was not much of a temptation; and Government paid well.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; but I cannot understand the present state of affairs. You said
+just now that things went slowly?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” said the old man, “but you must remember the Poor Laws. That
+established the Communists for ever. Certainly Braithwaite knew his
+business.”</p>
+
+<p>The younger priest looked up inquiringly.</p>
+
+<p>“The abolition of the old workhouse system,” said Mr. Templeton. “It is
+all ancient history to you, of course; but I remember as if it was
+yesterday. It was that which brought down what was still called the
+Monarchy and the Universities.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah,” said Percy. “I should like to hear you talk about that, sir.”</p>
+
+<p>“Presently, father.... Well, this is what Braithwaite did. By the old
+system all paupers were treated alike, and resented it. By the new
+system there were the three grades that we have now, and the
+enfranchisement of the two higher grades. Only the absolutely worthless
+were assigned to the third grade, and treated more or less as
+criminals—of course after careful examination. Then there was the
+reorganisation of the Old Age Pensions. Well, don’t you see how strong
+that made the Communists? The Individualists—they were still called
+Tories when I was a boy—the Individualists have had no chance since.
+They are no more than a worn-out drag now. The whole of the working
+classes—and that meant ninety-nine of a hundred—were all against
+them.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy looked up; but the other went on.</p>
+
+<p>“Then there was the Prison Reform Bill under Macpherson, and the
+abolition of capital punishment; there was the final Education Act of
+’59, whereby dogmatic secularism was established; the practical
+abolition of inheritance under the reformation of the Death Duties—-”</p>
+
+<p>“I forget what the old system was,” said Percy.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, it seems incredible, but the old system was that all paid alike.
+First came the Heirloom Act, and then the change by which inherited
+wealth paid three times the duty of earned wealth, leading up to the
+acceptance of Karl Marx’s doctrines in ’89—but the former came in
+’77.... Well, all these things kept England up to the level of the
+Continent; she had only been just in time to join in with the final
+scheme of Western Free Trade. That was the first effect, you remember,
+of the Socialists’ victory in Germany.”</p>
+
+<p>“And how did we keep out of the Eastern War?” asked Percy anxiously.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! that’s a long story; but, in a word, America stopped us; so we lost
+India and Australia. I think that was the nearest to the downfall of the
+Communists since ’25. But Braithwaite got out of it very cleverly by
+getting us the protectorate of South Africa once and for all. He was an
+old man then, too.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Templeton stopped to cough again. Father Francis sighed and shifted
+in his chair.</p>
+
+<p>“And America?” asked Percy.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah! all that is very complicated. But she knew her strength and annexed
+Canada the same year. That was when we were at our weakest.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy stood up.</p>
+
+<p>“Have you a Comparative Atlas, sir?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>The old man pointed to a shelf.</p>
+
+<p>“There,” he said.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Percy looked at the sheets a minute or two in silence, spreading them on
+his knees.</p>
+
+<p>“It is all much simpler, certainly,” he murmured, glancing first at the
+old complicated colouring of the beginning of the twentieth century, and
+then at the three great washes of the twenty-first.</p>
+
+<p>He moved his finger along Asia. The words EASTERN EMPIRE ran across the
+pale yellow, from the Ural Mountains on the left to the Behring Straits
+on the right, curling round in giant letters through India, Australia,
+and New Zealand. He glanced at the red; it was considerably smaller, but
+still important enough, considering that it covered not only Europe
+proper, but all Russia up to the Ural Mountains, and Africa to the
+south. The blue-labelled AMERICAN REPUBLIC swept over the whole of that
+continent, and disappeared right round to the left of the Western
+Hemisphere in a shower of blue sparks on the white sea.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, it’s simpler,” said the old man drily.</p>
+
+<p>Percy shut the book and set it by his chair.</p>
+
+<p>“And what next, sir? What will happen?”</p>
+
+<p>The old Tory statesman smiled.</p>
+
+<p>“God knows,” he said. “If the Eastern Empire chooses to move, we can do
+nothing. I don’t know why they have not moved. I suppose it is because
+of religious differences.”</p>
+
+<p>“Europe will not split?” asked the priest.</p>
+
+<p>“No, no. We know our danger now. And America would certainly help us.
+But, all the same, God help us—or you, I should rather say—if the
+Empire does move! She knows her strength at last.”</p>
+
+<p>There was silence for a moment or two. A faint vibration trembled
+through the deep-sunk room as some huge machine went past on the broad
+boulevard overhead.</p>
+
+<p>“Prophesy, sir,” said Percy suddenly. “I mean about religion.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Templeton inhaled another long breath from his instrument. Then
+again he took up his discourse.</p>
+
+<p>“Briefly,” he said, “there are three forces—Catholicism,
+Humanitarianism, and the Eastern religions. About the third I cannot
+prophesy, though I think the Sufis will be victorious. Anything may
+happen; Esotericism is making enormous strides—and that means
+Pantheism; and the blending of the Chinese and Japanese dynasties throws
+out all our calculations. But in Europe and America, there is no doubt
+that the struggle lies between the other two. We can neglect everything
+else. And, I think, if you wish me to say what I think, that, humanly
+speaking, Catholicism will decrease rapidly now. It is perfectly true
+that Protestantism is dead. Men do recognise at last that a supernatural
+Religion involves an absolute authority, and that Private Judgment in
+matters of faith is nothing else than the beginning of disintegration.
+And it is also true that since the Catholic Church is the only
+institution that even claims supernatural authority, with all its
+merciless logic, she has again the allegiance of practically all
+Christians who have any supernatural belief left. There are a few
+faddists left, especially in America and here; but they are negligible.
+That is all very well; but, on the other hand, you must remember that
+Humanitarianism, contrary to all persons’ expectations, is becoming an
+actual religion itself, though anti-supernatural. It is Pantheism; it is
+developing a ritual under Freemasonry; it has a creed, ‘God is Man,’ and
+the rest. It has therefore a real food of a sort to offer to religious
+cravings; it idealises, and yet it makes no demand upon the spiritual
+faculties. Then, they have the use of all the churches except ours, and
+all the Cathedrals; and they are beginning at last to encourage
+sentiment. Then, they may display their symbols and we may not: I think
+that they will be established legally in another ten years at the
+latest.</p>
+
+<p>“Now, we Catholics, remember, are losing; we have lost steadily for more
+than fifty years. I suppose that we have, nominally, about one-fortieth
+of America now—and that is the result of the Catholic movement of the
+early twenties. In France and Spain we are nowhere; in Germany we are
+less. We hold our position in the East, certainly; but even there we
+have not more than one in two hundred—so the statistics say—and we are
+scattered. In Italy? Well, we have Rome again to ourselves, but nothing
+else; here, we have Ireland altogether and perhaps one in sixty of
+England, Wales and Scotland; but we had one in forty seventy years ago.
+Then there is the enormous progress of psychology—all clean against us
+for at least a century. First, you see, there was Materialism, pure and
+simple that failed more or less—it was too crude—until psychology came
+to the rescue. Now psychology claims all the rest of the ground; and the
+supernatural sense seems accounted for. That’s the claim. No, father, we
+are losing; and we shall go on losing, and I think we must even be ready
+for a catastrophe at any moment.”</p>
+
+<p>“But—-” began Percy.</p>
+
+<p>“You think that weak for an old man on the edge of the grave. Well, it
+is what I think. I see no hope. In fact, it seems to me that even now
+something may come on us quickly. No; I see no hope until—-”</p>
+
+<p>Percy looked up sharply.</p>
+
+<p>“Until our Lord comes back,” said the old statesman.</p>
+
+<p>Father Francis sighed once more, and there fell a silence.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>“And the fall of the Universities?” said Percy at last.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear father, it was exactly like the fall of the Monasteries under
+Henry VIII—the same results, the same arguments, the same incidents.
+They were the strongholds of Individualism, as the Monasteries were the
+strongholds of Papalism; and they were regarded with the same kind of
+awe and envy. Then the usual sort of remarks began about the amount of
+port wine drunk; and suddenly people said that they had done their work,
+that the inmates were mistaking means for ends; and there was a great
+deal more reason for saying it. After all, granted the supernatural,
+Religious Houses are an obvious consequence; but the object of secular
+education is presumably the production of something visible—either
+character or competence; and it became quite impossible to prove that
+the Universities produced either—which was worth having. The
+distinction between ου and με is not an end in itself;
+and the kind of person produced by its study was not one which appealed
+to England in the twentieth century. I am not sure that it appealed even
+to me much (and I was always a strong Individualist)—except by way of
+pathos—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes?” said Percy.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, it was pathetic enough. The Science Schools of Cambridge and the
+Colonial Department of Oxford were the last hope; and then those went.
+The old dons crept about with their books, but nobody wanted them—they
+were too purely theoretical; some drifted into the poorhouses, first or
+second grade; some were taken care of by charitable clergymen; there was
+that attempt to concentrate in Dublin; but it failed, and people soon
+forgot them. The buildings, as you know, were used for all kinds of
+things. Oxford became an engineering establishment for a while, and
+Cambridge a kind of Government laboratory. I was at King’s College, you
+know. Of course it was all as horrible as it could be—though I am glad
+they kept the chapel open even as a museum. It was not nice to see the
+chantries filled with anatomical specimens. However, I don’t think it
+was much worse than keeping stoves and surplices in them.”</p>
+
+<p>“What happened to you?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! I was in Parliament very soon; and I had a little money of my own,
+too. But it was very hard on some of them; they had little pensions, at
+least all who were past work. And yet, I don’t know: I suppose it had
+to come. They were very little more than picturesque survivals, you
+know; and had not even the grace of a religious faith about them.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy sighed again, looking at the humorously reminiscent face of the
+old man. Then he suddenly changed the subject again.</p>
+
+<p>“What about this European parliament?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>The old man started.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh!... I think it will pass,” he said, “if a man can be found to push
+it. All this last century has been leading up to it, as you see.
+Patriotism has been dying fast; but it ought to have died, like slavery
+and so forth, under the influence of the Catholic Church. As it is, the
+work has been done without the Church; and the result is that the world
+is beginning to range itself against us: it is an organised antagonism—
+a kind of Catholic anti-Church. Democracy has done what the Divine
+Monarchy should have done. If the proposal passes I think we may expect
+something like persecution once more.... But, again, the Eastern
+invasion may save us, if it comes off.... I do not know....”</p>
+
+<p>Percy sat still yet a moment; then he stood up suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>“I must go, sir,” he said, relapsing into Esperanto. “It is past
+nineteen o’clock. Thank you so much. Are you coming, father?”</p>
+
+<p>Father Francis stood up also, in the dark grey suit permitted to
+priests, and took up his hat.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, father,” said the old man again, “come again some day, if I
+haven’t been too discursive. I suppose you have to write your letter
+yet?”</p>
+
+<p>Percy nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“I did half of it this morning,” he said, “but I felt I wanted another
+bird’s-eye view before I could understand properly: I am so grateful to
+you for giving it me. It is really a great labour, this daily letter to
+the Cardinal-Protector. I am thinking of resigning if I am allowed.”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear father, don’t do that. If I may say so to your face, I think
+you have a very shrewd mind; and unless Rome has balanced information
+she can do nothing. I don’t suppose your colleagues are as careful as
+yourself.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy smiled, lifting his dark eyebrows deprecatingly.</p>
+
+<p>“Come, father,” he said.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The two priests parted at the steps of the corridor, and Percy stood for
+a minute or two staring out at the familiar autumn scene, trying to
+understand what it all meant. What he had heard downstairs seemed
+strangely to illuminate that vision of splendid prosperity that lay
+before him.</p>
+
+<p>The air was as bright as day; artificial sunlight had carried all before
+it, and London now knew no difference between dark and light. He stood
+in a kind of glazed cloister, heavily floored with a preparation of
+rubber on which footsteps made no sound. Beneath him, at the foot of the
+stairs, poured an endless double line of persons severed by a partition,
+going to right and left, noiselessly, except for the murmur of Esperanto
+talking that sounded ceaselessly as they went. Through the clear,
+hardened glass of the public passage showed a broad sleek black roadway,
+ribbed from side to side, and puckered in the centre, significantly
+empty, but even as he stood there a note sounded far away from Old
+Westminster, like the hum of a giant hive, rising as it came, and an
+instant later a transparent thing shot past, flashing from every angle,
+and the note died to a hum again and a silence as the great Government
+motor from the south whirled eastwards with the mails. This was a
+privileged roadway; nothing but state-vehicles were allowed to use it,
+and those at a speed not exceeding one hundred miles an hour.</p>
+
+<p>Other noises were subdued in this city of rubber; the passenger-circles
+were a hundred yards away, and the subterranean traffic lay too deep for
+anything but a vibration to make itself felt. It was to remove this
+vibration, and silence the hum of the ordinary vehicles, that the
+Government experts had been working for the last twenty years.</p>
+
+<p>Once again before he moved there came a long cry from overhead,
+startlingly beautiful and piercing, and, as he lifted his eyes from the
+glimpse of the steady river which alone had refused to be transformed,
+he saw high above him against the heavy illuminated clouds, a long
+slender object, glowing with soft light, slide northwards and vanish on
+outstretched wings. That musical cry, he told himself, was the voice of
+one of the European line of volors announcing its arrival in the capital
+of Great Britain.</p>
+
+<p>“Until our Lord comes back,” he thought to himself; and for an instant
+the old misery stabbed at his heart. How difficult it was to hold the
+eyes focussed on that far horizon when this world lay in the foreground
+so compelling in its splendour and its strength! Oh, he had argued with
+Father Francis an hour ago that size was not the same as greatness, and
+that an insistent external could not exclude a subtle internal; and he
+had believed what he had then said; but the doubt yet remained till he
+silenced it by a fierce effort, crying in his heart to the Poor Man of
+Nazareth to keep his heart as the heart of a little child.</p>
+
+<p>Then he set his lips, wondering how long Father Francis would bear the
+pressure, and went down the steps.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="BOOK_I-THE_ADVENT">BOOK I-THE ADVENT</h2>
+</div>
+
+<h3>CHAPTER I</h3>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>Oliver Brand, the new member for Croydon (4), sat in his study, looking
+out of the window over the top of his typewriter.</p>
+
+<p>His house stood facing northwards at the extreme end of a spur of the
+Surrey Hills, now cut and tunnelled out of all recognition; only to a
+Communist the view was an inspiriting one. Immediately below the wide
+windows the embanked ground fell away rapidly for perhaps a hundred
+feet, ending in a high wall, and beyond that the world and works of men
+were triumphant as far as eye could see. Two vast tracks like streaked
+race-courses, each not less than a quarter of a mile in width, and sunk
+twenty feet below the surface of the ground, swept up to a meeting a
+mile ahead at the huge junction. Of those, that on his left was the
+First Trunk road to Brighton, inscribed in capital letters in the
+Railroad Guide, that to the right the Second Trunk to the Tunbridge and
+Hastings district. Each was divided length-ways by a cement wall, on one
+side of which, on steel rails, ran the electric trams, and on the other
+lay the motor-track itself again divided into three, on which ran, first
+the Government coaches at a speed of one hundred and fifty miles an
+hour, second the private motors at not more than sixty, third the cheap
+Government line at thirty, with stations every five miles. This was
+further bordered by a road confined to pedestrians, cyclists and
+ordinary cars on which no vehicle was allowed to move at more than
+twelve miles an hour.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond these great tracks lay an immense plain of house-roofs, with
+short towers here and there marking public buildings, from the Caterham
+district on the left to Croydon in front, all clear and bright in
+smokeless air; and far away to the west and north showed the low
+suburban hills against the April sky.</p>
+
+<p>There was surprisingly little sound, considering the pressure of the
+population; and, with the exception of the buzz of the steel rails as a
+train fled north or south, and the occasional sweet chord of the great
+motors as they neared or left the junction, there was little to be heard
+in this study except a smooth, soothing murmur that filled the air like
+the murmur of bees in a garden.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver loved every hint of human life—all busy sights and sounds—and
+was listening now, smiling faintly to himself as he stared out into the
+clear air. Then he set his lips, laid his fingers on the keys once more,
+and went on speech-constructing.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>He was very fortunate in the situation of his house. It stood in an
+angle of one of those huge spider-webs with which the country was
+covered, and for his purposes was all that he could expect. It was close
+enough to London to be extremely cheap, for all wealthy persons had
+retired at least a hundred miles from the throbbing heart of England;
+and yet it was as quiet as he could wish. He was within ten minutes of
+Westminster on the one side, and twenty minutes of the sea on the other,
+and his constituency lay before him like a raised map. Further, since
+the great London termini were but ten minutes away, there were at his
+disposal the First Trunk lines to every big town in England. For a
+politician of no great means, who was asked to speak at Edinburgh on one
+evening and in Marseilles on the next, he was as well placed as any man
+in Europe.</p>
+
+<p>He was a pleasant-looking man, not much over thirty years old; black
+wire-haired, clean-shaven, thin, virile, magnetic, blue-eyed and
+white-skinned; and he appeared this day extremely content with himself
+and the world. His lips moved slightly as he worked, his eyes enlarged
+and diminished with excitement, and more than once he paused and stared
+out again, smiling and flushed.</p>
+
+<p>Then a door opened; a middle-aged man came nervously in with a bundle of
+papers, laid them down on the table without a word, and turned to go
+out. Oliver lifted his hand for attention, snapped a lever, and spoke.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, Mr. Phillips?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“There is news from the East, sir,” said the secretary.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver shot a glance sideways, and laid his hand on the bundle.</p>
+
+<p>“Any complete message?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“No, sir; it is interrupted again. Mr. Felsenburgh’s name is mentioned.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver did not seem to hear; he lifted the flimsy printed sheets with a
+sudden movement, and began turning them.</p>
+
+<p>“The fourth from the top, Mr. Brand,” said the secretary.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver jerked his head impatiently, and the other went out as if at a
+signal.</p>
+
+<p>The fourth sheet from the top, printed in red on green, seemed to absorb
+Oliver’s attention altogether, for he read it through two or three
+times, leaning back motionless in his chair. Then he sighed, and stared
+again through the window.</p>
+
+<p>Then once more the door opened, and a tall girl came in.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, my dear?” she observed.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver shook his head, with compressed lips.</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing definite,” he said. “Even less than usual. Listen.”</p>
+
+<p>He took up the green sheet and began to read aloud as the girl sat down
+in a window-seat on his left.</p>
+
+<p>She was a very charming-looking creature, tall and slender, with
+serious, ardent grey eyes, firm red lips, and a beautiful carriage of
+head and shoulders. She had walked slowly across the room as Oliver took
+up the paper, and now sat back in her brown dress in a very graceful and
+stately attitude. She seemed to listen with a deliberate kind of
+patience; but her eyes flickered with interest.</p>
+
+<p>“‘Irkutsk—April fourteen—Yesterday—as—usual—But—rumoured—
+defection—from—Sufi—party—Troops—continue—gathering—
+Felsenburgh—addressed—Buddhist—crowd—Attempt—on—Llama—last—
+Friday—work—of—Anarchists—Felsenburgh—leaving—for—Moscow—as
+—arranged—he....’ There—that is absolutely all,” ended Oliver
+dispiritedly. “It’s interrupted as usual.”</p>
+
+<p>The girl began to swing a foot.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t understand in the least,” she said. “Who is Felsenburgh, after
+all?”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear child, that is what all the world is asking. Nothing is known
+except that he was included in the American deputation at the last
+moment. The <i>Herald</i> published his life last week; but it has been
+contradicted. It is certain that he is quite a young man, and that he
+has been quite obscure until now.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, he is not obscure now,” observed the girl.</p>
+
+<p>“I know; it seems as if he were running the whole thing. One never hears
+a word of the others. It’s lucky he’s on the right side.”</p>
+
+<p>“And what do you think?”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver turned vacant eyes again out of the window.</p>
+
+<p>“I think it is touch and go,” he said. “The only remarkable thing is
+that here hardly anybody seems to realise it. It’s too big for the
+imagination, I suppose. There is no doubt that the East has been
+preparing for a descent on Europe for these last five years. They have
+only been checked by America; and this is one last attempt to stop them.
+But why Felsenburgh should come to the front—-” he broke off. “He must
+be a good linguist, at any rate. This is at least the fifth crowd he has
+addressed; perhaps he is just the American interpreter. Christ! I wonder
+who he is.”</p>
+
+<p>“Has he any other name?”</p>
+
+<p>“Julian, I believe. One message said so.”</p>
+
+<p>“How did this come through?”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“Private enterprise,” he said. “The European agencies have stopped work.
+Every telegraph station is guarded night and day. There are lines of
+volors strung out on every frontier. The Empire means to settle this
+business without us.”</p>
+
+<p>“And if it goes wrong?”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear Mabel—if hell breaks loose—-” he threw out his hands
+deprecatingly.</p>
+
+<p>“And what is the Government doing?”</p>
+
+<p>“Working night and day; so is the rest of Europe. It’ll be Armageddon
+with a vengeance if it comes to war.”</p>
+
+<p>“What chance do you see?”</p>
+
+<p>“I see two chances,” said Oliver slowly: “one, that they may be afraid
+of America, and may hold their hands from sheer fear; the other that
+they may be induced to hold their hands from charity; if only they can
+be made to understand that co-operation is the one hope of the world.
+But those damned religions of theirs—-”</p>
+
+<p>The girl sighed, and looked out again on to the wide plain of
+house-roofs below the window.</p>
+
+<p>The situation was indeed as serious as it could be. That huge Empire,
+consisting of a federalism of States under the Son of Heaven (made
+possible by the merging of the Japanese and Chinese dynasties and the
+fall of Russia), had been consolidating its forces and learning its own
+power during the last thirty-five years, ever since, in fact, it had
+laid its lean yellow hands upon Australia and India. While the rest of
+the world had learned the folly of war, ever since the fall of the
+Russian republic under the combined attack of the yellow races, the last
+had grasped its possibilities. It seemed now as if the civilisation of
+the last century was to be swept back once more into chaos. It was not
+that the mob of the East cared very greatly; it was their rulers who had
+begun to stretch themselves after an almost eternal lethargy, and it was
+hard to imagine how they could be checked at this point. There was a
+touch of grimness too in the rumour that religious fanaticism was behind
+the movement, and that the patient East proposed at last to proselytise
+by the modern equivalents of fire and sword those who had laid aside for
+the most part all religious beliefs except that in Humanity. To Oliver
+it was simply maddening. As he looked from his window and saw that vast
+limit of London laid peaceably before him, as his imagination ran out
+over Europe and saw everywhere that steady triumph of common sense and
+fact over the wild fairy-stories of Christianity, it seemed intolerable
+that there should be even a possibility that all this should be swept
+back again into the barbarous turmoil of sects and dogmas; for no less
+than this would be the result if the East laid hands on Europe. Even
+Catholicism would revive, he told himself, that strange faith that had
+blazed so often as persecution had been dashed to quench it; and, of all
+forms of faith, to Oliver’s mind Catholicism was the most grotesque and
+enslaving. And the prospect of all this honestly troubled him, far more
+than the thought of the physical catastrophe and bloodshed that would
+fall on Europe with the advent of the East. There was but one hope on
+the religious side, as he had told Mabel a dozen times, and that was
+that the Quietistic Pantheism which for the last century had made such
+giant strides in East and West alike, among Mohammedans, Buddhists,
+Hindus, Confucianists and the rest, should avail to check the
+supernatural frenzy that inspired their exoteric brethren. Pantheism, he
+understood, was what he held himself; for him “God” was the developing
+sum of created life, and impersonal Unity was the essence of His being;
+competition then was the great heresy that set men one against another
+and delayed all progress; for, to his mind, progress lay in the merging
+of the individual in the family, of the family in the commonwealth, of
+the commonwealth in the continent, and of the continent in the world.
+Finally, the world itself at any moment was no more than the mood of
+impersonal life. It was, in fact, the Catholic idea with the
+supernatural left out, a union of earthly fortunes, an abandonment of
+individualism on the one side, and of supernaturalism on the other. It
+was treason to appeal from God Immanent to God Transcendent; there was
+no God transcendent; God, so far as He could be known, was man.</p>
+
+<p>Yet these two, husband and wife after a fashion—for they had entered
+into that terminable contract now recognised explicitly by the
+State—these two were very far from sharing in the usual heavy dulness
+of mere materialists. The world, for them, beat with one ardent life
+blossoming in flower and beast and man, a torrent of beautiful vigour
+flowing from a deep source and irrigating all that moved or felt. Its
+romance was the more appreciable because it was comprehensible to the
+minds that sprang from it; there were mysteries in it, but mysteries
+that enticed rather than baffled, for they unfolded new glories with
+every discovery that man could make; even inanimate objects, the fossil,
+the electric current, the far-off stars, these were dust thrown off by
+the Spirit of the World—fragrant with His Presence and eloquent of His
+Nature. For example, the announcement made by Klein, the astronomer,
+twenty years before, that the inhabitation of certain planets had become
+a certified fact—how vastly this had altered men’s views of themselves.
+But the one condition of progress and the building of Jerusalem, on the
+planet that happened to be men’s dwelling place, was peace, not the
+sword which Christ brought or that which Mahomet wielded; but peace that
+arose from, not passed, understanding; the peace that sprang from a
+knowledge that man was all and was able to develop himself only by
+sympathy with his fellows. To Oliver and his wife, then, the last
+century seemed like a revelation; little by little the old superstitions
+had died, and the new light broadened; the Spirit of the World had
+roused Himself, the sun had dawned in the west; and now with horror and
+loathing they had seen the clouds gather once more in the quarter whence
+all superstition had had its birth.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Mabel got up presently and came across to her husband.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear,” she said, “you must not be downhearted. It all may pass as it
+passed before. It is a great thing that they are listening to America at
+all. And this Mr. Felsenburgh seems to be on the right side.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver took her hand and kissed it.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>Oliver seemed altogether depressed at breakfast, half an hour later. His
+mother, an old lady of nearly eighty, who never appeared till noon,
+seemed to see it at once, for after a look or two at him and a word, she
+subsided into silence behind her plate.</p>
+
+<p>It was a pleasant little room in which they sat, immediately behind
+Oliver’s own, and was furnished, according to universal custom, in light
+green. Its windows looked out upon a strip of garden at the back, and
+the high creeper-grown wall that separated that domain from the next.
+The furniture, too, was of the usual sort; a sensible round table stood
+in the middle, with three tall arm-chairs, with the proper angles and
+rests, drawn up to it; and the centre of it, resting apparently on a
+broad round column, held the dishes. It was thirty years now since the
+practice of placing the dining-room above the kitchen, and of raising
+and lowering the courses by hydraulic power into the centre of the
+dining-table, had become universal in the houses of the well-to-do. The
+floor consisted entirely of the asbestos cork preparation invented in
+America, noiseless, clean, and pleasant to both foot and eye.</p>
+
+<p>Mabel broke the silence.</p>
+
+<p>“And your speech to-morrow?” she asked, taking up her fork.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver brightened a little, and began to discourse.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed that Birmingham was beginning to fret. They were crying out
+once more for free trade with America: European facilities were not
+enough, and it was Oliver’s business to keep them quiet. It was useless,
+he proposed to tell them, to agitate until the Eastern business was
+settled: they must not bother the Government with such details just now.
+He was to tell them, too, that the Government was wholly on their side;
+that it was bound to come soon.</p>
+
+<p>“They are pig-headed,” he added fiercely; “pig-headed and selfish; they
+are like children who cry for food ten minutes before dinner-time: it is
+bound to come if they will wait a little.”</p>
+
+<p>“And you will tell them so?”</p>
+
+<p>“That they are pig-headed? Certainly.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel looked at her husband with a pleased twinkle in her eyes. She knew
+perfectly well that his popularity rested largely on his outspokenness:
+folks liked to be scolded and abused by a genial bold man who danced and
+gesticulated in a magnetic fury; she liked it herself.</p>
+
+<p>“How shall you go?” she asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Volor. I shall catch the eighteen o’clock at Blackfriars; the meeting
+is at nineteen, and I shall be back at twenty-one.”</p>
+
+<p>He addressed himself vigorously to his <i>entree</i>, and his mother looked
+up with a patient, old-woman smile.</p>
+
+<p>Mabel began to drum her fingers softly on the damask.</p>
+
+<p>“Please make haste, my dear,” she said; “I have to be at Brighton at
+three.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver gulped his last mouthful, pushed his plate over the line, glanced
+to see if all plates were there, and then put his hand beneath the
+table.</p>
+
+<p>Instantly, without a sound, the centre-piece vanished, and the three
+waited unconcernedly while the clink of dishes came from beneath.</p>
+
+<p>Old Mrs. Brand was a hale-looking old lady, rosy and wrinkled, with the
+mantilla head-dress of fifty years ago; but she, too, looked a little
+depressed this morning. The <i>entree</i> was not very successful, she
+thought; the new food-stuff was not up to the old, it was a trifle
+gritty: she would see about it afterwards. There was a clink, a soft
+sound like a push, and the centre-piece snapped into its place, bearing
+an admirable imitation of a roasted fowl.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver and his wife were alone again for a minute or two after breakfast
+before Mabel started down the path to catch the 14¹⁄₂ o’clock 4th grade
+sub-trunk line to the junction.</p>
+
+<p>“What’s the matter with mother?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! it’s the food-stuff again: she’s never got accustomed to it; she
+says it doesn’t suit her.”</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing else?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, my dear, I am sure of it. She hasn’t said a word lately.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver watched his wife go down the path, reassured. He had been a
+little troubled once or twice lately by an odd word or two that his
+mother had let fall. She had been brought up a Christian for a few
+years, and it seemed to him sometimes as if it had left a taint. There
+was an old “Garden of the Soul” that she liked to keep by her, though
+she always protested with an appearance of scorn that it was nothing but
+nonsense. Still, Oliver would have preferred that she had burned it:
+superstition was a desperate thing for retaining life, and, as the brain
+weakened, might conceivably reassert itself. Christianity was both wild
+and dull, he told himself, wild because of its obvious grotesqueness and
+impossibility, and dull because it was so utterly apart from the
+exhilarating stream of human life; it crept dustily about still, he
+knew, in little dark churches here and there; it screamed with
+hysterical sentimentality in Westminster Cathedral which he had once
+entered and looked upon with a kind of disgusted fury; it gabbled
+strange, false words to the incompetent and the old and the half-witted.
+But it would be too dreadful if his own mother ever looked upon it again
+with favour.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver himself, ever since he could remember, had been violently opposed
+to the concessions to Rome and Ireland. It was intolerable that these
+two places should be definitely yielded up to this foolish, treacherous
+nonsense: they were hot-beds of sedition; plague-spots on the face of
+humanity. He had never agreed with those who said that it was better
+that all the poison of the West should be gathered rather than
+dispersed. But, at any rate, there it was. Rome had been given up wholly
+to that old man in white in exchange for all the parish churches and
+cathedrals of Italy, and it was understood that mediaeval darkness
+reigned there supreme; and Ireland, after receiving Home Rule thirty
+years before, had declared for Catholicism, and opened her arms to
+Individualism in its most virulent form. England had laughed and
+assented, for she was saved from a quantity of agitation by the
+immediate departure of half her Catholic population for that island, and
+had, consistently with her Communist-colonial policy, granted every
+facility for Individualism to reduce itself there <i>ad absurdum</i>. All
+kinds of funny things were happening there: Oliver had read with a
+bitter amusement of new appearances there, of a Woman in Blue and
+shrines raised where her feet had rested; but he was scarcely amused at
+Rome, for the movement to Turin of the Italian Government had deprived
+the Republic of quite a quantity of sentimental prestige, and had haloed
+the old religious nonsense with all the meretriciousness of historical
+association. However, it obviously could not last much longer: the world
+was beginning to understand at last.</p>
+
+<p>He stood a moment or two at the door after his wife had gone, drinking
+in reassurance from that glorious vision of solid sense that spread
+itself before his eyes: the endless house-roofs; the high glass vaults
+of the public baths and gymnasiums; the pinnacled schools where
+Citizenship was taught each morning; the spider-like cranes and
+scaffoldings that rose here and there; and even the few pricking spires
+did not disconcert him. There it stretched away into the grey haze of
+London, really beautiful, this vast hive of men and women who had
+learned at least the primary lesson of the gospel that there was no God
+but man, no priest but the politician, no prophet but the schoolmaster.</p>
+
+<p>Then he went back once more to his speech-constructing.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Mabel, too, was a little thoughtful as she sat with her paper on her
+lap, spinning down the broad line to Brighton. This Eastern news was
+more disconcerting to her than she allowed her husband to see; yet it
+seemed incredible that there could be any real danger of invasion. This
+Western life was so sensible and peaceful; folks had their feet at last
+upon the rock, and it was unthinkable that they could ever be forced
+back on to the mud-flats: it was contrary to the whole law of
+development. Yet she could not but recognise that catastrophe seemed one
+of nature’s methods....</p>
+
+<p>She sat very quiet, glancing once or twice at the meagre little scrap
+of news, and read the leading article upon it: that too seemed
+significant of dismay. A couple of men were talking in the
+half-compartment beyond on the same subject; one described the
+Government engineering works that he had visited, the breathless haste
+that dominated them; the other put in interrogations and questions.
+There was not much comfort there. There were no windows through which
+she could look; on the main lines the speed was too great for the eyes;
+the long compartment flooded with soft light bounded her horizon. She
+stared at the moulded white ceiling, the delicious oak-framed paintings,
+the deep spring-seats, the mellow globes overhead that poured out
+radiance, at a mother and child diagonally opposite her. Then the great
+chord sounded; the faint vibration increased ever so slightly; and an
+instant later the automatic doors ran back, and she stepped out on to
+the platform of Brighton station.</p>
+
+<p>As she went down the steps leading to the station square she noticed a
+priest going before her. He seemed a very upright and sturdy old man,
+for though his hair was white he walked steadily and strongly. At the
+foot of the steps he stopped and half turned, and then, to her surprise,
+she saw that his face was that of a young man, fine-featured and strong,
+with black eyebrows and very bright grey eyes. Then she passed on and
+began to cross the square in the direction of her aunt’s house.</p>
+
+<p>Then without the slightest warning, except one shrill hoot from
+overhead, a number of things happened.</p>
+
+<p>A great shadow whirled across the sunlight at her feet, a sound of
+rending tore the air, and a noise like a giant’s sigh; and, as she
+stopped bewildered, with a noise like ten thousand smashed kettles, a
+huge thing crashed on the rubber pavement before her, where it lay,
+filling half the square, writhing long wings on its upper side that beat
+and whirled like the flappers of some ghastly extinct monster, pouring
+out human screams, and beginning almost instantly to crawl with broken
+life.</p>
+
+<p>Mabel scarcely knew what happened next; but she found herself a moment
+later forced forward by some violent pressure from behind, till she
+stood shaking from head to foot, with some kind of smashed body of a man
+moaning and stretching at her feet. There was a sort of articulate
+language coming from it; she caught distinctly the names of Jesus and
+Mary; then a voice hissed suddenly in her ears:</p>
+
+<p>“Let me through. I am a priest.”</p>
+
+<p>She stood there a moment longer, dazed by the suddenness of the whole
+affair, and watched almost unintelligently the grey-haired young priest
+on his knees, with his coat torn open, and a crucifix out; she saw him
+bend close, wave his hand in a swift sign, and heard a murmur of a
+language she did not know. Then he was up again, holding the crucifix
+before him, and she saw him begin to move forward into the midst of the
+red-flooded pavement, looking this way and that as if for a signal. Down
+the steps of the great hospital on her right came figures running now,
+hatless, each carrying what looked like an old-fashioned camera. She
+knew what those men were, and her heart leaped in relief. They were the
+ministers of euthanasia. Then she felt herself taken by the shoulder and
+pulled back, and immediately found herself in the front rank of a crowd
+that was swaying and crying out, and behind a line of police and
+civilians who had formed themselves into a cordon to keep the pressure
+back.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>Oliver was in a panic of terror as his mother, half an hour later, ran
+in with the news that one of the Government volors had fallen in the
+station square at Brighton just after the 14¹⁄₂ train had discharged
+its passengers. He knew quite well what that meant, for he remembered
+one such accident ten years before, just after the law forbidding
+private volors had been passed. It meant that every living creature in
+it was killed and probably many more in the place where it fell—and
+what then? The message was clear enough; she would certainly be in the
+square at that time.</p>
+
+<p>He sent a desperate wire to her aunt asking for news; and sat, shaking
+in his chair, awaiting the answer. His mother sat by him.</p>
+
+<p>“Please God—-” she sobbed out once, and stopped confounded as he turned
+on her.</p>
+
+<p>But Fate was merciful, and three minutes before Mr. Phillips toiled up
+the path with the answer, Mabel herself came into the room, rather pale
+and smiling.</p>
+
+<p>“Christ!” cried Oliver, and gave one huge sob as he sprang up.</p>
+
+<p>She had not a great deal to tell him. There was no explanation of the
+disaster published as yet; it seemed that the wings on one side had
+simply ceased to work.</p>
+
+<p>She described the shadow, the hiss of sound, and the crash.</p>
+
+<p>Then she stopped.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, my dear?” said her husband, still rather white beneath the eyes
+as he sat close to her patting her hand.</p>
+
+<p>“There was a priest there,” said Mabel. “I saw him before, at the
+station.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver gave a little hysterical snort of laughter.</p>
+
+<p>“He was on his knees at once,” she said, “with his crucifix, even before
+the doctors came. My dear, do people really believe all that?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, they think they do,” said her husband.</p>
+
+<p>“It was all so—so sudden; and there he was, just as if he had been
+expecting it all. Oliver, how can they?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, people will believe anything if they begin early enough.”</p>
+
+<p>“And the man seemed to believe it, too—the dying man, I mean. I saw his
+eyes.”</p>
+
+<p>She stopped.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, my dear?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oliver, what do you say to people when they are dying?”</p>
+
+<p>“Say! Why, nothing! What can I say? But I don’t think I’ve ever seen any
+one die.”</p>
+
+<p>“Nor have I till to-day,” said the girl, and shivered a little. “The
+euthanasia people were soon at work.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver took her hand gently.</p>
+
+<p>“My darling, it must have been frightful. Why, you’re trembling still.”</p>
+
+<p>“No; but listen.... You know, if I had had anything to say I could have
+said it too. They were all just in front of me: I wondered; then I knew
+I hadn’t. I couldn’t possibly have talked about Humanity.”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear, it’s all very sad; but you know it doesn’t really matter. It’s
+all over.”</p>
+
+<p>“And—and they’ve just stopped?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, yes.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel compressed her lips a little; then she sighed. She had an agitated
+sort of meditation in the train. She knew perfectly that it was sheer
+nerves; but she could not just yet shake them off. As she had said, it
+was the first time she had seen death.</p>
+
+<p>“And that priest—that priest doesn’t think so?”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear, I’ll tell you what he believes. He believes that that man whom
+he showed the crucifix to, and said those words over, is alive
+somewhere, in spite of his brain being dead: he is not quite sure where;
+but he is either in a kind of smelting works being slowly burned; or, if
+he is very lucky, and that piece of wood took effect, he is somewhere
+beyond the clouds, before Three Persons who are only One although They
+are Three; that there are quantities of other people there, a Woman in
+Blue, a great many others in white with their heads under their arms,
+and still more with their heads on one side; and that they’ve all got
+harps and go on singing for ever and ever, and walking about on the
+clouds, and liking it very much indeed. He thinks, too, that all these
+nice people are perpetually looking down upon the aforesaid
+smelting-works, and praising the Three Great Persons for making them.
+That’s what the priest believes. Now you know it’s not likely; that kind
+of thing may be very nice, but it isn’t true.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel smiled pleasantly. She had never heard it put so well.</p>
+
+<p>“No, my dear, you’re quite right. That sort of thing isn’t true. How can
+he believe it? He looked quite intelligent!”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear girl, if I had told you in your cradle that the moon was green
+cheese, and had hammered at you ever since, every day and all day, that
+it was, you’d very nearly believe it by now. Why, you know in your heart
+that the euthanatisers are the real priests. Of course you do.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel sighed with satisfaction and stood up.</p>
+
+<p>“Oliver, you’re a most comforting person. I do like you! There! I must
+go to my room: I’m all shaky still.”</p>
+
+<p>Half across the room she stopped and put out a shoe.</p>
+
+<p>“Why—-” she began faintly.</p>
+
+<p>There was a curious rusty-looking splash upon it; and her husband saw
+her turn white. He rose abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear,” he said, “don’t be foolish.”</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him, smiled bravely, and went out.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>When she was gone, he still sat on a moment where she had left him. Dear
+me! how pleased he was! He did not like to think of what life would have
+been without her. He had known her since she was twelve—that was seven
+years ago-and last year they had gone together to the district official
+to make their contract. She had really become very necessary to him. Of
+course the world could get on without her, and he supposed that he could
+too; but he did not want to have to try. He knew perfectly well, for it
+was his creed of human love, that there was between them a double
+affection, of mind as well as body; and there was absolutely nothing
+else: but he loved her quick intuitions, and to hear his own thought
+echoed so perfectly. It was like two flames added together to make a
+third taller than either: of course one flame could burn without the
+other—in fact, one would have to, one day—but meantime the warmth and
+light were exhilarating. Yes, he was delighted that she happened to be
+clear of the falling volor.</p>
+
+<p>He gave no more thought to his exposition of the Christian creed; it was
+a mere commonplace to him that Catholics believed that kind of thing; it
+was no more blasphemous to his mind so to describe it, than it would be
+to laugh at a Fijian idol with mother-of-pearl eyes, and a horse-hair
+wig; it was simply impossible to treat it seriously. He, too, had
+wondered once or twice in his life how human beings could believe such
+rubbish; but psychology had helped him, and he knew now well enough that
+suggestion will do almost anything. And it was this hateful thing that
+had so long restrained the euthanasia movement with all its splendid
+mercy.</p>
+
+<p>His brows wrinkled a little as he remembered his mother’s exclamation,
+“Please God”; then he smiled at the poor old thing and her pathetic
+childishness, and turned once more to his table, thinking in spite of
+himself of his wife’s hesitation as she had seen the splash of blood on
+her shoe. Blood! Yes; that was as much a fact as anything else. How was
+it to be dealt with? Why, by the glorious creed of Humanity—that
+splendid God who died and rose again ten thousand times a day, who had
+died daily like the old cracked fanatic Saul of Tarsus, ever since the
+world began, and who rose again, not once like the Carpenter’s Son, but
+with every child that came into the world. That was the answer; and was
+it not overwhelmingly sufficient?</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Phillips came in an hour later with another bundle of papers.</p>
+
+<p>“No more news from the East, sir,” he said.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>Percy Franklin’s correspondence with the Cardinal-Protector of England
+occupied him directly for at least two hours every day, and for nearly
+eight hours indirectly.</p>
+
+<p>For the past eight years the methods of the Holy See had once more been
+revised with a view to modern needs, and now every important province
+throughout the world possessed not only an administrative metropolitan
+but a representative in Rome whose business it was to be in touch with
+the Pope on the one side and the people he represented on the other. In
+other words, centralisation had gone forward rapidly, in accordance with
+the laws of life; and, with centralisation, freedom of method and
+expansion of power. England’s Cardinal-Protector was one Abbot Martin, a
+Benedictine, and it was Percy’s business, as of a dozen more bishops,
+priests and laymen (with whom, by the way, he was forbidden to hold any
+formal consultation), to write a long daily letter to him on affairs
+that came under his notice.</p>
+
+<p>It was a curious life, therefore, that Percy led. He had a couple of
+rooms assigned to him in Archbishop’s House at Westminster, and was
+attached loosely to the Cathedral staff, although with considerable
+liberty. He rose early, and went to meditation for an hour, after which
+he said his mass. He took his coffee soon after, said a little office,
+and then settled down to map out his letter. At ten o’clock he was ready
+to receive callers, and till noon he was generally busy with both those
+who came to see him on their own responsibility and his staff of
+half-a-dozen reporters whose business it was to bring him marked
+paragraphs in the newspapers and their own comments. He then breakfasted
+with the other priests in the house, and set out soon after to call on
+people whose opinion was necessary, returning for a cup of tea soon
+after sixteen o’clock. Then he settled down, after the rest of his
+office and a visit to the Blessed Sacrament, to compose his letter,
+which though short, needed a great deal of care and sifting. After
+dinner he made a few notes for next day, received visitors again, and
+went to bed soon after twenty-two o’clock. Twice a week it was his
+business to assist at Vespers in the afternoon, and he usually sang high
+mass on Saturdays.</p>
+
+<p>It was, therefore, a curiously distracting life, with peculiar dangers.</p>
+
+<p>It was one day, a week or two after his visit to Brighton, that he was
+just finishing his letter, when his servant looked in to tell him that
+Father Francis was below.</p>
+
+<p>“In ten minutes,” said Percy, without looking up.</p>
+
+<p>He snapped off his last lines, drew out the sheet, and settled down to
+read it over, translating it unconsciously from Latin to English.</p>
+
+<p>“WESTMINSTER, May 14th.</p>
+
+<p>“EMINENCE: Since yesterday I have a little more information. It appears
+certain that the Bill establishing Esperanto for all State purposes will
+be brought in in June. I have had this from Johnson. This, as I have
+pointed out before, is the very last stone in our consolidation with the
+continent, which, at present, is to be regretted.... A great access of
+Jews to Freemasonry is to be expected; hitherto they have held aloof to
+some extent, but the ‘abolition of the Idea of God’ is tending to draw
+in those Jews, now greatly on the increase once more, who repudiate all
+notion of a personal Messiah. It is ‘Humanity’ here, too, that is at
+work. To-day I heard the Rabbi Simeon speak to this effect in the City,
+and was impressed by the applause he received.... Yet among others an
+expectation is growing that a man will presently be found to lead the
+Communist movement and unite their forces more closely. I enclose a
+verbose cutting from the <i>New People</i> to that effect; and it is echoed
+everywhere. They say that the cause must give birth to one such soon;
+that they have had prophets and precursors for a hundred years past, and
+lately a cessation of them. It is strange how this coincides
+superficially with Christian ideas. Your Eminence will observe that a
+simile of the ‘ninth wave’ is used with some eloquence.... I hear to-day
+of the secession of an old Catholic family, the Wargraves of Norfolk,
+with their chaplain Micklem, who it seems has been busy in this
+direction for some while. The <i>Epoch</i> announces it with satisfaction,
+owing to the peculiar circumstances; but unhappily such events are not
+uncommon now.... There is much distrust among the laity. Seven priests
+in Westminster diocese have left us within the last three months; on the
+other hand, I have pleasure in telling your Eminence that his Grace
+received into Catholic Communion this morning the ex-Anglican Bishop of
+Carlisle, with half-a-dozen of his clergy. This has been expected for
+some weeks past. I append also cuttings from the <i>Tribune</i>, the <i>London
+Trumpet</i>, and the <i>Observer</i>, with my comments upon them. Your Eminence
+will see how great the excitement is with regard to the last.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Recommendation.</i> That formal excommunication of the Wargraves and
+these eight priests should be issued in Norfolk and Westminster
+respectively, and no further notice taken.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy laid down the sheet, gathered up the half dozen other papers that
+contained his extracts and running commentary, signed the last, and
+slipped the whole into the printed envelope that lay ready.</p>
+
+<p>Then he took up his biretta and went to the lift.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The moment he came into the glass-doored parlour he saw that the crisis
+was come, if not passed already. Father Francis looked miserably ill,
+but there was a curious hardness, too, about his eyes and mouth, as he
+stood waiting. He shook his head abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>“I have come to say good-bye, father. I can bear it no more.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy was careful to show no emotion at all. He made a little sign to a
+chair, and himself sat down too. “It is an end of everything,” said the
+other again in a perfectly steady voice. “I believe nothing. I have
+believed nothing for a year now.”</p>
+
+<p>“You have felt nothing, you mean,” said Percy.</p>
+
+<p>“That won’t do, father,” went on the other. “I tell you there is nothing
+left. I can’t even argue now. It is just good-bye.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy had nothing to say. He had talked to this man during a period of
+over eight months, ever since Father Francis had first confided in him
+that his faith was going. He understood perfectly what a strain it had
+been; he felt bitterly compassionate towards this poor creature who had
+become caught up somehow into the dizzy triumphant whirl of the New
+Humanity. External facts were horribly strong just now; and faith,
+except to one who had learned that Will and Grace were all and emotion
+nothing, was as a child crawling about in the midst of some huge
+machinery: it might survive or it might not; but it required nerves of
+steel to keep steady. It was hard to know where blame could be assigned;
+yet Percy’s faith told him that there was blame due. In the ages of
+faith a very inadequate grasp of religion would pass muster; in these
+searching days none but the humble and the pure could stand the test for
+long, unless indeed they were protected by a miracle of ignorance. The
+alliance of Psychology and Materialism did indeed seem, looked at from
+one angle, to account for everything; it needed a robust supernatural
+perception to understand their practical inadequacy. And as regards
+Father Francis’s personal responsibility, he could not help feeling that
+the other had allowed ceremonial to play too great a part in his
+religion, and prayer too little. In him the external had absorbed the
+internal.</p>
+
+<p>So he did not allow his sympathy to show itself in his bright eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“You think it my fault, of course,” said the other sharply.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear father,” said Percy, motionless in his chair, “I know it is
+your fault. Listen to me. You say Christianity is absurd and impossible.
+Now, you know, it cannot be that! It may be untrue—I am not speaking of
+that now, even though I am perfectly certain that it is absolutely
+true—but it cannot be absurd so long as educated and virtuous people
+continue to hold it. To say that it is absurd is simple pride; it is to
+dismiss all who believe in it as not merely mistaken, but unintelligent
+as well—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Very well, then,” interrupted the other; “then suppose I withdraw that,
+and simply say that I do not believe it to be true.”</p>
+
+<p>“You do not withdraw it,” continued Percy serenely; “you still really
+believe it to be absurd: you have told me so a dozen times. Well, I
+repeat, that is pride, and quite sufficient to account for it all. It is
+the moral attitude that matters. There may be other things too—-”</p>
+
+<p>Father Francis looked up sharply.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! the old story!” he said sneeringly.</p>
+
+<p>“If you tell me on your word of honour that there is no woman in the
+case, or no particular programme of sin you propose to work out, I shall
+believe you. But it is an old story, as you say.”</p>
+
+<p>“I swear to you there is not,” cried the other.</p>
+
+<p>“Thank God then!” said Percy. “There are fewer obstacles to a return of
+faith.”</p>
+
+<p>There was silence for a moment after that. Percy had really no more to
+say. He had talked to him of the inner life again and again, in which
+verities are seen to be true, and acts of faith are ratified; he had
+urged prayer and humility till he was almost weary of the names; and had
+been met by the retort that this was to advise sheer self-hypnotism; and
+he had despaired of making clear to one who did not see it for himself
+that while Love and Faith may be called self-hypnotism from one angle,
+yet from another they are as much realities as, for example, artistic
+faculties, and need similar cultivation; that they produce a conviction
+that they are convictions, that they handle and taste things which when
+handled and tasted are overwhelmingly more real and objective than the
+things of sense. Evidences seemed to mean nothing to this man.</p>
+
+<p>So he was silent now, chilled himself by the presence of this crisis,
+looking unseeingly out upon the plain, little old-world parlour, its
+tall window, its strip of matting, conscious chiefly of the dreary
+hopelessness of this human brother of his who had eyes but did not see,
+ears and was deaf. He wished he would say good-bye, and go. There was no
+more to be done.</p>
+
+<p>Father Francis, who had been sitting in a lax kind of huddle, seemed to
+know his thoughts, and sat up suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>“You are tired of me,” he said. “I will go.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am not tired of you, my dear father,” said Percy simply. “I am only
+terribly sorry. You see I know that it is all true.”</p>
+
+<p>The other looked at him heavily.</p>
+
+<p>“And I know that it is not,” he said. “It is very beautiful; I wish I
+could believe it. I don’t think I shall be ever happy again—but—but
+there it is.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy sighed. He had told him so often that the heart is as divine a
+gift as the mind, and that to neglect it in the search for God is to
+seek ruin, but this priest had scarcely seen the application to himself.
+He had answered with the old psychological arguments that the
+suggestions of education accounted for everything.</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose you will cast me off,” said the other.</p>
+
+<p>“It is you who are leaving me,” said Percy. “I cannot follow, if you
+mean that.”</p>
+
+<p>“But—but cannot we be friends?”</p>
+
+<p>A sudden heat touched the elder priest’s heart.</p>
+
+<p>“Friends?” he said. “Is sentimentality all you mean by friendship? What
+kind of friends can we be?”</p>
+
+<p>The other’s face became suddenly heavy.</p>
+
+<p>“I thought so.”</p>
+
+<p>“John!” cried Percy. “You see that, do you not? How can we pretend
+anything when you do not believe in God? For I do you the honour of
+thinking that you do not.”</p>
+
+<p>Francis sprang up.</p>
+
+<p>“Well—-” he snapped. “I could not have believed—I am going.”</p>
+
+<p>He wheeled towards the door.</p>
+
+<p>“John!” said Percy again. “Are you going like this? Can you not shake
+hands?”</p>
+
+<p>The other wheeled again, with heavy anger in his face.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, you said you could not be friends with me!”</p>
+
+<p>Percy’s mouth opened. Then he understood, and smiled. “Oh! that is all
+you mean by friendship, is it?—I beg your pardon. Oh! we can be polite
+to one another, if you like.”</p>
+
+<p>He still stood holding out his hand. Father Francis looked at it a
+moment, his lips shook: then once more he turned, and went out without a
+word.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>Percy stood motionless until he heard the automatic bell outside tell
+him that Father Francis was really gone, then he went out himself and
+turned towards the long passage leading to the Cathedral. As he passed
+out through the sacristy he heard far in front the murmur of an organ,
+and on coming through into the chapel used as a parish church he
+perceived that Vespers were not yet over in the great choir. He came
+straight down the aisle, turned to the right, crossed the centre and
+knelt down.</p>
+
+<p>It was drawing on towards sunset, and the huge dark place was lighted
+here and there by patches of ruddy London light that lay on the gorgeous
+marble and gildings finished at last by a wealthy convert. In front of
+him rose up the choir, with a line of white surpliced and furred canons
+on either side, and the vast baldachino in the midst, beneath which
+burned the six lights as they had burned day by day for more than a
+century; behind that again lay the high line of the apse-choir with the
+dim, window-pierced vault above where Christ reigned in majesty. He let
+his eyes wander round for a few moments before beginning his deliberate
+prayer, drinking in the glory of the place, listening to the thunderous
+chorus, the peal of the organ, and the thin mellow voice of the priest.
+There on the left shone the refracted glow of the lamps that burned
+before the Lord in the Sacrament, on the right a dozen candles winked
+here and there at the foot of the gaunt images, high overhead hung the
+gigantic cross with that lean, emaciated Poor Man Who called all who
+looked on Him to the embraces of a God.</p>
+
+<p>Then he hid his face in his hands, drew a couple of long breaths, and
+set to work.</p>
+
+<p>He began, as his custom was in mental prayer, by a deliberate act of
+self-exclusion from the world of sense. Under the image of sinking
+beneath a surface he forced himself downwards and inwards, till the peal
+of the organ, the shuffle of footsteps, the rigidity of the chair-back
+beneath his wrists—all seemed apart and external, and he was left a
+single person with a beating heart, an intellect that suggested image
+after image, and emotions that were too languid to stir themselves. Then
+he made his second descent, renounced all that he possessed and was, and
+became conscious that even the body was left behind, and that his mind
+and heart, awed by the Presence in which they found themselves, clung
+close and obedient to the will which was their lord and protector. He
+drew another long breath, or two, as he felt that Presence surge about
+him; he repeated a few mechanical words, and sank to that peace which
+follows the relinquishment of thought.</p>
+
+<p>There he rested for a while. Far above him sounded the ecstatic music,
+the cry of trumpets and the shrilling of the flutes; but they were as
+insignificant street-noises to one who was falling asleep. He was within
+the veil of things now, beyond the barriers of sense and reflection, in
+that secret place to which he had learned the road by endless effort, in
+that strange region where realities are evident, where perceptions go to
+and fro with the swiftness of light, where the swaying will catches now
+this, now that act, moulds it and speeds it; where all things meet,
+where truth is known and handled and tasted, where God Immanent is one
+with God Transcendent, where the meaning of the external world is
+evident through its inner side, and the Church and its mysteries are
+seen from within a haze of glory.</p>
+
+<p>So he lay a few moments, absorbing and resting.</p>
+
+<p>Then he aroused himself to consciousness and began to speak.</p>
+
+<p>“Lord, I am here, and Thou art here. I know Thee. There is nothing else
+but Thou and I.... I lay this all in Thy hands—Thy apostate priest, Thy
+people, the world, and myself. I spread it before Thee—I spread it
+before Thee.”</p>
+
+<p>He paused, poised in the act, till all of which he thought lay like a
+plain before a peak.</p>
+
+<p>... “Myself, Lord—there but for Thy grace should I be going, in
+darkness and misery. It is Thou Who dost preserve me. Maintain and
+finish Thy work within my soul. Let me not falter for one instant. If
+Thou withdraw Thy hand I fall into utter nothingness.”</p>
+
+<p>So his soul stood a moment, with outstretched appealing hands, helpless
+and confident. Then the will flickered in self-consciousness, and he
+repeated acts of faith, hope and love to steady it. Then he drew another
+long breath, feeling the Presence tingle and shake about him, and began
+again.</p>
+
+<p>“Lord; look on Thy people. Many are falling from Thee. <i>Ne in aeternum
+irascaris nobis. Ne in aeternum irascaris nobis</i>.... I unite myself with
+all saints and angels and Mary Queen of Heaven; look on them and me, and
+hear us. <i>Emitte lucem tuam et veritatem tuam.</i> Thy light and Thy truth!
+Lay not on us heavier burdens than we can bear. Lord, why dost Thou not
+speak!”</p>
+
+<p>He writhed himself forward in a passion of expectant desire, hearing his
+muscles crack in the effort. Once more he relaxed himself; and the swift
+play of wordless acts began which he knew to be the very heart of
+prayer. The eyes of his soul flew hither and thither, from Calvary to
+heaven and back again to the tossing troubled earth. He saw Christ dying
+of desolation while the earth rocked and groaned; Christ reigning as a
+priest upon His Throne in robes of light, Christ patient and inexorably
+silent within the Sacramental species; and to each in turn he directed
+the eyes of the Eternal Father....</p>
+
+<p>Then he waited for communications, and they came, so soft and delicate,
+passing like shadows, that his will sweated blood and tears in the
+effort to catch and fix them and correspond....</p>
+
+<p>He saw the Body Mystical in its agony, strained over the world as on a
+cross, silent with pain; he saw this and that nerve wrenched and
+twisted, till pain presented it to himself as under the guise of flashes
+of colour; he saw the life-blood drop by drop run down from His head and
+hands and feet. The world was gathered mocking and good-humoured
+beneath. “<i>He saved others: Himself He cannot save.... Let Christ come
+down from the Cross and we will believe.</i>” Far away behind bushes and
+in holes of the ground the friends of Jesus peeped and sobbed; Mary
+herself was silent, pierced by seven swords; the disciple whom He loved
+had no words of comfort.</p>
+
+<p>He saw, too, how no word would be spoken from heaven; the angels
+themselves were bidden to put sword into sheath, and wait on the eternal
+patience of God, for the agony was hardly yet begun; there were a
+thousand horrors yet before the end could come, that final sum of
+crucifixion.... He must wait and watch, content to stand there and do
+nothing; and the Resurrection must seem to him no more than a dreamed-of
+hope. There was the Sabbath yet to come, while the Body Mystical must
+lie in its sepulchre cut off from light, and even the dignity of the
+Cross must be withdrawn and the knowledge that Jesus lived. That inner
+world, to which by long effort he had learned the way, was all alight
+with agony; it was bitter as brine, it was of that pale luminosity that
+is the utmost product of pain, it hummed in his ears with a note that
+rose to a scream ... it pressed upon him, penetrated him, stretched him
+as on a rack.... And with that his will grew sick and nerveless.</p>
+
+<p>“Lord! I cannot bear it!” he moaned....</p>
+
+<p>In an instant he was back again, drawing long breaths of misery. He
+passed his tongue over his lips, and opened his eyes on the darkening
+apse before him. The organ was silent now, and the choir was gone, and
+the lights out. The sunset colour, too, had faded from the walls, and
+grim cold faces looked down on him from wall and vault. He was back
+again on the surface of life; the vision had melted; he scarcely knew
+what it was that he had seen.</p>
+
+<p>But he must gather up the threads, and by sheer effort absorb them. He
+must pay his duty, too, to the Lord that gave Himself to the senses as
+well as to the inner spirit. So he rose, stiff and constrained, and
+passed across to the Chapel of the Holy Sacrament.</p>
+
+<p>As he came out from the block of chairs, very upright and tall, with his
+biretta once more on his white hair, he saw an old woman watching him
+very closely. He hesitated an instant, wondering whether she were a
+penitent, and as he hesitated she made a movement towards him.</p>
+
+<p>“I beg your pardon, sir,” she began.</p>
+
+<p>She was not a Catholic then. He lifted his biretta.</p>
+
+<p>“Can I do anything for you?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“I beg your pardon, sir, but were you at Brighton, at the accident two
+months ago?”</p>
+
+<p>“I was.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah! I thought so: my daughter-in-law saw you then.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy had a spasm of impatience: he was a little tired of being
+identified by his white hair and young face.</p>
+
+<p>“Were you there, madam?”</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him doubtfully and curiously, moving her old, eyes up and
+down his figure. Then she recollected herself.</p>
+
+<p>“No, sir; it was my daughter-in-law—I beg your pardon, sir, but—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Well?” asked Percy, trying to keep the impatience out of his voice.</p>
+
+<p>“Are you the Archbishop, sir?”</p>
+
+<p>The priest smiled, showing his white teeth.</p>
+
+<p>“No, madam; I am just a poor priest. Dr. Cholmondeley is Archbishop. I
+am Father Percy Franklin.”</p>
+
+<p>She said nothing, but still looking at him made a little old-world
+movement of a bow; and Percy passed on to the dim, splendid chapel to
+pay his devotions.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>There was great talk that night at dinner among the priests as to the
+extraordinary spread of Freemasonry. It had been going on for many years
+now, and Catholics perfectly recognised its dangers, for the profession
+of Masonry had been for some centuries rendered incompatible with
+religion through the Church’s unswerving condemnation of it. A man must
+choose between that and his faith. Things had developed extraordinarily
+during the last century. First there had been the organised assault upon
+the Church in France; and what Catholics had always suspected then
+became a certainty in the revelations of 1918, when P. Gerome, the
+Dominican and ex-Mason, had made his disclosures with regard to the
+Mark-Masons. It had become evident then that Catholics had been right,
+and that Masonry, in its higher grades at least, had been responsible
+throughout the world for the strange movement against religion. But he
+had died in his bed, and the public had been impressed by that fact.
+Then came the splendid donations in France and Italy—to hospitals,
+orphanages, and the like; and once more suspicion began to disappear.
+After all, it seemed—and continued to seem—for seventy years and more
+that Masonry was nothing more than a vast philanthropical society. Now
+once more men had their doubts.</p>
+
+<p>“I hear that Felsenburgh is a Mason,” observed Monsignor Macintosh, the
+Cathedral Administrator. “A Grand-Master or something.”</p>
+
+<p>“But who is Felsenburgh?” put in a young priest.</p>
+
+<p>Monsignor pursed his lips and shook his head. He was one of those humble
+persons as proud of ignorance as others of knowledge. He boasted that he
+never read the papers nor any book except those that had received the
+<i>imprimatur</i>; it was a priest’s business, he often remarked, to preserve
+the faith, not to acquire worldly knowledge. Percy had occasionally
+rather envied his point of view.</p>
+
+<p>“He’s a mystery,” said another priest, Father Blackmore; “but he seems
+to be causing great excitement. They were selling his ‘Life’ to-day on
+the Embankment.”</p>
+
+<p>“I met an American senator,” put in Percy, “three days ago, who told me
+that even there they know nothing of him, except his extraordinary
+eloquence. He only appeared last year, and seems to have carried
+everything before him by quite unusual methods. He is a great linguist,
+too. That is why they took him to Irkutsk.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, the Masons—-” went on Monsignor. “It is very serious. In the
+last month four of my penitents have left me because of it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Their inclusion of women was their master-stroke,” growled Father
+Blackmore, helping himself to claret.</p>
+
+<p>“It is extraordinary that they hesitated so long about that,” observed
+Percy.</p>
+
+<p>A couple of the others added their evidence. It appeared that they, too,
+had lost penitents lately through the spread of Masonry. It was rumoured
+that a Pastoral was a-preparing upstairs on the subject.</p>
+
+<p>Monsignor shook his head ominously.</p>
+
+<p>“More is wanted than that,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Percy pointed out that the Church had said her last word several
+centuries ago. She had laid her excommunication on all members of secret
+societies, and there was really no more that she could do.</p>
+
+<p>“Except bring it before her children again and again,” put in Monsignor.
+“I shall preach on it next Sunday.”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Percy dotted down a note when he reached his room, determining to say
+another word or two on the subject to the Cardinal-Protector. He had
+mentioned Freemasonry often before, but it seemed time for another
+remark. Then he opened his letters, first turning to one which he
+recognised as from the Cardinal.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed a curious coincidence, as he read a series of questions that
+Cardinal Martin’s letter contained, that one of them should be on this
+very subject. It ran as follows:</p>
+
+<p>“What of Masonry? Felsenburgh is said to be one. Gather all the gossip
+you can about him. Send any English or American biographies of him. Are
+you still losing Catholics through Masonry?”</p>
+
+<p>He ran his eyes down the rest of the questions. They chiefly referred to
+previous remarks of his own, but twice, even in them, Felsenburgh’s name
+appeared.</p>
+
+<p>He laid the paper down and considered a little.</p>
+
+<p>It was very curious, he thought, how this man’s name was in every one’s
+mouth, in spite of the fact that so little was known about him. He had
+bought in the streets, out of curiosity, three photographs that
+professed to represent this strange person, and though one of them might
+be genuine they all three could not be. He drew them out of a
+pigeon-hole, and spread them before him.</p>
+
+<p>One represented a fierce, bearded creature like a Cossack, with round
+staring eyes. No; intrinsic evidence condemned this: it was exactly how
+a coarse imagination would have pictured a man who seemed to be having a
+great influence in the East.</p>
+
+<p>The second showed a fat face with little eyes and a chin-beard. That
+might conceivably be genuine: he turned it over and saw the name of a
+New York firm on the back. Then he turned to the third. This presented a
+long, clean-shaven face with pince-nez, undeniably clever, but scarcely
+strong: and Felsenburgh was obviously a strong man.</p>
+
+<p>Percy inclined to think the second was the most probable; but they were
+all unconvincing; and he shuffled them carelessly together and replaced
+them.</p>
+
+<p>Then he put his elbows on the table, and began to think.</p>
+
+<p>He tried to remember what Mr. Varhaus, the American senator, had told
+him of Felsenburgh; yet it did not seem sufficient to account for the
+facts. Felsenburgh, it seemed, had employed none of those methods common
+in modern politics. He controlled no newspapers, vituperated nobody,
+championed nobody: he had no picked underlings; he used no bribes; there
+were no monstrous crimes alleged against him. It seemed rather as if his
+originality lay in his clean hands and his stainless past—that, and his
+magnetic character. He was the kind of figure that belonged rather to
+the age of chivalry: a pure, clean, compelling personality, like a
+radiant child. He had taken people by surprise, then, rising out of the
+heaving dun-coloured waters of American socialism like a vision—from
+those waters so fiercely restrained from breaking into storm over since
+the extraordinary social revolution under Mr. Hearst’s disciples, a
+century ago. That had been the end of plutocracy; the famous old laws of
+1914 had burst some of the stinking bubbles of the time; and the
+enactments of 1916 and 1917 had prevented their forming again in any
+thing like their previous force. It had been the salvation of America,
+undoubtedly, even if that salvation were of a dreary and uninspiring
+description; and now out of the flat socialistic level had arisen this
+romantic figure utterly unlike any that had preceded it.... So the
+senator had hinted.... It was too complicated for Percy just now, and he
+gave it up.</p>
+
+<p>It was a weary world, he told himself, turning his eyes homewards.
+Everything seemed so hopeless and ineffective. He tried not to reflect
+on his fellow-priests, but for the fiftieth time he could not help
+seeing that they were not the men for the present situation. It was not
+that he preferred himself; he knew perfectly well that he, too, was
+fully as incompetent: had he not proved to be so with poor Father
+Francis, and scores of others who had clutched at him in their agony
+during the last ten years? Even the Archbishop, holy man as he was, with
+all his childlike faith—was that the man to lead English Catholics and
+confound their enemies? There seemed no giants on the earth in these
+days. What in the world was to be done? He buried his face in his
+hands....</p>
+
+<p>Yes; what was wanted was a new Order in the Church; the old ones were
+rule-bound through no fault of their own. An Order was wanted without
+habit or tonsure, without traditions or customs, an Order with nothing
+but entire and whole-hearted devotion, without pride even in their most
+sacred privileges, without a past history in which they might take
+complacent refuge. They must be <i>franc-tireurs</i> of Christ’s Army; like
+the Jesuits, but without their fatal reputation, which, again, was no
+fault of their own. ... But there must be a Founder—Who, in God’s Name?
+—a Founder <i>nudus sequens Christum nudum</i>.... Yes—<i>Franc-tireurs</i>
+—priests, bishops, laymen and women—with the three vows of course, and
+a special clause forbidding utterly and for ever their ownership of
+corporate wealth.—Every gift received must be handed to the bishop of
+the diocese in which it was given, who must provide them himself with
+necessaries of life and travel. Oh!—what could they not do?... He was
+off in a rhapsody.</p>
+
+<p>Presently he recovered, and called himself a fool. Was not that scheme
+as old as the eternal hills, and as useless for practical purposes? Why,
+it had been the dream of every zealous man since the First Year of
+Salvation that such an Order should be founded!... He was a fool....</p>
+
+<p>Then once more he began to think of it all over again.</p>
+
+<p>Surely it was this which was wanted against the Masons; and women,
+too.—Had not scheme after scheme broken down because men had forgotten
+the power of women? It was that lack that had ruined Napoleon: he had
+trusted Josephine, and she had failed him; so he had trusted no other
+woman. In the Catholic Church, too, woman had been given no active work
+but either menial or connected with education: and was there not room
+for other activities than those? Well, it was useless to think of it. It
+was not his affair. If <i>Papa Angelicus</i> who now reigned in Rome had not
+thought of it, why should a foolish, conceited priest in Westminster set
+himself up to do so?</p>
+
+<p>So he beat himself on the breast once more, and took up his office-book.</p>
+
+<p>He finished in half an hour, and again sat thinking; but this time it
+was of poor Father Francis. He wondered what he was doing now; whether
+he had taken off the Roman collar of Christ’s familiar slaves? The poor
+devil! And how far was he, Percy Franklin, responsible?</p>
+
+<p>When a tap came at his door presently, and Father Blackmore looked in
+for a talk before going to bed, Percy told him what had happened.</p>
+
+<p>Father Blackmore removed his pipe and sighed deliberately.</p>
+
+<p>“I knew it was coming,” he said. “Well, well.”</p>
+
+<p>“He has been honest enough,” explained Percy. “He told me eight months
+ago he was in trouble.”</p>
+
+<p>Father Blackmore drew upon his pipe thoughtfully.</p>
+
+<p>“Father Franklin,” he said, “things are really very serious. There is
+the same story everywhere. What in the world is happening?”</p>
+
+<p>Percy paused before answering.</p>
+
+<p>“I think these things go in waves,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Waves, do you think?” said the other.</p>
+
+<p>“What else?”</p>
+
+<p>Father Blackmore looked at him intently.</p>
+
+<p>“It is more like a dead calm, it seems to me,” he said. “Have you ever
+been in a typhoon?”</p>
+
+<p>Percy shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” went on the other, “the most ominous thing is the calm. The sea
+is like oil; you feel half-dead: you can do nothing. Then comes the
+storm.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy looked at him, interested. He had not seen this mood in the priest
+before.</p>
+
+<p>“Before every great crash there comes this calm. It is always so in
+history. It was so before the Eastern War; it was so before the French
+Revolution. It was so before the Reformation. There is a kind of oily
+heaving; and everything is languid. So everything has been in America,
+too, for over eighty years.... Father Franklin, I think something is
+going to happen.”</p>
+
+<p>“Tell me,” said Percy, leaning forward.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I saw Templeton a week before he died, and he put the idea in my
+head.... Look here, father. It may be this Eastern affair that is coming
+on us; but somehow I don’t think it is. It is in religion that something
+is going to happen. At least, so I think.... Father, who in God’s name
+is Felsenburgh?”</p>
+
+<p>Percy was so startled at the sudden introduction of this name again,
+that he stared a moment without speaking.</p>
+
+<p>Outside, the summer night was very still. There was a faint vibration
+now and again from the underground track that ran twenty yards from the
+house where they sat; but the streets were quiet enough round the
+Cathedral. Once a hoot rang far away, as if some ominous bird of passage
+were crossing between London and the stars, and once the cry of a woman
+sounded thin and shrill from the direction of the river. For the rest
+there was no more than the solemn, subdued hum that never ceased now
+night or day.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; Felsenburgh,” said Father Blackmore once more. “I cannot get that
+man out of my head. And yet, what do I know of him? What does any one
+know of him?”</p>
+
+<p>Percy licked his lips to answer, and drew a breath to still the beating
+of his heart. He could not imagine why he felt excited. After all, who
+was old Blackmore to frighten him? But old Blackmore went on before he
+could speak.</p>
+
+<p>“See how people are leaving the Church! The Wargraves, the Hendersons,
+Sir James Bartlet, Lady Magnier, and then all the priests. Now they’re
+not all knaves—I wish they were; it would be so much easier to talk of
+it. But Sir James Bartlet, last month! Now, there’s a man who has spent
+half his fortune on the Church, and he doesn’t resent it even now. He
+says that any religion is better than none, but that, for himself, he
+just can’t believe any longer. Now what does all that mean?... I tell
+you something is going to happen. God knows what! And I can’t get
+Felsenburgh out of my head.... Father Franklin—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes?”</p>
+
+<p>“Have you noticed how few great men we’ve got? It’s not like fifty years
+ago, or even thirty. Then there were Mason, Selborne, Sherbrook, and
+half-a-dozen others. There was Brightman, too, as Archbishop: and now!
+Then the Communists, too. Braithwaite is dead fifteen years. Certainly
+he was big enough; but he was always speaking of the future, not of the
+present; and tell me what big man they have had since then! And now
+there’s this new man, whom no one knows, who came forward in America a
+few months ago, and whose name is in every one’s mouth. Very well,
+then!”</p>
+
+<p>Percy knitted his forehead.</p>
+
+<p>“I am not sure that I understand,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Father Blackmore knocked his pipe out before answering.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, this,” he said, standing up. “I can’t help thinking Felsenburgh
+is going to do something. I don’t know what; it may be for us or against
+us. But he is a Mason, remember that.... Well, well; I dare say I’m an
+old fool. Good-night.”</p>
+
+<p>“One moment, father,” said Percy slowly. “Do you mean—? Good Lord! What
+do you mean?” He stopped, looking at the other.</p>
+
+<p>The old priest stared back under his bushy eyebrows; it seemed to Percy
+as if he, too, were afraid of something in spite of his easy talk; but
+he made no sign.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Percy stood perfectly still a moment when the door was shut. Then he
+moved across to his <i>prie-dieu</i>.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>Old Mrs. Brand and Mabel were seated at a window of the new Admiralty
+Offices in Trafalgar Square to see Oliver deliver his speech on the
+fiftieth anniversary of the passing of the Poor Laws Reform.</p>
+
+<p>It was an inspiriting sight, this bright June morning, to see the crowds
+gathering round Braithwaite’s statue. That politician, dead fifteen
+years before, was represented in his famous attitude, with arms
+outstretched and down dropped, his head up and one foot slightly
+advanced, and to-day was decked, as was becoming more and more usual on
+such occasions, in his Masonic insignia. It was he who had given
+immense impetus to that secret movement by his declaration in the House
+that the key of future progress and brotherhood of nations was in the
+hands of the Order. It was through this alone that the false unity of
+the Church with its fantastic spiritual fraternity could be
+counteracted. St. Paul had been right, he declared, in his desire to
+break down the partition-walls between nations, and wrong only in his
+exaltation of Jesus Christ. Thus he had preluded his speech on the Poor
+Law question, pointing to the true charity that existed among Masons
+apart from religious motive, and appealing to the famous benefactions on
+the Continent; and in the enthusiasm of the Bill’s success the Order had
+received a great accession of members.</p>
+
+<p>Old Mrs. Brand was in her best to-day, and looked out with considerable
+excitement at the huge throng gathered to hear her son speak. A platform
+was erected round the bronze statue at such a height that the statesman
+appeared to be one of the speakers, though at a slightly higher
+elevation, and this platform was hung with roses, surmounted by a
+sounding-board, and set with a chair and table.</p>
+
+<p>The whole square round about was paved with heads and resonant with
+sound, the murmurs of thousands of voices, overpowered now and again by
+the crash of brass and thunder of drums as the Benefit Societies and
+democratic Guilds, each headed by a banner, deployed from North, South,
+East and West, and converged towards the wide railed space about the
+platform where room was reserved for them. The windows on every side
+were packed with faces; tall stands were erected along the front of the
+National Gallery and St. Martin’s Church, garden-beds of colour behind
+the mute, white statues that faced outwards round the square; from
+Braithwaite in front, past the Victorians—John Davidson, John Burns,
+and the rest—round to Hampden and de Montfort towards the north. The
+old column was gone, with its lions. Nelson had not been found
+advantageous to the <i>Entente Cordiale</i>, nor the lions to the new art;
+and in their place stretched a wide pavement broken by slopes of steps
+that led up to the National Gallery.</p>
+
+<p>Overhead the roofs showed crowded friezes of heads against the blue
+summer sky. Not less than one hundred thousand persons, it was estimated
+in the evening papers, were collected within sight and sound of the
+platform by noon.</p>
+
+<p>As the clocks began to tell the hour, two figures appeared from behind
+the statue and came forward, and, in an instant, the murmurs of talk
+rose into cheering.</p>
+
+<p>Old Lord Pemberton came first, a grey-haired, upright man, whose father
+had been active in denouncing the House of which he was a member on the
+occasion of its fall over seventy years ago, and his son had succeeded
+him worthily. This man was now a member of the Government, and sat for
+Manchester (3); and it was he who was to be chairman on this auspicious
+occasion. Behind him came Oliver, bareheaded and spruce, and even at
+that distance his mother and wife could see his brisk movement, his
+sudden smile and nod as his name emerged from the storm of sound that
+surged round the platform. Lord Pemberton came forward, lifted his hand
+and made a signal; and in a moment the thin cheering died under the
+sudden roll of drums beneath that preluded the Masonic Hymn.</p>
+
+<p>There was no doubt that these Londoners could sing. It was as if a giant
+voice hummed the sonorous melody, rising to enthusiasm till the music of
+massed bands followed it as a flag follows a flag-stick. The hymn was
+one composed ten years before, and all England was familiar with it.
+Old Mrs. Bland lifted the printed paper mechanically to her eyes, and
+saw the words that she knew so well:</p>
+
+<p>“<i>The Lord that dwells in earth and sea.</i>” ...</p>
+
+<p>She glanced down the verses, that from the Humanitarian point of view
+had been composed with both skill and ardour. They had a religious ring;
+the unintelligent Christian could sing them without a qualm; yet their
+sense was plain enough—the old human creed that man was all. Even
+Christ’s, words themselves were quoted. The kingdom of God, it was said,
+lay within the human heart, and the greatest of all graces was Charity.</p>
+
+<p>She glanced at Mabel, and saw that the girl was singing with all her
+might, with her eyes fixed on her husband’s dark figure a hundred yards
+away, and her soul pouring through them. So the mother, too, began to
+move her lips in chorus with that vast volume of sound.</p>
+
+<p>As the hymn died away, and before the cheering could begin again, old
+Lord Pemberton was standing forward on the edge of the platform, and his
+thin, metallic voice piped a sentence or two across the tinkling splash
+of the fountains behind him. Then he stepped back, and Oliver came
+forward.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It was too far for the two to hear what was said, but Mabel slipped a
+paper, smiling tremulously, into the old lady’s hand, and herself bent
+forward to listen.</p>
+
+<p>Old Mrs. Brand looked at that, too, knowing that it was an analysis of
+her son’s speech, and aware that she would not be able to hear his
+words.</p>
+
+<p>There was an exordium first, congratulating all who were present to do
+honour to the great man who presided from his pedestal on the occasion
+of this great anniversary. Then there came a retrospect, comparing the
+old state of England with the present. Fifty years ago, the speaker
+said, poverty was still a disgrace, now it was so no longer. It was in
+the causes that led to poverty that the disgrace or the merit lay. Who
+would not honour a man worn out in the service of his country, or
+overcome at last by circumstances against which his efforts could not
+prevail?... He enumerated the reforms passed fifty years before on this
+very day, by which the nation once and for all declared the glory of
+poverty and man’s sympathy with the unfortunate.</p>
+
+<p>So he had told them he was to sing the praise of patient poverty and its
+reward, and that, he supposed, together with a few periods on the reform
+of the prison laws, would form the first half of his speech.</p>
+
+<p>The second part was to be a panegyric of Braithwaite, treating him as
+the Precursor of a movement that even now had begun.</p>
+
+<p>Old Mrs. Brand leaned back in her seat, and looked about her.</p>
+
+<p>The window where they sat had been reserved for them; two arm-chairs
+filled the space, but immediately behind there were others, standing
+very silent now, craning forward, watching, too, with parted lips: a
+couple of women with an old man directly behind, and other faces visible
+again behind them. Their obvious absorption made the old lady a little
+ashamed of her distraction, and she turned resolutely once more to the
+square.</p>
+
+<p>Ah! he was working up now to his panegyric! The tiny dark figure was
+back, a yard nearer the statue, and as she looked, his hand went up and
+he wheeled, pointing, as a murmur of applause drowned for an instant the
+minute, resonant voice. Then again he was forward, half crouching—for
+he was a born actor—and a storm of laughter rippled round the throng of
+heads. She heard an indrawn hiss behind her chair, and the next instant
+an exclamation from Mabel.... What was that?</p>
+
+<p>There was a sharp crack, and the tiny gesticulating figure staggered
+back a step. The old man at the table was up in a moment, and
+simultaneously a violent commotion bubbled and heaved like water about a
+rock at a point in the crowd immediately outside the railed space where
+the bands were massed, and directly opposite the front of the platform.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Brand, bewildered and dazed, found herself standing up, clutching
+the window rail, while the girl gripped her, crying out something she
+could not understand. A great roaring filled the square, the heads
+tossed this way and that, like corn under a squall of wind. Then Oliver
+was forward again, pointing and crying out, for she could see his
+gestures; and she sank back quickly, the blood racing through her old
+veins, and her heart hammering at the base of her throat.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear, my dear, what is it?” she sobbed.</p>
+
+<p>But Mabel was up, too, staring out at her husband; and a quick babble of
+talk and exclamations from behind made itself audible in spite of the
+roaring tumult of the square.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>Oliver told them the explanation of the whole affair that evening at
+home, leaning back in his chair, with one arm bandaged and in a sling.</p>
+
+<p>They had not been able to get near him at the time; the excitement in
+the square had been too fierce; but a messenger had come to his wife
+with the news that her husband was only slightly wounded, and was in the
+hands of the doctors.</p>
+
+<p>“He was a Catholic,” explained the drawn-faced Oliver. “He must have
+come ready, for his repeater was found loaded. Well, there was no chance
+for a priest this time.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel nodded slowly: she had read of the man’s fate on the placards.</p>
+
+<p>“He was killed—trampled and strangled instantly,” said Oliver. “I did
+what I could: you saw me. But—well, I dare say it was more merciful.”</p>
+
+<p>“But you did what you could, my dear?” said the old lady, anxiously,
+from her corner.</p>
+
+<p>“I called out to them, mother, but they wouldn’t hear me.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel leaned forward—-</p>
+
+<p>“Oliver, I know this sounds stupid of me; but—but I wish they had not
+killed him.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver smiled at her. He knew this tender trait in her.</p>
+
+<p>“It would have been more perfect if they had not,” she said. Then she
+broke off and sat back.</p>
+
+<p>“Why did he shoot just then?” she asked.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver turned his eyes for an instant towards his mother, but she was
+knitting tranquilly.</p>
+
+<p>Then he answered with a curious deliberateness.</p>
+
+<p>“I said that Braithwaite had done more for the world by one speech than
+Jesus and all His saints put together.” He was aware that the
+knitting-needles stopped for a second; then they went on again as
+before.</p>
+
+<p>“But he must have meant to do it anyhow,” continued Oliver.</p>
+
+<p>“How do they know he was a Catholic?” asked the girl again.</p>
+
+<p>“There was a rosary on him; and then he just had time to call on his
+God.”</p>
+
+<p>“And nothing more is known?”</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing more. He was well dressed, though.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver leaned back a little wearily and closed his eyes; his arm still
+throbbed intolerably. But he was very happy at heart. It was true that
+he had been wounded by a fanatic, but he was not sorry to bear pain in
+such a cause, and it was obvious that the sympathy of England was with
+him. Mr. Phillips even now was busy in the next room, answering the
+telegrams that poured in every moment. Caldecott, the Prime Minister,
+Maxwell, Snowford and a dozen others had wired instantly their
+congratulations, and from every part of England streamed in message
+after message. It was an immense stroke for the Communists; their
+spokesman had been assaulted during the discharge of his duty, speaking
+in defence of his principles; it was an incalculable gain for them, and
+loss for the Individualists, that confessors were not all on one side
+after all. The huge electric placards over London had winked out the
+facts in Esperanto as Oliver stepped into the train at twilight.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Oliver Brand wounded.... Catholic assailant.... Indignation of the
+country.... Well-deserved fate of assassin</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>He was pleased, too, that he honestly had done his best to save the man.
+Even in that moment of sudden and acute pain he had cried out for a fair
+trial; but he had been too late. He had seen the starting eyes roll up
+in the crimson face, and the horrid grin come and go as the hands had
+clutched and torn at his throat. Then the face had vanished and a heavy
+trampling began where it had disappeared. Oh! there was some passion and
+loyalty left in England!</p>
+
+<p>His mother got up presently and went out, still without a word; and
+Mabel turned to him, laying a hand on his knee.</p>
+
+<p>“Are you too tired to talk, my dear?”</p>
+
+<p>He opened his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“Of course not, my darling. What is it?”</p>
+
+<p>“What do you think will be the effect?”</p>
+
+<p>He raised himself a little, looking out as usual through the darkening
+windows on to that astonishing view. Everywhere now lights were
+glowing, a sea of mellow moons just above the houses, and above the
+mysterious heavy blue of a summer evening.</p>
+
+<p>“The effect?” he said. “It can be nothing but good. It was time that
+something happened. My dear, I feel very downcast sometimes, as you
+know. Well, I do not think I shall be again. I have been afraid
+sometimes that we were losing all our spirit, and that the old Tories
+were partly right when they prophesied what Communism would do. But
+after this—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Well?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well; we have shown that we can shed our blood too. It is in the nick
+of time, too, just at the crisis. I don’t want to exaggerate; it is only
+a scratch—but it was so deliberate, and—and so dramatic. The poor
+devil could not have chosen a worse moment. People won’t forget it.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel’s eyes shone with pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>“You poor dear!” she said. “Are you in pain?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not much. Besides, Christ! what do I care? If only this infernal
+Eastern affair would end!”</p>
+
+<p>He knew he was feverish and irritable, and made a great effort to drive
+it down.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, my dear!” he went on, flushed a little. “If they would not be such
+heavy fools: they don’t understand; they don’t understand.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Oliver?”</p>
+
+<p>“They don’t understand what a glorious thing it all is: Humanity, Life,
+Truth at last, and the death of Folly! But haven’t I told them a hundred
+times?”</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him with kindling eyes. She loved to see him like this,
+his confident, flushed face, the enthusiasm in his blue eyes; and the
+knowledge of his pain pricked her feeling with passion. She bent forward
+and kissed him suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear, I am so proud of you. Oh, Oliver!”</p>
+
+<p>He said nothing; but she could see what she loved to see, that response
+to her own heart; and so they sat in silence while the sky darkened yet
+more, and the click of the writer in the next room told them that the
+world was alive and that they had a share in its affairs.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver stirred presently.</p>
+
+<p>“Did you notice anything just now, sweetheart—when I said that about
+Jesus Christ?”</p>
+
+<p>“She stopped knitting for a moment,” said the girl.</p>
+
+<p>He nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“You saw that too, then.... Mabel, do you think she is falling back?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! she is getting old,” said the girl lightly. “Of course she looks
+back a little.”</p>
+
+<p>“But you don’t think—it would be too awful!”</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>“No, no, my dear; you’re excited and tired. It’s just a little
+sentiment.... Oliver, I don’t think I would say that kind of thing
+before her.”</p>
+
+<p>“But she hears it everywhere now.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, she doesn’t. Remember she hardly ever goes out. Besides, she hates
+it. After all, she was brought up a Catholic.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver nodded, and lay back again, looking dreamily out.</p>
+
+<p>“Isn’t it astonishing the way in which suggestion lasts? She can’t get
+it out of her head, even after fifty years. Well, watch her, won’t
+you?... By the way ...”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes?”</p>
+
+<p>“There’s a little more news from the East. They say Felsenburgh’s
+running the whole thing now. The Empire is sending him everywhere—
+Tobolsk, Benares, Yakutsk—everywhere; and he’s been to Australia.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel sat up briskly.</p>
+
+<p>“Isn’t that very hopeful?”</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose so. There’s no doubt that the Sufis are winning; but for how
+long is another question. Besides, the troops don’t disperse.”</p>
+
+<p>“And Europe?”</p>
+
+<p>“Europe is arming as fast as possible. I hear we are to meet the Powers
+next week at Paris. I must go.”</p>
+
+<p>“Your arm, my dear?”</p>
+
+<p>“My arm must get well. It will have to go with me, anyhow.”</p>
+
+<p>“Tell me some more.”</p>
+
+<p>“There is no more. But it is just as certain as it can be that this is
+the crisis. If the East can be persuaded to hold its hand now, it will
+never be likely to raise it again. It will mean free trade all over the
+world, I suppose, and all that kind of thing. But if not—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Well?”</p>
+
+<p>“If not, there will be a catastrophe such as never has been even
+imagined. The whole human race will be at war, and either East or West
+will be simply wiped out. These new Benninschein explosives will make
+certain of that.”</p>
+
+<p>“But is it absolutely certain that the East has got them?”</p>
+
+<p>“Absolutely. Benninschein sold them simultaneously to East and West;
+then he died, luckily for him.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel had heard this kind of talk before, but her imagination simply
+refused to grasp it. A duel of East and West under these new conditions
+was an unthinkable thing. There had been no European war within living
+memory, and the Eastern wars of the last century had been under the old
+conditions. Now, if tales were true, entire towns would be destroyed
+with a single shell. The new conditions were unimaginable. Military
+experts prophesied extravagantly, contradicting one another on vital
+points; the whole procedure of war was a matter of theory; there were no
+precedents with which to compare it. It was as if archers disputed as to
+the results of cordite. Only one thing was certain—that the East had
+every modern engine, and, as regards male population, half as much
+again as the rest of the world put together; and the conclusion to be
+drawn from these premisses was not reassuring to England.</p>
+
+<p>But imagination simply refused to speak. The daily papers had a short,
+careful leading article every day, founded upon the scraps of news that
+stole out from the conferences on the other side of the world;
+Felsenburgh’s name appeared more frequently than ever: otherwise there
+seemed to be a kind of hush. Nothing suffered very much; trade went on;
+European stocks were not appreciably lower than usual; men still built
+houses, married wives, begat sons and daughters, did their business and
+went to the theatre, for the mere reason that there was no good in
+anything else. They could neither save nor precipitate the situation; it
+was on too large a scale. Occasionally people went mad—people who had
+succeeded in goading their imagination to a height whence a glimpse of
+reality could be obtained; and there was a diffused atmosphere of
+tenseness. But that was all. Not many speeches were made on the subject;
+it had been found inadvisable. After all, there was nothing to do but to
+wait.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>Mabel remembered her husband’s advice to watch, and for a few days did
+her best. But there was nothing that alarmed her. The old lady was a
+little quiet, perhaps, but went about her minute affairs as usual. She
+asked the girl to read to her sometimes, and listened unblenching to
+whatever was offered her; she attended in the kitchen daily, organised
+varieties of food, and appeared interested in all that concerned her
+son. She packed his bag with her own hands, set out his furs for the
+swift flight to Paris, and waved to him from the window as he went down
+the little path towards the junction. He would be gone three days, he
+said.</p>
+
+<p>It was on the evening of the second day that she fell ill; and Mabel,
+running upstairs, in alarm at the message of the servant, found her
+rather flushed and agitated in her chair.</p>
+
+<p>“It is nothing, my dear,” said the old lady tremulously; and she added
+the description of a symptom or two.</p>
+
+<p>Mabel got her to bed, sent for the doctor, and sat down to wait.</p>
+
+<p>She was sincerely fond of the old lady, and had always found her
+presence in the house a quiet sort of delight. The effect of her upon
+the mind was as that of an easy-chair upon the body. The old lady was so
+tranquil and human, so absorbed in small external matters, so
+reminiscent now and then of the days of her youth, so utterly without
+resentment or peevishness. It seemed curiously pathetic to the girl to
+watch that quiet old spirit approach its extinction, or rather, as Mabel
+believed, its loss of personality in the reabsorption into the Spirit of
+Life which informed the world. She found less difficulty in
+contemplating the end of a vigorous soul, for in that case she imagined
+a kind of energetic rush of force back into the origin of things; but in
+this peaceful old lady there was so little energy; her whole point, so
+to speak, lay in the delicate little fabric of personality, built out of
+fragile things into an entity far more significant than the sum of its
+component parts: the death of a flower, reflected Mabel, is sadder than
+the death of a lion; the breaking of a piece of china more irreparable
+than the ruin of a palace.</p>
+
+<p>“It is syncope,” said the doctor when he came in. “She may die at any
+time; she may live ten years.”</p>
+
+<p>“There is no need to telegraph for Mr. Brand?”</p>
+
+<p>He made a little deprecating movement with his hands.</p>
+
+<p>“It is not certain that she will die—it is not imminent?” she asked.</p>
+
+<p>“No, no; she may live ten years, I said.”</p>
+
+<p>He added a word or two of advice as to the use of the oxygen injector,
+and went away.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The old lady was lying quietly in bed, when the girl went up, and put
+out a wrinkled hand.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, my dear?” she asked.</p>
+
+<p>“It is just a little weakness, mother. You must lie quiet and do
+nothing. Shall I read to you?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, my dear; I will think a little.”</p>
+
+<p>It was no part of Mabel’s idea to duty to tell her that she was in
+danger, for there was no past to set straight, no Judge to be
+confronted. Death was an ending, not a beginning. It was a peaceful
+Gospel; at least, it became peaceful as soon as the end had come.</p>
+
+<p>So the girl went downstairs once more, with a quiet little ache at her
+heart that refused to be still.</p>
+
+<p>What a strange and beautiful thing death was, she told herself—this
+resolution of a chord that had hung suspended for thirty, fifty or
+seventy years—back again into the stillness of the huge Instrument that
+was all in all to itself. Those same notes would be struck again, were
+being struck again even now all over the world, though with an infinite
+delicacy of difference in the touch; but that particular emotion was
+gone: it was foolish to think that it was sounding eternally elsewhere,
+for there was no elsewhere. She, too, herself would cease one day, let
+her see to it that the tone was pure and lovely.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Mr. Phillips arrived the next morning as usual, just as Mabel had left
+the old lady’s room, and asked news of her.</p>
+
+<p>“She is a little better, I think,” said Mabel. “She must be very quiet
+all day.”</p>
+
+<p>The secretary bowed and turned aside into Oliver’s room, where a heap of
+letters lay to be answered.</p>
+
+<p>A couple of hours later, as Mabel went upstairs once more, she met Mr.
+Phillips coming down. He looked a little flushed under his sallow skin.</p>
+
+<p>“Mrs. Brand sent for me,” he said. “She wished to know whether Mr.
+Oliver would be back to-night.”</p>
+
+<p>“He will, will he not? You have not heard?”</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Brand said he would be here for a late dinner. He will reach London
+at nineteen.”</p>
+
+<p>“And is there any other news?”</p>
+
+<p>He compressed his lips.</p>
+
+<p>“There are rumours,” he said. “Mr. Brand wired to me an hour ago.”</p>
+
+<p>He seemed moved at something, and Mabel looked at him in astonishment.</p>
+
+<p>“It is not Eastern news?” she asked.</p>
+
+<p>His eyebrows wrinkled a little.</p>
+
+<p>“You must forgive me, Mrs. Brand,” he said. “I am not at liberty to say
+anything.”</p>
+
+<p>She was not offended, for she trusted her husband too well; but she went
+on into the sick-room with her heart beating.</p>
+
+<p>The old lady, too, seemed excited. She lay in bed with a clear flush in
+her white cheeks, and hardly smiled at all to the girl’s greeting.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, you have seen Mr. Phillips, then?” said Mabel.</p>
+
+<p>Old Mrs. Brand looked at her sharply an instant, but said nothing.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t excite yourself, mother. Oliver will be back to-night.”</p>
+
+<p>The old lady drew a long breath.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t trouble about me, my dear,” she said. “I shall do very well now.
+He will be back to dinner, will he not?”</p>
+
+<p>“If the volor is not late. Now, mother, are you ready for breakfast?”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Mabel passed an afternoon of considerable agitation. It was certain that
+something had happened. The secretary, who breakfasted with her in the
+parlour looking on to the garden, had appeared strangely excited. He had
+told her that he would be away the rest of the day: Mr. Oliver had given
+him his instructions. He had refrained from all discussion of the
+Eastern question, and he had given her no news of the Paris Convention;
+he only repeated that Mr. Oliver would be back that night. Then he had
+gone of in a hurry half-an-hour later.</p>
+
+<p>The old lady seemed asleep when the girl went up afterwards, and Mabel
+did not like to disturb her. Neither did she like to leave the house; so
+she walked by herself in the garden, thinking and hoping and fearing,
+till the long shadow lay across the path, and the tumbled platform of
+roofs was bathed in a dusty green haze from the west.</p>
+
+<p>As she came in she took up the evening paper, but there was no news
+there except to the effect that the Convention would close that
+afternoon.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Twenty o’clock came, but there was no sign of Oliver. The Paris volor
+should have arrived an hour before, but Mabel, staring out into the
+darkening heavens had seen the stars come out like jewels one by one,
+but no slender winged fish pass overhead. Of course she might have
+missed it; there was no depending on its exact course; but she had seen
+it a hundred times before, and wondered unreasonably why she had not
+seen it now. But she would not sit down to dinner, and paced up and
+down in her white dress, turning again and again to the window,
+listening to the soft rush of the trains, the faint hoots from the
+track, and the musical chords from the junction a mile away. The lights
+were up by now, and the vast sweep of the towns looked like fairyland
+between the earthly light and the heavenly darkness. Why did not Oliver
+come, or at least let her know why he did not?</p>
+
+<p>Once she went upstairs, miserably anxious herself, to reassure the old
+lady, and found her again very drowsy.</p>
+
+<p>“He is not come,” she said. “I dare say he may be kept in Paris.”</p>
+
+<p>The old face on the pillow nodded and murmured, and Mabel went down
+again. It was now an hour after dinner-time.</p>
+
+<p>Oh! there were a hundred things that might have kept him. He had often
+been later than this: he might have missed the volor he meant to catch;
+the Convention might have been prolonged; he might be exhausted, and
+think it better to sleep in Paris after all, and have forgotten to wire.
+He might even have wired to Mr. Phillips, and the secretary have
+forgotten to pass on the message.</p>
+
+<p>She went at last, hopelessly, to the telephone, and looked at it. There
+it was, that round silent mouth, that little row of labelled buttons.
+She half decided to touch them one by one, and inquire whether anything
+had been heard of her husband: there was his club, his office in
+Whitehall, Mr. Phillips’s house, Parliament-house, and the rest. But she
+hesitated, telling herself to be patient. Oliver hated interference, and
+he would surely soon remember and relieve her anxiety.</p>
+
+<p>Then, even as she turned away, the bell rang sharply, and a white label
+flashed into sight.—WHITEHALL.</p>
+
+<p>She pressed the corresponding button, and, her hand shaking so much that
+she could scarcely hold the receiver to her ear, she listened.</p>
+
+<p>“Who is there?”</p>
+
+<p>Her heart leaped at the sound of her husband’s voice, tiny and minute
+across the miles of wire.</p>
+
+<p>“I—Mabel,” she said. “Alone here.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! Mabel. Very well. I am back: all is well. Now listen. Can you
+hear?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, yes.”</p>
+
+<p>“The best has happened. It is all over in the East. Felsenburgh has done
+it. Now listen. I cannot come home to-night. It will be announced in
+Paul’s House in two hours from now. We are communicating with the Press.
+Come up here to me at once. You must be present.... Can you hear?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes.”</p>
+
+<p>“Come then at once. It will be the greatest thing in history. Tell no
+one. Come before the rush begins. In half-an-hour the way will be
+stopped.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oliver.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes? Quick.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mother is ill. Shall I leave her?”</p>
+
+<p>“How ill?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, no immediate danger. The doctor has seen her.”</p>
+
+<p>There was silence for a moment.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; come then. We will go back to-night anyhow, then. Tell her we
+shall be late.”</p>
+
+<p>“Very well.”</p>
+
+<p>“... Yes, you must come. Felsenburgh will be there.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>On the same afternoon Percy received a visitor.</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing exceptional about him; and Percy, as he came
+downstairs in his walking-dress and looked at him in the light from the
+tall parlour-window, came to no conclusion at all as to his business and
+person, except that he was not a Catholic.</p>
+
+<p>“You wished to see me,” said the priest, indicating a chair.</p>
+
+<p>“I fear I must not stop long.”</p>
+
+<p>“I shall not keep you long,” said the stranger eagerly. “My business is
+done in five minutes.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy waited with his eyes cast down.</p>
+
+<p>“A—a certain person has sent me to you. She was a Catholic once; she
+wishes to return to the Church.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy made a little movement with his head. It was a message he did not
+very often receive in these days.</p>
+
+<p>“You will come, sir, will you not? You will promise me?”</p>
+
+<p>The man seemed greatly agitated; his sallow face showed a little shining
+with sweat, and his eyes were piteous.</p>
+
+<p>“Of course I will come,” said Percy, smiling.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, sir; but you do not know who she is. It—it would make a great
+stir, sir, if it was known. It must not be known, sir; you will promise
+me that, too?”</p>
+
+<p>“I must not make any promise of that kind,” said the priest gently. “I
+do not know the circumstances yet.”</p>
+
+<p>The stranger licked his lips nervously.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, sir,” he said hastily, “you will say nothing till you have seen
+her? You can promise me that.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! certainly,” said the priest.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, sir, you had better not know my name. It—it may make it easier
+for you and for me. And—and, if you please, sir, the lady is ill; you
+must come to-day, if you please, but not until the evening. Will
+twenty-two o’clock be convenient, sir?”</p>
+
+<p>“Where is it?” asked Percy abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>“It—it is near Croydon junction. I will write down the address
+presently. And you will not come until twenty-two o’clock, sir?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why not now?”</p>
+
+<p>“Because the—the others may be there. They will be away then; I know
+that.”</p>
+
+<p>This was rather suspicious, Percy thought: discreditable plots had been
+known before. But he could not refuse outright.</p>
+
+<p>“Why does she not send for her parish-priest?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“She she does not know who he is, sir; she saw you once in the
+Cathedral, sir, and asked you for your name. Do you remember, sir?—an
+old lady?”</p>
+
+<p>Percy did dimly remember something of the kind a month or two before;
+but he could not be certain, and said so.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, sir, you will come, will you not?”</p>
+
+<p>“I must communicate with Father Dolan,” said the priest. “If he gives me
+permission—-”</p>
+
+<p>“If you please, sir, Father—Father Dolan must not know her name. You
+will not tell him?”</p>
+
+<p>“I do not know it myself yet,” said the priest, smiling.</p>
+
+<p>The stranger sat back abruptly at that, and his face worked.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, sir, let me tell you this first. This old lady’s son is my
+employer, and a very prominent Communist. She lives with him and his
+wife. The other two will be away to-night. That is why I am asking you
+all this. And now, you will come, sir?”</p>
+
+<p>Percy looked at him steadily for a moment or two. Certainly, if this was
+a conspiracy, the conspirators were feeble folk. Then he answered:</p>
+
+<p>“I will come, sir; I promise. Now the name.”</p>
+
+<p>The stranger again licked his lips nervously, and glanced timidly from
+side to side. Then he seemed to gather his resolution; he leaned forward
+and whispered sharply.</p>
+
+<p>“The old lady’s name is Brand, sir—the mother of Mr. Oliver Brand.”</p>
+
+<p>For a moment Percy was bewildered. It was too extraordinary to be true.
+He knew Mr. Oliver Brand’s name only too well; it was he who, by God’s
+permission, was doing more in England at this moment against the
+Catholic cause than any other man alive; and it was he whom the
+Trafalgar Square incident had raised into such eminent popularity. And
+now, here was his mother—-</p>
+
+<p>He turned fiercely upon the man.</p>
+
+<p>“I do not know what you are, sir—whether you believe in God or not; but
+will you swear to me on your religion and your honour that all this is
+true?”</p>
+
+<p>The timid eyes met his, and wavered; but it was the wavering of
+weakness, not of treachery.</p>
+
+<p>“I—I swear it, sir; by God Almighty.”</p>
+
+<p>“Are you a Catholic?”</p>
+
+<p>The man shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“But I believe in God,” he said. “At least, I think so.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy leaned back, trying to realise exactly what it all meant. There
+was no triumph in his mind—that kind of emotion was not his weakness;
+there was fear of a kind, excitement, bewilderment, and under all a
+satisfaction that God’s grace was so sovereign. If it could reach this
+woman, who could be too far removed for it to take effect? Presently he
+noticed the other looking at him anxiously.</p>
+
+<p>“You are afraid, sir? You are not going back from your promise?”</p>
+
+<p>That dispersed the cloud a little, and Percy smiled.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! no,” he said. “I will be there at twenty-two o’clock. ... Is death
+imminent?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, sir; it is syncope. She is recovered a little this morning.”</p>
+
+<p>The priest passed his hand over his eyes and stood up.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I will be there,” he said. “Shall you be there, sir?”</p>
+
+<p>The other shook his head, standing up too.</p>
+
+<p>“I must be with Mr. Brand, sir; there is to be a meeting to-night; but I
+must not speak of that.... No, sir; ask for Mrs. Brand, and say that she
+is expecting you. They will take you upstairs at once.”</p>
+
+<p>“I must not say I am a priest, I suppose?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, sir; if you please.”</p>
+
+<p>He drew out a pocket-book, scribbled in it a moment, tore out the sheet,
+and handed it to the priest.</p>
+
+<p>“The address, sir. Will you kindly destroy that when you have copied it?
+I—I do not wish to lose my place, sir, if it can be helped.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy stood twisting the paper in his fingers a moment.</p>
+
+<p>“Why are you not a Catholic yourself?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>The man shook his head mutely. Then he took up his hat, and went towards
+the door.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Percy passed a very emotional afternoon.</p>
+
+<p>For the last month or two little had happened to encourage him. He had
+been obliged to report half-a-dozen more significant secessions, and
+hardly a conversion of any kind. There was no doubt at all that the tide
+was setting steadily against the Church. The mad act in Trafalgar
+Square, too, had done incalculable harm last week: men were saying more
+than ever, and the papers storming, that the Church’s reliance on the
+supernatural was belied by every one of her public acts. “Scratch a
+Catholic and find an assassin” had been the text of a leading article in
+the <i>New People</i>, and Percy himself was dismayed at the folly of the
+attempt. It was true that the Archbishop had formally repudiated both
+the act and the motive from the Cathedral pulpit, but that too had only
+served as an opportunity hastily taken up by the principal papers, to
+recall the continual policy of the Church to avail herself of violence
+while she repudiated the violent. The horrible death of the man had in
+no way appeased popular indignation; there were not even wanting
+suggestions that the man had been seen coming out of Archbishop’s House
+an hour before the attempt at assassination had taken place.</p>
+
+<p>And now here, with dramatic swiftness, had come a message that the
+hero’s own mother desired reconciliation with the Church that had
+attempted to murder her son.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Again and again that afternoon, as Percy sped northwards on his visit to
+a priest in Worcester, and southwards once more as the lights began to
+shine towards evening, he wondered whether this were not a plot after
+all—some kind of retaliation, an attempt to trap him. Yet he had
+promised to say nothing, and to go.</p>
+
+<p>He finished his daily letter after dinner as usual, with a curious sense
+of fatality; addressed and stamped it. Then he went downstairs, in his
+walking-dress, to Father Blackmore’s room.</p>
+
+<p>“Will you hear my confession, father?” he said abruptly.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>Victoria Station, still named after the great nineteenth-century Queen,
+was neither more nor less busy than usual as he came into it
+half-an-hour later. The vast platform, sunk now nearly two hundred feet
+below the ground level, showed the double crowd of passengers entering
+and leaving town. Those on the extreme left, towards whom Percy began to
+descend in the open glazed lift, were by far the most numerous, and the
+stream at the lift-entrance made it necessary for him to move slowly.</p>
+
+<p>He arrived at last, walking in the soft light on the noiseless ribbed
+rubber, and stood by the door of the long car that ran straight through
+to the Junction. It was the last of a series of a dozen or more, each of
+which slid off minute by minute. Then, still watching the endless
+movement of the lifts ascending and descending between the entrances of
+the upper end of the station, he stepped in and sat down.</p>
+
+<p>He felt quiet now that he had actually started. He had made his
+confession, just in order to make certain of his own soul, though
+scarcely expecting any definite danger, and sat now, his grey suit and
+straw hat in no way distinguishing him as a priest (for a general leave
+was given by the authorities to dress so for any adequate reason). Since
+the case was not imminent, he had not brought stocks or pyx—Father
+Dolan had wired to him that he might fetch them if he wished from St.
+Joseph’s, near the Junction. He had only the violet thread in his
+pocket, such as was customary for sick calls.</p>
+
+<p>He was sliding along peaceably enough, fixing his eyes on the empty seat
+opposite, and trying to preserve complete collectedness when the car
+abruptly stopped. He looked out, astonished, and saw by the white
+enamelled walks twenty feet from the window that they were already in
+the tunnel. The stoppage might arise from many causes, and he was not
+greatly excited, nor did it seem that others in the carriage took it
+very seriously; he could hear, after a moment’s silence, the talking
+recommence beyond the partition.</p>
+
+<p>Then there came, echoed by the walls, the sound of shouting from far
+away, mingled with hoots and chords; it grew louder. The talking in the
+carriage stopped. He heard a window thrown up, and the next instant a
+car tore past, going back to the station although on the down line. This
+must be looked into, thought Percy: something certainly was happening;
+so he got up and went across the empty compartment to the further
+window. Again came the crying of voices, again the signals, and once
+more a car whirled past, followed almost immediately by another. There
+was a jerk—a smooth movement. Percy staggered and fell into a seat, as
+the carriage in which he was seated itself began to move backwards.</p>
+
+<p>There was a clamour now in the next compartment, and Percy made his way
+there through the door, only to find half-a-dozen men with their heads
+thrust from the windows, who paid absolutely no attention to his
+inquiries. So he stood there, aware that they knew no more than himself,
+waiting for an explanation from some one. It was disgraceful, he told
+himself, that any misadventure should so disorganise the line.</p>
+
+<p>Twice the car stopped; each time it moved on again after a hoot or two,
+and at last drew up at the platform whence it had started, although a
+hundred yards further out.</p>
+
+<p>Ah! there was no doubt that something had happened! The instant he
+opened the door a great roar met his ears, and as he sprang on to the
+platform and looked up at the end of the station, he began to
+understand.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>From right to left of the huge interior, across the platforms, swelling
+every instant, surged an enormous swaying, roaring crowd. The flight of
+steps, twenty yards broad, used only in cases of emergency, resembled a
+gigantic black cataract nearly two hundred feet in height. Each car as
+it drew up discharged more and more men and women, who ran like ants
+towards the assembly of their fellows. The noise was indescribable, the
+shouting of men, the screaming of women, the clang and hoot of the huge
+machines, and three or four times the brazen cry of a trumpet, as an
+emergency door was flung open overhead, and a small swirl of crowd
+poured through it towards the streets beyond. But after one look Percy
+looked no more at the people; for there, high up beneath the clock, on
+the Government signal board, flared out monstrous letters of fire,
+telling in Esperanto and English, the message for which England had
+grown sick. He read it a dozen times before he moved, staring, as at a
+supernatural sight which might denote the triumph of either heaven or
+hell.</p>
+
+<p>“EASTERN CONVENTION DISPERSED.</p>
+
+<p>PEACE, NOT WAR.</p>
+
+<p>UNIVERSAL BROTHERHOOD ESTABLISHED.</p>
+
+<p>FELSENBURGH IN LONDON TO-NIGHT.”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>It was not until nearly two hours later that Percy was standing at the
+house beyond the Junction.</p>
+
+<p>He had argued, expostulated, threatened, but the officials were like
+men possessed. Half of them had disappeared in the rush to the City, for
+it had leaked out, in spite of the Government’s precautions, that Paul’s
+House, known once as St. Paul’s Cathedral, was to be the scene of
+Felsenburgh’s reception. The others seemed demented; one man on the
+platform had dropped dead from nervous exhaustion, but no one appeared
+to care; and the body lay huddled beneath a seat. Again and again Percy
+had been swept away by a rush, as he struggled from platform to platform
+in his search for a car that would take him to Croydon. It seemed that
+there was none to be had, and the useless carriages collected like
+drift-wood between the platforms, as others whirled up from the country
+bringing loads of frantic, delirious men, who vanished like smoke from
+the white rubber-boards. The platforms were continually crowded, and as
+continually emptied, and it was not until half-an-hour before midnight
+that the block began to move outwards again.</p>
+
+<p>Well, he was here at last, dishevelled, hatless and exhausted, looking
+up at the dark windows.</p>
+
+<p>He scarcely knew what he thought of the whole matter. War, of course,
+was terrible. And such a war as this would have been too terrible for
+the imagination to visualise; but to the priest’s mind there were other
+things even worse. What of universal peace—peace, that is to say,
+established by others than Christ’s method? Or was God behind even this?
+The questions were hopeless.</p>
+
+<p>Felsenburgh—it was he then who had done this thing—this thing
+undoubtedly greater than any secular event hitherto known in
+civilisation. What manner of man was he? What was his character, his
+motive, his method? How would he use his success?... So the points flew
+before him like a stream of sparks, each, it might be, harmless; each,
+equally, capable of setting a world on fire. Meanwhile here was an old
+woman who desired to be reconciled with God before she died....</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>He touched the button again, three or four times, and waited. Then a
+light sprang out overhead, and he knew that he was heard.</p>
+
+<p>“I was sent for,” he exclaimed to the bewildered maid. “I should have
+been here at twenty-two: I was prevented by the rush.”</p>
+
+<p>She babbled out a question at him.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, it is true, I believe,” he said. “It is peace, not war. Kindly
+take me upstairs.”</p>
+
+<p>He went through the hall with a curious sense of guilt. This was Brand’s
+house then—that vivid orator, so bitterly eloquent against God; and
+here was he, a priest, slinking in under cover of night. Well, well, it
+was not of his appointment.</p>
+
+<p>At the door of an upstairs room the maid turned to him.</p>
+
+<p>“A doctor, sir?” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“That is my affair,” said Percy briefly, and opened the door.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>A little wailing cry broke from the corner, before he had time to close
+the door again.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! thank God! I thought He had forgotten me. You are a priest,
+father?”</p>
+
+<p>“I am a priest. Do you not remember seeing me in the Cathedral?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, yes, sir; I saw you praying, father. Oh! thank God, thank God!”</p>
+
+<p>Percy stood looking down at her a moment, seeing her flushed old face in
+the nightcap, her bright sunken eyes and her tremulous hands. Yes; this
+was genuine enough.</p>
+
+<p>“Now, my child,” he said, “tell me.”</p>
+
+<p>“My confession, father.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy drew out the purple thread, slipped it over his shoulders, and sat
+down by the bed.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>But she would not let him go for a while after that.</p>
+
+<p>“Tell me, father. When will you bring me Holy Communion?”</p>
+
+<p>He hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>“I understand that Mr. Brand and his wife know nothing of all this?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, father.”</p>
+
+<p>“Tell me, are you very ill?”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know, father. They will not tell me. I thought I was gone last
+night.”</p>
+
+<p>“When would you wish me to bring you Holy Communion? I will do as you
+say.”</p>
+
+<p>“Shall I send to you in a day or two? Father, ought I to tell him?”</p>
+
+<p>“You are not obliged.”</p>
+
+<p>“I will if I ought.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, think about it, and let me know.... You have heard what has
+happened?”</p>
+
+<p>She nodded, but almost uninterestedly; and Percy was conscious of a tiny
+prick of compunction at his own heart. After all, the reconciling of a
+soul to God was a greater thing than the reconciling of East to West.</p>
+
+<p>“It may make a difference to Mr. Brand,” he said. “He will be a great
+man, now, you know.”</p>
+
+<p>She still looked at him in silence, smiling a little. Percy was
+astonished at the youthfulness of that old face. Then her face changed.</p>
+
+<p>“Father, I must not keep you; but tell me this—Who is this man?”</p>
+
+<p>“Felsenburgh?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes.”</p>
+
+<p>“No one knows. We shall know more to-morrow. He is in town to-night.”</p>
+
+<p>She looked so strange that Percy for an instant thought it was a
+seizure. Her face seemed to fall away in a kind of emotion, half
+cunning, half fear.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, my child?”</p>
+
+<p>“Father, I am a little afraid when I think of that man. He cannot harm
+me, can he? I am safe now? I am a Catholic—?”</p>
+
+<p>“My child, of course you are safe. What is the matter? How can this man
+injure you?”</p>
+
+<p>But the look of terror was still there, and Percy came a step nearer.</p>
+
+<p>“You must not give way to fancies,” he said. “Just commit yourself to
+our Blessed Lord. This man can do you no harm.”</p>
+
+<p>He was speaking now as to a child; but it was of no use. Her old mouth
+was still sucked in, and her eyes wandered past him into the gloom of
+the room behind.</p>
+
+<p>“My child, tell me what is the matter. What do you know of Felsenburgh?
+You have been dreaming.”</p>
+
+<p>She nodded suddenly and energetically, and Percy for the first time felt
+his heart give a little leap of apprehension. Was this old woman out of
+her mind, then? Or why was it that that name seemed to him sinister?
+Then he remembered that Father Blackmore had once talked like this. He
+made an effort, and sat down once more.</p>
+
+<p>“Now tell me plainly,” he said. “You have been dreaming. What have you
+dreamt?”</p>
+
+<p>She raised herself a little in bed, again glancing round the room; then
+she put out her old ringed hand for one of his, and he gave it,
+wondering.</p>
+
+<p>“The door is shut, father? There is no one listening?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, no, my child. Why are you trembling? You must not be
+superstitious.”</p>
+
+<p>“Father, I will tell you. Dreams are nonsense, are they not? Well, at
+least, this is what I dreamt.</p>
+
+<p>“I was somewhere in a great house; I do not know where it was. It was a
+house I have never seen. It was one of the old houses, and it was very
+dark. I was a child, I thought, and I was ... I was afraid of something.
+The passages were all dark, and I went crying in the dark, looking for a
+light, and there was none. Then I heard a voice talking, a great way
+off. Father—-”</p>
+
+<p>Her hand gripped his more tightly, and again her eyes went round the
+room.</p>
+
+<p>With great difficulty Percy repressed a sigh. Yet he dared not leave her
+just now. The house was very still; only from outside now and again
+sounded the clang of the cars, as they sped countrywards again from the
+congested town, and once the sound of great shouting. He wondered what
+time it was.</p>
+
+<p>“Had you better tell me now?” he asked, still talking with a patient
+simplicity. “What time will they be back?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not yet,” she whispered. “Mabel said not till two o’clock. What time
+is it now, father?”</p>
+
+<p>He pulled out his watch with his disengaged hand.</p>
+
+<p>“It is not yet one,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Very well, listen, father.... I was in this house; and I heard that
+talking; and I ran along the passages, till I saw light below a door;
+and then I stopped.... Nearer, father.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy was a little awed in spite of himself. Her voice had suddenly
+dropped to a whisper, and her old eyes seemed to hold him strangely.</p>
+
+<p>“I stopped, father; I dared not go in. I could hear the talking, and I
+could see the light; and I dared not go in. Father, it was Felsenburgh
+in that room.”</p>
+
+<p>From beneath came the sudden snap of a door; then the sound of
+footsteps. Percy turned his head abruptly, and at the same moment heard
+a swift indrawn breath from the old woman.</p>
+
+<p>“Hush!” he said. “Who is that?”</p>
+
+<p>Two voices were talking in the hall below now, and at the sound the old
+woman relaxed her hold.</p>
+
+<p>“I—I thought it to be him,” she murmured.</p>
+
+<p>Percy stood up; he could see that she did not understand the situation.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, my child,” he said quietly, “but who is it?”</p>
+
+<p>“My son and his wife,” she said; then her face changed once more.
+“Why—why, father—-”</p>
+
+<p>Her voice died in her throat, as a step vibrated outside. For a moment
+there was complete silence; then a whisper, plainly audible, in a girl’s
+voice.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, her light is burning. Come in, Oliver, but softly.”</p>
+
+<p>Then the handle turned.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>There was an exclamation, then silence, as a tall, beautiful girl with
+flushed face and shining grey eyes came forward and stopped, followed by
+a man whom Percy knew at once from his pictures. A little whimpering
+sounded from the bed, and the priest lifted his hand instinctively to
+silence it.</p>
+
+<p>“Why,” said Mabel; and then stared at the man with the young face and
+the white hair.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver opened his lips and closed them again. He, too, had a strange
+excitement in his face. Then he spoke.</p>
+
+<p>“Who is this?” he said deliberately.</p>
+
+<p>“Oliver,” cried the girl, turning to him abruptly, “this is the priest I
+saw—-”</p>
+
+<p>“A priest!” said the other, and came forward a step. “Why, I thought—-”</p>
+
+
+<p>Percy drew a breath to steady that maddening vibration in his throat.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, I am a priest,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Again the whimpering broke out from the bed; and Percy, half turning
+again to silence it, saw the girl mechanically loosen the clasp of the
+thin dust cloak over her white dress.</p>
+
+<p>“You sent for him, mother?” snapped the man, with a tremble in his
+voice, and with a sudden jerk forward of his whole body. But the girl
+put out her hand.</p>
+
+<p>“Quietly, my dear,” she said. “Now, sir—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, I am a priest,” said Percy again, strung up now to a desperate
+resistance of will, hardly knowing what he said.</p>
+
+<p>“And you come to my house!” exclaimed the man. He came a step nearer,
+and half recoiled. “You swear you are a priest?” he said. “You have been
+here all this evening?”</p>
+
+<p>“Since midnight.”</p>
+
+<p>“And you are not—-” he stopped again.</p>
+
+<p>Mabel stepped straight between them.</p>
+
+<p>“Oliver,” she said, still with that air of suppressed excitement, “we
+must not have a scene here. The poor dear is too ill. Will you come
+downstairs, sir?”</p>
+
+<p>Percy took a step towards the door, and Oliver moved slightly aside.
+Then the priest stopped, turned and lifted his hand.</p>
+
+<p>“God bless you!” he said simply, to the muttering figure in the bed.
+Then he went out, and waited outside the door.</p>
+
+<p>He could hear a low talking within; then a compassionate murmur from the
+girl’s voice; then Oliver was beside him, trembling all over, as white
+as ashes, and made a silent gesture as he went past him down the stairs.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The whole thing seemed to Percy like some incredible dream; it was all
+so unexpected, so untrue to life. He felt conscious of an enormous shame
+at the sordidness of the affair, and at the same time of a kind of
+hopeless recklessness. The worst had happened and the best—that was his
+sole comfort.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver pushed a door open, touched a button, and went through into the
+suddenly lit room, followed by Percy. Still in silence, he pointed to a
+chair, Percy sat down, and Oliver stood before the fireplace, his hands
+deep in the pockets of his jacket, slightly turned away.</p>
+
+<p>Percy’s concentrated senses became aware of every detail of the
+room—the deep springy green carpet, smooth under his feet, the straight
+hanging thin silk curtains, the half-dozen low tables with a wealth of
+flowers upon them, and the books that lined the walls. The whole room
+was heavy with the scent of roses, although the windows were wide, and
+the night-breeze stirred the curtains continually. It was a woman’s
+room, he told himself. Then he looked at the man’s figure, lithe, tense,
+upright; the dark grey suit not unlike his own, the beautiful curve of
+the jaw, the clear pale complexion, the thin nose, the protruding curve
+of idealism over the eyes, and the dark hair. It was a poet’s face, he
+told himself, and the whole personality was a living and vivid one. Then
+he turned a little and rose as the door opened, and Mabel came in,
+closing it behind her.</p>
+
+<p>She came straight across to her husband, and put a hand on his shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>“Sit down, my dear,” she said. “We must talk a little. Please sit down,
+sir.”</p>
+
+<p>The three sat down, Percy on one side, and the husband and wife on a
+straight-backed settle opposite.</p>
+
+<p>The girl began again.</p>
+
+<p>“This must be arranged at once,” she said, “but we must have no tragedy.
+Oliver, do you understand? You must not make a scene. Leave this to me.”</p>
+
+<p>She spoke with a curious gaiety; and Percy to his astonishment saw that
+she was quite sincere: there was not the hint of cynicism.</p>
+
+<p>“Oliver, my dear,” she said again, “don’t mouth like that! It is all
+perfectly right. I am going to manage this.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy saw a venomous look directed at him by the man; the girl saw it
+too, moving her strong humorous eyes from one to the other. She put her
+hand on his knee.</p>
+
+<p>“Oliver, attend! Don’t look at this gentleman so bitterly. He has done
+no harm.”</p>
+
+<p>“No harm!” whispered the other.</p>
+
+<p>“No—no harm in the world. What does it matter what that poor dear
+upstairs thinks? Now, sir, would you mind telling us why you came here?”</p>
+
+<p>Percy drew another breath. He had not expected this line.</p>
+
+<p>“I came here to receive Mrs. Brand back into the Church,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“And you have done so?”</p>
+
+<p>“I have done so.”</p>
+
+<p>“Would you mind telling us your name? It makes it so much more
+convenient.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy hesitated. Then he determined to meet her on her own ground.</p>
+
+<p>“Certainly. My name is Franklin.”</p>
+
+<p>“Father Franklin?” asked the girl, with just the faintest tinge of
+mocking emphasis on the first word.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. Father Percy Franklin, from Archbishop’s House, Westminster,” said
+the priest steadily.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, then, Father Percy Franklin; can you tell us why you came here? I
+mean, who sent for you?”</p>
+
+<p>“Mrs. Brand sent for me.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, but by what means?”</p>
+
+<p>“That I must not say.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, very good.... May we know what good comes of being ‘received into
+the Church?’”</p>
+
+<p>“By being received into the Church, the soul is reconciled to God.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! (Oliver, be quiet.) And how do you do it, Father Franklin?”</p>
+
+<p>Percy stood up abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>“This is no good, madam,” he said. “What is the use of these questions?”</p>
+
+<p>The girl looked at him in open-eyed astonishment, still with her hand on
+her husband’s knee.</p>
+
+<p>“The use, Father Franklin! Why, we want to know. There is no church law
+against your telling us, is there?”</p>
+
+<p>Percy hesitated again. He did not understand in the least what she was
+after. Then he saw that he would give them an advantage if he lost his
+head at all: so he sat down again.</p>
+
+<p>“Certainly not. I will tell you if you wish to know. I heard Mrs.
+Brand’s confession, and gave her absolution.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! yes; and that does it, then? And what next?”</p>
+
+<p>“She ought to receive Holy Communion, and anointing, if she is in danger
+of death.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver twitched suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>“Christ!” he said softly.</p>
+
+<p>“Oliver!” cried the girl entreatingly. “Please leave this to me. It is
+much better so.—And then, I suppose, Father Franklin, you want to give
+those other things to my mother, too?”</p>
+
+<p>“They are not absolutely necessary,” said the priest, feeling, he did
+not know why, that he was somehow playing a losing game.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! they are not necessary? But you would like to?”</p>
+
+<p>“I shall do so if possible. But I have done what is necessary.”</p>
+
+<p>It required all his will to keep quiet. He was as a man who had armed
+himself in steel, only to find that his enemy was in the form of a
+subtle vapour. He simply had not an idea what to do next. He would have
+given anything for the man to have risen and flown at his throat, for
+this girl was too much for them both.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” she said softly. “Well, it is hardly to be expected that my
+husband should give you leave to come here again. But I am very glad
+that you have done what you think necessary. No doubt it will be a
+satisfaction to you, Father Franklin, and to the poor old thing
+upstairs, too. While we—- <i>we</i>—” she pressed her husband’s knee—“we
+do not mind at all. Oh!—but there is one thing more.”</p>
+
+<p>“If you please,” said Percy, wondering what on earth was coming.</p>
+
+<p>“You Christians—forgive me if I say anything rude—but, you know, you
+Christians have a reputation for counting heads, and making the most of
+converts. We shall be so much obliged, Father Franklin, if you will
+give us your word not to advertise this—this incident. It would
+distress my husband, and give him a great deal of trouble.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mrs. Brand—-” began the priest.</p>
+
+<p>“One moment.... You see, we have not treated you badly. There has been
+no violence. We will promise not to make scenes with my mother. Will you
+promise us that?”</p>
+
+<p>Percy had had time to consider, and he answered instantly.</p>
+
+<p>“Certainly, I will promise that.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel sighed contentedly.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, that is all right. We are so much obliged.... And I think we may
+say this, that perhaps after consideration my husband may see his way to
+letting you come here again to do Communion and—and the other thing—-”</p>
+
+<p>Again that spasm shook the man beside her.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, we will see about that. At any rate, we know your address, and
+can let you know.... By the way, Father Franklin, are you going back to
+Westminster to-night?”</p>
+
+<p>He bowed.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah! I hope you will get through. You will find London very much
+excited. Perhaps you heard—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Felsenburgh?” said Percy.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. Julian Felsenburgh,” said the girl softly, again with that strange
+excitement suddenly alight in her eyes. “Julian Felsenburgh,” she
+repeated. “He is there, you know. He will stay in England for the
+present.”</p>
+
+<p>Again Percy was conscious of that slight touch of fear at the mention of
+that name.</p>
+
+<p>“I understand there is to be peace,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>The girl rose and her husband with her.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” she said, almost compassionately, “there is to be peace. Peace at
+last.” (She moved half a step towards him, and her face glowed like a
+rose of fire. Her hand rose a little.) “Go back to London, Father
+Franklin, and use your eyes. You will see him, I dare say, and you will
+see more besides.” (Her voice began to vibrate.) “And you will
+understand, perhaps, why we have treated you like this—why we are no
+longer afraid of you—why we are willing that my mother should do as
+she pleases. Oh! you will understand, Father Franklin if not to-night,
+to-morrow; or if not to-morrow, at least in a very short time.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mabel!” cried her husband.</p>
+
+<p>The girl wheeled, and threw her arms round him, and kissed him on the
+mouth.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! I am not ashamed, Oliver, my dear. Let him go and see for himself.
+Good-night, Father Franklin.”</p>
+
+<p>As he went towards the door, hearing the ping of the bell that some one
+touched in the room behind him, he turned once more, dazed and
+bewildered; and there were the two, husband and wife, standing in the
+soft, sunny light, as if transfigured. The girl had her arm round the
+man’s shoulder, and stood upright and radiant as a pillar of fire; and
+even on the man’s face there was no anger now—nothing but an almost
+supernatural pride and confidence. They were both smiling.</p>
+
+<p>Then Percy passed out into the soft, summer night.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>Percy understood nothing except that he was afraid, as he sat in the
+crowded car that whirled him up to London. He scarcely even heard the
+talk round him, although it was loud and continuous; and what he heard
+meant little to him. He understood only that there had been strange
+scenes, that London was said to have gone suddenly mad, that Felsenburgh
+had spoken that night in Paul’s House.</p>
+
+<p>He was afraid at the way in which he had been treated, and he asked
+himself dully again and again what it was that had inspired that
+treatment; it seemed that he had been in the presence of the
+supernatural; he was conscious of shivering a little, and of the
+symptoms of an intolerable sleepiness. It was scarcely strange to him
+that he should be sitting in a crowded car at two o’clock of a summer
+dawn.</p>
+
+<p>Thrice the car stopped, and he stared out at the signs of confusion that
+were everywhere; at the figures that ran in the twilight between the
+tracks, at a couple of wrecked carriages, a tumble of tarpaulins; he
+listened mechanically to the hoots and cries that sounded everywhere.</p>
+
+<p>As he stepped out at last on to the platform, he found it very much as
+he had left it two hours before. There was the same desperate rush as
+the car discharged its load, the same dead body beneath the seat; and
+above all, as he ran helplessly behind the crowd, scarcely knowing
+whither he ran or why, above him burned the same stupendous message
+beneath the clock. Then he found himself in the lift, and a minute later
+he was out on the steps behind the station.</p>
+
+<p>There, too, was an astonishing sight. The lamps still burned overhead,
+but beyond them lay the first pale streaks of the false dawn. The street
+that ran now straight to the old royal palace, uniting there, as at the
+centre of a web, with those that came from Westminster, the Mall and
+Hyde Park, was one solid pavement of heads. On this side and that rose
+up the hotels and “Houses of Joy,” the windows all ablaze with light,
+solemn and triumphant as if to welcome a king; while far ahead against
+the sky stood the monstrous palace outlined in fire, and alight from
+within like all other houses within view. The noise was bewildering. It
+was impossible to distinguish one sound from another. Voices, horns,
+drums, the tramp of a thousand footsteps on the rubber pavements, the
+sombre roll of wheels from the station behind—all united in one
+overwhelmingly solemn booming, overscored by shriller notes.</p>
+
+<p>It was impossible to move.</p>
+
+<p>He found himself standing in a position of extraordinary advantage, at
+the very top of the broad flight of steps that led down into the old
+station yard, now a wide space that united, on the left the broad road
+to the palace, and on the right Victoria Street, that showed like all
+else one vivid perspective of lights and heads. Against the sky on his
+right rose up the illuminated head of the Cathedral Campanile. It
+appeared to him as if he had known that in some previous existence.</p>
+
+<p>He edged himself mechanically a foot or two to his left, till he clasped
+a pillar; then he waited, trying not to analyse his emotions, but to
+absorb them.</p>
+
+<p>Gradually he became aware that this crowd was as no other that he had
+ever seen. To his psychical sense it seemed to him that it possessed a
+unity unlike any other. There was magnetism in the air. There was a
+sensation as if a creative act were in process, whereby thousands of
+individual cells were being welded more and more perfectly every instant
+into one huge sentient being with one will, one emotion, and one head.
+The crying of voices seemed significant only as the stirrings of this
+creative power which so expressed itself. Here rested this giant
+humanity, stretching to his sight in living limbs so far as he could see
+on every side, waiting, waiting for some consummation—stretching, too,
+as his tired brain began to guess, down every thoroughfare of the vast
+city.</p>
+
+<p>He did not even ask himself for what they waited. He knew, yet he did
+not know. He knew it was for a revelation—for something that should
+crown their aspirations, and fix them so for ever.</p>
+
+<p>He had a sense that he had seen all this before; and, like a child, he
+began to ask himself where it could have happened, until he remembered
+that it was so that he had once dreamt of the Judgment Day—of humanity
+gathered to meet Jesus Christ—Jesus Christ! Ah! how tiny that Figure
+seemed to him now—how far away—real indeed, but insignificant to
+himself—how hopelessly apart from this tremendous life! He glanced up
+at the Campanile. Yes; there was a piece of the True Cross there, was
+there not?—a little piece of the wood on which a Poor Man had died
+twenty centuries ago.... Well, well. It was a long way off....</p>
+
+<p>He did not quite understand what was happening to him. “Sweet Jesus, be
+to me not a Judge but a Saviour,” he whispered beneath his breath,
+gripping the granite of the pillar; and a moment later knew how futile
+was that prayer. It was gone like a breath in this vast, vivid
+atmosphere of man. He had said mass, had he not? this morning—in white
+vestments.—Yes; he had believed it all then—desperately, but truly;
+and now....</p>
+
+<p>To look into the future was as useless as to look into the past. There
+was no future, and no past: it was all one eternal instant, present and
+final....</p>
+
+<p>Then he let go of effort, and again began to see with his bodily eyes.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The dawn was coming up the sky now, a steady soft brightening that
+appeared in spite of its sovereignty to be as nothing compared with the
+brilliant light of the streets. “We need no sun,” he whispered, smiling
+piteously; “no sun or light of a candle. We have our light on earth—the
+light that lighteneth every man....”</p>
+
+<p>The Campanile seemed further away than ever now, in that ghostly glimmer
+of dawn—more and more helpless every moment, compared with the
+beautiful vivid shining of the streets.</p>
+
+<p>Then he listened to the sounds, and it seemed to him as if somewhere,
+far down eastwards, there was a silence beginning. He jerked his head
+impatiently, as a man behind him began to talk rapidly and confusedly.
+Why would he not be silent, and let silence be heard?... The man stopped
+presently, and out of the distance there swelled up a roar, as soft as
+the roll of a summer tide; it passed up towards him from the right; it
+was about him, dinning in his ears. There was no longer any individual
+voice: it was the breathing of the giant that had been born; he was
+crying out too; he did not know what he said, but he could not be
+silent. His veins and nerves seemed alight with wine; and as he stared
+down the long street, hearing the huge cry ebb from him and move toward
+the palace, he knew why he had cried, and why he was now silent.</p>
+
+<p>A slender, fish-shaped thing, as white as milk, as ghostly as a shadow,
+and as beautiful as the dawn, slid into sight half-a-mile away, turned
+and came towards him, floating, as it seemed, on the very wave of
+silence that it created, up, up the long curving street on outstretched
+wings, not twenty feet above the heads of the crowd. There was one great
+sigh, and then silence once more.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>When Percy could think consciously again—for his will was only capable
+of efforts as a clock of ticks—the strange white thing was nearer. He
+told himself that he had seen a hundred such before; and at the same
+instant that this was different from all others.</p>
+
+<p>Then it was nearer still, floating slowly, slowly, like a gull over the
+sea; he could make out its smooth nose, its low parapet beyond, the
+steersman’s head motionless; he could even hear now the soft winnowing
+of the screw—and then he saw that for which he had waited.</p>
+
+<p>High on the central deck there stood a chair, draped, too, in white,
+with some insignia visible above its back; and in the chair sat the
+figure of a man, motionless and lonely. He made no sign as he came; his
+dark dress showed vividedly against the whiteness; his head was raised,
+and he turned it gently now and again from side to side.</p>
+
+<p>It came nearer still, in the profound stillness; the head turned, and
+for an instant the face was plainly visible in the soft, radiant light.</p>
+
+<p>It was a pale face, strongly marked, as of a young man, with arched,
+black eyebrows, thin lips, and white hair.</p>
+
+<p>Then the face turned once more, the steersman shifted his head, and the
+beautiful shape, wheeling a little, passed the corner, and moved up
+towards the palace.</p>
+
+<p>There was an hysterical yelp somewhere, a cry, and again the tempestuous
+groan broke out.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="BOOK_II-THE_ENCOUNTER">BOOK II-THE ENCOUNTER</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="2CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>Oliver Brand was seated at his desk, on the evening of the next day,
+reading the leading article of the <i>New People</i>, evening edition.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>“We have had time,” he read, “to recover ourselves a little from the
+intoxication of last night. Before embarking on prophecy, it will be as
+well to recall the facts. Up to yesterday evening our anxiety with
+regard to the Eastern crisis continued; and when twenty-one o’clock
+struck there were not more than forty persons in London—the English
+delegates, that is to say—who knew positively that the danger was over.
+Between that moment and half-an-hour later the Government took a few
+discreet steps: a select number of persons were informed; the police
+were called out, with half-a-dozen regiments, to preserve order; Paul’s
+House was cleared; the railroad companies were warned; and at the half
+hour precisely the announcement was made by means of the electric
+placards in every quarter of London, as well as in all large provincial
+towns. We have not space now to adequately describe the admirable manner
+in which the public authorities did their duty; it is enough to say that
+not more than seventy fatalities took place in the whole of London; nor
+is it our business to criticise the action of the Government, in
+choosing this mode of making the announcement.</p>
+
+<p>“By twenty-two o’clock Paul’s House was filled in every corner, the Old
+Choir was reserved for members of Parliament and public officials, the
+quarter-dome galleries were filled with ladies, and to the rest of the
+floor the public was freely admitted. The volor-police also inform us
+now that for about the distance of one mile in every direction round
+this centre every thoroughfare was blocked with pedestrians, and, two
+hours later, as we all know, practically all the main streets of the
+whole of London were in the same condition.</p>
+
+<p>“It was an excellent choice by which Mr. OLIVER BRAND was selected as
+the first speaker. His arm was still in bandages; and the appeal of his
+figure as well as his passionate words struck the first explicit note of
+the evening. A report of his words will be found in another column. In
+their turns, the PRIME MINISTER, Mr. SNOWFORD, the FIRST MINISTER OF THE
+ADMIRALTY, THE SECRETARY FOR EASTERN AFFAIRS, and LORD PEMBERTON, all
+spoke a few words, corroborating the extraordinary news. At a quarter
+before twenty-three, the noise of cheering outside announced the arrival
+of the American delegates from Paris, and one by one these ascended the
+platform by the south gates of the Old Choir. Each spoke in turn. It is
+impossible to appreciate words spoken at such a moment as this; but
+perhaps it is not invidious to name Mr. MARKHAM as the orator who above
+all others appealed to those who were privileged to hear him. It was he,
+too, who told us explicitly what others had merely mentioned, to the
+effect that the success of the American efforts was entirely due to Mr.
+JULIAN FELSENBURGH. As yet Mr. FELSENBURGH had not arrived; but in
+answer to a roar of inquiry, Mr. MARKHAM announced that this gentleman
+would be amongst them in a few minutes. He then proceeded to describe to
+us, so far as was possible in a few sentences, the methods by which Mr.
+FELSENBURGH had accomplished what is probably the most astonishing task
+known to history. It seems from his words that Mr. FELSENBURGH (whose
+biography, so far as it is known, we give in another column) is probably
+the greatest orator that the world has ever known—we use these words
+deliberately. All languages seem the same to him; he delivered speeches
+during the eight months through which the Eastern Convention lasted, in
+no less than fifteen tongues. Of his manner in speaking we shall have a
+few remarks to make presently. He showed also, Mr. MARKHAM told us, the
+most astonishing knowledge, not only of human nature, but of every trait
+under which that divine thing manifests itself. He appeared acquainted
+with the history, the prejudices, the fears, the hopes, the expectations
+of all the innumerable sects and castes of the East to whom it was his
+business to speak. In fact, as Mr. MARKHAM said, he is probably the
+first perfect product of that new cosmopolitan creation to which the
+world has laboured throughout its history. In no less than nine
+places—Damascus, Irkutsk, Constantinople, Calcutta, Benares, Nanking,
+among them—he was hailed as Messiah by a Mohammedan mob. Finally, in
+America, where this extraordinary figure has arisen, all speak well of
+him. He has been guilty of none of those crimes—there is not one that
+convicts him of sin—those crimes of the Yellow Press, of corruption, of
+commercial or political bullying which have so stained the past of all
+those old politicians who made the sister continent what she has become.
+Mr. FELSENBURGH has not even formed a party. He, and not his underlings,
+have conquered. Those who were present in Paul’s House on this occasion
+will understand us when we say that the effect of those words was
+indescribable.</p>
+
+<p>“When Mr. MARKHAM sat down, there was a silence; then, in order to quiet
+the rising excitement, the organist struck the first chords of the
+Masonic Hymn; the words were taken up, and presently not only the whole
+interior of the building rang with it, but outside, too, the people
+responded, and the city of London for a few moments became indeed a
+temple of the Lord.</p>
+
+<p>“Now indeed we come to the most difficult part of our task, and it is
+better to confess at once that anything resembling journalistic
+descriptiveness must be resolutely laid aside. The greatest things are
+best told in the simplest words.</p>
+
+<p>“Towards the close of the fourth verse, a figure in a plain dark suit
+was observed ascending the steps of the platform. For a moment this
+attracted no attention, but when it was seen that a sudden movement had
+broken out among the delegates, the singing began to falter; and it
+ceased altogether as the figure, after a slight inclination to right and
+left, passed up the further steps that led to the rostrum. Then occurred
+a curious incident. The organist aloft at first did not seem to
+understand, and continued playing, but a sound broke out from the crowd
+resembling a kind of groan, and instantly he ceased. But no cheering
+followed. Instead a profound silence dominated in an instant the huge
+throng; this, by some strange magnetism, communicated itself to those
+without the building, and when Mr. FELSENBURGH uttered his first words,
+it was in a stillness that was like a living thing. We leave the
+explanation of this phenomenon to the expert in psychology.</p>
+
+<p>“Of his actual words we have nothing to say. So far as we are aware no
+reporter made notes at the moment; but the speech, delivered in
+Esperanto, was a very simple one, and very short. It consisted of a
+brief announcement of the great fact of Universal Brotherhood, a
+congratulation to all who were yet alive to witness this consummation of
+history; and, at the end, an ascription of praise to that Spirit of the
+World whose incarnation was now accomplished.</p>
+
+<p>“So much we can say; but we can say nothing as to the impression of the
+personality who stood there. In appearance the man seemed to be about
+thirty-three years of age, clean-shaven, upright, with white hair and
+dark eyes and brows; he stood motionless with his hands on the rail, he
+made but one gesture that drew a kind of sob from the crowd, he spoke
+these words slowly, distinctly, and in a clear voice; then he stood
+waiting.</p>
+
+<p>“There was no response but a sigh which sounded in the ears of at least
+one who heard it as if the whole world drew breath for the first time;
+and then that strange heart-shaking silence fell again. Many were
+weeping silently, the lips of thousands moved without a sound, and all
+faces were turned to that simple figure, as if the hope of every soul
+were centred there. So, if we may believe it, the eyes of many,
+centuries ago, were turned on one known now to history as JESUS OF
+NAZARETH.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. FELSENBURGH stood so a moment longer, then he turned down the
+steps, passed across the platform and disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>“Of what took place outside we have received the following account from
+an eye-witness. The white volor, so well known now to all who were in
+London that night, had remained stationary outside the little south door
+of the Old Choir aisle, poised about twenty feet above the ground.
+Gradually it became known to the crowd, in those few minutes, who it was
+who had arrived in it, and upon Mr. FELSENBURGH’S reappearance that same
+strange groan sounded through the whole length of Paul’s Churchyard,
+followed by the same silence. The volor descended; the master stepped on
+board, and once more the vessel rose to a height of twenty feet. It was
+thought at first that some speech would be made, but none was necessary;
+and after a moment’s pause, the volor began that wonderful parade which
+London will never forget. Four times during the night Mr. FELSENBURGH
+went round the enormous metropolis, speaking no word; and everywhere the
+groan preceded and followed him, while silence accompanied his actual
+passage. Two hours after sunrise the white ship rose over Hampstead and
+disappeared towards the North; and since then he, whom we call, in
+truth, the Saviour of the world, has not been seen.</p>
+
+<p>“And now what remains to be said?</p>
+
+<p>“Comment is useless. It is enough to say in one short sentence that the
+new era has begun, to which prophets and kings, and the suffering, the
+dying, all who labour and are heavy-laden, have aspired in vain. Not
+only has intercontinental rivalry ceased to exist, but the strife of
+home dissensions has ceased also. Of him who has been the herald of its
+inauguration we have nothing more to say. Time alone can show what is
+yet left for him to do.</p>
+
+<p>“But what has been done is as follows. The Eastern peril has been for
+ever dissipated. It is understood now, by fanatic barbarians as well as
+by civilised nations, that the reign of War is ended. ‘Not peace but a
+sword,’ said CHRIST; and bitterly true have those words proved to be.
+‘Not a sword but peace’ is the retort, articulate at last, from those
+who have renounced CHRIST’S claims or have never accepted them. The
+principle of love and union learned however falteringly in the West
+during the last century, has been taken up in the East as well. There
+shall be no more an appeal to arms, but to justice; no longer a crying
+after a God Who hides Himself, but to Man who has learned his own
+Divinity. The Supernatural is dead; rather, we know now that it never
+yet has been alive. What remains is to work out this new lesson, to
+bring every action, word and thought to the bar of Love and Justice; and
+this will be, no doubt, the task of years. Every code must be reversed;
+every barrier thrown down; party must unite with party, country with
+country, and continent with continent. There is no longer the fear of
+fear, the dread of the hereafter, or the paralysis of strife. Man has
+groaned long enough in the travails of birth; his blood has been poured
+out like water through his own foolishness; but at length he understands
+himself and is at peace.</p>
+
+<p>“Let it be seen at least that England is not behind the nations in this
+work of reformation; let no national isolation, pride of race, or
+drunkenness of wealth hold her hands back from this enormous work. The
+responsibility is incalculable, but the victory certain. Let us go
+softly, humbled by the knowledge of our crimes in the past, confident in
+the hope of our achievements in the future, towards that reward which is
+in sight at last—the reward hidden so long by the selfishness of men,
+the darkness of religion, and the strife of tongues—the reward promised
+by one who knew not what he said and denied what he asserted—Blessed
+are the meek, the peacemakers, the merciful, for they shall inherit the
+earth, be named the children of God, and find mercy.”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Oliver, white to the lips, with his wife kneeling now beside him, turned
+the page and read one more short paragraph, marked as being the latest
+news.</p>
+
+<p>“It is understood that the Government is in communication with Mr.
+Felsenburgh.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h4 class="nobreak" id="II">II</h4>
+</div>
+
+<p>“Ah! it is journalese,” said Oliver, at last, leaning back. “Tawdry
+stuff! But—but the thing!”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel got up, passed across to the window-seat, and sat down. Her lips
+opened once or twice, but she said nothing.</p>
+
+<p>“My darling,” cried the man, “have you nothing to say?”</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him tremulously a moment.</p>
+
+<p>“Say!” she said. “As you said, What is the use of words?”</p>
+
+<p>“Tell me again,” said Oliver. “How do I know it is not a dream?”</p>
+
+<p>“A dream,” she said. “Was there ever a dream like this?”</p>
+
+<p>Again she got up restlessly, came across the floor, and knelt down by
+her husband once more, taking his hands in hers.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear,” she said, “I tell you it is not a dream. It is reality at
+last. I was there too—do you not remember? You waited for me when all
+was over—when He was gone out—we saw Him together, you and I. We heard
+Him—you on the platform and I in the gallery. We saw Him again pass up
+the Embankment as we stood in the crowd. Then we came home and we found
+the priest.”</p>
+
+<p>Her face was transfigured as she spoke. It was as of one who saw a
+Divine Vision. She spoke very quietly, without excitement or hysteria.
+Oliver stared at her a moment; then he bent forward and kissed her
+gently.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, my darling; it is true. But I want to hear it again and again.
+Tell me again what you saw.”</p>
+
+<p>“I saw the Son of Man,” she said. “Oh! there is no other phrase. The
+Saviour of the world, as that paper says. I knew Him in my heart as soon
+as I saw Him—as we all did—as soon as He stood there holding the rail.
+It was like a glory round his head. I understand it all now. It was He
+for whom we have waited so long; and He has come, bringing Peace and
+Goodwill in His hands. When He spoke, I knew it again. His voice was
+as—as the sound of the sea—as simple as that—as—as lamentable—as
+strong as that.—Did you not hear it?”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver bowed his head.</p>
+
+<p>“I can trust Him for all the rest,” went on the girl softly. “I do not
+know where He is, nor when He will come back, nor what He will do. I
+suppose there is a great deal for Him to do, before He is fully
+known—laws, reforms—that will be your business, my dear. And the rest
+of us must wait, and love, and be content.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver again lifted his face and looked at her.</p>
+
+<p>“Mabel, my dear—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! I knew it even last night,” she said, “but I did not know that I
+knew it till I awoke to-day and remembered. I dreamed of Him all
+night.... Oliver, where is He?”</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, I know where He is, but I am under oath—-”</p>
+
+<p>She nodded quickly, and stood up.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. I should not have asked that. Well, we are content to wait.”</p>
+
+<p>There was silence for a moment or two. Oliver broke it.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear, what do you mean when you say that He is not yet known?”</p>
+
+<p>“I mean just that,” she said. “The rest only know what He has done—not
+what He is; but that, too, will come in time.”</p>
+
+<p>“And meanwhile—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Meanwhile, you must work; the rest will come by and bye. Oh! Oliver, be
+strong and faithful.”</p>
+
+<p>She kissed him quickly, and went out.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Oliver sat on without moving, staring, as his habit was, out at the wide
+view beyond his windows. This time yesterday he was leaving Paris,
+knowing the fact indeed—for the delegates had arrived an hour
+before—but ignorant of the Man. Now he knew the Man as well—at least
+he had seen Him, heard Him, and stood enchanted under the glow of His
+personality. He could explain it to himself no more than could any one
+else—unless, perhaps, it were Mabel. The others had been as he had
+been: awed and overcome, yet at the same time kindled in the very depths
+of their souls. They had come out—Snowford, Cartwright, Pemberton, and
+the rest—on to the steps of Paul’s House, following that strange
+figure. They had intended to say something, but they were dumb as they
+saw the sea of white faces, heard the groan and the silence, and
+experienced that compelling wave of magnetism that surged up like
+something physical, as the volor rose and started on that indescribable
+progress.</p>
+
+<p>Once more he had seen Him, as he and Mabel stood together on the deck of
+the electric boat that carried them south. The white ship had passed
+along overhead, smooth and steady, above the heads of that vast
+multitude, bearing Him who, if any had the right to that title, was
+indeed the Saviour of the world. Then they had come home, and found the
+priest.</p>
+
+<p>That, too, had been a shock to him; for, at first sight, it seemed that
+this priest was the very man he had seen ascend the rostrum two hours
+before. It was an extraordinary likeness—the same young face and white
+hair. Mabel, of course, had not noticed it; for she had only seen
+Felsenburgh at a great distance; and he himself had soon been reassured.
+And as for his mother—it was terrible enough; if it had not been for
+Mabel there would have been violence done last night. How collected and
+reasonable she had been! And, as for his mother—he must leave her alone
+for the present. By and bye, perhaps, something might be done. The
+future! It was that which engrossed him—the future, and the absorbing
+power of the personality under whose dominion he had fallen last night.
+All else seemed insignificant now—even his mother’s defection, her
+illness—all paled before this new dawn of an unknown sun. And in an
+hour he would know more; he was summoned to Westminster to a meeting of
+the whole House; their proposals to Felsenburgh were to be formulated;
+it was intended to offer him a great position.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, as Mabel had said; this was now their work—to carry into
+effect the new principle that had suddenly become incarnate in this
+grey-haired young American—the principle of Universal Brotherhood.
+It would mean enormous labour; all foreign relations would have to
+be readjusted—trade, policy, methods of government—all demanded
+re-statement. Europe was already organised internally on a basis of
+mutual protection: that basis was now gone. There was no more any
+protection, because there was no more any menace. Enormous labour,
+too, awaited the Government in other directions. A Blue-book must be
+prepared, containing a complete report of the proceedings in the East,
+together with the text of the Treaty which had been laid before them
+in Paris, signed by the Eastern Emperor, the feudal kings, the Turkish
+Republic, and countersigned by the American plenipotentiaries....
+Finally, even home politics required reform: the friction of old strife
+between centre and extremes must cease forthwith—there must be but one
+party now, and that at the Prophet’s disposal.... He grew bewildered
+as he regarded the prospect, and saw how the whole plane of the world
+was shifted, how the entire foundation of western life required
+readjustment. It was a Revolution indeed, a cataclysm more stupendous
+than even invasion itself; but it was the conversion of darkness into
+light, and chaos into order.</p>
+
+<p>He drew a deep breath, and so sat pondering.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Mabel came down to him half-an-hour later, as he dined early before
+starting for Whitehall.</p>
+
+<p>“Mother is quieter,” she said. “We must be very patient, Oliver. Have
+you decided yet as to whether the priest is to come again?”</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“I can think of nothing,” he said, “but of what I have to do. You
+decide, my dear; I leave it in your hands.”</p>
+
+<p>She nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“I will talk to her again presently. Just now she can understand very
+little of what has happened.... What time shall you be home?”</p>
+
+<p>“Probably not to-night. We shall sit all night.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, dear. And what shall I tell Mr. Phillips?”</p>
+
+<p>“I will telephone in the morning.... Mabel, do you remember what I told
+you about the priest?”</p>
+
+<p>“His likeness to the other?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. What do you make of that?”</p>
+
+<p>She smiled.</p>
+
+<p>“I make nothing at all of it. Why should they not be alike?”</p>
+
+<p>He took a fig from the dish, and swallowed it, and stood up.</p>
+
+<p>“It is only very curious,” he said. “Now, good-night, my dear.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h4 class="nobreak" id="III">III</h4>
+</div>
+
+<p>“Oh, mother,” said Mabel, kneeling by the bed; “cannot you understand
+what has happened?”</p>
+
+<p>She had tried desperately to tell the old lady of the extraordinary
+change that had taken place in the world—and without success. It seemed
+to her that some great issue depended on it; that it would be piteous if
+the old woman went out into the dark unconscious of what had come. It
+was as if a Christian knelt by the death-bed of a Jew on the first
+Easter Monday. But the old lady lay in her bed, terrified but obdurate.</p>
+
+<p>“Mother,” said the girl, “let me tell you again. Do you not understand
+that all which Jesus Christ promised has come true, though in another
+way? The reign of God has really begun; but we know now who God is. You
+said just now you wanted the Forgiveness of Sins; well, you have that;
+we all have it, because there is no such thing as sin. There is only
+Crime. And then Communion. You used to believe that that made you a
+partaker of God; well, we are all partakers of God, because we are human
+beings. Don’t you see that Christianity is only one way of saying all
+that? I dare say it was the only way, for a time; but that is all over
+now. Oh! and how much better this is! It is true—true. You can see it
+to be true!”</p>
+
+<p>She paused a moment, forcing herself to look at that piteous old face,
+the flushed wrinkled cheeks, the writhing knotted hands on the coverlet.</p>
+
+<p>“Look how Christianity has failed—how it has divided people; think of
+all the cruelties—the Inquisition, the Religious Wars; the separations
+between husband and wife and parents and children—the disobedience to
+the State, the treasons. Oh! you cannot believe that these were right.
+What kind of a God would that be! And then Hell; how could you ever have
+believed in that?... Oh! mother, don’t believe anything so frightful....
+Don’t you understand that that God has gone—that He never existed at
+all—that it was all a hideous nightmare; and that now we all know at
+last what the truth is.... Mother! think of what happened last
+night—how He came—the Man of whom you were so frightened. I told you
+what He was like—so quiet and strong—how every one was silent—of
+the—the extraordinary atmosphere, and how six millions of people saw
+Him. And think what He has done—how He has healed all the old
+wounds—how the whole world is at peace at last—and of what is going to
+happen. Oh! mother, give up those horrible old lies; give them up; be
+brave.”</p>
+
+<p>“The priest, the priest!” moaned the old woman at last.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! no, no, no—not the priest; he can do nothing. He knows it’s all
+lies, too!”</p>
+
+<p>“The priest! the priest!” moaned the other again. “He can tell you; he
+knows the answer.”</p>
+
+<p>Her face was convulsed with effort, and her old fingers fumbled and
+twisted with the rosary. Mabel grew suddenly frightened, and stood up.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! mother!” She stooped and kissed her. “There! I won’t say any more
+now. But just think about it quietly. Don’t be in the least afraid; it
+is all perfectly right.”</p>
+
+<p>She stood a moment, still looking compassionately down; torn by sympathy
+and desire. No! it was no use now; she must wait till the next day.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll look in again presently,” she said, “when you have had dinner.
+Mother! don’t look like that! Kiss me!”</p>
+
+<p>It was astonishing, she told herself that evening, how any one could be
+so blind. And what a confession of weakness, too, to call only for the
+priest! It was ludicrous, absurd! She herself was filled with an
+extraordinary peace. Even death itself seemed now no longer terrible,
+for was not death swallowed up in victory? She contrasted the selfish
+individualism of the Christian, who sobbed and shrank from death, or, at
+the best, thought of it only as the gate to his own eternal life, with
+the free altruism of the New Believer who asked no more than that Man
+should live and grow, that the Spirit of the World should triumph and
+reveal Himself, while he, the unit, was content to sink back into that
+reservoir of energy from which he drew his life. At this moment she
+would have suffered anything, faced death cheerfully—she contemplated
+even the old woman upstairs with pity—for was it not piteous that death
+should not bring her to herself and reality?</p>
+
+<p>She was in a quiet whirl of intoxication; it was as if the heavy veil of
+sense had rolled back at last and shown a sweet, eternal landscape
+behind—a shadowless land of peace where the lion lay down with the
+lamb, and the leopard with the kid. There should be war no more: that
+bloody spectre was dead, and with him the brood of evil that lived in
+his shadow—superstition, conflict, terror, and unreality. The idols
+were smashed, and rats had run out; Jehovah was fallen; the wild-eyed
+dreamer of Galilee was in his grave; the reign of priests was ended. And
+in their place stood a strange, quiet figure of indomitable power and
+unruffled tenderness.... He whom she had seen—the Son of Man, the
+Saviour of the world, as she had called Him just now—He who bore these
+titles was no longer a monstrous figure, half God and half man, claiming
+both natures and possessing neither; one who was tempted without
+temptation, and who conquered without merit, as his followers said. Here
+was one instead whom she could follow, a god indeed and a man as well—a
+god because human, and a man because so divine.</p>
+
+<p>She said no more that night. She looked into the bedroom for a few
+minutes, and saw the old woman asleep. Her old hand lay out on the
+coverlet, and still between the fingers was twisted the silly string of
+beads. Mabel went softly across in the shaded light, and tried to detach
+it; but the wrinkled fingers writhed and closed, and a murmur came from
+the half-open lips. Ah! how piteous it was, thought the girl, how
+hopeless that a soul should flow out into such darkness, unwilling to
+make the supreme, generous surrender, and lay down its life because life
+itself demanded it!</p>
+
+<p>Then she went to her own room.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The clocks were chiming three, and the grey dawn lay on the walls, when
+she awoke to find by her bed the woman who had sat with the old lady.</p>
+
+<p>“Come at once, madam; Mrs. Brand is dying.”</p>
+
+
+<h4>IV</h4>
+
+<p>Oliver was with them by six o’clock; he came straight up into his
+mother’s room to find that all was over.</p>
+
+<p>The room was full of the morning light and the clean air, and a bubble
+of bird-music poured in from the lawn. But his wife knelt by the bed,
+still holding the wrinkled hands of the old woman, her face buried in
+her arms. The face of his mother was quieter than he had ever seen it,
+the lines showed only like the faintest shadows on an alabaster mask;
+her lips were set in a smile. He looked for a moment, waiting until the
+spasm that caught his throat had died again. Then he put his hand on his
+wife’s shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>“When?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Mabel lifted her face.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! Oliver,” she murmured. “It was an hour ago. ... Look at this.”</p>
+
+<p>She released the dead hands and showed the rosary still twisted there;
+it had snapped in the last struggle, and a brown bead lay beneath the
+fingers.</p>
+
+<p>“I did what I could,” sobbed Mabel. “I was not hard with her. But she
+would not listen. She kept on crying out for the priest as long as she
+could speak.”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear....” began the man. Then he, too, went down on his knees by
+his wife, leaned forward and kissed the rosary, while tears blinded him.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, yes,” he said. “Leave her in peace. I would not move it for the
+world: it was her toy, was it not?”</p>
+
+<p>The girl stared at him, astonished.</p>
+
+<p>“We can be generous, too,” he said. “We have all the world at last. And
+she—she has lost nothing: it was too late.”</p>
+
+<p>“I did what I could.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, my darling, and you were right. But she was too old; she could not
+understand.”</p>
+
+<p>He paused.</p>
+
+<p>“Euthanasia?” he whispered with something very like tenderness.</p>
+
+<p>She nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” she said; “just as the last agony began. She resisted, but I knew
+you would wish it.”</p>
+
+<p>They talked together for an hour in the garden before Oliver went to his
+room; and he began to tell her presently of all that had passed.</p>
+
+<p>“He has refused,” he said. “We offered to create an office for Him; He
+was to have been called Consultor, and he refused it two hours ago. But
+He has promised to be at our service.... No, I must not tell you where
+He is.... He will return to America soon, we think; but He will not
+leave us. We have drawn up a programme, and it is to be sent to Him
+presently.... Yes, we were unanimous.”</p>
+
+<p>“And the programme?”</p>
+
+<p>“It concerns the Franchise, the Poor Laws and Trade. I can tell you no
+more than that. It was He who suggested the points. But we are not sure
+if we understand Him yet.”</p>
+
+<p>“But, my dear—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; it is quite extraordinary. I have never seen such things. There
+was practically no argument.”</p>
+
+<p>“Do the people understand?”</p>
+
+<p>“I think so. We shall have to guard against a reaction. They say that
+the Catholics will be in danger. There is an article this morning in the
+<i>Era</i>. The proofs were sent to us for sanction. It suggests that means
+must be taken to protect the Catholics.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel smiled.</p>
+
+<p>“It is a strange irony,” he said. “But they have a right to exist. How
+far they have a right to share in the government is another matter. That
+will come before us, I think, in a week or two.”</p>
+
+<p>“Tell me more about Him.”</p>
+
+<p>“There is really nothing to tell; we know nothing, except that He is the
+supreme force in the world. France is in a ferment, and has offered him
+Dictatorship. That, too, He has refused. Germany has made the same
+proposal as ourselves; Italy, the same as France, with the title of
+Perpetual Tribune. America has done nothing yet, and Spain is divided.”</p>
+
+<p>“And the East?”</p>
+
+<p>“The Emperor thanked Him; no more than that.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel drew a long breath, and stood looking out across the heat haze
+that was beginning to rise from the town beneath. These were matters so
+vast that she could not take them in. But to her imagination Europe lay
+like a busy hive, moving to and fro in the sunshine. She saw the blue
+distance of France, the towns of Germany, the Alps, and beyond them the
+Pyrenees and sun-baked Spain; and all were intent on the same business,
+to capture if they could this astonishing figure that had risen over the
+world. Sober England, too, was alight with zeal. Each country desired
+nothing better than that this man should rule over them; and He had
+refused them all.</p>
+
+<p>“He has refused them all!” she repeated breathlessly.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, all. We think He may be waiting to hear from America. He still
+holds office there, you know.”</p>
+
+<p>“How old is He?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not more than thirty-two or three. He has only been in office a few
+months. Before that He lived alone in Vermont. Then He stood for the
+Senate; then He made a speech or two; then He was appointed delegate,
+though no one seems to have realised His power. And the rest we know.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel shook her head meditatively.</p>
+
+<p>“We know nothing,” she said. “Nothing; nothing! Where did He learn His
+languages?”</p>
+
+<p>“It is supposed that He travelled for many years. But no one knows. He
+has said nothing.”</p>
+
+<p>She turned swiftly to her husband.</p>
+
+<p>“But what does it all mean? What is His power? Tell me, Oliver?”</p>
+
+<p>He smiled back, shaking his head.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, Markham said that it was his incorruption—that and his oratory;
+but that explains nothing.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, it explains nothing,” said the girl.</p>
+
+<p>“It is just personality,” went on Oliver, “at least, that’s the label to
+use. But that, too, is only a label.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, just a label. But it is that. They all felt it in Paul’s House,
+and in the streets afterwards. Did you not feel it?”</p>
+
+<p>“Feel it!” cried the man, with shining eyes. “Why, I would die for Him!”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>They went back to the house presently, and it was not till they reached
+the door that either said a word about the dead old woman who lay
+upstairs.</p>
+
+<p>“They are with her now,” said Mabel softly. “I will communicate with the
+people.”</p>
+
+<p>He nodded gravely.</p>
+
+<p>“It had better be this afternoon,” he said. “I have a spare hour at
+fourteen o’clock. Oh! by the way, Mabel, do you know who took the
+message to the priest?”</p>
+
+<p>“I think so.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, it was Phillips. I saw him last night. He will not come here
+again.”</p>
+
+<p>“Did he confess it?”</p>
+
+<p>“He did. He was most offensive.”</p>
+
+<p>But Oliver’s face softened again as he nodded to his wife at the foot of
+the stairs, and turned to go up once more to his mother’s room.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="2CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>It seemed to Percy Franklin as he drew near Rome, sliding five hundred
+feet high through the summer dawn, that he was approaching the very
+gates of heaven, or, still better, he was as a child coming home. For
+what he had left behind him ten hours before in London was not a bad
+specimen, he thought, of the superior mansions of hell. It was a world
+whence God seemed to have withdrawn Himself, leaving it indeed in a
+state of profound complacency—a state without hope or faith, but a
+condition in which, although life continued, there was absent the one
+essential to well-being. It was not that there was not expectation—for
+London was on tip-toe with excitement. There were rumours of all kinds:
+Felsenburgh was coming back; he was back; he had never gone. He was to
+be President of the Council, Prime Minister, Tribune, with full
+capacities of democratic government and personal sacro-sanctity, even
+King—if not Emperor of the West. The entire constitution was to be
+remodelled, there was to be a complete rearrangement of the pieces;
+crime was to be abolished by the mysterious power that had killed war;
+there was to be free food—the secret of life was discovered, there was
+to be no more death—so the rumours ran.... Yet that was lacking, to the
+priest’s mind, which made life worth living....</p>
+
+<p>In Paris, while the volor waited at the great station at Montmartre,
+once known as the Church of the Sacred Heart, he had heard the roaring
+of the mob in love with life at last, and seen the banners go past. As
+it rose again over the suburbs he had seen the long lines of trains
+streaming in, visible as bright serpents in the brilliant glory of the
+electric globes, bringing the country folk up to the Council of the
+Nation which the legislators, mad with drama, had summoned to decide the
+great question. At Lyons it had been the same. The night was as clear as
+the day, and as full of sound. Mid France was arriving to register its
+votes.</p>
+
+<p>He had fallen asleep as the cold air of the Alps began to envelop the
+car, and had caught but glimpses of the solemn moonlit peaks below him,
+the black profundities of the gulfs, the silver glint of the shield-like
+lakes, and the soft glow of Interlaken and the towns in the Rhone
+valley. Once he had been moved in spite of himself, as one of the huge
+German volors had passed in the night, a blaze of ghostly lights and
+gilding, resembling a huge moth with antennae of electric light, and the
+two ships had saluted one another through half a league of silent air,
+with a pathetic cry as of two strange night-birds who have no leisure to
+pause. Milan and Turin had been quiet, for Italy was organised on other
+principles than France, and Florence was not yet half awake. And now the
+Campagna was slipping past like a grey-green rug, wrinkled and tumbled,
+five hundred feet beneath, and Rome was all but in sight. The indicator
+above his seat moved its finger from one hundred to ninety miles.</p>
+
+<p>He shook off the doze at last, and drew out his office book; but as he
+pronounced the words his attention was elsewhere, and, when Prime was
+said, he closed the book once more, propped himself more comfortably,
+drawing the furs round him, and stretching his feet on the empty seat
+opposite. He was alone in his compartment; the three men who had come in
+at Paris had descended at Turin.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>He had been remarkably relieved when the message had come three days
+before from the Cardinal-Protector, bidding him make arrangements for a
+long absence from England, and, as soon as that was done, to come to
+Rome. He understood that the ecclesiastical authorities were really
+disturbed at last.</p>
+
+<p>He reviewed the last day or two, considering the report he would have to
+present. Since his last letter, three days before, seven notable
+apostasies had taken place in Westminster diocese alone, two priests and
+five important laymen. There was talk of revolt on all sides; he had
+seen a threatening document, called a “petition,” demanding the right to
+dispense with all ecclesiastical vestments, signed by one hundred and
+twenty priests from England and Wales. The “petitioners” pointed out
+that persecution was coming swiftly at the hands of the mob; that the
+Government was not sincere in the promises of protection; they hinted
+that religious loyalty was already strained to breaking-point even in
+the case of the most faithful, and that with all but those it had
+already broken.</p>
+
+<p>And as to his comments Percy was clear. He would tell the authorities,
+as he had already told them fifty times, that it was not persecution
+that mattered; it was this new outburst of enthusiasm for Humanity—an
+enthusiasm which had waxed a hundredfold more hot since the coming of
+Felsenburgh and the publication of the Eastern news—which was melting
+the hearts of all but the very few. Man had suddenly fallen in love with
+man. The conventional were rubbing their eyes and wondering why they had
+ever believed, or even dreamed, that there was a God to love, asking one
+another what was the secret of the spell that had held them so long.
+Christianity and Theism were passing together from the world’s mind as a
+morning mist passes when the sun comes up. His recommendations—? Yes,
+he had those clear, and ran them over in his mind with a sense of
+despair.</p>
+
+<p>For himself, he scarcely knew if he believed what he professed. His
+emotions seemed to have been finally extinguished in the vision of the
+white car and the silence of the crowd that evening three weeks before.
+It had been so horribly real and positive; the delicate aspirations and
+hopes of the soul appeared so shadowy when compared with that burning,
+heart-shaking passion of the people. He had never seen anything like it;
+no congregation under the spell of the most kindling preacher alive had
+ever responded with one-tenth of the fervour with which that irreligious
+crowd, standing in the cold dawn of the London streets, had greeted the
+coming of their saviour. And as for the man himself—Percy could not
+analyse what it was that possessed him as he had stared, muttering the
+name of Jesus, on that quiet figure in black with features and hair so
+like his own. He only knew that a hand had gripped his heart—a hand
+warm, not cold—and had quenched, it seemed, all sense of religious
+conviction. It had only been with an effort that sickened him to
+remember, that he had refrained from that interior act of capitulation
+that is so familiar to all who have cultivated an inner life and
+understand what failure means. There had been one citadel that had not
+flung wide its gates—all else had yielded. His emotions had been
+stormed, his intellect silenced, his memory of grace obscured, a
+spiritual nausea had sickened his soul, yet the secret fortress of the
+will had, in an agony, held fast the doors and refused to cry out and
+call Felsenburgh king.</p>
+
+<p>Ah! how he had prayed during those three weeks! It appeared to him that
+he had done little else; there had been no peace. Lances of doubt thrust
+again and again through door and window; masses of argument had crashed
+from above; he had been on the alert day and night, repelling this,
+blindly, and denying that, endeavouring to keep his foothold on the
+slippery plane of the supernatural, sending up cry after cry to the Lord
+Who hid Himself. He had slept with his crucifix in his hand, he had
+awakened himself by kissing it; while he wrote, talked, ate, walked, and
+sat in cars, the inner life had been busy-making frantic speechless acts
+of faith in a religion which his intellect denied and from which his
+emotions shrank. There had been moments of ecstasy—now in a crowded
+street, when he recognised that God was all, that the Creator was the
+key to the creature’s life, that a humble act of adoration was
+transcendently greater than the most noble natural act, that the
+Supernatural was the origin and end of existence there had come to him
+such moments in the night, in the silence of the Cathedral, when the
+lamp flickered, and a soundless air had breathed from the iron door of
+the tabernacle. Then again passion ebbed, and left him stranded on
+misery, but set with a determination (which might equally be that of
+pride or faith) that no power in earth or hell should hinder him from
+professing Christianity even if he could not realise it. It was
+Christianity alone that made life tolerable.</p>
+
+<p>Percy drew a long vibrating breath, and changed his position; for far
+away his unseeing eyes had descried a dome, like a blue bubble set on a
+carpet of green; and his brain had interrupted itself to tell him that
+this was Rome. He got up presently, passed out of his compartment, and
+moved forward up the central gangway, seeing, as he went, through the
+glass doors to right and left his fellow-passengers, some still asleep,
+some staring out at the view, some reading. He put his eye to the glass
+square in the door, and for a minute or two watched, fascinated, the
+steady figure of the steerer at his post. There he stood motionless, his
+hands on the steel circle that directed the vast wings, his eyes on the
+wind-gauge that revealed to him as on the face of a clock both the force
+and the direction of the high gusts; now and again his hands moved
+slightly, and the huge fans responded, now lifting, now lowering.
+Beneath him and in front, fixed on a circular table, were the glass
+domes of various indicators—Percy did not know the meaning of half—one
+seemed a kind of barometer, intended, he guessed, to declare the height
+at which they were travelling, another a compass. And beyond, through
+the curved windows, lay the enormous sky. Well, it was all very
+wonderful, thought the priest, and it was with the force of which all
+this was but one symptom that the supernatural had to compete.</p>
+
+<p>He sighed, turned, and went back to his compartment.</p>
+
+<p>It was an astonishing vision that began presently to open before
+him—scarcely beautiful except for its strangeness, and as unreal as a
+raised map. Far to his right, as he could see through the glass doors,
+lay the grey line of the sea against the luminous sky, rising and
+falling ever so slightly as the car, apparently motionless, tilted
+imperceptibly against the western breeze; the only other movement was
+the faint pulsation of the huge throbbing screw in the rear. To the left
+stretched the limitless country, flitting beneath, in glimpses seen
+between the motionless wings, with here and there the streak of a
+village, flattened out of recognition, or the flash of water, and
+bounded far away by the low masses of the Umbrian hills; while in front,
+seen and gone again as the car veered, lay the confused line of Rome and
+the huge new suburbs, all crowned by the great dome growing every
+instant. Around, above and beneath, his eyes were conscious of wide
+air-spaces, overhead deepening into lapis-lazuli down to horizons of
+pale turquoise. The only sound, of which he had long ceased to be
+directly conscious, was that of the steady rush of air, less shrill now
+as the speed began to drop down—down—to forty miles an hour. There was
+a clang of a bell, and immediately he was aware of a sense of faint
+sickness as the car dropped in a glorious swoop, and he staggered a
+little as he grasped his rugs together. When he looked again the motion
+seemed to have ceased; he could see towers ahead, a line of house-roofs,
+and beneath he caught a glimpse of a road and more roofs with patches of
+green between. A bell clanged again, and a long sweet cry followed. On
+all sides he could hear the movement of feet; a guard in uniform passed
+swiftly along the glazed corridor; again came the faint nausea; and as
+he looked up once more from his luggage for an instant he saw the dome,
+grey now and lined, almost on a level with his own eyes, huge against
+the vivid sky. The world span round for a moment; he shut his eyes, and
+when he looked again walls seemed to heave up past him and stop,
+swaying. There was the last bell, a faint vibration as the car grounded
+in the steel-netted dock; a line of faces rocked and grew still outside
+the windows, and Percy passed out towards the doors, carrying his bags.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>He still felt a sense of insecure motion as he sat alone over coffee an
+hour later in one of the remote rooms of the Vatican; but there was a
+sense of exhilaration as well, as his tired brain realised where he was.
+It had been strange to drive over the rattling stones in the weedy
+little cab, such as he remembered ten years ago when he had left Rome,
+newly ordained. While the world had moved on, Rome had stood still; she
+had other affairs to think of than physical improvements, now that the
+spiritual weight of the earth rested entirely upon her shoulders. All
+had seemed unchanged—or rather it had reverted to the condition of
+nearly one hundred and fifty years ago. Histories related how the
+improvements of the Italian government had gradually dropped out of use
+as soon as the city, eighty years before, had been given her
+independence; the trains ceased to run; volors were not allowed to enter
+the walls; the new buildings, permitted to remain, had been converted to
+ecclesiastical use; the Quirinal became the offices of the “Red Pope”;
+the embassies, huge seminaries; even the Vatican itself, with the
+exception of the upper floor, had become the abode of the Sacred
+College, who surrounded the Supreme Pontiff as stars their sun.</p>
+
+<p>It was an extraordinary city, said antiquarians—the one living example
+of the old days. Here were to be seen the ancient inconveniences, the
+insanitary horrors, the incarnation of a world given over to dreaming.
+The old Church pomp was back, too; the cardinals drove again in gilt
+coaches; the Pope rode on his white mule; the Blessed Sacrament went
+through the ill-smelling streets with the sound of bells and the light
+of lanterns. A brilliant description of it had interested the civilised
+world immensely for about forty-eight hours; the appalling retrogression
+was still used occasionally as the text for violent denunciations by the
+poorly educated; the well-educated had ceased to do anything but take
+for granted that superstition and progress were irreconcilable enemies.</p>
+
+<p>Yet Percy, even in the glimpses he had had in the streets, as he drove
+from the volor station outside the People’s Gate, of the old peasant
+dresses, the blue and red-fringed wine carts, the cabbage-strewn
+gutters, the wet clothes flapping on strings, the mules and
+horses—strange though these were, he had found them a refreshment. It
+had seemed to remind him that man was human, and not divine as the rest
+of the world proclaimed—human, and therefore careless and
+individualistic; human, and therefore occupied with interests other than
+those of speed, cleanliness, and precision.</p>
+
+<p>The room in which he sat now by the window with shading blinds, for the
+sun was already hot, seemed to revert back even further than to a
+century-and-a-half. The old damask and gilding that he had expected was
+gone, and its absence gave the impression of great severity. There was a
+wide deal table running the length of the room, with upright wooden arm
+chairs set against it; the floor was red-tiled, with strips of matting
+for the feet, the white, distempered walls had only a couple of old
+pictures hung upon them, and a large crucifix flanked by candles stood
+on a little altar by the further door. There was no more furniture than
+that, with the exception of a writing-desk between the windows, on which
+stood a typewriter. That jarred somehow on his sense of fitness, and he
+wondered at it.</p>
+
+<p>He finished the last drop of coffee in the thick-rimmed white cup, and
+sat back in his chair.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Already the burden was lighter, and he was astonished at the swiftness
+with which it had become so. Life looked simpler here; the interior
+world was taken more for granted; it was not even a matter of debate.
+There it was, imperious and objective, and through it glimmered to the
+eyes of the soul the old Figures that had become shrouded behind the
+rush of worldly circumstance. The very shadow of God appeared to rest
+here; it was no longer impossible to realise that the saints watched and
+interceded, that Mary sat on her throne, that the white disc on the
+altar was Jesus Christ. Percy was not yet at peace after all, he had
+been but an hour in Rome; and air, charged with never so much grace,
+could scarcely do more than it had done. But he felt more at ease, less
+desperately anxious, more childlike, more content to rest on the
+authority that claimed without explanation, and asserted that the world,
+as a matter of fact, proved by evidences without and within, was made
+this way and not that, for this purpose and not the other. Yet he had
+used the conveniences which he hated; he had left London a bare twelve
+hours before, and now here he sat in a place which was either a stagnant
+backwater of life, or else the very mid-current of it; he was not yet
+sure which.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>There was a step outside, a handle was turned; and the
+Cardinal-Protector came through.</p>
+
+<p>Percy had not seen him for four years, and for a moment scarcely
+recognised him.</p>
+
+<p>It was a very old man that he saw now, bent and feeble, his face
+covered with wrinkles, crowned by very thin, white hair, and the little
+scarlet cap on top; he was in his black Benedictine habit with a plain
+abbatial cross on his breast, and walked hesitatingly, with a black
+stick. The only sign of vigour was in the narrow bright slit of his
+eyes showing beneath drooping lids. He held out his hand, smiling, and
+Percy, remembering in time that he was in the Vatican, bowed low only
+as he kissed the amethyst.</p>
+
+<p>“Welcome to Rome, father,” said the old man, speaking with an unexpected
+briskness. “They told me you were here half-an-hour ago; I thought I
+would leave you to wash and have your coffee.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy murmured something.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; you are tired, no doubt,” said the Cardinal, pulling out a chair.</p>
+
+<p>“Indeed not, your Eminence. I slept excellently.”</p>
+
+<p>The Cardinal made a little gesture to a chair.</p>
+
+<p>“But I must have a word with you. The Holy Father wishes to see you at
+eleven o’clock.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy started a little.</p>
+
+<p>“We move quickly in these days, father.... There is no time to dawdle.
+You understand that you are to remain in Rome for the present?”</p>
+
+<p>“I have made all arrangements for that, your Eminence.”</p>
+
+<p>“That is very well.... We are pleased with you here, Father Franklin.
+The Holy Father has been greatly impressed by your comments. You have
+foreseen things in a very remarkable manner.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy flushed with pleasure. It was almost the first hint of
+encouragement he had had. Cardinal Martin went on.</p>
+
+<p>“I may say that you are considered our most valuable
+correspondent—certainly in England. That is why you are summoned. You
+are to help us here in future—a kind of consultor: any one can relate
+facts; not every one can understand them.... You look very young,
+father. How old are you?”</p>
+
+<p>“I am thirty-three, your Eminence.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah! your white hair helps you.... Now, father, will you come with me
+into my room? It is now eight o’clock. I will keep you till nine—no
+longer. Then you shall have some rest, and at eleven I shall take you up
+to his Holiness.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy rose with a strange sense of elation, and ran to open the door for
+the Cardinal to go through.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>At a few minutes before eleven Percy came out of his little white-washed
+room in his new ferraiuola, soutane and buckle shoes, and tapped at the
+door of the Cardinal’s room.</p>
+
+<p>He felt a great deal more self-possessed now. He had talked to the
+Cardinal freely and strongly, had described the effect that Felsenburgh
+had had upon London, and even the paralysis that had seized upon
+himself. He had stated his belief that they were on the edge of a
+movement unparalleled in history: he related little scenes that he had
+witnessed—a group kneeling before a picture of Felsenburgh, a dying man
+calling him by name, the aspect of the crowd that had waited in
+Westminster to hear the result of the offer made to the stranger. He
+showed him half-a-dozen cuttings from newspapers, pointing out their
+hysterical enthusiasm; he even went so far as to venture upon prophecy,
+and to declare his belief that persecution was within reasonable
+distance.</p>
+
+<p>“The world seems very oddly alive,” he said; “it is as if the whole
+thing was flushed and nervous.”</p>
+
+<p>The Cardinal nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“We, too,” he said, “even we feel it.”</p>
+
+<p>For the rest the Cardinal had sat watching him out of his narrow eyes,
+nodding from time to time, putting an occasional question, but listening
+throughout with great attention.</p>
+
+<p>“And your recommendations, father—-” he had said, and then interrupted
+himself. “No, that is too much to ask. The Holy Father will speak of
+that.”</p>
+
+<p>He had congratulated him upon his Latin then—for they had spoken in
+that language throughout this second interview; and Percy had explained
+how loyal Catholic England had been in obeying the order, given ten
+years before, that Latin should become to the Church what Esperanto was
+becoming to the world.</p>
+
+<p>“That is very well,” said the old man. “His Holiness will be pleased at
+that.”</p>
+
+<p>At his second tap the door opened and the Cardinal came out, taking him
+by the arm without a word; and together they turned to the lift
+entrance.</p>
+
+<p>Percy ventured to make a remark as they slid noiselessly up towards the
+papal apartment.</p>
+
+<p>“I am surprised at the lift, your Eminence, and the typewriter in the
+audience-room.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, father?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, all the rest of Rome is back in the old days.”</p>
+
+<p>The Cardinal looked at him, puzzled.</p>
+
+<p>“Is it? I suppose it is. I never thought of that.”</p>
+
+<p>A Swiss guard flung back the door of the lift, saluted and went before
+them along the plain flagged passage to where his comrade stood. Then he
+saluted again and went back. A Pontifical chamberlain, in all the sombre
+glory of purple, black, and a Spanish ruff, peeped from the door, and
+made haste to open it. It really seemed almost incredible that such
+things still existed.</p>
+
+<p>“In a moment, your Eminence,” he said in Latin. “Will your Eminence wait
+here?”</p>
+
+<p>It was a little square room, with half-a-dozen doors, plainly contrived
+out of one of the huge old halls, for it was immensely high, and the
+tarnished gilt cornice vanished directly in two places into the white
+walls. The partitions, too, seemed thin; for as the two men sat down
+there was a murmur of voices faintly audible, the shuffling of
+footsteps, and the old eternal click of the typewriter from which Percy
+hoped he had escaped. They were alone in the room, which was furnished
+with the same simplicity as the Cardinal’s—giving the impression of a
+curious mingling of ascetic poverty and dignity by its red-tiled floor,
+its white walls, its altar and two vast bronze candlesticks of
+incalculable value that stood on the dais. The shutters here, too, were
+drawn; and there was nothing to distract Percy from the excitement that
+surged up now tenfold in heart and brain.</p>
+
+<p>It was <i>Papa Angelicus</i> whom he was about to see; that amazing old man
+who had been appointed Secretary of State just fifty years ago, at the
+age of thirty, and Pope nine years previously. It was he who had carried
+out the extraordinary policy of yielding the churches throughout the
+whole of Italy to the Government, in exchange for the temporal lordship
+of Rome, and who had since set himself to make it a city of saints. He
+had cared, it appeared, nothing whatever for the world’s opinion; his
+policy, so far as it could be called one, consisted in a very simple
+thing: he had declared in Epistle after Epistle that the object of the
+Church was to do glory to God by producing supernatural virtues in man,
+and that nothing at all was of any significance or importance except so
+far as it effected this object. He had further maintained that since
+Peter was the Rock, the City of Peter was the Capital of the world, and
+should set an example to its dependency: this could not be done unless
+Peter ruled his City, and therefore he had sacrificed every church and
+ecclesiastical building in the country for that one end. Then he had set
+about ruling his city: he had said that on the whole the latter-day
+discoveries of man tended to distract immortal souls from a
+contemplation of eternal verities—not that these discoveries could be
+anything but good in themselves, since after all they gave insight into
+the wonderful laws of God—but that at present they were too exciting to
+the imagination. So he had removed the trams, the volors, the
+laboratories, the manufactories—saying that there was plenty of room
+for them outside Rome—and had allowed them to be planted in the
+suburbs: in their place he had raised shrines, religious houses and
+Calvaries. Then he had attended further to the souls of his subjects.
+Since Rome was of limited area, and, still more because the world
+corrupted without its proper salt, he allowed no man under the age of
+fifty to live within its walls for more than one month in each year,
+except those who received his permit. They might live, of course,
+immediately outside the city (and they did, by tens of thousands), but
+they were to understand that by doing so they sinned against the spirit,
+though not the letter, of their Father’s wishes. Then he had divided the
+city into national quarters, saying that as each nation had its peculiar
+virtues, each was to let its light shine steadily in its proper place.
+Rents had instantly begun to rise, so he had legislated against that by
+reserving in each quarter a number of streets at fixed prices, and had
+issued an ipso facto excommunication against all who erred in this
+respect. The rest were abandoned to the millionaires. He had retained
+the Leonine City entirely at his own disposal. Then he had restored
+Capital Punishment, with as much serene gravity as that with which he
+had made himself the derision of the civilised world in other matters,
+saying that though human life was holy, human virtue was more holy
+still; and he had added to the crime of murder, the crimes of adultery,
+idolatry and apostasy, for which this punishment was theoretically
+sanctioned. There had not been, however, more than two such executions
+in the eight years of his reign, since criminals, of course, with the
+exception of devoted believers, instantly made their way to the suburbs,
+where they were no longer under his jurisdiction.</p>
+
+<p>But he had not stayed here. He had sent once more ambassadors to every
+country in the world, informing the Government of each of their arrival.
+No attention was paid to this, beyond that of laughter; but he had
+continued, undisturbed, to claim his rights, and, meanwhile, used his
+legates for the important work of disseminating his views. Epistles
+appeared from time to time in every town, laying down the principles of
+the papal claims with as much tranquillity as if they were everywhere
+acknowledged. Freemasonry was steadily denounced, as well as democratic
+ideas of every kind; men were urged to remember their immortal souls and
+the Majesty of God, and to reflect upon the fact that in a few years all
+would be called to give their account to Him Who was Creator and Ruler
+of the world, Whose Vicar was John XXIV, P.P., whose name and seal were
+appended.</p>
+
+<p>That was a line of action that took the world completely by surprise.
+People had expected hysteria, argument, and passionate exhortation;
+disguised emissaries, plots, and protests. There were none of these. It
+was as if progress had not yet begun, and volors were uninvented, as if
+the entire universe had not come to disbelieve in God, and to discover
+that itself was God. Here was this silly old man, talking in his sleep,
+babbling of the Cross, and the inner life and the forgiveness of sins,
+exactly as his predecessors had talked two thousand years before. Well,
+it was only one sign more that Rome had lost not only its power, but its
+common sense as well. It was really time that something should be done.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>And this was the man, thought Percy, <i>Papa Angelicus</i>, whom he was to
+see in a minute or two.</p>
+
+<p>The Cardinal put his hand on the priest’s knee as the door opened, and a
+purple prelate appeared, bowing.</p>
+
+<p>“Only this,” he said. “Be absolutely frank.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy stood up, trembling. Then he followed his patron towards the inner
+door.</p>
+
+
+<h4>IV</h4>
+
+<p>A white figure sat in the green gloom, beside a great writing-table,
+three or four yards away, but with the chair wheeled round to face the
+door by which the two entered. So much Percy saw as he performed the
+first genuflection. Then he dropped his eyes, advanced, genuflected
+again with the other, advanced once more, and for the third time
+genuflected, lifting the thin white hand, stretched out, to his lips. He
+heard the door close as he stood up.</p>
+
+<p>“Father Franklin, Holiness,” said the Cardinal’s voice at his ear.</p>
+
+<p>A white-sleeved arm waved to a couple of chairs set a yard away, and the
+two sat down.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>While the Cardinal, talking in slow Latin, said a few sentences,
+explaining that this was the English priest whose correspondence had
+been found so useful, Percy began to look with all his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>He knew the Pope’s face well, from a hundred photographs and moving
+pictures; even his gestures were familiar to him, the slight bowing of
+the head in assent, the tiny eloquent movement of the hands; but Percy,
+with a sense of being platitudinal, told himself that the living
+presence was very different.</p>
+
+<p>It was a very upright old man that he saw in the chair before him, of
+medium height and girth, with hands clasping the bosses of his
+chair-arms, and an appearance of great and deliberate dignity. But it
+was at the face chiefly that he looked, dropping his gaze three or four
+times, as the Pope’s blue eyes turned on him. They were extraordinary
+eyes, reminding him of what historians said of Pius X.; the lids drew
+straight lines across them, giving him the look of a hawk, but the rest
+of the face contradicted them. There was no sharpness in that. It was
+neither thin nor fat, but beautifully modelled in an oval outline: the
+lips were clean-cut, with a look of passion in their curves; the nose
+came down in an aquiline sweep, ending in chiselled nostrils; the chin
+was firm and cloven, and the poise of the whole head was strangely
+youthful. It was a face of great generosity and sweetness, set at an
+angle between defiance and humility, but ecclesiastical from ear to ear
+and brow to chin; the forehead was slightly compressed at the temples,
+and beneath the white cap lay white hair. It had been the subject of
+laughter at the music-halls nine years before, when the composite face
+of well-known priests had been thrown on a screen, side by side with the
+new Pope’s, for the two were almost indistinguishable.</p>
+
+<p>Percy found himself trying to sum it up, but nothing came to him except
+the word “priest.” It was that, and that was all. <i>Ecce sacerdos
+magnus!</i> He was astonished at the look of youth, for the Pope was
+eighty-eight this year; yet his figure was as upright as that of a man
+of fifty, his shoulders unbowed, his head set on them like an athlete’s,
+and his wrinkles scarcely perceptible in the half light. <i>Papa
+Angelicus!</i> reflected Percy.</p>
+
+<p>The Cardinal ceased his explanations, and made a little gesture. Percy
+drew up all his faculties tense and tight to answer the questions that
+he knew were coming.</p>
+
+<p>“I welcome you, my son,” said a very soft, resonant voice.</p>
+
+<p>Percy bowed, desperately, from the waist.</p>
+
+<p>The Pope dropped his eyes again, lifted a paper-weight with his left
+hand, and began to play with it gently as he talked.</p>
+
+<p>“Now, my son, deliver a little discourse. I suggest to you three
+heads—what has happened, what is happening, what will happen, with a
+peroration as to what should happen.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy drew a long breath, settled himself back, clasped the fingers of
+his left hand in the fingers of his right, fixed his eyes firmly upon
+the cross-embroidered red shoe opposite, and began. (Had he not
+rehearsed this a hundred times!)</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>He first stated his theme; to the effect that all the forces of the
+civilised world were concentrating into two camps—the world and God. Up
+to the present time the forces of the world had been incoherent and
+spasmodic, breaking out in various ways—revolutions and wars had been
+like the movements of a mob, undisciplined, unskilled, and unrestrained.
+To meet this, the Church, too, had acted through her Catholicity—
+dispersion rather than concentration: <i>franc-tireurs</i> had been opposed
+to <i>franc-tireurs</i>. But during the last hundred years there had been
+indications that the method of warfare was to change. Europe, at any
+rate, had grown weary of internal strife; the unions first of Labour,
+then of Capital, then of Labour and Capital combined, illustrated this
+in the economic sphere; the peaceful partition of Africa in the
+political sphere; the spread of Humanitarian religion in the spiritual
+sphere. Over against this must be placed the increased centralisation of
+the Church. By the wisdom of her pontiffs, over-ruled by God Almighty,
+the lines had been drawing tighter every year. He instanced the
+abolition of all local usages, including those so long cherished by the
+East, the establishment of the Cardinal-Protectorates in Rome, the
+enforced merging of all friars into one Order, though retaining their
+familiar names, under the authority of the supreme General; all monks,
+with the exception of the Carthusians, the Carmelites and the Trappists,
+into another; of the three excepted into a third; and the classification
+of nuns after the same plan. Further, he remarked on the more recent
+decrees, establishing the sense of the Vatican decision on
+infallibility, the new version of Canon Law, the immense simplification
+that had taken place in ecclesiastical government, the hierarchy,
+rubrics and the affairs of missionary countries, with the new and
+extraordinary privileges granted to mission priests. At this point he
+became aware that his self-consciousness had left him, and he began,
+even with little gestures, and a slightly raised voice, to enlarge on
+the significance of the last month’s events.</p>
+
+<p>All that had gone before, he said, pointed to what had now actually
+taken place—namely, the reconciliation of the world on a basis other
+than that of Divine Truth. It was the intention of God and of His Vicars
+to reconcile all men in Christ Jesus; but the corner-stone had once more
+been rejected, and instead of the chaos that the pious had prophesied,
+there was coming into existence a unity unlike anything known in
+history. This was the more deadly from the fact that it contained so
+many elements of indubitable good. War, apparently, was now extinct, and
+it was not Christianity that had done it; union was now seen to be
+better than disunion, and the lesson had been learned apart from the
+Church. In fact, natural virtues had suddenly waxed luxuriant, and
+supernatural virtues were despised. Friendliness took the place of
+charity, contentment the place of hope, and knowledge the place of
+faith.</p>
+
+<p>Percy stopped, he had become conscious that he was preaching a kind of
+sermon.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, my son,” said the kind voice. “What else?”</p>
+
+<p>What else?... Very well, continued Percy, movements such as these
+brought forth men, and the Man of this movement was Julian Felsenburgh.
+He had accomplished a work that—apart from God—seemed miraculous. He
+had broken down the eternal division between East and West, coming
+himself from the continent that alone could produce such powers; he had
+prevailed by sheer force of personality over the two supreme tyrants of
+life—religious fanaticism and party government. His influence over the
+impassive English was another miracle, yet he had also set on fire
+France, Germany, and Spain. Percy here described one or two of his
+little scenes, saying that it was like the vision of a god: and he
+quoted freely some of the titles given to the Man by sober, unhysterical
+newspapers. Felsenburgh was called the Son of Man, because he was so
+pure-bred a cosmopolitan; the Saviour of the World, because he had slain
+war and himself survived—even—even—here Percy’s voice faltered—even
+Incarnate God, because he was the perfect representative of divine man.</p>
+
+<p>The quiet, priestly face watching opposite never winced or moved; and he
+went on.</p>
+
+<p>Persecution, he said, was coming. There had been a riot or two already.
+But persecution was not to be feared. It would no doubt cause
+apostasies, as it had always done, but these were deplorable only on
+account of the individual apostates. On the other hand, it would
+reassure the faithful; and purge out the half-hearted. Once, in the
+early ages, Satan’s attack had been made on the bodily side, with whips
+and fire and beasts; in the sixteenth century it had been on the
+intellectual side; in the twentieth century on the springs of moral and
+spiritual life. Now it seemed as if the assault was on all three planes
+at once. But what was chiefly to be feared was the positive influence of
+Humanitarianism: it was coming, like the kingdom of God, with power; it
+was crushing the imaginative and the romantic, it was assuming rather
+than asserting its own truth; it was smothering with bolsters instead of
+wounding and stimulating with steel or controversy. It seemed to be
+forcing its way, almost objectively, into the inner world. Persons who
+had scarcely heard its name were professing its tenets; priests absorbed
+it, as they absorbed God in Communion—he mentioned the names of the
+recent apostates—children drank it in like Christianity itself. The
+soul “naturally Christian” seemed to be becoming “the soul naturally
+infidel.” Persecution, cried the priest, was to be welcomed like
+salvation, prayed for, and grasped; but he feared that the authorities
+were too shrewd, and knew the antidote and the poison apart. There might
+be individual martyrdoms—in fact there would be, and very many—but
+they would be in spite of secular government, not because of it.
+Finally, he expected, Humanitarianism would presently put on the dress
+of liturgy and sacrifice, and when that was done, the Church’s cause,
+unless God intervened, would be over.</p>
+
+<p>Percy sat back, trembling.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, my son. And what do you think should be done?”</p>
+
+<p>Percy flung out his hands.</p>
+
+<p>“Holy Father—the mass, prayer, the rosary. These first and last. The
+world denies their power: it is on their power that Christians must
+throw all their weight. All things in Jesus Christ—in Jesus Christ,
+first and last. Nothing else can avail. He must do all, for we can do
+nothing.”</p>
+
+<p>The white head bowed. Then it rose erect.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, my son.... But so long as Jesus Christ deigns to use us, we must
+be used. He is Prophet and King as well as Priest. We then, too, must be
+prophet and king as well as priest. What of Prophecy and Royalty?”</p>
+
+<p>The voice thrilled Percy like a trumpet.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Holiness.... For prophecy, then, let us preach charity; for
+Royalty, let us reign on crosses. We must love and suffer....” (He drew
+one sobbing breath.) “Your Holiness has preached charity always. Let
+charity then issue in good deeds. Let us be foremost in them; let us
+engage in trade honestly, in family life chastely, in government
+uprightly. And as for suffering—ah! Holiness!”</p>
+
+<p>His old scheme leaped back to his mind, and stood poised there
+convincing and imperious.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, my son, speak plainly.”</p>
+
+<p>“Your Holiness—it is old—old as Rome—every fool has desired it: a new
+Order, Holiness—a new Order,” he stammered.</p>
+
+<p>The white hand dropped the paper-weight; the Pope leaned forward,
+looking intently at the priest.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, my son?”</p>
+
+<p>Percy threw himself on his knees.</p>
+
+<p>“A new Order, Holiness—no habit or badge—subject to your Holiness
+only—freer than Jesuits, poorer than Franciscans, more mortified than
+Carthusians: men and women alike—the three vows with the intention of
+martyrdom; the Pantheon for their Church; each bishop responsible for
+their sustenance; a lieutenant in each country.... (Holiness, it is the
+thought of a fool.) ... And Christ Crucified for their patron.”</p>
+
+<p>The Pope stood up abruptly—so abruptly that Cardinal Martin sprang up
+too, apprehensive and terrified. It seemed that this young man had gone
+too far.</p>
+
+<p>Then the Pope sat down again, extending his hand.</p>
+
+<p>“God bless you, my son. You have leave to go.... Will your Eminence stay
+for a few minutes?”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="2CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>The Cardinal said very little to Percy when they met again that evening,
+beyond congratulating him on the way he had borne himself with the Pope.
+It seemed that the priest had done right by his extreme frankness. Then
+he told him of his duties.</p>
+
+<p>Percy was to retain the couple of rooms that had been put at his
+disposal; he was to say mass, as a rule, in the Cardinal’s oratory; and
+after that, at nine, he was to present himself for instructions: he was
+to dine at noon with the Cardinal, after which he was to consider
+himself at liberty till <i>Ave Maria</i>: then, once more he was to be at his
+master’s disposal until supper. The work he would principally have to do
+would be the reading of all English correspondence, and the drawing up
+of a report upon it.</p>
+
+<p>Percy found it a very pleasant and serene life, and the sense of home
+deepened every day. He had an abundance of time to himself, which he
+occupied resolutely in relaxation. From eight to nine he usually walked
+abroad, going sedately through the streets with his senses passive,
+looking into churches, watching the people, and gradually absorbing the
+strange naturalness of life under ancient conditions. At times it
+appeared to him like an historical dream; at times it seemed that there
+was no other reality; that the silent, tense world of modern
+civilisation was itself a phantom, and that here was the simple
+naturalness of the soul’s childhood back again. Even the reading of the
+English correspondence did not greatly affect him, for the stream of his
+mind was beginning to run clear again in this sweet old channel; and he
+read, dissected, analysed and diagnosed with a deepening tranquillity.</p>
+
+<p>There was not, after all, a great deal of news. It was a kind of lull
+after storm. Felsenburgh was still in retirement; he had refused the
+offers made to him by France and Italy, as that of England; and,
+although nothing definite was announced, it seemed that he was confining
+himself at present to an unofficial attitude. Meanwhile the Parliaments
+of Europe were busy in the preliminary stages of code-revision. Nothing
+would be done, it was understood, until the autumn sessions.</p>
+
+<p>Life in Rome was very strange. The city had now become not only the
+centre of faith but, in a sense, a microcosm of it. It was divided into
+four huge quarters—Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Teutonic and Eastern—besides
+Trastevere, which was occupied almost entirely by Papal offices,
+seminaries, and schools. Anglo-Saxondom occupied the southwestern
+quarter, now entirely covered with houses, including the Aventine, the
+Celian and Testaccio. The Latins inhabited old Rome, between the Course
+and the river; the Teutons the northeastern quarter, bounded on the
+south by St. Laurence’s Street; and the Easterns the remaining quarter,
+of which the centre was the Lateran. In this manner the true Romans were
+scarcely conscious of intrusion; they possessed a multitude of their own
+churches, they were allowed to revel in narrow, dark streets and hold
+their markets; and it was here that Percy usually walked, in a passion
+of historical retrospect. But the other quarters were strange enough,
+too. It was curious to see how a progeny of Gothic churches, served by
+northern priests, had grown up naturally in the Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic
+districts, and how the wide, grey streets, the neat pavements, the
+severe houses, showed how the northerns had not yet realised the
+requirements of southern life. The Easterns, on the other hand,
+resembled the Latins; their streets were as narrow and dark, their
+smells as overwhelming, their churches as dirty and as homely, and their
+colours even more brilliant.</p>
+
+<p>Outside the walls the confusion was indescribable. If the city
+represented a carved miniature of the world, the suburbs represented the
+same model broken into a thousand pieces, tumbled in a bag and shot out
+at random. So far as the eye could see, on all sides from the roof of
+the Vatican, there stretched an endless plain of house-roofs, broken by
+spires, towers, domes and chimneys, under which lived human beings of
+every race beneath the sun. Here were the great manufactories, the
+monster buildings of the new world, the stations, the schools, the
+offices, all under secular dominion, yet surrounded by six millions of
+souls who lived here for love of religion. It was these who had
+despaired of modern life, tired out with change and effort, who had fled
+from the new system for refuge to the Church, but who could not obtain
+leave to live in the city itself. New houses were continually springing
+up in all directions. A gigantic compass, fixed by one leg in Rome, and
+with a span of five miles, would, if twirled, revolve through packed
+streets through its entire circle. Beyond that too houses stretched into
+the indefinite distance.</p>
+
+<p>But Percy did not realise the significance of all that he saw, until the
+occasion of the Pope’s name-day towards the end of August.</p>
+
+<p>It was yet cool and early, when he followed his patron, whom he was to
+serve as chaplain, along the broad passages of the Vatican towards the
+room where the Pope and Cardinals were to assemble. Through a window, as
+he looked out into the Piazza, the crowd was yet more dense, if that
+were possible, than it had been an hour before. The huge oval square was
+cobbled with heads, through which ran a broad road, kept by papal troops
+for the passage of the carriages; and up the broad ribbon, white in the
+eastern light, came monstrous vehicles, a blaze of gilding and colour
+and cream tint; slow cheers swelled up and died, and through all came
+the rush and patter of wheels over the stones, like the sound of a
+tide-swept pebbly beach.</p>
+
+<p>As they waited in an ante-chamber, halted by the pressure in front and
+behind—a pack of scarlet and white and purple—he looked out again, and
+realised what he had known only intellectually before, that here before
+his eyes was the royalty of the old world assembled—and he began to
+perceive its significance.</p>
+
+<p>Round the steps of the basilica spread a great fan of coaches, each
+yoked to eight horses—the white of France and Spain, the black of
+Germany, Italy and Russia, and the cream-coloured of England. Those
+stood out in the near half-circle, and beyond was the sweep of the
+lesser powers: Greece, Norway, Sweden, Roumania and the Balkan States.
+One, the Turk, was alone wanting, he reminded himself. The emblems of
+some were visible—eagles, lions, leopards—guarding the royal crown
+above the roof of each. From the foot of the steps to the head ran a
+broad scarlet carpet, lined with soldiers.</p>
+
+<p>Percy leaned against the shutter, and began to meditate. Here was all
+that was left of Royalty. He had seen their palaces before, here and
+there in the various quarters, with standards flying, and
+scarlet-liveried men lounging on the steps. He had raised his hat a
+dozen times as a landau thundered past him up the Course; he had even
+seen the lilies of France and the leopards of England pass together in
+the solemn parade of the Pincian Hill. He had read in the papers every
+now and again during the last five years that family after family had
+made its way to Rome, after papal recognition had been granted; he had
+been told by the Cardinal on the previous evening that William of
+England, with his Consort, had landed at Ostia in the morning and that
+the tale of the Powers was complete. But he had never before realised
+the stupendous, overwhelming fact of the assembly of the world’s royalty
+under the shadow of Peter’s Throne, nor the appalling danger that its
+presence constituted in the midst of a democratic world. That world, he
+knew, affected to laugh at the folly and the childishness of it all—at
+the desperate play-acting of Divine Right on the part of fallen and
+despised families; but the same world, he knew very well, had not yet
+lost quite all its sentiment; and if that sentiment should happen to
+become resentful—-</p>
+
+<p>The pressure relaxed; Percy slipped out of the recess, and followed in
+the slow-moving stream.</p>
+
+<p>Half-an-hour later he was in his place among the ecclesiastics, as the
+papal procession came out through the glimmering dusk of the chapel of
+the Blessed Sacrament into the nave of the enormous church; but even
+before he had entered the chapel he heard the quiet roar of recognition
+and the cry of the trumpets that greeted the Supreme Pontiff as he came
+out, a hundred yards ahead, borne on the <i>sedia gestatoria</i>, with the
+fans going behind him. When Percy himself came out, five minutes later,
+walking in his quaternion, and saw the sight that was waiting, he
+remembered with a sudden throb at his heart that other sight he had seen
+in London in a summer dawn three months before....</p>
+
+<p>Far ahead, seeming to cleave its way through the surging heads, like the
+poop of an ancient ship, moved the canopy beneath which sat the Lord of
+the world, and between him and the priest, as if it were the wake of
+that same ship, swayed the gorgeous procession—Protonotaries Apostolic,
+Generals of Religious Orders and the rest—making its way along with
+white, gold, scarlet and silver foam between the living banks on either
+side. Overhead hung the splendid barrel of the roof, and far in front
+the haven of God’s altar reared its monstrous pillars, beneath which
+burned the seven yellow stars that were the harbour lights of sanctity.
+It was an astonishing sight, but too vast and bewildering to do anything
+but oppress the observers with a consciousness of their own futility.
+The enormous enclosed air, the giant statues, the dim and distant roofs,
+the indescribable concert of sound—of the movement of feet, the murmur
+of ten thousand voices, the peal of organs like the crying of gnats, the
+thin celestial music—the faint suggestive smell of incense and men and
+bruised bay and myrtle—and, supreme above all, the vibrant atmosphere
+of human emotion, shot with supernatural aspiration, as the Hope of the
+World, the holder of Divine Vice-Royalty, passed on his way to stand
+between God and man—this affected the priest as the action of a drug
+that at once lulls and stimulates, that blinds while it gives new
+vision, that deafens while it opens stopped ears, that exalts while it
+plunges into new gulfs of consciousness. Here, then, was the other
+formulated answer to the problem of life. The two Cities of Augustine
+lay for him to choose. The one was that of a world self-originated,
+self-organised and self-sufficient, interpreted by such men as Marx and
+Herve, socialists, materialists, and, in the end, hedonists, summed up
+at last in Felsenburgh. The other lay displayed in the sight he saw
+before him, telling of a Creator and of a creation, of a Divine purpose,
+a redemption, and a world transcendent and eternal from which all sprang
+and to which all moved. One of the two, John and Julian, was the Vicar,
+and the other the Ape, of God.... And Percy’s heart in one more spasm of
+conviction made its choice....</p>
+
+<p>But the summit was not yet reached.</p>
+
+<p>As Percy came at last out from the nave beneath the dome, on his way to
+the tribune beyond the papal throne, he became aware of a new element.</p>
+
+<p>A great space was cleared about the altar and confession, extending, as
+he could see at least on his side, to the point that marked the entrance
+to the transepts; at this point ran rails straight across from side to
+side, continuing the lines of the nave. Beyond this red-hung barrier lay
+a gradual slope of faces, white and motionless; a glimmer of steel
+bounded it, and above, a third of the distance down the transept, rose
+in solemn serried array a line of canopies. These were of scarlet, like
+cardinalitial baldachini, but upon the upright surface of each burned
+gigantic coats supported by beasts and topped by crowns. Under each was
+a figure or two—no more—in splendid isolation, and through the
+interspaces between the thrones showed again a misty slope of faces.</p>
+
+<p>His heart quickened as he saw it—as he swept his eyes round and across
+to the right and saw as in a mirror the replica of the left in the right
+transept. It was there then that they sat—those lonely survivors of
+that strange company of persons who, till half-a-century ago, had
+reigned as God’s temporal Vicegerents with the consent of their
+subjects. They were unrecognised, now, save by Him from whom they drew
+their sovereignty—pinnacles clustering and hanging from a dome, from
+which the walls had been withdrawn. These were men and women who had
+learned at last that power comes from above, and their title to rule
+came not from their subjects but from the Supreme Ruler of
+all—shepherds without sheep, captains without soldiers to command. It
+was piteous—horribly piteous, yet inspiring. The act of faith was so
+sublime; and Percy’s heart quickened as he understood it. These, then,
+men and women like himself, were not ashamed to appeal from man to God,
+to assume insignia which the world regarded as playthings, but which to
+them were emblems of supernatural commission. Was there not mirrored
+here, he asked himself, some far-off shadow of One Who rode on the colt
+of an ass amid the sneers of the great and the enthusiasm of
+children?...</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It was yet more kindling as the mass went on, and he saw the male
+sovereigns come down to do their services at the altar, and to go to and
+fro between it and the Throne. There they went bareheaded, the stately
+silent figures. The English king, once again <i>Fidei Defensor</i>, bore the
+train in place of the old king of Spain, who, with the Austrian Emperor,
+alone of all European sovereigns, had preserved the unbroken continuity
+of faith. The old man leaned over his fald-stool, mumbling and weeping,
+even crying out now and again in love and devotion, as, like Simeon, he
+saw his Salvation. The Austrian Emperor twice administered the Lavabo;
+the German sovereign, who had lost his throne and all but his life upon
+his conversion four years before, by a new privilege placed and withdrew
+the cushion, as his Lord kneeled before the Lord of them both. So
+movement by movement the gorgeous drama was enacted; the murmuring of
+the crowds died to a stillness that was but one wordless prayer as the
+tiny White Disc rose between the white hands, and the thin angelic music
+pealed in the dome. For here was the one hope of these thousands, as
+mighty and as little as once within the Manger. There was none other
+that fought for them but only God. Surely then, if the blood of men and
+the tears of women could not avail to move the Judge and Observer of all
+from His silence, surely at least here the bloodless Death of His only
+Son, that once on Calvary had darkened heaven and rent the earth,
+pleaded now with such sorrowful splendour upon this island of faith amid
+a sea of laughter and hatred—this at least must avail! How could it
+not?</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Percy had just sat down, tired out with the long ceremonies, when the
+door opened abruptly, and the Cardinal, still in his robes, came in
+swiftly, shutting the door behind him.</p>
+
+<p>“Father Franklin,” he said, in a strange breathless voice, “there is the
+worst of news. Felsenburgh is appointed President of Europe.”</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>It was late that night before Percy returned, completely exhausted by
+his labours. For hour after hour he had sat with the Cardinal, opening
+despatches that poured into the electric receivers from all over Europe,
+and were brought in one by one into the quiet sitting-room. Three times
+in the afternoon the Cardinal had been sent for, once by the Pope and
+twice to the Quirinal.</p>
+
+<p>There was no doubt at all that the news was true; and it seemed that
+Felsenburgh must have waited deliberately for the offer. All others he
+had refused. There had been a Convention of the Powers, each of whom had
+been anxious to secure him, and each of whom had severally failed; these
+private claims had been withdrawn, and an united message sent. The new
+proposal was to the effect that Felsenburgh should assume a position
+hitherto undreamed of in democracy; that he should receive a House of
+Government in every capital of Europe; that his veto of any measure
+should be final for three years; that any measure he chose to introduce
+three times in three consecutive years should become law; that his title
+should be that of President of Europe. From his side practically nothing
+was asked, except that he should refuse any other official position
+offered him that did not receive the sanction of all the Powers. And all
+this, Percy saw very well, involved the danger of an united Europe
+increased tenfold. It involved all the stupendous force of Socialism
+directed by a brilliant individual. It was the combination of the
+strongest characteristics of the two methods of government. The offer
+had been accepted by Felsenburgh after eight hours’ silence.</p>
+
+<p>It was remarkable, too, to observe how the news had been accepted by the
+two other divisions of the world. The East was enthusiastic; America was
+divided. But in any case America was powerless: the balance of the world
+was overwhelmingly against her.</p>
+
+<p>Percy threw himself, as he was, on to his bed, and lay there with
+drumming pulses, closed eyes and a huge despair at his heart. The world
+indeed had risen like a giant over the horizons of Rome, and the holy
+city was no better now than a sand castle before a tide. So much he
+grasped. As to how ruin would come, in what form and from what
+direction, he neither knew nor cared. Only he knew now that it would
+come.</p>
+
+<p>He had learned by now something of his own temperament; and he turned
+his eyes inwards to observe himself bitterly, as a doctor in mortal
+disease might with a dreadful complacency diagnose his own symptoms. It
+was even a relief to turn from the monstrous mechanism of the world to
+see in miniature one hopeless human heart. For his own religion he no
+longer feared; he knew, as absolutely as a man may know the colour of
+his eyes, that it was secure again and beyond shaking. During those
+weeks in Rome the cloudy deposit had run clear and the channel was once
+more visible. Or, better still, that vast erection of dogma, ceremony,
+custom and morals in which he had been educated, and on which he had
+looked all his life (as a man may stare upon some great set-piece that
+bewilders him), seeing now one spark of light, now another, flare and
+wane in the darkness, had little by little kindled and revealed itself
+in one stupendous blaze of divine fire that explains itself. Huge
+principles, once bewildering and even repellent, were again luminously
+self-evident; he saw, for example, that while Humanity-Religion
+endeavoured to abolish suffering the Divine Religion embraced it, so
+that the blind pangs even of beasts were within the Father’s Will and
+Scheme; or that while from one angle one colour only of the web of life
+was visible—material, or intellectual, or artistic—from another the
+Supernatural was as eminently obvious. Humanity-Religion could only be
+true if at least half of man’s nature, aspirations and sorrows were
+ignored. Christianity, on the other hand, at least included and
+accounted for these, even if it did not explain them. This ... and this
+... and this ... all made the one and perfect whole. There was the
+Catholic Faith, more certain to him than the existence of himself: it
+was true and alive. He might be damned, but God reigned. He might go
+mad, but Jesus Christ was Incarnate Deity, proving Himself so by death
+and Resurrection, and John his Vicar. These things were as the bones of
+the Universe—facts beyond doubting—if they were not true, nothing
+anywhere was anything but a dream.</p>
+
+<p>Difficulties?—Why, there were ten thousand. He did not in the least
+understand why God had made the world as it was, nor how Hell could be
+the creation of Love, nor how bread was transubstantiated into the Body
+of God but—well, these things were so. He had travelled far, he began
+to see, from his old status of faith, when he had believed that divine
+truth could be demonstrated on intellectual grounds. He had learned now
+(he knew not how) that the supernatural cried to the supernatural; the
+Christ without to the Christ within; that pure human reason indeed could
+not contradict, yet neither could it adequately prove the mysteries of
+faith, except on premisses visible only to him who receives Revelation
+as a fact; that it is the moral state, rather than the intellectual, to
+which the Spirit of God speaks with the greater certitude. That which he
+had both learned and taught he now knew, that Faith, having, like man
+himself, a body and a spirit—an historical expression and an inner
+verity—speaks now by one, now by another. This man believes because he
+sees—accepts the Incarnation or the Church from its credentials; that
+man, perceiving that these things are spiritual facts, yields himself
+wholly to the message and authority of her who alone professes them, as
+well as to the manifestation of them upon the historical plane; and in
+the darkness leans upon her arm. Or, best of all, because he has
+believed, now he sees.</p>
+
+<p>So he looked with a kind of interested indolence at other tracts of his
+nature.</p>
+
+<p>First, there was his intellect, puzzled beyond description, demanding,
+Why, why, why? Why was it allowed? How was it conceivable that God did
+not intervene, and that the Father of men could permit His dear world to
+be so ranged against Him? What did He mean to do? Was this eternal
+silence never to be broken? It was very well for those that had the
+Faith, but what of the countless millions who were settling down in
+contented blasphemy? Were these not, too, His children and the sheep of
+His pasture? What was the Catholic Church made for if not to convert the
+world, and why then had Almighty God allowed it, on the one side, to
+dwindle to a handful, and, on the other, the world to find its peace
+apart from Him?</p>
+
+<p>He considered his emotions, but there was no comfort there, no stimulus.
+Oh! yes; he could pray still, by mere cold acts of the will, and his
+theology told him that God accepted such. He could say “<i>Adveniat regnum
+tuum. ... Fiat voluntas tua</i>,” five thousand times a day, if God wanted
+that; but there was no sting or touch, no sense of vibration through the
+cords that his will threw up to the Heavenly Throne. What in the world
+then did God want him to do? Was it just then to repeat formulas, to lie
+still, to open despatches, to listen through the telephone, and to
+suffer?</p>
+
+<p>And then the rest of the world—the madness that had seized upon the
+nations; the amazing stories that had poured in that day of the men in
+Paris, who, raving like Bacchantes, had stripped themselves naked in the
+Place de Concorde, and stabbed themselves to the heart, crying out to
+thunders of applause that life was too enthralling to be endured; of the
+woman who sang herself mad last night in Spain, and fell laughing and
+foaming in the concert hall at Seville; of the crucifixion of the
+Catholics that morning in the Pyrenees, and the apostasy of three
+bishops in Germany.... And this ... and this ... and a thousand more
+horrors were permitted, and God made no sign and spoke no word....</p>
+
+<p>There was a tap, and Percy sprang up as the Cardinal came in.</p>
+
+<p>He looked horribly worn; and his eyes had a kind of sunken brilliance
+that revealed fever. He made a little motion to Percy to sit down, and
+himself sat in the deep chair, trembling a little, and gathering his
+buckled feet beneath his red-buttoned cassock.</p>
+
+<p>“You must forgive me, father,” he said. “I am anxious for the Bishop’s
+safety. He should be here by now.”</p>
+
+<p>This was the Bishop of Southwark, Percy remembered, who had left England
+early that morning.</p>
+
+<p>“He is coming straight through, your Eminence?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; he should have been here by twenty-three. It is after midnight, is
+it not?”</p>
+
+<p>As he spoke, the bells chimed out the half-hour.</p>
+
+<p>It was nearly quiet now. All day the air had been full of sound; mobs
+had paraded the suburbs; the gates of the City had been barred, yet that
+was only an earnest of what was to be expected when the world understood
+itself.</p>
+
+<p>The Cardinal seemed to recover himself after a few minutes’ silence.</p>
+
+<p>“You look tired out, father,” he said kindly.</p>
+
+<p>Percy smiled.</p>
+
+<p>“And your Eminence?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>The old man smiled too.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, yes,” he said. “I shall not last much longer, father. And then it
+will be you to suffer.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy sat up, suddenly, sick at heart.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, yes,” said the Cardinal. “The Holy Father has arranged it. You are
+to succeed me, you know. It need be no secret.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy drew a long trembling breath.</p>
+
+<p>“Eminence,” he began piteously.</p>
+
+<p>The other lifted a thin old hand.</p>
+
+<p>“I understand all that,” he said softly. “You wish to die, is it not
+so?—and be at peace. There are many who wish that. But we must suffer
+first. <i>Et pati et mori</i>. Father Franklin, there must be no faltering.”</p>
+
+<p>There was a long silence.</p>
+
+<p>The news was too stunning to convey anything to the priest but a sense
+of horrible shock. The thought had simply never entered his mind that
+he, a man under forty, should be considered eligible to succeed this
+wise, patient old prelate. As for the honour—Percy was past that now,
+even had he thought of it. There was but one view before him—of a long
+and intolerable journey, on a road that went uphill, to be traversed
+with a burden on his shoulders that he could not support.</p>
+
+<p>Yet he recognised its inevitability. The fact was announced to him as
+indisputable; it was to be; there was nothing to be said. But it was as
+if one more gulf had opened, and he stared into it with a dull, sick
+horror, incapable of expression.</p>
+
+<p>The Cardinal first broke the silence.</p>
+
+<p>“Father Franklin,” he said, “I have seen to-day a picture of
+Felsenburgh. Do you know whom I at first took it for?”</p>
+
+<p>Percy smiled listlessly.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, father, I took it for you. Now, what do you make of that?”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t understand, Eminence.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why—-” He broke off, suddenly changing the subject.</p>
+
+<p>“There was a murder in the City to-day,” he said. “A Catholic stabbed a
+blasphemer.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy glanced at him again.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! yes; he has not attempted to escape,” went on the old man. “He is
+in gaol.”</p>
+
+<p>“And—-”</p>
+
+<p>“He will be executed. The trial will begin to-morrow.... It is sad
+enough. It is the first murder for eight months.”</p>
+
+<p>The irony of the position was evident enough to Percy as he sat
+listening to the deepening silence outside in the starlit night. Here
+was this poor city pretending that nothing was the matter, quietly
+administering its derided justice; and there, outside, were the forces
+gathering that would put an end to all. His enthusiasm seemed dead.
+There was no thrill from the thought of the splendid disregard of
+material facts of which this was one tiny instance, none of despairing
+courage or drunken recklessness. He felt like one who watches a fly
+washing his face on the cylinder of an engine—the huge steel slides
+along bearing the tiny life towards enormous death—another moment and
+it will be over; and yet the watcher cannot interfere. The supernatural
+thus lay, perfect and alive, but immeasurably tiny; the huge forces were
+in motion, the world was heaving up, and Percy could do nothing but
+stare and frown. Yet, as has been said, there was no shadow on his
+faith; the fly he knew was greater than the engine from the superiority
+of its order of life; if it were crushed, life would not be the final
+sufferer; so much he knew, but how it was so, he did not know.</p>
+
+<p>As the two sat there, again came a step and a tap; and a servant’s face
+looked in.</p>
+
+<p>“His Lordship is come, Eminence,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>The Cardinal rose painfully, supporting himself by the table. Then he
+paused, seeming to remember something, and fumbled in his pocket.</p>
+
+<p>“See that, father,” he said, and pushed a small silver disc towards the
+priest. “No; when I am gone.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy closed the door and came back, taking up the little round object.</p>
+
+<p>It was a coin, fresh from the mint. On one side was the familiar wreath
+with the word “fivepence” in the midst, with its Esperanto equivalent
+beneath, and on the other the profile of a man, with an inscription.
+Percy turned it to read:</p>
+
+<p>“JULIAN FELSENBURGH, LA PREZIDANTE DE UROPO.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h4>III</h4>
+</div>
+
+<p>It was at ten o’clock on the following morning that the Cardinals were
+summoned to the Pope’s presence to hear the allocution.</p>
+
+<p>Percy, from his seat among the Consultors, watched them come in, men of
+every nation and temperament and age—the Italians all together,
+gesticulating, and flashing teeth; the Anglo-Saxons steady-faced and
+serious; an old French Cardinal leaning on his stick, walking with the
+English Benedictine. It was one of the great plain stately rooms of
+which the Vatican now chiefly consisted, seated length wise like a
+chapel. At the lower end, traversed by the gangway, were the seats of
+the Consultors; at the upper end, the dais with the papal throne. Three
+or four benches with desks before them, standing out beyond the
+Consultors’ seats, were reserved for the arrivals of the day before
+—prelates and priests who had poured into Rome from every European
+country on the announcement of the amazing news.</p>
+
+<p>Percy had not an idea as to what would be said. It was scarcely possible
+that nothing but platitudes would be uttered, yet what else could be
+said in view of the complete doubtfulness of the situation? All that was
+known even this morning was that the Presidentship of Europe was a fact;
+the little silver coin he had seen witnessed to that; that there had
+been an outburst of persecution, repressed sternly by local authorities;
+and that Felsenburgh was to-day to begin his tour from capital to
+capital. He was expected in Turin by the end of the week. From every
+Catholic centre throughout the world had come in messages imploring
+guidance; it was said that apostasy was rising like a tidal wave, that
+persecution threatened everywhere, and that even bishops were beginning
+to yield.</p>
+
+<p>As for the Holy Father, all was doubtful. Those who knew, said nothing;
+and the only rumour that escaped was to the effect that he had spent all
+night in prayer at the tomb of the Apostle....</p>
+
+<p>The murmur died suddenly to a rustle and a silence; there was a ripple
+of sinking heads along the seats as the door beside the canopy opened,
+and a moment later John, <i>Pater Patrum</i>, was on his throne.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>At first Percy understood nothing. He stared only, as at a picture,
+through the dusty sunlight that poured in through the shrouded windows,
+at the scarlet lines to right and left, up to the huge scarlet canopy,
+and the white figure that sat there. Certainly, these southerners
+understood the power of effect. It was as vivid and impressive as a
+vision of the Host in a jewelled monstrance. Every accessory was
+gorgeous, the high room, the colour of the robes, the chains and
+crosses, and as the eye moved along to its climax it was met by a piece
+of dead white—as if glory was exhausted and declared itself impotent to
+tell the supreme secret. Scarlet and purple and gold were well enough
+for those who stood on the steps of the throne—they needed it; but for
+Him who sat there nothing was needed. Let colours die and sounds faint
+in the presence of God’s Viceroy. Yet what expression was required found
+itself adequately provided in that beautiful oval face, the poised
+imperious head, the sweet brilliant eyes and the clean-curved lips that
+spoke so strongly. There was not a sound in the room, not a rustle, nor
+a breathing—even without it seemed as if the world were allowing the
+supernatural to state its defence uninterruptedly, before summing up and
+clamouring condemnation.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Percy made a violent effort at self-repression, clenched his hands and
+listened.</p>
+
+<p>“... Since this then is so, sons in Jesus Christ, it is for us to
+answer. We wrestle not, as the Doctor of the Gentiles teaches us,
+<i>against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against
+the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of
+wickedness in the high places. Wherefore<i>, he continues, </i>take unto you
+the armour of God<i>; and he further declares to us its nature—</i>the
+girdle of truth, the breastplate of justice, the shoes of peace, the
+shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit.</i></p>
+
+<p>“By this, therefore, the Word of God bids us to war, but not with the
+weapons of this world, for neither is His kingdom of this world; and it
+is to remind you of the principles of this warfare that we have summoned
+you to Our Presence.”</p>
+
+<p>The voice paused, and there was a rustling sigh along the seats. Then
+the voice continued on a slightly higher note.</p>
+
+<p>“It has ever been the wisdom of Our predecessors, as is also their duty,
+while keeping silence at certain seasons, at others to speak freely the
+whole counsel of God. From this duty We Ourself must not be deterred by
+the knowledge of Our own weakness and ignorance, but to trust rather
+that He Who has placed Us on this throne will deign to speak through Our
+mouth and use Our words to His glory.</p>
+
+<p>“First, then, it is necessary to utter Our sentence as to the new
+movement, as men call it, which has latterly been inaugurated by the
+rulers of this world.</p>
+
+<p>“We are not unmindful of the blessings of peace and unity, nor do We
+forget that the appearance of these things has been the fruit of much
+that we have condemned. It is this appearance of peace that has deceived
+many, causing them to doubt the promise of the Prince of Peace that it
+is through Him alone that we have access to the Father. That true peace,
+passing understanding, concerns not only the relations of men between
+themselves, but, supremely, the relations of men with their Maker; and
+it is in this necessary point that the efforts of the world are found
+wanting. It is not indeed to be wondered at that in a world which has
+rejected God this necessary matter should be forgotten. Men have
+thought—led astray by seducers—that the unity of nations was the
+greatest prize of this life, forgetting the words of our Saviour, Who
+said that He came to bring not peace but a sword, and that it is through
+many tribulations that we enter God’s Kingdom. First, then, there should
+be established the peace of man with God, and after that the unity of
+man with man will follow. <i>Seek ye first</i>, said Jesus Christ, <i>the
+kingdom of God—and then all these things shall be added unto you.</i></p>
+
+<p>“First, then, We once more condemn and anathematise the opinions of
+those who teach and believe the contrary of this; and we renew once more
+all the condemnations uttered by Ourself or Our predecessors against all
+those societies, organisations and communities that have been formed for
+the furtherance of an unity on another than a divine foundation; and We
+remind Our children throughout the world that it is forbidden to them to
+enter or to aid or to approve in any manner whatsoever any of those
+bodies named in such condemnations.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy moved in his seat, conscious of a touch of impatience.... The
+manner was superb, tranquil and stately as a river; but the matter a
+trifle banal. Here was this old reprobation of Freemasonry, repeated in
+unoriginal language.</p>
+
+<p>“Secondly,” went on the steady voice, “We wish to make known to you Our
+desires for the future; and here We tread on what many have considered
+dangerous ground.”</p>
+
+<p>Again came that rustle. Percy saw more than one cardinal lean forward
+with hand crooked at ear to hear the better. It was evident that
+something important was coming.</p>
+
+<p>“There are many points,” went on the high voice, “of which it is not Our
+intention to speak at this time, for of their own nature they are
+secret, and must be treated of on another occasion. But what We say
+here, We say to the world. Since the assaults of Our enemies are both
+open and secret, so too must be Our defences. This then is Our
+intention.”</p>
+
+<p>The Pope paused again, lifted one hand as if mechanically to his breast,
+and grasped the cross that hung there.</p>
+
+<p>“While the army of Christ is one, it consists of many divisions, each of
+which has its proper function and object. In times past God has raised
+up companies of His servants to do this or that particular work—the
+sons of St. Francis to preach poverty, those of St. Bernard to labour in
+prayer with all holy women dedicating themselves to this purpose, the
+Society of Jesus for the education of youth and the conversion of the
+heathen—together with all the other Religious Orders whose names are
+known throughout the world. Each such company was raised up at a
+particular season of need, and each has corresponded nobly with the
+divine vocation. It has also been the especial glory of each, for the
+furtherance of its intention, while pursuing its end, to cut off from
+itself all such activities (good in themselves) which would hinder that
+work for which God had called it into being—following in this matter
+the words of our Redeemer, <i>Every branch that beareth fruit, He purgeth
+it that it may bring forth more fruit.</i> At this present season, then, it
+appears to Our Humility that all such Orders (which once more We commend
+and bless) are not perfectly suited by the very conditions of their
+respective Rules to perform the great work which the time requires. Our
+warfare lies not with ignorance in particular, whether of the heathens
+to whom the Gospel has not yet come, or of those whose fathers have
+rejected it, nor with <i>the deceitful riches of this world</i>, nor with
+<i>science falsely so-called</i>, nor indeed with any one of those
+strongholds of infidelity against whom We have laboured in the past.
+Rather it appears as if at last the time was come of which the apostle
+spoke when he said that <i>that day shall not come, except there come a
+falling away first, and that Man of Sin be revealed, the Son of
+Perdition, who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called
+God.</i></p>
+
+<p>“It is not with this or that force that we are concerned, but rather
+with the unveiled immensity of that power whose time was foretold, and
+whose destruction is prepared.”</p>
+
+<p>The voice paused again, and Percy gripped the rail before him to stay
+the trembling of his hands. There was no rustle now, nothing but a
+silence that tingled and shook. The Pope drew a long breath, turned his
+head slowly to right and left, and went on more deliberately than ever.</p>
+
+<p>“It seems good, then, to Our Humility, that the Vicar of Christ should
+himself invite God’s children to this new warfare; and it is Our
+intention to enroll under the title of the Order of Christ Crucified the
+names of all who offer themselves to this supreme service. In doing this
+We are aware of the novelty of Our action, and the disregard of all such
+precautions as have been necessary in the past. We take counsel in this
+matter with none save Him Who we believe has inspired it.</p>
+
+<p>“First, then, let Us say, that although obedient service will be
+required from all who shall be admitted to this Order, Our primary
+intention in instituting it lies in God’s regard rather than in man’s,
+in appealing to Him Who asks our generosity rather than to those who
+deny it, and dedicating once more by a formal and deliberate act our
+souls and bodies to the heavenly Will and service of Him Who alone can
+rightly claim such offering, and will accept our poverty.</p>
+
+<p>“Briefly, we dictate only the following conditions.</p>
+
+<p>“None shall be capable of entering the Order except such as shall be
+above the age of seventeen years.</p>
+
+<p>“No badge, habit, nor insignia shall be attached to it.</p>
+
+<p>“The Three Evangelical Counsels shall be the foundation of the Rule, to
+which we add a fourth intention, namely, that of a desire to receive the
+crown of martyrdom and a purpose of embracing it.</p>
+
+<p>“The bishop of every diocese, if he himself shall enter the Order, shall
+be the superior within the limits of his own jurisdiction, and alone
+shall be exempt from the literal observance of the Vow of Poverty so
+long as he retains his see. Such bishops as do not feel the vocation to
+the Order shall retain their sees under the usual conditions, but shall
+have no Religious claim on the members of the Order.</p>
+
+<p>“Further, We announce Our intention of Ourself entering the Order as its
+supreme prelate, and of making Our profession within the course of a few
+days.</p>
+
+<p>“Further, We declare that in Our Own pontificate none shall be elevated
+to the Sacred College save those who have made their profession in the
+Order; and We shall dedicate shortly the Basilica of St. Peter and St.
+Paul as the central church of the Order, in which church We shall raise
+to the altars without any delay those happy souls who shall lay down
+their lives in the pursuance of their vocation.</p>
+
+<p>“Of that vocation it is unnecessary to speak beyond indicating that it
+may be pursued under any conditions laid down by the Superiors. As
+regards the novitiate, its conditions and requirements, we shall shortly
+issue the necessary directions. Each diocesan superior (for it is Our
+hope that none will hold back) shall have all such rights as usually
+appertain to Religious Superiors, and shall be empowered to employ his
+subjects in any work that, in his opinion, shall subserve the glory of
+God and the salvation of souls. It is Our Own intention to employ in Our
+service none except those who shall make their profession.”</p>
+
+<p>He raised his eyes once more, seemingly without emotion, then he
+continued:</p>
+
+<p>“So far, then, We have determined. On other matters We shall take
+counsel immediately; but it is Our wish that these words shall be
+communicated to all the world, that there may be no delay in making
+known what it is that Christ through His Vicar asks of all who profess
+the Divine Name. We offer no rewards except those which God Himself has
+promised to those that love Him, and lay down their life for Him; no
+promise of peace, save of that which passeth understanding; no home save
+that which befits pilgrims and sojourners who seek a City to come; no
+honour save the world’s contempt; no life, save that which is hid with
+Christ in God.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="2CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>Oliver Brand, seated in his little private room at Whitehall, was
+expecting a visitor. It was already close upon ten o’clock, and at
+half-past he must be in the House. He had hoped that Mr. Francis,
+whoever he might be, would not detain him long. Even now, every moment
+was a respite, for the work had become simply prodigious during the last
+weeks.</p>
+
+<p>But he was not reprieved for more than a minute, for the last boom from
+the Victoria Tower had scarcely ceased to throb when the door opened and
+a clerkly voice uttered the name he was expecting.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver shot one quick look at the stranger, at his drooping lids and
+down-turned mouth, summed him up fairly and accurately in the moments
+during which they seated themselves, and went briskly to business.</p>
+
+<p>“At twenty-five minutes past, sir, I must leave this room,” he said.
+“Until then—-” he made a little gesture.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Francis reassured him.</p>
+
+<p>“Thank you, Mr. Brand—that is ample time. Then, if you will excuse
+me—-” He groped in his breast-pocket, and drew out a long envelope.</p>
+
+<p>“I will leave this with you,” he said, “when I go. It sets out our
+desires at length and our names. And this is what I have to say, sir.”</p>
+
+<p>He sat back, crossed his legs, and went on, with a touch of eagerness in
+his voice.</p>
+
+<p>“I am a kind of deputation, as you know,” he said. “We have something
+both to ask and to offer. I am chosen because it was my own idea. First,
+may I ask a question?”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver bowed.</p>
+
+<p>“I wish to ask nothing that I ought not. But I believe it is practically
+certain, is it not?—that Divine Worship is to be restored throughout
+the kingdom?”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver smiled.</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose so,” he said. “The bill has been read for the third time,
+and, as you know, the President is to speak upon it this evening.”</p>
+
+<p>“He will not veto it?”</p>
+
+<p>“We suppose not. He has assented to it in Germany.”</p>
+
+<p>“Just so,” said Mr. Francis. “And if he assents here, I suppose it will
+become law immediately.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver leaned over this table, and drew out the green paper that
+contained the Bill.</p>
+
+<p>“You have this, of course—-” he said. “Well, it becomes law at once;
+and the first feast will be observed on the first of October.
+‘Paternity,’ is it not? Yes, Paternity.”</p>
+
+<p>“There will be something of a rush then,” said the other eagerly. “Why,
+that is only a week hence.”</p>
+
+<p>“I have not charge of this department,” said Oliver, laying back the
+Bill. “But I understand that the ritual will be that already in use in
+Germany. There is no reason why we should be peculiar.”</p>
+
+<p>“And the Abbey will be used?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, yes.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, sir,” said Mr. Francis, “of course I know the Government
+Commission has studied it all very closely, and no doubt has its own
+plans. But it appears to me that they will want all the experience they
+can get.”</p>
+
+<p>“No doubt.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, Mr. Brand, the society which I represent consists entirely of men
+who were once Catholic priests. We number about two hundred in London. I
+will leave a pamphlet with you, if I may, stating our objects, our
+constitution, and so on. It seemed to us that here was a matter in which
+our past experience might be of service to the Government. Catholic
+ceremonies, as you know, are very intricate, and some of us studied them
+very deeply in old days. We used to say that Masters of Ceremonies were
+born, not made, and we have a fair number of those amongst us. But
+indeed every priest is something of a ceremonialist.”</p>
+
+<p>He paused.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Mr. Francis?”</p>
+
+<p>“I am sure the Government realises the immense importance of all going
+smoothly. If Divine Service was at all grotesque or disorderly, it would
+largely defeat its own object. So I have been deputed to see you, Mr.
+Brand, and to suggest to you that here is a body of men—reckon it as at
+least twenty-five—who have had special experience in this kind of
+thing, and are perfectly ready to put themselves at the disposal of the
+Government.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver could not resist a faint flicker of a smile at the corner of his
+mouth. It was a very grim bit of irony, he thought, but it seemed
+sensible enough.</p>
+
+<p>“I quite understand, Mr. Francis. It seems a very reasonable suggestion.
+But I do not think I am the proper person. Mr. Snowford—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, yes, sir, I know. But your speech the other day inspired us all.
+You said exactly what was in all our hearts—that the world could not
+live without worship; and that now that God was found at last—-”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver waved his hand. He hated even a touch of flattery.</p>
+
+<p>“It is very good of you, Mr. Francis. I will certainly speak to Mr.
+Snowford. I understand that you offer yourselves as—as Masters of
+Ceremonies—?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, sir; and sacristans. I have studied the German ritual very
+carefully; it is more elaborate than I had thought it. It will need a
+good deal of adroitness. I imagine that you will want at least a dozen
+<i>Ceremoniarii</i> in the Abbey; and a dozen more in the vestries will
+scarcely be too much.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver nodded abruptly, looking curiously at the eager pathetic face of
+the man opposite him; yet it had something, too, of that mask-like
+priestly look that he had seen before in others like him. This was
+evidently a devotee.</p>
+
+<p>“You are all Masons, of course?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, of course, Mr. Brand.”</p>
+
+<p>“Very good. I will speak to Mr. Snowford to-day if I can catch him.”</p>
+
+<p>He glanced at the clock. There were yet three or four minutes.</p>
+
+<p>“You have seen the new appointment in Rome, sir,” went on Mr. Francis.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver shook his head. He was not particularly interested in Rome just
+now.</p>
+
+<p>“Cardinal Martin is dead—he died on Tuesday—and his place is already
+filled.”</p>
+
+<p>“Indeed, sir?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes—the new man was once a friend of mine—Franklin, his name
+is—Percy Franklin.”</p>
+
+<p>“Eh?”</p>
+
+<p>“What is the matter, Mr. Brand? Did you know him?”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver was eyeing him darkly, a little pale.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; I knew him,” he said quietly. “At least, I think so.”</p>
+
+<p>“He was at Westminster until a month or two ago.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, yes,” said Oliver, still looking at him. “And you knew him, Mr.
+Francis?”</p>
+
+<p>“I knew him—yes.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah!—well, I should like to have a talk some day about him.”</p>
+
+<p>He broke off. It yet wanted a minute to his time.</p>
+
+<p>“And that is all?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“That is all my actual business, sir,” answered the other. “But I hope
+you will allow me to say how much we all appreciate what you have done,
+Mr. Brand. I do not think it is possible for any, except ourselves, to
+understand what the loss of worship means to us. It was very strange at
+first—-”</p>
+
+<p>His voice trembled a little, and he stopped. Oliver felt interested, and
+checked himself in his movement to rise.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Mr. Francis?”</p>
+
+<p>The melancholy brown eyes turned on him full.</p>
+
+<p>“It was an illusion, of course, sir—we know that. But I, at any rate,
+dare to hope that it was not all wasted—all our aspirations and
+penitence and praise. We mistook our God, but none the less it reached
+Him—it found its way to the Spirit of the World. It taught us that the
+individual was nothing, and that He was all. And now—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, sir,” said the other softly. He was really touched.</p>
+
+<p>The sad brown eyes opened full.</p>
+
+<p>“And now Mr. Felsenburgh is come.” He swallowed in his throat. “Julian
+Felsenburgh!” There was a world of sudden passion in his gentle voice,
+and Oliver’s own heart responded.</p>
+
+<p>“I know, sir,” he said; “I know all that you mean.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! to have a Saviour at last!” cried Francis. “One that can be seen
+and handled and praised to His Face! It is like a dream—too good to be
+true!”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver glanced at the clock, and rose abruptly, holding out his hand.</p>
+
+<p>“Forgive me, sir. I must not stay. You have touched me very deeply.... I
+will speak to Snowford. Your address is here, I understand?”</p>
+
+<p>He pointed to the papers.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Mr. Brand. There is one more question.”</p>
+
+<p>“I must not stay, sir,” said Oliver, shaking his head.</p>
+
+<p>“One instant—is it true that this worship will be compulsory?”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver bowed as he gathered up his papers.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>Mabel, seated in the gallery that evening behind the President’s chair,
+had already glanced at her watch half-a-dozen times in the last hour,
+hoping each time that twenty-one o’clock was nearer than she feared. She
+knew well enough by now that the President of Europe would not be
+half-a-minute either before or after his time. His supreme punctuality
+was famous all over the continent. He had said Twenty-One, so it was to
+be twenty-one.</p>
+
+<p>A sharp bell-note impinged from beneath, and in a moment the drawling
+voice of the speaker stopped. Once more she lifted her wrist, saw that
+it wanted five minutes of the hour; then she leaned forward from her
+corner and stared down into the House.</p>
+
+<p>A great change had passed over it at the metallic noise. All down the
+long brown seats members were shifting and arranging themselves more
+decorously, uncrossing their legs, slipping their hats beneath the
+leather fringes. As she looked, too, she saw the President of the House
+coming down the three steps from his chair, for Another would need it in
+a few moments.</p>
+
+<p>The house was full from end to end; a late comer ran in from the
+twilight of the south door and looked distractedly about him in the full
+light before he saw his vacant place. The galleries at the lower end
+were occupied too, down there, where she had failed to obtain a seat.
+Yet from all the crowded interior there was no sound but a sibilant
+whispering; from the passages behind she could hear again the quick
+bell-note repeat itself as the lobbies were cleared; and from Parliament
+Square outside once more came the heavy murmur of the crowd that had
+been inaudible for the last twenty minutes. When that ceased she would
+know that he was come.</p>
+
+<p>How strange and wonderful it was to be here—on this night of all, when
+the President was to speak! A month ago he had assented to a similar
+Bill in Germany, and had delivered a speech on the same subject at
+Turin. To-morrow he was to be in Spain. No one knew where he had been
+during the past week. A rumour had spread that his volor had been seen
+passing over Lake Como, and had been instantly contradicted. No one knew
+either what he would say to-night. It might be three words or twenty
+thousand. There were a few clauses in the Bill—notably those bearing on
+the point as to when the new worship was to be made compulsory on all
+subjects over the age of seven—it might be he would object and veto
+these. In that case all must be done again, and the Bill re-passed,
+unless the House accepted his amendment instantly by acclamation.</p>
+
+<p>Mabel herself was inclined to these clauses. They provided that,
+although worship was to be offered in every parish church of England on
+the ensuing first day of October, this was not to be compulsory on all
+subjects till the New Year; whereas, Germany, who had passed the Bill
+only a month before, had caused it to come into full force immediately,
+thus compelling all her Catholic subjects either to leave the country
+without delay or suffer the penalties. These penalties were not
+vindictive: on a first offence a week’s detention only was to be given;
+on the second, one month’s imprisonment; on the third, one year’s; and
+on the fourth, perpetual imprisonment until the criminal yielded. These
+were merciful terms, it seemed; for even imprisonment itself meant no
+more than reasonable confinement and employment on Government works.
+There were no mediaeval horrors here; and the act of worship demanded
+was so little, too; it consisted of no more than bodily presence in the
+church or cathedral on the four new festivals of Maternity, Life,
+Sustenance and Paternity, celebrated on the first day of each quarter.
+Sunday worship was to be purely voluntary.</p>
+
+<p>She could not understand how any man could refuse this homage. These
+four things were facts—they were the manifestations of what she called
+the Spirit of the World—and if others called that Power God, yet surely
+these ought to be considered as His functions. Where then was the
+difficulty? It was not as if Christian worship were not permitted, under
+the usual regulations. Catholics could still go to mass. And yet
+appalling things were threatened in Germany: not less than twelve
+thousand persons had already left for Rome; and it was rumoured that
+forty thousand would refuse this simple act of homage a few days hence.
+It bewildered and angered her to think of it.</p>
+
+<p>For herself the new worship was a crowning sign of the triumph of
+Humanity. Her heart had yearned for some such thing as this—some
+public corporate profession of what all now believed. She had so
+resented the dulness of folk who were content with action and never
+considered its springs. Surely this instinct within her was a true one;
+she desired to stand with her fellows in some solemn place, consecrated
+not by priests but by the will of man; to have as her inspirers sweet
+singing and the peal of organs; to utter her sorrow with thousands
+beside her at her own feebleness of immolation before the Spirit of all;
+to sing aloud her praise of the glory of life, and to offer by sacrifice
+and incense an emblematic homage to That from which she drew her being,
+and to whom one day she must render it again. Ah! these Christians had
+understood human nature, she had told herself a hundred times: it was
+true that they had degraded it, darkened light, poisoned thought,
+misinterpreted instinct; but they had understood that man must worship
+—must worship or sink.</p>
+
+<p>For herself she intended to go at least once a week to the little old
+church half-a-mile away from her home, to kneel there before the sunlit
+sanctuary, to meditate on sweet mysteries, to present herself to That
+which she was yearning to love, and to drink, it might be, new draughts
+of life and power.</p>
+
+<p>Ah! but the Bill must pass first.... She clenched her hands on the rail,
+and stared steadily before her on the ranks of heads, the open gangways,
+the great mace on the table, and heard, above the murmur of the crowd
+outside and the dying whispers within, her own heart beat.</p>
+
+<p>She could not see Him, she knew. He would come in from beneath through
+the door that none but He might use, straight into the seat beneath the
+canopy. But she would hear His voice—that must be joy enough for
+her....</p>
+
+<p>Ah! there was silence now outside; the soft roar had died. He had come
+then. And through swimming eyes she saw the long ridges of heads rise
+beneath her, and through drumming ears heard the murmur of many feet.
+All faces looked this way; and she watched them as a mirror to see the
+reflected light of His presence. There was a gentle sobbing somewhere in
+the air—was it her own or another’s? ... the click of a door; a great
+mellow booming over-head, shock after shock, as the huge tenor bells
+tolled their three strokes; and, in an instant, over the white faces
+passed a ripple, as if some breeze of passion shook the souls within;
+there was a swaying here and there; and a passionless voice spoke half a
+dozen words in Esperanto, out of sight:</p>
+
+<p>“Englishmen, I assent to the Bill of Worship.”</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>It was not until mid-day breakfast on the following morning that husband
+and wife met again. Oliver had slept in town and telephoned about eleven
+o’clock that he would be home immediately, bringing a guest with him:
+and shortly before noon she heard their voices in the hall.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Francis, who was presently introduced to her, seemed a harmless kind
+of man, she thought, not interesting, though he seemed in earnest about
+this Bill. It was not until breakfast was nearly over that she
+understood who he was.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t go, Mabel,” said her husband, as she made a movement to rise.
+“You will like to hear about this, I expect. My wife knows all that I
+know,” he added.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Francis smiled and bowed.</p>
+
+<p>“I may tell her about you, sir?” said Oliver again.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, certainly.”</p>
+
+<p>Then she heard that he had been a Catholic priest a few months before,
+and that Mr. Snowford was in consultation with him as to the ceremonies
+in the Abbey. She was conscious of a sudden interest as she heard this.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! do talk,” she said. “I want to hear everything.”</p>
+
+<p>It seemed that Mr. Francis had seen the new Minister of Public Worship
+that morning, and had received a definite commission from him to take
+charge of the ceremonies on the first of October. Two dozen of his
+colleagues, too, were to be enrolled among the <i>ceremoniarii</i>, at least
+temporarily—and after the event they were to be sent on a lecturing
+tour to organise the national worship throughout the country.</p>
+
+<p>Of course things would be somewhat sloppy at first, said Mr. Francis;
+but by the New Year it was hoped that all would be in order, at least in
+the cathedrals and principal towns.</p>
+
+<p>“It is important,” he said, “that this should be done as soon as
+possible. It is very necessary to make a good impression. There are
+thousands who have the instinct of worship, without knowing how to
+satisfy it.”</p>
+
+<p>“That is perfectly true,” said Oliver. “I have felt that for a long
+time. I suppose it is the deepest instinct in man.”</p>
+
+<p>“As to the ceremonies—-” went on the other, with a slightly important
+air. His eyes roved round a moment; then he dived into his
+breast-pocket, and drew out a thin red-covered book.</p>
+
+<p>“Here is the Order of Worship for the Feast of Paternity,” he said. “I
+have had it interleaved, and have made a few notes.”</p>
+
+<p>He began to turn the pages, and Mabel, with considerable excitement,
+drew her chair a little closer to listen.</p>
+
+<p>“That is right, sir,” said the other. “Now give us a little lecture.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Francis closed the book on his finger, pushed his plate aside, and
+began to discourse.</p>
+
+<p>“First,” he said, “we must remember that this ritual is based almost
+entirely upon that of the Masons. Three-quarters at least of the entire
+function will be occupied by that. With that the <i>ceremoniarii</i> will not
+interfere, beyond seeing that the insignia are ready in the vestries and
+properly put on. The proper officials will conduct the rest.... I need
+not speak of that then. The difficulties begin with the last quarter.”</p>
+
+<p>He paused, and with a glance of apology began arranging forks and
+glasses before him on the cloth.</p>
+
+<p>“Now here,” he said, “we have the old sanctuary of the abbey. In the
+place of the reredos and Communion table there will be erected the large
+altar of which the ritual speaks, with the steps leading up to it from
+the floor. Behind the altar—extending almost to the old shrine of the
+Confessor—will stand the pedestal with the emblematic figure upon it;
+and—so far as I understand from the absence of directions—each such
+figure will remain in place until the eve of the next quarterly feast.”</p>
+
+<p>“What kind of figure?” put in the girl.</p>
+
+<p>Francis glanced at her husband.</p>
+
+<p>“I understand that Mr. Markenheim has been consulted,” he said. “He will
+design and execute them. Each is to represent its own feast. This for
+Paternity—-”</p>
+
+<p>He paused again.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Mr. Francis?”</p>
+
+<p>“This one, I understand, is to be the naked figure of a man.”</p>
+
+<p>“A kind of Apollo—or Jupiter, my dear,” put in Oliver.</p>
+
+<p>Yes—that seemed all right, thought Mabel. Mr. Francis’s voice moved on
+hastily.</p>
+
+<p>“A new procession enters at this point, after the discourse,” he said.
+“It is this that will need special marshalling. I suppose no rehearsal
+will be possible?”</p>
+
+<p>“Scarcely,” said Oliver, smiling.</p>
+
+<p>The Master of Ceremonies sighed.</p>
+
+<p>“I feared not. Then we must issue very precise printed instructions.
+Those who take part will withdraw, I imagine, during the hymn, to the
+old chapel of St. Faith. That is what seems to me the best.”</p>
+
+<p>He indicated the chapel.</p>
+
+<p>“After the entrance of the procession all will take their places on
+these two sides—here—and here—while the celebrant with the sacred
+ministers—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Eh?”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Francis permitted a slight grimace to appear on his face; he flushed
+a little.</p>
+
+<p>“The President of Europe—-” He broke off. “Ah! that is the point. Will
+the President take part? That is not made clear in the ritual.”</p>
+
+<p>“We think so,” said Oliver. “He is to be approached.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, if not, I suppose the Minister of Public Worship will officiate.
+He with his supporters pass straight up to the foot of the altar.
+Remember that the figure is still veiled, and that the candles have been
+lighted during the approach of the procession. There follow the
+Aspirations printed in the ritual with the responds. These are sung by
+the choir, and will be most impressive, I think. Then the officiant
+ascends the altar alone, and, standing, declaims the Address, as it is
+called. At the close of it—at the point, that is to say, marked here
+with a star, the thurifers will leave the chapel, four in number. One
+ascends the altar, leaving the others swinging their thurifers at its
+foot—hands his to the officiant and retires. Upon the sounding of a
+bell the curtains are drawn back, the officiant tenses the image in
+silence with four double swings, and, as he ceases the choir sings the
+appointed antiphon.”</p>
+
+<p>He waved his hands.</p>
+
+<p>“The rest is easy,” he said. “We need not discuss that.”</p>
+
+<p>To Mabel’s mind even the previous ceremonies seemed easy enough. But she
+was undeceived.</p>
+
+<p>“You have no idea, Mrs. Brand,” went on the <i>ceremoniarius</i>, “of the
+difficulties involved even in such a simple matter as this. The
+stupidity of people is prodigious. I foresee a great deal of hard work
+for us all.... Who is to deliver the discourse, Mr. Brand?”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“I have no idea,” he said. “I suppose Mr. Snowford will select.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Francis looked at him doubtfully.</p>
+
+<p>“What is your opinion of the whole affair, sir?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver paused a moment.</p>
+
+<p>“I think it is necessary,” he began. “There would not be such a cry for
+worship if it was not a real need. I think too—yes, I think that on the
+whole the ritual is impressive. I do not see how it could be
+bettered....”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Oliver?” put in his wife, questioningly.</p>
+
+<p>“No—there is nothing—except ... except I hope the people will
+understand it.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Francis broke in.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear sir, worship involves a touch of mystery. You must remember
+that. It was the lack of that that made Empire Day fail in the last
+century. For myself, I think it is admirable. Of course much must depend
+on the manner in which it is presented. I see many details at present
+undecided—the colour of the curtains, and so forth. But the main plan
+is magnificent. It is simple, impressive, and, above all, it is
+unmistakable in its main lesson—-”</p>
+
+<p>“And that you take to be—?”</p>
+
+<p>“I take it that it is homage offered to Life,” said the other slowly.
+“Life under four aspects—Maternity corresponds to Christmas and the
+Christian fable; it is the feast of home, love, faithfulness. Life
+itself is approached in spring, teeming, young, passionate. Sustenance
+in midsummer, abundance, comfort, plenty, and the rest, corresponding
+somewhat to the Catholic Corpus Christi; and Paternity, the protective,
+generative, masterful idea, as winter draws on.... I understand it was a
+German thought.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” he said. “And I suppose it will be the business of the speaker to
+explain all this.”</p>
+
+<p>“I take it so. It appears to me far more suggestive than the alternative
+plan—Citizenship, Labour, and so forth. These, after all, are
+subordinate to Life.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Francis spoke with an extraordinary suppressed enthusiasm, and the
+priestly look was more evident than ever. It was plain that his heart at
+least demanded worship.</p>
+
+<p>Mabel clasped her hands suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>“I think it is beautiful,” she said softly, “and—and it is so real.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Francis turned on her with a glow in his brown eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah! yes, madam. That is it. There is no Faith, as we used to call it:
+it is the vision of Facts that no one can doubt; and the incense
+declares the sole divinity of Life as well as its mystery.”</p>
+
+<p>“What of the figures?” put in Oliver.</p>
+
+<p>“A stone image is impossible, of course. It must be clay for the
+present. Mr. Markenheim is to set to work immediately. If the figures
+are approved they can then be executed in marble.”</p>
+
+<p>Again Mabel spoke with a soft gravity.</p>
+
+<p>“It seems to me,” she said, “that this is the last thing that we needed.
+It is so hard to keep our principles clear—we must have a body for
+them—some kind of expression—-”</p>
+
+<p>She paused.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Mabel?”</p>
+
+<p>“I do not mean,” she went on, “that some cannot live without it, but
+many cannot. The unimaginative need concrete images. There must be some
+channel for their aspirations to flow through—- Ah! I cannot express
+myself!”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver nodded slowly. He, too, seemed to be in a meditative mood.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” he said. “And this, I suppose, will mould men’s thoughts too: it
+will keep out all danger of superstition.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Francis turned on him abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>“What do you think of the Pope’s new Religious Order, sir?”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver’s face took on it a tinge of grimness.</p>
+
+<p>“I think it is the worst step he ever took—for himself, I mean. Either
+it is a real effort, in which case it will provoke immense
+indignation—or it is a sham, and will discredit him. Why do you ask?”</p>
+
+<p>“I was wondering whether any disturbance will be made in the abbey.”</p>
+
+<p>“I should be sorry for the brawler.”</p>
+
+<p>A bell rang sharply from the row of telephone labels. Oliver rose and
+went to it. Mabel watched him as he touched a button—mentioned his
+name, and put his ear to the opening.</p>
+
+<p>“It is Snowford’s secretary,” he said abruptly to the two expectant
+faces. “Snowford wants to—ah!”</p>
+
+<p>Again he mentioned his name and listened. They heard a sentence or two
+from him that seemed significant.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah! that is certain, is it? I am sorry.... Yes.... Oh! but that is
+better than nothing.... Yes; he is here.... Indeed. Very well; we will
+be with you directly.”</p>
+
+<p>He looked on the tube, touched the button again, and came back to them.</p>
+
+<p>“I am sorry,” he said. “The President will take no part at the Feast.
+But it is uncertain whether he will not be present. Mr. Snowford wants
+to see us both at once, Mr. Francis. Markenheim is with him.”</p>
+
+<p>But though Mabel was herself disappointed, she thought he looked graver
+than the disappointment warranted.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="2CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>Percy Franklin, the new Cardinal-Protector of England, came slowly along
+the passage leading from the Pope’s apartments, with Hans Steinmann,
+Cardinal-Protector of Germany, blowing at his side. They entered the
+lift, still in silence, and passed out, two splendid vivid figures, one
+erect and virile, the other bent, fat, and very German from spectacles
+to flat buckled feet.</p>
+
+<p>At the door of Percy’s suite, the Englishman paused, made a little
+gesture of reverence, and went in without a word.</p>
+
+<p>A secretary, young Mr. Brent, lately from England, stood up as his
+patron came in.</p>
+
+<p>“Eminence,” he said, “the English papers are come.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy put out a hand, took a paper, passed on into his inner room, and
+sat down.</p>
+
+<p>There it all was—gigantic headlines, and four columns of print broken
+by startling title phrases in capital letters, after the fashion set by
+America a hundred years ago. No better way even yet had been found of
+misinforming the unintelligent.</p>
+
+<p>He looked at the top. It was the English edition of the <i>Era</i>. Then he
+read the headlines. They ran as follows:</p>
+
+<p>“THE NATIONAL WORSHIP. BEWILDERING SPLENDOUR. RELIGIOUS ENTHUSIASM. THE
+ABBEY AND GOD. CATHOLIC FANATIC. EX-PRIESTS AS FUNCTIONARIES.”</p>
+
+<p>He ran his eyes down the page, reading the vivid little phrases, and
+drawing from the whole a kind of impressionist view of the scenes in the
+Abbey on the previous day, of which he had already been informed by the
+telegraph, and the discussion of which had been the purpose of his
+interview just now with the Holy Father.</p>
+
+<p>There plainly was no additional news; and he was laying the paper down
+when his eye caught a name.</p>
+
+<p>“It is understood that Mr. Francis, the <i>ceremoniarius</i> (to whom the
+thanks of all are due for his reverent zeal and skill), will proceed
+shortly to the northern towns to lecture on the Ritual. It is
+interesting to reflect that this gentleman only a few months ago was
+officiating at a Catholic altar. He was assisted in his labours by
+twenty-four confreres with the same experience behind them.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good God!” said Percy aloud. Then he laid the paper down.</p>
+
+<p>But his thoughts had soon left this renegade behind, and once more he
+was running over in his mind the significance of the whole affair, and
+the advice that he had thought it his duty to give just now upstairs.</p>
+
+<p>Briefly, there was no use in disputing the fact that the inauguration of
+Pantheistic worship had been as stupendous a success in England as in
+Germany. France, by the way, was still too busy with the cult of human
+individuals, to develop larger ideas.</p>
+
+<p>But England was deeper; and, somehow, in spite of prophecy, the affair
+had taken place without even a touch of bathos or grotesqueness. It had
+been said that England was too solid and too humorous. Yet there had
+been extraordinary scenes the day before. A great murmur of enthusiasm
+had rolled round the Abbey from end to end as the gorgeous curtains ran
+back, and the huge masculine figure, majestic and overwhelming, coloured
+with exquisite art, had stood out above the blaze of candles against the
+tall screen that shrouded the shrine. Markenheim had done his work well;
+and Mr. Brand’s passionate discourse had well prepared the popular mind
+for the revelation. He had quoted in his peroration passage after
+passage from the Jewish prophets, telling of the City of Peace whose
+walls rose now before their eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is
+risen upon thee.... For behold I create new heavens and a new earth; and
+the former shall not be remembered nor come into mind.... Violence shall
+no more be heard in thy land, wasting nor destruction within thy
+borders. O thou so long afflicted, tossed with tempest and not
+comforted; behold I will lay thy stones with fair colours, and thy
+foundations with sapphires.... I will make thy windows of agates and thy
+gates of carbuncles, and all thy borders of pleasant stones. Arise,
+shine, for thy light is come.</i>”</p>
+
+<p>As the chink of the censer-chains had sounded in the stillness, with one
+consent the enormous crowd had fallen on its knees, and so remained, as
+the smoke curled up from the hands of the rebel figure who held the
+thurible. Then the organ had begun to blow, and from the huge massed
+chorus in the transepts had rolled out the anthem, broken by one
+passionate cry, from some mad Catholic. But it had been silenced in an
+instant....</p>
+
+<p>It was incredible—utterly incredible, Percy had told himself. Yet the
+incredible had happened; and England had found its worship once
+more—the necessary culmination of unimpeded subjectivity. From the
+provinces had come the like news. In cathedral after cathedral had been
+the same scenes. Markenheim’s masterpiece, executed in four days after
+the passing of the bill, had been reproduced by the ordinary machinery,
+and four thousand replicas had been despatched to every important
+centre. Telegraphic reports had streamed into the London papers that
+everywhere the new movement had been received with acclamation, and that
+human instincts had found adequate expression at last. If there had not
+been a God, mused Percy reminiscently, it would have been necessary to
+invent one. He was astonished, too, at the skill with which the new cult
+had been framed. It moved round no disputable points; there was no
+possibility of divergent political tendencies to mar its success, no
+over-insistence on citizenship, labour and the rest, for those who were
+secretly individualistic and idle. Life was the one fount and centre of
+it all, clad in the gorgeous robes of ancient worship. Of course the
+thought had been Felsenburgh’s, though a German name had been mentioned.
+It was Positivism of a kind, Catholicism without Christianity, Humanity
+worship without its inadequacy. It was not man that was worshipped but
+the Idea of man, deprived of his supernatural principle. Sacrifice,
+too, was recognised—the instinct of oblation without the demand made by
+transcendent Holiness upon the blood-guiltiness of man.... In fact,—in
+fact, said Percy, it was exactly as clever as the devil, and as old as
+Cain.</p>
+
+<p>The advice he had given to the Holy Father just now was a counsel of
+despair, or of hope; he really did not know which. He had urged that a
+stringent decree should be issued, forbidding any acts of violence on
+the part of Catholics. The faithful were to be encouraged to be patient,
+to hold utterly aloof from the worship, to say nothing unless they were
+questioned, to suffer bonds gladly. He had suggested, in company with
+the German Cardinal, that they two should return to their respective
+countries at the close of the year, to encourage the waverers; but the
+answer had been that their vocation was to remain in Rome, unless
+something unforeseen happened.</p>
+
+<p>As for Felsenburgh, there was little news. It was said that he was in
+the East; but further details were secret. Percy understood quite well
+why he had not been present at the worship as had been expected. First,
+it would have been difficult to decide between the two countries that
+had established it; and, secondly, he was too brilliant a politician to
+risk the possible association of failure with his own person; thirdly,
+there was something the matter with the East.</p>
+
+<p>This last point was difficult to understand; it had not yet become
+explicit, but it seemed as if the movement of last year had not yet run
+its course. It was undoubtedly difficult to explain the new President’s
+constant absences from his adopted continent, unless there was something
+that demanded his presence elsewhere; but the extreme discretion of the
+East and the stringent precautions taken by the Empire made it
+impossible to know any details. It was apparently connected with
+religion; there were rumours, portents, prophets, ecstatics there.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Upon Percy himself had fallen a subtle change which he himself was
+recognising. He no longer soared to confidence or sank to despair. He
+said his mass, read his enormous correspondence, meditated strictly;
+and, though he felt nothing he knew everything. There was not a tinge of
+doubt upon his faith, but neither was there emotion in it. He was as one
+who laboured in the depths of the earth, crushed even in imagination,
+yet conscious that somewhere birds sang, and the sun shone, and water
+ran. He understood his own state well enough, and perceived that he had
+come to a reality of faith that was new to him, for it was sheer
+faith—sheer apprehension of the Spiritual—without either the dangers
+or the joys of imaginative vision. He expressed it to himself by saying
+that there were three processes through which God led the soul: the
+first was that of external faith, which assents to all things presented
+by the accustomed authority, practises religion, and is neither
+interested nor doubtful; the second follows the quickening of the
+emotional and perceptive powers of the soul, and is set about with
+consolations, desires, mystical visions and perils; it is in this plane
+that resolutions are taken and vocations found and shipwrecks
+experienced; and the third, mysterious and inexpressible, consists in
+the re-enactment in the purely spiritual sphere of all that has preceded
+(as a play follows a rehearsal), in which God is grasped but not
+experienced, grace is absorbed unconsciously and even distastefully, and
+little by little the inner spirit is conformed in the depths of its
+being, far within the spheres of emotion and intellectual perception, to
+the image and mind of Christ.</p>
+
+<p>So he lay back now, thinking, a long, stately, scarlet figure, in his
+deep chair, staring out over Holy Rome seen through the misty September
+haze. How long, he wondered, would there be peace? To his eyes even
+already the air was black with doom.</p>
+
+<p>He struck his hand-bell at last.</p>
+
+<p>“Bring me Father Blackmore’s Last report,” he said, as his secretary
+appeared.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>Percy’s intuitive faculties were keen by nature and had been vastly
+increased by cultivation. He had never forgotten Father Blackmore’s
+shrewd remarks of a year ago; and one of his first acts as
+Cardinal-Protector had been to appoint that priest on the list of
+English correspondents. Hitherto he had received some dozen letters, and
+not one of them had been without its grain of gold. Especially he had
+noticed that one warning ran through them all, namely, that sooner or
+later there would be some overt act of provocation on the part of
+English Catholics; and it was the memory of this that had inspired his
+vehement entreaties to the Pope this morning. As in the Roman and
+African persecutions of the first three centuries, so now, the greatest
+danger to the Catholic community lay not in the unjust measures of the
+Government but in the indiscreet zeal of the faithful themselves. The
+world desired nothing better than a handle to its blade. The scabbard
+was already cast away.</p>
+
+<p>When the young man had brought the four closely written sheets, dated
+from Westminster, the previous evening, Percy turned at once to the last
+paragraph before the usual Recommendations.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Brand’s late secretary, Mr. Phillips, whom your Eminence commended
+to me, has been to see me two or three times. He is in a curious state.
+He has no faith; yet, intellectually, he sees no hope anywhere but in
+the Catholic Church. He has even begged for admission to the Order of
+Christ Crucified, which of course is impossible. But there is no doubt
+he is sincere; otherwise he would have professed Catholicism. I have
+introduced him to many Catholics in the hope that they may help him. I
+should much wish your Eminence to see him.”</p>
+
+<p>Before leaving England, Percy had followed up the acquaintance he had
+made so strangely over Mrs. Brand’s reconciliation to God, and, scarcely
+knowing why, had commended him to the priest. He had not been
+particularly impressed by Mr. Phillips; he had thought him a timid,
+undecided creature, yet he had been struck by the extremely unselfish
+action by which the man had forfeited his position. There must surely be
+a good deal behind.</p>
+
+<p>And now the impulse had come to send for him. Perhaps the spiritual
+atmosphere of Rome would precipitate faith. In any case, the
+conversation of Mr. Brand’s late secretary might be instructive.</p>
+
+<p>He struck the bell again.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Brent,” he said, “in your next letter to Father Blackmore, tell him
+that I wish to see the man whom he proposed to send—Mr. Phillips.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Eminence.”</p>
+
+<p>“There is no hurry. He can send him at his leisure.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Eminence.”</p>
+
+<p>“But he must not come till January. That will be time enough, unless
+there is urgent reason.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Eminence.”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The development of the Order of Christ Crucified had gone forward with
+almost miraculous success. The appeal issued by the Holy Father
+throughout Christendom had been as fire among stubble. It seemed as if
+the Christian world had reached exactly that point of tension at which a
+new organisation of this nature was needed, and the response had
+startled even the most sanguine. Practically the whole of Rome with its
+suburbs—three millions in all—had run to the enrolling stations in
+St. Peter’s as starving men run to food, and desperate to the storming
+of a breach. For day after day the Pope himself had sat enthroned below
+the altar of the Chair, a glorious, radiant figure, growing ever white
+and weary towards evening, imparting his Blessing with a silent sign to
+each individual of the vast crowd that swarmed up between the barriers,
+fresh from fast and Communion, to kneel before his new Superior and kiss
+the Pontifical ring. The requirements had been as stringent as
+circumstances allowed. Each postulant was obliged to go to confession to
+a specially authorised priest, who examined sharply into motives and
+sincerity, and only one-third of the applicants had been accepted. This,
+the authorities pointed out to the scornful, was not an excessive
+proportion; for it was to be remembered that most of those who had
+presented themselves had already undergone a sifting fierce as fire. Of
+the three millions in Rome, two millions at least were exiles for their
+faith, preferring to live obscure and despised in the shadow of God
+rather than in the desolate glare of their own infidel countries.</p>
+
+<p>On the fifth evening of the enrolment of novices an astonishing incident
+had taken place. The old King of Spain (Queen Victoria’s second son),
+already on the edge of the grave, had just risen and tottered before his
+Ruler; it seemed for an instant as if he would fall, when the Pope
+himself, by a sudden movement, had risen, caught him in his arms and
+kissed him; and then, still standing, had spread his arms abroad and
+delivered a <i>fervorino</i> such as never had been heard before in the
+history of the basilica.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Benedictus Dominus!</i>” he cried, with upraised face and shining eyes.
+“Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for He hath visited and redeemed His
+people. I, John, Vicar of Christ, Servant of Servants, and sinner among
+sinners, bid you be of good courage in the Name of God. By Him Who hung
+on the Cross, I promise eternal life to all who persevere in His Order.
+He Himself has said it. <i>To him that overcometh I will give a crown of
+life.</i></p>
+
+<p>“Little children; fear not him that killeth the body. There is no more
+that he can do. God and His Mother are amongst us....”</p>
+
+<p>So his voice had poured on, telling the enormous awe-stricken crowd of
+the blood that already had been shed on the place where they stood, of
+the body of the Apostle that lay scarcely fifty yards away, urging,
+encouraging, inspiring. They had vowed themselves to death, if that were
+God’s Will; and if not, the intention would be taken for the deed. They
+were under obedience now; their wills were no longer theirs but God’s;
+under chastity—for their bodies were bought with a price; under
+poverty, and theirs was the kingdom of heaven.</p>
+
+<p>He had ended by a great silent Benediction of the City and the World:
+and there were not wanting a half-dozen of the faithful who had seen,
+they thought, a white shape in the form of a bird that hung in the air
+while he spoke white as a mist, translucent as water....</p>
+
+<p>The consequent scenes in the city and suburbs had been unparalleled, for
+thousands of families had with one consent dissolved human ties.
+Husbands had found their way to the huge houses on the Quirinal set
+apart for them; wives to the Aventine; while the children, as confident
+as their parents, had swarmed over to the Sisters of St. Vincent who had
+received at the Pope’s orders the gift of three streets to shelter them
+in. Everywhere the smoke of burning went up in the squares where
+household property, rendered useless by the vows of poverty, were
+consumed by their late owners; and daily long trains moved out from the
+station outside the walls carrying jubilant loads of those who were
+despatched by the Pope’s delegates to be the salt of men, consumed in
+their function, and leaven plunged in the vast measures of the infidel
+world. And that infidel world welcomed their coming with bitter
+laughter.</p>
+
+<p>From the rest of Christendom had poured in news of success. The same
+precautions had been observed as in Rome, for the directions issued were
+precise and searching; and day after day came in the long rolls of the
+new Religious drawn up by the diocesan superiors.</p>
+
+<p>Within the last few days, too, other lists had arrived, more glorious
+than all. Not only did reports stream in that already the Order was
+beginning its work and that already broken communications were being
+re-established, that devoted missioners were in process of organising
+themselves, and that hope was once more rising in the most desperate
+hearts; but better than all this was the tidings of victory in another
+sphere. In Paris forty of the new-born Order had been burned alive in
+one day in the Latin quarter, before the Government intervened. From
+Spain, Holland, Russia had come in other names. In Dusseldorf eighteen
+men and boys, surprised at their singing of Prime in the church of Saint
+Laurence, had been cast down one by one into the city-sewer, each
+chanting as he vanished:</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Christi Fili Dei vivi miserere nobis,</i>”</p>
+
+<p>and from the darkness had come up the same broken song till it was
+silenced with stones. Meanwhile, the German prisons were thronged with
+the first batches of recusants. The world shrugged its shoulders, and
+declared that they had brought it on themselves, while yet it deprecated
+mob-violence, and requested the attention of the authorities and the
+decisive repression of this new conspiracy of superstition. And within
+St. Peter’s Church the workmen were busy at the long rows of new altars,
+affixing to the stone diptychs the brass-forged names of those who had
+already fulfilled their vows and gained their crowns.</p>
+
+<p>It was the first word of God’s reply to the world’s challenge.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>As Christmas drew on it was announced that the Sovereign pontiff would
+sing mass on the last day of the year, at the papal altar of Saint
+Peter’s, on behalf of the Order; and preparations began to be made.</p>
+
+<p>It was to be a kind of public inauguration of the new enterprise; and,
+to the astonishment of all, a special summons was issued to all members
+of the Sacred College throughout the world to be present, unless
+hindered by sickness. It seemed as if the Pope were determined that
+the world should understand that war was declared; for, although the
+command would not involve the absence of any Cardinal from his province
+for more than five days, yet many inconveniences must surely result.
+However, it had been said, and it was to be done.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It was a strange Christmas.</p>
+
+<p>Percy was ordered to attend the Pope at his second mass, and himself
+said his three at midnight in his own private oratory. For the first
+time in his life he saw that of which he had heard so often, the
+wonderful old-world Pontifical procession, lit by torches, going through
+the streets from the Lateran to St. Anastasia, where the Pope for the
+last few years had restored the ancient custom discontinued for nearly a
+century-and-a-half. The little basilica was reserved, of course, in
+every corner for the peculiarly privileged; but the streets outside
+along the whole route from the Cathedral to the church—and, indeed, the
+other two sides of the triangle as well, were one dense mass of silent
+heads and flaming torches. The Holy Father was attended at the altar by
+the usual sovereigns; and Percy from his place watched the heavenly
+drama of Christ’s Passion enacted through the veil of His nativity at
+the hands of His old Angelic Vicar. It was hard to perceive Calvary
+here; it was surely the air of Bethlehem, the celestial light, not the
+supernatural darkness, that beamed round the simple altar. It was the
+Child called Wonderful that lay there beneath the old hands, rather than
+the stricken Man of Sorrows.</p>
+
+<p><i>Adeste fideles</i> sang the choir from the tribune.—Come, let us adore,
+rather than weep; let us exult, be content, be ourselves like little
+children. As He for us became a child, let us become childlike for Him.
+Let us put on the garments of infancy and the shoes of peace. <i>For the
+Lord hath reigned; He is clothed with beauty: the Lord is clothed with
+strength and hath girded Himself. He hath established the world which
+shall not be moved: His throne is prepared from of old. He is from
+everlasting. Rejoice greatly then, O daughter of Zion, shout for joy, O
+daughter of Jerusalem; behold thy King cometh, to thee, the Holy One,
+the Saviour of the world.</i> It will be time, then, to suffer by and bye,
+when the Prince of this world cometh upon the Prince of Heaven.</p>
+
+<p>So Percy mused, standing apart in his gorgeousness, striving to make
+himself little and simple. Surely nothing was too hard for God! Might
+not this mystic Birth once more do what it had done before—bring into
+subjection through the might of its weakness every proud thing that
+exalts itself above all that is called God? It had drawn wise Kings once
+across the desert, as well as shepherds from their flocks. It had kings
+about it now, kneeling with the poor and foolish, kings who had laid
+down their crowns, who brought the gold of loyal hearts, the myrrh of
+desired martyrdom, and the incense of a pure faith. Could not republics,
+too, lay aside their splendour, mobs be tamed, selfishness deny itself,
+and wisdom confess its ignorance?...</p>
+
+<p>Then he remembered Felsenburgh; and his heart sickened within him.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>Six days later, Percy rose as usual, said his mass, breakfasted, and
+sat down to say office until his servant should summon him to vest for
+the Pontifical mass.</p>
+
+<p>He had learned to expect bad news now so constantly—of apostasies,
+deaths, losses—that the lull of the previous week had come to him with
+extraordinary refreshment. It appeared to him as if his musings in St.
+Anastasia had been truer than he thought, and that the sweetness of the
+old feast had not yet wholly lost its power even over a world that
+denied its substance. For nothing at all had happened of importance. A
+few more martyrdoms had been chronicled, but they had been isolated
+cases; and of Felsenburgh there had been no tidings at all. Europe
+confessed its ignorance of his business.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, to-morrow, Percy knew very well, would be a day of
+extraordinary moment in England and Germany at any rate; for in England
+it was appointed as the first occasion of compulsory worship throughout
+the country, while it was the second in Germany. Men and women would
+have to declare themselves now.</p>
+
+<p>He had seen on the previous evening a photograph of the image that was
+to be worshipped next day in the Abbey; and, in a fit of loathing, had
+torn it to shreds. It represented a nude woman, huge and majestic,
+entrancingly lovely, with head and shoulders thrown back, as one who
+sees a strange and heavenly vision, arms downstretched and hands a
+little raised, with wide fingers, as in astonishment—the whole
+attitude, with feet and knees pressed together, suggestive of
+expectation, hope and wonder; in devilish mockery her long hair was
+crowned with twelve stars. This, then, was the spouse of the other, the
+embodiment of man’s ideal maternity, still waiting for her child....</p>
+
+<p>When the white scraps lay like poisonous snow at his feet, he had sprung
+across the room to his <i>prie-dieu</i>, and fallen there in an agony of
+reparation.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! Mother, Mother!” he cried to the stately Queen of Heaven who, with
+Her true Son long ago in Her arms, looked down on him from Her
+bracket—no more than that.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>But he was still again this morning, and celebrated Saint Silvester,
+Pope and Martyr, the last saint in the procession of the Christian year,
+with tolerable equanimity. The sights of last night, the throng of
+officials, the stately, scarlet, unfamiliar figures of the Cardinals who
+had come in from north, south, east and west—these helped to reassure
+him again—unreasonably, as he knew, yet effectually. The very air was
+electric with expectation. All night the piazza had been crowded by a
+huge, silent mob waiting till the opening of the doors at seven o’clock.
+Now the church itself was full, and the piazza full again. Far down the
+street to the river, so far as he could see as he had leaned from his
+window just now, lay that solemn motionless pavement of heads. The roof
+of the colonnade showed a fringe of them, the house-tops were black—and
+this in the bitter cold of a clear, frosty morning, for it was announced
+that after mass and the proceeding of the members of the Order past the
+Pontifical Throne, the Pope would give Apostolic Benediction to the City
+and the World.</p>
+
+<p>Percy finished Terce, closed his book and lay back; his servant would be
+here in a minute now.</p>
+
+<p>His mind began to run over the function, and he reflected that the
+entire Sacred College (with the exception of the Cardinal-Protector of
+Jerusalem, detained by sickness), numbering sixty-four members, would
+take part. This would mean an unique sight by and bye. Eight years
+before, he remembered, after the freedom of Rome, there had been a
+similar assembly; but the Cardinals at that time amounted to no more
+than fifty-three all told, and four had been absent.</p>
+
+<p>Then he heard voices in his ante-room, a quick step, and a loud English
+expostulation. That was curious, and he sat up.</p>
+
+<p>Then he heard a sentence.</p>
+
+<p>“His Eminence must go to vest; it is useless.”</p>
+
+<p>There was a sharp answer, a faint scuffle, and a snatch at the handle.
+This was indecent; so Percy stood up, made three strides of it to the
+door, and tore it open.</p>
+
+<p>A man stood there, whom at first he did not recognise, pale and
+disordered.</p>
+
+<p>“Why—-” began Percy, and recoiled.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Phillips!” he said.</p>
+
+<p>The other threw out his hands.</p>
+
+<p>“It is I, sir—your Eminence—this moment arrived. It is life and death.
+Your servant tells me—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Who sent you?”</p>
+
+<p>“Father Blackmore.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good news or bad?”</p>
+
+<p>The man rolled his eyes towards the servant, who still stood erect and
+offended a yard away; and Percy understood.</p>
+
+<p>He put his hand on the other’s arm, drawing him through the doorway.</p>
+
+<p>“Tap upon this door in two minutes, James,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>They passed across the polished floor together; Percy went to his usual
+place in the window, leaned against the shutter, and spoke.</p>
+
+<p>“Tell me in one sentence, sir,” he said to the breathless man.</p>
+
+<p>“There is a plot among the Catholics. They intend destroying the Abbey
+to-morrow with explosives. I knew that the Pope—-”</p>
+
+<p>Percy cut him short with a gesture.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="2CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>The volor-stage was comparatively empty this afternoon, as the little
+party of six stepped out on to it from the lift. There was nothing to
+distinguish these from ordinary travellers. The two Cardinals of Germany
+and England were wrapped in plain furs, without insignia of any kind;
+their chaplains stood near them, while the two men-servants hurried
+forward with the bags to secure a private compartment.</p>
+
+<p>The four kept complete silence, watching the busy movements of the
+officials on board, staring unseeingly at the sleek, polished monster
+that lay netted in steel at their feet, and the great folded fins that
+would presently be cutting the thin air at a hundred and fifty miles an
+hour.</p>
+
+<p>Then Percy, by a sudden movement, turned from the others, went to the
+open window that looked over Rome, and leaned there with his elbows on
+the sill, looking.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It was a strange view before him.</p>
+
+<p>It was darkening now towards sunset, and the sky, primrose-green
+overhead, deepened to a clear tawny orange above the horizon, with a
+sanguine line or two at the edge, and beneath that lay the deep evening
+violet of the city, blotted here and there by the black of cypresses and
+cut by the thin leafless pinnacles of a poplar grove that aspired
+without the walls. But right across the picture rose the enormous dome,
+of an indescribable tint; it was grey, it was violet—it was what the
+eye chose to make it—and through it, giving its solidity the air of a
+bubble, shone the southern sky, flushed too with faint orange. It was
+this that was supreme and dominant; the serrated line of domes, spires
+and pinnacles, the crowded roofs beneath, in the valley dell’ Inferno,
+the fairy hills far away—all were but the annexe to this mighty
+tabernacle of God. Already lights were beginning to shine, as for thirty
+centuries they had shone; thin straight skeins of smoke were ascending
+against the darkening sky. The hum of this Mother of cities was
+beginning to be still, for the keen air kept folks indoors; and the
+evening peace was descending that closed another day and another year.
+Beneath in the narrow streets Percy could see tiny figures, hurrying
+like belated ants; the crack of a whip, the cry of a woman, the wail of
+a child came up to this immense elevation like details of a murmur from
+another world. They, too, would soon be quiet, and there would be peace.</p>
+
+<p>A heavy bell beat faintly from far away, and the drowsy city turned to
+murmur its good-night to the Mother of God. From a thousand towers came
+the tiny melody, floating across the great air spaces, in a thousand
+accents, the solemn bass of St. Peter’s, the mellow tenor of the
+Lateran, the rough cry from some old slum church, the peevish tinkle
+of convents and chapels—all softened and made mystical in this grave
+evening air—it was the wedding of delicate sound and clear light.
+Above, the liquid orange sky; beneath, this sweet, subdued ecstasy of
+bells.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Alma Redemptoris Mater</i>,” whispered Percy, his eyes wet with tears.
+“<i>Gentle Mother of the Redeemer—the open door of the sky, star of the
+sea—have mercy on sinners.</i> <i>The Angel of the Lord announced it to
+Mary, and she conceived of the Holy Ghost</i>.... <i>Pour, therefore, Lord,
+Thy grace into our hearts. Let us, who know Christ’s incarnation, rise
+through passion and cross to the glory of Resurrection—through the
+same Christ our Lord.</i>”</p>
+
+<p>Another bell clanged sharply close at hand, calling him down to earth,
+and wrong, and labour and grief; and he turned to see the motionless
+volor itself one blaze of brilliant internal light, and the two priests
+following the German Cardinal across the gangway.</p>
+
+<p>It was the rear compartment that the men had taken; and when he had seen
+that the old man was comfortable, still without a word he passed out
+again into the central passage to see the last of Rome.</p>
+
+<p>The exit-door had now been snapped, and as Percy stood at the opposite
+window looking out at the high wall that would presently sink beneath
+him, throughout the whole of the delicate frame began to run the
+vibration of the electric engine. There was the murmur of talking
+somewhere, a heavy step shook the floor, a bell clanged again, twice,
+and a sweet wind-chord sounded. Again it sounded; the vibration ceased,
+and the edge of the high wall against the tawny sky on which he had
+fixed his eyes sank suddenly like a dropped bar, and he staggered a
+little in his place. A moment later the dome rose again, and itself
+sank, the city, a fringe of towers and a mass of dark roofs, pricked
+with light, span like a whirlpool; the jewelled stars themselves sprang
+this way and that; and with one more long cry the marvellous machine
+righted itself, beat with its wings, and settled down, with the note of
+the flying air passing through rising shrillness into vibrant silence,
+to its long voyage to the north.</p>
+
+<p>Further and further sank the city behind; it was a patch now: greyness
+on black. The sky seemed to grow more huge and all-containing as the
+earth relapsed into darkness; it glowed like a vast dome of wonderful
+glass, darkening even as it glowed; and as Percy dropped his eyes once
+more round the extreme edge of the car the city was but a line and a
+bubble—a line and a swelling—a line, and nothingness.</p>
+
+<p>He drew a long breath, and went back to his friends.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>“Tell me again,” said the old Cardinal, when the two were settled down
+opposite to one another, and the chaplains were gone to another
+compartment. “Who is this man?”</p>
+
+<p>“This man? He was secretary to Oliver Brand, one of our politicians. He
+fetched me to old Mrs. Brand’s death bed, and lost his place in
+consequence. He is in journalism now. He is perfectly honest. No, he is
+not a Catholic, though he longs to be one. That is why they confided in
+him.”</p>
+
+<p>“And they?”</p>
+
+<p>“I know nothing of them, except that they are a desperate set. They have
+enough faith to act, but not enough to be patient.... I suppose they
+thought this man would sympathise. But unfortunately he has a
+conscience, and he also sees that any attempt of this kind would be the
+last straw on the back of toleration. Eminence, do you realise how
+violent the feeling is against us?”</p>
+
+<p>The old man shook his head lamentably.</p>
+
+<p>“Do I not?” he murmured. “And my Germans are in it? Are you sure?”</p>
+
+<p>“Eminence, it is a vast plot. It has been simmering for months. There
+have been meetings every week. They have kept the secret marvellously.
+Your Germans only delayed that the blow might be more complete. And now,
+to-morrow—-” Percy drew back with a despairing gesture.</p>
+
+<p>“And the Holy Father?”</p>
+
+<p>“I went to him as soon as mass was over. He withdrew all opposition, and
+sent for you. It is our one chance, Eminence.”</p>
+
+<p>“And you think our plan will hinder it?”</p>
+
+<p>“I have no idea, but I can think of nothing else. I shall go straight to
+the Archbishop and tell him all. We arrive, I believe, at three o’clock,
+and you in Berlin about seven, I suppose, by German time. The function
+is fixed for eleven. By eleven, then, we shall have done all that is
+possible. The Government will know, and they will know, too, that we are
+innocent in Rome. I imagine they will cause it to be announced that the
+Cardinal-Protector and the Archbishop, with his coadjutors, will be
+present in the sacristies. They will double every guard; they will
+parade volors overhead—and then—well! in God’s hands be the rest.”</p>
+
+<p>“Do you think the conspirators will attempt it?”</p>
+
+<p>“I have no idea,” said Percy shortly.</p>
+
+<p>“I understand they have alternative plans.”</p>
+
+<p>“Just so. If all is clear, they intend dropping the explosive from
+above; if not, at least three men have offered to sacrifice themselves
+by taking it into the Abbey themselves.... And you, Eminence?”</p>
+
+<p>The old man eyed him steadily.</p>
+
+<p>“My programme is yours,” he said. “Eminence, have you considered the
+effect in either case? If nothing happens—-”</p>
+
+<p>“If nothing happens we shall be accused of a fraud, of seeking to
+advertise ourselves. If anything happens—well, we shall all go before
+God together. Pray God it may be the second,” he added passionately.</p>
+
+<p>“It will be at least easier to bear,” observed the old man.</p>
+
+<p>“I beg your pardon, Eminence. I should not have said that.”</p>
+
+<p>There fell a silence between the two, in which no sound was heard but
+the faint untiring vibration of the screw, and the sudden cough of a man
+in the next compartment. Percy leaned his head wearily on his hand, and
+stared from the window.</p>
+
+<p>The earth was now dark beneath them—an immense emptiness; above, the
+huge engulfing sky was still faintly luminous, and through the high
+frosty mist through which they moved stars glimmered now and again, as
+the car swayed and tacked across the wind.</p>
+
+<p>“It will be cold among the Alps,” murmured Percy. Then he broke off.
+“And I have not one shred of evidence,” he said; “nothing but the word
+of a man.”</p>
+
+<p>“And you are sure?”</p>
+
+<p>“I am sure.”</p>
+
+<p>“Eminence,” said the German suddenly, staring straight into his face,
+“the likeness is extraordinary.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy smiled listlessly. He was tired of bearing that.</p>
+
+<p>“What do you make of it?” persisted the other.</p>
+
+<p>“I have been asked that before,” said Percy. “I have no views.”</p>
+
+<p>“It seems to me that God means something,” murmured the German heavily,
+still staring at him.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, Eminence?”</p>
+
+<p>“A kind of antithesis—a reverse of the medal. I do not know.”</p>
+
+<p>Again there was silence. A chaplain looked in through the glazed door, a
+homely, blue-eyed German, and was waved away once more.</p>
+
+<p>“Eminence,” said the old man abruptly, “there is surely more to speak
+of. Plans to be made.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“There are no plans to be made,” he said. “We know nothing but the
+fact—no names—nothing. We—we are like children in a tiger’s cage. And
+one of us has just made a gesture in the tiger’s face.”</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose we shall communicate with one another?”</p>
+
+<p>“If we are in existence.”</p>
+
+<p>It was curious how Percy took the lead. He had worn his scarlet for
+about three months, and his companion for twelve years; yet it was the
+younger who dictated plans and arranged. He was scarcely conscious of
+its strangeness, however. Ever since the shocking news of the morning,
+when a new mine had been sprung under the shaking Church, and he had
+watched the stately ceremonial, the gorgeous splendour, the dignified,
+tranquil movements of the Pope and his court, with a secret that burned
+his heart and brain—above all, since that quick interview in which old
+plans had been reversed and a startling decision formed, and a blessing
+given and received, and a farewell looked not uttered—all done in
+half-an-hour—his whole nature had concentrated itself into one keen
+tense force, like a coiled spring. He felt power tingling to his
+finger-tips—power and the dulness of an immense despair. Every prop had
+been cut, every brace severed; he, the City of Rome, the Catholic
+Church, the very supernatural itself, seemed to hang now on one single
+thing—the Finger of God. And if that failed—well, nothing would ever
+matter any more....</p>
+
+<p>He was going now to one of two things—ignominy or death. There was no
+third thing—unless, indeed, the conspirators were actually taken with
+their instruments upon them. But that was impossible. Either they would
+refrain, knowing that God’s ministers would fall with them, and in that
+case there would be the ignominy of a detected fraud, of a miserable
+attempt to win credit. Or they would not refrain; they would count the
+death of a Cardinal and a few bishops a cheap price to pay for
+revenge—and in that case well, there was Death and Judgment. But Percy
+had ceased to fear. No ignominy could be greater than that which he
+already bore—the ignominy of loneliness and discredit. And death could
+be nothing but sweet—it would at least be knowledge and rest. He was
+willing to risk all on God.</p>
+
+<p>The other, with a little gesture of apology, took out his office book
+presently, and began to read.</p>
+
+<p>Percy looked at him with an immense envy. Ah! if only he were as old as
+that! He could bear a year or two more of this misery, but not fifty
+years, he thought. It was an almost endless vista that (even if things
+went well) opened before him, of continual strife, self-repression,
+energy, misrepresentation from his enemies. The Church was sinking
+further every day. What if this new spasm of fervour were no more than
+the dying flare of faith? How could he bear that? He would have to see
+the tide of atheism rise higher and more triumphant every day;
+Felsenburgh had given it an impetus of whose end there was no
+prophesying. Never before had a single man wielded the full power of
+democracy. Then once more he looked forward to the morrow. Oh! if it
+could but end in death!... <i>Beati mortui qui in Domino moriuntur!</i> ...</p>
+
+<p>It was no good; it was cowardly to think in this fashion. After all, God
+was God—He takes up the isles as a very little thing.</p>
+
+<p>Percy took out his office book, found Prime and St. Sylvester, signed
+himself with the cross, and began to pray. A minute later the two
+chaplains slipped in once more, and sat down; and all was silent, save
+for that throb of the screw, and the strange whispering rush of air
+outside.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>It was about nineteen o’clock that the ruddy English conductor looked in
+at the doorway, waking Percy from his doze.</p>
+
+<p>“Dinner will be served in half-an-hour, gentlemen,” he said (speaking
+Esperanto, as the rule was on international cars). “We do not stop at
+Turin to-night.”</p>
+
+<p>He shut the door and went out, and the sound of closing doors came down
+the corridor as he made the same announcement to each compartment.</p>
+
+<p>There were no passengers to descend at Turin, then, reflected Percy; and
+no doubt a wireless message had been received that there were none to
+come on board either. That was good news: it would give him more time in
+London. It might even enable Cardinal Steinmann to catch an earlier
+volor from Paris to Berlin; but he was not sure how they ran. It was a
+pity that the German had not been able to catch the thirteen o’clock
+from Rome to Berlin direct. So he calculated, in a kind of superficial
+insensibility.</p>
+
+<p>He stood up presently to stretch himself. Then he passed out and along
+the corridor to the lavatory to wash his hands.</p>
+
+<p>He became fascinated by the view as he stood before the basin at the
+rear of the car, for even now they were passing over Turin. It was a
+blur of light, vivid and beautiful, that shone beneath him in the midst
+of this gulf of darkness, sweeping away southwards into the gloom as the
+car sped on towards the Alps. How little, he thought, seemed this great
+city seen from above; and yet, how mighty it was! It was from that
+glimmer, already five miles behind, that Italy was controlled; in one of
+these dolls’ houses of which he had caught but a glimpse, men sat in
+council over souls and bodies, and abolished God, and smiled at His
+Church. And God allowed it all, and made no sign. It was there that
+Felsenburgh had been, a month or two ago—Felsenburgh, his double! And
+again the mental sword tore and stabbed at his heart.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>A few minutes later, the four ecclesiastics were sitting at their round
+table in a little screened compartment of the dining-room in the bows of
+the air-ship. It was an excellent dinner, served, as usual, from the
+kitchen in the bowels of the volor, and rose, course by course, with a
+smooth click, into the centre of the table. There was a bottle of red
+wine to each diner, and both table and chairs swung easily to the very
+slight motion of the ship. But they did not talk much, for there was
+only one subject possible to the two cardinals, and the chaplains had
+not yet been admitted into the full secret.</p>
+
+<p>It was growing cold now, and even the hot-air foot-rests did not quite
+compensate for the deathly iciness of the breath that began to stream
+down from the Alps, which the ship was now approaching at a slight
+incline. It was necessary to rise at least nine thousand feet from the
+usual level, in order to pass the frontier of the Mont Cenis at a safe
+angle; and at the same time it was necessary to go a little slower over
+the Alps themselves, owing to the extreme rarity of the air, and the
+difficulty in causing the screw to revolve sufficiently quickly to
+counteract it.</p>
+
+<p>“There will be clouds to-night,” said a voice clear and distinct from
+the passage, as the door swung slightly to a movement of the car.</p>
+
+<p>Percy got up and closed it.</p>
+
+<p>The German Cardinal began to grow a little fidgety towards the end of
+dinner.</p>
+
+<p>“I shall go back,” he said at last. “I shall be better in my fur rug.”</p>
+
+<p>His chaplain dutifully went after him, leaving his own dinner
+unfinished, and Percy was left alone with Father Corkran, his English
+chaplain lately from Scotland.</p>
+
+<p>He finished his wine, ate a couple of figs, and then sat staring out
+through the plate-glass window in front.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah!” he said. “Excuse me, father. There are the Alps at last.”</p>
+
+<p>The front of the car consisted of three divisions, in the centre of one
+of which stood the steersman, his eyes looking straight ahead, and his
+hands upon the wheel. On either side of him, separated from him by
+aluminium walls, was contrived a narrow slip of a compartment, with a
+long curved window at the height of a man’s eyes, through which a
+magnificent view could be obtained. It was to one of these that Percy
+went, passing along the corridor, and seeing through half-opened doors
+other parties still over their wine. He pushed the spring door on the
+left and went through.</p>
+
+<p>He had crossed the Alps three times before in his life, and well
+remembered the extraordinary effect they had had on him, especially as
+he had once seen them from a great altitude upon a clear day—an
+eternal, immeasurable sea of white ice, broken by hummocks and wrinkles
+that from below were soaring peaks named and reverenced; and, beyond,
+the spherical curve of the earth’s edge that dropped in a haze of air
+into unutterable space. But this time they seemed more amazing than
+ever, and he looked out on them with the interest of a sick child.</p>
+
+<p>The car was now ascending; rapidly towards the pass up across the huge
+tumbled slopes, ravines, and cliffs that lie like outworks of the
+enormous wall. Seen from this great height they were in themselves
+comparatively insignificant, but they at least suggested the vastness of
+the bastions of which they were no more than buttresses. As Percy
+turned, he could see the moonless sky alight with frosty stars, and the
+dimness of the illumination made the scene even more impressive; but as
+he turned again, there was a change. The vast air about him seemed now
+to be perceived through frosted glass. The velvet blackness of the pine
+forests had faded to heavy grey, the pale glint of water and ice seen
+and gone again in a moment, the monstrous nakedness of rock spires and
+slopes, rising towards him and sliding away again beneath with a
+crawling motion—all these had lost their distinctness of outline, and
+were veiled in invisible white. As he looked yet higher to right and
+left the sight became terrifying, for the giant walls of rock rushing
+towards him, the huge grotesque shapes towering on all sides, ran upward
+into a curtain of cloud visible only from the dancing radiance thrown
+upon it by the brilliantly lighted car. Even as he looked, two straight
+fingers of splendour, resembling horns, shot out, as the bow
+searchlights were turned on; and the car itself, already travelling at
+half-speed, dropped to quarter-speed, and began to sway softly from side
+to side as the huge air-planes beat the mist through which they moved,
+and the antennae of light pierced it. Still up they went, and on—yet
+swift enough to let Percy see one great pinnacle rear itself, elongate,
+sink down into a cruel needle, and vanish into nothingness a thousand
+feet below. The motion grew yet more nauseous, as the car moved up at a
+sharp angle preserving its level, simultaneously rising, advancing and
+swaying. Once, hoarse and sonorous, an unfrozen torrent roared like a
+beast, it seemed within twenty yards, and was dumb again on the instant.
+Now, too, the horns began to cry, long, lamentable hootings, ringing
+sadly in that echoing desolation like the wail of wandering souls; and
+as Percy, awed beyond feeling, wiped the gathering moisture from the
+glass, and stared again, it appeared as if he floated now, motionless
+except for the slight rocking beneath his feet, in a world of whiteness,
+as remote from earth as from heaven, poised in hopeless infinite space,
+blind, alone, frozen, lost in a white hell of desolation.</p>
+
+
+<p>Once, as he stared, a huge whiteness moved towards him through the veil,
+slid slowly sideways and down, disclosing, as the car veered, a gigantic
+slope smooth as oil, with one cluster of black rock cutting it like the
+fingers of a man’s hand groping from a mountainous wave.</p>
+
+<p>Then, as once more the car cried aloud like a lost sheep, there answered
+it, it seemed scarcely ten yards away, first one windy scream of dismay,
+another and another; a clang of bells, a chorus broke out; and the air
+was full of the beating of wings.</p>
+
+
+<h4>IV</h4>
+
+<p>There was one horrible instant before a clang of a bell, the answering
+scream, and a whirling motion showed that the steersman was alert. Then
+like a stone the car dropped, and Percy clutched at the rail before him
+to steady the terrible sensation of falling into emptiness. He could
+hear behind him the crash of crockery, the bumping of heavy bodies, and
+as the car again checked on its wide wings, a rush of footsteps broke
+out and a cry or two of dismay. Outside, but high and far away, the
+hooting went on; the air was full of it, and in a flash he recognised
+that it could not be one or ten or twenty cars, but at least a hundred
+that had answered the call, and that somewhere overhead were hooting and
+flapping. The invisible ravines and cliffs on all sides took up the
+crying; long wails whooped and moaned and died amid a clash of bells,
+further and further every instant, but now in every direction, behind,
+above, in front, and far to right and left. Once more the car began to
+move, sinking in a long still curve towards the face of the mountain;
+and as it checked, and began to sway again on its huge wings, he turned
+to the door, seeing as he did so, through the cloudy windows in the
+glow of light, a spire of rock not thirty feet below rising from the
+mist, and one smooth shoulder of snow curving away into invisibility.</p>
+
+<p>Within, the car shewed brutal signs of the sudden check: the doors of
+the dining compartments, as he passed along, were flung wide; glasses,
+plates, pools of wine and tumbled fruit rolled to and fro on the heaving
+floors; one man, sitting helplessly on the ground, rolled vacant,
+terrified eyes upon the priest. He glanced in at the door through which
+he had come just now, and Father Corkran staggered up from his seat and
+came towards him, reeling at the motion underfoot; simultaneously there
+was a rush from the opposite door, where a party of Americans had been
+dining; and as Percy, beckoning with his head, turned again to go down
+to the stern-end of the ship, he found the narrow passage blocked with
+the crowd that had run out. A babble of talking and cries made questions
+impossible; and Percy, with his chaplain behind him, gripped the
+aluminium panelling, and step by step began to make his way in search of
+his friends.</p>
+
+<p>Half-way down the passage, as he pushed and struggled, a voice made
+itself heard above the din; and in the momentary silence that followed,
+again sounded the far-away crying of the volors overhead.</p>
+
+<p>“Seats, gentlemen, seats,” roared the voice. “We are moving
+immediately.”</p>
+
+<p>Then the crowd melted as the conductor came through, red-faced and
+determined, and Percy, springing into his wake, found his way clear to
+the stern.</p>
+
+<p>The Cardinal seemed none the worse. He had been asleep, he explained,
+and saved himself in time from rolling on to the floor; but his old face
+twitched as he talked.</p>
+
+<p>“But what is it?” he said. “What is the meaning?”</p>
+
+<p>Father Bechlin related how he had actually seen one of the troop of
+volors within five yards of the window; it was crowded with faces, he
+said, from stem to stern. Then it had soared suddenly, and vanished in
+whorls of mist.</p>
+
+<p>Percy shook his head, saying nothing. He had no explanation.</p>
+
+<p>“They are inquiring, I understand,” said Father Bechlin again. “The
+conductor was at his instrument just now.”</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing to be seen from the windows now. Only, as Percy stared
+out, still dazed with the shock, he saw the cruel needle of rock
+wavering beneath as if seen through water, and the huge shoulder of snow
+swaying softly up and down. It was quieter outside. It appeared that the
+flock had passed, only somewhere from an infinite height still sounded a
+fitful wailing, as if a lonely bird were wandering, lost in space.</p>
+
+<p>“That is the signalling volor,” murmured Percy to himself.</p>
+
+<p>He had no theory—no suggestion. Yet the matter seemed an ominous one.
+It was unheard of that an encounter with a hundred volors should take
+place, and he wondered why they were going southwards. Again the name of
+Felsenburgh came to his mind. What if that sinister man were still
+somewhere overhead?</p>
+
+<p>“Eminence,” began the old man again. But at that instant the car began
+to move.</p>
+
+<p>A bell clanged, a vibration tingled underfoot, and then, soft as a
+flake of snow, the great ship began to rise, its movement perceptible
+only by the sudden drop and vanishing of the spire of rock at which
+Percy still stared. Slowly the snowfield too began to flit downwards, a
+black cleft, whisked smoothly into sight from above, and disappeared
+again below, and a moment later once more the car seemed poised in white
+space as it climbed the slope of air down which it had dropped just now.
+Again the wind-chord rent the atmosphere; and this time the answer was
+as faint and distant as a cry from another world. The speed quickened,
+and the steady throb of the screw began to replace the swaying motion of
+the wings. Again came the hoot, wild and echoing through the barren
+wilderness of rock walls beneath, and again with a sudden impulse the
+car soared. It was going in great circles now, cautious as a cat,
+climbing, climbing, punctuating the ascent with cry after cry, searching
+the blind air for dangers. Once again a vast white slope came into
+sight, illuminated by the glare from the windows, sinking ever more and
+more swiftly, receding and approaching—until for one instant a jagged
+line of rocks grinned like teeth through the mist, dropped away and
+vanished, and with a clash of bells, and a last scream of warning, the
+throb of the screw passed from a whirr to a rising note, and the note to
+stillness, as the huge ship, clear at last of the frontier peaks, shook
+out her wings steady once more, and set out for her humming flight
+through space.... Whatever it was, was behind them now, vanished into
+the thick night.</p>
+
+<p>There was a sound of talking from the interior of the car, hasty,
+breathless voices, questioning, exclaiming, and the authoritative terse
+answer of the guard. A step came along outside, and Percy sprang to meet
+it, but, as he laid his hand on the door, it was pushed from without,
+and to his astonishment the English guard came straight through, closing
+it behind him.</p>
+
+<p>He stood there, looking strangely at the four priests, with compressed
+lips and anxious eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“Well?” cried Percy.</p>
+
+<p>“All right, gentlemen. But I’m thinking you’d better descend at Paris. I
+know who you are, gentlemen—and though I’m not a Catholic—-”</p>
+
+<p>He stopped again.</p>
+
+<p>“For God’s sake, man—-” began Percy.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! the news, gentlemen. Well, it was two hundred cars going to Rome.
+There is a Catholic plot, sir, discovered in London—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Well?”</p>
+
+<p>“To wipe out the Abbey. So they’re going—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah!”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, sir—to wipe out Rome.”</p>
+
+<p>Then he was gone again.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="2CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>It was nearly sixteen o’clock on the same day, the last day of the year,
+that Mabel went into the little church that stood in the street beneath
+her house.</p>
+
+<p>The dark was falling softly layer on layer; across the roofs to westward
+burned the smouldering fire of the winter sunset, and the interior was
+full of the dying light. She had slept a little in her chair that
+afternoon, and had awakened with that strange cleansed sense of spirit
+and mind that sometimes follows such sleep. She wondered later how she
+could have slept at such a time, and above all, how it was that she had
+perceived nothing of that cloud of fear and fury that even now was
+falling over town and country alike. She remembered afterwards an
+unusual busy-ness on the broad tracks beneath her as she had looked out
+on them from her windows, and an unusual calling of horns and whistles;
+but she thought nothing of it, and passed down an hour later for a
+meditation in the church.</p>
+
+<p>She had grown to love the quiet place, and came in often like this to
+steady her thoughts and concentrate them on the significance that lay
+beneath the surface of life—the huge principles upon which all lived,
+and which so plainly were the true realities. Indeed, such devotion was
+becoming almost recognised among certain classes of people. Addresses
+were delivered now and then; little books were being published as guides
+to the interior life, curiously resembling the old Catholic books on
+mental prayer.</p>
+
+<p>She went to-day to her usual seat, sat down, folded her hands, looked
+for a minute or two upon the old stone sanctuary, the white image and
+the darkening window. Then she closed her eyes and began to think,
+according to the method she followed.</p>
+
+<p>First she concentrated her attention on herself, detaching it from all
+that was merely external and transitory, withdrawing it inwards ...
+inwards, until she found that secret spark which, beneath all frailties
+and activities, made her a substantial member of the divine race of
+humankind.</p>
+
+<p>This then was the first step.</p>
+
+<p>The second consisted in an act of the intellect, followed by one of the
+imagination. All men possessed that spark, she considered.... Then she
+sent out her powers, sweeping with the eyes of her mind the seething
+world, seeing beneath the light and dark of the two hemispheres, the
+countless millions of mankind—children coming into the world, old men
+leaving it, the mature rejoicing in it and their own strength. Back
+through the ages she looked, through those centuries of crime and
+blindness, as the race rose through savagery and superstition to a
+knowledge of themselves; on through the ages yet to come, as generation
+followed generation to some climax whose perfection, she told herself,
+she could not fully comprehend because she was not of it. Yet, she told
+herself again, that climax had already been born; the birthpangs were
+over; for had not He come who was the heir of time?...</p>
+
+<p>Then by a third and vivid act she realised the unity of all, the central
+fire of which each spark was but a radiation—that vast passionless
+divine being, realising Himself up through these centuries, one yet
+many, Him whom men had called God, now no longer unknown, but recognised
+as the transcendent total of themselves—Him who now, with the coming of
+the new Saviour, had stirred and awakened and shown Himself as One.</p>
+
+<p>And there she stayed, contemplating the vision of her mind, detaching
+now this virtue, now that for particular assimilation, dwelling on her
+deficiencies, seeing in the whole the fulfilment of all aspirations, the
+sum of all for which men had hoped—that Spirit of Peace, so long
+hindered yet generated too perpetually by the passions of the world,
+forced into outline and being by the energy of individual lives,
+realising itself in pulse after pulse, dominant at last, serene,
+manifest, and triumphant. There she stayed, losing the sense of
+individuality, merging it by a long sustained effort of the will,
+drinking, as she thought, long breaths of the spirit of life and
+love....</p>
+
+<p>Some sound, she supposed afterwards, disturbed her, and she opened her
+eyes; and there before her lay the quiet pavement, glimmering through
+the dusk, the step of the sanctuary, the rostrum on the right, and the
+peaceful space of darkening air above the white Mother-figure and
+against the tracery of the old window. It was here that men had
+worshipped Jesus, that blood-stained Man of Sorrow, who had borne, even
+on His own confession, not peace but a sword. Yet they had knelt, those
+blind and hopeless Christians.... Ah! the pathos of it all, the
+despairing acceptance of any creed that would account for sorrow, the
+wild worship of any God who had claimed to bear it!</p>
+
+<p>And again came the sound, striking across her peace, though as yet she
+did not understand why.</p>
+
+<p>It was nearer now; and she turned in astonishment to look down the dusky
+nave.</p>
+
+<p>It was from without that the sound had come, that strange murmur, that
+rose and fell again as she listened.</p>
+
+<p>She stood up, her heart quickening a little—only once before had she
+heard such a sound, once before, in a square, where men raged about a
+point beneath a platform....</p>
+
+<p>She stepped swiftly out of her seat, passed down the aisle, drew back
+the curtains beneath the west window, lifted the latch and stepped out.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The street, from where she looked over the railings that barred the
+entrance to the church, seemed unusually empty and dark. To right and
+left stretched the houses, overhead the darkening sky was flushed with
+rose; but it seemed as if the public lights had been forgotten. There
+was not a living being to be seen.</p>
+
+<p>She had put her hand on the latch of the gate, to open it and go out,
+when a sudden patter of footsteps made her hesitate; and the next
+instant a child appeared panting, breathless and terrified, running with
+her hands before her.</p>
+
+<p>“They’re coming, they’re coming,” sobbed the child, seeing the face
+looking at her. Then she clung to the bars, staring over her shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>Mabel lifted the latch in an instant; the child sprang in, ran to the
+door and beat against it, then turning, seized her dress and cowered
+against her. Mabel shut the gate.</p>
+
+<p>“There, there,” she said. “Who is it? Who are coming?”</p>
+
+<p>But the child hid her face, drawing at the kindly skirts; and the next
+moment came the roar of voices and the trampling of footsteps.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It was not more than a few seconds before the heralds of that grim
+procession came past. First came a flying squadron of children,
+laughing, terrified, fascinated, screaming, turning their heads as they
+ran, with a dog or two yelping among them, and a few women drifting
+sideways along the pavements. A face of a man, Mabel saw as she glanced
+in terror upwards, had appeared at the windows opposite, pale and
+eager—some invalid no doubt dragging himself to see. One group—a
+well-dressed man in grey, a couple of women carrying babies, a
+solemn-faced boy—halted immediately before her on the other side of the
+railings, all talking, none listening, and these too turned their faces
+to the road on the left, up which every instant the clamour and
+trampling grew. Yet she could not ask. Her lips moved; but no sound came
+from them. She was one incarnate apprehension. Across her intense fixity
+moved pictures of no importance of Oliver as he had been at breakfast,
+of her own bedroom with its softened paper, of the dark sanctuary and
+the white figure on which she had looked just now.</p>
+
+<p>They were coming thicker now; a troop of young men with their arms
+linked swayed into sight, all talking or crying aloud, none
+listening—all across the roadway, and behind them surged the crowd,
+like a wave in a stone-fenced channel, male scarcely distinguishable
+from female in that pack of faces, and under that sky that grew darker
+every instant. Except for the noise, which Mabel now hardly noticed, so
+thick and incessant it was, so complete her concentration in the sense
+of sight—except for that, it might have been, from its suddenness and
+overwhelming force, some mob of phantoms trooping on a sudden out of
+some vista of the spiritual world visible across an open space, and
+about to vanish again in obscurity. That empty street was full now on
+this side and that so far as she could see; the young men were
+gone—running or walking she hardly knew—round the corner to the right,
+and the entire space was one stream of heads and faces, pressing so
+fiercely that the group at the railings were detached like weeds and
+drifted too, sideways, clutching at the bars, and swept away too and
+vanished. And all the while the child tugged and tore at her skirts.</p>
+
+<p>Certain things began to appear now above the heads of the crowd—objects
+she could not distinguish in the failing light—poles, and fantastic
+shapes, fragments of stuff resembling banners, moving as if alive,
+turning from side to side, borne from beneath.</p>
+
+<p>Faces, distorted with passion, looked at her from time to time as the
+moving show went past, open mouths cried at her; but she hardly saw
+them. She was watching those strange emblems, straining her eyes through
+the dusk, striving to distinguish the battered broken shapes,
+half-guessing, yet afraid to guess.</p>
+
+<p>Then, on a sudden, from the hidden lamps beneath the eaves, light leaped
+into being—that strong, sweet, familiar light, generated by the great
+engines underground that, in the passion of that catastrophic day, all
+men had forgotten; and in a moment all changed from a mob of phantoms
+and shapes into a pitiless reality of life and death.</p>
+
+<p>Before her moved a great rood, with a figure upon it, of which one arm
+hung from the nailed hand, swinging as it went; an embroidery streamed
+behind with the swiftness of the motion.</p>
+
+<p>And next after it came the naked body of a child, impaled, white and
+ruddy, the head fallen upon the breast, and the arms, too, dangling and
+turning.</p>
+
+<p>And next the figure of a man, hanging by the neck, dressed, it seemed,
+in a kind of black gown and cape, with its black-capped head twisting
+from the twisting rope.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>The same night Oliver Brand came home about an hour before midnight.</p>
+
+<p>For himself, what he had heard and seen that day was still too vivid and
+too imminent for him to judge of it coolly. He had seen, from his
+windows in Whitehall, Parliament Square filled with a mob the like of
+which had not been known in England since the days of Christianity—a
+mob full of a fury that could scarcely draw its origin except from
+sources beyond the reach of sense. Thrice during the hours that followed
+the publication of the Catholic plot and the outbreak of mob-law he had
+communicated with the Prime Minister asking whether nothing could be
+done to allay the tumult; and on both occasions he had received the
+doubtful answer that what could be done would be done, that force was
+inadmissible at present; but that the police were doing all that was
+possible.</p>
+
+<p>As regarded the despatch of the volors to Rome, he had assented by
+silence, as had the rest of the Council. That was, Snowford had said, a
+judicial punitive act, regrettable but necessary. Peace, in this
+instance, could not be secured except on terms of war—or rather, since
+war was obsolete—by the sternness of justice. These Catholics had shown
+themselves the avowed enemies of society; very well, then society must
+defend itself, at least this once. Man was still human. And Oliver had
+listened and said nothing.</p>
+
+<p>As he passed in one of the Government volors over London on his way
+home, he had caught more than one glimpse of what was proceeding beneath
+him. The streets were as bright as day, shadowless and clear in the
+white light, and every roadway was a crawling serpent. From beneath rose
+up a steady roar of voices, soft and woolly, punctuated by cries. From
+here and there ascended the smoke of burning; and once, as he flitted
+over one of the great squares to the south of Battersea, he had seen as
+it were a scattered squadron of ants running as if in fear or
+pursuit.... He knew what was happening.... Well, after all, man was not
+yet perfectly civilised.</p>
+
+<p>He did not like to think of what awaited him at home. Once, about five
+hours earlier, he had listened to his wife’s voice through the
+telephone, and what he had heard had nearly caused him to leave all and
+go to her. Yet he was scarcely prepared for what he found.</p>
+
+<p>As he came into the sitting-room, there was no sound, except that
+far-away hum from the seething streets below. The room seemed strangely
+dark and cold; the only light that entered was through one of the
+windows from which the curtains were withdrawn, and, silhouetted against
+the luminous sky beyond, was the upright figure of a woman, looking and
+listening....</p>
+
+<p>He pressed the knob of the electric light; and Mabel turned slowly
+towards him. She was in her day-dress, with a cloak thrown over her
+shoulders, and her face was almost as that of a stranger. It was
+perfectly colourless, her lips were compressed and her eyes full of an
+emotion which he could not interpret. It might equally have been anger,
+terror or misery.</p>
+
+<p>She stood there in the steady light, motionless, looking at him.</p>
+
+<p>For a moment he did not trust himself to speak. He passed across to the
+window, closed it and drew the curtains. Then he took that rigid figure
+gently by the arm.</p>
+
+<p>“Mabel,” he said, “Mabel.”</p>
+
+<p>She submitted to be drawn towards the sofa, but there was no response to
+his touch. He sat down and looked up at her with a kind of despairing
+apprehension.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear, I am tired out,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Still she looked at him. There was in her pose that rigidity that actors
+simulate; yet he knew it for the real thing. He had seen that silence
+once or twice before in the presence of a horror—once at any rate, at
+the sight of a splash of blood on her shoe.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, my darling, sit down, at least,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>She obeyed him mechanically—sat, and still stared at him. In the
+silence once more that soft roar rose and died from the invisible world
+of tumult outside the windows. Within here all was quiet. He knew
+perfectly that two things strove within her, her loyalty to her faith
+and her hatred of those crimes in the name of justice. As he looked on
+her he saw that these two were at death grips, that hatred was
+prevailing, and that she herself was little more than a passive
+battlefield. Then, as with a long-drawn howl of a wolf, there surged and
+sank the voices of the mob a mile away, the tension broke.... She threw
+herself forward towards him, he caught her by the wrists, and so she
+rested, clasped in his arms, her face and bosom on his knees, and her
+whole body torn by emotion.</p>
+
+<p>For a full minute neither spoke. Oliver understood well enough, yet at
+present he had no words. He only drew her a little closer to himself,
+kissed her hair two or three times, and settled himself to hold her. He
+began to rehearse what he must say presently.</p>
+
+<p>Then she raised her flushed face for an instant, looked at him
+passionately, dropped her head again and began to sob out broken words.</p>
+
+<p>He could only catch a sentence here and there, yet he knew what she was
+saying....</p>
+
+<p>It was the ruin of all her hopes, she sobbed, the end of her religion.
+Let her die, die and have done with it! It was all gone, gone, swept
+away in this murderous passion of the people of her faith ... they were
+no better than Christians, after all, as fierce as the men on whom they
+avenged themselves, as dark as though the Saviour, Julian, had never
+come; it was all lost ... War and Passion and Murder had returned to the
+body from which she had thought them gone forever.... The burning
+churches, the hunted Catholics, the raging of the streets on which she
+had looked that day, the bodies of the child and the priest carried on
+poles, the burning churches and convents. ... All streamed out,
+incoherent, broken by sobs, details of horror, lamentations, reproaches,
+interpreted by the writhing of her head and hands upon his knees. The
+collapse was complete.</p>
+
+<p>He put his hands again beneath her arms and raised her. He was worn out
+by his work, yet he knew he must quiet her. This was more serious than
+any previous crisis. Yet he knew her power of recovery.</p>
+
+<p>“Sit down, my darling,” he said. “There ... give me your hands. Now
+listen to me.”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>He made really an admirable defence, for it was what he had been
+repeating to himself all day. Men were not yet perfect, he said; there
+ran in their veins the blood of men who for twenty centuries had been
+Christians.... There must be no despair; faith in man was of the very
+essence of religion, faith in man’s best self, in what he would become,
+not in what at present he actually was. They were at the beginning of
+the new religion, not in its maturity; there must be sourness in the
+young fruit. ... Consider, too, the provocation! Remember the appalling
+crime that these Catholics had contemplated; they had set themselves to
+strike the new Faith in its very heart....</p>
+
+<p>“My darling,” he said, “men are not changed in an instant. What if those
+Christians had succeeded!... I condemn it all as strongly as you. I saw
+a couple of newspapers this afternoon that are as wicked as anything
+that the Christians have ever done. They exulted in all these crimes. It
+will throw the movement back ten years.... Do you think that there are
+not thousands like yourself who hate and detest this violence?... But
+what does faith mean, except that we know that mercy will prevail?
+Faith, patience and hope—these are our weapons.”</p>
+
+<p>He spoke with passionate conviction, his eyes fixed on hers, in a fierce
+endeavour to give her his own confidence, and to reassure the remnants
+of his own doubtfulness. It was true that he too hated what she hated,
+yet he saw things that she did not.... Well, well, he told himself, he
+must remember that she was a woman.</p>
+
+<p>The look of frantic horror passed slowly out of her eyes, giving way to
+acute misery as he talked, and as his personality once more began to
+dominate her own. But it was not yet over.</p>
+
+<p>“But the volors,” she cried, “the volors! That is deliberate; that is
+not the work of the mob.”</p>
+
+<p>“My darling, it is no more deliberate than the other. We are all human,
+we are all immature. Yes, the Council permitted it, ... permitted it,
+remember. The German Government, too, had to yield. We must tame nature
+slowly, we must not break it.”</p>
+
+<p>He talked again for a few minutes, repeating his arguments, soothing,
+reassuring, encouraging; and he saw that he was beginning to prevail.
+But she returned to one of his words.</p>
+
+<p>“Permitted it! And you permitted it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Dear; I said nothing, either for it or against. I tell you that if we
+had forbidden it there would have been yet more murder, and the people
+would have lost their rulers. We were passive, since we could do
+nothing.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah! but it would have been better to die.... Oh, Oliver, let me die at
+least! I cannot bear it.”</p>
+
+<p>By her hands which he still held he drew her nearer yet to himself.</p>
+
+<p>“Sweetheart,” he said gravely, “cannot you trust me a little? If I could
+tell you all that passed to-day, you would understand. But trust me that
+I am not heartless. And what of Julian Felsenburgh?”</p>
+
+<p>For a moment he saw hesitation in her eyes; her loyalty to him and her
+loathing of all that had happened strove within her. Then once again
+loyalty prevailed, the name of Felsenburgh weighed down the balance, and
+trust came back with a flood of tears.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Oliver,” she said, “I know I trust you. But I am so weak, and all
+is so terrible. And He so strong and merciful. And will He be with us
+to-morrow?”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It struck midnight from the clock-tower a mile away as they yet sat and
+talked. She was still tremulous from the struggle; but she looked at him
+smiling, still holding his hands. He saw that the reaction was upon her
+in full force at last.</p>
+
+<p>“The New Year, my husband,” she said, and rose as she said it, drawing
+him after her.</p>
+
+<p>“I wish you a happy New Year,” she said. “Oh help me, Oliver.”</p>
+
+<p>She kissed him, and drew back, still holding his hands, looking at him
+with bright tearful eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“Oliver,” she cried again, “I must tell you this.... Do you know what I
+thought before you came?”</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head, staring at her greedily. How sweet she was! He felt
+her grip tighten on his hands.</p>
+
+<p>“I thought I could not bear it,” she whispered—“that I must end it
+all—ah! you know what I mean.”</p>
+
+<p>His heart flinched as he heard her; and he drew her closer again to
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>“It is all over! it is all over,” she cried. “Ah! do not look like that!
+I could not tell you if it was not.”’</p>
+
+<p>As their lips met again there came the vibration of an electric bell
+from the next room, and Oliver, knowing what it meant, felt even in that
+instant a tremor shake his heart. He loosed her hands, and still smiled
+at her.</p>
+
+<p>“The bell!” she said, with a flash of apprehension.</p>
+
+<p>“But it is all well between us again?”</p>
+
+<p>Her face steadied itself into loyalty and confidence.</p>
+
+<p>“It is all well,” she said; and again the impatient bell tingled. “Go,
+Oliver; I will wait here.”</p>
+
+<p>A minute later he was back again, with a strange look on his white face,
+and his lips compressed. He came straight up to her, taking her once
+more by the hands, and looking steadily into her steady eyes. In the
+hearts of both of them resolve and faith were holding down the emotion
+that was not yet dead. He drew a long breath.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” he said in an even voice, “it is over.”</p>
+
+<p>Her lips moved; and that deadly paleness lay on her cheeks. He gripped
+her firmly.</p>
+
+<p>“Listen,” he said. “You must face it. It is over. Rome is gone. Now we
+must build something better.”</p>
+
+<p>She threw herself sobbing into his arms.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="2CHAPTER_VIII">CHAPTER VIII</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>Long before dawn on the first morning of the New Year the approaches to
+the Abbey were already blocked. Victoria Street, Great George Street,
+Whitehall—even Millbank Street itself—were full and motionless. Broad
+Sanctuary, divided by the low-walled motor-track, was itself cut into
+great blocks and wedges of people by the ways which the police kept open
+for the passage of important personages, and Palace Yard was kept
+rigidly clear except for one island, occupied by a stand which was
+itself full from top to bottom and end to end. All roofs and parapets
+which commanded a view of the Abbey were also one mass of heads.
+Overhead, like solemn moons, burned the white lights of the electric
+globes.</p>
+
+<p>It was not known at exactly what hour the tumult had steadied itself to
+definite purpose, except to a few weary controllers of the temporary
+turnstiles which had been erected the evening before. It had been
+announced a week previously that, in consideration of the enormous
+demand for seats, all persons who presented their worship-ticket at an
+authorised office, and followed the directions issued by the police,
+would be accounted as having fulfilled the duties of citizenship in that
+respect, and it was generally made known that it was the Government’s
+intention to toll the great bell of the Abbey at the beginning of the
+ceremony and at the incensing of the image, during which period silence
+must be as far as possible preserved by all those within hearing.</p>
+
+<p>London had gone completely mad on the announcement of the Catholic plot
+on the afternoon before. The secret had leaked out about fourteen
+o’clock, an hour after the betrayal of the scheme to Mr. Snowford; and
+practically all commercial activities had ceased on the instant. By
+fifteen-and-a-half all stores were closed, the Stock Exchange, the City
+offices, the West End establishments—all had as by irresistible impulse
+suspended business, and from within two hours after noon until nearly
+midnight, when the police had been adequately reinforced and enabled to
+deal with the situation, whole mobs and armies of men, screaming
+squadrons of women, troops of frantic youths, had paraded the streets,
+howling, denouncing, and murdering. It was not known how many deaths had
+taken place, but there was scarcely a street without the signs of
+outrage. Westminster Cathedral had been sacked, every altar overthrown,
+indescribable indignities performed there. An unknown priest had
+scarcely been able to consume the Blessed Sacrament before he was seized
+and throttled; the Archbishop with eleven priests and two bishops had
+been hanged at the north end of the church, thirty-five convents had
+been destroyed, St. George’s Cathedral burned to the ground; and it was
+reported even, by the evening papers, that it was believed that, for the
+first time since the introduction of Christianity into England, there
+was not one Tabernacle left within twenty miles of the Abbey. “London,”
+explained the <i>New People</i>, in huge headlines, “was cleansed at last of
+dingy and fantastic nonsense.”</p>
+
+<p>It was known at about fifteen-and-a-half o’clock that at least seventy
+volors had left for Rome, and half-an-hour later that Berlin had
+reinforced them by sixty more. At midnight, fortunately at a time when
+the police had succeeded in shepherding the crowds into some kind of
+order, the news was flashed on to cloud and placard alike that the grim
+work was done, and that Rome had ceased to exist. The early morning
+papers added a few details, pointing out, of course, the coincidence of
+the fall with the close of the year, relating how, by an astonishing
+chance, practically all the heads of the hierarchy throughout the world
+had been assembled in the Vatican which had been the first object of
+attack, and how these, in desperation, it was supposed, had refused to
+leave the City when the news came by wireless telegraphy that the
+punitive force was on its way. There was not a building left in Rome;
+the entire place, Leonine City, Trastevere, suburbs—everything was
+gone; for the volors, poised at an immense height, had parcelled out the
+City beneath them with extreme care, before beginning to drop the
+explosives; and five minutes after the first roar from beneath and the
+first burst of smoke and flying fragments, the thing was finished. The
+volors had then dispersed in every direction, pursuing the motor and
+rail-tracks along which the population had attempted to escape so soon
+as the news was known; and it was supposed that not less than thirty
+thousand belated fugitives had been annihilated by this foresight. It
+was true, remarked the <i>Studio</i>, that many treasures of incalculable
+value had been destroyed, but this was a cheap price to pay for the
+final and complete extermination of the Catholic pest. “There comes a
+point,” it remarked, “when destruction is the only cure for a
+vermin-infested house,” and it proceeded to observe that now that the
+Pope with the entire College of Cardinals, all the ex-Royalties of
+Europe, all the most frantic religionists from the inhabited world who
+had taken up their abode in the “Holy City” were gone at a stroke, a
+recrudescence of the superstition was scarcely to be feared elsewhere.
+Yet care must even now be taken against any relenting. Catholics (if any
+were left bold enough to attempt it) must no longer be allowed to take
+any kind of part in the life of any civilised country. So far as
+messages had come in from other countries, there was but one chorus of
+approval at what had been done.</p>
+
+<p>A few papers regretted the incident, or rather the spirit which had lain
+behind it. It was not seemly, they said, that Humanitarians should have
+recourse to violence; yet not one pretended that anything could be felt
+but thanksgiving for the general result. Ireland, too, must be brought
+into line; they must not dally any longer.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It was now brightening slowly towards dawn, and beyond the river through
+the faint wintry haze a crimson streak or two began to burn. But all was
+surprisingly quiet, for this crowd, tired out with an all-night watch,
+chilled by the bitter cold, and intent on what lay before them, had no
+energy left for useless effort. Only from packed square and street and
+lane went up a deep, steady murmur like the sound of the sea a mile
+away, broken now and again by the hoot and clang of a motor and the rush
+of its passage as it tore eastwards round the circle through Broad
+Sanctuary and vanished citywards. And the light broadened and the
+electric globes sickened and paled, and the haze began to clear a
+little, showing, not the fresh blue that had been hoped for from the
+cold of the night, but a high, colourless vault of cloud, washed with
+grey and faint rose-colour, as the sun came up, a ruddy copper disc,
+beyond the river.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>At nine o’clock the excitement rose a degree higher. The police between
+Whitehall and the Abbey, looking from their high platforms strung along
+the route, whence they kept watch and controlled the wire palisadings,
+showed a certain activity, and a minute later a police-car whirled
+through the square between the palings, and vanished round the Abbey
+towers. The crowd murmured and shuffled and began to expect, and a cheer
+was raised when a moment later four more cars appeared, bearing the
+Government insignia, and disappeared in the same direction. These were
+the officials, they said, going to Dean’s Yard, where the procession
+would assemble.</p>
+
+<p>At about a quarter to ten the crowd at the west end of Victoria Street
+began to raise its voice in a song, and by the time that was over, and
+the bells had burst out from the Abbey towers, a rumour had somehow made
+its entrance that Felsenburgh was to be present at the ceremony. There
+was no assignable reason for this, neither then nor afterwards; in fact,
+the <i>Evening Star</i> declared that it was one more instance of the
+astonishing instinct of human beings <i>en masse</i>; for it was not until an
+hour later that even the Government were made aware of the facts. Yet
+the truth remained that at half-past ten one continuous roar went up,
+drowning even the brazen clamour of the bells, reaching round to
+Whitehall and the crowded pavements of Westminster Bridge, demanding
+Julian Felsenburgh. Yet there had been absolutely no news of the
+President of Europe for the last fortnight, beyond an entirely
+unsupported report that he was somewhere in the East.</p>
+
+<p>And all the while the motors poured from all directions towards the
+Abbey and disappeared under the arch into Dean’s Yard, bearing those
+fortunate persons whose tickets actually admitted them to the church
+itself. Cheers ran and rippled along the lines as the great men were
+recognised—Lord Pemberton, Oliver Brand and his wife, Mr. Caldecott,
+Maxwell, Snowford, with the European delegates—even melancholy-faced
+Mr. Francis himself, the Government <i>ceremoniarius</i>, received a
+greeting. But by a quarter to eleven, when the pealing bells paused, the
+stream had stopped, the barriers issued out to stop the roads, the wire
+palisadings vanished, and the crowd for an instant, ceasing its roaring,
+sighed with relief at the relaxed pressure, and surged out into the
+roadways. Then once more the roaring began for Julian Felsenburgh.</p>
+
+<p>The sun was now high, still a copper disc, above the Victoria Tower, but
+paler than an hour ago; the whiteness of the Abbey, the heavy greys of
+Parliament House, the ten thousand tints of house-roofs, heads,
+streamers, placards began to disclose themselves.</p>
+
+<p>A single bell tolled five minutes to the hour, and the moments slipped
+by, until once more the bell stopped, and to the ears of those within
+hearing of the great west doors came the first blare of the huge organ,
+reinforced by trumpets. And then, as sudden and profound as the hush of
+death, there fell an enormous silence.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>As the five-minutes bell began, sounding like a continuous wind-note in
+the great vaults overhead, solemn and persistent, Mabel drew a long
+breath and leaned back in her seat from the rigid position in which for
+the last half-hour she had been staring out at the wonderful sight. She
+seemed to herself to have assimilated it at last, to be herself once
+more, to have drunk her fill of the triumph and the beauty. She was as
+one who looks upon a summer sea on the morning after a storm. And now
+the climax was at hand.</p>
+
+<p>From end to end and side to side the interior of the Abbey presented a
+great broken mosaic of human faces; living slopes, walls, sections and
+curves. The south transept directly opposite to her, from pavement to
+rose window, was one sheet of heads; the floor was paved with them, cut
+in two by the scarlet of the gangway leading from the chapel of St.
+Faith—on the right, the choir beyond the open space before the
+sanctuary was a mass of white figures, scarved and surpliced; the high
+organ gallery, beneath which the screen had been removed, was crowded
+with them, and, far down beneath, the dim nave stretched the same
+endless pale living pavement to the shadow beneath the west window.
+Between every group of columns behind the choir-stalls, before her, to
+right, left, and behind, were platforms contrived in the masonry; and
+the exquisite roof, fan-tracery and soaring capital, alone gave the eye
+an escape from humanity. The whole vast space was full, it seemed, of
+delicate sunlight that streamed in from the artificial light set outside
+each window, and poured the ruby and the purple and the blue from the
+old glass in long shafts of colour across the dusty air, and in broken
+patches on the faces and dresses behind. The murmur of ten thousand
+voices filled the place, supplying, it seemed, a solemn accompaniment to
+that melodious note that now pulsed above it. And finally, more
+significant than all, was the empty carpeted sanctuary at her feet, the
+enormous altar with its flight of steps, the gorgeous curtain and the
+great untenanted sedilia.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Mabel needed some such reassurance, for last night, until the coming of
+Oliver, had passed for her as a kind of appalling waking dream. From the
+first shock of what she had seen outside the church, through those hours
+of waiting, with the knowledge that this was the way in which the Spirit
+of Peace asserted its superiority, up to that last moment when, in her
+husband’s arms, she had learned of the Fall of Rome, it had appeared to
+her as if her new world had suddenly corrupted about her. It was
+incredible, she told herself, that this ravening monster, dripping blood
+from claws and teeth, that had arisen roaring in the night, could be the
+Humanity that had become her God. She had thought revenge and cruelty
+and slaughter to be the brood of Christian superstition, dead and buried
+under the new-born angel of light, and now it seemed that the monsters
+yet stirred and lived. All the evening she had sat, walked, lain about
+her quiet house with the horror heavy about her, flinging open a window
+now and again in the icy air to listen with clenched hands to the cries
+and the roarings of the mob that raged in the streets beneath, the
+clanks, the yells and the hoots of the motor-trains that tore up from
+the country to swell the frenzy of the city—to watch the red glow of
+fire, the volumes of smoke that heaved up from the burning chapels and
+convents.</p>
+
+<p>She had questioned, doubted, resisted her doubts, flung out frantic acts
+of faith, attempted to renew the confidence that she attained in her
+meditation, told herself that traditions died slowly; she had knelt,
+crying out to the spirit of peace that lay, as she knew so well, at the
+heart of man, though overwhelmed for the moment by evil passion. A line
+or two ran in her head from one of the old Victorian poets:</p>
+
+<p>You doubt If any one Could think or bid it? How could it come about?...
+Who did it? Not men! Not here! Oh! not beneath the sun.... The torch
+that smouldered till the cup o’er-ran The wrath of God which is the
+wrath of Man!</p>
+
+<p>She had even contemplated death, as she had told her husband—the taking
+of her own life, in a great despair with the world. Seriously she had
+thought of it; it was an escape perfectly in accord with her morality.
+The useless and agonising were put out of the world by common consent;
+the Euthanasia houses witnessed to it. Then why not she?... For she
+could not bear it!... Then Oliver had come, she had fought her way back
+to sanity and confidence; and the phantom had gone again.</p>
+
+<p>How sensible and quiet he had been, she was beginning to tell herself
+now, as the quiet influence of this huge throng in this glorious place
+of worship possessed her once more—how reasonable in his explanation
+that man was even now only convalescent and therefore liable to relapse.
+She had told herself that again and again during the night, but it had
+been different when he had said so. His personality had once more
+prevailed; and the name of Felsenburgh had finished the work.</p>
+
+<p>“If He were but here!” she sighed. But she knew He was far away.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It was not until a quarter to eleven that she understood that the crowds
+outside were clamouring for Him too, and that knowledge reassured her
+yet further. They knew, then, these wild tigers, where their redemption
+lay; they understood what was their ideal, even if they had not attained
+to it. Ah! if He were but here, there would be no more question: the
+sullen waves would sink beneath His call of peace, the hazy clouds lift,
+the rumble die to silence. But He was away—away on some strange
+business. Well; He knew His work. He would surely come soon again to His
+children who needed Him so terribly.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>She had the good fortune to be alone in a crowd. Her neighbour, a
+grizzled old man with his daughters beyond, was her only neighbour, and
+a stranger. At her left rose up the red-covered barricade over which she
+could see the sanctuary and the curtain; and her seat in the tribune,
+raised some eight feet above the floor, removed her from any possibility
+of conversation. She was thankful for that: she did not want to talk;
+she wanted only to control her faculties in silence, to reassert her
+faith, to look out over this enormous throng gathered to pay homage to
+the great Spirit whom they had betrayed, to renew her own courage and
+faithfulness. She wondered what the preacher would say, whether there
+would be any note of penitence. Maternity was his subject—that benign
+aspect of universal life—tenderness, love, quiet, receptive, protective
+passion, the spirit that soothes rather than inspires, that busies
+itself with peaceful tasks, that kindles the lights and fires of home,
+that gives sleep, food and welcome....</p>
+
+<p>The bell stopped, and in the instant before the music began she heard,
+clear above the murmur within, the roar of the crowds outside, who still
+demanded their God. Then, with a crash, the huge organ awoke, pierced by
+the cry of the trumpets and the maddening throb of drums. There was no
+delicate prelude here, no slow stirring of life rising through
+labyrinths of mystery to the climax of sight—here rather was full-orbed
+day, the high noon of knowledge and power, the dayspring from on high,
+dawning in mid-heaven. Her heart quickened to meet it, and her reviving
+confidence, still convalescent, stirred and smiled, as the tremendous
+chords blared overhead, telling of triumph full-armed. God was man,
+then, after all—a God who last night had faltered for an hour, but who
+rose again on this morning of a new year, scattering mists, dominant
+over his own passion, all-compelling and all-beloved. God was man, and
+Felsenburgh his Incarnation! Yes, she must believe that! She did
+believe that!</p>
+
+<p>Then she saw how already the long procession was winding up beneath the
+screen, and by imperceptible art the light grew yet more acutely
+beautiful. They were coming, then, those ministers of a pure worship;
+grave men who knew in what they believed, and who, even if they did not
+at this moment thrill with feeling (for she knew that in this respect
+her husband for one did not), yet believed the principles of this
+worship and recognised their need of expression for the majority of
+mankind—coming slowly up in fours and pairs and units, led by robed
+vergers, rippling over the steps, and emerging again into the coloured
+sunlight in all their bravery of Masonic apron, badge and jewel. Surely
+here was reassurance enough.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The sanctuary now held a figure or two. Anxious-faced Mr. Francis, in
+his robes of office, came gravely down the steps and stood awaiting the
+procession, directing with almost imperceptible motions his satellites
+who hovered about the aisles ready to point this way and that to the
+advancing stream; and the western-most seats were already beginning to
+fill, when on a sudden she recognised that something had happened.</p>
+
+<p>Just now the roaring of the mob outside had provided a kind of underbass
+to the music within, imperceptible except to sub-consciousness, but
+clearly discernible in its absence; and this absence was now a fact.</p>
+
+<p>At first she thought that the signal of beginning worship had hushed
+them; and then, with an indescribable thrill, she remembered that in all
+her knowledge only one thing had ever availed to quiet a turbulent
+crowd. Yet she was not sure; it might be an illusion. Even now the mob
+might be roaring still, and she only deaf to it; but again with an
+ecstasy that was very near to agony she perceived that the murmur of
+voices even within the building had ceased, and that some great wave of
+emotion was stirring the sheets and slopes of faces before her as a wind
+stirs wheat. A moment later, and she was on her feet, gripping the rail,
+with her heart like an over-driven engine beating pulses of blood,
+furious and insistent, through every vein; for with great rushing surge
+that sounded like a sigh, heard even above the triumphant tumult
+overhead, the whole enormous assemblage had risen to its feet.</p>
+
+<p>Confusion seemed to break out in the orderly procession. She saw Mr.
+Francis run forward quickly, gesticulating like a conductor, and at his
+signal the long line swayed forward, split, recoiled, and again slid
+swiftly forward, breaking as it did so into twenty streams that poured
+along the seats and filled them in a moment. Men ran and pushed, aprons
+flapped, hands beckoned, all without coherent words. There was a
+knocking of feet, the crash of an overturned chair, and then, as if a
+god had lifted his hand for quiet, the music ceased abruptly, sending a
+wild echo that swooned and died in a moment; a great sigh filled its
+place, and, in the coloured sunshine that lay along the immense length
+of the gangway that ran open now from west to east, far down in the
+distant nave, a single figure was seen advancing.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>What Mabel saw and heard and felt from eleven o’clock to half-an-hour
+after noon on that first morning of the New Year she could never
+adequately remember. For the time she lost the continuous consciousness
+of self, the power of reflection, for she was still weak from her
+struggle; there was no longer in her the process by which events are
+stored, labelled and recorded; she was no more than a being who observed
+as it were in one long act, across which considerations played at
+uncertain intervals. Eyes and ear seemed her sole functions,
+communicating direct with a burning heart.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>She did not even know at what point her senses told her that this was
+Felsenburgh. She seemed to have known it even before he entered, and she
+watched Him as in complete silence He came deliberately up the red
+carpet, superbly alone, rising a step or two at the entrance of the
+choir, passing on and up before her. He was in his English judicial
+dress of scarlet and black, but she scarcely noticed it. For her, too,
+no one else existed but, He; this vast assemblage was gone, poised and
+transfigured in one vibrating atmosphere of an immense human emotion.
+There was no one, anywhere, but Julian Felsenburgh. Peace and light
+burned like a glory about Him.</p>
+
+<p>For an instant after passing he disappeared beyond the speaker’s
+tribune, and the instant after reappeared once more, coming up the
+steps. He reached his place—she could see His profile beneath her and
+slightly to the left, pure and keen as the blade of a knife, beneath His
+white hair. He lifted one white-furred sleeve, made a single motion, and
+with a surge and a rumble, the ten thousand were seated. He motioned
+again and with a roar they were on their feet.</p>
+
+<p>Again there was a silence. He stood now, perfectly still, His hands laid
+together on the rail, and His face looking steadily before Him; it
+seemed as if He who had drawn all eyes and stilled all sounds were
+waiting until His domination were complete, and there was but one will,
+one desire, and that beneath His hand. Then He began to speak....</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>In this again, as Mabel perceived afterwards, there was no precise or
+verbal record within her of what he said; there was no conscious process
+by which she received, tested, or approved what she heard. The nearest
+image under which she could afterwards describe her emotions to herself,
+was that when He spoke it was she who was speaking. Her own thoughts,
+her predispositions, her griefs, her disappointment, her passion, her
+hopes—all these interior acts of the soul known scarcely even to
+herself, down even, it seemed, to the minutest whorls and eddies of
+thought, were, by this man, lifted up, cleansed, kindled, satisfied and
+proclaimed. For the first time in her life she became perfectly aware of
+what human nature meant; for it was her own heart that passed out upon
+the air, borne on that immense voice. Again, as once before for a few
+moments in Paul’s House, it seemed that creation, groaning so long, had
+spoken articulate words at last—had come to growth and coherent thought
+and perfect speech. Yet then He had spoken to men; now it was Man
+Himself speaking. It was not one man who spoke there, it was Man—Man
+conscious of his origin, his destiny, and his pilgrimage between, Man
+sane again after a night of madness—knowing his strength, declaring his
+law, lamenting in a voice as eloquent as stringed instruments his own
+failure to correspond. It was a soliloquy rather than an oration. Rome
+had fallen, English and Italian streets had run with blood, smoke and
+flame had gone up to heaven, because man had for an instant sunk back to
+the tiger. Yet it was done, cried the great voice, and there was no
+repentance; it was done, and ages hence man must still do penance and
+flush scarlet with shame to remember that once he turned his back on
+the risen light.</p>
+
+<p>There was no appeal to the lurid, no picture of the tumbling palaces,
+the running figures, the coughing explosions, the shaking of the earth
+and the dying of the doomed. It was rather with those hot hearts
+shouting in the English and German streets, or aloft in the winter air
+of Italy, the ugly passions that warred there, as the volors rocked at
+their stations, generating and fulfilling revenge, paying back plot with
+plot, and violence with violence. For there, cried the voice, was man as
+he had been, fallen in an instant to the cruel old ages before he had
+learned what he was and why.</p>
+
+<p>There was no repentance, said the voice again, but there was something
+better; and as the hard, stinging tones melted, the girl’s dry eyes of
+shame filled in an instant with tears. There was something better—the
+knowledge of what crimes man was yet capable of, and the will to use
+that knowledge. Rome was gone, and it was a lamentable shame; Rome was
+gone, and the air was the sweeter for it; and then in an instant, like
+the soar of a bird, He was up and away—away from the horrid gulf where
+He had looked just now, from the fragments of charred bodies, and
+tumbled houses and all the signs of man’s disgrace, to the pure air and
+sunlight to which man must once more set his face. Yet He bore with Him
+in that wonderful flight the dew of tears and the aroma of earth. He had
+not spared words with which to lash and whip the naked human heart, and
+He did not spare words to lift up the bleeding, shrinking thing, and
+comfort it with the divine vision of love....</p>
+
+<p>Historically speaking, it was about forty minutes before He turned to
+the shrouded image behind the altar.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! Maternity!” he cried. “Mother of us all—-”</p>
+
+<p>And then, to those who heard Him, the supreme miracle took place.... For
+it seemed now in an instant that it was no longer man who spoke, but One
+who stood upon the stage of the superhuman. The curtain ripped back, as
+one who stood by it tore, panting, at the strings; and there, it seemed,
+face to face stood the Mother above the altar, huge, white and
+protective, and the Child, one passionate incarnation of love, crying to
+her from the tribune.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! Mother of us all, and Mother of Me!”</p>
+
+<p>So He praised her to her face, that sublime principle of life, declared
+her glories and her strength, her Immaculate Motherhood, her seven
+swords of anguish driven through her heart by the passion and the
+follies of her Son—He promised her great things, the recognition of her
+countless children, the love and service of the unborn, the welcome of
+those yet quickening within the womb. He named her the Wisdom of the
+Most High, that sweetly orders all things, the Gate of Heaven, House of
+Ivory, Comforter of the afflicted, Queen of the World; and, to the
+delirious eyes of those who looked on her it seemed that the grave face
+smiled to hear Him....</p>
+
+<p>A great panting as of some monstrous life began to fill the air as the
+mob swayed behind Him, and the torrential voice poured on. Waves of
+emotion swept up and down; there were cries and sobs, the yelping of a
+man beside himself at last, from somewhere among the crowded seats, the
+crash of a bench, and another and another, and the gangways were full,
+for He no longer held them passive to listen; He was rousing them to
+some supreme act. The tide crawled nearer, and the faces stared no
+longer at the Son but the Mother; the girl in the gallery tore at the
+heavy railing, and sank down sobbing upon her knees. And above all the
+voice pealed on—and the thin hands blanched to whiteness strained from
+the wide and sumptuous sleeves as if to reach across the sanctuary
+itself.</p>
+
+<p>It was a new tale He was telling now, and all to her glory. He was from
+the East, now they knew, come from some triumph. He had been hailed as
+King, adored as Divine, as was meet and right—He, the humble superhuman
+son of a Human Mother—who bore not a sword but peace, not a cross but a
+crown. So it seemed He was saying; yet no man there knew whether He said
+it or not—whether the voice proclaimed it, or their hearts asserted it.
+He was on the steps of the sanctuary now, still with outstretched hands
+and pouring words, and the mob rolled after him to the rumble of ten
+thousand feet and the sighing of ten thousand hearts.... He was at the
+altar; He was upon it. Again in one last cry, as the crowd broke against
+the steps beneath, He hailed her Queen and Mother.</p>
+
+<p>The end came in a moment, swift and inevitable. And for an instant,
+before the girl in the gallery sank down, blind with tears, she saw the
+tiny figure poised there at the knees of the huge image, beneath the
+expectant hands, silent and transfigured in the blaze of light. The
+Mother, it seemed, had found her Son at last.</p>
+
+<p>For an instant she saw it, the soaring columns, the gilding and the
+colours, the swaying heads, the tossing hands. It was a sea that heaved
+before her, lights went up and down, the rose window whirled overhead,
+presences filled the air, heaven flashed away, and the earth shook it
+ecstasy. Then in the heavenly light, to the crash of drums, above the
+screaming of the women and the battering of feet, in one thunder-peal of
+worship ten thousand voices hailed Him Lord and God.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="BOOK_III-THE_VICTORY">BOOK III-THE VICTORY</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="3CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>The little room where the new Pope sat reading was a model of
+simplicity. Its walls were whitewashed, its roof unpolished rafters, and
+its floor beaten mud. A square table stood in the centre, with a chair
+beside it; a cold brazier laid for lighting, stood in the wide hearth; a
+bookshelf against the wall held a dozen volumes. There were three doors,
+one leading to the private oratory, one to the ante-room, and the third
+to the little paved court. The south windows were shuttered, but through
+the ill-fitting hinges streamed knife-blades of fiery light from the hot
+Eastern day outside.</p>
+
+<p>It was the time of the mid-day siesta, and except for the brisk scything
+of the <i>cicade</i> from the hill-slope behind the house, all was in deep
+silence.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The Pope, who had dined an hour before, had hardly shifted His attitude
+in all that time, so intent was He upon His reading. For the while, all
+was put away, His own memory of those last three months, the bitter
+anxiety, the intolerable load of responsibility. The book He held was a
+cheap reprint of the famous biography of Julian Felsenburgh, issued a
+month before, and He was now drawing to an end.</p>
+
+<p>It was a terse, well-written book, composed by an unknown hand, and some
+even suspected it to be the disguised work of Felsenburgh himself. More,
+however, considered that it was written at least with Felsenburgh’s
+consent by one of that small body of intimates whom he had admitted to
+his society—that body which under him now conducted the affairs of West
+and East. From certain indications in the book it had been argued that
+its actual writer was a Westerner.</p>
+
+<p>The main body of the work dealt with his life, or rather with those two
+or three years known to the world, from his rapid rise in American
+politics and his mediation in the East down to the event of five months
+ago, when in swift succession he had been hailed Messiah in Damascus,
+had been formally adored in London, and finally elected by an
+extraordinary majority to the Tribuniciate of the two Americas.</p>
+
+<p>The Pope had read rapidly through these objective facts, for He knew
+them well enough already, and was now studying with close attention the
+summary of his character, or rather, as the author rather sententiously
+explained, the summary of his self-manifestation to the world. He read
+the description of his two main characteristics, his grasp upon words
+and facts; “words, the daughters of earth, were wedded in this man to
+facts, the sons of heaven, and Superman was their offspring.” His minor
+characteristics, too, were noticed, his appetite for literature, his
+astonishing memory, his linguistic powers. He possessed, it appeared,
+both the telescopic and the microscopic eye—he discerned world-wide
+tendencies and movements on the one hand; he had a passionate capacity
+for detail on the other. Various anecdotes illustrated these remarks,
+and a number of terse aphorisms of his were recorded. “No man forgives,”
+he said; “he only understands.” “It needs supreme faith to renounce a
+transcendent God.” “A man who believes in himself is almost capable of
+believing in his neighbour.” Here was a sentence that to the Pope’s mind
+was significant of that sublime egotism that is alone capable of
+confronting the Christian spirit: and again, “To forgive a wrong is to
+condone a crime,” and “The strong man is accessible to no one, but all
+are accessible to him.”</p>
+
+<p>There was a certain pompousness in this array of remarks, but it lay, as
+the Pope saw very well, not in the speaker but in the scribe. To him who
+had seen the speaker it was plain how they had been uttered—with no
+pontifical solemnity, but whirled out in a fiery stream of eloquence, or
+spoken with that strangely moving simplicity that had constituted his
+first assault on London. It was possible to hate Felsenburgh, and to
+fear him; but never to be amused at him.</p>
+
+<p>But plainly the supreme pleasure of the writer was to trace the analogy
+between his hero and nature. In both there was the same apparent
+contradictoriness—the combination of utter tenderness and utter
+ruthlessness. “The power that heals wounds also inflicts them: that
+clothes the dungheap with sweet growths and grasses, breaks, too, into
+fire and earthquake; that causes the partridge to die for her young,
+also makes the shrike with his living larder.” So, too, with
+Felsenburgh; He who had wept over the Fall of Rome, a month later had
+spoken of extermination as an instrument that even now might be
+judicially used in the service of humanity. Only it must be used with
+deliberation, not with passion.</p>
+
+<p>The utterance had aroused extraordinary interest, since it seemed so
+paradoxical from one who preached peace and toleration; and argument
+had broken out all over the world. But beyond enforcing the dispersal of
+the Irish Catholics, and the execution of a few individuals, so far that
+utterance had not been acted upon. Yet the world seemed as a whole to
+have accepted it, and even now to be waiting for its fulfilment.</p>
+
+<p>As the biographer pointed out, the world enclosed in physical nature
+should welcome one who followed its precepts, one who was indeed the
+first to introduce deliberately and confessedly into human affairs such
+laws as those of the Survival of the Fittest and the immorality of
+forgiveness. If there was mystery in the one, there was mystery in the
+other, and both must be accepted if man was to develop.</p>
+
+<p>And the secret of this, it seemed, lay in His personality. To see Him
+was to believe in Him, or rather to accept Him as inevitably true. “We
+do not explain nature or escape from it by sentimental regrets: the hare
+cries like a child, the wounded stag weeps great tears, the robin kills
+his parents; life exists only on condition of death; and these things
+happen however we may weave theories that explain nothing. Life must be
+accepted on those terms; we cannot be wrong if we follow nature; rather
+to accept them is to find peace—our great mother only reveals her
+secrets to those who take her as she is.” So, too, with Felsenburgh. “It
+is not for us to discriminate: His personality is of a kind that does
+not admit it. He is complete and sufficing for those who trust Him and
+are willing to suffer; an hostile and hateful enigma to those who are
+not. We must prepare ourselves for the logical outcome of this doctrine.
+Sentimentality must not be permitted to dominate reason.”</p>
+
+<p>Finally, then, the writer showed how to this Man belonged properly all
+those titles hitherto lavished upon imagined Supreme Beings. It was in
+preparation for Him that these types came into the realms of thought and
+influenced men’s lives.</p>
+
+<p>He was the <i>Creator</i>, for it was reserved for Him to bring into being
+the perfect life of union to which all the world had hitherto groaned in
+vain; it was in His own image and likeness that He had made man.</p>
+
+<p>Yet He was the <i>Redeemer</i> too, for that likeness had in one sense always
+underlain the tumult of mistake and conflict. He had brought man out of
+darkness and the shadow of death, guiding their feet into the way of
+peace. He was the <i>Saviour</i> for the same reason—the <i>Son of Man</i>, for
+He alone was perfectly human; He was the <i>Absolute</i>, for He was the
+content of Ideals; the <i>Eternal</i>, for He had lain always in nature’s
+potentiality and secured by His being the continuity of that order; the
+<i>Infinite</i>, for all finite things fell short of Him who was more than
+their sum.</p>
+
+<p>He was <i>Alpha</i>, then, and <i>Omega</i>, the beginning and the end, the first
+and the last. He was <i>Dominus et Deus noster</i> (as Domitian had been, the
+Pope reflected). He was as simple and as complex as life itself—simple
+in its essence, complex in its activities.</p>
+
+<p>And last of all, the supreme proof of His mission lay in the immortal
+nature of His message. There was no more to be added to what He had
+brought to light—for in Him all diverging lines at last found their
+origin and their end. As to whether or no He would prove to be
+personally immortal was an wholly irrelevant thought; it would be indeed
+fitting if through His means the vital principle should disclose its
+last secret; but no more than fitting. Already His spirit was in the
+world; the individual was no more separate from his fellows; death no
+more than a wrinkle that came and went across the inviolable sea. For
+man had learned at last that the race was all and self was nothing; the
+cell had discovered the unity of the body; even, the greatest thinkers
+declared, the consciousness of the individual had yielded the title of
+Personality to the corporate mass of man—and the restlessness of the
+unit had sunk into the peace of a common Humanity, for nothing but this
+could explain the cessation of party strife and national
+competition—and this, above all, had been the work of Felsenburgh.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Behold I am with you always</i>,” quoted the writer in a passionate
+peroration, “<i>even now in the consummation of the world; and, the
+Comforter is come unto you. I am the Door—the Way, the Truth and the
+Life—the Bread of Life and the Water of Life. My name is Wonderful, the
+Prince of Peace, the Father Everlasting. It is I who am the Desire of
+all nations, the fairest among the children of men—and of my Kingdom
+there shall be no end</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>The Pope laid down the book, and leaned back, closing his eyes.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>And as for Himself, what had He to say to all this? A Transcendent God
+Who hid Himself, a Divine Saviour Who delayed to come, a Comforter heard
+no longer in wind nor seen in fire!</p>
+
+<p>There, in the next room, was a little wooden altar, and above it an iron
+box, and within that box a silver cup, and within that cup—Something.
+Outside the house, a hundred yards away, lay the domes and plaster roofs
+of a little village called Nazareth; Carmel was on the right, a mile or
+two away, Thabor on the left, the plain of Esdraelon in front; and
+behind, Cana and Galilee, and the quiet lake, and Hermon. And far away
+to the south lay Jerusalem....</p>
+
+<p>It was to this tiny strip of holy land that the Pope had come—the land
+where a Faith had sprouted two thousand years ago, and where, unless God
+spoke in fire from heaven, it would presently be cut down as a cumberer
+of the ground. It was here on this material earth that One had walked
+Whom all men had thought to have been He Who would redeem Israel—in
+this village that He had fetched water and made boxes and chairs, on
+that long lake that His Feet had walked, on that high hill that He had
+flamed in glory, on that smooth, low mountain to the north that He had
+declared that the meek were blessed and should inherit the earth, that
+peacemakers were the children of God, that they who hungered and
+thirsted should be satisfied.</p>
+
+<p>And now it was come to this. Christianity had smouldered away from
+Europe like a sunset on darkening peaks; Eternal Rome was a heap of
+ruins; in East and West alike a man had been set upon the throne of God,
+had been acclaimed as divine. The world had leaped forward; social
+science was supreme; men had learned consistency; they had learned, too,
+the social lessons of Christianity apart from a Divine Teacher, or,
+rather, they said, in spite of Him. There were left, perhaps, three
+millions, perhaps five, at the utmost ten millions—it was impossible to
+know—throughout the entire inhabited globe who still worshipped Jesus
+Christ as God. And the Vicar of Christ sat in a whitewashed room in
+Nazareth, dressed as simply as His master, waiting for the end.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>He had done what He could. There had been a week five months ago when
+it had been doubtful whether anything at all could be done. There were
+left three Cardinals alive, Himself, Steinmann, and the Patriarch of
+Jerusalem; the rest lay mangled somewhere in the ruins of Rome. There
+was no precedent to follow; so the two Europeans had made their way out
+to the East, and to the one town in it where quiet still reigned. With
+the disappearance of Greek Christianity there had also vanished the last
+remnants of internecine war in Christendom; and by a kind of tacit
+consent of the world, Christians were allowed a moderate liberty in
+Palestine. Russia, which now held the country as a dependency, had
+sufficient sentiment left to leave it alone; it was true that the holy
+places had been desecrated, and remained now only as spots of
+antiquarian interest; the altars were gone but the sites were yet
+marked, and, although mass could no longer be said there, it was
+understood that private oratories were not forbidden.</p>
+
+<p>It was in this state that the two European Cardinals had found the Holy
+City; it was not thought wise to wear insignia of any description in
+public; and it was practically certain even now that the civilised world
+was unaware of their existence; for within three days of their arrival
+the old Patriarch had died, yet not before Percy Franklin, surely under
+the strangest circumstances since those of the first century, had been
+elected to the Supreme Pontificate. It had all been done in a few
+minutes by the dying man’s bedside. The two old men had insisted. The
+German had even recurred once more to the strange resemblance between
+Percy and Julian Felsenburgh, and had murmured his old half-heard
+remarks about the antithesis, and the Finger of God; and Percy,
+marvelling at his superstition, had accepted, and the election was
+recorded. He had taken the name of Silvester, the last saint in the
+year, and was the third of that title. He had then retired to Nazareth
+with his chaplain; Steinmann had gone back to Germany, and been hanged
+in a riot within a fortnight of his arrival.</p>
+
+<p>The next matter was the creation of new cardinals, and to twenty
+persons, with infinite precautions, briefs had been conveyed. Of these,
+nine had declined; three more had been approached, of whom only one had
+accepted. There were therefore at this moment twelve persons in the
+world who constituted the Sacred College—two Englishmen, of whom
+Corkran was one; two Americans, a Frenchman, a German, an Italian, a
+Spaniard, a Pole, a Chinaman, a Greek, and a Russian. To these were
+entrusted vast districts over which their control was supreme, subject
+only to the Holy Father Himself.</p>
+
+<p>As regarded the Pope’s own life very little need be said. It resembled,
+He thought, in its outward circumstances that of such a man as Leo the
+Great, without His worldly importance or pomp. Theoretically, the
+Christian world was under His dominion; practically, Christian affairs
+were administered by local authorities. It was impossible for a hundred
+reasons for Him to do what He wished with regard to the exchange of
+communications. An elaborate cypher had been designed, and a private
+telegraphic station organised on His roof communicating with another in
+Damascus where Cardinal Corkran had fixed his residence; and from that
+centre messages occasionally were despatched to ecclesiastical
+authorities elsewhere; but, for the most part, there was little to be
+done. The Pope, however, had the satisfaction of knowing that, with
+incredible difficulty, a little progress had been made towards the
+reorganisation of the hierarchy in all countries. Bishops were being
+consecrated freely; there were not less than two thousand of them all
+told, and of priests an unknown number. The Order of Christ Crucified
+was doing excellent work, and the tales of not less than four hundred
+martyrdoms had reached Nazareth during the last two months, accomplished
+mostly at the hands of the mobs.</p>
+
+<p>In other respects, also, as well as in the primary object of the Order’s
+existence (namely, the affording of an opportunity to all who loved God
+to dedicate themselves to Him more perfectly), the new Religious were
+doing good work. The more perilous tasks—the work of communication
+between prelates, missions to persons of suspected integrity—all the
+business, in fact, which was carried on now at the vital risk of the
+agent were entrusted solely to members of the Order. Stringent
+instructions had been issued from Nazareth that no bishop was to expose
+himself unnecessarily; each was to regard himself as the heart of his
+diocese to be protected at all costs save that of Christian honour, and
+in consequence each had surrounded himself with a group of the new
+Religious—men and women—who with extraordinary and generous obedience
+undertook such dangerous tasks as they were capable of performing. It
+was plain enough by now that had it not been for the Order, the Church
+would have been little better than paralysed under these new conditions.</p>
+
+<p>Extraordinary facilities were being issued in all directions. Every
+priest who belonged to the Order received universal jurisdiction subject
+to the bishop, if any, of the diocese in which he might be; mass might
+be said on any day of the year of the Five Wounds, or the Resurrection,
+or Our Lady; and all had the privilege of the portable altar, now
+permitted to be wood. Further ritual requirements were relaxed; mass
+might be said with any decent vessels of any material capable of
+destruction, such as glass or china; bread of any description might be
+used; and no vestments were obligatory except the thin thread that now
+represented the stole; lights were non-essential; none need wear the
+clerical habit; and rosary, even without beads, was always permissible
+instead of the Office.</p>
+
+<p>In this manner priests were rendered capable of giving the sacraments
+and offering the holy sacrifice at the least possible risk to
+themselves; and these relaxations had already proved of enormous benefit
+in the European prisons, where by this time many thousands of Catholics
+were undergoing the penalty of refusing public worship.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The Pope’s private life was as simple as His room. He had one Syrian
+priest for His chaplain, and two Syrian servants. He said His mass each
+morning, Himself wearing vestments and His white habit beneath, and
+heard a mass after. He then took His coffee, after changing into the
+tunic and burnous of the country, and spent the morning over business.
+He dined at noon, slept, and rode out, for the country by reason of its
+indeterminate position was still in the simplicity of a hundred years
+ago. He returned at dusk, supped, and worked again till late into the
+night.</p>
+
+<p>That was all. His chaplain sent what messages were necessary to
+Damascus; His servants, themselves ignorant of His dignity, dealt with
+the secular world so far as was required, and the utmost that seemed to
+be known to His few neighbours was that there lived in the late Sheikh’s
+little house on the hill an eccentric European with a telegraph office.
+His servants, themselves devout Catholics, knew Him for a bishop, but no
+more than that. They were told only that there was yet a Pope alive, and
+with that and the sacraments were content.</p>
+
+<p>To sum up, therefore—the Catholic world knew that their Pope lived
+under the name of Silvester; and thirteen persons of the entire human
+race knew that Franklin had been His name, and that the throne of Peter
+rested for the time in Nazareth.</p>
+
+<p>It was, as a Frenchman had said, just a hundred years ago. Catholicism
+survived; but no more.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>And as for His inner life, what can be said of that? He lay now back in
+his wooden chair, thinking with closed eyes.</p>
+
+<p>He could not have described it consistently even to Himself, for indeed
+He scarcely knew it: He acted rather than indulged in reflex thought.
+But the centre of His position was simple faith. The Catholic Religion,
+He knew well enough, gave the only adequate explanation of the universe;
+it did not unlock all mysteries, but it unlocked more than any other key
+known to man; He knew, too, perfectly well, that it was the only system
+of thought that satisfied man as a whole, and accounted for him in his
+essential nature. Further, He saw well enough that the failure of
+Christianity to unite all men one to another rested not upon its
+feebleness but its strength; its lines met in eternity, not in time.
+Besides, He happened to believe it.</p>
+
+<p>But to this foreground there were other moods whose shifting was out of
+his control. In his <i>exalt</i> moods, which came upon Him like a breeze
+from Paradise, the background was bright with hope and drama—He saw
+Himself and His companions as Peter and the Apostles must have regarded
+themselves, as they proclaimed through the world, in temples, slums,
+market-places and private houses, the faith that was to shake and
+transform the world. They had handled the Lord of Life, seen the empty
+sepulchre, grasped the pierced hands of Him Who was their brother and
+their God. It was radiantly true, though not a man believed it; the huge
+superincumbent weight of incredulity could not disturb a fact that was
+as the sun in heaven. Moreover, the very desperateness of the cause was
+their inspiration. There was no temptation to lean upon the arm of
+flesh, for there was none that fought for them but God. Their nakedness
+was their armour, their slow tongues their persuasiveness, their
+weakness demanded God’s strength, and found it. Yet there was this
+difference, and it was a significant one. For Peter the spiritual world
+had an interpretation and a guarantee in the outward events he had
+witnessed. He had handled the Risen Christ, the external corroborated
+the internal. But for Silvester it was not so. For Him it was necessary
+so to grasp spiritual truths in the supernatural sphere that the
+external events of the Incarnation were proved by rather than proved the
+certitude of His spiritual apprehension. Certainly, historically
+speaking, Christianity was true—proved by its records—yet to see that
+needed illumination. He apprehended the power of the Resurrection,
+therefore Christ was risen.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore in heavier moods it was different with him. There were
+periods, lasting sometimes for days together, clouding Him when He
+awoke, stifling Him as He tried to sleep, dulling the very savour of the
+Sacrament and the thrill of the Precious Blood; times in which the
+darkness was so intolerable that even the solid objects of faith
+attenuated themselves to shadow, when half His nature was blind not only
+to Christ, but to God Himself, and the reality of His own
+existence—when His own awful dignity seemed as the insignia of a fool.
+And was it conceivable, His earthly mind demanded, that He and His
+college of twelve and His few thousands should be right, and the entire
+consensus of the civilised world wrong? It was not that the world had
+not heard the message of the Gospel; it had heard little else for two
+thousand years, and now pronounced it false—false in its external
+credentials, and false therefore in its spiritual claims. It was a lost
+cause for which He suffered; He was not the last of an august line, He
+was the smoking wick of a candle of folly; He was the <i>reductio ad
+absurdam</i> of a ludicrous syllogism based on impossible premises. He was
+not worth killing, He and His company of the insane—they were no more
+than the crowned dunces of the world’s school. Sanity sat on the solid
+benches of materialism. And this heaviness waxed so dark sometimes that
+He almost persuaded Himself that His faith was gone; the clamours of
+mind so loud that the whisper of the heart was unheard, the desires for
+earthly peace so fierce that supernatural ambitions were silenced—so
+dense was the gloom, that, hoping against hope, believing against
+knowledge, and loving against truth, He cried as One other had cried on
+another day like this—<i>Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!</i> ... But that, at
+least, He never failed to cry.</p>
+
+<p>One thing alone gave Him power to go on, so far at least as His
+consciousness was concerned, and that was His meditation. He had
+travelled far in the mystical life since His agonies of effort. Now He
+used no deliberate descents into the spiritual world: He threw, as it
+were, His hands over His head, and dropped into spacelessness.
+Consciousness would draw Him up, as a cork, to the surface, but He would
+do no more than repeat His action, until by that cessation of activity,
+which is the supreme energy, He floated in the twilight realm of
+transcendence; and there God would deal with Him—now by an articulate
+sentence, now by a sword of pain, now by an air like the vivifying
+breath of the sea. Sometimes after Communion He would treat Him so,
+sometimes as He fell asleep, sometimes in the whirl of work. Yet His
+consciousness did not seem to retain for long such experiences; five
+minutes later, it might be, He would be wrestling once more with the all
+but sensible phantoms of the mind and the heart.</p>
+
+<p>There He lay, then, in the chair, revolving the intolerable blasphemies
+that He had read. His white hair was thin upon His browned temples, His
+hands were as the hands of a spirit, and His young face lined and
+patched with sorrow. His bare feet protruded from beneath His stained
+tunic, and His old brown burnous lay on the floor beside Him....</p>
+
+<p>It was an hour before He moved, and the sun had already lost half its
+fierceness, when the steps of the horses sounded in the paved court
+outside. Then He sat up, slipped His feet into their shoes, and lifted
+the burnous from the floor, as the door opened and the lean sun-burned
+priest came through.</p>
+
+<p>“The horses, Holiness,” said the man.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The Pope spoke not one word that afternoon, until the two came towards
+sunset up the bridle-path that leads between Thabor and Nazareth. They
+had taken their usual round through Cana, mounting a hillock from which
+the long mirror of Gennesareth could be seen, and passing on, always
+bearing to the right, under the shadow of Thabor until once more
+Esdraelon spread itself beneath like a grey-green carpet, a vast circle,
+twenty miles across, sprinkled sparsely with groups of huts, white walls
+and roofs, with Nain visible on the other side, Carmel heaving its long
+form far off on the right, and Nazareth nestling a mile or two away on
+the plateau on which they had halted.</p>
+
+<p>It was a sight of extraordinary peace, and seemed an extract from some
+old picture-book designed centuries ago. Here was no crowd of roofs, no
+pressure of hot humanity, no terrible evidences of civilisation and
+manufactory and strenuous, fruitless effort. A few tired Jews had come
+back to this quiet little land, as old people may return to their native
+place, with no hope of renewing their youth, or refinding their ideals,
+but with a kind of sentimentality that prevails so often over more
+logical motives, and a few more barrack-like houses had been added here
+and there to the obscure villages in sight. But it was very much as it
+had been a hundred years ago.</p>
+
+<p>The plain was half shadowed by Carmel, and half in dusty golden light.
+Overhead the clear Eastern sky was flushed with rose, as it had flushed
+for Abraham, Jacob, and the Son of David. There was no little cloud
+here, as a man’s hand, over the sea, charged with both promise and
+terror; no sound of chariot-wheels from earth or heaven, no vision of
+heavenly horses such as a young man had seen thirty centuries ago in
+this very sky. Here was the old earth and the old heaven, unchanged and
+unchangeable; the patient, returning spring had starred the thin soil
+with flowers of Bethlehem, and those glorious lilies to which Solomon’s
+scarlet garments might not be compared. There was no whisper from the
+Throne as when Gabriel had once stooped through this very air to hail
+Her who was blessed among women, no breath of promise or hope beyond
+that which God sends through every movement of His created robe of life.</p>
+
+<p>As the two halted, and the horses looked out with steady, inquisitive
+eyes at the immensity of light and air beneath them, a soft hooting cry
+broke out, and a shepherd passed below along the hillside a hundred
+yards away, trailing his long shadow behind him, and to the mellow
+tinkle of bells his flock came after, a troop of obedient sheep and
+wilful goats, cropping and following and cropping again as they went on
+to the fold, called by name in that sad minor voice of him who knew
+each, and led instead of driving. The soft clanking grew fainter, the
+shadow of the shepherd shot once to their very feet, as he topped the
+rise, and vanished again as he stepped down once more; and the call grew
+fainter yet, and ceased.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The Pope lifted His hand to His eyes for an instant, then smoothed it
+down His face.</p>
+
+<p>He nodded across to a dim patch of white walls glimmering through the
+violet haze of the falling twilight.</p>
+
+<p>“That place, father,” He said, “what is its name?”</p>
+
+<p>The Syrian priest looked across, back once more at the Pope, and across
+again.</p>
+
+<p>“That among the palms, Holiness?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes.”</p>
+
+<p>“That is Megiddo,” he said. “Some call it Armageddon.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="3CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>At twenty-three o’clock that night the Syrian priest went out to watch
+for the coming of the messenger from Tiberias. Nearly two hours
+previously he had heard the cry of the Russian volor that plied from
+Damascus to Tiberias, and Tiberias to Jerusalem, and even as it was the
+messenger was a little late.</p>
+
+<p>These were very primitive arrangements, but Palestine was out of the
+world—a slip of useless country—and it was necessary for a man to ride
+from Tiberias to Nazareth each night with papers from Cardinal Corkran
+to the Pope, and to return with correspondence. It was a dangerous task,
+and the members of the New Order who surrounded the Cardinal undertook
+it by turns. In this manner all matters for which the Pope’s personal
+attention was required, and which were too long and not too urgent,
+could be dealt with at leisure by him, and an answer returned within the
+twenty-four hours.</p>
+
+<p>It was a brilliant moonlit night. The great golden shield was riding
+high above Thabor, shedding its strange metallic light down the long
+slopes and over the moor-like country that rose up from before the
+house-door—casting too heavy black shadows that seemed far more
+concrete and solid than the brilliant pale surfaces of the rock slabs or
+even than the diamond flashes from the quartz and crystal that here and
+there sparkled up the stony pathway. Compared with this clear splendour,
+the yellow light from the shuttered house seemed a hot and tawdry thing;
+and the priest, leaning against the door-post, his eyes alone alight in
+his dark face, sank down at last with a kind of Eastern sensuousness to
+bathe himself in the glory, and to spread his lean, brown hands out to
+it.</p>
+
+<p>This was a very simple man, in faith as well as in life. For him there
+were neither the ecstasies nor the desolations of his master. It was an
+immense and solemn joy to him to live here at the spot of God’s
+Incarnation and in attendance upon His Vicar. As regarded the movements
+of the world, he observed them as a man in a ship watches the heaving of
+the waves far beneath. Of course the world was restless, he half
+perceived, for, as the Latin Doctor had said, all hearts were restless
+until they found their rest in God. <i>Quare fremuerunt gentes?...
+Adversus Dominum, et adversus Christum ejus!</i> As to the end—he was not
+greatly concerned. It might well be that the ship would be overwhelmed,
+but the moment of the catastrophe would be the end of all things
+earthly. The gates of hell shall not prevail: when Rome falls, the world
+falls; and when the world falls, Christ is manifest in power. For
+himself, he imagined that the end was not far away. When he had named
+Megiddo this afternoon it had been in his mind; to him it seemed natural
+that at the consummation of all things Christ’s Vicar should dwell at
+Nazareth where His King had come on earth—and that the Armageddon of
+the Divine John should be within sight of the scene where Christ had
+first taken His earthly sceptre and should take it again. After all, it
+would not be the first battle that Megiddo had seen. Israel and Amalek
+had met here; Israel and Assyria; Sesostris had ridden here and
+Sennacherib. Christian and Turk had contended here, like Michael and
+Satan, over the place where God’s Body had lain. As to the exact method
+of that end, he had no clear views; it would be a battle of some kind,
+and what field could be found more evidently designed for that than this
+huge flat circular plain of Esdraelon, twenty miles across, sufficient
+to hold all the armies of the earth in its embrace? To his view once
+more, ignorant as he was of present statistics, the world was divided
+into two large sections, Christians and heathens, and he supposed them
+very much of a size. Something would happen, troops would land at
+Khaifa, they would stream southwards from Tiberias, Damascus and remote
+Asia, northwards from Jerusalem, Egypt and Africa; eastwards from
+Europe; westwards from Asia again and the far-off Americas. And, surely,
+the time could not be far away, for here was Christ’s Vicar; and, as He
+Himself had said in His gospel of the Advent, <i>Ubicumque fuerit corpus,
+illie congregabuntur et aquilae.</i> Of more subtle interpretations of
+prophecy he had no knowledge. For him words were things, not merely
+labels upon ideas. What Christ and St. Paul and St. John had said—these
+things were so. He had escaped, owing chiefly to his isolation from the
+world, that vast expansion of Ritschlian ideas that during the last
+century had been responsible for the desertion by so many of any
+intelligible creed. For others this had been the supreme struggle—the
+difficulty of decision between the facts that words were not things, and
+yet that the things they represented were in themselves objective. But
+to this man, sitting now in the moonlight, listening to the far-off tap
+of hoofs over the hill as the messenger came up from Cana, faith was as
+simple as an exact science. Here Gabriel had descended on wide feathered
+wings from the Throne of God set beyond the stars, the Holy Ghost had
+breathed in a beam of ineffable light, the Word had become Flesh as Mary
+folded her arms and bowed her head to the decree of the Eternal. And
+here once more, he thought, though it was no more than a guess—yet he
+thought that already the running of chariot-wheels was audible—the
+tumult of the hosts of God gathering about the camp of the saints—he
+thought that already beyond the bars of the dark Gabriel set to his lips
+the trumpet of doom and heaven was astir. He might be wrong at this
+time, as others had been wrong at other times, but neither he nor they
+could be wrong for ever; there must some day be an end to the patience
+of God, even though that patience sprang from the eternity of His
+nature. He stood up, as down the pale moonlit path a hundred yards away
+came a pale figure of one who rode, with a leather bag strapped to his
+girdle.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>It would be about three o’clock in the morning that the priest awoke in
+his little mud-walled room next to that of the Holy Father’s, and heard
+a footstep coming up the stairs. Last evening he had left his master as
+usual beginning to open the pile of letters arrived from Cardinal
+Corkran, and himself had gone straight to his bed and slept. He lay now
+a moment or two, still drowsy, listening to the pad of feet, and an
+instant later sat up abruptly, for a deliberate tap had sounded on the
+door. Again it came; he sprang out of bed in his long night-tunic, drew
+it up hastily in his girdle, went to the door and opened it.</p>
+
+<p>The Pope was standing there, with a little lamp in one hand, for the
+dawn had scarcely yet begun, and a paper in the other.</p>
+
+<p>“I beg your pardon, Father; but there is a message I must have sent at
+once to his Eminence.”</p>
+
+<p>Together they went out through the Pope’s room, the priest, still
+half-blind with sleep, passed up the stairs, and emerged into the clear
+cold air of the upper roof. The Pope blew out His lamp, and set it on
+the parapet.</p>
+
+<p>“You will be cold, Father; fetch your cloak.”</p>
+
+<p>“And you, Holiness?”</p>
+
+<p>The other made a little gesture of denial, and went across to the tiny
+temporary shed where the wireless telegraphic instrument stood.</p>
+
+<p>“Fetch your cloak, Father,” He said again over His shoulder. “I will
+ring up meanwhile.”</p>
+
+<p>When the priest came back three minutes later, in his slippers and
+cloak, carrying another cloak also for his master, the Pope was still
+seated at the table. He did not even move His head as the other came up,
+but once more pressed on the lever that, communicating with the
+twelve-foot pole that rose through the pent-house overhead, shot out the
+quivering energy through the eighty miles of glimmering air that lay
+between Nazareth and Damascus.</p>
+
+<p>This simple priest had scarcely even by now become accustomed to this
+extraordinary device invented a century ago and perfected through all
+those years to this precise exactness—that device by which with the
+help of a stick, a bundle of wires, and a box of wheels, something, at
+last established to be at the root of all matter, if not at the very
+root of physical life, spoke across the spaces of the world to a tiny
+receiver tuned by a hair’s breadth to the vibration with which it was
+set in relations.</p>
+
+<p>The air was surprisingly cold, considering the heat that had preceded
+and would follow it, and the priest shivered a little as he stood clear
+of the roof, and stared, now at the motionless figure in the chair
+before him, now at the vast vault of the sky passing, even as he looked,
+from a cold colourless luminosity to a tender tint of yellow, as far
+away beyond Thabor and Moab the dawn began to deepen. From the village
+half-a-mile away arose the crowing of a cock, thin and brazen as a
+trumpet; a dog barked once and was silent again; and then, on a sudden,
+a single stroke upon a bell hung in the roof recalled him in an instant,
+and told him that his work was to begin.</p>
+
+<p>The Pope pressed the lever again at the sound, twice, and then, after a
+pause, once more—waited a moment for an answer, and then when it came,
+rose and signed to the priest to take his place.</p>
+
+<p>The Syrian sat down, handing the extra cloak to his master, and waited
+until the other had settled Himself in a chair set in such a position at
+the side of the table that the face of each was visible to the other.
+Then he waited, with his brown fingers poised above the row of keys,
+looking at the other’s face as He arranged himself to speak. That face,
+he thought, looking out from the hood, seemed paler than ever in this
+cold light of dawn; the black arched eyebrows accentuated this, and even
+the steady lips, preparing to speak, seemed white and bloodless. He had
+His paper in His hand, and His eyes were fixed upon this.</p>
+
+<p>“Make sure it is the Cardinal,” he said abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>The priest tapped off an enquiry, and, with moving lips, raid off the
+printed message, as like magic it precipitated itself on to the tall
+white sheet of paper that faced him.</p>
+
+<p>“It is his Eminence, Holiness,” he said softly. “He is alone at the
+instrument.”</p>
+
+<p>“Very well. Now then; begin.”</p>
+
+<p>“We have received your Eminence’s letter, and have noted the news.... It
+should have been forwarded by telegraphy—why was that not done?”</p>
+
+<p>The voice paused, and the priest who had snapped off the message, more
+quickly than a man could write it, read aloud the answer.</p>
+
+<p>“‘I did not understand that it was urgent. I thought it was but one
+more assault. I had intended to communicate more so soon as I heard
+more.”’</p>
+
+<p>“Of course it was urgent,” came the voice again in the deliberate
+intonation that was used between these two in the case of messages for
+transmission. “Remember that all news of this kind is always urgent.”</p>
+
+<p>“‘I will remember,’ read the priest. ‘I regret my mistake.’”</p>
+
+<p>“You tell us,” went on the Pope, His eyes still downcast on the paper,
+“that this measure is decided upon; you name only three authorities.
+Give me, now, all the authorities you have, if you have more.”</p>
+
+<p>There was a moment’s pause. Then the priest began to read off the names.</p>
+
+<p>“Besides the three Cardinals whose names I sent, the Archbishops of
+Thibet, Cairo, Calcutta and Sydney have all asked if the news was true,
+and for directions if it is true; besides others whose names I can
+communicate if I may leave the table for a moment.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Do so,” said the Pope.</p>
+
+<p>Again there was a pause. Then once more the names began.</p>
+
+<p>“‘The Bishops of Bukarest, the Marquesas Islands and Newfoundland. The
+Franciscans in Japan, the Crutched Friars in Morocco, the Archbishops of
+Manitoba and Portland, and the Cardinal-Archbisbop of Pekin. I have
+despatched two members of Christ Crucified to England.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Tell us when the news first arrived, and how.”</p>
+
+<p>“‘I was called up to the instrument yesterday evening at about twenty
+o’clock. The Archbishop of Sydney was asking, through our station at
+Bombay, whether the news was true. I replied I had heard nothing of it.
+Within ten minutes four more inquiries had come to the same effect; and
+three minutes later Cardinal Ruspoli sent the positive news from Turin.
+This was accompanied by a similar message from Father Petrovski in
+Moscow. Then—- ’”</p>
+
+<p>“Stop. Why did not Cardinal Dolgorovski communicate it?”</p>
+
+<p>“‘He did communicate it three hours later.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Why not at once?”</p>
+
+<p>“‘His Eminence had not heard it.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Find out at what hour the news reached Moscow—not now, but within the
+day.”</p>
+
+<p>“‘I will.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Go on, then.”</p>
+
+<p>“‘Cardinal Malpas communicated it within five minutes of Cardinal
+Ruspoli, and the rest of the inquiries arrived before midnight. China
+reported it at twenty-three.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Then when do you suppose the news was made public?”</p>
+
+<p>“‘It was decided first at the secret London conference, yesterday, at
+about sixteen o’clock by our time. The Plenipotentiaries appear to have
+signed it at that hour. After that it was communicated to the world. It
+was published here half an hour past midnight.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Then Felsenburgh was in London?”</p>
+
+<p>“‘I am not yet sure. Cardinal Malpas tells me that Felsenburgh gave his
+provisional consent on the previous day.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Very good. That is all you know, then?”</p>
+
+<p>“‘I was called up an hour ago by Cardinal Ruspoli again. He tells me
+that he fears a riot in Florence; it will be the first of many
+revolutions, he says.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Does he ask for anything?”</p>
+
+<p>“‘Only for directions.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Tell him that we send him the Apostolic Benediction, and will forward
+directions within the course of two hours. Select twelve members of the
+Order for immediate service.”</p>
+
+<p>“‘I will.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Communicate that message also, as soon as we have finished, to all the
+Sacred College, and bid them communicate it with all discretion to all
+metropolitans and bishops, that priests and people may know that We bear
+them in our heart.”</p>
+
+<p>“‘I will, Holiness.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Tell them, finally, that We had foreseen this long ago; that We commend
+them to the Eternal Father without Whose Providence no sparrow falls to
+the ground. Bid them be quiet and confident; to do nothing, save confess
+their faith when they are questioned. All other directions shall be
+issued to their pastors immediately!”</p>
+
+<p>“‘I will, Holiness.’”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>There was again a pause.</p>
+
+<p>The Pope had been speaking with the utmost tranquillity as one in a
+dream. His eyes were downcast upon the paper, His whole body as
+motionless as an image. Yet to the priest who listened, despatching the
+Latin messages, and reading aloud the replies, it seemed, although so
+little intelligible news had reached him, as if something very strange
+and great was impending. There was the sense of a peculiar strain in the
+air, and although he drew no deductions from the fact that apparently
+the whole Catholic world was in frantic communication with Damascus, yet
+he remembered his meditations of the evening before as he had waited for
+the messenger. It seemed as if the powers of this world were
+contemplating one more step—with its nature he was not greatly
+concerned.</p>
+
+<p>The Pope spoke again in His natural voice.</p>
+
+<p>“Father,” he said, “what I am about to say now is as if I told it in
+confession. You understand?—Very well. Now begin.”</p>
+
+<p>Then again the intonation began.</p>
+
+<p>“Eminence. We shall say mass of the Holy Ghost in one hour from now. At
+the end of that time, you will cause that all the Sacred College shall
+be in touch with yourself, and waiting for our commands. This new
+decision is unlike any that have preceded it. Surely you understand
+that now. Two or three plans are in our mind, yet We are not sure yet
+which it is that our Lord intends. After mass We shall communicate to
+you that which He shall show Us to be according to His Will. We beg of
+you to say mass also, immediately, for Our intention. Whatever must be
+done must be done quickly. The matter of Cardinal Dolgorovski you may
+leave until later. But we wish to hear the result of your inquiries,
+especially in London, before mid-day. <i>Benedicat te Omnipotens Deus,
+Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus.</i>”</p>
+
+<p>“‘Amen!’” murmured the priest, reading it from the sheet.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>The little chapel in the house below was scarcely more dignified than
+the other rooms. Of ornaments, except those absolutely essential to
+liturgy and devotion, there were none. In the plaster of the walls were
+indented in slight relief the fourteen stations of the Cross; a small
+stone image of the Mother of God stood in a corner, with an iron-work
+candlestick before it, and on the solid uncarved stone altar, raised on
+a stone step, stood six more iron candlesticks and an iron crucifix. A
+tabernacle, also of iron, shrouded by linen curtains, stood beneath the
+cross; a small stone slab projecting from the wall served as a credence.
+There was but one window, and this looked into the court, so that the
+eyes of strangers might not penetrate.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed to the Syrian priest as he went about his business—laying out
+the vestments in the little sacristy that opened out at one side of the
+altar, preparing the cruets and stripping the covering from the
+altar-cloth—that even that slight work was wearying. There seemed a
+certain oppression in the air. As to how far that was the result of his
+broken rest he did not know, but he feared that it was one more of those
+scirocco days that threatened. That yellowish tinge of dawn had not
+passed with the sun-rising; even now, as he went noiselessly on his bare
+feet between the predella and the <i>prie-dieu</i> where the silent white
+figure was still motionless, he caught now and again, above the roof
+across the tiny court, a glimpse of that faint sand-tinged sky that was
+the promise of beat and heaviness.</p>
+
+<p>He finished at last, lighted the candles, genuflected, and stood with
+bowed head waiting for the Holy Father to rise from His knees. A
+servant’s footstep sounded in the court, coming across to hear mass, and
+simultaneously the Pope rose and went towards the sacristy, where the
+red vestments of God who came by fire were laid ready for the Sacrifice.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Silvester’s bearing at mass was singularly unostentatious. He moved as
+swiftly as any young priest, His voice was quite even and quite low, and
+his pace neither rapid nor pompous. According to tradition, He occupied
+half-an-hour <i>ab amictu ad amictum</i>; and even in the tiny empty chapel
+He observed to keep His eyes always downcast. And yet this Syrian never
+served His mass without a thrill of something resembling fear; it was
+not only his knowledge of the awful dignity of this simple celebrant;
+but, although he could not have expressed it so, there was an aroma of
+an emotion about the vestmented figure that affected him almost
+physically—an entire absence of self-consciousness, and in its place
+the consciousness of some other Presence, a perfection of manner even in
+the smallest details that could only arise from absolute recollection.
+Even in Rome in the old days it had been one of the sights of Rome to
+see Father Franklin say mass; seminary students on the eve of ordination
+were sent to that sight to learn the perfect manner and method.</p>
+
+<p>To-day all was as usual, but at the Communion the priest looked up
+suddenly at the moment when the Host had been consumed, with a half
+impression that either a sound or a gesture had invited it; and, as he
+looked, his heart began to beat thick and convulsive at the base of his
+throat. Yet to the outward eyes there was nothing unusual. The figure
+stood there with bowed head, the chin resting on the tips of the long
+fingers, the body absolutely upright, and standing with that curious
+light poise as if no weight rested upon the feet. But to the inner sense
+something was apparent the Syrian could not in the least formulate it to
+himself; but afterwards he reflected that he had stared expecting some
+visible or audible manifestation to take place. It was an impression
+that might be described under the terms of either light or sound; at any
+instant that delicate vivid force, that to the eyes of the soul burned
+beneath the red chasuble and the white alb, might have suddenly welled
+outwards under the appearance of a gush of radiant light rendering
+luminous not only the clear brown flesh seen beneath the white hair, but
+the very texture of the coarse, dead, stained stuffs that swathed the
+rest of the body. Or it might have shown itself in the strain of a long
+chord on strings or wind, as if the mystical union of the dedicated soul
+with the ineffable Godhead and Humanity of Jesus Christ generated such a
+sound as ceaselessly flows out with the river of life from beneath the
+Throne of the Lamb. Or yet once more it might have declared itself under
+the guise of a perfume—the very essence of distilled sweetness—such a
+scent as that which, streaming out through the gross tabernacle of a
+saint’s body, is to those who observe it as the breath of heavenly
+roses....</p>
+
+<p>The moments passed in that hush of purity and peace; sounds came and
+went outside, the rattle of a cart far away, the sawing of the first
+cicada in the coarse grass twenty yards away beyond the wall; some one
+behind the priest was breathing short and thick as under the pressure of
+an intolerable emotion, and yet the figure stood there still, without a
+movement or sway to break the carved motionlessness of the alb-folds or
+the perfect poise of the white-shod feet. When He moved at last to
+uncover the Precious Blood, to lay His hands on the altar and adore, it
+was as if a statue had stirred into life; to the server it was very
+nearly as a shock.</p>
+
+<p>Again, when the chalice was empty, that first impression reasserted
+itself; the human and the external died in the embrace of the Divine and
+Invisible, and once more silence lived and glowed.... And again as the
+spiritual energy sank back again into its origin, Silvester stretched
+out the chalice.</p>
+
+<p>With knees that shook and eyes wide in expectation, the priest rose,
+adored, and went to the credence.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It was customary after the Pope’s mass that the priest himself should
+offer the Sacrifice in his presence, but to-day so soon as the vestments
+had been laid one by one on the rough chest, Silvester turned to the
+priest.</p>
+
+<p>“Presently,” he said softly. “Go up, father, at once to the roof, and
+tell the Cardinal to be ready. I shall come in five minutes.”</p>
+
+<p>It was surely a scirocco-day, thought the priest, as he came up on to
+the flat roof. Overhead, instead of the clear blue proper to that hour
+of the morning, lay a pale yellow sky darkening even to brown at the
+horizon. Thabor, before him, hung distant and sombre seen through the
+impalpable atmosphere of sand, and across the plain, as he glanced
+behind him, beyond the white streak of Nain nothing was visible except
+the pale outline of the tops of the hills against the sky. Even at this
+morning hour, too, the air was hot and breathless, broken only by the
+slow-stifling lift of the south-western breeze that, blowing across
+countless miles of sand beyond far-away Egypt, gathered up the heat of
+the huge waterless continent and was pouring it, with scarcely a streak
+of sea to soften its malignity, on this poor strip of land. Carmel, too,
+as he turned again, was swathed about its base with mist, half dry and
+half damp, and above showed its long bull-head running out defiantly
+against the western sky. The very table as he touched it was dry and hot
+to the hand, by mid-day the steel would be intolerable.</p>
+
+<p>He pressed the lever, and waited; pressed it again, and waited again.
+There came the answering ring, and he tapped across the eighty miles of
+air that his Eminence’s presence was required at once. A minute or two
+passed, and then, after another rap of the bell, a line flicked out on
+the new white sheet.</p>
+
+<p>“‘I am here. Is it his Holiness?’”</p>
+
+<p>He felt a hand upon his shoulder, and turned to see Silvester, hooded
+and in white, behind his chair.</p>
+
+<p>“Tell him yes. Ask him if there is further news.”</p>
+
+<p>The Pope went to the chair once more and sat down, and a minute later
+the priest, with growing excitement, read out the answer.</p>
+
+<p>“‘Inquiries are pouring in. Many expect your Holiness to issue a
+challenge. My secretaries have been occupied since four o’clock. The
+anxiety is indescribable. Some are denying that they have a Pope.
+Something must be done at once.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Is that all?” asked the Pope.</p>
+
+<p>Again the priest read out the answer. “‘Yes and no. The news is true. It
+will be inforced immediately. Unless a step is taken immediately there
+will be widespread and final apostasy.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Very good,” murmured the Pope, in his official voice. “Now listen
+carefully, Eminence.” He was silent for a moment, his fingers joined
+beneath his chin as just now at mass. Then he spoke.</p>
+
+<p>“We are about to place ourselves unreservedly in the hands of God. Human
+prudence must no longer restrain us. We command you then, using all
+discretion that is possible, to communicate these wishes of ours to the
+following persons under the strictest secrecy, and to no others
+whatsoever. And for this service you are to employ messengers, taken
+from the Order of Christ Crucified, two for each message, which is not
+to be committed to writing in any form. The members of the Sacred
+College, numbering twelve; the metropolitans and Patriarchs through the
+entire world, numbering twenty-two; the Generals of the Religious
+Orders: the Society of Jesus, the Friars, the Monks Ordinary, and the
+Monks Contemplative four. These persons, thirty-eight in number, with
+the chaplain of your Eminence, who shall act as notary, and my own who
+shall assist him, and Ourself—forty-one all told—these persons are to
+present themselves here at our palace of Nazareth not later than the Eve
+of Pentecost. We feel Ourselves unwilling to decide the steps necessary
+to be taken with reference to the new decree, except we first hear the
+counsel of our advisers, and give them an opportunity of communicating
+freely one with another. These words, as we have spoken them, are to be
+forwarded to all those persons whom we have named; and your Eminence
+will further inform them that our deliberations will not occupy more
+than four days.</p>
+
+<p>“As regards the questions of provisioning the council and all matters of
+that kind, your Eminence will despatch to-day the chaplain of whom we
+have spoken, who with my own chaplain will at once set about
+preparations, and your Eminence will yourself follow, appointing Father
+Marabout to act in your absence, not later than four days hence.</p>
+
+<p>“Finally, to all who have asked explicit directions in the face of this
+new decree, communicate this one sentence, and no more.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Lose not your confidence which hath a great reward. For yet a little
+while, and, He that is to come will come and will not delay</i>.—Silvester
+the Bishop, Servant of the Servants of God.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="3CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>Oliver Brand stepped out from the Conference Hall in Westminster on the
+Friday evening, so soon as the business was over and the
+Plenipotentiaries had risen from the table, more concerned as to the
+effect of the news upon his wife than upon the world.</p>
+
+<p>He traced the beginning of the change to the day five months ago when
+the President of the World had first declared the development of his
+policy, and while Oliver himself had yielded to that development, and
+from defending it in public had gradually convinced himself of its
+necessity, Mabel, for the first time in her life, had shown herself
+absolutely obstinate.</p>
+
+<p>The woman to his mind seemed to him to have fallen into some kind of
+insanity. Felsenburgh’s declaration had been made a week or two after
+his Acclamation at Westminster, and Mabel had received the news of it at
+first with absolute incredulity.</p>
+
+<p>Then, when there was no longer any doubt that he had declared the
+extermination of the Supernaturalists to be a possible necessity, there
+had been a terrible scene between husband and wife. She had said that
+she had been deceived; that the world’s hope was a monstrous mockery;
+that the reign of universal peace was as far away as ever; that
+Felsenburgh had betrayed his trust and broken his word. There had been
+an appalling scene. He did not even now like to recall it to his
+imagination. She had quieted after a while, but his arguments, delivered
+with infinite patience, seemed to produce very little effect. She
+settled down into silence, hardly answering him. One thing only seemed
+to touch her, and that was when he spoke of the President himself. It
+was becoming plain to him that she was but a woman after all at the
+mercy of a strong personality, but utterly beyond the reach of logic. He
+was very much disappointed. Yet he trusted to time to cure her.</p>
+
+<p>The Government of England had taken swift and skilful steps to reassure
+those who, like Mabel, recoiled from the inevitable logic of the new
+policy. An army of speakers traversed the country, defending and
+explaining; the press was engineered with extraordinary adroitness, and
+it was possible to say that there was not a person among the millions of
+England who had not easy access to the Government’s defence.</p>
+
+<p>Briefly, shorn of rhetoric, their arguments were as follows, and there
+was no doubt that, on the whole, they had the effect of quieting the
+amazed revolt of the more sentimental minds.</p>
+
+<p>Peace, it was pointed out, had for the first time in the world’s history
+become an universal fact. There was no longer one State, however small,
+whose interests were not identical with those of one of the three
+divisions of the world of which it was a dependency, and that first
+stage had been accomplished nearly half-a-century ago. But the second
+stage—the reunion of these three divisions under a common head—an
+infinitely greater achievement than the former, since the conflicting
+interests were incalculably more vast—this had been consummated by a
+single Person, Who, it appeared, had emerged from humanity at the very
+instant when such a Character was demanded. It was surely not much to
+ask that those on whom these benefits had come should assent to the will
+and judgment of Him through whom they had come. This, then, was an
+appeal to faith.</p>
+
+<p>The second main argument was addressed to reason. Persecution, as all
+enlightened persons confessed, was the method of a majority of savages
+who desired to force a set of opinions upon a minority who did not
+spontaneously share them. Now the peculiar malevolence of persecution in
+the past lay, not in the employment of force, but in the abuse of it.
+That any one kingdom should dictate religious opinions to a minority of
+its members was an intolerable tyranny, for no one State possessed the
+right to lay down universal laws, the contrary to which might be held by
+its neighbour. This, however, disguised, was nothing else than the
+Individualism of Nations, a heresy even more disastrous to the
+commonwealth of the world than the Individualism of the Individual. But
+with the arrival of the universal community of interests the whole
+situation was changed. The single personality of the human race had
+succeeded to the incoherence of divided units, and with that
+consummation—which might be compared to a coming of age, an entirely
+new set of rights had come into being. The human race was now a single
+entity with a supreme responsibility towards itself; there were no
+longer any private rights at all, such as had certainly existed, in the
+period previous to this. Man now possessed dominion over every cell
+which composed His Mystical Body, and where any such cell asserted
+itself to the detriment of the Body, the rights of the whole were
+unqualified.</p>
+
+<p>And there was no religion but one that claimed the equal rights of
+universal jurisdiction—and that the Catholic. The sects of the East,
+while each retained characteristics of its own, had yet found in the New
+Man the incarnation of their ideals, and had therefore given in their
+allegiance to the authority of the whole Body of whom He was Head. But
+the very essence of the Catholic Religion was treason to the very idea
+of man. Christians directed their homage to a supposed supernatural
+Being who was not only—so they claimed—outside of the world but
+positively transcended it. Christians, then—leaving aside the mad fable
+of the Incarnation, which might very well be suffered to die of its own
+folly—deliberately severed themselves from that Body of which by human
+generation they had been made members. They were as mortified limbs
+yielding themselves to the domination of an outside force other than
+that which was their only life, and by that very act imperilled the
+entire Body. This madness, then, was the one crime which still deserved
+the name. Murder, theft, rape, even anarchy itself, were as trifling
+faults compared to this monstrous sin, for while these injured indeed
+the Body they did not strike at its heart—individuals suffered, and
+therefore those minor criminals deserved restraint; but the very Life
+was not struck at. But in Christianity there was a poison actually
+deadly. Every cell that became infected with it was infected in that
+very fibre that bound it to the spring of life. This, and this alone,
+was the supreme crime of High Treason against man—and nothing but
+complete removal from the world could be an adequate remedy.</p>
+
+<p>These, then, were the main arguments addressed to that section of the
+world which still recoiled from the deliberate utterance of Felsenburgh,
+and their success had been remarkable. Of course, the logic, in itself
+indisputable, had been dressed in a variety of costumes gilded with
+rhetoric, flushed with passion, and it had done its work in such a
+manner that as summer drew on Felsenburgh had announced privately that
+he proposed to introduce a bill which should carry out to its logical
+conclusion the policy of which he had spoken.</p>
+
+<p>Now, this too, had been accomplished.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>Oliver let himself into his house, and went straight upstairs to Mabel’s
+room. It would not do to let her hear the news from any but his own
+lips. She was not there, and on inquiry he heard that she had gone out
+an hour before.</p>
+
+<p>He was disconcerted at this. The decree had been signed half-an-hour
+earlier, and in answer to an inquiry from Lord Pemberton it had been
+stated that there was no longer any reason for secrecy, and that the
+decision might be communicated to the press. Oliver had hurried away
+immediately in order to make sure that Mabel should hear the news from
+him, and now she was out, and at any moment the placards might tell her
+of what had been done.</p>
+
+<p>He felt extremely uneasy, but for another hour or so was ashamed to act.
+Then he went to the tube and asked another question or two, but the
+servant had no idea of Mabel’s movements; it might be she had gone to
+the church; sometimes she did at this hour. He sent the woman off to
+see, and himself sat down again in the window-seat of his wife’s room,
+staring out disconsolately at the wide array of roofs in the golden
+sunset light, that seemed to his eyes to be strangely beautiful this
+evening. The sky was not that pure gold which it had been every night
+during this last week; there was a touch of rose in it, and this
+extended across the entire vault so far as he could see from west to
+east. He reflected on what he had lately read in an old book to the
+effect that the abolition of smoke had certainly changed evening colours
+for the worse.... There had been a couple of severe earthquakes, too, in
+America—he wondered whether there was any connection.... Then his
+thoughts flew back to Mabel....</p>
+
+<p>It was about ten minutes before he heard her footstep on the stairs, and
+as he stood up she came in.</p>
+
+<p>There was something in her face that told him that she knew everything,
+and his heart sickened at her pale rigidity. There was no fury
+there—nothing but white, hopeless despair, and an immense
+determination. Her lips showed a straight line, and her eyes, beneath
+her white summer hat, seemed contracted to pinpricks. She stood there,
+closing the door mechanically behind her, and made no further movement
+towards him.</p>
+
+<p>“Is it true?” she said.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver drew one steady breath, and sat down again.</p>
+
+<p>“Is what true, my dear?”</p>
+
+<p>“Is it true,” she said again, “that all are to be questioned as to
+whether they believe in God, and to be killed if they confess it?”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver licked his dry lips.</p>
+
+<p>“You put it very harshly,” he said. “The question is, whether the world
+has a right—-”</p>
+
+<p>She made a sharp movement with her head.</p>
+
+<p>“It is true then. And you signed it?”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear, I beg you not to make a scene. I am tired out. And I will not
+answer that until you have heard what I have to say.”</p>
+
+<p>“Say it, then.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sit down, then.”</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>“Very well, then.... Well, this is the point. The world is one now, not
+many. Individualism is dead. It died when Felsenburgh became President
+of the World. You surely see that absolutely new conditions prevail
+now—there has never been anything like it before. You know all this as
+well as I do.”</p>
+
+<p>Again came that jerk of impatience.</p>
+
+<p>“You will please to hear me out,” he said wearily. “Well, now that this
+has happened, there is a new morality; it is exactly like a child coming
+to the age of reason. We are obliged, therefore, to see that this
+continues—that there is no going back—no mortification—that all the
+limbs are in good health. ‘If thy hand offend thee, cut it off,’ said
+Jesus Christ. Well, that is what we say.... Now, for any one to say that
+they believe in God—I doubt very much whether there is any one who
+really does believe, or understand what it means—but for any one even
+to say so is the very worst crime conceivable: it is high treason. But
+there is going to be no violence; it will all be quite quiet and
+merciful. Why, you have always approved of Euthanasia, as we all do.
+Well, it is that that will be used; and—-”</p>
+
+<p>Once more she made a little movement with her hand. The rest of her was
+like an image.</p>
+
+<p>“Is this any use?” she asked.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver stood up. He could not bear the hardness of her voice.</p>
+
+<p>“Mabel, my darling—-”</p>
+
+<p>For an instant her lips shook; then again she looked at him with eyes of
+ice.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t want that,” she said. “It is of no use. Then you did sign it?”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver had a sense of miserable desperation as he looked back at her.
+He would infinitely have preferred that she had stormed and wept.</p>
+
+<p>“Mabel—-” he cried again.</p>
+
+<p>“Then you did sign it?”</p>
+
+<p>“I did sign it,” he said at last.</p>
+
+<p>She turned and went towards the door. He sprang after her.</p>
+
+<p>“Mabel, where are you going?”</p>
+
+<p>Then, for the first time in her life, she lied to her husband frankly
+and fully.</p>
+
+<p>“I am going to rest a little,” she said. “I shall see you presently at
+supper.”</p>
+
+<p>He still hesitated, but she met his eyes, pale indeed, but so honest
+that he fell back.</p>
+
+<p>“Very well, my dear.... Mabel, try to understand.”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>He came down to supper half-an-hour later, primed with logic, and even
+kindled with emotion. The argument seemed to him now so utterly
+convincing; granted the premises that they both accepted and lived by,
+the conclusion was simply inevitable.</p>
+
+<p>He waited a minute or two, and at last went to the tube that
+communicated with the servants’ quarters.</p>
+
+<p>“Where is Mrs. Brand?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>There was an instant’s silence, and then the answer came:</p>
+
+<p>“She left the house half-an-hour ago, sir. I thought you knew.”</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>That same evening Mr. Francis was very busy in his office over the
+details connected with the festival of Sustenance that was to be
+celebrated on the first of July. It was the first time that the
+particular ceremony had taken place, and he was anxious that it should
+be as successful as its predecessors. There were a few differences
+between this and the others, and it was necessary that the
+<i>ceremoniarii</i> should be fully instructed.</p>
+
+<p>So, with his model before him—a miniature replica of the interior of
+the Abbey, with tiny dummy figures on blocks that could be shifted this
+way and that, he was engaged in adding in a minute ecclesiastical hand
+rubrical notes to his copy of the Order of Proceedings.</p>
+
+<p>When the porter therefore rang up a little after twenty-one o’clock,
+that a lady wished to see him, he answered rather brusquely down the
+tube that it was impossible. But the bell rang again, and to his
+impatient question, the reply came up that it was Mrs. Brand below, and
+that she did not ask for more than ten minutes’ conversation. This was
+quite another matter. Oliver Brand was an important personage, and his
+wife therefore had significance, and Mr. Francis apologised, gave
+directions that she was to come to his ante-room, and rose, sighing,
+from his dummy Abbey and officials.</p>
+
+<p>She seemed very quiet this evening, he thought, as he shook hands with
+her a minute later; she wore her veil down, so that he could not see her
+face very well, but her voice seemed to lack its usual vivacity.</p>
+
+<p>“I am so sorry to interrupt you, Mr. Francis,” she said. “I only want to
+ask you one or two questions.”</p>
+
+<p>He smiled at her encouragingly.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Brand, no doubt—-”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” she said, “Mr. Brand has not sent me. It is entirely my own
+affair. You will see my reasons presently. I will begin at once. I know
+I must not keep you.”</p>
+
+<p>It all seemed rather odd, he thought, but no doubt he would understand
+soon.</p>
+
+<p>“First,” she said, “I think you used to know Father Franklin. He became
+a Cardinal, didn’t he?”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Francis assented, smiling.</p>
+
+<p>“Do you know if he is alive?”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” he said. “He is dead. He was in Rome, you know, at the time of its
+destruction.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah! You are sure?”</p>
+
+<p>“Quite sure. Only one Cardinal escaped—Steinmann. He was hanged in
+Berlin; and the Patriarch of Jerusalem died a week or two later.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah! very well. Well, now, here is a very odd question. I ask for a
+particular reason, which I cannot explain, but you will soon
+understand.... It is this—Why do Catholics believe in God?”</p>
+
+<p>He was so much taken aback that for a moment he sat staring.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” she said tranquilly, “it is a very odd question. But—-” she
+hesitated. “Well, I will tell you,” she said. “The fact is, that I have
+a friend who is—is in danger from this new law. I want to be able to
+argue with her; and I must know her side. You are the only priest—I
+mean who has been a priest—whom I ever knew, except Father Franklin. So
+I thought you would not mind telling me.”</p>
+
+<p>Her voice was entirely natural; there was not a tremor or a falter in
+it. Mr. Francis smiled genially, rubbing his hands softly together.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah!” he said. “Yes, I see.... Well, that is a very large question.
+Would not to-morrow, perhaps—-?”</p>
+
+<p>“I only want just the shortest answer,” she said. “It is really
+important for me to know at once. You see, this new law comes into
+force—-”</p>
+
+<p>He nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“Well—very briefly, I should say this: Catholics say that God can be
+perceived by reason; that from the arrangements of the world they can
+deduce that there must have been an Arranger—a Mind, you understand.
+Then they say that they deduce other things about God—that He is Love,
+for example, because of happiness—-”</p>
+
+<p>“And the pain?” she interrupted.</p>
+
+<p>He smiled again.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. That is the point—that is the weak point.”</p>
+
+<p>“But what do they say about that?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, briefly, they say that pain is the result of sin—-”</p>
+
+<p>“And sin? You see, I know nothing at all, Mr. Francis.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, sin is the rebellion of man’s will against God’s.”</p>
+
+<p>“What do they mean by that?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, you see, they say that God wanted to be loved by His creatures,
+so He made them free; otherwise they could not really love. But if they
+were free, it means that they could if they liked refuse to love and
+obey God; and that is what is called Sin. You see what nonsense—-”</p>
+
+<p>She jerked her head a little.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, yes,” she said. “But I really want to get at what they think....
+Well, then, that is all?”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Francis pursed his lips.</p>
+
+<p>“Scarcely,” he said; “that is hardly more than what they call Natural
+Religion. Catholics believe much more than that.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well?”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear Mrs. Brand, it is impossible to put it in a few words. But, in
+brief, they believe that God became man—that Jesus was God, and that He
+did this in order to save them from sin by dying—-”</p>
+
+<p>“By bearing pain, you mean?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; by dying. Well, what they call the Incarnation is really the
+point. Everything else flows from that. And, once a man believes that, I
+must confess that all the rest follows—even down to scapulars and holy
+water.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Francis, I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”</p>
+
+<p>He smiled indulgently.</p>
+
+<p>“Of course not,” he said; “it is all incredible nonsense. But, you know,
+I did really believe it all once.”</p>
+
+<p>“But it’s unreasonable,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>He made a little demurring sound.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” he said, “in one sense, of course it is—utterly unreasonable.
+But in another sense—-”</p>
+
+<p>She leaned forward suddenly, and he could catch the glint of her eyes
+beneath her white veil.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah!” she said, almost breathlessly. “That is what I want to hear. Now,
+tell me how they justify it.”</p>
+
+<p>He paused an instant, considering.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” he said slowly, “as far as I remember, they say that there are
+other faculties besides those of reason. They say, for example, that
+the heart sometimes finds out things that the reason cannot—intuitions,
+you see. For instance, they say that all things such as self-sacrifice
+and chivalry and even art—all come from the heart, that Reason comes
+with them—in rules of technique, for instance—but that it cannot prove
+them; they are quite apart from that.”</p>
+
+<p>“I think I see.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, they say that Religion is like that—in other words, they
+practically confess that it is merely a matter of emotion.” He paused
+again, trying to be fair. “Well, perhaps they would not say
+that—although it is true. But briefly—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Well?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, they say there is a thing called Faith—a kind of deep conviction
+unlike anything else—supernatural—which God is supposed to give to
+people who desire it—to people who pray for it, and lead good lives,
+and so on—-”</p>
+
+<p>“And this Faith?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, this Faith, acting upon what they call Evidences—this Faith
+makes them absolutely certain that there is a God, that He was made man
+and so on, with the Church and all the rest of it. They say too that
+this is further proved by the effect that their religion has had in the
+world, and by the way it explains man’s nature to himself. You see, it
+is just a case of self-suggestion.”</p>
+
+<p>He heard her sigh, and stopped.</p>
+
+<p>“Is that any clearer, Mrs. Brand?”</p>
+
+<p>“Thank you very much,” she said, “it certainly is clearer. ... And it is
+true that Christians have died for this Faith, whatever it is?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! yes. Thousands and thousands. Just as Mohammedans have for theirs.”</p>
+
+<p>“The Mohammedans believe in God, too, don’t they?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, they did, and I suppose that a few do now. But very few: the rest
+have become esoteric, as they say.”</p>
+
+<p>“And—and which would you say were the most highly evolved people—East
+or West?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! West undoubtedly. The East thinks a good deal, but it doesn’t act
+much. And that always leads to confusion—even to stagnation of
+thought.”</p>
+
+<p>“And Christianity certainly has been the Religion of the West up to a
+hundred years ago?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! yes.”</p>
+
+<p>She was silent then, and Mr. Francis had time again to reflect how very
+odd all this was. She certainly must be very much attached to this
+Christian friend of hers.</p>
+
+<p>Then she stood up, and he rose with her.</p>
+
+<p>“Thank you so much, Mr. Francis.... Then that is the kind of outline?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, yes; so far as one can put it in a few words.”</p>
+
+<p>“Thank you.... I mustn’t keep you.”</p>
+
+<p>He went with her towards the door. But within a yard of it she stopped.</p>
+
+<p>“And you, Mr. Francis. You were brought up in all this. Does it ever
+come back to you?”</p>
+
+<p>He smiled.</p>
+
+<p>“Never,” he said, “except as a dream.”</p>
+
+<p>“How do you account for that, then? If it is all self-suggestion, you
+have had thirty years of it.”</p>
+
+<p>She paused; and for a moment he hesitated what to answer.</p>
+
+<p>“How would your old fellow-Catholics account for it?”</p>
+
+<p>“They would say that I had forfeited light—that Faith was withdrawn.”</p>
+
+<p>“And you?”</p>
+
+<p>Again he paused.</p>
+
+<p>“I should say that I had made a stronger self-suggestion the other way.”</p>
+
+<p>“I see.... Good-night, Mr. Francis.”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>She would not let him come down the lift with her, so when he had seen
+the smooth box drop noiselessly below the level, he went back again to
+his model of the Abbey and the little dummy figures. But, before he
+began to move these about again, he sat for a moment or two with pursed
+lips, staring.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="3CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>A week later Mabel awoke about dawn; and for a moment or two forgot
+where she was. She even spoke Oliver’s name aloud, staring round the
+unfamiliar room, wondering what she did here. Then she remembered, and
+was silent....</p>
+
+<p>It was the eighth day she had spent in this Home; her probation was
+finished: to-day she was at liberty to do that for which she had come.
+On the Saturday of the previous week she had gone through her private
+examination before the magistrate, stating under the usual conditions of
+secrecy her name, age and home, as well as her reasons for making the
+application for Euthanasia; and all had passed off well. She had
+selected Manchester as being sufficiently remote and sufficiently large
+to secure her freedom from Oliver’s molestation; and her secret had been
+admirably kept. There was not a hint that her husband knew anything of
+her intentions; for, after all, in these cases the police were bound to
+assist the fugitive. Individualism was at least so far recognised as to
+secure to those weary of life the right of relinquishing it. She
+scarcely knew why she had selected this method, except that any other
+seemed impossible. The knife required skill and resolution; firearms
+were unthinkable, and poison, under the new stringent regulations, was
+hard to obtain. Besides, she seriously wished to test her own
+intentions, and to be quite sure that there was no other way than
+this....</p>
+
+<p>Well, she was as certain as ever. The thought had first come to her in
+the mad misery of the outbreak of violence on the last day of the old
+year. Then it had gone again, soothed away by the arguments that man was
+still liable to relapse. Then once more it had recurred, a cold and
+convincing phantom, in the plain daylight revealed by Felsenburgh’s
+Declaration. It had taken up its abode with her then, yet she controlled
+it, hoping against hope that the Declaration would not be carried into
+action, occasionally revolting against its horror. Yet it had never been
+far away; and finally when the policy sprouted into deliberate law, she
+had yielded herself resolutely to its suggestion. That was eight days
+ago; and she had not had one moment of faltering since that.</p>
+
+<p>Yet she had ceased to condemn. The logic had silenced her. All that she
+knew was that she could not bear it; that she had misconceived the New
+Faith; that for her, whatever it was for others, there was no hope....
+She had not even a child of her own.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Those eight days, required by law, had passed very peacefully. She had
+taken with her enough money to enter one of the private homes furnished
+with sufficient comfort to save from distractions those who had been
+accustomed to gentle living: the nurses had been pleasant and
+sympathetic; she had nothing to complain of.</p>
+
+<p>She had suffered, of course, to some degree from reactions. The second
+night after her arrival had been terrible, when, as she lay in bed in
+the hot darkness, her whole sentient life had protested and struggled
+against the fate her will ordained. It had demanded the familiar
+things—the promise of food and breath and human intercourse; it had
+writhed in horror against the blind dark towards which it moved so
+inevitably; and, in the agony had been pacified only by the half-hinted
+promise of some deeper voice suggesting that death was not the end. With
+morning light sanity had come back; the will had reassumed the mastery,
+and, with it, had withdrawn explicitly the implied hope of continued
+existence. She had suffered again for an hour or two from a more
+concrete fear; the memory came back to her of those shocking revelations
+that ten years ago had convulsed England and brought about the
+establishment of these Homes under Government supervision—those
+evidences that for years in the great vivisection laboratories human
+subjects had been practised upon—persons who with the same intentions
+as herself had cut themselves off from the world in private
+euthanasia-houses, to whom had been supplied a gas that suspended
+instead of destroying animation.... But this, too, had passed with the
+return of light. Such things were impossible now under the new
+system—at least, in England. She had refrained from making an end upon
+the Continent for this very reason. There, where sentiment was weaker,
+and logic more imperious, materialism was more consistent. Since men
+were but animals—the conclusion was inevitable.</p>
+
+<p>There had been but one physical drawback, the intolerable heat of the
+days and nights. It seemed, scientists said, that an entirely unexpected
+heat-wave had been generated; there were a dozen theories, most of which
+were mutually exclusive one of another. It was humiliating, she thought,
+that men who professed to have taken the earth under their charge should
+be so completely baffled. The conditions of the weather had of course
+been accompanied by disasters; there had been earthquakes of astonishing
+violence, a ripple had wrecked not less than twenty-five towns in
+America; an island or two had disappeared, and that bewildering Vesuvius
+seemed to be working up for a denouement. But no one knew really the
+explanation. One man had been wild enough to say that some cataclysm had
+taken place in the centre of the earth.... So she had heard from her
+nurse; but she was not greatly interested. It was only tiresome that she
+could not walk much in the garden, and had to be content with sitting in
+her own cool shaded room on the second floor.</p>
+
+<p>There was only one other matter of which she had asked, namely, the
+effect of the new decree; but the nurse did not seem to know much about
+that. It appeared that there had been an outrage or two, but the law had
+not yet been enforced to any great extent; a week, after all, was a
+short time, even though the decree had taken effect at once, and
+magistrates were beginning the prescribed census.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It seemed to her as she lay awake this morning, staring at the tinted
+ceiling, and out now and again at the quiet little room, that the heat
+was worse than ever. For a minute she thought she must have overslept;
+but, as she touched her repeater, it told her that it was scarcely after
+four o’clock. Well, well; she would not have to bear it much longer; she
+thought that about eight it would be time to make an end. There was her
+letter to Oliver yet to be written; and one or two final arrangements to
+be made.</p>
+
+<p>As regarded the morality of what she was doing-the relation, that is to
+say, which her act bore to the common life of man—she had no shadow of
+doubt. It was her belief, as of the whole Humanitarian world, that just
+as bodily pain occasionally justified this termination of life, so also
+did mental pain. There was a certain pitch of distress at which the
+individual was no longer necessary to himself or the world; it was the
+most charitable act that could be performed. But she had never thought
+in old days that that state could ever be hers; Life had been much too
+interesting. But it had come to this: there was no question of it.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Perhaps a dozen times in that week she had thought over her conversation
+with Mr. Francis. Her going to him had been little more than
+instinctive; she did just wish to hear what the other side was—whether
+Christianity was as ludicrous as she had always thought. It seemed that
+it was not ludicrous; it was only terribly pathetic. It was just a
+lovely dream—an exquisite piece of poetry. It would be heavenly to
+believe it, but she did not. No—a transcendent God was unthinkable,
+although not quite so unthinkable as a merely immeasurable Man. And as
+for the Incarnation—well, well!</p>
+
+<p>There seemed no way out of it. The Humanity-Religion was the only one.
+Man was God, or at least His highest manifestation; and He was a God
+with which she did not wish to have anything more to do. These faint new
+instincts after something other than intellect and emotion were, she
+knew perfectly well, nothing but refined emotion itself.</p>
+
+<p>She had thought a great deal of Felsenburgh, however, and was astonished
+at her own feelings. He was certainly the most impressive man she had
+ever seen; it did seem very probable indeed that He was what He claimed
+to be—the Incarnation of the ideal Man the first perfect product of
+humanity. But the logic of his position was too much for her. She saw
+now that He was perfectly logical—that He had not been inconsistent in
+denouncing the destruction of Rome and a week later making His
+declaration. It was the passion of one man against another that He
+denounced—of kingdom against kingdom, and sect against sect—for this
+was suicidal for the race. He denounced passion, too, not judicial
+action. Therefore, this new decree was as logical as Himself—it was a
+judicial act on the part of an united world against a tiny majority that
+threatened the principle of life and faith: and it was to be carried out
+with supreme mercy; there was no revenge or passion or partisan spirit
+in it from beginning to end; no more than a man is revengeful or
+passionate when he amputates a diseased limb—Oliver had convinced her
+of that.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, it was logical and sound. And it was because it was so that she
+could not bear it.... But ah! what a sublime man Felsenburgh was; it was
+a joy to her even to recall his speeches and his personality. She would
+have liked to see him again. But it was no good. She had better be done
+with it as tranquilly as possible. And the world must go forward without
+her. She was just tired out with Facts.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>She dozed off again presently, and it seemed scarcely five minutes
+before she looked up to see a gentle smiling face of a white-capped
+nurse bending over her.</p>
+
+<p>“It is nearly six o’clock, my dear—the time you told me. I came to see
+about breakfast.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel drew a long breath. Then she sat up suddenly, throwing back the
+sheet.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>It struck a quarter-past six from the little clock on the mantel-shelf
+as she laid down her pen. Then she took up the closely written sheets,
+leaned back in her deep chair, and began to read.</p>
+
+<p>“HOME OF REST,</p>
+
+<p>“NO 3A MANCHESTER WEST.</p>
+
+<p>“MY DEAR: I am very sorry, but it has come back to me. I really cannot
+go on any longer, so I am going to escape in the only way left, as I
+once told you. I have had a very quiet and happy time here; they have
+been most kind and considerate. You see, of course, from the heading on
+this paper, what I mean....</p>
+
+<p>“Well, you have always been very dear to me; you are still, even at this
+moment. So you have a right to know my reasons so far as I know them
+myself. It is very difficult to understand myself; but it seems to me
+that I am not strong enough to live. So long as I was pleased and
+excited it was all very well—especially when He came. But I think I had
+expected it to be different; I did not understand as I do now how it
+must come to this—how it is all quite logical and right. I could bear
+it, when I thought that they had acted through passion, but this is
+deliberate. I did not realise that Peace must have its laws, and must
+protect itself. And, somehow, that Peace is not what I want. It is being
+alive at all that is wrong.</p>
+
+<p>“Then there is this difficulty. I know how absolutely in agreement you
+are with this new state of affairs; of course you are, because you are
+so much stronger and more logical than I am. But if you have a wife she
+must be of one mind with you. And I am not, any more, at least not with
+my heart, though I see you are right.... Do you understand, my dear?</p>
+
+<p>“If we had had a child, it might have been different. I might have liked
+to go on living for his sake. But Humanity, somehow—Oh! Oliver! I
+can’t—I can’t.</p>
+
+<p>“I know I am wrong, and that you are right—but there it is; I cannot
+change myself. So I am quite sure that I must go.</p>
+
+<p>“Then I want to tell you this—that I am not at all frightened. I never
+can understand why people are—unless, of course, they are Christians. I
+should be horribly frightened if I was one of them. But, you see, we
+both know that there is nothing beyond. It is life that I am frightened
+of—not death. Of course, I should be frightened if there was any pain;
+but the doctors tell me there is absolutely none. It is simply going to
+sleep. The nerves are dead before the brain. I am going to do it myself.
+I don’t want any one else in the room. In a few minutes the nurse
+here—Sister Anne, with whom I have made great friends—will bring in
+the thing, and then she will leave me.</p>
+
+<p>“As regards what happens afterwards, I do not mind at all. Please do
+exactly what you wish. The cremation will take place to-morrow morning
+at noon, so that you can be here if you like. Or you can send
+directions, and they will send on the urn to you. I know you liked to
+have your mother’s urn in the garden; so perhaps you will like mine.
+Please do exactly what you like. And with all my things too. Of course I
+leave them to you.</p>
+
+<p>“Now, my dear, I want to say this—that I am very sorry indeed now that
+I was so tiresome and stupid. I think I did really believe your
+arguments all along. But I did not want to believe them. Do you see now
+why I was so tiresome?</p>
+
+<p>“Oliver, my darling, you have been extraordinarily good to me.... Yes, I
+know I am crying, but I am really very happy. This is such a lovely
+ending. I wish I hadn’t been obliged to make you so anxious during this
+last week: but I had to—I knew you would persuade me against it, if you
+found me, and that would have been worse than ever. I am sorry I told
+you that lie, too. Indeed, it is the first I ever did tell you.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I don’t think there is much more to say. Oliver, my dear,
+good-bye. I send you my love with all my heart.</p>
+
+<p>“MABEL.”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>She sat still when she had read it through, and her eyes were still wet
+with tears. Yet it was all perfectly true. She was far happier than she
+could be if she had still the prospect of going back. Life seemed
+entirely blank: death was so obvious an escape; her soul ached for it,
+as a body for sleep.</p>
+
+<p>She directed the envelope, still with a perfectly steady hand, laid it
+on the table, and leaned back once more, glancing again at her untasted
+breakfast.</p>
+
+<p>Then she suddenly began to think of her conversation with Mr. Francis;
+and, by a strange association of ideas, remembered the fall of the volor
+in Brighton, the busy-ness of the priest, and the Euthanasia boxes....</p>
+
+<p>When Sister Anne came in a few minutes later, she was astonished at what
+she saw. The girl crouched at the window, her hands on the sill, staring
+out at the sky in an attitude of unmistakable horror.</p>
+
+<p>Sister Anne came across the room quickly, setting down something on the
+table as she passed. She touched the girl on the shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear, what is it?”</p>
+
+<p>There was a long sobbing breath, and Mabel turned, rising as she turned,
+and clutched the nurse with one shaking hand, pointing out with the
+other.</p>
+
+<p>“There!” she said. “There—look!”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, my dear, what is it? I see nothing. It is a little dark!”</p>
+
+<p>“Dark!” said the other. “You call that dark! Why, why, it is
+black—black!”</p>
+
+<p>The nurse drew her softly backwards to the chair, turning her from the
+window. She recognised nervous fear; but no more than that. But Mabel
+tore herself free, and wheeled again.</p>
+
+<p>“You call that a little dark,” she said. “Why, look, sister, look!”</p>
+
+<p>Yet there was nothing remarkable to be seen. In front rose up the
+feathery hand of an elm, then the shuttered windows across the court,
+the roof, and above that the morning sky, a little heavy and dusky as
+before a storm; but no more than that.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, what is it, my dear? What do you see?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, why ... look! look!—There, listen to that.”</p>
+
+<p>A faint far-away rumble sounded as the rolling of a waggon—so faint
+that it might almost be an aural delusion. But the girl’s hands were at
+her ears, and her face was one white wide-eyed mask of terror. The nurse
+threw her arms round her.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear,” she said, “you are not yourself. That is nothing but a little
+heat-thunder. Sit down quietly.”</p>
+
+<p>She could feel the girl’s body shaking beneath her hands, but there was
+no resistance as she drew her to the chair.</p>
+
+<p>“The lights! the lights!” sobbed Mabel.</p>
+
+<p>“Will you promise me to sit quietly, then?”</p>
+
+<p>She nodded; and the nurse went across to the door, smiling tenderly; she
+had seen such things before. A moment later the room was full of
+exquisite sunlight, as she switched the handle. As she turned, she saw
+that Mabel had wheeled herself round in the chair, and with clasped
+hands was still staring out at the sky above the roofs; but she was
+plainly quieter again now. The nurse came back, and put her hand on her
+shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>“You are overwrought, my dear.... Now you must believe me. There is
+nothing to be frightened of. It is just nervous excitement.... Shall I
+pull down the blind?”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel turned her face.... Yes, certainly the light had reassured her.
+Her face was still white and bewildered, but the steady look was coming
+back to her eyes, though, even as she spoke, they wandered back more
+than once to the window.</p>
+
+<p>“Nurse,” she said more quietly, “please look again and tell me if you
+see nothing. If you say there is nothing I will believe that I am going
+mad. No; you must not touch the blind.”</p>
+
+<p>No; there was nothing. The sky was a little dark, as if a blight were
+coming on; but there was hardly more than a veil of cloud, and the light
+was scarcely more than tinged with gloom. It was just such a sky as
+precedes a spring thunderstorm. She said so, clearly and firmly.</p>
+
+<p>Mabel’s face steadied still more.</p>
+
+<p>“Very well, nurse.... Then—-”</p>
+
+<p>She turned to the little table by the side on which Sister Anne had set
+down what she had brought into the room.</p>
+
+<p>“Show me, please.”</p>
+
+<p>The nurse still hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>“Are you sure you are not too frightened, my dear? Shall I get you
+anything?”</p>
+
+<p>“I have no more to say,” said Mabel firmly. “Show me, please.”</p>
+
+<p>Sister Anne turned resolutely to the table.</p>
+
+<p>There rested upon it a white-enamelled box, delicately painted with
+flowers. From this box emerged a white flexible tube with a broad
+mouthpiece, fitted with two leather-covered steel clasps. From the side
+of the box nearest the chair protruded a little china handle.</p>
+
+<p>“Now, my dear,” began the nurse quietly, watching the other’s eyes turn
+once again to the window, and then back—“now, my dear, you sit there,
+as you are now. Your head right back, please. When you are ready, you
+put this over your mouth, and clasp the springs behind your head....
+So.... it works quite easily. Then you turn this handle, round that way,
+as far as it will go. And that is all.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel nodded. She had regained her self-command, and understood plainly
+enough, though even as she spoke once again her eyes strayed away to the
+window.</p>
+
+<p>“That is all,” she said. “And what then?”</p>
+
+<p>The nurse eyed her doubtfully for a moment.</p>
+
+<p>“I understand perfectly,” said Mabel. “And what then?”</p>
+
+<p>“There is nothing more. Breathe naturally. You will feel sleepy almost
+directly. Then you close your eyes, and that is all.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel laid the tube on the table and stood up. She was completely
+herself now.</p>
+
+<p>“Give me a kiss, sister,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>The nurse nodded and smiled to her once more at the door. But Mabel
+hardly noticed it; again she was looking towards the window.</p>
+
+<p>“I shall come back in half-an-hour,” said Sister Anne.</p>
+
+<p>Then her eyes caught a square of white upon the centre table. “Ah! that
+letter!” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” said the girl absently. “Please take it.”</p>
+
+<p>The nurse took it up, glanced at the address, and again at Mabel. Still
+she hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>“In half-an-hour,” she repeated. “There is no hurry at all. It doesn’t
+take five minutes.... Good-bye, my dear.”</p>
+
+<p>But Mabel was still looking out of the window, and made no answer.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>Mabel stood perfectly still until she heard the locking of the door and
+the withdrawal of the key. Then once more she went to the window and
+clasped the sill.</p>
+
+<p>From where she stood there was visible to her first the courtyard
+beneath, with its lawn in the centre, and a couple of trees growing
+there—all plain in the brilliant light that now streamed from her
+window, and secondly, above the roofs, a tremendous pall of ruddy black.
+It was the more terrible from the contrast. Earth, it seemed, was
+capable of light; heaven had failed.</p>
+
+<p>It appeared, too, that there was a curious stillness. The house was,
+usually, quiet enough at this hour: the inhabitants of that place were
+in no mood for bustle: but now it was more than quiet; it was deathly
+still: it was such a hush as precedes the sudden crash of the sky’s
+artillery. But the moments went by, and there was no such crash: only
+once again there sounded a solemn rolling, as of some great wain far
+away; stupendously impressive, for with it to the girl’s ears there
+seemed mingled a murmur of innumerable voices, ghostly crying and
+applause. Then again the hush settled down like wool.</p>
+
+<p>She had begun to understand now. The darkness and the sounds were not
+for all eyes and ears. The nurse had seen and heard nothing
+extraordinary, and the rest of the world of men saw and heard nothing.
+To them it was no more than the hint of a coming storm.</p>
+
+<p>Mabel did not attempt to distinguish between the subjective and the
+objective. It was nothing to her as to whether the sights and sounds
+were generated by her own brain or perceived by some faculty hitherto
+unknown. She seemed to herself to be standing already apart from the
+world which she had known; it was receding from her, or, rather, while
+standing where it had always done, it was melting, transforming itself,
+passing to some other mode of existence. The strangeness seemed no more
+strange than anything else than that ... that little painted box upon
+the table.</p>
+
+<p>Then, hardly knowing what she said, looking steadily upon that appalling
+sky, she began to speak....</p>
+
+<p>“O God!” she said. “If You are really there really there—-”</p>
+
+<p>Her voice faltered, and she gripped the sill to steady herself. She
+wondered vaguely why she spoke so; it was neither intellect nor emotion
+that inspired her. Yet she continued....</p>
+
+<p>“O God, I know You are not there—of course You are not. But if You were
+there, I know what I would say to You. I would tell You how puzzled and
+tired I am. No—No—I need not tell You: You would know it. But I would
+say that I was very sorry for all this. Oh! You would know that too. I
+need not say anything at all. O God! I don’t know what I want to say. I
+would like You to look after Oliver, of course, and all Your poor
+Christians. Oh! they will have such a hard time.... God. God—You would
+understand, wouldn’t You?” ...</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Again came the heavy rumble and the solemn bass of a myriad voices; it
+seemed a shade nearer, she thought.... She never liked thunderstorms or
+shouting crowds. They always gave her a headache ...</p>
+
+<p>“Well, well,” she said. “Good-bye, everything—-”</p>
+
+<p>Then she was in the chair. The mouthpiece—yes; that was it....</p>
+
+<p>She was furious at the trembling of her hands; twice the spring slipped
+from her polished coils of hair.... Then it was fixed ... and as if a
+breeze fanned her, her sense came back....</p>
+
+<p>She found she could breathe quite easily; there was no resistance—that
+was a comfort; there would be no suffocation about it.... She put out
+her left hand and touched the handle, conscious less of its sudden
+coolness than of the unbearable heat in which the room seemed almost
+suddenly plunged. She could hear the drumming pulses in her temples and
+the roaring of the voices.... She dropped the handle once more, and with
+both hands tore at the loose white wrapper that she had put on this
+morning....</p>
+
+<p>Yes, that was a little easier; she could breathe better so. Again her
+fingers felt for and found the handle, but the sweat streamed from her
+fingers, and for an instant she could not turn the knob. Then it yielded
+suddenly....</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>For one instant the sweet languid smell struck her consciousness like a
+blow, for she knew it as the scent of death. Then the steady will that
+had borne her so far asserted itself, and she laid her hands softly in
+her lap, breathing deeply and easily.</p>
+
+<p>She had closed her eyes at the turning of the handle, but now opened
+them again, curious to watch the aspect of the fading world. She had
+determined to do this a week ago: she would at least miss nothing of
+this unique last experience.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed at first that there was no change. There was the feathery head
+of the elm, the lead roof opposite, and the terrible sky above. She
+noticed a pigeon, white against the blackness, soar and swoop again out
+of sight in an instant....</p>
+
+<p>... Then the following things happened....</p>
+
+<p>There was a sudden sensation of ecstatic lightness in all her limbs; she
+attempted to lift a hand, and was aware that it was impossible; it was
+no longer hers. She attempted to lower her eyes from that broad strip of
+violet sky, and perceived that that too was impossible. Then she
+understood that the will had already lost touch with the body, that the
+crumbling world had receded to an infinite distance—that was as she had
+expected, but what continued to puzzle her was that her mind was still
+active. It was true that the world she had known had withdrawn itself
+from the dominion of consciousness, as her body had done, except, that
+was, in the sense of hearing, which was still strangely alert; yet there
+was still enough memory to be aware that there was such a world—that
+there were other persons in existence; that men went about their
+business, knowing nothing of what had happened; but faces, names,
+places had all alike gone. In fact, she was conscious of herself in such
+a manner as she had never been before; it seemed as if she had
+penetrated at last into some recess of her being into which hitherto she
+had only looked as through clouded glass. This was very strange, and yet
+it was familiar, too; she had arrived, it seemed, at a centre, round the
+circumference of which she had been circling all her life; and it was
+more than a mere point: it was a distinct space, walled and enclosed....
+At the same instant she knew that hearing, too, was gone....</p>
+
+<p>Then an amazing thing happened—yet it appeared to her that she had
+always known it would happen, although her mind had never articulated
+it. This is what happened.</p>
+
+<p>The enclosure melted, with a sound of breaking, and a limitless space
+was about her—limitless, different to everything else, and alive, and
+astir. It was alive, as a breathing, panting body is alive—self-evident
+and overpowering—it was one, yet it was many; it was immaterial, yet
+absolutely real—real in a sense in which she never dreamed of
+reality....</p>
+
+<p>Yet even this was familiar, as a place often visited in dreams is
+familiar; and then, without warning, something resembling sound or
+light, something which she knew in an instant to be unique, tore across
+it....</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Then she saw, and understood....</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="3CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>Oliver had passed the days since Mabel’s disappearance in an
+indescribable horror. He had done all that was possible: he had traced
+her to the station and to Victoria, where he lost her clue; he had
+communicated with the police, and the official answer, telling him
+nothing, had arrived to the effect that there was no news: and it was
+not until the Tuesday following her disappearance that Mr. Francis,
+hearing by chance of his trouble, informed him by telephone that he had
+spoken with her on the Friday night. But there was no satisfaction to be
+got from him—indeed, the news was bad rather than good, for Oliver
+could not but be dismayed at the report of the conversation, in spite of
+Mr. Francis’s assurances that Mrs. Brand had shown no kind of
+inclination to defend the Christian cause.</p>
+
+<p>Two theories gradually emerged, in his mind; either she was gone to the
+protection of some unknown Catholic, or—and he grew sick at the
+thought—she had applied somewhere for Euthanasia as she had once
+threatened, and was now under the care of the Law; such an event was
+sufficiently common since the passing of the Release Act in 1998. And it
+was frightful that he could not condemn it.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>On the Tuesday evening, as he sat heavily in his room, for the hundredth
+time attempting to trace out some coherent line through the maze of
+intercourse he had had with his wife during these past months, his bell
+suddenly rang. It was the red label of Whitehall that had made its
+appearance; and for an instant his heart leaped with hope that it was
+news of her. But at the first words it sank again.</p>
+
+<p>“Brand,” came the sharp fairy voice, “is that you?... Yes, I am
+Snowford. You are wanted at once—at once, you understand. There is an
+extraordinary meeting of the Council at twenty o’clock. The President
+will be there. You understand the urgency. No time for more. Come
+instantly to my room.”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Even this message scarcely distracted him. He, with the rest of the
+world, was no longer surprised at the sudden descents of the President.
+He came and vanished again without warning, travelling and working with
+incredible energy, yet always, as it seemed, retaining his personal
+calm.</p>
+
+<p>It was already after nineteen; Oliver supped immediately, and a
+quarter-of-an-hour before the hour presented himself in Snowford’s room,
+where half a dozen of his colleagues were assembled.</p>
+
+<p>That minister came forward to meet him, with a strange excitement in his
+face. He drew him aside by a button.</p>
+
+<p>“See here, Brand, you are wanted to speak first—immediately after the
+President’s Secretary who will open; they are coming from Paris. It is
+about a new matter altogether. He has had information of the whereabouts
+of the Pope.... It seems that there is one.... Oh, you will understand
+presently. Oh, and by the way,” he went on, looking curiously at the
+strained face, “I am sorry to hear of your anxiety. Pemberton told me
+just now.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver lifted a hand abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>“Tell me,” he said. “What am I wanted to say?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, the President will have a proposal, we imagine. You know our
+minds well enough. Just explain our attitude towards the Catholics.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver’s eyes shrank suddenly to two bright lines beneath the lids. He
+nodded.</p>
+
+<p>Cartwright came up presently, an immense, bent old man with a face of
+parchment, as befitted the Lord Chief Justice.</p>
+
+<p>“By the way, Brand, what do you know of a man called Phillips? He seems
+to have mentioned your name.”</p>
+
+<p>“He was my secretary,” said Oliver slowly. “What about him?”</p>
+
+<p>“I think he must be mad. He has given himself up to a magistrate,
+entreating to be examined at once. The magistrate has applied for
+instructions. You see, the Act has scarcely begun to move yet.”</p>
+
+<p>“But what has he done?”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s the difficulty. He says he cannot deny God, neither can he
+affirm Him.—He was your secretary, then?”</p>
+
+<p>“Certainly. I knew he was inclined to Christianity. I had to get rid of
+him for that.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, he is to be remanded for a week. Perhaps he will be able to make
+up his mind.”</p>
+
+<p>Then the talk shifted off again. Two or three more came up, and all eyed
+Oliver with a certain curiosity; the story was gone about that his wife
+had left him. They wished to see how he took it.</p>
+
+<p>At five minutes before the hour a bell rang, and the door into the
+corridor was thrown open.</p>
+
+<p>“Come, gentlemen,” said the Prime Minister.</p>
+
+<p>The Council Chamber was a long high room on the first floor; its walls
+from floor to ceiling were lined with books. A noiseless rubber carpet
+was underfoot. There were no windows; the room was lighted artificially.
+A long table, set round with armed chairs, ran the length of the floor,
+eight on either side; and the Presidential chair, raised on a dais,
+stood at the head.</p>
+
+<p>Each man went straight to his chair in silence, and remained there,
+waiting.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The room was beautifully cool, in spite of the absence of windows, and
+was a pleasant contrast to the hot evening outside through which most of
+these men had come. They, too, had wondered at the surprising weather,
+and had smiled at the conflict of the infallible. But they were not
+thinking about that now: the coming of the President was a matter which
+always silenced the most loquacious. Besides, this time, they understood
+that the affair was more serious than usual.</p>
+
+<p>At one minute before the hour, again a bell sounded, four times, and
+ceased; and at the signal each man turned instinctively to the high
+sliding door behind the Presidential chair. There was dead silence
+within and without: the huge Government offices were luxuriously
+provided with sound-deadening apparatus, and not even the rolling of the
+vast motors within a hundred yards was able to send a vibration through
+the layers of rubber on which the walls rested. There was only one noise
+that could penetrate, and that the sound of thunder. The experts were at
+present unable to exclude this.</p>
+
+<p>Again the silence seemed to fall in one yet deeper veil. Then the door
+opened, and a figure came swiftly through, followed by Another in black
+and scarlet.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>He passed straight up to the chair, followed by two secretaries, bowed
+slightly to this side and that, sat down and made a little gesture. Then
+they, too, were in their chairs, upright and intent. For perhaps the
+hundredth time, Oliver, staring upon the President, marvelled at the
+quietness and the astounding personality of Him. He was in the English
+judicial dress that had passed down through centuries—black and scarlet
+with sleeves of white fur and a crimson sash—and that had lately been
+adopted as the English presidential costume of him who stood at the head
+of the legislature. But it was in His personality, in the atmosphere
+that flowed from Him, that the marvel lay. It was as the scent of the
+sea to the physical nature—it exhilarated, cleansed, kindled,
+intoxicated. It was as inexplicably attractive as a cherry orchard in
+spring, as affecting as the cry of stringed instruments, as compelling
+as a storm. So writers had said. They compared it to a stream of clear
+water, to the flash of a gem, to the love of woman. They lost all
+decency sometimes; they said it fitted all moods, as the voice of many
+waters; they called it again and again, as explicitly as possible, the
+Divine Nature perfectly Incarnate at last....</p>
+
+<p>Then Oliver’s reflections dropped from him like a mantle, for the
+President, with downcast eyes and head thrown back, made a little
+gesture to the ruddy-faced secretary on His right; and this man, without
+a movement, began to speak like an impersonal actor repeating his part.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>“Gentlemen,” he said, in an even, resonant voice, “the President is come
+direct from Paris. This afternoon His Honour was in Berlin; this
+morning, early, in Moscow. Yesterday in New York. To-night His Honour
+must be in Turin; and to-morrow will begin to return through Spain,
+North Africa, Greece and the southeastern states.”</p>
+
+<p>This was the usual formula for such speeches. The President spoke but
+little himself now; but was careful for the information of his subjects
+on occasions like this. His secretaries were perfectly trained, and this
+speaker was no exception. After a slight pause, he continued:</p>
+
+<p>“This is the business, gentlemen.</p>
+
+<p>“Last Thursday, as you are aware, the Plenipotentaries signed the Test
+Act in this room, and it was immediately communicated all over the
+world. At sixteen o’clock His Honour received a message from a man named
+Dolgorovski—who is, it is understood, one of the Cardinals of the
+Catholic Church. This he claimed; and on inquiry it was found to be a
+fact. His information confirmed what was already suspected—namely, that
+there was a man claiming to be Pope, who had created (so the phrase is)
+other cardinals, shortly after the destruction of Rome, subsequent to
+which his own election took place in Jerusalem. It appears that this
+Pope, with a good deal of statesmanship, has chosen to keep his own name
+and place of residence a secret from even his own followers, with the
+exception of the twelve cardinals; that he has done a great deal,
+through the instrumentality of one of his cardinals in particular, and
+through his new Order in general, towards the reorganisation of the
+Catholic Church; and that at this moment he is living, apart from the
+world, in complete security.</p>
+
+<p>“His Honour blames Himself that He did not do more than suspect
+something of the kind—misled, He thinks, by a belief that if there had
+been a Pope, news would have been heard of it from other quarters, for,
+as is well known, the entire structure of the Christian Church rests
+upon him as upon a rock. Further, His Honour thinks inquiries should
+have been made in the very place where now it is understood that this
+Pope is living.</p>
+
+<p>“The man’s name, gentlemen, is Franklin—-”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver started uncontrollably, but relapsed again to bright-eyed
+intelligence as for an instant the President glanced up from his
+motionlessness.</p>
+
+<p>“Franklin,” repeated the secretary, “and he is living in Nazareth,
+where, it is said, the Founder of Christianity passed His youth.</p>
+
+<p>“Now this, gentlemen, His Honour heard on Thursday in last week. He
+caused inquiries to be made, and on Friday morning received further
+intelligence from Dolgorovski that this Pope had summoned to Nazareth a
+meeting of his cardinals, and certain other officials, from all over the
+world, to consider what steps should be taken in view of the new Test
+Act. This His Honour takes to show an extreme want of statesmanship
+which seems hard to reconcile with his former action. These persons are
+summoned by special messengers to meet on Saturday next, and will begin
+their deliberations after some Christian ceremonies on the following
+morning.</p>
+
+<p>“You wish, gentlemen, no doubt, to know Dolgorovski’s motives in making
+all this known. His Honour is satisfied that they are genuine. The man
+has been losing belief in his religion; in fact, he has come to see that
+this religion is the supreme obstacle to the consolidation of the race.
+He has esteemed it his duty, therefore, to lay this information before
+His Honour. It is interesting as an historical parallel to reflect that
+the same kind of incident marked the rise of Christianity as will mark,
+it is thought, its final extinction—namely, the informing on the part
+of one of the leaders of the place and method by which the principal
+personage may be best approached. It is also, surely, very significant
+that the scene of the extinction of Christianity is identical with that
+of its inauguration....</p>
+
+<p>“Well, gentlemen, His Honour’s proposal is as follows, carrying out the
+Declaration to which you all acceded. It is that a force should proceed
+during the night of Saturday next to Palestine, and on the Sunday
+morning, when these men will be all gathered together, that this force
+should finish as swiftly and mercifully as possible the work to which
+the Powers have set their hands. So far, the comment of the Governments
+which have been consulted has been unanimous, and there is little doubt
+that the rest will be equally so. His Honour felt that He could not act
+in so grave a matter on His own responsibility; it is not merely local;
+it is a catholic administration of justice, and will have results wider
+than it is safe minutely to prophesy.</p>
+
+<p>“It is not necessary to enter into His Honour’s reasons. They are
+already well known to you; but before asking for your opinion, He
+desires me to indicate what He thinks, in the event of your approval,
+should be the method of action.</p>
+
+<p>“Each Government, it is proposed, should take part in the final scene,
+for it is something of a symbolic action; and for this purpose it is
+thought well that each of the three Departments of the World should
+depute volors, to the number of the constituting States, one hundred and
+twenty-two all told, to set about the business. These volors should have
+no common meeting-ground, otherwise the news will surely penetrate to
+Nazareth, for it is understood that, this new Order of Christ Crucified
+has a highly organised system of espionage. The rendezvous, then, should
+be no other than Nazareth itself; and the time of meeting should be, it
+is thought, not later than nine o’clock according to Palestine
+reckoning. These details, however, can be decided and communicated as
+soon as a determination has been formed as regards the entire scheme.</p>
+
+<p>“With respect to the exact method of carrying out the conclusion, His
+Honour is inclined to think it will be more merciful to enter into no
+negotiations with the persons concerned. An opportunity should be given
+to the inhabitants of the village to make their escape if they so desire
+it, and then, with the explosives that the force should carry, the end
+can be practically instantaneous.</p>
+
+<p>“For Himself, His Honour proposes to be there in person, and further
+that the actual discharge should take place from His own car. It seems
+but suitable that the world which has done His Honour the goodness to
+elect Him to its Presidentship should act through His hands; and this
+would be at least some slight token of respect to a superstition which,
+however infamous, is yet the one and only force capable of withstanding
+the true progress of man.</p>
+
+<p>“His Honour promises you, gentlemen, that in the event of this plan
+being carried out, we shall be no more troubled with Christianity.
+Already the moral effect of the Test Act has been prodigious. It is
+understood that, by tens of thousands, Catholics, numbering among them
+even members of this new fanatical Religious Order, have been renouncing
+their follies even in these few days; and a final blow struck now at the
+very heart and head of the Catholic Church, eliminating, as it would do,
+the actual body on which the entire organisation subsists, would render
+its resurrection impossible. It is a well-known fact that, granted the
+extinction of the line of Popes, together with those necessary for its
+continuance, there could be no longer any question amongst even the most
+ignorant that the claim of Jesus had ceased to be either reasonable or
+possible. Even the Order that has provided the sinews for this new
+movement must cease to exist.</p>
+
+<p>“Dolgorovski, of course, is the difficulty, for it is not certainly
+known whether one Cardinal would be considered sufficient for the
+propagation of the line; and, although reluctantly, His Honour feels
+bound to suggest that at the conclusion of the affair, Dolgorovski,
+also, who will not, of course, be with his fellows at Nazareth, should
+be mercifully removed from even the danger of a relapse....</p>
+
+<p>“His Honour, then, asks you, gentlemen, as briefly as possible, to state
+your views on the points of which I have had the privilege of speaking.”</p>
+
+<p>The quiet business-like voice ceased.</p>
+
+<p>He had spoken throughout in the manner with which he had begun; his eyes
+had been downcast throughout; his voice had been tranquil and
+restrained. His deportment had been admirable.</p>
+
+<p>There was an instant’s silence, and all eyes settled steadily again upon
+the motionless figure in black and scarlet and the ivory face.</p>
+
+<p>Then Oliver stood up. His face was as white as paper; his eyes bright
+and dilated.</p>
+
+<p>“Sir,” he said, “I have no doubt that we are all of one mind. I need say
+no more than that, so far as I am a representative of my colleagues, we
+assent to the proposal, and leave all details in your Honour’s hands.”</p>
+
+<p>The President lifted his eyes, and ran them swiftly along the rigid
+faces turned to him.</p>
+
+<p>Then, in the breathless hush, he spoke for the first time in his strange
+voice, now as passionless as a frozen river.</p>
+
+<p>“Is there any other proposal?”</p>
+
+<p>There was a murmur of assent as the men rose to their feet.</p>
+
+<p>“Thank you, gentlemen,” said the secretary.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>It was a little before seven o’clock on the morning of Saturday that
+Oliver stepped out of the motor that had carried him to Wimbledon
+Common, and began to go up the steps of the old volor-stage, abandoned
+five years ago. It had been thought better, in view of the extreme
+secrecy that was to be kept, that England’s representative in the
+expedition should start from a comparatively unknown point, and this old
+stage, in disuse now, except for occasional trials of new Government
+machines, had been selected. Even the lift had been removed, and it was
+necessary to climb the hundred and fifty steps on foot.</p>
+
+<p>It was with a certain unwillingness that he had accepted this post among
+the four delegates, for nothing had been heard of his wife, and it was
+terrible to him to leave London while her fate was as yet doubtful. On
+the whole, he was less inclined than ever now to accept the Euthanasia
+theory; he had spoken to one or two of her friends, all of whom declared
+that she had never even hinted at such an end. And, again, although he
+was well aware of the eight-day law in the matter, even if she had
+determined on such a step there was nothing to show that she was yet in
+England, and, in fact, it was more than likely that if she were bent on
+such an act she would go abroad for it, where laxer conditions
+prevailed. In short, it seemed that he could do no good by remaining in
+England, and the temptation to be present at the final act of justice in
+the East by which land, and, in fact, it was more than likely that if
+she were to be wiped out, and Franklin, too, among them—Franklin, that
+parody of the Lord of the World—this, added to the opinion of his
+colleagues in the Government, and the curious sense, never absent from
+him now, that Felsenburgh’s approval was a thing to die for if
+necessary—these things had finally prevailed. He left behind him at
+home his secretary, with instructions that no expense was to be spared
+in communicating with him should any news of his wife arrive during his
+absence.</p>
+
+<p>It was terribly hot this morning, and, by the time that he reached the
+top he noticed that the monster in the net was already fitted into its
+white aluminium casing, and that the fans within the corridor and saloon
+were already active. He stepped inside to secure a seat in the saloon,
+set his bag down, and after a word or two with the guard, who, of
+course, had not yet been informed of their destination, learning that
+the others were not yet come, he went out again on to the platform for
+coolness’ sake, and to brood in peace.</p>
+
+<p>London looked strange this morning, he thought. Here beneath him was the
+common, parched somewhat with the intense heat of the previous week,
+stretching for perhaps half-a-mile—tumbled ground, smooth stretches of
+turf, and the heads of heavy trees up to the first house-roofs, set,
+too, it seemed, in bowers of foliage. Then beyond that began the serried
+array, line beyond line, broken in one spot by the gleam of a
+river-reach, and then on again fading beyond eyesight. But what
+surprised him was the density of the air; it was now, as old books
+related it had been in the days of smoke. There was no freshness, no
+translucence of morning atmosphere; it was impossible to point in any
+one direction to the source of this veiling gloom, for on all sides it
+was the same. Even the sky overhead lacked its blue; it appeared painted
+with a muddy brush, and the sun shewed the same faint tinge of red. Yes,
+it was like that, he said wearily to himself—like a second-rate sketch;
+there was no sense of mystery as of a veiled city, but rather unreality.
+The shadows seemed lacking in definiteness, the outlines and grouping in
+coherence. A storm was wanted, he reflected; or even, it might be, one
+more earthquake on the other side of the world would, in wonderful
+illustration of the globe’s unity, relieve the pressure on this side.
+Well, well; the journey would be worth taking even for the interest of
+observing climatic changes; but it would be terribly hot, he mused, by
+the time the south of France was reached.</p>
+
+<p>Then his thoughts leaped back to their own gnawing misery.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It was another ten minutes before he saw the scarlet Government motor,
+with awnings out, slide up the road from the direction of Fulham; and
+yet five minutes more before the three men appeared with their servants
+behind them—Maxwell, Snowford and Cartwright, all alike, as was Oliver,
+in white duck from head to foot.</p>
+
+<p>They did not speak one word of their business, for the officials were
+going to and fro, and it was advisable to guard against even the
+smallest possibility of betrayal. The guard had been told that the volor
+was required for a three days’ journey, that provisions were to be taken
+in for that period, and that the first point towards which the course
+was to lie was the centre of the South Downs. There would be no stopping
+for at least a day and a night.</p>
+
+<p>Further instructions had reached them from the President on the previous
+morning, by which time He had completed His visitation, and received the
+assent of the Emergency Councils of the world. This Snowford commented
+upon in an undertone, and added a word or two as to details, as the four
+stood together looking out over the city.</p>
+
+<p>Briefly, the plan was as follows, at least so far as it concerned
+England. The volor was to approach Palestine from the direction of the
+Mediterranean, observing to get into touch with France on her left and
+Spain on her right within ten miles of the eastern end of Crete. The
+approximate hour was fixed at twenty-three (eastern time). At this point
+she was to show her night signal, a scarlet line on a white field; and
+in the event of her failing to observe her neighbours was to circle at
+that point, at a height of eight hundred feet, until either the two were
+sighted or further instructions were received. For the purpose of
+dealing with emergencies, the President’s car, which would finally make
+its entrance from the south, was to be accompanied by an <i>aide-de-camp</i>
+capable of moving at a very high speed, whose signals were to be taken
+as Felsenburgh’s own.</p>
+
+<p>So soon as the circle was completed, having Esdraelon as its centre with
+a radius of five hundred and forty miles, the volors were to advance,
+dropping gradually to within five hundred feet of sea-level, and
+diminishing their distance one from another from the twenty-five miles
+or so at which they would first find themselves, until they were as near
+as safety allowed. In this manner the advance at a pace of fifty miles
+an hour from the moment that the circle was arranged would bring them
+within sight of Nazareth at about nine o’clock on the Sunday morning.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The guard came up to the four as they stood there silent.</p>
+
+<p>“We are ready, gentlemen,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“What do you think of the weather?” asked Snowford abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>The guard pursed his lips.</p>
+
+<p>“A little thunder, I expect, sir,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver looked at him curiously.</p>
+
+<p>“No more than that?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“I should say a storm, sir,” observed the guard shortly.</p>
+
+<p>Snowford turned towards the gangway.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, we had best be off: we can lose time further on, if we wish.”</p>
+
+<p>It was about five minutes more before all was ready. From the stern of
+the boat came a faint smell of cooking, for breakfast would be served
+immediately, and a white-capped cook protruded his head for an instant,
+to question the guard. The four sat down in the gorgeous saloon in the
+bows; Oliver silent by himself, the other three talking in low voices
+together. Once more the guard passed through to his compartment at the
+prow, glancing as he went to see that all were seated; and an instant
+later came the clang of the signal. Then through all the length of the
+boat—for she was the fastest ship that England possessed—passed the
+thrill of the propeller beginning to work up speed; and simultaneously
+Oliver, staring sideways through the plate-glass window, saw the rail
+drop away, and the long line of London, pale beneath the tinged sky,
+surge up suddenly. He caught a glimpse of a little group of persons
+staring up from below, and they, too, dropped in a great swirl, and
+vanished. Then, with a flash of dusty green, the Common had vanished,
+and a pavement of house-roofs began to stream beneath, the long lines of
+streets on this side and that turning like spokes of a gigantic wheel;
+once more this pavement thinned, showing green again as between
+infrequently laid cobble-stones; then they, too, were gone, and the
+country was open beneath.</p>
+
+<p>Snowford rose, staggering a little.</p>
+
+<p>“I may as well tell the guard now,” he said. “Then we need not be
+interrupted again.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="3CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>The Syrian awoke from a dream that a myriad faces were looking into his
+own, eager, attentive and horrible, in his corner of the roof-top, and
+sat up sweating and gasping aloud for breath. For an instant he thought
+that he was really dying, and that the spiritual world was about him.
+Then, as he struggled, sense came back, and he stood up, drawing long
+breaths of the stifling night air.</p>
+
+<p>Above him the sky was as the pit, black and empty; there was not a
+glimmer of light, though the moon was surely up. He had seen her four
+hours before, a red sickle, swing slowly out from Thabor. Across the
+plain, as he looked from the parapet, there was nothing. For a few yards
+there lay across the broken ground a single crooked lance of light from
+a half-closed shutter; and beneath that, nothing. To the north again,
+nothing; to the west a glimmer, pale as a moth’s wing, from the
+house-roofs of Nazareth; to the east, nothing. He might be on a
+tower-top in space, except for that line of light and that grey glimmer
+that evaded the eye.</p>
+
+<p>On the roof, however, it was possible to make out at least outlines, for
+the dormer trap had been left open at the head of the stairs, and from
+somewhere within the depths of the house there stole up a faint
+refracted light.</p>
+
+<p>There was a white bundle in that corner; that would be the pillow of the
+Benedictine abbot. He had seen him lay himself down there some time—was
+it four hours or four centuries ago? There was a grey shape stretched
+along that pale wall—the Friar, he thought; there were other irregular
+outlines breaking the face of the parapet, here and there along the
+sides.</p>
+
+<p>Very softly, for he knew the caprices of sleep, he stepped across the
+paved roof to the opposite parapet and looked over, for there yet hung
+about him a desire for reassurance that he was still in company with
+flesh and blood. Yes, indeed he was still on earth; for there was a real
+and distinct light burning among the tumbled rocks, and beside it,
+delicate as a miniature, the head and shoulders of a man, writing. And
+in the circle of light were other figures, pale, broken patches on which
+men lay; a pole or two, erected with the thought of a tent to follow; a
+little pile of luggage with a rug across it; and beyond the circle other
+outlines and shapes faded away into the stupendous blackness.</p>
+
+<p>Then the writing man moved his head, and a monstrous shadow fled across
+the ground; a yelp as of a strangling dog broke out suddenly close
+behind him, and, as he turned, a moaning figure sat up on the roof,
+sobbing itself awake. Another moved at the sound, and then as, sighing,
+the former relapsed heavily against the wall, once more the priest went
+back to his place, still doubtful as to the reality of all that he saw,
+and the breathless silence came down again as a pall.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>He woke again from dreamless sleep, and there was a change. From his
+corner, as he raised his heavy eyes, there met them what seemed an
+unbearable brightness; then, as he looked, it resolved itself into a
+candle-flame, and beyond it a white sleeve, and higher yet a white face
+and throat. He understood, and rose reeling; it was the messenger come
+to fetch him as had been arranged.</p>
+
+<p>As he passed across the space, once he looked round him, and it seemed
+that the dawn must have come, for that appalling sky overhead was
+visible at last. An enormous vault, smoke-coloured and opaque, seemed to
+curve away to the ghostly horizons on either side where the far-away
+hills raised sharp shapes as if cut in paper. Carmel was before him; at
+least he thought it was that—a bull head and shoulders thrusting itself
+forward and ending in an abrupt descent, and beyond that again the
+glimmering sky. There were no clouds, no outlines to break the huge,
+smooth, dusky dome beneath the centre of which this house-roof seemed
+poised. Across the parapet, as he glanced to the right before descending
+the steps, stretched Esdraelon, sad-coloured and sombre, into the
+metallic distance. It was all as unreal as some fantastic picture by one
+who had never looked upon clear sunlight. The silence was complete and
+profound.</p>
+
+<p>Straight down through the wheeling shadows he went, following the
+white-hooded head and figure down the stairs, along the tiny passage,
+stumbling once against the feet of one who slept with limbs tossed loose
+like a tired dog; the feet drew back mechanically, and a little moan
+broke from the shadows. Then he went on, passing the servant who stood
+aside, and entered.</p>
+
+<p>There were half-a-dozen men gathered here, silent, white figures
+standing apart one from the other, who genuflected as the Pope came in
+simultaneously through the opposite door, and again stood white-faced
+and attentive. He ran his eyes over them as he stopped, waiting behind
+his master’s chair—there were two he knew, remembering them from last
+night—dark-faced Cardinal Ruspoli, and the lean Australian Archbishop,
+besides Cardinal Corkran, who stood by his chair at the Pope’s own
+table, with papers laid ready.</p>
+
+<p>Silvester sat down, and with a little gesture caused the others to sit
+too. Then He began at once in that quiet tired voice that his servant
+knew so well.</p>
+
+<p>“Eminences-we are all here, I think. We need lose no more time, then....
+Cardinal Corkran has something to communicate—-” He turned a little.
+“Father, sit down, if you please. This will occupy a little while.”</p>
+
+<p>The priest went across to the stone window-seat, whence he could watch
+the Pope’s face in the light of the two candles that now stood on the
+table between him and the Cardinal-Secretary. Then the Cardinal began,
+glancing up from his papers.</p>
+
+<p>“Holiness. I had better begin a little way back. Their Eminences have
+not heard the details properly....</p>
+
+<p>“I received at Damascus, on last Friday week, inquiries from various
+prelates in different parts of the world, as to the actual measure
+concerning the new policy of persecution. At first I could tell them
+nothing positively, for it was not until after twenty o’clock that
+Cardinal Ruspoli, in Turin, informed me of the facts. Cardinal Malpas
+confirmed them a few minutes later, and the Cardinal Archbishop of Pekin
+at twenty-three. Before mid-day on Saturday I received final
+confirmation from my messengers in London.</p>
+
+<p>“I was at first surprised that Cardinal Dolgorovski did not communicate
+it; for almost simultaneously with the Turin message I received one from
+a priest of the Order of Christ Crucified in Moscow, to which, of
+course, I paid no attention. (It is our rule, Eminences, to treat
+unauthorised communications in that way.) His Holiness, however, bade me
+make inquiries, and I learned from Father Petrovoski and others that the
+Government placards published the news at twenty o’clock—by our time.
+It was curious, therefore, that the Cardinal had not seen it; if he had
+seen it, it was, of course, his duty to acquaint me immediately.</p>
+
+<p>“Since that time, however, the following facts have come out. It is
+established beyond a doubt that Cardinal Dolgorovski received a visitor
+in the course of the evening. His own chaplain, who, your Eminences are
+perhaps aware, has been very active in Russia on behalf of the Church,
+informs me of this privately. Yet the Cardinal asserts, in explanation
+of his silence, that he was alone during those hours, and had given
+orders that no one was to be admitted to his presence without urgent
+cause. This, of course, confirmed His Holiness’s opinion, but I received
+orders from Him to act as if nothing had happened, and to command the
+Cardinal’s presence here with the rest of the Sacred College. To this I
+received an intimation that he would be present. Yesterday, however, a
+little before mid-day, I received a further message that his Eminency
+had met with a slight accident, but that he yet hoped to present himself
+in time for the deliberations. Since then no further news has arrived.”</p>
+
+<p>There was a dead silence.</p>
+
+<p>Then the Pope turned to the Syrian priest.</p>
+
+<p>“Father,” he said, “it was you who received his Eminency’s messages.
+Have you anything to add to this?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, Holiness.”</p>
+
+<p>He turned again.</p>
+
+<p>“My son,” he said, “report to Us publicly what you have already
+reported to Us in private.”</p>
+
+<p>A small, bright-eyed man moved out of the shadows.</p>
+
+<p>“Holiness, it was I who conveyed the message to Cardinal Dolgorovski. He
+refused at first to receive me. When I reached his presence and
+communicated the command he was silent; then he smiled; then he told me
+to carry back the message that he would obey.”</p>
+
+<p>Again the Pope was silent.</p>
+
+<p>Then suddenly the tall Australian stood up.</p>
+
+<p>“Holiness,” he said, “I was once intimate with that man. It was partly
+through my means that he sought reception into the Catholic Church. This
+was not less than fourteen years ago, when the fortunes of the Church
+seemed about to prosper.... Our friendly relations ceased two years ago,
+and I may say that, from what I know of him, I find no difficulty in
+believing—-”</p>
+
+<p>As his voice shook with passion and he faltered, Silvester raised his
+hand.</p>
+
+<p>“We desire no recriminations. Even the evidence is now useless, for what
+was to be done has been done. For ourselves, we have no doubt as to its
+nature.... It was to this man that Christ gave the morsel through our
+hands, saying <i>Quod faces, fac cities. Cum ergo accepisset Me buccellam,
+exivit continuo. Erat autem nox.</i>”</p>
+
+<p>Again fell the silence, and in the pause sounded a long half-vocal sigh
+from without the door. It came and went as a sleeper turned, for the
+passage was crowded with exhausted men—as a soul might sigh that passed
+from light to darkness.</p>
+
+<p>Then Silvester spoke again. And as He spoke He began, as if
+mechanically, to tear up a long paper, written with lists of names, that
+lay before Him.</p>
+
+<p>“Eminences, it is three hours after dawn. In two hours more We shall say
+mass in your presence, and give Holy Communion. During those two hours
+We commission you to communicate this news to all who are assembled
+here; and further, We bestow on each and all of you jurisdiction apart
+from all previous rules of time and place; we give a Plenary Indulgence
+to all who confess and communicate this day. Father—” he turned to the
+Syrian—“Father, you will now expose the Blessed Sacrament in the
+chapel, after which you will proceed to the village and inform the
+inhabitants that if they wish to save their lives they had best be gone
+immediately—immediately, you understand.”</p>
+
+<p>The Syrian started from his daze.</p>
+
+<p>“Holiness,” he stammered, stretching out a hand, “the lists, the lists!”</p>
+
+<p>(He had seen what these were.)</p>
+
+<p>But Silvester only smiled as He tossed the fragments on to the table.
+Then He stood up.</p>
+
+<p>“You need not trouble, my son.... We shall not need these any more....</p>
+
+<p>“One last word, Eminences.... If there is one heart here that doubts or
+is afraid, I have a word to say.”</p>
+
+<p>He paused, with an extraordinarily simple deliberateness, ran the eyes
+round the tense faces turned to Him.</p>
+
+<p>“I have had a Vision of God,” He said softly. “I walk no more by faith,
+but by sight.”</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>An hour later the priest toiled back in the hot twilight up the path
+from the village, followed by half-a-dozen silent men, twenty yards
+behind, whose curiosity exceeded their credulousness. He had left a few
+more standing bewildered at the doors of the little mud-houses; and had
+seen perhaps a hundred families, weighted with domestic articles, pour
+like a stream down the rocky path that led to Khaifa. He had been cursed
+by some, even threatened; stared upon by others; mocked by a few. The
+fanatical said that the Christians had brought God’s wrath upon the
+place, and the darkness upon the sky: the sun was dying, for these
+hounds were too evil for him to look upon and live. Others again seemed
+to see nothing remarkable in the state of the weather....</p>
+
+<p>There was no change in that sky from its state an hour before, except
+that perhaps it had lightened a little as the sun climbed higher behind
+that impenetrable dusky shroud. Hills, grass, men’s faces—all bore to
+the priest’s eyes the look of unreality; they were as things seen in a
+dream by eyes that roll with sleep through lids weighted with lead. Even
+to other physical senses that unreality was present; and once more he
+remembered his dream, thankful that that horror at least was absent. But
+silence seemed other than a negation of sound, it was a thing in itself,
+an affirmation, unruffled by the sound of footsteps, the thin barking of
+dogs, the murmur of voices. It appeared as if the stillness of eternity
+had descended and embraced the world’s activities, and as if that world,
+in a desperate attempt to assert its own reality, was braced in a set,
+motionless, noiseless, breathless effort to hold itself in being. What
+Silvester had said just now was beginning to be true of this man also.
+The touch of the powdery soil and the warm pebbles beneath the priest’s
+bare feet seemed something apart from the consciousness that usually
+regards the things of sense as more real and more intimate than the
+things of spirit. Matter still had a reality, still occupied space, but
+it was of a subjective nature, the result of internal rather than
+external powers. He appeared to himself already to be scarcely more than
+a soul, intent and steady, united by a thread only to the body and the
+world with which he was yet in relations. He knew that the appalling
+heat was there; once even, before his eyes a patch of beaten ground
+cracked and lisped as water that touches hot iron, as he trod upon it.
+He could feel the heat upon his forehead and hands, his whole body was
+swathed and soaked in it; yet he regarded it as from an outside
+standpoint, as a man with neuritis perceives that the pain is no longer
+in his hand but in the pillow which supports it. So, too, with what his
+eyes looked upon and his ears heard; so, too, with that faint bitter
+taste that lay upon his lips and nostrils. There was no longer in him
+fear or even hope—he regarded himself, the world, and even the
+enshrouding and awful Presence of spirit as facts with which he had but
+little to do. He was scarcely even interested; still less was he
+distressed. There was Thabor before him—at least what once had been
+Thabor, now it was no more than a huge and dusky dome-shape which
+impressed itself upon his retina and informed his passive brain of its
+existence and outline, though that existence seemed no better than that
+of a dissolving phantom.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed then almost natural—or at least as natural as all else—as he
+came in through the passage and opened the chapel-door, to see that the
+floor was crowded with prostrate motionless figures. There they lay, all
+alike in the white burnous which he had given out last night; and, with
+forehead on arms, as during the singing of the Litany of the Saints at
+an ordination, lay the figure he knew best and loved more than all the
+world, the shoulders and white hair at a slight elevation upon the
+single altar step. Above the plain altar itself burned the six tall
+candles; and in the midst, on the mean little throne, stood the
+white-metal monstrance, with its White Centre....</p>
+
+<p>Then he, too, dropped, and lay as he was....</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>He did not know how long it was before the circling observant
+consciousness, the flow of slow images, the vibration of particular
+thoughts, ceased and stilled as a pool rocks quietly to peace after the
+dropped stone has long lain still. But it came at last—that superb
+tranquillity, possible only when the senses are physically awake, with
+which God, perhaps once in a lifetime, rewards the aspiring trustful
+soul—that point of complete rest in the heart of the Fount of all
+existence with which one day He will reward eternally the spirits of His
+children. There was no thought in him of articulating this experience,
+of analysing its elements, or fingering this or that strain of ecstatic
+joy. The time for self-regarding was passed. It was enough that the
+experience was there, although he was not even self-reflective enough to
+tell himself so. He had passed from that circle whence the soul looks
+within, from that circle, too, whence it looks upon objective glory, to
+that very centre where it reposes—and the first sign to him that time
+had passed was the murmur of words, heard distinctly and understood,
+although with that apartness with which a drowsy man perceives a message
+from without—heard as through a veil through which nothing but thinnest
+essence could transpire.</p>
+
+<p><i>Spiritus Domini replevit orbem terrarum.... The Spirit of the Lord hath
+fulfilled all things, alleluia: and that which contains all things hath
+knowledge of the voice, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Exsurgat Deus</i> (and the voice rose ever so slightly). “<i>Let God arise
+and let His enemies be scattered; and let them who hate Him flee before
+His face.</i>”</p>
+
+<p><i>Gloria Patri....</i></p>
+
+<p>Then he raised his heavy head; and a phantom figure stood there in red
+vestments, seeming to float rather than to stand, with thin hands
+outstretched, and white cap on white hair seen in the gleam of the
+steady candle-flames; another, also in white, kneeled on the step....</p>
+
+<p><i>Kyrie eleison ... Gloria in excelsis Deo ...</i> those things passed like
+a shadow-show, with movements and rustlings, but he perceived rather the
+light which cast them. He heard <i>Deus qui in hodierna die ...</i> but his
+passive mind gave no pulse of reflex action, no stir of understanding
+until these words. <i>Cum complerentur dies Pentecostes....</i></p>
+
+<p>“<i>When the day of Pentecost was fully come, all the disciples were with
+one accord in the same place; and there came from heaven suddenly a
+sound, as of a mighty wind approaching, and it filled the house where
+they were sitting....</i>”</p>
+
+<p>Then he remembered and understood.... It was Pentecost then! And with
+memory a shred of reflection came back. Where then was the wind, and the
+flame, and the earthquake, and the secret voice? Yet the world was
+silent, rigid in its last effort at self-assertion: there was no tremor
+to show that God remembered; no actual point of light, yet, breaking the
+appalling vault of gloom that lay over sea and land to reveal that He
+burned there in eternity, transcendent and dominant; not even a voice;
+and at that he understood yet more. He perceived that that world, whose
+monstrous parody his sleep had presented to him in the night, was other
+than that he had feared it to be; it was sweet, not terrible; friendly,
+not hostile; clear, not stifling; and home, not exile. There were
+presences here, but not those gluttonous, lustful things that had looked
+on him last night.... He dropped his head again upon his hands, at once
+ashamed and content; and again he sank down to depths of glimmering
+inner peace....</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Not again, for a while, did he perceive what he did or thought, or what
+passed there, five yards away on the low step. Once only a ripple passed
+across that sea of glass, a ripple of fire and sound like a rising star
+that flicks a line of light across a sleeping lake, like a thin thread
+of vibration streaming from a quivering string across the stillness of a
+deep night—and be perceived for an instant as in a formless mirror that
+a lower nature was struck into existence and into union with the Divine
+nature at the same moment.... And then no more again but the great
+encompassing hush, the sense of the innermost heart of reality, till he
+found himself kneeling at the rail, and knew that That which alone truly
+existed on earth approached him with the swiftness of thought and the
+ardour of Divine Love....</p>
+
+<p>Then, as the mass ended, and he raised his passive happy soul to receive
+the last gift of God, there was a cry, a sudden clamour in the passage,
+and a man stood in the doorway, gabbling Arabic.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>Yet even at that sound and sight his soul scarcely tightened the languid
+threads that united it through every fibre of his body with the world of
+sense. He saw and heard the tumult in the passage, frantic eyes and
+mouths crying aloud, and, in strange contrast, the pale ecstatic faces
+of those princes who turned and looked; even within the tranquil
+presence-chamber of the spirit where two beings, Incarnate God and all
+but Discarnate Man, were locked in embrace, a certain mental process
+went on. Yet all was still as apart from him as a lighted stage and its
+drama from a self-contained spectator. In the material world, now as
+attenuated as a mirage, events were at hand; but to his soul, balanced
+now on reality and awake to facts, these things were but a spectacle....</p>
+
+<p>He turned to the altar again, and there, as he had known it would be, in
+the midst of clear light, all was at peace: the celebrant, seen as
+through molten glass, adored as He murmured the mystery of the
+Word-made-Flesh, and once more passing to the centre, sank upon His
+knees.</p>
+
+<p>Again the priest understood; for thought was no longer the process of a
+mind, rather it was the glance of a spirit. He knew all now; and, by an
+inevitable impulse, his throat began to sing aloud words that, as he
+sang, opened for the first time as flowers telling their secret to the
+sun.</p>
+
+<p><i>O Salutaris Hostia
+Qui coeli pandis ostium. . . .</i></p>
+
+<p>They were all singing now; even the Mohammedan catechumen who had burst
+in a moment ago sang with the rest, his lean head thrust out and his
+arms tight across his breast; the tiny chapel rang with the forty
+voices, and the vast world thrilled to hear it....</p>
+
+<p>Still singing, the priest saw the veil laid as by a phantom upon the
+Pontiff’s shoulders; there was a movement, a surge of figures—shadows
+only in the midst of substance,</p>
+
+<p><i>... Uni Trinoque Domino ....</i></p>
+
+<p>—and the Pope stood erect, Himself a pallor in the heart of light, with
+spectral folds of silk dripping from His shoulders, His hands swathed in
+them, and His down-bent head hidden by the silver-rayed monstrance and
+That which it bore....</p>
+
+<p><i>... Qui vitam sine termino
+Nobis donet in patria ....</i></p>
+
+<p>... They were moving now, and the world of life swung with them; of so
+much was he aware. He was out in the passage, among the white, frenzied
+faces that with bared teeth stared up at that sight, silenced at last by
+the thunder of <i>Pange Lingua</i>, and the radiance of those who passed out
+to eternal life.... At the corner he turned for an instant to see the
+six pale flames move along a dozen yards behind, as spear-heads about a
+King, and in the midst the silver rays and the White Heart of God....
+Then he was out, and the battle lay in array....</p>
+
+<p>That sky on which he had looked an hour ago had passed from darkness
+charged with light to light overlaid with darkness—from glimmering
+night to Wrathful Day—and that light was red....</p>
+
+<p>From behind Thabor on the left to Carmel on the far right, above the
+hills twenty miles away rested an enormous vault of colour; here were no
+gradations from zenith to horizon; all was the one deep smoulder of
+crimson as of the glow of iron. It was such a colour as men have seen at
+sunsets after rain, while the clouds, more translucent each instant,
+transmit the glory they cannot contain. Here, too, was the sun, pale as
+the Host, set like a fragile wafer above the Mount of Transfiguration,
+and there, far down in the west where men had once cried upon Baal in
+vain, hung the sickle of the white moon. Yet all was no more than
+stained light that lies broken across carven work of stone....</p>
+
+<p class="poetry"><i>... In suprema nocte coena,</i></p>
+
+<p class="p0">sang the myriad voices,</p>
+
+<p class="poetry"><i>Recumbens cum fratribus
+Observata lege plena
+Cibis in legalibus
+Cibum turbae duodenae
+Se dat suis manibus ....</i></p>
+
+<p>He saw, too, poised as motes in light, that ring of strange
+fish-creatures, white as milk, except where the angry glory turned their
+backs to flame, white-winged like floating moths, from the tiny shape
+far to the south to the monster at hand scarcely five hundred yards
+away; and even as he looked, singing as he looked, he understood that
+the circle was nearer, and perceived that these as yet knew nothing....</p>
+
+<p class="poetry"><i>Verbum caro, panem verum
+Verbo carnem efficit ....</i></p>
+
+<p>They were nearer still, until now even at his feet there slid along the
+ground the shadow of a monstrous bird, pale and undefined, as between
+the wan sun and himself moved out the vast shape that a moment ago hung
+above the Hill.... Then again it backed across and waited ...</p>
+
+<p class="poetry"><i>Et si census deficit
+Ad formandum cor sincerum
+Sola fides sufficit ....</i></p>
+
+<p>He had halted and turned, going in the midst of his fellows, hearing,
+he thought, the thrill of harping and the throb of heavenly drums; and,
+across the space, moved now the six flames, steady as if cut of steel in
+that stupendous poise of heaven and earth; and in their centre the
+silver-rayed glory and the Whiteness of God made Man....</p>
+
+<p>... Then, with a roar, came the thunder again, pealing in circle beyond
+circle of those tremendous Presences—Thrones and Powers—who,
+themselves to the world as substance to shadow, are but shadows again
+beneath the apex and within the ring of Absolute Deity.... The thunder
+broke loose, shaking the earth that now cringed on the quivering edge of
+dissolution....</p>
+
+<p class="poetry">TANTUM ERGO SACRAMENTUM
+VENEREMUR CERNUI
+ET ANTIQUUM DOCUMENTUM
+NOVO CEDAT RITUI.</p>
+
+<p>Ah! yes; it was He for whom God waited now—He who far up beneath that
+trembling shadow of a dome, itself but the piteous core of unimagined
+splendour, came in His swift chariot, blind to all save that on which He
+had fixed His eyes so long, unaware that His world corrupted about Him,
+His shadow moving like a pale cloud across the ghostly plain where
+Israel had fought and Sennacherib boasted—that plain lighted now with a
+yet deeper glow, as heaven, kindling to glory beyond glory of yet
+fiercer spiritual flame, still restrained the power knit at last to the
+relief of final revelation, and for the last time the voices sang....</p>
+
+<p class="poetry">PRAESTET FIDES SUPPLEMENTUM
+SENSUUM DEFECTUI ....</p>
+
+<p>... He was coming now, swifter than ever, the heir of temporal ages and
+the Exile of eternity, the final piteous Prince of rebels, the creature
+against God, blinder than the sun which paled and the earth that shook;
+and, as He came, passing even then through the last material stage to
+the thinness of a spirit-fabric, the floating circle swirled behind Him,
+tossing like phantom birds in the wake of a phantom ship.... He was
+coming, and the earth, rent once again in its allegiance, shrank and
+reeled in the agony of divided homage....</p>
+
+<p>... He was coming—and already the shadow swept off the plain and
+vanished, and the pale netted wings were rising to the cheek; and the
+great bell clanged, and the long sweet chord rang out—not more than
+whispers heard across the pealing storm of everlasting praise....</p>
+
+<p class="poetry">.... GENITORI GENITOQUE
+LAUS ET JUBILATIO
+SALUS HONOR VIRTUS QUOQUE
+SIT ET BENEDICTIO
+PROCEDENTI AB UTROQUE
+COMPAR SIT LAUDATIO.</p>
+
+<p class="p0">and once more</p>
+
+<p class="poetry">PROCEDENTI AB UTROQUE
+COMPAR SIT LAUDATIO ....</p>
+
+<p>Then this world passed, and the glory of it.</p>
+
+<p class="center p4">THE END</p>
+
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14021 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #14021 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14021)
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Lord of the World, by Robert Hugh Benson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: Lord of the World
+
+Author: Robert Hugh Benson
+
+Release Date: November 11, 2004 [EBook #14021]
+[Last updated: February 19, 2023]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Geoff Horton
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SISTERS ***
+
+
+
+
+LORD OF THE WORLD
+
+BY ROBERT HUGH BENSON
+
+Dedication
+
+CLAVI DOMUS DAVID
+
+PREFACE
+
+I am perfectly aware that this is a terribly sensational book, and open
+to innumerable criticisms on that account, as well as on many others.
+But I did not know how else to express the principles I desired (and
+which I passionately believe to be true) except by producing their lines
+to a sensational point. I have tried, however, not to scream unduly
+loud, and to retain, so far as possible, reverence and consideration for
+the opinions of other people. Whether I have succeeded in that attempt
+is quite another matter.
+
+Robert Hugh Benson.
+
+CAMBRIDGE 1907.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+PROLOGUE
+
+BOOK I
+
+THE ADVENT
+
+BOOK II
+
+THE ENCOUNTER
+
+BOOK III
+
+THE VICTORY
+
+
+Persons who do not like tiresome prologues, need not read this one. It
+is essential only to the situation, not to the story.
+
+
+
+
+PROLOGUE
+
+“You must give me a moment,” said the old man, leaning back.
+
+Percy resettled himself in his chair and waited, chin on hand.
+
+It was a very silent room in which the three men sat, furnished with the
+extreme common sense of the period. It had neither window nor door; for
+it was now sixty years since the world, recognising that space is not
+confined to the surface of the globe, had begun to burrow in earnest.
+Old Mr. Templeton’s house stood some forty feet below the level of the
+Thames embankment, in what was considered a somewhat commodious
+position, for he had only a hundred yards to walk before he reached the
+station of the Second Central Motor-circle, and a quarter of a mile to
+the volor-station at Blackfriars. He was over ninety years old, however,
+and seldom left his house now. The room itself was lined throughout with
+the delicate green jade-enamel prescribed by the Board of Health, and
+was suffused with the artificial sunlight discovered by the great Reuter
+forty years before; it had the colour-tone of a spring wood, and was
+warmed and ventilated through the classical frieze grating to the exact
+temperature of 18 degrees Centigrade. Mr. Templeton was a plain man,
+content to live as his father had lived before him. The furniture, too,
+was a little old-fashioned in make and design, constructed however
+according to the prevailing system of soft asbestos enamel welded over
+iron, indestructible, pleasant to the touch, and resembling mahogany. A
+couple of book-cases well filled ran on either side of the bronze
+pedestal electric fire before which sat the three men; and in the
+further corners stood the hydraulic lifts that gave entrance, the one to
+the bedroom, the other to the corridor fifty feet up which opened on to
+the Embankment.
+
+Father Percy Franklin, the elder of the two priests, was rather a
+remarkable-looking man, not more than thirty-five years old, but with
+hair that was white throughout; his grey eyes, under black eyebrows,
+were peculiarly bright and almost passionate; but his prominent nose and
+chin and the extreme decisiveness of his mouth reassured the observer as
+to his will. Strangers usually looked twice at him.
+
+Father Francis, however, sitting in his upright chair on the other side
+of the hearth, brought down the average; for, though his brown eyes were
+pleasant and pathetic, there was no strength in his face; there was even
+a tendency to feminine melancholy in the corners of his mouth and the
+marked droop of his eyelids.
+
+Mr. Templeton was just a very old man, with a strong face in folds,
+clean-shaven like the rest of the world, and was now lying back on his
+water-pillows with the quilt over his feet.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At last he spoke, glancing first at Percy, on his left.
+
+“Well,” he said, “it is a great business to remember exactly; but this
+is how I put it to myself.”
+
+“In England our party was first seriously alarmed at the Labour
+Parliament of 1917. That showed us how deeply Herveism had impregnated
+the whole social atmosphere. There had been Socialists before, but none
+like Gustave Herve in his old age--at least no one of the same power.
+He, perhaps you have read, taught absolute Materialism and Socialism
+developed to their logical issues. Patriotism, he said, was a relic of
+barbarism; and sensual enjoyment was the only certain good. Of course,
+every one laughed at him. It was said that without religion there could
+be no adequate motive among the masses for even the simplest social
+order. But he was right, it seemed. After the fall of the French Church
+at the beginning of the century and the massacres of 1914, the
+bourgeoisie settled down to organise itself; and that extraordinary
+movement began in earnest, pushed through by the middle classes, with no
+patriotism, no class distinctions, practically no army. Of course,
+Freemasonry directed it all. This spread to Germany, where the influence
+of Karl Marx had already---”
+
+“Yes, sir,” put in Percy smoothly, “but what of England, if you don’t
+mind---”
+
+“Ah, yes; England. Well, in 1917 the Labour party gathered up the reins,
+and Communism really began. That was long before I can remember, of
+course, but my father used to date it from then. The only wonder was
+that things did not go forward more quickly; but I suppose there was a
+good deal of Tory leaven left. Besides, centuries generally run slower
+than is expected, especially after beginning with an impulse. But the
+new order began then; and the Communists have never suffered a serious
+reverse since, except the little one in ’25. Blenkin founded ‘The New
+People’ then; and the ‘Times’ dropped out; but it was not, strangely
+enough, till ’35 that the House of Lords fell for the last time. The
+Established Church had gone finally in ’29.”
+
+“And the religious effect of that?” asked Percy swiftly, as the old man
+paused to cough slightly, lifting his inhaler. The priest was anxious to
+keep to the point.
+
+“It was an effect itself,” said the other, “rather than a cause. You
+see, the Ritualists, as they used to call them, after a desperate
+attempt to get into the Labour swim, came into the Church after the
+Convocation of ’19, when the Nicene Creed dropped out; and there was no
+real enthusiasm except among them. But so far as there was an effect
+from the final Disestablishment, I think it was that what was left of
+the State Church melted into the Free Church, and the Free Church was,
+after all, nothing more than a little sentiment. The Bible was
+completely given up as an authority after the renewed German attacks in
+the twenties; and the Divinity of our Lord, some think, had gone all but
+in name by the beginning of the century. The Kenotic theory had provided
+for that. Then there was that strange little movement among the Free
+Churchmen even earlier; when ministers who did no more than follow the
+swim--who were sensitive to draughts, so to speak--broke off from their
+old positions. It is curious to read in the history of the time how they
+were hailed as independent thinkers. It was just exactly what they were
+not.... Where was I? Oh, yes.... Well, that cleared the ground for us,
+and the Church made extraordinary progress for a while--extraordinary,
+that is, under the circumstances, because you must remember, things were
+very different from twenty, or even ten, years before. I mean that,
+roughly speaking, the severing of the sheep and the goats had begun. The
+religious people were practically all Catholics and Individualists; the
+irreligious people rejected the supernatural altogether, and were, to a
+man, Materialists and Communists. But we made progress because we had a
+few exceptional men--Delaney the philosopher, McArthur and Largent, the
+philanthropists, and so on. It really seemed as if Delaney and his
+disciples might carry everything before them. You remember his
+‘Analogy’? Oh, yes, it is all in the text-books....
+
+“Well, then, at the close of the Vatican Council, which had been called
+in the nineteenth century, and never dissolved, we lost a great number
+through the final definitions. The ‘Exodus of the Intellectuals’ the
+world called it---”
+
+“The Biblical decisions,” put in the younger priest.
+
+“That partly; and the whole conflict that began with the rise of
+Modernism at the beginning of the century but much more the condemnation
+of Delaney, and of the New Transcendentalism generally, as it was then
+understood. He died outside the Church, you know. Then there was the
+condemnation of Sciotti’s book on Comparative Religion.... After that
+the Communists went on by strides, although by very slow ones. It seems
+extraordinary to you, I dare say, but you cannot imagine the excitement
+when the _Necessary Trades Bill_ became law in ’60. People thought that
+all enterprise would stop when so many professions were nationalised;
+but, you know, it didn’t. Certainly the nation was behind it.”
+
+“What year was the _Two-Thirds Majority Bill_ passed?” asked Percy.
+
+“Oh! long before--within a year or two of the fall of the House of
+Lords. It was necessary, I think, or the Individualists would have gone
+raving mad.... Well, the _Necessary Trades Bill_ was inevitable: people
+had begun to see that even so far back as the time when the railways
+were municipalised. For a while there was a burst of art; because all
+the Individualists who could went in for it (it was then that the Toller
+school was founded); but they soon drifted back into Government
+employment; after all, the six-per-cent limit for all individual
+enterprise was not much of a temptation; and Government paid well.”
+
+Percy shook his head.
+
+“Yes; but I cannot understand the present state of affairs. You said
+just now that things went slowly?”
+
+“Yes,” said the old man, “but you must remember the Poor Laws. That
+established the Communists for ever. Certainly Braithwaite knew his
+business.”
+
+The younger priest looked up inquiringly.
+
+“The abolition of the old workhouse system,” said Mr. Templeton. “It is
+all ancient history to you, of course; but I remember as if it was
+yesterday. It was that which brought down what was still called the
+Monarchy and the Universities.”
+
+“Ah,” said Percy. “I should like to hear you talk about that, sir.”
+
+“Presently, father.... Well, this is what Braithwaite did. By the old
+system all paupers were treated alike, and resented it. By the new
+system there were the three grades that we have now, and the
+enfranchisement of the two higher grades. Only the absolutely worthless
+were assigned to the third grade, and treated more or less as
+criminals--of course after careful examination. Then there was the
+reorganisation of the Old Age Pensions. Well, don’t you see how strong
+that made the Communists? The Individualists--they were still called
+Tories when I was a boy--the Individualists have had no chance since.
+They are no more than a worn-out drag now. The whole of the working
+classes--and that meant ninety-nine of a hundred--were all against
+them.”
+
+Percy looked up; but the other went on.
+
+“Then there was the Prison Reform Bill under Macpherson, and the
+abolition of capital punishment; there was the final Education Act of
+’59, whereby dogmatic secularism was established; the practical
+abolition of inheritance under the reformation of the Death Duties---”
+
+“I forget what the old system was,” said Percy.
+
+“Why, it seems incredible, but the old system was that all paid alike.
+First came the Heirloom Act, and then the change by which inherited
+wealth paid three times the duty of earned wealth, leading up to the
+acceptance of Karl Marx’s doctrines in ’89--but the former came in
+’77.... Well, all these things kept England up to the level of the
+Continent; she had only been just in time to join in with the final
+scheme of Western Free Trade. That was the first effect, you remember,
+of the Socialists’ victory in Germany.”
+
+“And how did we keep out of the Eastern War?” asked Percy anxiously.
+
+“Oh! that’s a long story; but, in a word, America stopped us; so we lost
+India and Australia. I think that was the nearest to the downfall of the
+Communists since ’25. But Braithwaite got out of it very cleverly by
+getting us the protectorate of South Africa once and for all. He was an
+old man then, too.”
+
+Mr. Templeton stopped to cough again. Father Francis sighed and shifted
+in his chair.
+
+“And America?” asked Percy.
+
+“Ah! all that is very complicated. But she knew her strength and annexed
+Canada the same year. That was when we were at our weakest.”
+
+Percy stood up.
+
+“Have you a Comparative Atlas, sir?” he asked.
+
+The old man pointed to a shelf.
+
+“There,” he said.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Percy looked at the sheets a minute or two in silence, spreading them on
+his knees.
+
+“It is all much simpler, certainly,” he murmured, glancing first at the
+old complicated colouring of the beginning of the twentieth century, and
+then at the three great washes of the twenty-first.
+
+He moved his finger along Asia. The words EASTERN EMPIRE ran across the
+pale yellow, from the Ural Mountains on the left to the Behring Straits
+on the right, curling round in giant letters through India, Australia,
+and New Zealand. He glanced at the red; it was considerably smaller, but
+still important enough, considering that it covered not only Europe
+proper, but all Russia up to the Ural Mountains, and Africa to the
+south. The blue-labelled AMERICAN REPUBLIC swept over the whole of that
+continent, and disappeared right round to the left of the Western
+Hemisphere in a shower of blue sparks on the white sea.
+
+“Yes, it’s simpler,” said the old man drily.
+
+Percy shut the book and set it by his chair.
+
+“And what next, sir? What will happen?”
+
+The old Tory statesman smiled.
+
+“God knows,” he said. “If the Eastern Empire chooses to move, we can do
+nothing. I don’t know why they have not moved. I suppose it is because
+of religious differences.”
+
+“Europe will not split?” asked the priest.
+
+“No, no. We know our danger now. And America would certainly help us.
+But, all the same, God help us--or you, I should rather say--if the
+Empire does move! She knows her strength at last.”
+
+There was silence for a moment or two. A faint vibration trembled
+through the deep-sunk room as some huge machine went past on the broad
+boulevard overhead.
+
+“Prophesy, sir,” said Percy suddenly. “I mean about religion.”
+
+Mr. Templeton inhaled another long breath from his instrument. Then
+again he took up his discourse.
+
+“Briefly,” he said, “there are three forces--Catholicism,
+Humanitarianism, and the Eastern religions. About the third I cannot
+prophesy, though I think the Sufis will be victorious. Anything may
+happen; Esotericism is making enormous strides--and that means
+Pantheism; and the blending of the Chinese and Japanese dynasties throws
+out all our calculations. But in Europe and America, there is no doubt
+that the struggle lies between the other two. We can neglect everything
+else. And, I think, if you wish me to say what I think, that, humanly
+speaking, Catholicism will decrease rapidly now. It is perfectly true
+that Protestantism is dead. Men do recognise at last that a supernatural
+Religion involves an absolute authority, and that Private Judgment in
+matters of faith is nothing else than the beginning of disintegration.
+And it is also true that since the Catholic Church is the only
+institution that even claims supernatural authority, with all its
+merciless logic, she has again the allegiance of practically all
+Christians who have any supernatural belief left. There are a few
+faddists left, especially in America and here; but they are negligible.
+That is all very well; but, on the other hand, you must remember that
+Humanitarianism, contrary to all persons’ expectations, is becoming an
+actual religion itself, though anti-supernatural. It is Pantheism; it is
+developing a ritual under Freemasonry; it has a creed, ‘God is Man,’ and
+the rest. It has therefore a real food of a sort to offer to religious
+cravings; it idealises, and yet it makes no demand upon the spiritual
+faculties. Then, they have the use of all the churches except ours, and
+all the Cathedrals; and they are beginning at last to encourage
+sentiment. Then, they may display their symbols and we may not: I think
+that they will be established legally in another ten years at the
+latest.
+
+“Now, we Catholics, remember, are losing; we have lost steadily for more
+than fifty years. I suppose that we have, nominally, about one-fortieth
+of America now--and that is the result of the Catholic movement of the
+early twenties. In France and Spain we are nowhere; in Germany we are
+less. We hold our position in the East, certainly; but even there we
+have not more than one in two hundred--so the statistics say--and we are
+scattered. In Italy? Well, we have Rome again to ourselves, but nothing
+else; here, we have Ireland altogether and perhaps one in sixty of
+England, Wales and Scotland; but we had one in forty seventy years ago.
+Then there is the enormous progress of psychology--all clean against us
+for at least a century. First, you see, there was Materialism, pure and
+simple that failed more or less--it was too crude--until psychology came
+to the rescue. Now psychology claims all the rest of the ground; and the
+supernatural sense seems accounted for. That’s the claim. No, father, we
+are losing; and we shall go on losing, and I think we must even be ready
+for a catastrophe at any moment.”
+
+“But---” began Percy.
+
+“You think that weak for an old man on the edge of the grave. Well, it
+is what I think. I see no hope. In fact, it seems to me that even now
+something may come on us quickly. No; I see no hope until---”
+
+Percy looked up sharply.
+
+“Until our Lord comes back,” said the old statesman.
+
+Father Francis sighed once more, and there fell a silence.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+“And the fall of the Universities?” said Percy at last.
+
+“My dear father, it was exactly like the fall of the Monasteries under
+Henry VIII--the same results, the same arguments, the same incidents.
+They were the strongholds of Individualism, as the Monasteries were the
+strongholds of Papalism; and they were regarded with the same kind of
+awe and envy. Then the usual sort of remarks began about the amount of
+port wine drunk; and suddenly people said that they had done their work,
+that the inmates were mistaking means for ends; and there was a great
+deal more reason for saying it. After all, granted the supernatural,
+Religious Houses are an obvious consequence; but the object of secular
+education is presumably the production of something visible--either
+character or competence; and it became quite impossible to prove that
+the Universities produced either--which was worth having. The
+distinction between ου and με is not an end in itself;
+and the kind of person produced by its study was not one which appealed
+to England in the twentieth century. I am not sure that it appealed even
+to me much (and I was always a strong Individualist)--except by way of
+pathos---”
+
+“Yes?” said Percy.
+
+“Oh, it was pathetic enough. The Science Schools of Cambridge and the
+Colonial Department of Oxford were the last hope; and then those went.
+The old dons crept about with their books, but nobody wanted them--they
+were too purely theoretical; some drifted into the poorhouses, first or
+second grade; some were taken care of by charitable clergymen; there was
+that attempt to concentrate in Dublin; but it failed, and people soon
+forgot them. The buildings, as you know, were used for all kinds of
+things. Oxford became an engineering establishment for a while, and
+Cambridge a kind of Government laboratory. I was at King’s College, you
+know. Of course it was all as horrible as it could be--though I am glad
+they kept the chapel open even as a museum. It was not nice to see the
+chantries filled with anatomical specimens. However, I don’t think it
+was much worse than keeping stoves and surplices in them.”
+
+“What happened to you?”
+
+“Oh! I was in Parliament very soon; and I had a little money of my own,
+too. But it was very hard on some of them; they had little pensions, at
+least all who were past work. And yet, I don’t know: I suppose it had
+to come. They were very little more than picturesque survivals, you
+know; and had not even the grace of a religious faith about them.”
+
+Percy sighed again, looking at the humorously reminiscent face of the
+old man. Then he suddenly changed the subject again.
+
+“What about this European parliament?” he said.
+
+The old man started.
+
+“Oh!... I think it will pass,” he said, “if a man can be found to push
+it. All this last century has been leading up to it, as you see.
+Patriotism has been dying fast; but it ought to have died, like slavery
+and so forth, under the influence of the Catholic Church. As it is, the
+work has been done without the Church; and the result is that the world
+is beginning to range itself against us: it is an organised antagonism--
+a kind of Catholic anti-Church. Democracy has done what the Divine
+Monarchy should have done. If the proposal passes I think we may expect
+something like persecution once more.... But, again, the Eastern
+invasion may save us, if it comes off.... I do not know....”
+
+Percy sat still yet a moment; then he stood up suddenly.
+
+“I must go, sir,” he said, relapsing into Esperanto. “It is past
+nineteen o’clock. Thank you so much. Are you coming, father?”
+
+Father Francis stood up also, in the dark grey suit permitted to
+priests, and took up his hat.
+
+“Well, father,” said the old man again, “come again some day, if I
+haven’t been too discursive. I suppose you have to write your letter
+yet?”
+
+Percy nodded.
+
+“I did half of it this morning,” he said, “but I felt I wanted another
+bird’s-eye view before I could understand properly: I am so grateful to
+you for giving it me. It is really a great labour, this daily letter to
+the Cardinal-Protector. I am thinking of resigning if I am allowed.”
+
+“My dear father, don’t do that. If I may say so to your face, I think
+you have a very shrewd mind; and unless Rome has balanced information
+she can do nothing. I don’t suppose your colleagues are as careful as
+yourself.”
+
+Percy smiled, lifting his dark eyebrows deprecatingly.
+
+“Come, father,” he said.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The two priests parted at the steps of the corridor, and Percy stood for
+a minute or two staring out at the familiar autumn scene, trying to
+understand what it all meant. What he had heard downstairs seemed
+strangely to illuminate that vision of splendid prosperity that lay
+before him.
+
+The air was as bright as day; artificial sunlight had carried all before
+it, and London now knew no difference between dark and light. He stood
+in a kind of glazed cloister, heavily floored with a preparation of
+rubber on which footsteps made no sound. Beneath him, at the foot of the
+stairs, poured an endless double line of persons severed by a partition,
+going to right and left, noiselessly, except for the murmur of Esperanto
+talking that sounded ceaselessly as they went. Through the clear,
+hardened glass of the public passage showed a broad sleek black roadway,
+ribbed from side to side, and puckered in the centre, significantly
+empty, but even as he stood there a note sounded far away from Old
+Westminster, like the hum of a giant hive, rising as it came, and an
+instant later a transparent thing shot past, flashing from every angle,
+and the note died to a hum again and a silence as the great Government
+motor from the south whirled eastwards with the mails. This was a
+privileged roadway; nothing but state-vehicles were allowed to use it,
+and those at a speed not exceeding one hundred miles an hour.
+
+Other noises were subdued in this city of rubber; the passenger-circles
+were a hundred yards away, and the subterranean traffic lay too deep for
+anything but a vibration to make itself felt. It was to remove this
+vibration, and silence the hum of the ordinary vehicles, that the
+Government experts had been working for the last twenty years.
+
+Once again before he moved there came a long cry from overhead,
+startlingly beautiful and piercing, and, as he lifted his eyes from the
+glimpse of the steady river which alone had refused to be transformed,
+he saw high above him against the heavy illuminated clouds, a long
+slender object, glowing with soft light, slide northwards and vanish on
+outstretched wings. That musical cry, he told himself, was the voice of
+one of the European line of volors announcing its arrival in the capital
+of Great Britain.
+
+“Until our Lord comes back,” he thought to himself; and for an instant
+the old misery stabbed at his heart. How difficult it was to hold the
+eyes focussed on that far horizon when this world lay in the foreground
+so compelling in its splendour and its strength! Oh, he had argued with
+Father Francis an hour ago that size was not the same as greatness, and
+that an insistent external could not exclude a subtle internal; and he
+had believed what he had then said; but the doubt yet remained till he
+silenced it by a fierce effort, crying in his heart to the Poor Man of
+Nazareth to keep his heart as the heart of a little child.
+
+Then he set his lips, wondering how long Father Francis would bear the
+pressure, and went down the steps.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I-THE ADVENT
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+I
+
+Oliver Brand, the new member for Croydon (4), sat in his study, looking
+out of the window over the top of his typewriter.
+
+His house stood facing northwards at the extreme end of a spur of the
+Surrey Hills, now cut and tunnelled out of all recognition; only to a
+Communist the view was an inspiriting one. Immediately below the wide
+windows the embanked ground fell away rapidly for perhaps a hundred
+feet, ending in a high wall, and beyond that the world and works of men
+were triumphant as far as eye could see. Two vast tracks like streaked
+race-courses, each not less than a quarter of a mile in width, and sunk
+twenty feet below the surface of the ground, swept up to a meeting a
+mile ahead at the huge junction. Of those, that on his left was the
+First Trunk road to Brighton, inscribed in capital letters in the
+Railroad Guide, that to the right the Second Trunk to the Tunbridge and
+Hastings district. Each was divided length-ways by a cement wall, on one
+side of which, on steel rails, ran the electric trams, and on the other
+lay the motor-track itself again divided into three, on which ran, first
+the Government coaches at a speed of one hundred and fifty miles an
+hour, second the private motors at not more than sixty, third the cheap
+Government line at thirty, with stations every five miles. This was
+further bordered by a road confined to pedestrians, cyclists and
+ordinary cars on which no vehicle was allowed to move at more than
+twelve miles an hour.
+
+Beyond these great tracks lay an immense plain of house-roofs, with
+short towers here and there marking public buildings, from the Caterham
+district on the left to Croydon in front, all clear and bright in
+smokeless air; and far away to the west and north showed the low
+suburban hills against the April sky.
+
+There was surprisingly little sound, considering the pressure of the
+population; and, with the exception of the buzz of the steel rails as a
+train fled north or south, and the occasional sweet chord of the great
+motors as they neared or left the junction, there was little to be heard
+in this study except a smooth, soothing murmur that filled the air like
+the murmur of bees in a garden.
+
+Oliver loved every hint of human life--all busy sights and sounds--and
+was listening now, smiling faintly to himself as he stared out into the
+clear air. Then he set his lips, laid his fingers on the keys once more,
+and went on speech-constructing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He was very fortunate in the situation of his house. It stood in an
+angle of one of those huge spider-webs with which the country was
+covered, and for his purposes was all that he could expect. It was close
+enough to London to be extremely cheap, for all wealthy persons had
+retired at least a hundred miles from the throbbing heart of England;
+and yet it was as quiet as he could wish. He was within ten minutes of
+Westminster on the one side, and twenty minutes of the sea on the other,
+and his constituency lay before him like a raised map. Further, since
+the great London termini were but ten minutes away, there were at his
+disposal the First Trunk lines to every big town in England. For a
+politician of no great means, who was asked to speak at Edinburgh on one
+evening and in Marseilles on the next, he was as well placed as any man
+in Europe.
+
+He was a pleasant-looking man, not much over thirty years old; black
+wire-haired, clean-shaven, thin, virile, magnetic, blue-eyed and
+white-skinned; and he appeared this day extremely content with himself
+and the world. His lips moved slightly as he worked, his eyes enlarged
+and diminished with excitement, and more than once he paused and stared
+out again, smiling and flushed.
+
+Then a door opened; a middle-aged man came nervously in with a bundle of
+papers, laid them down on the table without a word, and turned to go
+out. Oliver lifted his hand for attention, snapped a lever, and spoke.
+
+“Well, Mr. Phillips?” he said.
+
+“There is news from the East, sir,” said the secretary.
+
+Oliver shot a glance sideways, and laid his hand on the bundle.
+
+“Any complete message?” he asked.
+
+“No, sir; it is interrupted again. Mr. Felsenburgh’s name is mentioned.”
+
+Oliver did not seem to hear; he lifted the flimsy printed sheets with a
+sudden movement, and began turning them.
+
+“The fourth from the top, Mr. Brand,” said the secretary.
+
+Oliver jerked his head impatiently, and the other went out as if at a
+signal.
+
+The fourth sheet from the top, printed in red on green, seemed to absorb
+Oliver’s attention altogether, for he read it through two or three
+times, leaning back motionless in his chair. Then he sighed, and stared
+again through the window.
+
+Then once more the door opened, and a tall girl came in.
+
+“Well, my dear?” she observed.
+
+Oliver shook his head, with compressed lips.
+
+“Nothing definite,” he said. “Even less than usual. Listen.”
+
+He took up the green sheet and began to read aloud as the girl sat down
+in a window-seat on his left.
+
+She was a very charming-looking creature, tall and slender, with
+serious, ardent grey eyes, firm red lips, and a beautiful carriage of
+head and shoulders. She had walked slowly across the room as Oliver took
+up the paper, and now sat back in her brown dress in a very graceful and
+stately attitude. She seemed to listen with a deliberate kind of
+patience; but her eyes flickered with interest.
+
+“‘Irkutsk--April fourteen--Yesterday--as--usual--But--rumoured--
+defection--from--Sufi--party--Troops--continue--gathering--
+Felsenburgh--addressed--Buddhist--crowd--Attempt--on--Llama--last--
+Friday--work--of--Anarchists--Felsenburgh--leaving--for--Moscow--as
+--arranged--he....’ There--that is absolutely all,” ended Oliver
+dispiritedly. “It’s interrupted as usual.”
+
+The girl began to swing a foot.
+
+“I don’t understand in the least,” she said. “Who is Felsenburgh, after
+all?”
+
+“My dear child, that is what all the world is asking. Nothing is known
+except that he was included in the American deputation at the last
+moment. The _Herald_ published his life last week; but it has been
+contradicted. It is certain that he is quite a young man, and that he
+has been quite obscure until now.”
+
+“Well, he is not obscure now,” observed the girl.
+
+“I know; it seems as if he were running the whole thing. One never hears
+a word of the others. It’s lucky he’s on the right side.”
+
+“And what do you think?”
+
+Oliver turned vacant eyes again out of the window.
+
+“I think it is touch and go,” he said. “The only remarkable thing is
+that here hardly anybody seems to realise it. It’s too big for the
+imagination, I suppose. There is no doubt that the East has been
+preparing for a descent on Europe for these last five years. They have
+only been checked by America; and this is one last attempt to stop them.
+But why Felsenburgh should come to the front---” he broke off. “He must
+be a good linguist, at any rate. This is at least the fifth crowd he has
+addressed; perhaps he is just the American interpreter. Christ! I wonder
+who he is.”
+
+“Has he any other name?”
+
+“Julian, I believe. One message said so.”
+
+“How did this come through?”
+
+Oliver shook his head.
+
+“Private enterprise,” he said. “The European agencies have stopped work.
+Every telegraph station is guarded night and day. There are lines of
+volors strung out on every frontier. The Empire means to settle this
+business without us.”
+
+“And if it goes wrong?”
+
+“My dear Mabel--if hell breaks loose---” he threw out his hands
+deprecatingly.
+
+“And what is the Government doing?”
+
+“Working night and day; so is the rest of Europe. It’ll be Armageddon
+with a vengeance if it comes to war.”
+
+“What chance do you see?”
+
+“I see two chances,” said Oliver slowly: “one, that they may be afraid
+of America, and may hold their hands from sheer fear; the other that
+they may be induced to hold their hands from charity; if only they can
+be made to understand that co-operation is the one hope of the world.
+But those damned religions of theirs---”
+
+The girl sighed, and looked out again on to the wide plain of
+house-roofs below the window.
+
+The situation was indeed as serious as it could be. That huge Empire,
+consisting of a federalism of States under the Son of Heaven (made
+possible by the merging of the Japanese and Chinese dynasties and the
+fall of Russia), had been consolidating its forces and learning its own
+power during the last thirty-five years, ever since, in fact, it had
+laid its lean yellow hands upon Australia and India. While the rest of
+the world had learned the folly of war, ever since the fall of the
+Russian republic under the combined attack of the yellow races, the last
+had grasped its possibilities. It seemed now as if the civilisation of
+the last century was to be swept back once more into chaos. It was not
+that the mob of the East cared very greatly; it was their rulers who had
+begun to stretch themselves after an almost eternal lethargy, and it was
+hard to imagine how they could be checked at this point. There was a
+touch of grimness too in the rumour that religious fanaticism was behind
+the movement, and that the patient East proposed at last to proselytise
+by the modern equivalents of fire and sword those who had laid aside for
+the most part all religious beliefs except that in Humanity. To Oliver
+it was simply maddening. As he looked from his window and saw that vast
+limit of London laid peaceably before him, as his imagination ran out
+over Europe and saw everywhere that steady triumph of common sense and
+fact over the wild fairy-stories of Christianity, it seemed intolerable
+that there should be even a possibility that all this should be swept
+back again into the barbarous turmoil of sects and dogmas; for no less
+than this would be the result if the East laid hands on Europe. Even
+Catholicism would revive, he told himself, that strange faith that had
+blazed so often as persecution had been dashed to quench it; and, of all
+forms of faith, to Oliver’s mind Catholicism was the most grotesque and
+enslaving. And the prospect of all this honestly troubled him, far more
+than the thought of the physical catastrophe and bloodshed that would
+fall on Europe with the advent of the East. There was but one hope on
+the religious side, as he had told Mabel a dozen times, and that was
+that the Quietistic Pantheism which for the last century had made such
+giant strides in East and West alike, among Mohammedans, Buddhists,
+Hindus, Confucianists and the rest, should avail to check the
+supernatural frenzy that inspired their exoteric brethren. Pantheism, he
+understood, was what he held himself; for him “God” was the developing
+sum of created life, and impersonal Unity was the essence of His being;
+competition then was the great heresy that set men one against another
+and delayed all progress; for, to his mind, progress lay in the merging
+of the individual in the family, of the family in the commonwealth, of
+the commonwealth in the continent, and of the continent in the world.
+Finally, the world itself at any moment was no more than the mood of
+impersonal life. It was, in fact, the Catholic idea with the
+supernatural left out, a union of earthly fortunes, an abandonment of
+individualism on the one side, and of supernaturalism on the other. It
+was treason to appeal from God Immanent to God Transcendent; there was
+no God transcendent; God, so far as He could be known, was man.
+
+Yet these two, husband and wife after a fashion--for they had entered
+into that terminable contract now recognised explicitly by the
+State--these two were very far from sharing in the usual heavy dulness
+of mere materialists. The world, for them, beat with one ardent life
+blossoming in flower and beast and man, a torrent of beautiful vigour
+flowing from a deep source and irrigating all that moved or felt. Its
+romance was the more appreciable because it was comprehensible to the
+minds that sprang from it; there were mysteries in it, but mysteries
+that enticed rather than baffled, for they unfolded new glories with
+every discovery that man could make; even inanimate objects, the fossil,
+the electric current, the far-off stars, these were dust thrown off by
+the Spirit of the World--fragrant with His Presence and eloquent of His
+Nature. For example, the announcement made by Klein, the astronomer,
+twenty years before, that the inhabitation of certain planets had become
+a certified fact--how vastly this had altered men’s views of themselves.
+But the one condition of progress and the building of Jerusalem, on the
+planet that happened to be men’s dwelling place, was peace, not the
+sword which Christ brought or that which Mahomet wielded; but peace that
+arose from, not passed, understanding; the peace that sprang from a
+knowledge that man was all and was able to develop himself only by
+sympathy with his fellows. To Oliver and his wife, then, the last
+century seemed like a revelation; little by little the old superstitions
+had died, and the new light broadened; the Spirit of the World had
+roused Himself, the sun had dawned in the west; and now with horror and
+loathing they had seen the clouds gather once more in the quarter whence
+all superstition had had its birth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mabel got up presently and came across to her husband.
+
+“My dear,” she said, “you must not be downhearted. It all may pass as it
+passed before. It is a great thing that they are listening to America at
+all. And this Mr. Felsenburgh seems to be on the right side.”
+
+Oliver took her hand and kissed it.
+
+
+II
+
+Oliver seemed altogether depressed at breakfast, half an hour later. His
+mother, an old lady of nearly eighty, who never appeared till noon,
+seemed to see it at once, for after a look or two at him and a word, she
+subsided into silence behind her plate.
+
+It was a pleasant little room in which they sat, immediately behind
+Oliver’s own, and was furnished, according to universal custom, in light
+green. Its windows looked out upon a strip of garden at the back, and
+the high creeper-grown wall that separated that domain from the next.
+The furniture, too, was of the usual sort; a sensible round table stood
+in the middle, with three tall arm-chairs, with the proper angles and
+rests, drawn up to it; and the centre of it, resting apparently on a
+broad round column, held the dishes. It was thirty years now since the
+practice of placing the dining-room above the kitchen, and of raising
+and lowering the courses by hydraulic power into the centre of the
+dining-table, had become universal in the houses of the well-to-do. The
+floor consisted entirely of the asbestos cork preparation invented in
+America, noiseless, clean, and pleasant to both foot and eye.
+
+Mabel broke the silence.
+
+“And your speech to-morrow?” she asked, taking up her fork.
+
+Oliver brightened a little, and began to discourse.
+
+It seemed that Birmingham was beginning to fret. They were crying out
+once more for free trade with America: European facilities were not
+enough, and it was Oliver’s business to keep them quiet. It was useless,
+he proposed to tell them, to agitate until the Eastern business was
+settled: they must not bother the Government with such details just now.
+He was to tell them, too, that the Government was wholly on their side;
+that it was bound to come soon.
+
+“They are pig-headed,” he added fiercely; “pig-headed and selfish; they
+are like children who cry for food ten minutes before dinner-time: it is
+bound to come if they will wait a little.”
+
+“And you will tell them so?”
+
+“That they are pig-headed? Certainly.”
+
+Mabel looked at her husband with a pleased twinkle in her eyes. She knew
+perfectly well that his popularity rested largely on his outspokenness:
+folks liked to be scolded and abused by a genial bold man who danced and
+gesticulated in a magnetic fury; she liked it herself.
+
+“How shall you go?” she asked.
+
+“Volor. I shall catch the eighteen o’clock at Blackfriars; the meeting
+is at nineteen, and I shall be back at twenty-one.”
+
+He addressed himself vigorously to his _entree_, and his mother looked
+up with a patient, old-woman smile.
+
+Mabel began to drum her fingers softly on the damask.
+
+“Please make haste, my dear,” she said; “I have to be at Brighton at
+three.”
+
+Oliver gulped his last mouthful, pushed his plate over the line, glanced
+to see if all plates were there, and then put his hand beneath the
+table.
+
+Instantly, without a sound, the centre-piece vanished, and the three
+waited unconcernedly while the clink of dishes came from beneath.
+
+Old Mrs. Brand was a hale-looking old lady, rosy and wrinkled, with the
+mantilla head-dress of fifty years ago; but she, too, looked a little
+depressed this morning. The _entree_ was not very successful, she
+thought; the new food-stuff was not up to the old, it was a trifle
+gritty: she would see about it afterwards. There was a clink, a soft
+sound like a push, and the centre-piece snapped into its place, bearing
+an admirable imitation of a roasted fowl.
+
+Oliver and his wife were alone again for a minute or two after breakfast
+before Mabel started down the path to catch the 14¹⁄₂ o’clock 4th grade
+sub-trunk line to the junction.
+
+“What’s the matter with mother?” he said.
+
+“Oh! it’s the food-stuff again: she’s never got accustomed to it; she
+says it doesn’t suit her.”
+
+“Nothing else?”
+
+“No, my dear, I am sure of it. She hasn’t said a word lately.”
+
+Oliver watched his wife go down the path, reassured. He had been a
+little troubled once or twice lately by an odd word or two that his
+mother had let fall. She had been brought up a Christian for a few
+years, and it seemed to him sometimes as if it had left a taint. There
+was an old “Garden of the Soul” that she liked to keep by her, though
+she always protested with an appearance of scorn that it was nothing but
+nonsense. Still, Oliver would have preferred that she had burned it:
+superstition was a desperate thing for retaining life, and, as the brain
+weakened, might conceivably reassert itself. Christianity was both wild
+and dull, he told himself, wild because of its obvious grotesqueness and
+impossibility, and dull because it was so utterly apart from the
+exhilarating stream of human life; it crept dustily about still, he
+knew, in little dark churches here and there; it screamed with
+hysterical sentimentality in Westminster Cathedral which he had once
+entered and looked upon with a kind of disgusted fury; it gabbled
+strange, false words to the incompetent and the old and the half-witted.
+But it would be too dreadful if his own mother ever looked upon it again
+with favour.
+
+Oliver himself, ever since he could remember, had been violently opposed
+to the concessions to Rome and Ireland. It was intolerable that these
+two places should be definitely yielded up to this foolish, treacherous
+nonsense: they were hot-beds of sedition; plague-spots on the face of
+humanity. He had never agreed with those who said that it was better
+that all the poison of the West should be gathered rather than
+dispersed. But, at any rate, there it was. Rome had been given up wholly
+to that old man in white in exchange for all the parish churches and
+cathedrals of Italy, and it was understood that mediaeval darkness
+reigned there supreme; and Ireland, after receiving Home Rule thirty
+years before, had declared for Catholicism, and opened her arms to
+Individualism in its most virulent form. England had laughed and
+assented, for she was saved from a quantity of agitation by the
+immediate departure of half her Catholic population for that island, and
+had, consistently with her Communist-colonial policy, granted every
+facility for Individualism to reduce itself there _ad absurdum_. All
+kinds of funny things were happening there: Oliver had read with a
+bitter amusement of new appearances there, of a Woman in Blue and
+shrines raised where her feet had rested; but he was scarcely amused at
+Rome, for the movement to Turin of the Italian Government had deprived
+the Republic of quite a quantity of sentimental prestige, and had haloed
+the old religious nonsense with all the meretriciousness of historical
+association. However, it obviously could not last much longer: the world
+was beginning to understand at last.
+
+He stood a moment or two at the door after his wife had gone, drinking
+in reassurance from that glorious vision of solid sense that spread
+itself before his eyes: the endless house-roofs; the high glass vaults
+of the public baths and gymnasiums; the pinnacled schools where
+Citizenship was taught each morning; the spider-like cranes and
+scaffoldings that rose here and there; and even the few pricking spires
+did not disconcert him. There it stretched away into the grey haze of
+London, really beautiful, this vast hive of men and women who had
+learned at least the primary lesson of the gospel that there was no God
+but man, no priest but the politician, no prophet but the schoolmaster.
+
+Then he went back once more to his speech-constructing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mabel, too, was a little thoughtful as she sat with her paper on her
+lap, spinning down the broad line to Brighton. This Eastern news was
+more disconcerting to her than she allowed her husband to see; yet it
+seemed incredible that there could be any real danger of invasion. This
+Western life was so sensible and peaceful; folks had their feet at last
+upon the rock, and it was unthinkable that they could ever be forced
+back on to the mud-flats: it was contrary to the whole law of
+development. Yet she could not but recognise that catastrophe seemed one
+of nature’s methods....
+
+She sat very quiet, glancing once or twice at the meagre little scrap
+of news, and read the leading article upon it: that too seemed
+significant of dismay. A couple of men were talking in the
+half-compartment beyond on the same subject; one described the
+Government engineering works that he had visited, the breathless haste
+that dominated them; the other put in interrogations and questions.
+There was not much comfort there. There were no windows through which
+she could look; on the main lines the speed was too great for the eyes;
+the long compartment flooded with soft light bounded her horizon. She
+stared at the moulded white ceiling, the delicious oak-framed paintings,
+the deep spring-seats, the mellow globes overhead that poured out
+radiance, at a mother and child diagonally opposite her. Then the great
+chord sounded; the faint vibration increased ever so slightly; and an
+instant later the automatic doors ran back, and she stepped out on to
+the platform of Brighton station.
+
+As she went down the steps leading to the station square she noticed a
+priest going before her. He seemed a very upright and sturdy old man,
+for though his hair was white he walked steadily and strongly. At the
+foot of the steps he stopped and half turned, and then, to her surprise,
+she saw that his face was that of a young man, fine-featured and strong,
+with black eyebrows and very bright grey eyes. Then she passed on and
+began to cross the square in the direction of her aunt’s house.
+
+Then without the slightest warning, except one shrill hoot from
+overhead, a number of things happened.
+
+A great shadow whirled across the sunlight at her feet, a sound of
+rending tore the air, and a noise like a giant’s sigh; and, as she
+stopped bewildered, with a noise like ten thousand smashed kettles, a
+huge thing crashed on the rubber pavement before her, where it lay,
+filling half the square, writhing long wings on its upper side that beat
+and whirled like the flappers of some ghastly extinct monster, pouring
+out human screams, and beginning almost instantly to crawl with broken
+life.
+
+Mabel scarcely knew what happened next; but she found herself a moment
+later forced forward by some violent pressure from behind, till she
+stood shaking from head to foot, with some kind of smashed body of a man
+moaning and stretching at her feet. There was a sort of articulate
+language coming from it; she caught distinctly the names of Jesus and
+Mary; then a voice hissed suddenly in her ears:
+
+“Let me through. I am a priest.”
+
+She stood there a moment longer, dazed by the suddenness of the whole
+affair, and watched almost unintelligently the grey-haired young priest
+on his knees, with his coat torn open, and a crucifix out; she saw him
+bend close, wave his hand in a swift sign, and heard a murmur of a
+language she did not know. Then he was up again, holding the crucifix
+before him, and she saw him begin to move forward into the midst of the
+red-flooded pavement, looking this way and that as if for a signal. Down
+the steps of the great hospital on her right came figures running now,
+hatless, each carrying what looked like an old-fashioned camera. She
+knew what those men were, and her heart leaped in relief. They were the
+ministers of euthanasia. Then she felt herself taken by the shoulder and
+pulled back, and immediately found herself in the front rank of a crowd
+that was swaying and crying out, and behind a line of police and
+civilians who had formed themselves into a cordon to keep the pressure
+back.
+
+
+III
+
+Oliver was in a panic of terror as his mother, half an hour later, ran
+in with the news that one of the Government volors had fallen in the
+station square at Brighton just after the 14¹⁄₂ train had discharged
+its passengers. He knew quite well what that meant, for he remembered
+one such accident ten years before, just after the law forbidding
+private volors had been passed. It meant that every living creature in
+it was killed and probably many more in the place where it fell--and
+what then? The message was clear enough; she would certainly be in the
+square at that time.
+
+He sent a desperate wire to her aunt asking for news; and sat, shaking
+in his chair, awaiting the answer. His mother sat by him.
+
+“Please God---” she sobbed out once, and stopped confounded as he turned
+on her.
+
+But Fate was merciful, and three minutes before Mr. Phillips toiled up
+the path with the answer, Mabel herself came into the room, rather pale
+and smiling.
+
+“Christ!” cried Oliver, and gave one huge sob as he sprang up.
+
+She had not a great deal to tell him. There was no explanation of the
+disaster published as yet; it seemed that the wings on one side had
+simply ceased to work.
+
+She described the shadow, the hiss of sound, and the crash.
+
+Then she stopped.
+
+“Well, my dear?” said her husband, still rather white beneath the eyes
+as he sat close to her patting her hand.
+
+“There was a priest there,” said Mabel. “I saw him before, at the
+station.”
+
+Oliver gave a little hysterical snort of laughter.
+
+“He was on his knees at once,” she said, “with his crucifix, even before
+the doctors came. My dear, do people really believe all that?”
+
+“Why, they think they do,” said her husband.
+
+“It was all so--so sudden; and there he was, just as if he had been
+expecting it all. Oliver, how can they?”
+
+“Why, people will believe anything if they begin early enough.”
+
+“And the man seemed to believe it, too--the dying man, I mean. I saw his
+eyes.”
+
+She stopped.
+
+“Well, my dear?”
+
+“Oliver, what do you say to people when they are dying?”
+
+“Say! Why, nothing! What can I say? But I don’t think I’ve ever seen any
+one die.”
+
+“Nor have I till to-day,” said the girl, and shivered a little. “The
+euthanasia people were soon at work.”
+
+Oliver took her hand gently.
+
+“My darling, it must have been frightful. Why, you’re trembling still.”
+
+“No; but listen.... You know, if I had had anything to say I could have
+said it too. They were all just in front of me: I wondered; then I knew
+I hadn’t. I couldn’t possibly have talked about Humanity.”
+
+“My dear, it’s all very sad; but you know it doesn’t really matter. It’s
+all over.”
+
+“And--and they’ve just stopped?”
+
+“Why, yes.”
+
+Mabel compressed her lips a little; then she sighed. She had an agitated
+sort of meditation in the train. She knew perfectly that it was sheer
+nerves; but she could not just yet shake them off. As she had said, it
+was the first time she had seen death.
+
+“And that priest--that priest doesn’t think so?”
+
+“My dear, I’ll tell you what he believes. He believes that that man whom
+he showed the crucifix to, and said those words over, is alive
+somewhere, in spite of his brain being dead: he is not quite sure where;
+but he is either in a kind of smelting works being slowly burned; or, if
+he is very lucky, and that piece of wood took effect, he is somewhere
+beyond the clouds, before Three Persons who are only One although They
+are Three; that there are quantities of other people there, a Woman in
+Blue, a great many others in white with their heads under their arms,
+and still more with their heads on one side; and that they’ve all got
+harps and go on singing for ever and ever, and walking about on the
+clouds, and liking it very much indeed. He thinks, too, that all these
+nice people are perpetually looking down upon the aforesaid
+smelting-works, and praising the Three Great Persons for making them.
+That’s what the priest believes. Now you know it’s not likely; that kind
+of thing may be very nice, but it isn’t true.”
+
+Mabel smiled pleasantly. She had never heard it put so well.
+
+“No, my dear, you’re quite right. That sort of thing isn’t true. How can
+he believe it? He looked quite intelligent!”
+
+“My dear girl, if I had told you in your cradle that the moon was green
+cheese, and had hammered at you ever since, every day and all day, that
+it was, you’d very nearly believe it by now. Why, you know in your heart
+that the euthanatisers are the real priests. Of course you do.”
+
+Mabel sighed with satisfaction and stood up.
+
+“Oliver, you’re a most comforting person. I do like you! There! I must
+go to my room: I’m all shaky still.”
+
+Half across the room she stopped and put out a shoe.
+
+“Why---” she began faintly.
+
+There was a curious rusty-looking splash upon it; and her husband saw
+her turn white. He rose abruptly.
+
+“My dear,” he said, “don’t be foolish.”
+
+She looked at him, smiled bravely, and went out.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When she was gone, he still sat on a moment where she had left him. Dear
+me! how pleased he was! He did not like to think of what life would have
+been without her. He had known her since she was twelve--that was seven
+years ago-and last year they had gone together to the district official
+to make their contract. She had really become very necessary to him. Of
+course the world could get on without her, and he supposed that he could
+too; but he did not want to have to try. He knew perfectly well, for it
+was his creed of human love, that there was between them a double
+affection, of mind as well as body; and there was absolutely nothing
+else: but he loved her quick intuitions, and to hear his own thought
+echoed so perfectly. It was like two flames added together to make a
+third taller than either: of course one flame could burn without the
+other--in fact, one would have to, one day--but meantime the warmth and
+light were exhilarating. Yes, he was delighted that she happened to be
+clear of the falling volor.
+
+He gave no more thought to his exposition of the Christian creed; it was
+a mere commonplace to him that Catholics believed that kind of thing; it
+was no more blasphemous to his mind so to describe it, than it would be
+to laugh at a Fijian idol with mother-of-pearl eyes, and a horse-hair
+wig; it was simply impossible to treat it seriously. He, too, had
+wondered once or twice in his life how human beings could believe such
+rubbish; but psychology had helped him, and he knew now well enough that
+suggestion will do almost anything. And it was this hateful thing that
+had so long restrained the euthanasia movement with all its splendid
+mercy.
+
+His brows wrinkled a little as he remembered his mother’s exclamation,
+“Please God”; then he smiled at the poor old thing and her pathetic
+childishness, and turned once more to his table, thinking in spite of
+himself of his wife’s hesitation as she had seen the splash of blood on
+her shoe. Blood! Yes; that was as much a fact as anything else. How was
+it to be dealt with? Why, by the glorious creed of Humanity--that
+splendid God who died and rose again ten thousand times a day, who had
+died daily like the old cracked fanatic Saul of Tarsus, ever since the
+world began, and who rose again, not once like the Carpenter’s Son, but
+with every child that came into the world. That was the answer; and was
+it not overwhelmingly sufficient?
+
+Mr. Phillips came in an hour later with another bundle of papers.
+
+“No more news from the East, sir,” he said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+I
+
+Percy Franklin’s correspondence with the Cardinal-Protector of England
+occupied him directly for at least two hours every day, and for nearly
+eight hours indirectly.
+
+For the past eight years the methods of the Holy See had once more been
+revised with a view to modern needs, and now every important province
+throughout the world possessed not only an administrative metropolitan
+but a representative in Rome whose business it was to be in touch with
+the Pope on the one side and the people he represented on the other. In
+other words, centralisation had gone forward rapidly, in accordance with
+the laws of life; and, with centralisation, freedom of method and
+expansion of power. England’s Cardinal-Protector was one Abbot Martin, a
+Benedictine, and it was Percy’s business, as of a dozen more bishops,
+priests and laymen (with whom, by the way, he was forbidden to hold any
+formal consultation), to write a long daily letter to him on affairs
+that came under his notice.
+
+It was a curious life, therefore, that Percy led. He had a couple of
+rooms assigned to him in Archbishop’s House at Westminster, and was
+attached loosely to the Cathedral staff, although with considerable
+liberty. He rose early, and went to meditation for an hour, after which
+he said his mass. He took his coffee soon after, said a little office,
+and then settled down to map out his letter. At ten o’clock he was ready
+to receive callers, and till noon he was generally busy with both those
+who came to see him on their own responsibility and his staff of
+half-a-dozen reporters whose business it was to bring him marked
+paragraphs in the newspapers and their own comments. He then breakfasted
+with the other priests in the house, and set out soon after to call on
+people whose opinion was necessary, returning for a cup of tea soon
+after sixteen o’clock. Then he settled down, after the rest of his
+office and a visit to the Blessed Sacrament, to compose his letter,
+which though short, needed a great deal of care and sifting. After
+dinner he made a few notes for next day, received visitors again, and
+went to bed soon after twenty-two o’clock. Twice a week it was his
+business to assist at Vespers in the afternoon, and he usually sang high
+mass on Saturdays.
+
+It was, therefore, a curiously distracting life, with peculiar dangers.
+
+It was one day, a week or two after his visit to Brighton, that he was
+just finishing his letter, when his servant looked in to tell him that
+Father Francis was below.
+
+“In ten minutes,” said Percy, without looking up.
+
+He snapped off his last lines, drew out the sheet, and settled down to
+read it over, translating it unconsciously from Latin to English.
+
+“WESTMINSTER, May 14th.
+
+“EMINENCE: Since yesterday I have a little more information. It appears
+certain that the Bill establishing Esperanto for all State purposes will
+be brought in in June. I have had this from Johnson. This, as I have
+pointed out before, is the very last stone in our consolidation with the
+continent, which, at present, is to be regretted.... A great access of
+Jews to Freemasonry is to be expected; hitherto they have held aloof to
+some extent, but the ‘abolition of the Idea of God’ is tending to draw
+in those Jews, now greatly on the increase once more, who repudiate all
+notion of a personal Messiah. It is ‘Humanity’ here, too, that is at
+work. To-day I heard the Rabbi Simeon speak to this effect in the City,
+and was impressed by the applause he received.... Yet among others an
+expectation is growing that a man will presently be found to lead the
+Communist movement and unite their forces more closely. I enclose a
+verbose cutting from the _New People_ to that effect; and it is echoed
+everywhere. They say that the cause must give birth to one such soon;
+that they have had prophets and precursors for a hundred years past, and
+lately a cessation of them. It is strange how this coincides
+superficially with Christian ideas. Your Eminence will observe that a
+simile of the ‘ninth wave’ is used with some eloquence.... I hear to-day
+of the secession of an old Catholic family, the Wargraves of Norfolk,
+with their chaplain Micklem, who it seems has been busy in this
+direction for some while. The _Epoch_ announces it with satisfaction,
+owing to the peculiar circumstances; but unhappily such events are not
+uncommon now.... There is much distrust among the laity. Seven priests
+in Westminster diocese have left us within the last three months; on the
+other hand, I have pleasure in telling your Eminence that his Grace
+received into Catholic Communion this morning the ex-Anglican Bishop of
+Carlisle, with half-a-dozen of his clergy. This has been expected for
+some weeks past. I append also cuttings from the _Tribune_, the _London
+Trumpet_, and the _Observer_, with my comments upon them. Your Eminence
+will see how great the excitement is with regard to the last.
+
+“_Recommendation._ That formal excommunication of the Wargraves and
+these eight priests should be issued in Norfolk and Westminster
+respectively, and no further notice taken.”
+
+Percy laid down the sheet, gathered up the half dozen other papers that
+contained his extracts and running commentary, signed the last, and
+slipped the whole into the printed envelope that lay ready.
+
+Then he took up his biretta and went to the lift.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The moment he came into the glass-doored parlour he saw that the crisis
+was come, if not passed already. Father Francis looked miserably ill,
+but there was a curious hardness, too, about his eyes and mouth, as he
+stood waiting. He shook his head abruptly.
+
+“I have come to say good-bye, father. I can bear it no more.”
+
+Percy was careful to show no emotion at all. He made a little sign to a
+chair, and himself sat down too. “It is an end of everything,” said the
+other again in a perfectly steady voice. “I believe nothing. I have
+believed nothing for a year now.”
+
+“You have felt nothing, you mean,” said Percy.
+
+“That won’t do, father,” went on the other. “I tell you there is nothing
+left. I can’t even argue now. It is just good-bye.”
+
+Percy had nothing to say. He had talked to this man during a period of
+over eight months, ever since Father Francis had first confided in him
+that his faith was going. He understood perfectly what a strain it had
+been; he felt bitterly compassionate towards this poor creature who had
+become caught up somehow into the dizzy triumphant whirl of the New
+Humanity. External facts were horribly strong just now; and faith,
+except to one who had learned that Will and Grace were all and emotion
+nothing, was as a child crawling about in the midst of some huge
+machinery: it might survive or it might not; but it required nerves of
+steel to keep steady. It was hard to know where blame could be assigned;
+yet Percy’s faith told him that there was blame due. In the ages of
+faith a very inadequate grasp of religion would pass muster; in these
+searching days none but the humble and the pure could stand the test for
+long, unless indeed they were protected by a miracle of ignorance. The
+alliance of Psychology and Materialism did indeed seem, looked at from
+one angle, to account for everything; it needed a robust supernatural
+perception to understand their practical inadequacy. And as regards
+Father Francis’s personal responsibility, he could not help feeling that
+the other had allowed ceremonial to play too great a part in his
+religion, and prayer too little. In him the external had absorbed the
+internal.
+
+So he did not allow his sympathy to show itself in his bright eyes.
+
+“You think it my fault, of course,” said the other sharply.
+
+“My dear father,” said Percy, motionless in his chair, “I know it is
+your fault. Listen to me. You say Christianity is absurd and impossible.
+Now, you know, it cannot be that! It may be untrue--I am not speaking of
+that now, even though I am perfectly certain that it is absolutely
+true--but it cannot be absurd so long as educated and virtuous people
+continue to hold it. To say that it is absurd is simple pride; it is to
+dismiss all who believe in it as not merely mistaken, but unintelligent
+as well---”
+
+“Very well, then,” interrupted the other; “then suppose I withdraw that,
+and simply say that I do not believe it to be true.”
+
+“You do not withdraw it,” continued Percy serenely; “you still really
+believe it to be absurd: you have told me so a dozen times. Well, I
+repeat, that is pride, and quite sufficient to account for it all. It is
+the moral attitude that matters. There may be other things too---”
+
+Father Francis looked up sharply.
+
+“Oh! the old story!” he said sneeringly.
+
+“If you tell me on your word of honour that there is no woman in the
+case, or no particular programme of sin you propose to work out, I shall
+believe you. But it is an old story, as you say.”
+
+“I swear to you there is not,” cried the other.
+
+“Thank God then!” said Percy. “There are fewer obstacles to a return of
+faith.”
+
+There was silence for a moment after that. Percy had really no more to
+say. He had talked to him of the inner life again and again, in which
+verities are seen to be true, and acts of faith are ratified; he had
+urged prayer and humility till he was almost weary of the names; and had
+been met by the retort that this was to advise sheer self-hypnotism; and
+he had despaired of making clear to one who did not see it for himself
+that while Love and Faith may be called self-hypnotism from one angle,
+yet from another they are as much realities as, for example, artistic
+faculties, and need similar cultivation; that they produce a conviction
+that they are convictions, that they handle and taste things which when
+handled and tasted are overwhelmingly more real and objective than the
+things of sense. Evidences seemed to mean nothing to this man.
+
+So he was silent now, chilled himself by the presence of this crisis,
+looking unseeingly out upon the plain, little old-world parlour, its
+tall window, its strip of matting, conscious chiefly of the dreary
+hopelessness of this human brother of his who had eyes but did not see,
+ears and was deaf. He wished he would say good-bye, and go. There was no
+more to be done.
+
+Father Francis, who had been sitting in a lax kind of huddle, seemed to
+know his thoughts, and sat up suddenly.
+
+“You are tired of me,” he said. “I will go.”
+
+“I am not tired of you, my dear father,” said Percy simply. “I am only
+terribly sorry. You see I know that it is all true.”
+
+The other looked at him heavily.
+
+“And I know that it is not,” he said. “It is very beautiful; I wish I
+could believe it. I don’t think I shall be ever happy again--but--but
+there it is.”
+
+Percy sighed. He had told him so often that the heart is as divine a
+gift as the mind, and that to neglect it in the search for God is to
+seek ruin, but this priest had scarcely seen the application to himself.
+He had answered with the old psychological arguments that the
+suggestions of education accounted for everything.
+
+“I suppose you will cast me off,” said the other.
+
+“It is you who are leaving me,” said Percy. “I cannot follow, if you
+mean that.”
+
+“But--but cannot we be friends?”
+
+A sudden heat touched the elder priest’s heart.
+
+“Friends?” he said. “Is sentimentality all you mean by friendship? What
+kind of friends can we be?”
+
+The other’s face became suddenly heavy.
+
+“I thought so.”
+
+“John!” cried Percy. “You see that, do you not? How can we pretend
+anything when you do not believe in God? For I do you the honour of
+thinking that you do not.”
+
+Francis sprang up.
+
+“Well---” he snapped. “I could not have believed--I am going.”
+
+He wheeled towards the door.
+
+“John!” said Percy again. “Are you going like this? Can you not shake
+hands?”
+
+The other wheeled again, with heavy anger in his face.
+
+“Why, you said you could not be friends with me!”
+
+Percy’s mouth opened. Then he understood, and smiled. “Oh! that is all
+you mean by friendship, is it?--I beg your pardon. Oh! we can be polite
+to one another, if you like.”
+
+He still stood holding out his hand. Father Francis looked at it a
+moment, his lips shook: then once more he turned, and went out without a
+word.
+
+
+II
+
+Percy stood motionless until he heard the automatic bell outside tell
+him that Father Francis was really gone, then he went out himself and
+turned towards the long passage leading to the Cathedral. As he passed
+out through the sacristy he heard far in front the murmur of an organ,
+and on coming through into the chapel used as a parish church he
+perceived that Vespers were not yet over in the great choir. He came
+straight down the aisle, turned to the right, crossed the centre and
+knelt down.
+
+It was drawing on towards sunset, and the huge dark place was lighted
+here and there by patches of ruddy London light that lay on the gorgeous
+marble and gildings finished at last by a wealthy convert. In front of
+him rose up the choir, with a line of white surpliced and furred canons
+on either side, and the vast baldachino in the midst, beneath which
+burned the six lights as they had burned day by day for more than a
+century; behind that again lay the high line of the apse-choir with the
+dim, window-pierced vault above where Christ reigned in majesty. He let
+his eyes wander round for a few moments before beginning his deliberate
+prayer, drinking in the glory of the place, listening to the thunderous
+chorus, the peal of the organ, and the thin mellow voice of the priest.
+There on the left shone the refracted glow of the lamps that burned
+before the Lord in the Sacrament, on the right a dozen candles winked
+here and there at the foot of the gaunt images, high overhead hung the
+gigantic cross with that lean, emaciated Poor Man Who called all who
+looked on Him to the embraces of a God.
+
+Then he hid his face in his hands, drew a couple of long breaths, and
+set to work.
+
+He began, as his custom was in mental prayer, by a deliberate act of
+self-exclusion from the world of sense. Under the image of sinking
+beneath a surface he forced himself downwards and inwards, till the peal
+of the organ, the shuffle of footsteps, the rigidity of the chair-back
+beneath his wrists--all seemed apart and external, and he was left a
+single person with a beating heart, an intellect that suggested image
+after image, and emotions that were too languid to stir themselves. Then
+he made his second descent, renounced all that he possessed and was, and
+became conscious that even the body was left behind, and that his mind
+and heart, awed by the Presence in which they found themselves, clung
+close and obedient to the will which was their lord and protector. He
+drew another long breath, or two, as he felt that Presence surge about
+him; he repeated a few mechanical words, and sank to that peace which
+follows the relinquishment of thought.
+
+There he rested for a while. Far above him sounded the ecstatic music,
+the cry of trumpets and the shrilling of the flutes; but they were as
+insignificant street-noises to one who was falling asleep. He was within
+the veil of things now, beyond the barriers of sense and reflection, in
+that secret place to which he had learned the road by endless effort, in
+that strange region where realities are evident, where perceptions go to
+and fro with the swiftness of light, where the swaying will catches now
+this, now that act, moulds it and speeds it; where all things meet,
+where truth is known and handled and tasted, where God Immanent is one
+with God Transcendent, where the meaning of the external world is
+evident through its inner side, and the Church and its mysteries are
+seen from within a haze of glory.
+
+So he lay a few moments, absorbing and resting.
+
+Then he aroused himself to consciousness and began to speak.
+
+“Lord, I am here, and Thou art here. I know Thee. There is nothing else
+but Thou and I.... I lay this all in Thy hands--Thy apostate priest, Thy
+people, the world, and myself. I spread it before Thee--I spread it
+before Thee.”
+
+He paused, poised in the act, till all of which he thought lay like a
+plain before a peak.
+
+... “Myself, Lord--there but for Thy grace should I be going, in
+darkness and misery. It is Thou Who dost preserve me. Maintain and
+finish Thy work within my soul. Let me not falter for one instant. If
+Thou withdraw Thy hand I fall into utter nothingness.”
+
+So his soul stood a moment, with outstretched appealing hands, helpless
+and confident. Then the will flickered in self-consciousness, and he
+repeated acts of faith, hope and love to steady it. Then he drew another
+long breath, feeling the Presence tingle and shake about him, and began
+again.
+
+“Lord; look on Thy people. Many are falling from Thee. _Ne in aeternum
+irascaris nobis. Ne in aeternum irascaris nobis_.... I unite myself with
+all saints and angels and Mary Queen of Heaven; look on them and me, and
+hear us. _Emitte lucem tuam et veritatem tuam._ Thy light and Thy truth!
+Lay not on us heavier burdens than we can bear. Lord, why dost Thou not
+speak!”
+
+He writhed himself forward in a passion of expectant desire, hearing his
+muscles crack in the effort. Once more he relaxed himself; and the swift
+play of wordless acts began which he knew to be the very heart of
+prayer. The eyes of his soul flew hither and thither, from Calvary to
+heaven and back again to the tossing troubled earth. He saw Christ dying
+of desolation while the earth rocked and groaned; Christ reigning as a
+priest upon His Throne in robes of light, Christ patient and inexorably
+silent within the Sacramental species; and to each in turn he directed
+the eyes of the Eternal Father....
+
+Then he waited for communications, and they came, so soft and delicate,
+passing like shadows, that his will sweated blood and tears in the
+effort to catch and fix them and correspond....
+
+He saw the Body Mystical in its agony, strained over the world as on a
+cross, silent with pain; he saw this and that nerve wrenched and
+twisted, till pain presented it to himself as under the guise of flashes
+of colour; he saw the life-blood drop by drop run down from His head and
+hands and feet. The world was gathered mocking and good-humoured
+beneath. “_He saved others: Himself He cannot save.... Let Christ come
+down from the Cross and we will believe._” Far away behind bushes and
+in holes of the ground the friends of Jesus peeped and sobbed; Mary
+herself was silent, pierced by seven swords; the disciple whom He loved
+had no words of comfort.
+
+He saw, too, how no word would be spoken from heaven; the angels
+themselves were bidden to put sword into sheath, and wait on the eternal
+patience of God, for the agony was hardly yet begun; there were a
+thousand horrors yet before the end could come, that final sum of
+crucifixion.... He must wait and watch, content to stand there and do
+nothing; and the Resurrection must seem to him no more than a dreamed-of
+hope. There was the Sabbath yet to come, while the Body Mystical must
+lie in its sepulchre cut off from light, and even the dignity of the
+Cross must be withdrawn and the knowledge that Jesus lived. That inner
+world, to which by long effort he had learned the way, was all alight
+with agony; it was bitter as brine, it was of that pale luminosity that
+is the utmost product of pain, it hummed in his ears with a note that
+rose to a scream ... it pressed upon him, penetrated him, stretched him
+as on a rack.... And with that his will grew sick and nerveless.
+
+“Lord! I cannot bear it!” he moaned....
+
+In an instant he was back again, drawing long breaths of misery. He
+passed his tongue over his lips, and opened his eyes on the darkening
+apse before him. The organ was silent now, and the choir was gone, and
+the lights out. The sunset colour, too, had faded from the walls, and
+grim cold faces looked down on him from wall and vault. He was back
+again on the surface of life; the vision had melted; he scarcely knew
+what it was that he had seen.
+
+But he must gather up the threads, and by sheer effort absorb them. He
+must pay his duty, too, to the Lord that gave Himself to the senses as
+well as to the inner spirit. So he rose, stiff and constrained, and
+passed across to the Chapel of the Holy Sacrament.
+
+As he came out from the block of chairs, very upright and tall, with his
+biretta once more on his white hair, he saw an old woman watching him
+very closely. He hesitated an instant, wondering whether she were a
+penitent, and as he hesitated she made a movement towards him.
+
+“I beg your pardon, sir,” she began.
+
+She was not a Catholic then. He lifted his biretta.
+
+“Can I do anything for you?” he asked.
+
+“I beg your pardon, sir, but were you at Brighton, at the accident two
+months ago?”
+
+“I was.”
+
+“Ah! I thought so: my daughter-in-law saw you then.”
+
+Percy had a spasm of impatience: he was a little tired of being
+identified by his white hair and young face.
+
+“Were you there, madam?”
+
+She looked at him doubtfully and curiously, moving her old, eyes up and
+down his figure. Then she recollected herself.
+
+“No, sir; it was my daughter-in-law--I beg your pardon, sir, but---”
+
+“Well?” asked Percy, trying to keep the impatience out of his voice.
+
+“Are you the Archbishop, sir?”
+
+The priest smiled, showing his white teeth.
+
+“No, madam; I am just a poor priest. Dr. Cholmondeley is Archbishop. I
+am Father Percy Franklin.”
+
+She said nothing, but still looking at him made a little old-world
+movement of a bow; and Percy passed on to the dim, splendid chapel to
+pay his devotions.
+
+
+III
+
+There was great talk that night at dinner among the priests as to the
+extraordinary spread of Freemasonry. It had been going on for many years
+now, and Catholics perfectly recognised its dangers, for the profession
+of Masonry had been for some centuries rendered incompatible with
+religion through the Church’s unswerving condemnation of it. A man must
+choose between that and his faith. Things had developed extraordinarily
+during the last century. First there had been the organised assault upon
+the Church in France; and what Catholics had always suspected then
+became a certainty in the revelations of 1918, when P. Gerome, the
+Dominican and ex-Mason, had made his disclosures with regard to the
+Mark-Masons. It had become evident then that Catholics had been right,
+and that Masonry, in its higher grades at least, had been responsible
+throughout the world for the strange movement against religion. But he
+had died in his bed, and the public had been impressed by that fact.
+Then came the splendid donations in France and Italy--to hospitals,
+orphanages, and the like; and once more suspicion began to disappear.
+After all, it seemed--and continued to seem--for seventy years and more
+that Masonry was nothing more than a vast philanthropical society. Now
+once more men had their doubts.
+
+“I hear that Felsenburgh is a Mason,” observed Monsignor Macintosh, the
+Cathedral Administrator. “A Grand-Master or something.”
+
+“But who is Felsenburgh?” put in a young priest.
+
+Monsignor pursed his lips and shook his head. He was one of those humble
+persons as proud of ignorance as others of knowledge. He boasted that he
+never read the papers nor any book except those that had received the
+_imprimatur_; it was a priest’s business, he often remarked, to preserve
+the faith, not to acquire worldly knowledge. Percy had occasionally
+rather envied his point of view.
+
+“He’s a mystery,” said another priest, Father Blackmore; “but he seems
+to be causing great excitement. They were selling his ‘Life’ to-day on
+the Embankment.”
+
+“I met an American senator,” put in Percy, “three days ago, who told me
+that even there they know nothing of him, except his extraordinary
+eloquence. He only appeared last year, and seems to have carried
+everything before him by quite unusual methods. He is a great linguist,
+too. That is why they took him to Irkutsk.”
+
+“Well, the Masons---” went on Monsignor. “It is very serious. In the
+last month four of my penitents have left me because of it.”
+
+“Their inclusion of women was their master-stroke,” growled Father
+Blackmore, helping himself to claret.
+
+“It is extraordinary that they hesitated so long about that,” observed
+Percy.
+
+A couple of the others added their evidence. It appeared that they, too,
+had lost penitents lately through the spread of Masonry. It was rumoured
+that a Pastoral was a-preparing upstairs on the subject.
+
+Monsignor shook his head ominously.
+
+“More is wanted than that,” he said.
+
+Percy pointed out that the Church had said her last word several
+centuries ago. She had laid her excommunication on all members of secret
+societies, and there was really no more that she could do.
+
+“Except bring it before her children again and again,” put in Monsignor.
+“I shall preach on it next Sunday.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Percy dotted down a note when he reached his room, determining to say
+another word or two on the subject to the Cardinal-Protector. He had
+mentioned Freemasonry often before, but it seemed time for another
+remark. Then he opened his letters, first turning to one which he
+recognised as from the Cardinal.
+
+It seemed a curious coincidence, as he read a series of questions that
+Cardinal Martin’s letter contained, that one of them should be on this
+very subject. It ran as follows:
+
+“What of Masonry? Felsenburgh is said to be one. Gather all the gossip
+you can about him. Send any English or American biographies of him. Are
+you still losing Catholics through Masonry?”
+
+He ran his eyes down the rest of the questions. They chiefly referred to
+previous remarks of his own, but twice, even in them, Felsenburgh’s name
+appeared.
+
+He laid the paper down and considered a little.
+
+It was very curious, he thought, how this man’s name was in every one’s
+mouth, in spite of the fact that so little was known about him. He had
+bought in the streets, out of curiosity, three photographs that
+professed to represent this strange person, and though one of them might
+be genuine they all three could not be. He drew them out of a
+pigeon-hole, and spread them before him.
+
+One represented a fierce, bearded creature like a Cossack, with round
+staring eyes. No; intrinsic evidence condemned this: it was exactly how
+a coarse imagination would have pictured a man who seemed to be having a
+great influence in the East.
+
+The second showed a fat face with little eyes and a chin-beard. That
+might conceivably be genuine: he turned it over and saw the name of a
+New York firm on the back. Then he turned to the third. This presented a
+long, clean-shaven face with pince-nez, undeniably clever, but scarcely
+strong: and Felsenburgh was obviously a strong man.
+
+Percy inclined to think the second was the most probable; but they were
+all unconvincing; and he shuffled them carelessly together and replaced
+them.
+
+Then he put his elbows on the table, and began to think.
+
+He tried to remember what Mr. Varhaus, the American senator, had told
+him of Felsenburgh; yet it did not seem sufficient to account for the
+facts. Felsenburgh, it seemed, had employed none of those methods common
+in modern politics. He controlled no newspapers, vituperated nobody,
+championed nobody: he had no picked underlings; he used no bribes; there
+were no monstrous crimes alleged against him. It seemed rather as if his
+originality lay in his clean hands and his stainless past--that, and his
+magnetic character. He was the kind of figure that belonged rather to
+the age of chivalry: a pure, clean, compelling personality, like a
+radiant child. He had taken people by surprise, then, rising out of the
+heaving dun-coloured waters of American socialism like a vision--from
+those waters so fiercely restrained from breaking into storm over since
+the extraordinary social revolution under Mr. Hearst’s disciples, a
+century ago. That had been the end of plutocracy; the famous old laws of
+1914 had burst some of the stinking bubbles of the time; and the
+enactments of 1916 and 1917 had prevented their forming again in any
+thing like their previous force. It had been the salvation of America,
+undoubtedly, even if that salvation were of a dreary and uninspiring
+description; and now out of the flat socialistic level had arisen this
+romantic figure utterly unlike any that had preceded it.... So the
+senator had hinted.... It was too complicated for Percy just now, and he
+gave it up.
+
+It was a weary world, he told himself, turning his eyes homewards.
+Everything seemed so hopeless and ineffective. He tried not to reflect
+on his fellow-priests, but for the fiftieth time he could not help
+seeing that they were not the men for the present situation. It was not
+that he preferred himself; he knew perfectly well that he, too, was
+fully as incompetent: had he not proved to be so with poor Father
+Francis, and scores of others who had clutched at him in their agony
+during the last ten years? Even the Archbishop, holy man as he was, with
+all his childlike faith--was that the man to lead English Catholics and
+confound their enemies? There seemed no giants on the earth in these
+days. What in the world was to be done? He buried his face in his
+hands....
+
+Yes; what was wanted was a new Order in the Church; the old ones were
+rule-bound through no fault of their own. An Order was wanted without
+habit or tonsure, without traditions or customs, an Order with nothing
+but entire and whole-hearted devotion, without pride even in their most
+sacred privileges, without a past history in which they might take
+complacent refuge. They must be _franc-tireurs_ of Christ’s Army; like
+the Jesuits, but without their fatal reputation, which, again, was no
+fault of their own. ... But there must be a Founder--Who, in God’s Name?
+--a Founder _nudus sequens Christum nudum_.... Yes--_Franc-tireurs_
+--priests, bishops, laymen and women--with the three vows of course, and
+a special clause forbidding utterly and for ever their ownership of
+corporate wealth.--Every gift received must be handed to the bishop of
+the diocese in which it was given, who must provide them himself with
+necessaries of life and travel. Oh!--what could they not do?... He was
+off in a rhapsody.
+
+Presently he recovered, and called himself a fool. Was not that scheme
+as old as the eternal hills, and as useless for practical purposes? Why,
+it had been the dream of every zealous man since the First Year of
+Salvation that such an Order should be founded!... He was a fool....
+
+Then once more he began to think of it all over again.
+
+Surely it was this which was wanted against the Masons; and women,
+too.--Had not scheme after scheme broken down because men had forgotten
+the power of women? It was that lack that had ruined Napoleon: he had
+trusted Josephine, and she had failed him; so he had trusted no other
+woman. In the Catholic Church, too, woman had been given no active work
+but either menial or connected with education: and was there not room
+for other activities than those? Well, it was useless to think of it. It
+was not his affair. If _Papa Angelicus_ who now reigned in Rome had not
+thought of it, why should a foolish, conceited priest in Westminster set
+himself up to do so?
+
+So he beat himself on the breast once more, and took up his office-book.
+
+He finished in half an hour, and again sat thinking; but this time it
+was of poor Father Francis. He wondered what he was doing now; whether
+he had taken off the Roman collar of Christ’s familiar slaves? The poor
+devil! And how far was he, Percy Franklin, responsible?
+
+When a tap came at his door presently, and Father Blackmore looked in
+for a talk before going to bed, Percy told him what had happened.
+
+Father Blackmore removed his pipe and sighed deliberately.
+
+“I knew it was coming,” he said. “Well, well.”
+
+“He has been honest enough,” explained Percy. “He told me eight months
+ago he was in trouble.”
+
+Father Blackmore drew upon his pipe thoughtfully.
+
+“Father Franklin,” he said, “things are really very serious. There is
+the same story everywhere. What in the world is happening?”
+
+Percy paused before answering.
+
+“I think these things go in waves,” he said.
+
+“Waves, do you think?” said the other.
+
+“What else?”
+
+Father Blackmore looked at him intently.
+
+“It is more like a dead calm, it seems to me,” he said. “Have you ever
+been in a typhoon?”
+
+Percy shook his head.
+
+“Well,” went on the other, “the most ominous thing is the calm. The sea
+is like oil; you feel half-dead: you can do nothing. Then comes the
+storm.”
+
+Percy looked at him, interested. He had not seen this mood in the priest
+before.
+
+“Before every great crash there comes this calm. It is always so in
+history. It was so before the Eastern War; it was so before the French
+Revolution. It was so before the Reformation. There is a kind of oily
+heaving; and everything is languid. So everything has been in America,
+too, for over eighty years.... Father Franklin, I think something is
+going to happen.”
+
+“Tell me,” said Percy, leaning forward.
+
+“Well, I saw Templeton a week before he died, and he put the idea in my
+head.... Look here, father. It may be this Eastern affair that is coming
+on us; but somehow I don’t think it is. It is in religion that something
+is going to happen. At least, so I think.... Father, who in God’s name
+is Felsenburgh?”
+
+Percy was so startled at the sudden introduction of this name again,
+that he stared a moment without speaking.
+
+Outside, the summer night was very still. There was a faint vibration
+now and again from the underground track that ran twenty yards from the
+house where they sat; but the streets were quiet enough round the
+Cathedral. Once a hoot rang far away, as if some ominous bird of passage
+were crossing between London and the stars, and once the cry of a woman
+sounded thin and shrill from the direction of the river. For the rest
+there was no more than the solemn, subdued hum that never ceased now
+night or day.
+
+“Yes; Felsenburgh,” said Father Blackmore once more. “I cannot get that
+man out of my head. And yet, what do I know of him? What does any one
+know of him?”
+
+Percy licked his lips to answer, and drew a breath to still the beating
+of his heart. He could not imagine why he felt excited. After all, who
+was old Blackmore to frighten him? But old Blackmore went on before he
+could speak.
+
+“See how people are leaving the Church! The Wargraves, the Hendersons,
+Sir James Bartlet, Lady Magnier, and then all the priests. Now they’re
+not all knaves--I wish they were; it would be so much easier to talk of
+it. But Sir James Bartlet, last month! Now, there’s a man who has spent
+half his fortune on the Church, and he doesn’t resent it even now. He
+says that any religion is better than none, but that, for himself, he
+just can’t believe any longer. Now what does all that mean?... I tell
+you something is going to happen. God knows what! And I can’t get
+Felsenburgh out of my head.... Father Franklin---”
+
+“Yes?”
+
+“Have you noticed how few great men we’ve got? It’s not like fifty years
+ago, or even thirty. Then there were Mason, Selborne, Sherbrook, and
+half-a-dozen others. There was Brightman, too, as Archbishop: and now!
+Then the Communists, too. Braithwaite is dead fifteen years. Certainly
+he was big enough; but he was always speaking of the future, not of the
+present; and tell me what big man they have had since then! And now
+there’s this new man, whom no one knows, who came forward in America a
+few months ago, and whose name is in every one’s mouth. Very well,
+then!”
+
+Percy knitted his forehead.
+
+“I am not sure that I understand,” he said.
+
+Father Blackmore knocked his pipe out before answering.
+
+“Well, this,” he said, standing up. “I can’t help thinking Felsenburgh
+is going to do something. I don’t know what; it may be for us or against
+us. But he is a Mason, remember that.... Well, well; I dare say I’m an
+old fool. Good-night.”
+
+“One moment, father,” said Percy slowly. “Do you mean--? Good Lord! What
+do you mean?” He stopped, looking at the other.
+
+The old priest stared back under his bushy eyebrows; it seemed to Percy
+as if he, too, were afraid of something in spite of his easy talk; but
+he made no sign.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Percy stood perfectly still a moment when the door was shut. Then he
+moved across to his _prie-dieu_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+I
+
+Old Mrs. Brand and Mabel were seated at a window of the new Admiralty
+Offices in Trafalgar Square to see Oliver deliver his speech on the
+fiftieth anniversary of the passing of the Poor Laws Reform.
+
+It was an inspiriting sight, this bright June morning, to see the crowds
+gathering round Braithwaite’s statue. That politician, dead fifteen
+years before, was represented in his famous attitude, with arms
+outstretched and down dropped, his head up and one foot slightly
+advanced, and to-day was decked, as was becoming more and more usual on
+such occasions, in his Masonic insignia. It was he who had given
+immense impetus to that secret movement by his declaration in the House
+that the key of future progress and brotherhood of nations was in the
+hands of the Order. It was through this alone that the false unity of
+the Church with its fantastic spiritual fraternity could be
+counteracted. St. Paul had been right, he declared, in his desire to
+break down the partition-walls between nations, and wrong only in his
+exaltation of Jesus Christ. Thus he had preluded his speech on the Poor
+Law question, pointing to the true charity that existed among Masons
+apart from religious motive, and appealing to the famous benefactions on
+the Continent; and in the enthusiasm of the Bill’s success the Order had
+received a great accession of members.
+
+Old Mrs. Brand was in her best to-day, and looked out with considerable
+excitement at the huge throng gathered to hear her son speak. A platform
+was erected round the bronze statue at such a height that the statesman
+appeared to be one of the speakers, though at a slightly higher
+elevation, and this platform was hung with roses, surmounted by a
+sounding-board, and set with a chair and table.
+
+The whole square round about was paved with heads and resonant with
+sound, the murmurs of thousands of voices, overpowered now and again by
+the crash of brass and thunder of drums as the Benefit Societies and
+democratic Guilds, each headed by a banner, deployed from North, South,
+East and West, and converged towards the wide railed space about the
+platform where room was reserved for them. The windows on every side
+were packed with faces; tall stands were erected along the front of the
+National Gallery and St. Martin’s Church, garden-beds of colour behind
+the mute, white statues that faced outwards round the square; from
+Braithwaite in front, past the Victorians--John Davidson, John Burns,
+and the rest--round to Hampden and de Montfort towards the north. The
+old column was gone, with its lions. Nelson had not been found
+advantageous to the _Entente Cordiale_, nor the lions to the new art;
+and in their place stretched a wide pavement broken by slopes of steps
+that led up to the National Gallery.
+
+Overhead the roofs showed crowded friezes of heads against the blue
+summer sky. Not less than one hundred thousand persons, it was estimated
+in the evening papers, were collected within sight and sound of the
+platform by noon.
+
+As the clocks began to tell the hour, two figures appeared from behind
+the statue and came forward, and, in an instant, the murmurs of talk
+rose into cheering.
+
+Old Lord Pemberton came first, a grey-haired, upright man, whose father
+had been active in denouncing the House of which he was a member on the
+occasion of its fall over seventy years ago, and his son had succeeded
+him worthily. This man was now a member of the Government, and sat for
+Manchester (3); and it was he who was to be chairman on this auspicious
+occasion. Behind him came Oliver, bareheaded and spruce, and even at
+that distance his mother and wife could see his brisk movement, his
+sudden smile and nod as his name emerged from the storm of sound that
+surged round the platform. Lord Pemberton came forward, lifted his hand
+and made a signal; and in a moment the thin cheering died under the
+sudden roll of drums beneath that preluded the Masonic Hymn.
+
+There was no doubt that these Londoners could sing. It was as if a giant
+voice hummed the sonorous melody, rising to enthusiasm till the music of
+massed bands followed it as a flag follows a flag-stick. The hymn was
+one composed ten years before, and all England was familiar with it.
+Old Mrs. Bland lifted the printed paper mechanically to her eyes, and
+saw the words that she knew so well:
+
+“_The Lord that dwells in earth and sea._” ...
+
+She glanced down the verses, that from the Humanitarian point of view
+had been composed with both skill and ardour. They had a religious ring;
+the unintelligent Christian could sing them without a qualm; yet their
+sense was plain enough--the old human creed that man was all. Even
+Christ’s, words themselves were quoted. The kingdom of God, it was said,
+lay within the human heart, and the greatest of all graces was Charity.
+
+She glanced at Mabel, and saw that the girl was singing with all her
+might, with her eyes fixed on her husband’s dark figure a hundred yards
+away, and her soul pouring through them. So the mother, too, began to
+move her lips in chorus with that vast volume of sound.
+
+As the hymn died away, and before the cheering could begin again, old
+Lord Pemberton was standing forward on the edge of the platform, and his
+thin, metallic voice piped a sentence or two across the tinkling splash
+of the fountains behind him. Then he stepped back, and Oliver came
+forward.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was too far for the two to hear what was said, but Mabel slipped a
+paper, smiling tremulously, into the old lady’s hand, and herself bent
+forward to listen.
+
+Old Mrs. Brand looked at that, too, knowing that it was an analysis of
+her son’s speech, and aware that she would not be able to hear his
+words.
+
+There was an exordium first, congratulating all who were present to do
+honour to the great man who presided from his pedestal on the occasion
+of this great anniversary. Then there came a retrospect, comparing the
+old state of England with the present. Fifty years ago, the speaker
+said, poverty was still a disgrace, now it was so no longer. It was in
+the causes that led to poverty that the disgrace or the merit lay. Who
+would not honour a man worn out in the service of his country, or
+overcome at last by circumstances against which his efforts could not
+prevail?... He enumerated the reforms passed fifty years before on this
+very day, by which the nation once and for all declared the glory of
+poverty and man’s sympathy with the unfortunate.
+
+So he had told them he was to sing the praise of patient poverty and its
+reward, and that, he supposed, together with a few periods on the reform
+of the prison laws, would form the first half of his speech.
+
+The second part was to be a panegyric of Braithwaite, treating him as
+the Precursor of a movement that even now had begun.
+
+Old Mrs. Brand leaned back in her seat, and looked about her.
+
+The window where they sat had been reserved for them; two arm-chairs
+filled the space, but immediately behind there were others, standing
+very silent now, craning forward, watching, too, with parted lips: a
+couple of women with an old man directly behind, and other faces visible
+again behind them. Their obvious absorption made the old lady a little
+ashamed of her distraction, and she turned resolutely once more to the
+square.
+
+Ah! he was working up now to his panegyric! The tiny dark figure was
+back, a yard nearer the statue, and as she looked, his hand went up and
+he wheeled, pointing, as a murmur of applause drowned for an instant the
+minute, resonant voice. Then again he was forward, half crouching--for
+he was a born actor--and a storm of laughter rippled round the throng of
+heads. She heard an indrawn hiss behind her chair, and the next instant
+an exclamation from Mabel.... What was that?
+
+There was a sharp crack, and the tiny gesticulating figure staggered
+back a step. The old man at the table was up in a moment, and
+simultaneously a violent commotion bubbled and heaved like water about a
+rock at a point in the crowd immediately outside the railed space where
+the bands were massed, and directly opposite the front of the platform.
+
+Mrs. Brand, bewildered and dazed, found herself standing up, clutching
+the window rail, while the girl gripped her, crying out something she
+could not understand. A great roaring filled the square, the heads
+tossed this way and that, like corn under a squall of wind. Then Oliver
+was forward again, pointing and crying out, for she could see his
+gestures; and she sank back quickly, the blood racing through her old
+veins, and her heart hammering at the base of her throat.
+
+“My dear, my dear, what is it?” she sobbed.
+
+But Mabel was up, too, staring out at her husband; and a quick babble of
+talk and exclamations from behind made itself audible in spite of the
+roaring tumult of the square.
+
+
+II
+
+Oliver told them the explanation of the whole affair that evening at
+home, leaning back in his chair, with one arm bandaged and in a sling.
+
+They had not been able to get near him at the time; the excitement in
+the square had been too fierce; but a messenger had come to his wife
+with the news that her husband was only slightly wounded, and was in the
+hands of the doctors.
+
+“He was a Catholic,” explained the drawn-faced Oliver. “He must have
+come ready, for his repeater was found loaded. Well, there was no chance
+for a priest this time.”
+
+Mabel nodded slowly: she had read of the man’s fate on the placards.
+
+“He was killed--trampled and strangled instantly,” said Oliver. “I did
+what I could: you saw me. But--well, I dare say it was more merciful.”
+
+“But you did what you could, my dear?” said the old lady, anxiously,
+from her corner.
+
+“I called out to them, mother, but they wouldn’t hear me.”
+
+Mabel leaned forward---
+
+“Oliver, I know this sounds stupid of me; but--but I wish they had not
+killed him.”
+
+Oliver smiled at her. He knew this tender trait in her.
+
+“It would have been more perfect if they had not,” she said. Then she
+broke off and sat back.
+
+“Why did he shoot just then?” she asked.
+
+Oliver turned his eyes for an instant towards his mother, but she was
+knitting tranquilly.
+
+Then he answered with a curious deliberateness.
+
+“I said that Braithwaite had done more for the world by one speech than
+Jesus and all His saints put together.” He was aware that the
+knitting-needles stopped for a second; then they went on again as
+before.
+
+“But he must have meant to do it anyhow,” continued Oliver.
+
+“How do they know he was a Catholic?” asked the girl again.
+
+“There was a rosary on him; and then he just had time to call on his
+God.”
+
+“And nothing more is known?”
+
+“Nothing more. He was well dressed, though.”
+
+Oliver leaned back a little wearily and closed his eyes; his arm still
+throbbed intolerably. But he was very happy at heart. It was true that
+he had been wounded by a fanatic, but he was not sorry to bear pain in
+such a cause, and it was obvious that the sympathy of England was with
+him. Mr. Phillips even now was busy in the next room, answering the
+telegrams that poured in every moment. Caldecott, the Prime Minister,
+Maxwell, Snowford and a dozen others had wired instantly their
+congratulations, and from every part of England streamed in message
+after message. It was an immense stroke for the Communists; their
+spokesman had been assaulted during the discharge of his duty, speaking
+in defence of his principles; it was an incalculable gain for them, and
+loss for the Individualists, that confessors were not all on one side
+after all. The huge electric placards over London had winked out the
+facts in Esperanto as Oliver stepped into the train at twilight.
+
+“_Oliver Brand wounded.... Catholic assailant.... Indignation of the
+country.... Well-deserved fate of assassin_.”
+
+He was pleased, too, that he honestly had done his best to save the man.
+Even in that moment of sudden and acute pain he had cried out for a fair
+trial; but he had been too late. He had seen the starting eyes roll up
+in the crimson face, and the horrid grin come and go as the hands had
+clutched and torn at his throat. Then the face had vanished and a heavy
+trampling began where it had disappeared. Oh! there was some passion and
+loyalty left in England!
+
+His mother got up presently and went out, still without a word; and
+Mabel turned to him, laying a hand on his knee.
+
+“Are you too tired to talk, my dear?”
+
+He opened his eyes.
+
+“Of course not, my darling. What is it?”
+
+“What do you think will be the effect?”
+
+He raised himself a little, looking out as usual through the darkening
+windows on to that astonishing view. Everywhere now lights were
+glowing, a sea of mellow moons just above the houses, and above the
+mysterious heavy blue of a summer evening.
+
+“The effect?” he said. “It can be nothing but good. It was time that
+something happened. My dear, I feel very downcast sometimes, as you
+know. Well, I do not think I shall be again. I have been afraid
+sometimes that we were losing all our spirit, and that the old Tories
+were partly right when they prophesied what Communism would do. But
+after this---”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“Well; we have shown that we can shed our blood too. It is in the nick
+of time, too, just at the crisis. I don’t want to exaggerate; it is only
+a scratch--but it was so deliberate, and--and so dramatic. The poor
+devil could not have chosen a worse moment. People won’t forget it.”
+
+Mabel’s eyes shone with pleasure.
+
+“You poor dear!” she said. “Are you in pain?”
+
+“Not much. Besides, Christ! what do I care? If only this infernal
+Eastern affair would end!”
+
+He knew he was feverish and irritable, and made a great effort to drive
+it down.
+
+“Oh, my dear!” he went on, flushed a little. “If they would not be such
+heavy fools: they don’t understand; they don’t understand.”
+
+“Yes, Oliver?”
+
+“They don’t understand what a glorious thing it all is: Humanity, Life,
+Truth at last, and the death of Folly! But haven’t I told them a hundred
+times?”
+
+She looked at him with kindling eyes. She loved to see him like this,
+his confident, flushed face, the enthusiasm in his blue eyes; and the
+knowledge of his pain pricked her feeling with passion. She bent forward
+and kissed him suddenly.
+
+“My dear, I am so proud of you. Oh, Oliver!”
+
+He said nothing; but she could see what she loved to see, that response
+to her own heart; and so they sat in silence while the sky darkened yet
+more, and the click of the writer in the next room told them that the
+world was alive and that they had a share in its affairs.
+
+Oliver stirred presently.
+
+“Did you notice anything just now, sweetheart--when I said that about
+Jesus Christ?”
+
+“She stopped knitting for a moment,” said the girl.
+
+He nodded.
+
+“You saw that too, then.... Mabel, do you think she is falling back?”
+
+“Oh! she is getting old,” said the girl lightly. “Of course she looks
+back a little.”
+
+“But you don’t think--it would be too awful!”
+
+She shook her head.
+
+“No, no, my dear; you’re excited and tired. It’s just a little
+sentiment.... Oliver, I don’t think I would say that kind of thing
+before her.”
+
+“But she hears it everywhere now.”
+
+“No, she doesn’t. Remember she hardly ever goes out. Besides, she hates
+it. After all, she was brought up a Catholic.”
+
+Oliver nodded, and lay back again, looking dreamily out.
+
+“Isn’t it astonishing the way in which suggestion lasts? She can’t get
+it out of her head, even after fifty years. Well, watch her, won’t
+you?... By the way ...”
+
+“Yes?”
+
+“There’s a little more news from the East. They say Felsenburgh’s
+running the whole thing now. The Empire is sending him everywhere--
+Tobolsk, Benares, Yakutsk--everywhere; and he’s been to Australia.”
+
+Mabel sat up briskly.
+
+“Isn’t that very hopeful?”
+
+“I suppose so. There’s no doubt that the Sufis are winning; but for how
+long is another question. Besides, the troops don’t disperse.”
+
+“And Europe?”
+
+“Europe is arming as fast as possible. I hear we are to meet the Powers
+next week at Paris. I must go.”
+
+“Your arm, my dear?”
+
+“My arm must get well. It will have to go with me, anyhow.”
+
+“Tell me some more.”
+
+“There is no more. But it is just as certain as it can be that this is
+the crisis. If the East can be persuaded to hold its hand now, it will
+never be likely to raise it again. It will mean free trade all over the
+world, I suppose, and all that kind of thing. But if not---”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“If not, there will be a catastrophe such as never has been even
+imagined. The whole human race will be at war, and either East or West
+will be simply wiped out. These new Benninschein explosives will make
+certain of that.”
+
+“But is it absolutely certain that the East has got them?”
+
+“Absolutely. Benninschein sold them simultaneously to East and West;
+then he died, luckily for him.”
+
+Mabel had heard this kind of talk before, but her imagination simply
+refused to grasp it. A duel of East and West under these new conditions
+was an unthinkable thing. There had been no European war within living
+memory, and the Eastern wars of the last century had been under the old
+conditions. Now, if tales were true, entire towns would be destroyed
+with a single shell. The new conditions were unimaginable. Military
+experts prophesied extravagantly, contradicting one another on vital
+points; the whole procedure of war was a matter of theory; there were no
+precedents with which to compare it. It was as if archers disputed as to
+the results of cordite. Only one thing was certain--that the East had
+every modern engine, and, as regards male population, half as much
+again as the rest of the world put together; and the conclusion to be
+drawn from these premisses was not reassuring to England.
+
+But imagination simply refused to speak. The daily papers had a short,
+careful leading article every day, founded upon the scraps of news that
+stole out from the conferences on the other side of the world;
+Felsenburgh’s name appeared more frequently than ever: otherwise there
+seemed to be a kind of hush. Nothing suffered very much; trade went on;
+European stocks were not appreciably lower than usual; men still built
+houses, married wives, begat sons and daughters, did their business and
+went to the theatre, for the mere reason that there was no good in
+anything else. They could neither save nor precipitate the situation; it
+was on too large a scale. Occasionally people went mad--people who had
+succeeded in goading their imagination to a height whence a glimpse of
+reality could be obtained; and there was a diffused atmosphere of
+tenseness. But that was all. Not many speeches were made on the subject;
+it had been found inadvisable. After all, there was nothing to do but to
+wait.
+
+
+III
+
+Mabel remembered her husband’s advice to watch, and for a few days did
+her best. But there was nothing that alarmed her. The old lady was a
+little quiet, perhaps, but went about her minute affairs as usual. She
+asked the girl to read to her sometimes, and listened unblenching to
+whatever was offered her; she attended in the kitchen daily, organised
+varieties of food, and appeared interested in all that concerned her
+son. She packed his bag with her own hands, set out his furs for the
+swift flight to Paris, and waved to him from the window as he went down
+the little path towards the junction. He would be gone three days, he
+said.
+
+It was on the evening of the second day that she fell ill; and Mabel,
+running upstairs, in alarm at the message of the servant, found her
+rather flushed and agitated in her chair.
+
+“It is nothing, my dear,” said the old lady tremulously; and she added
+the description of a symptom or two.
+
+Mabel got her to bed, sent for the doctor, and sat down to wait.
+
+She was sincerely fond of the old lady, and had always found her
+presence in the house a quiet sort of delight. The effect of her upon
+the mind was as that of an easy-chair upon the body. The old lady was so
+tranquil and human, so absorbed in small external matters, so
+reminiscent now and then of the days of her youth, so utterly without
+resentment or peevishness. It seemed curiously pathetic to the girl to
+watch that quiet old spirit approach its extinction, or rather, as Mabel
+believed, its loss of personality in the reabsorption into the Spirit of
+Life which informed the world. She found less difficulty in
+contemplating the end of a vigorous soul, for in that case she imagined
+a kind of energetic rush of force back into the origin of things; but in
+this peaceful old lady there was so little energy; her whole point, so
+to speak, lay in the delicate little fabric of personality, built out of
+fragile things into an entity far more significant than the sum of its
+component parts: the death of a flower, reflected Mabel, is sadder than
+the death of a lion; the breaking of a piece of china more irreparable
+than the ruin of a palace.
+
+“It is syncope,” said the doctor when he came in. “She may die at any
+time; she may live ten years.”
+
+“There is no need to telegraph for Mr. Brand?”
+
+He made a little deprecating movement with his hands.
+
+“It is not certain that she will die--it is not imminent?” she asked.
+
+“No, no; she may live ten years, I said.”
+
+He added a word or two of advice as to the use of the oxygen injector,
+and went away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The old lady was lying quietly in bed, when the girl went up, and put
+out a wrinkled hand.
+
+“Well, my dear?” she asked.
+
+“It is just a little weakness, mother. You must lie quiet and do
+nothing. Shall I read to you?”
+
+“No, my dear; I will think a little.”
+
+It was no part of Mabel’s idea to duty to tell her that she was in
+danger, for there was no past to set straight, no Judge to be
+confronted. Death was an ending, not a beginning. It was a peaceful
+Gospel; at least, it became peaceful as soon as the end had come.
+
+So the girl went downstairs once more, with a quiet little ache at her
+heart that refused to be still.
+
+What a strange and beautiful thing death was, she told herself--this
+resolution of a chord that had hung suspended for thirty, fifty or
+seventy years--back again into the stillness of the huge Instrument that
+was all in all to itself. Those same notes would be struck again, were
+being struck again even now all over the world, though with an infinite
+delicacy of difference in the touch; but that particular emotion was
+gone: it was foolish to think that it was sounding eternally elsewhere,
+for there was no elsewhere. She, too, herself would cease one day, let
+her see to it that the tone was pure and lovely.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mr. Phillips arrived the next morning as usual, just as Mabel had left
+the old lady’s room, and asked news of her.
+
+“She is a little better, I think,” said Mabel. “She must be very quiet
+all day.”
+
+The secretary bowed and turned aside into Oliver’s room, where a heap of
+letters lay to be answered.
+
+A couple of hours later, as Mabel went upstairs once more, she met Mr.
+Phillips coming down. He looked a little flushed under his sallow skin.
+
+“Mrs. Brand sent for me,” he said. “She wished to know whether Mr.
+Oliver would be back to-night.”
+
+“He will, will he not? You have not heard?”
+
+“Mr. Brand said he would be here for a late dinner. He will reach London
+at nineteen.”
+
+“And is there any other news?”
+
+He compressed his lips.
+
+“There are rumours,” he said. “Mr. Brand wired to me an hour ago.”
+
+He seemed moved at something, and Mabel looked at him in astonishment.
+
+“It is not Eastern news?” she asked.
+
+His eyebrows wrinkled a little.
+
+“You must forgive me, Mrs. Brand,” he said. “I am not at liberty to say
+anything.”
+
+She was not offended, for she trusted her husband too well; but she went
+on into the sick-room with her heart beating.
+
+The old lady, too, seemed excited. She lay in bed with a clear flush in
+her white cheeks, and hardly smiled at all to the girl’s greeting.
+
+“Well, you have seen Mr. Phillips, then?” said Mabel.
+
+Old Mrs. Brand looked at her sharply an instant, but said nothing.
+
+“Don’t excite yourself, mother. Oliver will be back to-night.”
+
+The old lady drew a long breath.
+
+“Don’t trouble about me, my dear,” she said. “I shall do very well now.
+He will be back to dinner, will he not?”
+
+“If the volor is not late. Now, mother, are you ready for breakfast?”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mabel passed an afternoon of considerable agitation. It was certain that
+something had happened. The secretary, who breakfasted with her in the
+parlour looking on to the garden, had appeared strangely excited. He had
+told her that he would be away the rest of the day: Mr. Oliver had given
+him his instructions. He had refrained from all discussion of the
+Eastern question, and he had given her no news of the Paris Convention;
+he only repeated that Mr. Oliver would be back that night. Then he had
+gone of in a hurry half-an-hour later.
+
+The old lady seemed asleep when the girl went up afterwards, and Mabel
+did not like to disturb her. Neither did she like to leave the house; so
+she walked by herself in the garden, thinking and hoping and fearing,
+till the long shadow lay across the path, and the tumbled platform of
+roofs was bathed in a dusty green haze from the west.
+
+As she came in she took up the evening paper, but there was no news
+there except to the effect that the Convention would close that
+afternoon.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Twenty o’clock came, but there was no sign of Oliver. The Paris volor
+should have arrived an hour before, but Mabel, staring out into the
+darkening heavens had seen the stars come out like jewels one by one,
+but no slender winged fish pass overhead. Of course she might have
+missed it; there was no depending on its exact course; but she had seen
+it a hundred times before, and wondered unreasonably why she had not
+seen it now. But she would not sit down to dinner, and paced up and
+down in her white dress, turning again and again to the window,
+listening to the soft rush of the trains, the faint hoots from the
+track, and the musical chords from the junction a mile away. The lights
+were up by now, and the vast sweep of the towns looked like fairyland
+between the earthly light and the heavenly darkness. Why did not Oliver
+come, or at least let her know why he did not?
+
+Once she went upstairs, miserably anxious herself, to reassure the old
+lady, and found her again very drowsy.
+
+“He is not come,” she said. “I dare say he may be kept in Paris.”
+
+The old face on the pillow nodded and murmured, and Mabel went down
+again. It was now an hour after dinner-time.
+
+Oh! there were a hundred things that might have kept him. He had often
+been later than this: he might have missed the volor he meant to catch;
+the Convention might have been prolonged; he might be exhausted, and
+think it better to sleep in Paris after all, and have forgotten to wire.
+He might even have wired to Mr. Phillips, and the secretary have
+forgotten to pass on the message.
+
+She went at last, hopelessly, to the telephone, and looked at it. There
+it was, that round silent mouth, that little row of labelled buttons.
+She half decided to touch them one by one, and inquire whether anything
+had been heard of her husband: there was his club, his office in
+Whitehall, Mr. Phillips’s house, Parliament-house, and the rest. But she
+hesitated, telling herself to be patient. Oliver hated interference, and
+he would surely soon remember and relieve her anxiety.
+
+Then, even as she turned away, the bell rang sharply, and a white label
+flashed into sight.--WHITEHALL.
+
+She pressed the corresponding button, and, her hand shaking so much that
+she could scarcely hold the receiver to her ear, she listened.
+
+“Who is there?”
+
+Her heart leaped at the sound of her husband’s voice, tiny and minute
+across the miles of wire.
+
+“I--Mabel,” she said. “Alone here.”
+
+“Oh! Mabel. Very well. I am back: all is well. Now listen. Can you
+hear?”
+
+“Yes, yes.”
+
+“The best has happened. It is all over in the East. Felsenburgh has done
+it. Now listen. I cannot come home to-night. It will be announced in
+Paul’s House in two hours from now. We are communicating with the Press.
+Come up here to me at once. You must be present.... Can you hear?”
+
+“Oh, yes.”
+
+“Come then at once. It will be the greatest thing in history. Tell no
+one. Come before the rush begins. In half-an-hour the way will be
+stopped.”
+
+“Oliver.”
+
+“Yes? Quick.”
+
+“Mother is ill. Shall I leave her?”
+
+“How ill?”
+
+“Oh, no immediate danger. The doctor has seen her.”
+
+There was silence for a moment.
+
+“Yes; come then. We will go back to-night anyhow, then. Tell her we
+shall be late.”
+
+“Very well.”
+
+“... Yes, you must come. Felsenburgh will be there.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+I
+
+On the same afternoon Percy received a visitor.
+
+There was nothing exceptional about him; and Percy, as he came
+downstairs in his walking-dress and looked at him in the light from the
+tall parlour-window, came to no conclusion at all as to his business and
+person, except that he was not a Catholic.
+
+“You wished to see me,” said the priest, indicating a chair.
+
+“I fear I must not stop long.”
+
+“I shall not keep you long,” said the stranger eagerly. “My business is
+done in five minutes.”
+
+Percy waited with his eyes cast down.
+
+“A--a certain person has sent me to you. She was a Catholic once; she
+wishes to return to the Church.”
+
+Percy made a little movement with his head. It was a message he did not
+very often receive in these days.
+
+“You will come, sir, will you not? You will promise me?”
+
+The man seemed greatly agitated; his sallow face showed a little shining
+with sweat, and his eyes were piteous.
+
+“Of course I will come,” said Percy, smiling.
+
+“Yes, sir; but you do not know who she is. It--it would make a great
+stir, sir, if it was known. It must not be known, sir; you will promise
+me that, too?”
+
+“I must not make any promise of that kind,” said the priest gently. “I
+do not know the circumstances yet.”
+
+The stranger licked his lips nervously.
+
+“Well, sir,” he said hastily, “you will say nothing till you have seen
+her? You can promise me that.”
+
+“Oh! certainly,” said the priest.
+
+“Well, sir, you had better not know my name. It--it may make it easier
+for you and for me. And--and, if you please, sir, the lady is ill; you
+must come to-day, if you please, but not until the evening. Will
+twenty-two o’clock be convenient, sir?”
+
+“Where is it?” asked Percy abruptly.
+
+“It--it is near Croydon junction. I will write down the address
+presently. And you will not come until twenty-two o’clock, sir?”
+
+“Why not now?”
+
+“Because the--the others may be there. They will be away then; I know
+that.”
+
+This was rather suspicious, Percy thought: discreditable plots had been
+known before. But he could not refuse outright.
+
+“Why does she not send for her parish-priest?” he asked.
+
+“She she does not know who he is, sir; she saw you once in the
+Cathedral, sir, and asked you for your name. Do you remember, sir?--an
+old lady?”
+
+Percy did dimly remember something of the kind a month or two before;
+but he could not be certain, and said so.
+
+“Well, sir, you will come, will you not?”
+
+“I must communicate with Father Dolan,” said the priest. “If he gives me
+permission---”
+
+“If you please, sir, Father--Father Dolan must not know her name. You
+will not tell him?”
+
+“I do not know it myself yet,” said the priest, smiling.
+
+The stranger sat back abruptly at that, and his face worked.
+
+“Well, sir, let me tell you this first. This old lady’s son is my
+employer, and a very prominent Communist. She lives with him and his
+wife. The other two will be away to-night. That is why I am asking you
+all this. And now, you will come, sir?”
+
+Percy looked at him steadily for a moment or two. Certainly, if this was
+a conspiracy, the conspirators were feeble folk. Then he answered:
+
+“I will come, sir; I promise. Now the name.”
+
+The stranger again licked his lips nervously, and glanced timidly from
+side to side. Then he seemed to gather his resolution; he leaned forward
+and whispered sharply.
+
+“The old lady’s name is Brand, sir--the mother of Mr. Oliver Brand.”
+
+For a moment Percy was bewildered. It was too extraordinary to be true.
+He knew Mr. Oliver Brand’s name only too well; it was he who, by God’s
+permission, was doing more in England at this moment against the
+Catholic cause than any other man alive; and it was he whom the
+Trafalgar Square incident had raised into such eminent popularity. And
+now, here was his mother---
+
+He turned fiercely upon the man.
+
+“I do not know what you are, sir--whether you believe in God or not; but
+will you swear to me on your religion and your honour that all this is
+true?”
+
+The timid eyes met his, and wavered; but it was the wavering of
+weakness, not of treachery.
+
+“I--I swear it, sir; by God Almighty.”
+
+“Are you a Catholic?”
+
+The man shook his head.
+
+“But I believe in God,” he said. “At least, I think so.”
+
+Percy leaned back, trying to realise exactly what it all meant. There
+was no triumph in his mind--that kind of emotion was not his weakness;
+there was fear of a kind, excitement, bewilderment, and under all a
+satisfaction that God’s grace was so sovereign. If it could reach this
+woman, who could be too far removed for it to take effect? Presently he
+noticed the other looking at him anxiously.
+
+“You are afraid, sir? You are not going back from your promise?”
+
+That dispersed the cloud a little, and Percy smiled.
+
+“Oh! no,” he said. “I will be there at twenty-two o’clock. ... Is death
+imminent?”
+
+“No, sir; it is syncope. She is recovered a little this morning.”
+
+The priest passed his hand over his eyes and stood up.
+
+“Well, I will be there,” he said. “Shall you be there, sir?”
+
+The other shook his head, standing up too.
+
+“I must be with Mr. Brand, sir; there is to be a meeting to-night; but I
+must not speak of that.... No, sir; ask for Mrs. Brand, and say that she
+is expecting you. They will take you upstairs at once.”
+
+“I must not say I am a priest, I suppose?”
+
+“No, sir; if you please.”
+
+He drew out a pocket-book, scribbled in it a moment, tore out the sheet,
+and handed it to the priest.
+
+“The address, sir. Will you kindly destroy that when you have copied it?
+I--I do not wish to lose my place, sir, if it can be helped.”
+
+Percy stood twisting the paper in his fingers a moment.
+
+“Why are you not a Catholic yourself?” he asked.
+
+The man shook his head mutely. Then he took up his hat, and went towards
+the door.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Percy passed a very emotional afternoon.
+
+For the last month or two little had happened to encourage him. He had
+been obliged to report half-a-dozen more significant secessions, and
+hardly a conversion of any kind. There was no doubt at all that the tide
+was setting steadily against the Church. The mad act in Trafalgar
+Square, too, had done incalculable harm last week: men were saying more
+than ever, and the papers storming, that the Church’s reliance on the
+supernatural was belied by every one of her public acts. “Scratch a
+Catholic and find an assassin” had been the text of a leading article in
+the _New People_, and Percy himself was dismayed at the folly of the
+attempt. It was true that the Archbishop had formally repudiated both
+the act and the motive from the Cathedral pulpit, but that too had only
+served as an opportunity hastily taken up by the principal papers, to
+recall the continual policy of the Church to avail herself of violence
+while she repudiated the violent. The horrible death of the man had in
+no way appeased popular indignation; there were not even wanting
+suggestions that the man had been seen coming out of Archbishop’s House
+an hour before the attempt at assassination had taken place.
+
+And now here, with dramatic swiftness, had come a message that the
+hero’s own mother desired reconciliation with the Church that had
+attempted to murder her son.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Again and again that afternoon, as Percy sped northwards on his visit to
+a priest in Worcester, and southwards once more as the lights began to
+shine towards evening, he wondered whether this were not a plot after
+all--some kind of retaliation, an attempt to trap him. Yet he had
+promised to say nothing, and to go.
+
+He finished his daily letter after dinner as usual, with a curious sense
+of fatality; addressed and stamped it. Then he went downstairs, in his
+walking-dress, to Father Blackmore’s room.
+
+“Will you hear my confession, father?” he said abruptly.
+
+
+II
+
+Victoria Station, still named after the great nineteenth-century Queen,
+was neither more nor less busy than usual as he came into it
+half-an-hour later. The vast platform, sunk now nearly two hundred feet
+below the ground level, showed the double crowd of passengers entering
+and leaving town. Those on the extreme left, towards whom Percy began to
+descend in the open glazed lift, were by far the most numerous, and the
+stream at the lift-entrance made it necessary for him to move slowly.
+
+He arrived at last, walking in the soft light on the noiseless ribbed
+rubber, and stood by the door of the long car that ran straight through
+to the Junction. It was the last of a series of a dozen or more, each of
+which slid off minute by minute. Then, still watching the endless
+movement of the lifts ascending and descending between the entrances of
+the upper end of the station, he stepped in and sat down.
+
+He felt quiet now that he had actually started. He had made his
+confession, just in order to make certain of his own soul, though
+scarcely expecting any definite danger, and sat now, his grey suit and
+straw hat in no way distinguishing him as a priest (for a general leave
+was given by the authorities to dress so for any adequate reason). Since
+the case was not imminent, he had not brought stocks or pyx--Father
+Dolan had wired to him that he might fetch them if he wished from St.
+Joseph’s, near the Junction. He had only the violet thread in his
+pocket, such as was customary for sick calls.
+
+He was sliding along peaceably enough, fixing his eyes on the empty seat
+opposite, and trying to preserve complete collectedness when the car
+abruptly stopped. He looked out, astonished, and saw by the white
+enamelled walks twenty feet from the window that they were already in
+the tunnel. The stoppage might arise from many causes, and he was not
+greatly excited, nor did it seem that others in the carriage took it
+very seriously; he could hear, after a moment’s silence, the talking
+recommence beyond the partition.
+
+Then there came, echoed by the walls, the sound of shouting from far
+away, mingled with hoots and chords; it grew louder. The talking in the
+carriage stopped. He heard a window thrown up, and the next instant a
+car tore past, going back to the station although on the down line. This
+must be looked into, thought Percy: something certainly was happening;
+so he got up and went across the empty compartment to the further
+window. Again came the crying of voices, again the signals, and once
+more a car whirled past, followed almost immediately by another. There
+was a jerk--a smooth movement. Percy staggered and fell into a seat, as
+the carriage in which he was seated itself began to move backwards.
+
+There was a clamour now in the next compartment, and Percy made his way
+there through the door, only to find half-a-dozen men with their heads
+thrust from the windows, who paid absolutely no attention to his
+inquiries. So he stood there, aware that they knew no more than himself,
+waiting for an explanation from some one. It was disgraceful, he told
+himself, that any misadventure should so disorganise the line.
+
+Twice the car stopped; each time it moved on again after a hoot or two,
+and at last drew up at the platform whence it had started, although a
+hundred yards further out.
+
+Ah! there was no doubt that something had happened! The instant he
+opened the door a great roar met his ears, and as he sprang on to the
+platform and looked up at the end of the station, he began to
+understand.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From right to left of the huge interior, across the platforms, swelling
+every instant, surged an enormous swaying, roaring crowd. The flight of
+steps, twenty yards broad, used only in cases of emergency, resembled a
+gigantic black cataract nearly two hundred feet in height. Each car as
+it drew up discharged more and more men and women, who ran like ants
+towards the assembly of their fellows. The noise was indescribable, the
+shouting of men, the screaming of women, the clang and hoot of the huge
+machines, and three or four times the brazen cry of a trumpet, as an
+emergency door was flung open overhead, and a small swirl of crowd
+poured through it towards the streets beyond. But after one look Percy
+looked no more at the people; for there, high up beneath the clock, on
+the Government signal board, flared out monstrous letters of fire,
+telling in Esperanto and English, the message for which England had
+grown sick. He read it a dozen times before he moved, staring, as at a
+supernatural sight which might denote the triumph of either heaven or
+hell.
+
+“EASTERN CONVENTION DISPERSED.
+
+PEACE, NOT WAR.
+
+UNIVERSAL BROTHERHOOD ESTABLISHED.
+
+FELSENBURGH IN LONDON TO-NIGHT.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+III
+
+It was not until nearly two hours later that Percy was standing at the
+house beyond the Junction.
+
+He had argued, expostulated, threatened, but the officials were like
+men possessed. Half of them had disappeared in the rush to the City, for
+it had leaked out, in spite of the Government’s precautions, that Paul’s
+House, known once as St. Paul’s Cathedral, was to be the scene of
+Felsenburgh’s reception. The others seemed demented; one man on the
+platform had dropped dead from nervous exhaustion, but no one appeared
+to care; and the body lay huddled beneath a seat. Again and again Percy
+had been swept away by a rush, as he struggled from platform to platform
+in his search for a car that would take him to Croydon. It seemed that
+there was none to be had, and the useless carriages collected like
+drift-wood between the platforms, as others whirled up from the country
+bringing loads of frantic, delirious men, who vanished like smoke from
+the white rubber-boards. The platforms were continually crowded, and as
+continually emptied, and it was not until half-an-hour before midnight
+that the block began to move outwards again.
+
+Well, he was here at last, dishevelled, hatless and exhausted, looking
+up at the dark windows.
+
+He scarcely knew what he thought of the whole matter. War, of course,
+was terrible. And such a war as this would have been too terrible for
+the imagination to visualise; but to the priest’s mind there were other
+things even worse. What of universal peace--peace, that is to say,
+established by others than Christ’s method? Or was God behind even this?
+The questions were hopeless.
+
+Felsenburgh--it was he then who had done this thing--this thing
+undoubtedly greater than any secular event hitherto known in
+civilisation. What manner of man was he? What was his character, his
+motive, his method? How would he use his success?... So the points flew
+before him like a stream of sparks, each, it might be, harmless; each,
+equally, capable of setting a world on fire. Meanwhile here was an old
+woman who desired to be reconciled with God before she died....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He touched the button again, three or four times, and waited. Then a
+light sprang out overhead, and he knew that he was heard.
+
+“I was sent for,” he exclaimed to the bewildered maid. “I should have
+been here at twenty-two: I was prevented by the rush.”
+
+She babbled out a question at him.
+
+“Yes, it is true, I believe,” he said. “It is peace, not war. Kindly
+take me upstairs.”
+
+He went through the hall with a curious sense of guilt. This was Brand’s
+house then--that vivid orator, so bitterly eloquent against God; and
+here was he, a priest, slinking in under cover of night. Well, well, it
+was not of his appointment.
+
+At the door of an upstairs room the maid turned to him.
+
+“A doctor, sir?” she said.
+
+“That is my affair,” said Percy briefly, and opened the door.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A little wailing cry broke from the corner, before he had time to close
+the door again.
+
+“Oh! thank God! I thought He had forgotten me. You are a priest,
+father?”
+
+“I am a priest. Do you not remember seeing me in the Cathedral?”
+
+“Yes, yes, sir; I saw you praying, father. Oh! thank God, thank God!”
+
+Percy stood looking down at her a moment, seeing her flushed old face in
+the nightcap, her bright sunken eyes and her tremulous hands. Yes; this
+was genuine enough.
+
+“Now, my child,” he said, “tell me.”
+
+“My confession, father.”
+
+Percy drew out the purple thread, slipped it over his shoulders, and sat
+down by the bed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But she would not let him go for a while after that.
+
+“Tell me, father. When will you bring me Holy Communion?”
+
+He hesitated.
+
+“I understand that Mr. Brand and his wife know nothing of all this?”
+
+“No, father.”
+
+“Tell me, are you very ill?”
+
+“I don’t know, father. They will not tell me. I thought I was gone last
+night.”
+
+“When would you wish me to bring you Holy Communion? I will do as you
+say.”
+
+“Shall I send to you in a day or two? Father, ought I to tell him?”
+
+“You are not obliged.”
+
+“I will if I ought.”
+
+“Well, think about it, and let me know.... You have heard what has
+happened?”
+
+She nodded, but almost uninterestedly; and Percy was conscious of a tiny
+prick of compunction at his own heart. After all, the reconciling of a
+soul to God was a greater thing than the reconciling of East to West.
+
+“It may make a difference to Mr. Brand,” he said. “He will be a great
+man, now, you know.”
+
+She still looked at him in silence, smiling a little. Percy was
+astonished at the youthfulness of that old face. Then her face changed.
+
+“Father, I must not keep you; but tell me this--Who is this man?”
+
+“Felsenburgh?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“No one knows. We shall know more to-morrow. He is in town to-night.”
+
+She looked so strange that Percy for an instant thought it was a
+seizure. Her face seemed to fall away in a kind of emotion, half
+cunning, half fear.
+
+“Well, my child?”
+
+“Father, I am a little afraid when I think of that man. He cannot harm
+me, can he? I am safe now? I am a Catholic--?”
+
+“My child, of course you are safe. What is the matter? How can this man
+injure you?”
+
+But the look of terror was still there, and Percy came a step nearer.
+
+“You must not give way to fancies,” he said. “Just commit yourself to
+our Blessed Lord. This man can do you no harm.”
+
+He was speaking now as to a child; but it was of no use. Her old mouth
+was still sucked in, and her eyes wandered past him into the gloom of
+the room behind.
+
+“My child, tell me what is the matter. What do you know of Felsenburgh?
+You have been dreaming.”
+
+She nodded suddenly and energetically, and Percy for the first time felt
+his heart give a little leap of apprehension. Was this old woman out of
+her mind, then? Or why was it that that name seemed to him sinister?
+Then he remembered that Father Blackmore had once talked like this. He
+made an effort, and sat down once more.
+
+“Now tell me plainly,” he said. “You have been dreaming. What have you
+dreamt?”
+
+She raised herself a little in bed, again glancing round the room; then
+she put out her old ringed hand for one of his, and he gave it,
+wondering.
+
+“The door is shut, father? There is no one listening?”
+
+“No, no, my child. Why are you trembling? You must not be
+superstitious.”
+
+“Father, I will tell you. Dreams are nonsense, are they not? Well, at
+least, this is what I dreamt.
+
+“I was somewhere in a great house; I do not know where it was. It was a
+house I have never seen. It was one of the old houses, and it was very
+dark. I was a child, I thought, and I was ... I was afraid of something.
+The passages were all dark, and I went crying in the dark, looking for a
+light, and there was none. Then I heard a voice talking, a great way
+off. Father---”
+
+Her hand gripped his more tightly, and again her eyes went round the
+room.
+
+With great difficulty Percy repressed a sigh. Yet he dared not leave her
+just now. The house was very still; only from outside now and again
+sounded the clang of the cars, as they sped countrywards again from the
+congested town, and once the sound of great shouting. He wondered what
+time it was.
+
+“Had you better tell me now?” he asked, still talking with a patient
+simplicity. “What time will they be back?”
+
+“Not yet,” she whispered. “Mabel said not till two o’clock. What time
+is it now, father?”
+
+He pulled out his watch with his disengaged hand.
+
+“It is not yet one,” he said.
+
+“Very well, listen, father.... I was in this house; and I heard that
+talking; and I ran along the passages, till I saw light below a door;
+and then I stopped.... Nearer, father.”
+
+Percy was a little awed in spite of himself. Her voice had suddenly
+dropped to a whisper, and her old eyes seemed to hold him strangely.
+
+“I stopped, father; I dared not go in. I could hear the talking, and I
+could see the light; and I dared not go in. Father, it was Felsenburgh
+in that room.”
+
+From beneath came the sudden snap of a door; then the sound of
+footsteps. Percy turned his head abruptly, and at the same moment heard
+a swift indrawn breath from the old woman.
+
+“Hush!” he said. “Who is that?”
+
+Two voices were talking in the hall below now, and at the sound the old
+woman relaxed her hold.
+
+“I--I thought it to be him,” she murmured.
+
+Percy stood up; he could see that she did not understand the situation.
+
+“Yes, my child,” he said quietly, “but who is it?”
+
+“My son and his wife,” she said; then her face changed once more.
+“Why--why, father---”
+
+Her voice died in her throat, as a step vibrated outside. For a moment
+there was complete silence; then a whisper, plainly audible, in a girl’s
+voice.
+
+“Why, her light is burning. Come in, Oliver, but softly.”
+
+Then the handle turned.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+I
+
+There was an exclamation, then silence, as a tall, beautiful girl with
+flushed face and shining grey eyes came forward and stopped, followed by
+a man whom Percy knew at once from his pictures. A little whimpering
+sounded from the bed, and the priest lifted his hand instinctively to
+silence it.
+
+“Why,” said Mabel; and then stared at the man with the young face and
+the white hair.
+
+Oliver opened his lips and closed them again. He, too, had a strange
+excitement in his face. Then he spoke.
+
+“Who is this?” he said deliberately.
+
+“Oliver,” cried the girl, turning to him abruptly, “this is the priest I
+saw---”
+
+“A priest!” said the other, and came forward a step. “Why, I thought---”
+
+
+Percy drew a breath to steady that maddening vibration in his throat.
+
+“Yes, I am a priest,” he said.
+
+Again the whimpering broke out from the bed; and Percy, half turning
+again to silence it, saw the girl mechanically loosen the clasp of the
+thin dust cloak over her white dress.
+
+“You sent for him, mother?” snapped the man, with a tremble in his
+voice, and with a sudden jerk forward of his whole body. But the girl
+put out her hand.
+
+“Quietly, my dear,” she said. “Now, sir---”
+
+“Yes, I am a priest,” said Percy again, strung up now to a desperate
+resistance of will, hardly knowing what he said.
+
+“And you come to my house!” exclaimed the man. He came a step nearer,
+and half recoiled. “You swear you are a priest?” he said. “You have been
+here all this evening?”
+
+“Since midnight.”
+
+“And you are not---” he stopped again.
+
+Mabel stepped straight between them.
+
+“Oliver,” she said, still with that air of suppressed excitement, “we
+must not have a scene here. The poor dear is too ill. Will you come
+downstairs, sir?”
+
+Percy took a step towards the door, and Oliver moved slightly aside.
+Then the priest stopped, turned and lifted his hand.
+
+“God bless you!” he said simply, to the muttering figure in the bed.
+Then he went out, and waited outside the door.
+
+He could hear a low talking within; then a compassionate murmur from the
+girl’s voice; then Oliver was beside him, trembling all over, as white
+as ashes, and made a silent gesture as he went past him down the stairs.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The whole thing seemed to Percy like some incredible dream; it was all
+so unexpected, so untrue to life. He felt conscious of an enormous shame
+at the sordidness of the affair, and at the same time of a kind of
+hopeless recklessness. The worst had happened and the best--that was his
+sole comfort.
+
+Oliver pushed a door open, touched a button, and went through into the
+suddenly lit room, followed by Percy. Still in silence, he pointed to a
+chair, Percy sat down, and Oliver stood before the fireplace, his hands
+deep in the pockets of his jacket, slightly turned away.
+
+Percy’s concentrated senses became aware of every detail of the
+room--the deep springy green carpet, smooth under his feet, the straight
+hanging thin silk curtains, the half-dozen low tables with a wealth of
+flowers upon them, and the books that lined the walls. The whole room
+was heavy with the scent of roses, although the windows were wide, and
+the night-breeze stirred the curtains continually. It was a woman’s
+room, he told himself. Then he looked at the man’s figure, lithe, tense,
+upright; the dark grey suit not unlike his own, the beautiful curve of
+the jaw, the clear pale complexion, the thin nose, the protruding curve
+of idealism over the eyes, and the dark hair. It was a poet’s face, he
+told himself, and the whole personality was a living and vivid one. Then
+he turned a little and rose as the door opened, and Mabel came in,
+closing it behind her.
+
+She came straight across to her husband, and put a hand on his shoulder.
+
+“Sit down, my dear,” she said. “We must talk a little. Please sit down,
+sir.”
+
+The three sat down, Percy on one side, and the husband and wife on a
+straight-backed settle opposite.
+
+The girl began again.
+
+“This must be arranged at once,” she said, “but we must have no tragedy.
+Oliver, do you understand? You must not make a scene. Leave this to me.”
+
+She spoke with a curious gaiety; and Percy to his astonishment saw that
+she was quite sincere: there was not the hint of cynicism.
+
+“Oliver, my dear,” she said again, “don’t mouth like that! It is all
+perfectly right. I am going to manage this.”
+
+Percy saw a venomous look directed at him by the man; the girl saw it
+too, moving her strong humorous eyes from one to the other. She put her
+hand on his knee.
+
+“Oliver, attend! Don’t look at this gentleman so bitterly. He has done
+no harm.”
+
+“No harm!” whispered the other.
+
+“No--no harm in the world. What does it matter what that poor dear
+upstairs thinks? Now, sir, would you mind telling us why you came here?”
+
+Percy drew another breath. He had not expected this line.
+
+“I came here to receive Mrs. Brand back into the Church,” he said.
+
+“And you have done so?”
+
+“I have done so.”
+
+“Would you mind telling us your name? It makes it so much more
+convenient.”
+
+Percy hesitated. Then he determined to meet her on her own ground.
+
+“Certainly. My name is Franklin.”
+
+“Father Franklin?” asked the girl, with just the faintest tinge of
+mocking emphasis on the first word.
+
+“Yes. Father Percy Franklin, from Archbishop’s House, Westminster,” said
+the priest steadily.
+
+“Well, then, Father Percy Franklin; can you tell us why you came here? I
+mean, who sent for you?”
+
+“Mrs. Brand sent for me.”
+
+“Yes, but by what means?”
+
+“That I must not say.”
+
+“Oh, very good.... May we know what good comes of being ‘received into
+the Church?’”
+
+“By being received into the Church, the soul is reconciled to God.”
+
+“Oh! (Oliver, be quiet.) And how do you do it, Father Franklin?”
+
+Percy stood up abruptly.
+
+“This is no good, madam,” he said. “What is the use of these questions?”
+
+The girl looked at him in open-eyed astonishment, still with her hand on
+her husband’s knee.
+
+“The use, Father Franklin! Why, we want to know. There is no church law
+against your telling us, is there?”
+
+Percy hesitated again. He did not understand in the least what she was
+after. Then he saw that he would give them an advantage if he lost his
+head at all: so he sat down again.
+
+“Certainly not. I will tell you if you wish to know. I heard Mrs.
+Brand’s confession, and gave her absolution.”
+
+“Oh! yes; and that does it, then? And what next?”
+
+“She ought to receive Holy Communion, and anointing, if she is in danger
+of death.”
+
+Oliver twitched suddenly.
+
+“Christ!” he said softly.
+
+“Oliver!” cried the girl entreatingly. “Please leave this to me. It is
+much better so.--And then, I suppose, Father Franklin, you want to give
+those other things to my mother, too?”
+
+“They are not absolutely necessary,” said the priest, feeling, he did
+not know why, that he was somehow playing a losing game.
+
+“Oh! they are not necessary? But you would like to?”
+
+“I shall do so if possible. But I have done what is necessary.”
+
+It required all his will to keep quiet. He was as a man who had armed
+himself in steel, only to find that his enemy was in the form of a
+subtle vapour. He simply had not an idea what to do next. He would have
+given anything for the man to have risen and flown at his throat, for
+this girl was too much for them both.
+
+“Yes,” she said softly. “Well, it is hardly to be expected that my
+husband should give you leave to come here again. But I am very glad
+that you have done what you think necessary. No doubt it will be a
+satisfaction to you, Father Franklin, and to the poor old thing
+upstairs, too. While we--- _we_--” she pressed her husband’s knee--“we
+do not mind at all. Oh!--but there is one thing more.”
+
+“If you please,” said Percy, wondering what on earth was coming.
+
+“You Christians--forgive me if I say anything rude--but, you know, you
+Christians have a reputation for counting heads, and making the most of
+converts. We shall be so much obliged, Father Franklin, if you will
+give us your word not to advertise this--this incident. It would
+distress my husband, and give him a great deal of trouble.”
+
+“Mrs. Brand---” began the priest.
+
+“One moment.... You see, we have not treated you badly. There has been
+no violence. We will promise not to make scenes with my mother. Will you
+promise us that?”
+
+Percy had had time to consider, and he answered instantly.
+
+“Certainly, I will promise that.”
+
+Mabel sighed contentedly.
+
+“Well, that is all right. We are so much obliged.... And I think we may
+say this, that perhaps after consideration my husband may see his way to
+letting you come here again to do Communion and--and the other thing---”
+
+Again that spasm shook the man beside her.
+
+“Well, we will see about that. At any rate, we know your address, and
+can let you know.... By the way, Father Franklin, are you going back to
+Westminster to-night?”
+
+He bowed.
+
+“Ah! I hope you will get through. You will find London very much
+excited. Perhaps you heard---”
+
+“Felsenburgh?” said Percy.
+
+“Yes. Julian Felsenburgh,” said the girl softly, again with that strange
+excitement suddenly alight in her eyes. “Julian Felsenburgh,” she
+repeated. “He is there, you know. He will stay in England for the
+present.”
+
+Again Percy was conscious of that slight touch of fear at the mention of
+that name.
+
+“I understand there is to be peace,” he said.
+
+The girl rose and her husband with her.
+
+“Yes,” she said, almost compassionately, “there is to be peace. Peace at
+last.” (She moved half a step towards him, and her face glowed like a
+rose of fire. Her hand rose a little.) “Go back to London, Father
+Franklin, and use your eyes. You will see him, I dare say, and you will
+see more besides.” (Her voice began to vibrate.) “And you will
+understand, perhaps, why we have treated you like this--why we are no
+longer afraid of you--why we are willing that my mother should do as
+she pleases. Oh! you will understand, Father Franklin if not to-night,
+to-morrow; or if not to-morrow, at least in a very short time.”
+
+“Mabel!” cried her husband.
+
+The girl wheeled, and threw her arms round him, and kissed him on the
+mouth.
+
+“Oh! I am not ashamed, Oliver, my dear. Let him go and see for himself.
+Good-night, Father Franklin.”
+
+As he went towards the door, hearing the ping of the bell that some one
+touched in the room behind him, he turned once more, dazed and
+bewildered; and there were the two, husband and wife, standing in the
+soft, sunny light, as if transfigured. The girl had her arm round the
+man’s shoulder, and stood upright and radiant as a pillar of fire; and
+even on the man’s face there was no anger now--nothing but an almost
+supernatural pride and confidence. They were both smiling.
+
+Then Percy passed out into the soft, summer night.
+
+
+II
+
+Percy understood nothing except that he was afraid, as he sat in the
+crowded car that whirled him up to London. He scarcely even heard the
+talk round him, although it was loud and continuous; and what he heard
+meant little to him. He understood only that there had been strange
+scenes, that London was said to have gone suddenly mad, that Felsenburgh
+had spoken that night in Paul’s House.
+
+He was afraid at the way in which he had been treated, and he asked
+himself dully again and again what it was that had inspired that
+treatment; it seemed that he had been in the presence of the
+supernatural; he was conscious of shivering a little, and of the
+symptoms of an intolerable sleepiness. It was scarcely strange to him
+that he should be sitting in a crowded car at two o’clock of a summer
+dawn.
+
+Thrice the car stopped, and he stared out at the signs of confusion that
+were everywhere; at the figures that ran in the twilight between the
+tracks, at a couple of wrecked carriages, a tumble of tarpaulins; he
+listened mechanically to the hoots and cries that sounded everywhere.
+
+As he stepped out at last on to the platform, he found it very much as
+he had left it two hours before. There was the same desperate rush as
+the car discharged its load, the same dead body beneath the seat; and
+above all, as he ran helplessly behind the crowd, scarcely knowing
+whither he ran or why, above him burned the same stupendous message
+beneath the clock. Then he found himself in the lift, and a minute later
+he was out on the steps behind the station.
+
+There, too, was an astonishing sight. The lamps still burned overhead,
+but beyond them lay the first pale streaks of the false dawn. The street
+that ran now straight to the old royal palace, uniting there, as at the
+centre of a web, with those that came from Westminster, the Mall and
+Hyde Park, was one solid pavement of heads. On this side and that rose
+up the hotels and “Houses of Joy,” the windows all ablaze with light,
+solemn and triumphant as if to welcome a king; while far ahead against
+the sky stood the monstrous palace outlined in fire, and alight from
+within like all other houses within view. The noise was bewildering. It
+was impossible to distinguish one sound from another. Voices, horns,
+drums, the tramp of a thousand footsteps on the rubber pavements, the
+sombre roll of wheels from the station behind--all united in one
+overwhelmingly solemn booming, overscored by shriller notes.
+
+It was impossible to move.
+
+He found himself standing in a position of extraordinary advantage, at
+the very top of the broad flight of steps that led down into the old
+station yard, now a wide space that united, on the left the broad road
+to the palace, and on the right Victoria Street, that showed like all
+else one vivid perspective of lights and heads. Against the sky on his
+right rose up the illuminated head of the Cathedral Campanile. It
+appeared to him as if he had known that in some previous existence.
+
+He edged himself mechanically a foot or two to his left, till he clasped
+a pillar; then he waited, trying not to analyse his emotions, but to
+absorb them.
+
+Gradually he became aware that this crowd was as no other that he had
+ever seen. To his psychical sense it seemed to him that it possessed a
+unity unlike any other. There was magnetism in the air. There was a
+sensation as if a creative act were in process, whereby thousands of
+individual cells were being welded more and more perfectly every instant
+into one huge sentient being with one will, one emotion, and one head.
+The crying of voices seemed significant only as the stirrings of this
+creative power which so expressed itself. Here rested this giant
+humanity, stretching to his sight in living limbs so far as he could see
+on every side, waiting, waiting for some consummation--stretching, too,
+as his tired brain began to guess, down every thoroughfare of the vast
+city.
+
+He did not even ask himself for what they waited. He knew, yet he did
+not know. He knew it was for a revelation--for something that should
+crown their aspirations, and fix them so for ever.
+
+He had a sense that he had seen all this before; and, like a child, he
+began to ask himself where it could have happened, until he remembered
+that it was so that he had once dreamt of the Judgment Day--of humanity
+gathered to meet Jesus Christ--Jesus Christ! Ah! how tiny that Figure
+seemed to him now--how far away--real indeed, but insignificant to
+himself--how hopelessly apart from this tremendous life! He glanced up
+at the Campanile. Yes; there was a piece of the True Cross there, was
+there not?--a little piece of the wood on which a Poor Man had died
+twenty centuries ago.... Well, well. It was a long way off....
+
+He did not quite understand what was happening to him. “Sweet Jesus, be
+to me not a Judge but a Saviour,” he whispered beneath his breath,
+gripping the granite of the pillar; and a moment later knew how futile
+was that prayer. It was gone like a breath in this vast, vivid
+atmosphere of man. He had said mass, had he not? this morning--in white
+vestments.--Yes; he had believed it all then--desperately, but truly;
+and now....
+
+To look into the future was as useless as to look into the past. There
+was no future, and no past: it was all one eternal instant, present and
+final....
+
+Then he let go of effort, and again began to see with his bodily eyes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The dawn was coming up the sky now, a steady soft brightening that
+appeared in spite of its sovereignty to be as nothing compared with the
+brilliant light of the streets. “We need no sun,” he whispered, smiling
+piteously; “no sun or light of a candle. We have our light on earth--the
+light that lighteneth every man....”
+
+The Campanile seemed further away than ever now, in that ghostly glimmer
+of dawn--more and more helpless every moment, compared with the
+beautiful vivid shining of the streets.
+
+Then he listened to the sounds, and it seemed to him as if somewhere,
+far down eastwards, there was a silence beginning. He jerked his head
+impatiently, as a man behind him began to talk rapidly and confusedly.
+Why would he not be silent, and let silence be heard?... The man stopped
+presently, and out of the distance there swelled up a roar, as soft as
+the roll of a summer tide; it passed up towards him from the right; it
+was about him, dinning in his ears. There was no longer any individual
+voice: it was the breathing of the giant that had been born; he was
+crying out too; he did not know what he said, but he could not be
+silent. His veins and nerves seemed alight with wine; and as he stared
+down the long street, hearing the huge cry ebb from him and move toward
+the palace, he knew why he had cried, and why he was now silent.
+
+A slender, fish-shaped thing, as white as milk, as ghostly as a shadow,
+and as beautiful as the dawn, slid into sight half-a-mile away, turned
+and came towards him, floating, as it seemed, on the very wave of
+silence that it created, up, up the long curving street on outstretched
+wings, not twenty feet above the heads of the crowd. There was one great
+sigh, and then silence once more.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Percy could think consciously again--for his will was only capable
+of efforts as a clock of ticks--the strange white thing was nearer. He
+told himself that he had seen a hundred such before; and at the same
+instant that this was different from all others.
+
+Then it was nearer still, floating slowly, slowly, like a gull over the
+sea; he could make out its smooth nose, its low parapet beyond, the
+steersman’s head motionless; he could even hear now the soft winnowing
+of the screw--and then he saw that for which he had waited.
+
+High on the central deck there stood a chair, draped, too, in white,
+with some insignia visible above its back; and in the chair sat the
+figure of a man, motionless and lonely. He made no sign as he came; his
+dark dress showed vividedly against the whiteness; his head was raised,
+and he turned it gently now and again from side to side.
+
+It came nearer still, in the profound stillness; the head turned, and
+for an instant the face was plainly visible in the soft, radiant light.
+
+It was a pale face, strongly marked, as of a young man, with arched,
+black eyebrows, thin lips, and white hair.
+
+Then the face turned once more, the steersman shifted his head, and the
+beautiful shape, wheeling a little, passed the corner, and moved up
+towards the palace.
+
+There was an hysterical yelp somewhere, a cry, and again the tempestuous
+groan broke out.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II-THE ENCOUNTER
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+I
+
+Oliver Brand was seated at his desk, on the evening of the next day,
+reading the leading article of the _New People_, evening edition.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+“We have had time,” he read, “to recover ourselves a little from the
+intoxication of last night. Before embarking on prophecy, it will be as
+well to recall the facts. Up to yesterday evening our anxiety with
+regard to the Eastern crisis continued; and when twenty-one o’clock
+struck there were not more than forty persons in London--the English
+delegates, that is to say--who knew positively that the danger was over.
+Between that moment and half-an-hour later the Government took a few
+discreet steps: a select number of persons were informed; the police
+were called out, with half-a-dozen regiments, to preserve order; Paul’s
+House was cleared; the railroad companies were warned; and at the half
+hour precisely the announcement was made by means of the electric
+placards in every quarter of London, as well as in all large provincial
+towns. We have not space now to adequately describe the admirable manner
+in which the public authorities did their duty; it is enough to say that
+not more than seventy fatalities took place in the whole of London; nor
+is it our business to criticise the action of the Government, in
+choosing this mode of making the announcement.
+
+“By twenty-two o’clock Paul’s House was filled in every corner, the Old
+Choir was reserved for members of Parliament and public officials, the
+quarter-dome galleries were filled with ladies, and to the rest of the
+floor the public was freely admitted. The volor-police also inform us
+now that for about the distance of one mile in every direction round
+this centre every thoroughfare was blocked with pedestrians, and, two
+hours later, as we all know, practically all the main streets of the
+whole of London were in the same condition.
+
+“It was an excellent choice by which Mr. OLIVER BRAND was selected as
+the first speaker. His arm was still in bandages; and the appeal of his
+figure as well as his passionate words struck the first explicit note of
+the evening. A report of his words will be found in another column. In
+their turns, the PRIME MINISTER, Mr. SNOWFORD, the FIRST MINISTER OF THE
+ADMIRALTY, THE SECRETARY FOR EASTERN AFFAIRS, and LORD PEMBERTON, all
+spoke a few words, corroborating the extraordinary news. At a quarter
+before twenty-three, the noise of cheering outside announced the arrival
+of the American delegates from Paris, and one by one these ascended the
+platform by the south gates of the Old Choir. Each spoke in turn. It is
+impossible to appreciate words spoken at such a moment as this; but
+perhaps it is not invidious to name Mr. MARKHAM as the orator who above
+all others appealed to those who were privileged to hear him. It was he,
+too, who told us explicitly what others had merely mentioned, to the
+effect that the success of the American efforts was entirely due to Mr.
+JULIAN FELSENBURGH. As yet Mr. FELSENBURGH had not arrived; but in
+answer to a roar of inquiry, Mr. MARKHAM announced that this gentleman
+would be amongst them in a few minutes. He then proceeded to describe to
+us, so far as was possible in a few sentences, the methods by which Mr.
+FELSENBURGH had accomplished what is probably the most astonishing task
+known to history. It seems from his words that Mr. FELSENBURGH (whose
+biography, so far as it is known, we give in another column) is probably
+the greatest orator that the world has ever known--we use these words
+deliberately. All languages seem the same to him; he delivered speeches
+during the eight months through which the Eastern Convention lasted, in
+no less than fifteen tongues. Of his manner in speaking we shall have a
+few remarks to make presently. He showed also, Mr. MARKHAM told us, the
+most astonishing knowledge, not only of human nature, but of every trait
+under which that divine thing manifests itself. He appeared acquainted
+with the history, the prejudices, the fears, the hopes, the expectations
+of all the innumerable sects and castes of the East to whom it was his
+business to speak. In fact, as Mr. MARKHAM said, he is probably the
+first perfect product of that new cosmopolitan creation to which the
+world has laboured throughout its history. In no less than nine
+places--Damascus, Irkutsk, Constantinople, Calcutta, Benares, Nanking,
+among them--he was hailed as Messiah by a Mohammedan mob. Finally, in
+America, where this extraordinary figure has arisen, all speak well of
+him. He has been guilty of none of those crimes--there is not one that
+convicts him of sin--those crimes of the Yellow Press, of corruption, of
+commercial or political bullying which have so stained the past of all
+those old politicians who made the sister continent what she has become.
+Mr. FELSENBURGH has not even formed a party. He, and not his underlings,
+have conquered. Those who were present in Paul’s House on this occasion
+will understand us when we say that the effect of those words was
+indescribable.
+
+“When Mr. MARKHAM sat down, there was a silence; then, in order to quiet
+the rising excitement, the organist struck the first chords of the
+Masonic Hymn; the words were taken up, and presently not only the whole
+interior of the building rang with it, but outside, too, the people
+responded, and the city of London for a few moments became indeed a
+temple of the Lord.
+
+“Now indeed we come to the most difficult part of our task, and it is
+better to confess at once that anything resembling journalistic
+descriptiveness must be resolutely laid aside. The greatest things are
+best told in the simplest words.
+
+“Towards the close of the fourth verse, a figure in a plain dark suit
+was observed ascending the steps of the platform. For a moment this
+attracted no attention, but when it was seen that a sudden movement had
+broken out among the delegates, the singing began to falter; and it
+ceased altogether as the figure, after a slight inclination to right and
+left, passed up the further steps that led to the rostrum. Then occurred
+a curious incident. The organist aloft at first did not seem to
+understand, and continued playing, but a sound broke out from the crowd
+resembling a kind of groan, and instantly he ceased. But no cheering
+followed. Instead a profound silence dominated in an instant the huge
+throng; this, by some strange magnetism, communicated itself to those
+without the building, and when Mr. FELSENBURGH uttered his first words,
+it was in a stillness that was like a living thing. We leave the
+explanation of this phenomenon to the expert in psychology.
+
+“Of his actual words we have nothing to say. So far as we are aware no
+reporter made notes at the moment; but the speech, delivered in
+Esperanto, was a very simple one, and very short. It consisted of a
+brief announcement of the great fact of Universal Brotherhood, a
+congratulation to all who were yet alive to witness this consummation of
+history; and, at the end, an ascription of praise to that Spirit of the
+World whose incarnation was now accomplished.
+
+“So much we can say; but we can say nothing as to the impression of the
+personality who stood there. In appearance the man seemed to be about
+thirty-three years of age, clean-shaven, upright, with white hair and
+dark eyes and brows; he stood motionless with his hands on the rail, he
+made but one gesture that drew a kind of sob from the crowd, he spoke
+these words slowly, distinctly, and in a clear voice; then he stood
+waiting.
+
+“There was no response but a sigh which sounded in the ears of at least
+one who heard it as if the whole world drew breath for the first time;
+and then that strange heart-shaking silence fell again. Many were
+weeping silently, the lips of thousands moved without a sound, and all
+faces were turned to that simple figure, as if the hope of every soul
+were centred there. So, if we may believe it, the eyes of many,
+centuries ago, were turned on one known now to history as JESUS OF
+NAZARETH.
+
+“Mr. FELSENBURGH stood so a moment longer, then he turned down the
+steps, passed across the platform and disappeared.
+
+“Of what took place outside we have received the following account from
+an eye-witness. The white volor, so well known now to all who were in
+London that night, had remained stationary outside the little south door
+of the Old Choir aisle, poised about twenty feet above the ground.
+Gradually it became known to the crowd, in those few minutes, who it was
+who had arrived in it, and upon Mr. FELSENBURGH’S reappearance that same
+strange groan sounded through the whole length of Paul’s Churchyard,
+followed by the same silence. The volor descended; the master stepped on
+board, and once more the vessel rose to a height of twenty feet. It was
+thought at first that some speech would be made, but none was necessary;
+and after a moment’s pause, the volor began that wonderful parade which
+London will never forget. Four times during the night Mr. FELSENBURGH
+went round the enormous metropolis, speaking no word; and everywhere the
+groan preceded and followed him, while silence accompanied his actual
+passage. Two hours after sunrise the white ship rose over Hampstead and
+disappeared towards the North; and since then he, whom we call, in
+truth, the Saviour of the world, has not been seen.
+
+“And now what remains to be said?
+
+“Comment is useless. It is enough to say in one short sentence that the
+new era has begun, to which prophets and kings, and the suffering, the
+dying, all who labour and are heavy-laden, have aspired in vain. Not
+only has intercontinental rivalry ceased to exist, but the strife of
+home dissensions has ceased also. Of him who has been the herald of its
+inauguration we have nothing more to say. Time alone can show what is
+yet left for him to do.
+
+“But what has been done is as follows. The Eastern peril has been for
+ever dissipated. It is understood now, by fanatic barbarians as well as
+by civilised nations, that the reign of War is ended. ‘Not peace but a
+sword,’ said CHRIST; and bitterly true have those words proved to be.
+‘Not a sword but peace’ is the retort, articulate at last, from those
+who have renounced CHRIST’S claims or have never accepted them. The
+principle of love and union learned however falteringly in the West
+during the last century, has been taken up in the East as well. There
+shall be no more an appeal to arms, but to justice; no longer a crying
+after a God Who hides Himself, but to Man who has learned his own
+Divinity. The Supernatural is dead; rather, we know now that it never
+yet has been alive. What remains is to work out this new lesson, to
+bring every action, word and thought to the bar of Love and Justice; and
+this will be, no doubt, the task of years. Every code must be reversed;
+every barrier thrown down; party must unite with party, country with
+country, and continent with continent. There is no longer the fear of
+fear, the dread of the hereafter, or the paralysis of strife. Man has
+groaned long enough in the travails of birth; his blood has been poured
+out like water through his own foolishness; but at length he understands
+himself and is at peace.
+
+“Let it be seen at least that England is not behind the nations in this
+work of reformation; let no national isolation, pride of race, or
+drunkenness of wealth hold her hands back from this enormous work. The
+responsibility is incalculable, but the victory certain. Let us go
+softly, humbled by the knowledge of our crimes in the past, confident in
+the hope of our achievements in the future, towards that reward which is
+in sight at last--the reward hidden so long by the selfishness of men,
+the darkness of religion, and the strife of tongues--the reward promised
+by one who knew not what he said and denied what he asserted--Blessed
+are the meek, the peacemakers, the merciful, for they shall inherit the
+earth, be named the children of God, and find mercy.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Oliver, white to the lips, with his wife kneeling now beside him, turned
+the page and read one more short paragraph, marked as being the latest
+news.
+
+“It is understood that the Government is in communication with Mr.
+Felsenburgh.”
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+“Ah! it is journalese,” said Oliver, at last, leaning back. “Tawdry
+stuff! But--but the thing!”
+
+Mabel got up, passed across to the window-seat, and sat down. Her lips
+opened once or twice, but she said nothing.
+
+“My darling,” cried the man, “have you nothing to say?”
+
+She looked at him tremulously a moment.
+
+“Say!” she said. “As you said, What is the use of words?”
+
+“Tell me again,” said Oliver. “How do I know it is not a dream?”
+
+“A dream,” she said. “Was there ever a dream like this?”
+
+Again she got up restlessly, came across the floor, and knelt down by
+her husband once more, taking his hands in hers.
+
+“My dear,” she said, “I tell you it is not a dream. It is reality at
+last. I was there too--do you not remember? You waited for me when all
+was over--when He was gone out--we saw Him together, you and I. We heard
+Him--you on the platform and I in the gallery. We saw Him again pass up
+the Embankment as we stood in the crowd. Then we came home and we found
+the priest.”
+
+Her face was transfigured as she spoke. It was as of one who saw a
+Divine Vision. She spoke very quietly, without excitement or hysteria.
+Oliver stared at her a moment; then he bent forward and kissed her
+gently.
+
+“Yes, my darling; it is true. But I want to hear it again and again.
+Tell me again what you saw.”
+
+“I saw the Son of Man,” she said. “Oh! there is no other phrase. The
+Saviour of the world, as that paper says. I knew Him in my heart as soon
+as I saw Him--as we all did--as soon as He stood there holding the rail.
+It was like a glory round his head. I understand it all now. It was He
+for whom we have waited so long; and He has come, bringing Peace and
+Goodwill in His hands. When He spoke, I knew it again. His voice was
+as--as the sound of the sea--as simple as that--as--as lamentable--as
+strong as that.--Did you not hear it?”
+
+Oliver bowed his head.
+
+“I can trust Him for all the rest,” went on the girl softly. “I do not
+know where He is, nor when He will come back, nor what He will do. I
+suppose there is a great deal for Him to do, before He is fully
+known--laws, reforms--that will be your business, my dear. And the rest
+of us must wait, and love, and be content.”
+
+Oliver again lifted his face and looked at her.
+
+“Mabel, my dear---”
+
+“Oh! I knew it even last night,” she said, “but I did not know that I
+knew it till I awoke to-day and remembered. I dreamed of Him all
+night.... Oliver, where is He?”
+
+He shook his head.
+
+“Yes, I know where He is, but I am under oath---”
+
+She nodded quickly, and stood up.
+
+“Yes. I should not have asked that. Well, we are content to wait.”
+
+There was silence for a moment or two. Oliver broke it.
+
+“My dear, what do you mean when you say that He is not yet known?”
+
+“I mean just that,” she said. “The rest only know what He has done--not
+what He is; but that, too, will come in time.”
+
+“And meanwhile---”
+
+“Meanwhile, you must work; the rest will come by and bye. Oh! Oliver, be
+strong and faithful.”
+
+She kissed him quickly, and went out.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Oliver sat on without moving, staring, as his habit was, out at the wide
+view beyond his windows. This time yesterday he was leaving Paris,
+knowing the fact indeed--for the delegates had arrived an hour
+before--but ignorant of the Man. Now he knew the Man as well--at least
+he had seen Him, heard Him, and stood enchanted under the glow of His
+personality. He could explain it to himself no more than could any one
+else--unless, perhaps, it were Mabel. The others had been as he had
+been: awed and overcome, yet at the same time kindled in the very depths
+of their souls. They had come out--Snowford, Cartwright, Pemberton, and
+the rest--on to the steps of Paul’s House, following that strange
+figure. They had intended to say something, but they were dumb as they
+saw the sea of white faces, heard the groan and the silence, and
+experienced that compelling wave of magnetism that surged up like
+something physical, as the volor rose and started on that indescribable
+progress.
+
+Once more he had seen Him, as he and Mabel stood together on the deck of
+the electric boat that carried them south. The white ship had passed
+along overhead, smooth and steady, above the heads of that vast
+multitude, bearing Him who, if any had the right to that title, was
+indeed the Saviour of the world. Then they had come home, and found the
+priest.
+
+That, too, had been a shock to him; for, at first sight, it seemed that
+this priest was the very man he had seen ascend the rostrum two hours
+before. It was an extraordinary likeness--the same young face and white
+hair. Mabel, of course, had not noticed it; for she had only seen
+Felsenburgh at a great distance; and he himself had soon been reassured.
+And as for his mother--it was terrible enough; if it had not been for
+Mabel there would have been violence done last night. How collected and
+reasonable she had been! And, as for his mother--he must leave her alone
+for the present. By and bye, perhaps, something might be done. The
+future! It was that which engrossed him--the future, and the absorbing
+power of the personality under whose dominion he had fallen last night.
+All else seemed insignificant now--even his mother’s defection, her
+illness--all paled before this new dawn of an unknown sun. And in an
+hour he would know more; he was summoned to Westminster to a meeting of
+the whole House; their proposals to Felsenburgh were to be formulated;
+it was intended to offer him a great position.
+
+Yes, as Mabel had said; this was now their work--to carry into
+effect the new principle that had suddenly become incarnate in this
+grey-haired young American--the principle of Universal Brotherhood.
+It would mean enormous labour; all foreign relations would have to
+be readjusted--trade, policy, methods of government--all demanded
+re-statement. Europe was already organised internally on a basis of
+mutual protection: that basis was now gone. There was no more any
+protection, because there was no more any menace. Enormous labour,
+too, awaited the Government in other directions. A Blue-book must be
+prepared, containing a complete report of the proceedings in the East,
+together with the text of the Treaty which had been laid before them
+in Paris, signed by the Eastern Emperor, the feudal kings, the Turkish
+Republic, and countersigned by the American plenipotentiaries....
+Finally, even home politics required reform: the friction of old strife
+between centre and extremes must cease forthwith--there must be but one
+party now, and that at the Prophet’s disposal.... He grew bewildered
+as he regarded the prospect, and saw how the whole plane of the world
+was shifted, how the entire foundation of western life required
+readjustment. It was a Revolution indeed, a cataclysm more stupendous
+than even invasion itself; but it was the conversion of darkness into
+light, and chaos into order.
+
+He drew a deep breath, and so sat pondering.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mabel came down to him half-an-hour later, as he dined early before
+starting for Whitehall.
+
+“Mother is quieter,” she said. “We must be very patient, Oliver. Have
+you decided yet as to whether the priest is to come again?”
+
+He shook his head.
+
+“I can think of nothing,” he said, “but of what I have to do. You
+decide, my dear; I leave it in your hands.”
+
+She nodded.
+
+“I will talk to her again presently. Just now she can understand very
+little of what has happened.... What time shall you be home?”
+
+“Probably not to-night. We shall sit all night.”
+
+“Yes, dear. And what shall I tell Mr. Phillips?”
+
+“I will telephone in the morning.... Mabel, do you remember what I told
+you about the priest?”
+
+“His likeness to the other?”
+
+“Yes. What do you make of that?”
+
+She smiled.
+
+“I make nothing at all of it. Why should they not be alike?”
+
+He took a fig from the dish, and swallowed it, and stood up.
+
+“It is only very curious,” he said. “Now, good-night, my dear.”
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+“Oh, mother,” said Mabel, kneeling by the bed; “cannot you understand
+what has happened?”
+
+She had tried desperately to tell the old lady of the extraordinary
+change that had taken place in the world--and without success. It seemed
+to her that some great issue depended on it; that it would be piteous if
+the old woman went out into the dark unconscious of what had come. It
+was as if a Christian knelt by the death-bed of a Jew on the first
+Easter Monday. But the old lady lay in her bed, terrified but obdurate.
+
+“Mother,” said the girl, “let me tell you again. Do you not understand
+that all which Jesus Christ promised has come true, though in another
+way? The reign of God has really begun; but we know now who God is. You
+said just now you wanted the Forgiveness of Sins; well, you have that;
+we all have it, because there is no such thing as sin. There is only
+Crime. And then Communion. You used to believe that that made you a
+partaker of God; well, we are all partakers of God, because we are human
+beings. Don’t you see that Christianity is only one way of saying all
+that? I dare say it was the only way, for a time; but that is all over
+now. Oh! and how much better this is! It is true--true. You can see it
+to be true!”
+
+She paused a moment, forcing herself to look at that piteous old face,
+the flushed wrinkled cheeks, the writhing knotted hands on the coverlet.
+
+“Look how Christianity has failed--how it has divided people; think of
+all the cruelties--the Inquisition, the Religious Wars; the separations
+between husband and wife and parents and children--the disobedience to
+the State, the treasons. Oh! you cannot believe that these were right.
+What kind of a God would that be! And then Hell; how could you ever have
+believed in that?... Oh! mother, don’t believe anything so frightful....
+Don’t you understand that that God has gone--that He never existed at
+all--that it was all a hideous nightmare; and that now we all know at
+last what the truth is.... Mother! think of what happened last
+night--how He came--the Man of whom you were so frightened. I told you
+what He was like--so quiet and strong--how every one was silent--of
+the--the extraordinary atmosphere, and how six millions of people saw
+Him. And think what He has done--how He has healed all the old
+wounds--how the whole world is at peace at last--and of what is going to
+happen. Oh! mother, give up those horrible old lies; give them up; be
+brave.”
+
+“The priest, the priest!” moaned the old woman at last.
+
+“Oh! no, no, no--not the priest; he can do nothing. He knows it’s all
+lies, too!”
+
+“The priest! the priest!” moaned the other again. “He can tell you; he
+knows the answer.”
+
+Her face was convulsed with effort, and her old fingers fumbled and
+twisted with the rosary. Mabel grew suddenly frightened, and stood up.
+
+“Oh! mother!” She stooped and kissed her. “There! I won’t say any more
+now. But just think about it quietly. Don’t be in the least afraid; it
+is all perfectly right.”
+
+She stood a moment, still looking compassionately down; torn by sympathy
+and desire. No! it was no use now; she must wait till the next day.
+
+“I’ll look in again presently,” she said, “when you have had dinner.
+Mother! don’t look like that! Kiss me!”
+
+It was astonishing, she told herself that evening, how any one could be
+so blind. And what a confession of weakness, too, to call only for the
+priest! It was ludicrous, absurd! She herself was filled with an
+extraordinary peace. Even death itself seemed now no longer terrible,
+for was not death swallowed up in victory? She contrasted the selfish
+individualism of the Christian, who sobbed and shrank from death, or, at
+the best, thought of it only as the gate to his own eternal life, with
+the free altruism of the New Believer who asked no more than that Man
+should live and grow, that the Spirit of the World should triumph and
+reveal Himself, while he, the unit, was content to sink back into that
+reservoir of energy from which he drew his life. At this moment she
+would have suffered anything, faced death cheerfully--she contemplated
+even the old woman upstairs with pity--for was it not piteous that death
+should not bring her to herself and reality?
+
+She was in a quiet whirl of intoxication; it was as if the heavy veil of
+sense had rolled back at last and shown a sweet, eternal landscape
+behind--a shadowless land of peace where the lion lay down with the
+lamb, and the leopard with the kid. There should be war no more: that
+bloody spectre was dead, and with him the brood of evil that lived in
+his shadow--superstition, conflict, terror, and unreality. The idols
+were smashed, and rats had run out; Jehovah was fallen; the wild-eyed
+dreamer of Galilee was in his grave; the reign of priests was ended. And
+in their place stood a strange, quiet figure of indomitable power and
+unruffled tenderness.... He whom she had seen--the Son of Man, the
+Saviour of the world, as she had called Him just now--He who bore these
+titles was no longer a monstrous figure, half God and half man, claiming
+both natures and possessing neither; one who was tempted without
+temptation, and who conquered without merit, as his followers said. Here
+was one instead whom she could follow, a god indeed and a man as well--a
+god because human, and a man because so divine.
+
+She said no more that night. She looked into the bedroom for a few
+minutes, and saw the old woman asleep. Her old hand lay out on the
+coverlet, and still between the fingers was twisted the silly string of
+beads. Mabel went softly across in the shaded light, and tried to detach
+it; but the wrinkled fingers writhed and closed, and a murmur came from
+the half-open lips. Ah! how piteous it was, thought the girl, how
+hopeless that a soul should flow out into such darkness, unwilling to
+make the supreme, generous surrender, and lay down its life because life
+itself demanded it!
+
+Then she went to her own room.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The clocks were chiming three, and the grey dawn lay on the walls, when
+she awoke to find by her bed the woman who had sat with the old lady.
+
+“Come at once, madam; Mrs. Brand is dying.”
+
+
+IV
+
+Oliver was with them by six o’clock; he came straight up into his
+mother’s room to find that all was over.
+
+The room was full of the morning light and the clean air, and a bubble
+of bird-music poured in from the lawn. But his wife knelt by the bed,
+still holding the wrinkled hands of the old woman, her face buried in
+her arms. The face of his mother was quieter than he had ever seen it,
+the lines showed only like the faintest shadows on an alabaster mask;
+her lips were set in a smile. He looked for a moment, waiting until the
+spasm that caught his throat had died again. Then he put his hand on his
+wife’s shoulder.
+
+“When?” he said.
+
+Mabel lifted her face.
+
+“Oh! Oliver,” she murmured. “It was an hour ago. ... Look at this.”
+
+She released the dead hands and showed the rosary still twisted there;
+it had snapped in the last struggle, and a brown bead lay beneath the
+fingers.
+
+“I did what I could,” sobbed Mabel. “I was not hard with her. But she
+would not listen. She kept on crying out for the priest as long as she
+could speak.”
+
+“My dear....” began the man. Then he, too, went down on his knees by
+his wife, leaned forward and kissed the rosary, while tears blinded him.
+
+“Yes, yes,” he said. “Leave her in peace. I would not move it for the
+world: it was her toy, was it not?”
+
+The girl stared at him, astonished.
+
+“We can be generous, too,” he said. “We have all the world at last. And
+she--she has lost nothing: it was too late.”
+
+“I did what I could.”
+
+“Yes, my darling, and you were right. But she was too old; she could not
+understand.”
+
+He paused.
+
+“Euthanasia?” he whispered with something very like tenderness.
+
+She nodded.
+
+“Yes,” she said; “just as the last agony began. She resisted, but I knew
+you would wish it.”
+
+They talked together for an hour in the garden before Oliver went to his
+room; and he began to tell her presently of all that had passed.
+
+“He has refused,” he said. “We offered to create an office for Him; He
+was to have been called Consultor, and he refused it two hours ago. But
+He has promised to be at our service.... No, I must not tell you where
+He is.... He will return to America soon, we think; but He will not
+leave us. We have drawn up a programme, and it is to be sent to Him
+presently.... Yes, we were unanimous.”
+
+“And the programme?”
+
+“It concerns the Franchise, the Poor Laws and Trade. I can tell you no
+more than that. It was He who suggested the points. But we are not sure
+if we understand Him yet.”
+
+“But, my dear---”
+
+“Yes; it is quite extraordinary. I have never seen such things. There
+was practically no argument.”
+
+“Do the people understand?”
+
+“I think so. We shall have to guard against a reaction. They say that
+the Catholics will be in danger. There is an article this morning in the
+_Era_. The proofs were sent to us for sanction. It suggests that means
+must be taken to protect the Catholics.”
+
+Mabel smiled.
+
+“It is a strange irony,” he said. “But they have a right to exist. How
+far they have a right to share in the government is another matter. That
+will come before us, I think, in a week or two.”
+
+“Tell me more about Him.”
+
+“There is really nothing to tell; we know nothing, except that He is the
+supreme force in the world. France is in a ferment, and has offered him
+Dictatorship. That, too, He has refused. Germany has made the same
+proposal as ourselves; Italy, the same as France, with the title of
+Perpetual Tribune. America has done nothing yet, and Spain is divided.”
+
+“And the East?”
+
+“The Emperor thanked Him; no more than that.”
+
+Mabel drew a long breath, and stood looking out across the heat haze
+that was beginning to rise from the town beneath. These were matters so
+vast that she could not take them in. But to her imagination Europe lay
+like a busy hive, moving to and fro in the sunshine. She saw the blue
+distance of France, the towns of Germany, the Alps, and beyond them the
+Pyrenees and sun-baked Spain; and all were intent on the same business,
+to capture if they could this astonishing figure that had risen over the
+world. Sober England, too, was alight with zeal. Each country desired
+nothing better than that this man should rule over them; and He had
+refused them all.
+
+“He has refused them all!” she repeated breathlessly.
+
+“Yes, all. We think He may be waiting to hear from America. He still
+holds office there, you know.”
+
+“How old is He?”
+
+“Not more than thirty-two or three. He has only been in office a few
+months. Before that He lived alone in Vermont. Then He stood for the
+Senate; then He made a speech or two; then He was appointed delegate,
+though no one seems to have realised His power. And the rest we know.”
+
+Mabel shook her head meditatively.
+
+“We know nothing,” she said. “Nothing; nothing! Where did He learn His
+languages?”
+
+“It is supposed that He travelled for many years. But no one knows. He
+has said nothing.”
+
+She turned swiftly to her husband.
+
+“But what does it all mean? What is His power? Tell me, Oliver?”
+
+He smiled back, shaking his head.
+
+“Well, Markham said that it was his incorruption--that and his oratory;
+but that explains nothing.”
+
+“No, it explains nothing,” said the girl.
+
+“It is just personality,” went on Oliver, “at least, that’s the label to
+use. But that, too, is only a label.”
+
+“Yes, just a label. But it is that. They all felt it in Paul’s House,
+and in the streets afterwards. Did you not feel it?”
+
+“Feel it!” cried the man, with shining eyes. “Why, I would die for Him!”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They went back to the house presently, and it was not till they reached
+the door that either said a word about the dead old woman who lay
+upstairs.
+
+“They are with her now,” said Mabel softly. “I will communicate with the
+people.”
+
+He nodded gravely.
+
+“It had better be this afternoon,” he said. “I have a spare hour at
+fourteen o’clock. Oh! by the way, Mabel, do you know who took the
+message to the priest?”
+
+“I think so.”
+
+“Yes, it was Phillips. I saw him last night. He will not come here
+again.”
+
+“Did he confess it?”
+
+“He did. He was most offensive.”
+
+But Oliver’s face softened again as he nodded to his wife at the foot of
+the stairs, and turned to go up once more to his mother’s room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+I
+
+It seemed to Percy Franklin as he drew near Rome, sliding five hundred
+feet high through the summer dawn, that he was approaching the very
+gates of heaven, or, still better, he was as a child coming home. For
+what he had left behind him ten hours before in London was not a bad
+specimen, he thought, of the superior mansions of hell. It was a world
+whence God seemed to have withdrawn Himself, leaving it indeed in a
+state of profound complacency--a state without hope or faith, but a
+condition in which, although life continued, there was absent the one
+essential to well-being. It was not that there was not expectation--for
+London was on tip-toe with excitement. There were rumours of all kinds:
+Felsenburgh was coming back; he was back; he had never gone. He was to
+be President of the Council, Prime Minister, Tribune, with full
+capacities of democratic government and personal sacro-sanctity, even
+King--if not Emperor of the West. The entire constitution was to be
+remodelled, there was to be a complete rearrangement of the pieces;
+crime was to be abolished by the mysterious power that had killed war;
+there was to be free food--the secret of life was discovered, there was
+to be no more death--so the rumours ran.... Yet that was lacking, to the
+priest’s mind, which made life worth living....
+
+In Paris, while the volor waited at the great station at Montmartre,
+once known as the Church of the Sacred Heart, he had heard the roaring
+of the mob in love with life at last, and seen the banners go past. As
+it rose again over the suburbs he had seen the long lines of trains
+streaming in, visible as bright serpents in the brilliant glory of the
+electric globes, bringing the country folk up to the Council of the
+Nation which the legislators, mad with drama, had summoned to decide the
+great question. At Lyons it had been the same. The night was as clear as
+the day, and as full of sound. Mid France was arriving to register its
+votes.
+
+He had fallen asleep as the cold air of the Alps began to envelop the
+car, and had caught but glimpses of the solemn moonlit peaks below him,
+the black profundities of the gulfs, the silver glint of the shield-like
+lakes, and the soft glow of Interlaken and the towns in the Rhone
+valley. Once he had been moved in spite of himself, as one of the huge
+German volors had passed in the night, a blaze of ghostly lights and
+gilding, resembling a huge moth with antennae of electric light, and the
+two ships had saluted one another through half a league of silent air,
+with a pathetic cry as of two strange night-birds who have no leisure to
+pause. Milan and Turin had been quiet, for Italy was organised on other
+principles than France, and Florence was not yet half awake. And now the
+Campagna was slipping past like a grey-green rug, wrinkled and tumbled,
+five hundred feet beneath, and Rome was all but in sight. The indicator
+above his seat moved its finger from one hundred to ninety miles.
+
+He shook off the doze at last, and drew out his office book; but as he
+pronounced the words his attention was elsewhere, and, when Prime was
+said, he closed the book once more, propped himself more comfortably,
+drawing the furs round him, and stretching his feet on the empty seat
+opposite. He was alone in his compartment; the three men who had come in
+at Paris had descended at Turin.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He had been remarkably relieved when the message had come three days
+before from the Cardinal-Protector, bidding him make arrangements for a
+long absence from England, and, as soon as that was done, to come to
+Rome. He understood that the ecclesiastical authorities were really
+disturbed at last.
+
+He reviewed the last day or two, considering the report he would have to
+present. Since his last letter, three days before, seven notable
+apostasies had taken place in Westminster diocese alone, two priests and
+five important laymen. There was talk of revolt on all sides; he had
+seen a threatening document, called a “petition,” demanding the right to
+dispense with all ecclesiastical vestments, signed by one hundred and
+twenty priests from England and Wales. The “petitioners” pointed out
+that persecution was coming swiftly at the hands of the mob; that the
+Government was not sincere in the promises of protection; they hinted
+that religious loyalty was already strained to breaking-point even in
+the case of the most faithful, and that with all but those it had
+already broken.
+
+And as to his comments Percy was clear. He would tell the authorities,
+as he had already told them fifty times, that it was not persecution
+that mattered; it was this new outburst of enthusiasm for Humanity--an
+enthusiasm which had waxed a hundredfold more hot since the coming of
+Felsenburgh and the publication of the Eastern news--which was melting
+the hearts of all but the very few. Man had suddenly fallen in love with
+man. The conventional were rubbing their eyes and wondering why they had
+ever believed, or even dreamed, that there was a God to love, asking one
+another what was the secret of the spell that had held them so long.
+Christianity and Theism were passing together from the world’s mind as a
+morning mist passes when the sun comes up. His recommendations--? Yes,
+he had those clear, and ran them over in his mind with a sense of
+despair.
+
+For himself, he scarcely knew if he believed what he professed. His
+emotions seemed to have been finally extinguished in the vision of the
+white car and the silence of the crowd that evening three weeks before.
+It had been so horribly real and positive; the delicate aspirations and
+hopes of the soul appeared so shadowy when compared with that burning,
+heart-shaking passion of the people. He had never seen anything like it;
+no congregation under the spell of the most kindling preacher alive had
+ever responded with one-tenth of the fervour with which that irreligious
+crowd, standing in the cold dawn of the London streets, had greeted the
+coming of their saviour. And as for the man himself--Percy could not
+analyse what it was that possessed him as he had stared, muttering the
+name of Jesus, on that quiet figure in black with features and hair so
+like his own. He only knew that a hand had gripped his heart--a hand
+warm, not cold--and had quenched, it seemed, all sense of religious
+conviction. It had only been with an effort that sickened him to
+remember, that he had refrained from that interior act of capitulation
+that is so familiar to all who have cultivated an inner life and
+understand what failure means. There had been one citadel that had not
+flung wide its gates--all else had yielded. His emotions had been
+stormed, his intellect silenced, his memory of grace obscured, a
+spiritual nausea had sickened his soul, yet the secret fortress of the
+will had, in an agony, held fast the doors and refused to cry out and
+call Felsenburgh king.
+
+Ah! how he had prayed during those three weeks! It appeared to him that
+he had done little else; there had been no peace. Lances of doubt thrust
+again and again through door and window; masses of argument had crashed
+from above; he had been on the alert day and night, repelling this,
+blindly, and denying that, endeavouring to keep his foothold on the
+slippery plane of the supernatural, sending up cry after cry to the Lord
+Who hid Himself. He had slept with his crucifix in his hand, he had
+awakened himself by kissing it; while he wrote, talked, ate, walked, and
+sat in cars, the inner life had been busy-making frantic speechless acts
+of faith in a religion which his intellect denied and from which his
+emotions shrank. There had been moments of ecstasy--now in a crowded
+street, when he recognised that God was all, that the Creator was the
+key to the creature’s life, that a humble act of adoration was
+transcendently greater than the most noble natural act, that the
+Supernatural was the origin and end of existence there had come to him
+such moments in the night, in the silence of the Cathedral, when the
+lamp flickered, and a soundless air had breathed from the iron door of
+the tabernacle. Then again passion ebbed, and left him stranded on
+misery, but set with a determination (which might equally be that of
+pride or faith) that no power in earth or hell should hinder him from
+professing Christianity even if he could not realise it. It was
+Christianity alone that made life tolerable.
+
+Percy drew a long vibrating breath, and changed his position; for far
+away his unseeing eyes had descried a dome, like a blue bubble set on a
+carpet of green; and his brain had interrupted itself to tell him that
+this was Rome. He got up presently, passed out of his compartment, and
+moved forward up the central gangway, seeing, as he went, through the
+glass doors to right and left his fellow-passengers, some still asleep,
+some staring out at the view, some reading. He put his eye to the glass
+square in the door, and for a minute or two watched, fascinated, the
+steady figure of the steerer at his post. There he stood motionless, his
+hands on the steel circle that directed the vast wings, his eyes on the
+wind-gauge that revealed to him as on the face of a clock both the force
+and the direction of the high gusts; now and again his hands moved
+slightly, and the huge fans responded, now lifting, now lowering.
+Beneath him and in front, fixed on a circular table, were the glass
+domes of various indicators--Percy did not know the meaning of half--one
+seemed a kind of barometer, intended, he guessed, to declare the height
+at which they were travelling, another a compass. And beyond, through
+the curved windows, lay the enormous sky. Well, it was all very
+wonderful, thought the priest, and it was with the force of which all
+this was but one symptom that the supernatural had to compete.
+
+He sighed, turned, and went back to his compartment.
+
+It was an astonishing vision that began presently to open before
+him--scarcely beautiful except for its strangeness, and as unreal as a
+raised map. Far to his right, as he could see through the glass doors,
+lay the grey line of the sea against the luminous sky, rising and
+falling ever so slightly as the car, apparently motionless, tilted
+imperceptibly against the western breeze; the only other movement was
+the faint pulsation of the huge throbbing screw in the rear. To the left
+stretched the limitless country, flitting beneath, in glimpses seen
+between the motionless wings, with here and there the streak of a
+village, flattened out of recognition, or the flash of water, and
+bounded far away by the low masses of the Umbrian hills; while in front,
+seen and gone again as the car veered, lay the confused line of Rome and
+the huge new suburbs, all crowned by the great dome growing every
+instant. Around, above and beneath, his eyes were conscious of wide
+air-spaces, overhead deepening into lapis-lazuli down to horizons of
+pale turquoise. The only sound, of which he had long ceased to be
+directly conscious, was that of the steady rush of air, less shrill now
+as the speed began to drop down--down--to forty miles an hour. There was
+a clang of a bell, and immediately he was aware of a sense of faint
+sickness as the car dropped in a glorious swoop, and he staggered a
+little as he grasped his rugs together. When he looked again the motion
+seemed to have ceased; he could see towers ahead, a line of house-roofs,
+and beneath he caught a glimpse of a road and more roofs with patches of
+green between. A bell clanged again, and a long sweet cry followed. On
+all sides he could hear the movement of feet; a guard in uniform passed
+swiftly along the glazed corridor; again came the faint nausea; and as
+he looked up once more from his luggage for an instant he saw the dome,
+grey now and lined, almost on a level with his own eyes, huge against
+the vivid sky. The world span round for a moment; he shut his eyes, and
+when he looked again walls seemed to heave up past him and stop,
+swaying. There was the last bell, a faint vibration as the car grounded
+in the steel-netted dock; a line of faces rocked and grew still outside
+the windows, and Percy passed out towards the doors, carrying his bags.
+
+
+II
+
+He still felt a sense of insecure motion as he sat alone over coffee an
+hour later in one of the remote rooms of the Vatican; but there was a
+sense of exhilaration as well, as his tired brain realised where he was.
+It had been strange to drive over the rattling stones in the weedy
+little cab, such as he remembered ten years ago when he had left Rome,
+newly ordained. While the world had moved on, Rome had stood still; she
+had other affairs to think of than physical improvements, now that the
+spiritual weight of the earth rested entirely upon her shoulders. All
+had seemed unchanged--or rather it had reverted to the condition of
+nearly one hundred and fifty years ago. Histories related how the
+improvements of the Italian government had gradually dropped out of use
+as soon as the city, eighty years before, had been given her
+independence; the trains ceased to run; volors were not allowed to enter
+the walls; the new buildings, permitted to remain, had been converted to
+ecclesiastical use; the Quirinal became the offices of the “Red Pope”;
+the embassies, huge seminaries; even the Vatican itself, with the
+exception of the upper floor, had become the abode of the Sacred
+College, who surrounded the Supreme Pontiff as stars their sun.
+
+It was an extraordinary city, said antiquarians--the one living example
+of the old days. Here were to be seen the ancient inconveniences, the
+insanitary horrors, the incarnation of a world given over to dreaming.
+The old Church pomp was back, too; the cardinals drove again in gilt
+coaches; the Pope rode on his white mule; the Blessed Sacrament went
+through the ill-smelling streets with the sound of bells and the light
+of lanterns. A brilliant description of it had interested the civilised
+world immensely for about forty-eight hours; the appalling retrogression
+was still used occasionally as the text for violent denunciations by the
+poorly educated; the well-educated had ceased to do anything but take
+for granted that superstition and progress were irreconcilable enemies.
+
+Yet Percy, even in the glimpses he had had in the streets, as he drove
+from the volor station outside the People’s Gate, of the old peasant
+dresses, the blue and red-fringed wine carts, the cabbage-strewn
+gutters, the wet clothes flapping on strings, the mules and
+horses--strange though these were, he had found them a refreshment. It
+had seemed to remind him that man was human, and not divine as the rest
+of the world proclaimed--human, and therefore careless and
+individualistic; human, and therefore occupied with interests other than
+those of speed, cleanliness, and precision.
+
+The room in which he sat now by the window with shading blinds, for the
+sun was already hot, seemed to revert back even further than to a
+century-and-a-half. The old damask and gilding that he had expected was
+gone, and its absence gave the impression of great severity. There was a
+wide deal table running the length of the room, with upright wooden arm
+chairs set against it; the floor was red-tiled, with strips of matting
+for the feet, the white, distempered walls had only a couple of old
+pictures hung upon them, and a large crucifix flanked by candles stood
+on a little altar by the further door. There was no more furniture than
+that, with the exception of a writing-desk between the windows, on which
+stood a typewriter. That jarred somehow on his sense of fitness, and he
+wondered at it.
+
+He finished the last drop of coffee in the thick-rimmed white cup, and
+sat back in his chair.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Already the burden was lighter, and he was astonished at the swiftness
+with which it had become so. Life looked simpler here; the interior
+world was taken more for granted; it was not even a matter of debate.
+There it was, imperious and objective, and through it glimmered to the
+eyes of the soul the old Figures that had become shrouded behind the
+rush of worldly circumstance. The very shadow of God appeared to rest
+here; it was no longer impossible to realise that the saints watched and
+interceded, that Mary sat on her throne, that the white disc on the
+altar was Jesus Christ. Percy was not yet at peace after all, he had
+been but an hour in Rome; and air, charged with never so much grace,
+could scarcely do more than it had done. But he felt more at ease, less
+desperately anxious, more childlike, more content to rest on the
+authority that claimed without explanation, and asserted that the world,
+as a matter of fact, proved by evidences without and within, was made
+this way and not that, for this purpose and not the other. Yet he had
+used the conveniences which he hated; he had left London a bare twelve
+hours before, and now here he sat in a place which was either a stagnant
+backwater of life, or else the very mid-current of it; he was not yet
+sure which.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a step outside, a handle was turned; and the
+Cardinal-Protector came through.
+
+Percy had not seen him for four years, and for a moment scarcely
+recognised him.
+
+It was a very old man that he saw now, bent and feeble, his face
+covered with wrinkles, crowned by very thin, white hair, and the little
+scarlet cap on top; he was in his black Benedictine habit with a plain
+abbatial cross on his breast, and walked hesitatingly, with a black
+stick. The only sign of vigour was in the narrow bright slit of his
+eyes showing beneath drooping lids. He held out his hand, smiling, and
+Percy, remembering in time that he was in the Vatican, bowed low only
+as he kissed the amethyst.
+
+“Welcome to Rome, father,” said the old man, speaking with an unexpected
+briskness. “They told me you were here half-an-hour ago; I thought I
+would leave you to wash and have your coffee.”
+
+Percy murmured something.
+
+“Yes; you are tired, no doubt,” said the Cardinal, pulling out a chair.
+
+“Indeed not, your Eminence. I slept excellently.”
+
+The Cardinal made a little gesture to a chair.
+
+“But I must have a word with you. The Holy Father wishes to see you at
+eleven o’clock.”
+
+Percy started a little.
+
+“We move quickly in these days, father.... There is no time to dawdle.
+You understand that you are to remain in Rome for the present?”
+
+“I have made all arrangements for that, your Eminence.”
+
+“That is very well.... We are pleased with you here, Father Franklin.
+The Holy Father has been greatly impressed by your comments. You have
+foreseen things in a very remarkable manner.”
+
+Percy flushed with pleasure. It was almost the first hint of
+encouragement he had had. Cardinal Martin went on.
+
+“I may say that you are considered our most valuable
+correspondent--certainly in England. That is why you are summoned. You
+are to help us here in future--a kind of consultor: any one can relate
+facts; not every one can understand them.... You look very young,
+father. How old are you?”
+
+“I am thirty-three, your Eminence.”
+
+“Ah! your white hair helps you.... Now, father, will you come with me
+into my room? It is now eight o’clock. I will keep you till nine--no
+longer. Then you shall have some rest, and at eleven I shall take you up
+to his Holiness.”
+
+Percy rose with a strange sense of elation, and ran to open the door for
+the Cardinal to go through.
+
+
+III
+
+At a few minutes before eleven Percy came out of his little white-washed
+room in his new ferraiuola, soutane and buckle shoes, and tapped at the
+door of the Cardinal’s room.
+
+He felt a great deal more self-possessed now. He had talked to the
+Cardinal freely and strongly, had described the effect that Felsenburgh
+had had upon London, and even the paralysis that had seized upon
+himself. He had stated his belief that they were on the edge of a
+movement unparalleled in history: he related little scenes that he had
+witnessed--a group kneeling before a picture of Felsenburgh, a dying man
+calling him by name, the aspect of the crowd that had waited in
+Westminster to hear the result of the offer made to the stranger. He
+showed him half-a-dozen cuttings from newspapers, pointing out their
+hysterical enthusiasm; he even went so far as to venture upon prophecy,
+and to declare his belief that persecution was within reasonable
+distance.
+
+“The world seems very oddly alive,” he said; “it is as if the whole
+thing was flushed and nervous.”
+
+The Cardinal nodded.
+
+“We, too,” he said, “even we feel it.”
+
+For the rest the Cardinal had sat watching him out of his narrow eyes,
+nodding from time to time, putting an occasional question, but listening
+throughout with great attention.
+
+“And your recommendations, father---” he had said, and then interrupted
+himself. “No, that is too much to ask. The Holy Father will speak of
+that.”
+
+He had congratulated him upon his Latin then--for they had spoken in
+that language throughout this second interview; and Percy had explained
+how loyal Catholic England had been in obeying the order, given ten
+years before, that Latin should become to the Church what Esperanto was
+becoming to the world.
+
+“That is very well,” said the old man. “His Holiness will be pleased at
+that.”
+
+At his second tap the door opened and the Cardinal came out, taking him
+by the arm without a word; and together they turned to the lift
+entrance.
+
+Percy ventured to make a remark as they slid noiselessly up towards the
+papal apartment.
+
+“I am surprised at the lift, your Eminence, and the typewriter in the
+audience-room.”
+
+“Why, father?”
+
+“Why, all the rest of Rome is back in the old days.”
+
+The Cardinal looked at him, puzzled.
+
+“Is it? I suppose it is. I never thought of that.”
+
+A Swiss guard flung back the door of the lift, saluted and went before
+them along the plain flagged passage to where his comrade stood. Then he
+saluted again and went back. A Pontifical chamberlain, in all the sombre
+glory of purple, black, and a Spanish ruff, peeped from the door, and
+made haste to open it. It really seemed almost incredible that such
+things still existed.
+
+“In a moment, your Eminence,” he said in Latin. “Will your Eminence wait
+here?”
+
+It was a little square room, with half-a-dozen doors, plainly contrived
+out of one of the huge old halls, for it was immensely high, and the
+tarnished gilt cornice vanished directly in two places into the white
+walls. The partitions, too, seemed thin; for as the two men sat down
+there was a murmur of voices faintly audible, the shuffling of
+footsteps, and the old eternal click of the typewriter from which Percy
+hoped he had escaped. They were alone in the room, which was furnished
+with the same simplicity as the Cardinal’s--giving the impression of a
+curious mingling of ascetic poverty and dignity by its red-tiled floor,
+its white walls, its altar and two vast bronze candlesticks of
+incalculable value that stood on the dais. The shutters here, too, were
+drawn; and there was nothing to distract Percy from the excitement that
+surged up now tenfold in heart and brain.
+
+It was _Papa Angelicus_ whom he was about to see; that amazing old man
+who had been appointed Secretary of State just fifty years ago, at the
+age of thirty, and Pope nine years previously. It was he who had carried
+out the extraordinary policy of yielding the churches throughout the
+whole of Italy to the Government, in exchange for the temporal lordship
+of Rome, and who had since set himself to make it a city of saints. He
+had cared, it appeared, nothing whatever for the world’s opinion; his
+policy, so far as it could be called one, consisted in a very simple
+thing: he had declared in Epistle after Epistle that the object of the
+Church was to do glory to God by producing supernatural virtues in man,
+and that nothing at all was of any significance or importance except so
+far as it effected this object. He had further maintained that since
+Peter was the Rock, the City of Peter was the Capital of the world, and
+should set an example to its dependency: this could not be done unless
+Peter ruled his City, and therefore he had sacrificed every church and
+ecclesiastical building in the country for that one end. Then he had set
+about ruling his city: he had said that on the whole the latter-day
+discoveries of man tended to distract immortal souls from a
+contemplation of eternal verities--not that these discoveries could be
+anything but good in themselves, since after all they gave insight into
+the wonderful laws of God--but that at present they were too exciting to
+the imagination. So he had removed the trams, the volors, the
+laboratories, the manufactories--saying that there was plenty of room
+for them outside Rome--and had allowed them to be planted in the
+suburbs: in their place he had raised shrines, religious houses and
+Calvaries. Then he had attended further to the souls of his subjects.
+Since Rome was of limited area, and, still more because the world
+corrupted without its proper salt, he allowed no man under the age of
+fifty to live within its walls for more than one month in each year,
+except those who received his permit. They might live, of course,
+immediately outside the city (and they did, by tens of thousands), but
+they were to understand that by doing so they sinned against the spirit,
+though not the letter, of their Father’s wishes. Then he had divided the
+city into national quarters, saying that as each nation had its peculiar
+virtues, each was to let its light shine steadily in its proper place.
+Rents had instantly begun to rise, so he had legislated against that by
+reserving in each quarter a number of streets at fixed prices, and had
+issued an ipso facto excommunication against all who erred in this
+respect. The rest were abandoned to the millionaires. He had retained
+the Leonine City entirely at his own disposal. Then he had restored
+Capital Punishment, with as much serene gravity as that with which he
+had made himself the derision of the civilised world in other matters,
+saying that though human life was holy, human virtue was more holy
+still; and he had added to the crime of murder, the crimes of adultery,
+idolatry and apostasy, for which this punishment was theoretically
+sanctioned. There had not been, however, more than two such executions
+in the eight years of his reign, since criminals, of course, with the
+exception of devoted believers, instantly made their way to the suburbs,
+where they were no longer under his jurisdiction.
+
+But he had not stayed here. He had sent once more ambassadors to every
+country in the world, informing the Government of each of their arrival.
+No attention was paid to this, beyond that of laughter; but he had
+continued, undisturbed, to claim his rights, and, meanwhile, used his
+legates for the important work of disseminating his views. Epistles
+appeared from time to time in every town, laying down the principles of
+the papal claims with as much tranquillity as if they were everywhere
+acknowledged. Freemasonry was steadily denounced, as well as democratic
+ideas of every kind; men were urged to remember their immortal souls and
+the Majesty of God, and to reflect upon the fact that in a few years all
+would be called to give their account to Him Who was Creator and Ruler
+of the world, Whose Vicar was John XXIV, P.P., whose name and seal were
+appended.
+
+That was a line of action that took the world completely by surprise.
+People had expected hysteria, argument, and passionate exhortation;
+disguised emissaries, plots, and protests. There were none of these. It
+was as if progress had not yet begun, and volors were uninvented, as if
+the entire universe had not come to disbelieve in God, and to discover
+that itself was God. Here was this silly old man, talking in his sleep,
+babbling of the Cross, and the inner life and the forgiveness of sins,
+exactly as his predecessors had talked two thousand years before. Well,
+it was only one sign more that Rome had lost not only its power, but its
+common sense as well. It was really time that something should be done.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And this was the man, thought Percy, _Papa Angelicus_, whom he was to
+see in a minute or two.
+
+The Cardinal put his hand on the priest’s knee as the door opened, and a
+purple prelate appeared, bowing.
+
+“Only this,” he said. “Be absolutely frank.”
+
+Percy stood up, trembling. Then he followed his patron towards the inner
+door.
+
+
+IV
+
+A white figure sat in the green gloom, beside a great writing-table,
+three or four yards away, but with the chair wheeled round to face the
+door by which the two entered. So much Percy saw as he performed the
+first genuflection. Then he dropped his eyes, advanced, genuflected
+again with the other, advanced once more, and for the third time
+genuflected, lifting the thin white hand, stretched out, to his lips. He
+heard the door close as he stood up.
+
+“Father Franklin, Holiness,” said the Cardinal’s voice at his ear.
+
+A white-sleeved arm waved to a couple of chairs set a yard away, and the
+two sat down.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+While the Cardinal, talking in slow Latin, said a few sentences,
+explaining that this was the English priest whose correspondence had
+been found so useful, Percy began to look with all his eyes.
+
+He knew the Pope’s face well, from a hundred photographs and moving
+pictures; even his gestures were familiar to him, the slight bowing of
+the head in assent, the tiny eloquent movement of the hands; but Percy,
+with a sense of being platitudinal, told himself that the living
+presence was very different.
+
+It was a very upright old man that he saw in the chair before him, of
+medium height and girth, with hands clasping the bosses of his
+chair-arms, and an appearance of great and deliberate dignity. But it
+was at the face chiefly that he looked, dropping his gaze three or four
+times, as the Pope’s blue eyes turned on him. They were extraordinary
+eyes, reminding him of what historians said of Pius X.; the lids drew
+straight lines across them, giving him the look of a hawk, but the rest
+of the face contradicted them. There was no sharpness in that. It was
+neither thin nor fat, but beautifully modelled in an oval outline: the
+lips were clean-cut, with a look of passion in their curves; the nose
+came down in an aquiline sweep, ending in chiselled nostrils; the chin
+was firm and cloven, and the poise of the whole head was strangely
+youthful. It was a face of great generosity and sweetness, set at an
+angle between defiance and humility, but ecclesiastical from ear to ear
+and brow to chin; the forehead was slightly compressed at the temples,
+and beneath the white cap lay white hair. It had been the subject of
+laughter at the music-halls nine years before, when the composite face
+of well-known priests had been thrown on a screen, side by side with the
+new Pope’s, for the two were almost indistinguishable.
+
+Percy found himself trying to sum it up, but nothing came to him except
+the word “priest.” It was that, and that was all. _Ecce sacerdos
+magnus!_ He was astonished at the look of youth, for the Pope was
+eighty-eight this year; yet his figure was as upright as that of a man
+of fifty, his shoulders unbowed, his head set on them like an athlete’s,
+and his wrinkles scarcely perceptible in the half light. _Papa
+Angelicus!_ reflected Percy.
+
+The Cardinal ceased his explanations, and made a little gesture. Percy
+drew up all his faculties tense and tight to answer the questions that
+he knew were coming.
+
+“I welcome you, my son,” said a very soft, resonant voice.
+
+Percy bowed, desperately, from the waist.
+
+The Pope dropped his eyes again, lifted a paper-weight with his left
+hand, and began to play with it gently as he talked.
+
+“Now, my son, deliver a little discourse. I suggest to you three
+heads--what has happened, what is happening, what will happen, with a
+peroration as to what should happen.”
+
+Percy drew a long breath, settled himself back, clasped the fingers of
+his left hand in the fingers of his right, fixed his eyes firmly upon
+the cross-embroidered red shoe opposite, and began. (Had he not
+rehearsed this a hundred times!)
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He first stated his theme; to the effect that all the forces of the
+civilised world were concentrating into two camps--the world and God. Up
+to the present time the forces of the world had been incoherent and
+spasmodic, breaking out in various ways--revolutions and wars had been
+like the movements of a mob, undisciplined, unskilled, and unrestrained.
+To meet this, the Church, too, had acted through her Catholicity--
+dispersion rather than concentration: _franc-tireurs_ had been opposed
+to _franc-tireurs_. But during the last hundred years there had been
+indications that the method of warfare was to change. Europe, at any
+rate, had grown weary of internal strife; the unions first of Labour,
+then of Capital, then of Labour and Capital combined, illustrated this
+in the economic sphere; the peaceful partition of Africa in the
+political sphere; the spread of Humanitarian religion in the spiritual
+sphere. Over against this must be placed the increased centralisation of
+the Church. By the wisdom of her pontiffs, over-ruled by God Almighty,
+the lines had been drawing tighter every year. He instanced the
+abolition of all local usages, including those so long cherished by the
+East, the establishment of the Cardinal-Protectorates in Rome, the
+enforced merging of all friars into one Order, though retaining their
+familiar names, under the authority of the supreme General; all monks,
+with the exception of the Carthusians, the Carmelites and the Trappists,
+into another; of the three excepted into a third; and the classification
+of nuns after the same plan. Further, he remarked on the more recent
+decrees, establishing the sense of the Vatican decision on
+infallibility, the new version of Canon Law, the immense simplification
+that had taken place in ecclesiastical government, the hierarchy,
+rubrics and the affairs of missionary countries, with the new and
+extraordinary privileges granted to mission priests. At this point he
+became aware that his self-consciousness had left him, and he began,
+even with little gestures, and a slightly raised voice, to enlarge on
+the significance of the last month’s events.
+
+All that had gone before, he said, pointed to what had now actually
+taken place--namely, the reconciliation of the world on a basis other
+than that of Divine Truth. It was the intention of God and of His Vicars
+to reconcile all men in Christ Jesus; but the corner-stone had once more
+been rejected, and instead of the chaos that the pious had prophesied,
+there was coming into existence a unity unlike anything known in
+history. This was the more deadly from the fact that it contained so
+many elements of indubitable good. War, apparently, was now extinct, and
+it was not Christianity that had done it; union was now seen to be
+better than disunion, and the lesson had been learned apart from the
+Church. In fact, natural virtues had suddenly waxed luxuriant, and
+supernatural virtues were despised. Friendliness took the place of
+charity, contentment the place of hope, and knowledge the place of
+faith.
+
+Percy stopped, he had become conscious that he was preaching a kind of
+sermon.
+
+“Yes, my son,” said the kind voice. “What else?”
+
+What else?... Very well, continued Percy, movements such as these
+brought forth men, and the Man of this movement was Julian Felsenburgh.
+He had accomplished a work that--apart from God--seemed miraculous. He
+had broken down the eternal division between East and West, coming
+himself from the continent that alone could produce such powers; he had
+prevailed by sheer force of personality over the two supreme tyrants of
+life--religious fanaticism and party government. His influence over the
+impassive English was another miracle, yet he had also set on fire
+France, Germany, and Spain. Percy here described one or two of his
+little scenes, saying that it was like the vision of a god: and he
+quoted freely some of the titles given to the Man by sober, unhysterical
+newspapers. Felsenburgh was called the Son of Man, because he was so
+pure-bred a cosmopolitan; the Saviour of the World, because he had slain
+war and himself survived--even--even--here Percy’s voice faltered--even
+Incarnate God, because he was the perfect representative of divine man.
+
+The quiet, priestly face watching opposite never winced or moved; and he
+went on.
+
+Persecution, he said, was coming. There had been a riot or two already.
+But persecution was not to be feared. It would no doubt cause
+apostasies, as it had always done, but these were deplorable only on
+account of the individual apostates. On the other hand, it would
+reassure the faithful; and purge out the half-hearted. Once, in the
+early ages, Satan’s attack had been made on the bodily side, with whips
+and fire and beasts; in the sixteenth century it had been on the
+intellectual side; in the twentieth century on the springs of moral and
+spiritual life. Now it seemed as if the assault was on all three planes
+at once. But what was chiefly to be feared was the positive influence of
+Humanitarianism: it was coming, like the kingdom of God, with power; it
+was crushing the imaginative and the romantic, it was assuming rather
+than asserting its own truth; it was smothering with bolsters instead of
+wounding and stimulating with steel or controversy. It seemed to be
+forcing its way, almost objectively, into the inner world. Persons who
+had scarcely heard its name were professing its tenets; priests absorbed
+it, as they absorbed God in Communion--he mentioned the names of the
+recent apostates--children drank it in like Christianity itself. The
+soul “naturally Christian” seemed to be becoming “the soul naturally
+infidel.” Persecution, cried the priest, was to be welcomed like
+salvation, prayed for, and grasped; but he feared that the authorities
+were too shrewd, and knew the antidote and the poison apart. There might
+be individual martyrdoms--in fact there would be, and very many--but
+they would be in spite of secular government, not because of it.
+Finally, he expected, Humanitarianism would presently put on the dress
+of liturgy and sacrifice, and when that was done, the Church’s cause,
+unless God intervened, would be over.
+
+Percy sat back, trembling.
+
+“Yes, my son. And what do you think should be done?”
+
+Percy flung out his hands.
+
+“Holy Father--the mass, prayer, the rosary. These first and last. The
+world denies their power: it is on their power that Christians must
+throw all their weight. All things in Jesus Christ--in Jesus Christ,
+first and last. Nothing else can avail. He must do all, for we can do
+nothing.”
+
+The white head bowed. Then it rose erect.
+
+“Yes, my son.... But so long as Jesus Christ deigns to use us, we must
+be used. He is Prophet and King as well as Priest. We then, too, must be
+prophet and king as well as priest. What of Prophecy and Royalty?”
+
+The voice thrilled Percy like a trumpet.
+
+“Yes, Holiness.... For prophecy, then, let us preach charity; for
+Royalty, let us reign on crosses. We must love and suffer....” (He drew
+one sobbing breath.) “Your Holiness has preached charity always. Let
+charity then issue in good deeds. Let us be foremost in them; let us
+engage in trade honestly, in family life chastely, in government
+uprightly. And as for suffering--ah! Holiness!”
+
+His old scheme leaped back to his mind, and stood poised there
+convincing and imperious.
+
+“Yes, my son, speak plainly.”
+
+“Your Holiness--it is old--old as Rome--every fool has desired it: a new
+Order, Holiness--a new Order,” he stammered.
+
+The white hand dropped the paper-weight; the Pope leaned forward,
+looking intently at the priest.
+
+“Yes, my son?”
+
+Percy threw himself on his knees.
+
+“A new Order, Holiness--no habit or badge--subject to your Holiness
+only--freer than Jesuits, poorer than Franciscans, more mortified than
+Carthusians: men and women alike--the three vows with the intention of
+martyrdom; the Pantheon for their Church; each bishop responsible for
+their sustenance; a lieutenant in each country.... (Holiness, it is the
+thought of a fool.) ... And Christ Crucified for their patron.”
+
+The Pope stood up abruptly--so abruptly that Cardinal Martin sprang up
+too, apprehensive and terrified. It seemed that this young man had gone
+too far.
+
+Then the Pope sat down again, extending his hand.
+
+“God bless you, my son. You have leave to go.... Will your Eminence stay
+for a few minutes?”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+I
+
+The Cardinal said very little to Percy when they met again that evening,
+beyond congratulating him on the way he had borne himself with the Pope.
+It seemed that the priest had done right by his extreme frankness. Then
+he told him of his duties.
+
+Percy was to retain the couple of rooms that had been put at his
+disposal; he was to say mass, as a rule, in the Cardinal’s oratory; and
+after that, at nine, he was to present himself for instructions: he was
+to dine at noon with the Cardinal, after which he was to consider
+himself at liberty till _Ave Maria_: then, once more he was to be at his
+master’s disposal until supper. The work he would principally have to do
+would be the reading of all English correspondence, and the drawing up
+of a report upon it.
+
+Percy found it a very pleasant and serene life, and the sense of home
+deepened every day. He had an abundance of time to himself, which he
+occupied resolutely in relaxation. From eight to nine he usually walked
+abroad, going sedately through the streets with his senses passive,
+looking into churches, watching the people, and gradually absorbing the
+strange naturalness of life under ancient conditions. At times it
+appeared to him like an historical dream; at times it seemed that there
+was no other reality; that the silent, tense world of modern
+civilisation was itself a phantom, and that here was the simple
+naturalness of the soul’s childhood back again. Even the reading of the
+English correspondence did not greatly affect him, for the stream of his
+mind was beginning to run clear again in this sweet old channel; and he
+read, dissected, analysed and diagnosed with a deepening tranquillity.
+
+There was not, after all, a great deal of news. It was a kind of lull
+after storm. Felsenburgh was still in retirement; he had refused the
+offers made to him by France and Italy, as that of England; and,
+although nothing definite was announced, it seemed that he was confining
+himself at present to an unofficial attitude. Meanwhile the Parliaments
+of Europe were busy in the preliminary stages of code-revision. Nothing
+would be done, it was understood, until the autumn sessions.
+
+Life in Rome was very strange. The city had now become not only the
+centre of faith but, in a sense, a microcosm of it. It was divided into
+four huge quarters--Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Teutonic and Eastern--besides
+Trastevere, which was occupied almost entirely by Papal offices,
+seminaries, and schools. Anglo-Saxondom occupied the southwestern
+quarter, now entirely covered with houses, including the Aventine, the
+Celian and Testaccio. The Latins inhabited old Rome, between the Course
+and the river; the Teutons the northeastern quarter, bounded on the
+south by St. Laurence’s Street; and the Easterns the remaining quarter,
+of which the centre was the Lateran. In this manner the true Romans were
+scarcely conscious of intrusion; they possessed a multitude of their own
+churches, they were allowed to revel in narrow, dark streets and hold
+their markets; and it was here that Percy usually walked, in a passion
+of historical retrospect. But the other quarters were strange enough,
+too. It was curious to see how a progeny of Gothic churches, served by
+northern priests, had grown up naturally in the Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic
+districts, and how the wide, grey streets, the neat pavements, the
+severe houses, showed how the northerns had not yet realised the
+requirements of southern life. The Easterns, on the other hand,
+resembled the Latins; their streets were as narrow and dark, their
+smells as overwhelming, their churches as dirty and as homely, and their
+colours even more brilliant.
+
+Outside the walls the confusion was indescribable. If the city
+represented a carved miniature of the world, the suburbs represented the
+same model broken into a thousand pieces, tumbled in a bag and shot out
+at random. So far as the eye could see, on all sides from the roof of
+the Vatican, there stretched an endless plain of house-roofs, broken by
+spires, towers, domes and chimneys, under which lived human beings of
+every race beneath the sun. Here were the great manufactories, the
+monster buildings of the new world, the stations, the schools, the
+offices, all under secular dominion, yet surrounded by six millions of
+souls who lived here for love of religion. It was these who had
+despaired of modern life, tired out with change and effort, who had fled
+from the new system for refuge to the Church, but who could not obtain
+leave to live in the city itself. New houses were continually springing
+up in all directions. A gigantic compass, fixed by one leg in Rome, and
+with a span of five miles, would, if twirled, revolve through packed
+streets through its entire circle. Beyond that too houses stretched into
+the indefinite distance.
+
+But Percy did not realise the significance of all that he saw, until the
+occasion of the Pope’s name-day towards the end of August.
+
+It was yet cool and early, when he followed his patron, whom he was to
+serve as chaplain, along the broad passages of the Vatican towards the
+room where the Pope and Cardinals were to assemble. Through a window, as
+he looked out into the Piazza, the crowd was yet more dense, if that
+were possible, than it had been an hour before. The huge oval square was
+cobbled with heads, through which ran a broad road, kept by papal troops
+for the passage of the carriages; and up the broad ribbon, white in the
+eastern light, came monstrous vehicles, a blaze of gilding and colour
+and cream tint; slow cheers swelled up and died, and through all came
+the rush and patter of wheels over the stones, like the sound of a
+tide-swept pebbly beach.
+
+As they waited in an ante-chamber, halted by the pressure in front and
+behind--a pack of scarlet and white and purple--he looked out again, and
+realised what he had known only intellectually before, that here before
+his eyes was the royalty of the old world assembled--and he began to
+perceive its significance.
+
+Round the steps of the basilica spread a great fan of coaches, each
+yoked to eight horses--the white of France and Spain, the black of
+Germany, Italy and Russia, and the cream-coloured of England. Those
+stood out in the near half-circle, and beyond was the sweep of the
+lesser powers: Greece, Norway, Sweden, Roumania and the Balkan States.
+One, the Turk, was alone wanting, he reminded himself. The emblems of
+some were visible--eagles, lions, leopards--guarding the royal crown
+above the roof of each. From the foot of the steps to the head ran a
+broad scarlet carpet, lined with soldiers.
+
+Percy leaned against the shutter, and began to meditate. Here was all
+that was left of Royalty. He had seen their palaces before, here and
+there in the various quarters, with standards flying, and
+scarlet-liveried men lounging on the steps. He had raised his hat a
+dozen times as a landau thundered past him up the Course; he had even
+seen the lilies of France and the leopards of England pass together in
+the solemn parade of the Pincian Hill. He had read in the papers every
+now and again during the last five years that family after family had
+made its way to Rome, after papal recognition had been granted; he had
+been told by the Cardinal on the previous evening that William of
+England, with his Consort, had landed at Ostia in the morning and that
+the tale of the Powers was complete. But he had never before realised
+the stupendous, overwhelming fact of the assembly of the world’s royalty
+under the shadow of Peter’s Throne, nor the appalling danger that its
+presence constituted in the midst of a democratic world. That world, he
+knew, affected to laugh at the folly and the childishness of it all--at
+the desperate play-acting of Divine Right on the part of fallen and
+despised families; but the same world, he knew very well, had not yet
+lost quite all its sentiment; and if that sentiment should happen to
+become resentful---
+
+The pressure relaxed; Percy slipped out of the recess, and followed in
+the slow-moving stream.
+
+Half-an-hour later he was in his place among the ecclesiastics, as the
+papal procession came out through the glimmering dusk of the chapel of
+the Blessed Sacrament into the nave of the enormous church; but even
+before he had entered the chapel he heard the quiet roar of recognition
+and the cry of the trumpets that greeted the Supreme Pontiff as he came
+out, a hundred yards ahead, borne on the _sedia gestatoria_, with the
+fans going behind him. When Percy himself came out, five minutes later,
+walking in his quaternion, and saw the sight that was waiting, he
+remembered with a sudden throb at his heart that other sight he had seen
+in London in a summer dawn three months before....
+
+Far ahead, seeming to cleave its way through the surging heads, like the
+poop of an ancient ship, moved the canopy beneath which sat the Lord of
+the world, and between him and the priest, as if it were the wake of
+that same ship, swayed the gorgeous procession--Protonotaries Apostolic,
+Generals of Religious Orders and the rest--making its way along with
+white, gold, scarlet and silver foam between the living banks on either
+side. Overhead hung the splendid barrel of the roof, and far in front
+the haven of God’s altar reared its monstrous pillars, beneath which
+burned the seven yellow stars that were the harbour lights of sanctity.
+It was an astonishing sight, but too vast and bewildering to do anything
+but oppress the observers with a consciousness of their own futility.
+The enormous enclosed air, the giant statues, the dim and distant roofs,
+the indescribable concert of sound--of the movement of feet, the murmur
+of ten thousand voices, the peal of organs like the crying of gnats, the
+thin celestial music--the faint suggestive smell of incense and men and
+bruised bay and myrtle--and, supreme above all, the vibrant atmosphere
+of human emotion, shot with supernatural aspiration, as the Hope of the
+World, the holder of Divine Vice-Royalty, passed on his way to stand
+between God and man--this affected the priest as the action of a drug
+that at once lulls and stimulates, that blinds while it gives new
+vision, that deafens while it opens stopped ears, that exalts while it
+plunges into new gulfs of consciousness. Here, then, was the other
+formulated answer to the problem of life. The two Cities of Augustine
+lay for him to choose. The one was that of a world self-originated,
+self-organised and self-sufficient, interpreted by such men as Marx and
+Herve, socialists, materialists, and, in the end, hedonists, summed up
+at last in Felsenburgh. The other lay displayed in the sight he saw
+before him, telling of a Creator and of a creation, of a Divine purpose,
+a redemption, and a world transcendent and eternal from which all sprang
+and to which all moved. One of the two, John and Julian, was the Vicar,
+and the other the Ape, of God.... And Percy’s heart in one more spasm of
+conviction made its choice....
+
+But the summit was not yet reached.
+
+As Percy came at last out from the nave beneath the dome, on his way to
+the tribune beyond the papal throne, he became aware of a new element.
+
+A great space was cleared about the altar and confession, extending, as
+he could see at least on his side, to the point that marked the entrance
+to the transepts; at this point ran rails straight across from side to
+side, continuing the lines of the nave. Beyond this red-hung barrier lay
+a gradual slope of faces, white and motionless; a glimmer of steel
+bounded it, and above, a third of the distance down the transept, rose
+in solemn serried array a line of canopies. These were of scarlet, like
+cardinalitial baldachini, but upon the upright surface of each burned
+gigantic coats supported by beasts and topped by crowns. Under each was
+a figure or two--no more--in splendid isolation, and through the
+interspaces between the thrones showed again a misty slope of faces.
+
+His heart quickened as he saw it--as he swept his eyes round and across
+to the right and saw as in a mirror the replica of the left in the right
+transept. It was there then that they sat--those lonely survivors of
+that strange company of persons who, till half-a-century ago, had
+reigned as God’s temporal Vicegerents with the consent of their
+subjects. They were unrecognised, now, save by Him from whom they drew
+their sovereignty--pinnacles clustering and hanging from a dome, from
+which the walls had been withdrawn. These were men and women who had
+learned at last that power comes from above, and their title to rule
+came not from their subjects but from the Supreme Ruler of
+all--shepherds without sheep, captains without soldiers to command. It
+was piteous--horribly piteous, yet inspiring. The act of faith was so
+sublime; and Percy’s heart quickened as he understood it. These, then,
+men and women like himself, were not ashamed to appeal from man to God,
+to assume insignia which the world regarded as playthings, but which to
+them were emblems of supernatural commission. Was there not mirrored
+here, he asked himself, some far-off shadow of One Who rode on the colt
+of an ass amid the sneers of the great and the enthusiasm of
+children?...
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was yet more kindling as the mass went on, and he saw the male
+sovereigns come down to do their services at the altar, and to go to and
+fro between it and the Throne. There they went bareheaded, the stately
+silent figures. The English king, once again _Fidei Defensor_, bore the
+train in place of the old king of Spain, who, with the Austrian Emperor,
+alone of all European sovereigns, had preserved the unbroken continuity
+of faith. The old man leaned over his fald-stool, mumbling and weeping,
+even crying out now and again in love and devotion, as, like Simeon, he
+saw his Salvation. The Austrian Emperor twice administered the Lavabo;
+the German sovereign, who had lost his throne and all but his life upon
+his conversion four years before, by a new privilege placed and withdrew
+the cushion, as his Lord kneeled before the Lord of them both. So
+movement by movement the gorgeous drama was enacted; the murmuring of
+the crowds died to a stillness that was but one wordless prayer as the
+tiny White Disc rose between the white hands, and the thin angelic music
+pealed in the dome. For here was the one hope of these thousands, as
+mighty and as little as once within the Manger. There was none other
+that fought for them but only God. Surely then, if the blood of men and
+the tears of women could not avail to move the Judge and Observer of all
+from His silence, surely at least here the bloodless Death of His only
+Son, that once on Calvary had darkened heaven and rent the earth,
+pleaded now with such sorrowful splendour upon this island of faith amid
+a sea of laughter and hatred--this at least must avail! How could it
+not?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Percy had just sat down, tired out with the long ceremonies, when the
+door opened abruptly, and the Cardinal, still in his robes, came in
+swiftly, shutting the door behind him.
+
+“Father Franklin,” he said, in a strange breathless voice, “there is the
+worst of news. Felsenburgh is appointed President of Europe.”
+
+
+II
+
+It was late that night before Percy returned, completely exhausted by
+his labours. For hour after hour he had sat with the Cardinal, opening
+despatches that poured into the electric receivers from all over Europe,
+and were brought in one by one into the quiet sitting-room. Three times
+in the afternoon the Cardinal had been sent for, once by the Pope and
+twice to the Quirinal.
+
+There was no doubt at all that the news was true; and it seemed that
+Felsenburgh must have waited deliberately for the offer. All others he
+had refused. There had been a Convention of the Powers, each of whom had
+been anxious to secure him, and each of whom had severally failed; these
+private claims had been withdrawn, and an united message sent. The new
+proposal was to the effect that Felsenburgh should assume a position
+hitherto undreamed of in democracy; that he should receive a House of
+Government in every capital of Europe; that his veto of any measure
+should be final for three years; that any measure he chose to introduce
+three times in three consecutive years should become law; that his title
+should be that of President of Europe. From his side practically nothing
+was asked, except that he should refuse any other official position
+offered him that did not receive the sanction of all the Powers. And all
+this, Percy saw very well, involved the danger of an united Europe
+increased tenfold. It involved all the stupendous force of Socialism
+directed by a brilliant individual. It was the combination of the
+strongest characteristics of the two methods of government. The offer
+had been accepted by Felsenburgh after eight hours’ silence.
+
+It was remarkable, too, to observe how the news had been accepted by the
+two other divisions of the world. The East was enthusiastic; America was
+divided. But in any case America was powerless: the balance of the world
+was overwhelmingly against her.
+
+Percy threw himself, as he was, on to his bed, and lay there with
+drumming pulses, closed eyes and a huge despair at his heart. The world
+indeed had risen like a giant over the horizons of Rome, and the holy
+city was no better now than a sand castle before a tide. So much he
+grasped. As to how ruin would come, in what form and from what
+direction, he neither knew nor cared. Only he knew now that it would
+come.
+
+He had learned by now something of his own temperament; and he turned
+his eyes inwards to observe himself bitterly, as a doctor in mortal
+disease might with a dreadful complacency diagnose his own symptoms. It
+was even a relief to turn from the monstrous mechanism of the world to
+see in miniature one hopeless human heart. For his own religion he no
+longer feared; he knew, as absolutely as a man may know the colour of
+his eyes, that it was secure again and beyond shaking. During those
+weeks in Rome the cloudy deposit had run clear and the channel was once
+more visible. Or, better still, that vast erection of dogma, ceremony,
+custom and morals in which he had been educated, and on which he had
+looked all his life (as a man may stare upon some great set-piece that
+bewilders him), seeing now one spark of light, now another, flare and
+wane in the darkness, had little by little kindled and revealed itself
+in one stupendous blaze of divine fire that explains itself. Huge
+principles, once bewildering and even repellent, were again luminously
+self-evident; he saw, for example, that while Humanity-Religion
+endeavoured to abolish suffering the Divine Religion embraced it, so
+that the blind pangs even of beasts were within the Father’s Will and
+Scheme; or that while from one angle one colour only of the web of life
+was visible--material, or intellectual, or artistic--from another the
+Supernatural was as eminently obvious. Humanity-Religion could only be
+true if at least half of man’s nature, aspirations and sorrows were
+ignored. Christianity, on the other hand, at least included and
+accounted for these, even if it did not explain them. This ... and this
+... and this ... all made the one and perfect whole. There was the
+Catholic Faith, more certain to him than the existence of himself: it
+was true and alive. He might be damned, but God reigned. He might go
+mad, but Jesus Christ was Incarnate Deity, proving Himself so by death
+and Resurrection, and John his Vicar. These things were as the bones of
+the Universe--facts beyond doubting--if they were not true, nothing
+anywhere was anything but a dream.
+
+Difficulties?--Why, there were ten thousand. He did not in the least
+understand why God had made the world as it was, nor how Hell could be
+the creation of Love, nor how bread was transubstantiated into the Body
+of God but--well, these things were so. He had travelled far, he began
+to see, from his old status of faith, when he had believed that divine
+truth could be demonstrated on intellectual grounds. He had learned now
+(he knew not how) that the supernatural cried to the supernatural; the
+Christ without to the Christ within; that pure human reason indeed could
+not contradict, yet neither could it adequately prove the mysteries of
+faith, except on premisses visible only to him who receives Revelation
+as a fact; that it is the moral state, rather than the intellectual, to
+which the Spirit of God speaks with the greater certitude. That which he
+had both learned and taught he now knew, that Faith, having, like man
+himself, a body and a spirit--an historical expression and an inner
+verity--speaks now by one, now by another. This man believes because he
+sees--accepts the Incarnation or the Church from its credentials; that
+man, perceiving that these things are spiritual facts, yields himself
+wholly to the message and authority of her who alone professes them, as
+well as to the manifestation of them upon the historical plane; and in
+the darkness leans upon her arm. Or, best of all, because he has
+believed, now he sees.
+
+So he looked with a kind of interested indolence at other tracts of his
+nature.
+
+First, there was his intellect, puzzled beyond description, demanding,
+Why, why, why? Why was it allowed? How was it conceivable that God did
+not intervene, and that the Father of men could permit His dear world to
+be so ranged against Him? What did He mean to do? Was this eternal
+silence never to be broken? It was very well for those that had the
+Faith, but what of the countless millions who were settling down in
+contented blasphemy? Were these not, too, His children and the sheep of
+His pasture? What was the Catholic Church made for if not to convert the
+world, and why then had Almighty God allowed it, on the one side, to
+dwindle to a handful, and, on the other, the world to find its peace
+apart from Him?
+
+He considered his emotions, but there was no comfort there, no stimulus.
+Oh! yes; he could pray still, by mere cold acts of the will, and his
+theology told him that God accepted such. He could say “_Adveniat regnum
+tuum. ... Fiat voluntas tua_,” five thousand times a day, if God wanted
+that; but there was no sting or touch, no sense of vibration through the
+cords that his will threw up to the Heavenly Throne. What in the world
+then did God want him to do? Was it just then to repeat formulas, to lie
+still, to open despatches, to listen through the telephone, and to
+suffer?
+
+And then the rest of the world--the madness that had seized upon the
+nations; the amazing stories that had poured in that day of the men in
+Paris, who, raving like Bacchantes, had stripped themselves naked in the
+Place de Concorde, and stabbed themselves to the heart, crying out to
+thunders of applause that life was too enthralling to be endured; of the
+woman who sang herself mad last night in Spain, and fell laughing and
+foaming in the concert hall at Seville; of the crucifixion of the
+Catholics that morning in the Pyrenees, and the apostasy of three
+bishops in Germany.... And this ... and this ... and a thousand more
+horrors were permitted, and God made no sign and spoke no word....
+
+There was a tap, and Percy sprang up as the Cardinal came in.
+
+He looked horribly worn; and his eyes had a kind of sunken brilliance
+that revealed fever. He made a little motion to Percy to sit down, and
+himself sat in the deep chair, trembling a little, and gathering his
+buckled feet beneath his red-buttoned cassock.
+
+“You must forgive me, father,” he said. “I am anxious for the Bishop’s
+safety. He should be here by now.”
+
+This was the Bishop of Southwark, Percy remembered, who had left England
+early that morning.
+
+“He is coming straight through, your Eminence?”
+
+“Yes; he should have been here by twenty-three. It is after midnight, is
+it not?”
+
+As he spoke, the bells chimed out the half-hour.
+
+It was nearly quiet now. All day the air had been full of sound; mobs
+had paraded the suburbs; the gates of the City had been barred, yet that
+was only an earnest of what was to be expected when the world understood
+itself.
+
+The Cardinal seemed to recover himself after a few minutes’ silence.
+
+“You look tired out, father,” he said kindly.
+
+Percy smiled.
+
+“And your Eminence?” he said.
+
+The old man smiled too.
+
+“Why, yes,” he said. “I shall not last much longer, father. And then it
+will be you to suffer.”
+
+Percy sat up, suddenly, sick at heart.
+
+“Why, yes,” said the Cardinal. “The Holy Father has arranged it. You are
+to succeed me, you know. It need be no secret.”
+
+Percy drew a long trembling breath.
+
+“Eminence,” he began piteously.
+
+The other lifted a thin old hand.
+
+“I understand all that,” he said softly. “You wish to die, is it not
+so?--and be at peace. There are many who wish that. But we must suffer
+first. _Et pati et mori_. Father Franklin, there must be no faltering.”
+
+There was a long silence.
+
+The news was too stunning to convey anything to the priest but a sense
+of horrible shock. The thought had simply never entered his mind that
+he, a man under forty, should be considered eligible to succeed this
+wise, patient old prelate. As for the honour--Percy was past that now,
+even had he thought of it. There was but one view before him--of a long
+and intolerable journey, on a road that went uphill, to be traversed
+with a burden on his shoulders that he could not support.
+
+Yet he recognised its inevitability. The fact was announced to him as
+indisputable; it was to be; there was nothing to be said. But it was as
+if one more gulf had opened, and he stared into it with a dull, sick
+horror, incapable of expression.
+
+The Cardinal first broke the silence.
+
+“Father Franklin,” he said, “I have seen to-day a picture of
+Felsenburgh. Do you know whom I at first took it for?”
+
+Percy smiled listlessly.
+
+“Yes, father, I took it for you. Now, what do you make of that?”
+
+“I don’t understand, Eminence.”
+
+“Why---” He broke off, suddenly changing the subject.
+
+“There was a murder in the City to-day,” he said. “A Catholic stabbed a
+blasphemer.”
+
+Percy glanced at him again.
+
+“Oh! yes; he has not attempted to escape,” went on the old man. “He is
+in gaol.”
+
+“And---”
+
+“He will be executed. The trial will begin to-morrow.... It is sad
+enough. It is the first murder for eight months.”
+
+The irony of the position was evident enough to Percy as he sat
+listening to the deepening silence outside in the starlit night. Here
+was this poor city pretending that nothing was the matter, quietly
+administering its derided justice; and there, outside, were the forces
+gathering that would put an end to all. His enthusiasm seemed dead.
+There was no thrill from the thought of the splendid disregard of
+material facts of which this was one tiny instance, none of despairing
+courage or drunken recklessness. He felt like one who watches a fly
+washing his face on the cylinder of an engine--the huge steel slides
+along bearing the tiny life towards enormous death--another moment and
+it will be over; and yet the watcher cannot interfere. The supernatural
+thus lay, perfect and alive, but immeasurably tiny; the huge forces were
+in motion, the world was heaving up, and Percy could do nothing but
+stare and frown. Yet, as has been said, there was no shadow on his
+faith; the fly he knew was greater than the engine from the superiority
+of its order of life; if it were crushed, life would not be the final
+sufferer; so much he knew, but how it was so, he did not know.
+
+As the two sat there, again came a step and a tap; and a servant’s face
+looked in.
+
+“His Lordship is come, Eminence,” he said.
+
+The Cardinal rose painfully, supporting himself by the table. Then he
+paused, seeming to remember something, and fumbled in his pocket.
+
+“See that, father,” he said, and pushed a small silver disc towards the
+priest. “No; when I am gone.”
+
+Percy closed the door and came back, taking up the little round object.
+
+It was a coin, fresh from the mint. On one side was the familiar wreath
+with the word “fivepence” in the midst, with its Esperanto equivalent
+beneath, and on the other the profile of a man, with an inscription.
+Percy turned it to read:
+
+“JULIAN FELSENBURGH, LA PREZIDANTE DE UROPO.”
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+It was at ten o’clock on the following morning that the Cardinals were
+summoned to the Pope’s presence to hear the allocution.
+
+Percy, from his seat among the Consultors, watched them come in, men of
+every nation and temperament and age--the Italians all together,
+gesticulating, and flashing teeth; the Anglo-Saxons steady-faced and
+serious; an old French Cardinal leaning on his stick, walking with the
+English Benedictine. It was one of the great plain stately rooms of
+which the Vatican now chiefly consisted, seated length wise like a
+chapel. At the lower end, traversed by the gangway, were the seats of
+the Consultors; at the upper end, the dais with the papal throne. Three
+or four benches with desks before them, standing out beyond the
+Consultors’ seats, were reserved for the arrivals of the day before
+--prelates and priests who had poured into Rome from every European
+country on the announcement of the amazing news.
+
+Percy had not an idea as to what would be said. It was scarcely possible
+that nothing but platitudes would be uttered, yet what else could be
+said in view of the complete doubtfulness of the situation? All that was
+known even this morning was that the Presidentship of Europe was a fact;
+the little silver coin he had seen witnessed to that; that there had
+been an outburst of persecution, repressed sternly by local authorities;
+and that Felsenburgh was to-day to begin his tour from capital to
+capital. He was expected in Turin by the end of the week. From every
+Catholic centre throughout the world had come in messages imploring
+guidance; it was said that apostasy was rising like a tidal wave, that
+persecution threatened everywhere, and that even bishops were beginning
+to yield.
+
+As for the Holy Father, all was doubtful. Those who knew, said nothing;
+and the only rumour that escaped was to the effect that he had spent all
+night in prayer at the tomb of the Apostle....
+
+The murmur died suddenly to a rustle and a silence; there was a ripple
+of sinking heads along the seats as the door beside the canopy opened,
+and a moment later John, _Pater Patrum_, was on his throne.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At first Percy understood nothing. He stared only, as at a picture,
+through the dusty sunlight that poured in through the shrouded windows,
+at the scarlet lines to right and left, up to the huge scarlet canopy,
+and the white figure that sat there. Certainly, these southerners
+understood the power of effect. It was as vivid and impressive as a
+vision of the Host in a jewelled monstrance. Every accessory was
+gorgeous, the high room, the colour of the robes, the chains and
+crosses, and as the eye moved along to its climax it was met by a piece
+of dead white--as if glory was exhausted and declared itself impotent to
+tell the supreme secret. Scarlet and purple and gold were well enough
+for those who stood on the steps of the throne--they needed it; but for
+Him who sat there nothing was needed. Let colours die and sounds faint
+in the presence of God’s Viceroy. Yet what expression was required found
+itself adequately provided in that beautiful oval face, the poised
+imperious head, the sweet brilliant eyes and the clean-curved lips that
+spoke so strongly. There was not a sound in the room, not a rustle, nor
+a breathing--even without it seemed as if the world were allowing the
+supernatural to state its defence uninterruptedly, before summing up and
+clamouring condemnation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Percy made a violent effort at self-repression, clenched his hands and
+listened.
+
+“... Since this then is so, sons in Jesus Christ, it is for us to
+answer. We wrestle not, as the Doctor of the Gentiles teaches us,
+_against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against
+the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of
+wickedness in the high places. Wherefore_, he continues, _take unto you
+the armour of God_; and he further declares to us its nature--_the
+girdle of truth, the breastplate of justice, the shoes of peace, the
+shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit._
+
+“By this, therefore, the Word of God bids us to war, but not with the
+weapons of this world, for neither is His kingdom of this world; and it
+is to remind you of the principles of this warfare that we have summoned
+you to Our Presence.”
+
+The voice paused, and there was a rustling sigh along the seats. Then
+the voice continued on a slightly higher note.
+
+“It has ever been the wisdom of Our predecessors, as is also their duty,
+while keeping silence at certain seasons, at others to speak freely the
+whole counsel of God. From this duty We Ourself must not be deterred by
+the knowledge of Our own weakness and ignorance, but to trust rather
+that He Who has placed Us on this throne will deign to speak through Our
+mouth and use Our words to His glory.
+
+“First, then, it is necessary to utter Our sentence as to the new
+movement, as men call it, which has latterly been inaugurated by the
+rulers of this world.
+
+“We are not unmindful of the blessings of peace and unity, nor do We
+forget that the appearance of these things has been the fruit of much
+that we have condemned. It is this appearance of peace that has deceived
+many, causing them to doubt the promise of the Prince of Peace that it
+is through Him alone that we have access to the Father. That true peace,
+passing understanding, concerns not only the relations of men between
+themselves, but, supremely, the relations of men with their Maker; and
+it is in this necessary point that the efforts of the world are found
+wanting. It is not indeed to be wondered at that in a world which has
+rejected God this necessary matter should be forgotten. Men have
+thought--led astray by seducers--that the unity of nations was the
+greatest prize of this life, forgetting the words of our Saviour, Who
+said that He came to bring not peace but a sword, and that it is through
+many tribulations that we enter God’s Kingdom. First, then, there should
+be established the peace of man with God, and after that the unity of
+man with man will follow. _Seek ye first_, said Jesus Christ, _the
+kingdom of God--and then all these things shall be added unto you._
+
+“First, then, We once more condemn and anathematise the opinions of
+those who teach and believe the contrary of this; and we renew once more
+all the condemnations uttered by Ourself or Our predecessors against all
+those societies, organisations and communities that have been formed for
+the furtherance of an unity on another than a divine foundation; and We
+remind Our children throughout the world that it is forbidden to them to
+enter or to aid or to approve in any manner whatsoever any of those
+bodies named in such condemnations.”
+
+Percy moved in his seat, conscious of a touch of impatience.... The
+manner was superb, tranquil and stately as a river; but the matter a
+trifle banal. Here was this old reprobation of Freemasonry, repeated in
+unoriginal language.
+
+“Secondly,” went on the steady voice, “We wish to make known to you Our
+desires for the future; and here We tread on what many have considered
+dangerous ground.”
+
+Again came that rustle. Percy saw more than one cardinal lean forward
+with hand crooked at ear to hear the better. It was evident that
+something important was coming.
+
+“There are many points,” went on the high voice, “of which it is not Our
+intention to speak at this time, for of their own nature they are
+secret, and must be treated of on another occasion. But what We say
+here, We say to the world. Since the assaults of Our enemies are both
+open and secret, so too must be Our defences. This then is Our
+intention.”
+
+The Pope paused again, lifted one hand as if mechanically to his breast,
+and grasped the cross that hung there.
+
+“While the army of Christ is one, it consists of many divisions, each of
+which has its proper function and object. In times past God has raised
+up companies of His servants to do this or that particular work--the
+sons of St. Francis to preach poverty, those of St. Bernard to labour in
+prayer with all holy women dedicating themselves to this purpose, the
+Society of Jesus for the education of youth and the conversion of the
+heathen--together with all the other Religious Orders whose names are
+known throughout the world. Each such company was raised up at a
+particular season of need, and each has corresponded nobly with the
+divine vocation. It has also been the especial glory of each, for the
+furtherance of its intention, while pursuing its end, to cut off from
+itself all such activities (good in themselves) which would hinder that
+work for which God had called it into being--following in this matter
+the words of our Redeemer, _Every branch that beareth fruit, He purgeth
+it that it may bring forth more fruit._ At this present season, then, it
+appears to Our Humility that all such Orders (which once more We commend
+and bless) are not perfectly suited by the very conditions of their
+respective Rules to perform the great work which the time requires. Our
+warfare lies not with ignorance in particular, whether of the heathens
+to whom the Gospel has not yet come, or of those whose fathers have
+rejected it, nor with _the deceitful riches of this world_, nor with
+_science falsely so-called_, nor indeed with any one of those
+strongholds of infidelity against whom We have laboured in the past.
+Rather it appears as if at last the time was come of which the apostle
+spoke when he said that _that day shall not come, except there come a
+falling away first, and that Man of Sin be revealed, the Son of
+Perdition, who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called
+God._
+
+“It is not with this or that force that we are concerned, but rather
+with the unveiled immensity of that power whose time was foretold, and
+whose destruction is prepared.”
+
+The voice paused again, and Percy gripped the rail before him to stay
+the trembling of his hands. There was no rustle now, nothing but a
+silence that tingled and shook. The Pope drew a long breath, turned his
+head slowly to right and left, and went on more deliberately than ever.
+
+“It seems good, then, to Our Humility, that the Vicar of Christ should
+himself invite God’s children to this new warfare; and it is Our
+intention to enroll under the title of the Order of Christ Crucified the
+names of all who offer themselves to this supreme service. In doing this
+We are aware of the novelty of Our action, and the disregard of all such
+precautions as have been necessary in the past. We take counsel in this
+matter with none save Him Who we believe has inspired it.
+
+“First, then, let Us say, that although obedient service will be
+required from all who shall be admitted to this Order, Our primary
+intention in instituting it lies in God’s regard rather than in man’s,
+in appealing to Him Who asks our generosity rather than to those who
+deny it, and dedicating once more by a formal and deliberate act our
+souls and bodies to the heavenly Will and service of Him Who alone can
+rightly claim such offering, and will accept our poverty.
+
+“Briefly, we dictate only the following conditions.
+
+“None shall be capable of entering the Order except such as shall be
+above the age of seventeen years.
+
+“No badge, habit, nor insignia shall be attached to it.
+
+“The Three Evangelical Counsels shall be the foundation of the Rule, to
+which we add a fourth intention, namely, that of a desire to receive the
+crown of martyrdom and a purpose of embracing it.
+
+“The bishop of every diocese, if he himself shall enter the Order, shall
+be the superior within the limits of his own jurisdiction, and alone
+shall be exempt from the literal observance of the Vow of Poverty so
+long as he retains his see. Such bishops as do not feel the vocation to
+the Order shall retain their sees under the usual conditions, but shall
+have no Religious claim on the members of the Order.
+
+“Further, We announce Our intention of Ourself entering the Order as its
+supreme prelate, and of making Our profession within the course of a few
+days.
+
+“Further, We declare that in Our Own pontificate none shall be elevated
+to the Sacred College save those who have made their profession in the
+Order; and We shall dedicate shortly the Basilica of St. Peter and St.
+Paul as the central church of the Order, in which church We shall raise
+to the altars without any delay those happy souls who shall lay down
+their lives in the pursuance of their vocation.
+
+“Of that vocation it is unnecessary to speak beyond indicating that it
+may be pursued under any conditions laid down by the Superiors. As
+regards the novitiate, its conditions and requirements, we shall shortly
+issue the necessary directions. Each diocesan superior (for it is Our
+hope that none will hold back) shall have all such rights as usually
+appertain to Religious Superiors, and shall be empowered to employ his
+subjects in any work that, in his opinion, shall subserve the glory of
+God and the salvation of souls. It is Our Own intention to employ in Our
+service none except those who shall make their profession.”
+
+He raised his eyes once more, seemingly without emotion, then he
+continued:
+
+“So far, then, We have determined. On other matters We shall take
+counsel immediately; but it is Our wish that these words shall be
+communicated to all the world, that there may be no delay in making
+known what it is that Christ through His Vicar asks of all who profess
+the Divine Name. We offer no rewards except those which God Himself has
+promised to those that love Him, and lay down their life for Him; no
+promise of peace, save of that which passeth understanding; no home save
+that which befits pilgrims and sojourners who seek a City to come; no
+honour save the world’s contempt; no life, save that which is hid with
+Christ in God.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+I
+
+Oliver Brand, seated in his little private room at Whitehall, was
+expecting a visitor. It was already close upon ten o’clock, and at
+half-past he must be in the House. He had hoped that Mr. Francis,
+whoever he might be, would not detain him long. Even now, every moment
+was a respite, for the work had become simply prodigious during the last
+weeks.
+
+But he was not reprieved for more than a minute, for the last boom from
+the Victoria Tower had scarcely ceased to throb when the door opened and
+a clerkly voice uttered the name he was expecting.
+
+Oliver shot one quick look at the stranger, at his drooping lids and
+down-turned mouth, summed him up fairly and accurately in the moments
+during which they seated themselves, and went briskly to business.
+
+“At twenty-five minutes past, sir, I must leave this room,” he said.
+“Until then---” he made a little gesture.
+
+Mr. Francis reassured him.
+
+“Thank you, Mr. Brand--that is ample time. Then, if you will excuse
+me---” He groped in his breast-pocket, and drew out a long envelope.
+
+“I will leave this with you,” he said, “when I go. It sets out our
+desires at length and our names. And this is what I have to say, sir.”
+
+He sat back, crossed his legs, and went on, with a touch of eagerness in
+his voice.
+
+“I am a kind of deputation, as you know,” he said. “We have something
+both to ask and to offer. I am chosen because it was my own idea. First,
+may I ask a question?”
+
+Oliver bowed.
+
+“I wish to ask nothing that I ought not. But I believe it is practically
+certain, is it not?--that Divine Worship is to be restored throughout
+the kingdom?”
+
+Oliver smiled.
+
+“I suppose so,” he said. “The bill has been read for the third time,
+and, as you know, the President is to speak upon it this evening.”
+
+“He will not veto it?”
+
+“We suppose not. He has assented to it in Germany.”
+
+“Just so,” said Mr. Francis. “And if he assents here, I suppose it will
+become law immediately.”
+
+Oliver leaned over this table, and drew out the green paper that
+contained the Bill.
+
+“You have this, of course---” he said. “Well, it becomes law at once;
+and the first feast will be observed on the first of October.
+‘Paternity,’ is it not? Yes, Paternity.”
+
+“There will be something of a rush then,” said the other eagerly. “Why,
+that is only a week hence.”
+
+“I have not charge of this department,” said Oliver, laying back the
+Bill. “But I understand that the ritual will be that already in use in
+Germany. There is no reason why we should be peculiar.”
+
+“And the Abbey will be used?”
+
+“Why, yes.”
+
+“Well, sir,” said Mr. Francis, “of course I know the Government
+Commission has studied it all very closely, and no doubt has its own
+plans. But it appears to me that they will want all the experience they
+can get.”
+
+“No doubt.”
+
+“Well, Mr. Brand, the society which I represent consists entirely of men
+who were once Catholic priests. We number about two hundred in London. I
+will leave a pamphlet with you, if I may, stating our objects, our
+constitution, and so on. It seemed to us that here was a matter in which
+our past experience might be of service to the Government. Catholic
+ceremonies, as you know, are very intricate, and some of us studied them
+very deeply in old days. We used to say that Masters of Ceremonies were
+born, not made, and we have a fair number of those amongst us. But
+indeed every priest is something of a ceremonialist.”
+
+He paused.
+
+“Yes, Mr. Francis?”
+
+“I am sure the Government realises the immense importance of all going
+smoothly. If Divine Service was at all grotesque or disorderly, it would
+largely defeat its own object. So I have been deputed to see you, Mr.
+Brand, and to suggest to you that here is a body of men--reckon it as at
+least twenty-five--who have had special experience in this kind of
+thing, and are perfectly ready to put themselves at the disposal of the
+Government.”
+
+Oliver could not resist a faint flicker of a smile at the corner of his
+mouth. It was a very grim bit of irony, he thought, but it seemed
+sensible enough.
+
+“I quite understand, Mr. Francis. It seems a very reasonable suggestion.
+But I do not think I am the proper person. Mr. Snowford---”
+
+“Yes, yes, sir, I know. But your speech the other day inspired us all.
+You said exactly what was in all our hearts--that the world could not
+live without worship; and that now that God was found at last---”
+
+Oliver waved his hand. He hated even a touch of flattery.
+
+“It is very good of you, Mr. Francis. I will certainly speak to Mr.
+Snowford. I understand that you offer yourselves as--as Masters of
+Ceremonies--?”
+
+“Yes, sir; and sacristans. I have studied the German ritual very
+carefully; it is more elaborate than I had thought it. It will need a
+good deal of adroitness. I imagine that you will want at least a dozen
+_Ceremoniarii_ in the Abbey; and a dozen more in the vestries will
+scarcely be too much.”
+
+Oliver nodded abruptly, looking curiously at the eager pathetic face of
+the man opposite him; yet it had something, too, of that mask-like
+priestly look that he had seen before in others like him. This was
+evidently a devotee.
+
+“You are all Masons, of course?” he said.
+
+“Why, of course, Mr. Brand.”
+
+“Very good. I will speak to Mr. Snowford to-day if I can catch him.”
+
+He glanced at the clock. There were yet three or four minutes.
+
+“You have seen the new appointment in Rome, sir,” went on Mr. Francis.
+
+Oliver shook his head. He was not particularly interested in Rome just
+now.
+
+“Cardinal Martin is dead--he died on Tuesday--and his place is already
+filled.”
+
+“Indeed, sir?”
+
+“Yes--the new man was once a friend of mine--Franklin, his name
+is--Percy Franklin.”
+
+“Eh?”
+
+“What is the matter, Mr. Brand? Did you know him?”
+
+Oliver was eyeing him darkly, a little pale.
+
+“Yes; I knew him,” he said quietly. “At least, I think so.”
+
+“He was at Westminster until a month or two ago.”
+
+“Yes, yes,” said Oliver, still looking at him. “And you knew him, Mr.
+Francis?”
+
+“I knew him--yes.”
+
+“Ah!--well, I should like to have a talk some day about him.”
+
+He broke off. It yet wanted a minute to his time.
+
+“And that is all?” he asked.
+
+“That is all my actual business, sir,” answered the other. “But I hope
+you will allow me to say how much we all appreciate what you have done,
+Mr. Brand. I do not think it is possible for any, except ourselves, to
+understand what the loss of worship means to us. It was very strange at
+first---”
+
+His voice trembled a little, and he stopped. Oliver felt interested, and
+checked himself in his movement to rise.
+
+“Yes, Mr. Francis?”
+
+The melancholy brown eyes turned on him full.
+
+“It was an illusion, of course, sir--we know that. But I, at any rate,
+dare to hope that it was not all wasted--all our aspirations and
+penitence and praise. We mistook our God, but none the less it reached
+Him--it found its way to the Spirit of the World. It taught us that the
+individual was nothing, and that He was all. And now---”
+
+“Yes, sir,” said the other softly. He was really touched.
+
+The sad brown eyes opened full.
+
+“And now Mr. Felsenburgh is come.” He swallowed in his throat. “Julian
+Felsenburgh!” There was a world of sudden passion in his gentle voice,
+and Oliver’s own heart responded.
+
+“I know, sir,” he said; “I know all that you mean.”
+
+“Oh! to have a Saviour at last!” cried Francis. “One that can be seen
+and handled and praised to His Face! It is like a dream--too good to be
+true!”
+
+Oliver glanced at the clock, and rose abruptly, holding out his hand.
+
+“Forgive me, sir. I must not stay. You have touched me very deeply.... I
+will speak to Snowford. Your address is here, I understand?”
+
+He pointed to the papers.
+
+“Yes, Mr. Brand. There is one more question.”
+
+“I must not stay, sir,” said Oliver, shaking his head.
+
+“One instant--is it true that this worship will be compulsory?”
+
+Oliver bowed as he gathered up his papers.
+
+
+II
+
+Mabel, seated in the gallery that evening behind the President’s chair,
+had already glanced at her watch half-a-dozen times in the last hour,
+hoping each time that twenty-one o’clock was nearer than she feared. She
+knew well enough by now that the President of Europe would not be
+half-a-minute either before or after his time. His supreme punctuality
+was famous all over the continent. He had said Twenty-One, so it was to
+be twenty-one.
+
+A sharp bell-note impinged from beneath, and in a moment the drawling
+voice of the speaker stopped. Once more she lifted her wrist, saw that
+it wanted five minutes of the hour; then she leaned forward from her
+corner and stared down into the House.
+
+A great change had passed over it at the metallic noise. All down the
+long brown seats members were shifting and arranging themselves more
+decorously, uncrossing their legs, slipping their hats beneath the
+leather fringes. As she looked, too, she saw the President of the House
+coming down the three steps from his chair, for Another would need it in
+a few moments.
+
+The house was full from end to end; a late comer ran in from the
+twilight of the south door and looked distractedly about him in the full
+light before he saw his vacant place. The galleries at the lower end
+were occupied too, down there, where she had failed to obtain a seat.
+Yet from all the crowded interior there was no sound but a sibilant
+whispering; from the passages behind she could hear again the quick
+bell-note repeat itself as the lobbies were cleared; and from Parliament
+Square outside once more came the heavy murmur of the crowd that had
+been inaudible for the last twenty minutes. When that ceased she would
+know that he was come.
+
+How strange and wonderful it was to be here--on this night of all, when
+the President was to speak! A month ago he had assented to a similar
+Bill in Germany, and had delivered a speech on the same subject at
+Turin. To-morrow he was to be in Spain. No one knew where he had been
+during the past week. A rumour had spread that his volor had been seen
+passing over Lake Como, and had been instantly contradicted. No one knew
+either what he would say to-night. It might be three words or twenty
+thousand. There were a few clauses in the Bill--notably those bearing on
+the point as to when the new worship was to be made compulsory on all
+subjects over the age of seven--it might be he would object and veto
+these. In that case all must be done again, and the Bill re-passed,
+unless the House accepted his amendment instantly by acclamation.
+
+Mabel herself was inclined to these clauses. They provided that,
+although worship was to be offered in every parish church of England on
+the ensuing first day of October, this was not to be compulsory on all
+subjects till the New Year; whereas, Germany, who had passed the Bill
+only a month before, had caused it to come into full force immediately,
+thus compelling all her Catholic subjects either to leave the country
+without delay or suffer the penalties. These penalties were not
+vindictive: on a first offence a week’s detention only was to be given;
+on the second, one month’s imprisonment; on the third, one year’s; and
+on the fourth, perpetual imprisonment until the criminal yielded. These
+were merciful terms, it seemed; for even imprisonment itself meant no
+more than reasonable confinement and employment on Government works.
+There were no mediaeval horrors here; and the act of worship demanded
+was so little, too; it consisted of no more than bodily presence in the
+church or cathedral on the four new festivals of Maternity, Life,
+Sustenance and Paternity, celebrated on the first day of each quarter.
+Sunday worship was to be purely voluntary.
+
+She could not understand how any man could refuse this homage. These
+four things were facts--they were the manifestations of what she called
+the Spirit of the World--and if others called that Power God, yet surely
+these ought to be considered as His functions. Where then was the
+difficulty? It was not as if Christian worship were not permitted, under
+the usual regulations. Catholics could still go to mass. And yet
+appalling things were threatened in Germany: not less than twelve
+thousand persons had already left for Rome; and it was rumoured that
+forty thousand would refuse this simple act of homage a few days hence.
+It bewildered and angered her to think of it.
+
+For herself the new worship was a crowning sign of the triumph of
+Humanity. Her heart had yearned for some such thing as this--some
+public corporate profession of what all now believed. She had so
+resented the dulness of folk who were content with action and never
+considered its springs. Surely this instinct within her was a true one;
+she desired to stand with her fellows in some solemn place, consecrated
+not by priests but by the will of man; to have as her inspirers sweet
+singing and the peal of organs; to utter her sorrow with thousands
+beside her at her own feebleness of immolation before the Spirit of all;
+to sing aloud her praise of the glory of life, and to offer by sacrifice
+and incense an emblematic homage to That from which she drew her being,
+and to whom one day she must render it again. Ah! these Christians had
+understood human nature, she had told herself a hundred times: it was
+true that they had degraded it, darkened light, poisoned thought,
+misinterpreted instinct; but they had understood that man must worship
+--must worship or sink.
+
+For herself she intended to go at least once a week to the little old
+church half-a-mile away from her home, to kneel there before the sunlit
+sanctuary, to meditate on sweet mysteries, to present herself to That
+which she was yearning to love, and to drink, it might be, new draughts
+of life and power.
+
+Ah! but the Bill must pass first.... She clenched her hands on the rail,
+and stared steadily before her on the ranks of heads, the open gangways,
+the great mace on the table, and heard, above the murmur of the crowd
+outside and the dying whispers within, her own heart beat.
+
+She could not see Him, she knew. He would come in from beneath through
+the door that none but He might use, straight into the seat beneath the
+canopy. But she would hear His voice--that must be joy enough for
+her....
+
+Ah! there was silence now outside; the soft roar had died. He had come
+then. And through swimming eyes she saw the long ridges of heads rise
+beneath her, and through drumming ears heard the murmur of many feet.
+All faces looked this way; and she watched them as a mirror to see the
+reflected light of His presence. There was a gentle sobbing somewhere in
+the air--was it her own or another’s? ... the click of a door; a great
+mellow booming over-head, shock after shock, as the huge tenor bells
+tolled their three strokes; and, in an instant, over the white faces
+passed a ripple, as if some breeze of passion shook the souls within;
+there was a swaying here and there; and a passionless voice spoke half a
+dozen words in Esperanto, out of sight:
+
+“Englishmen, I assent to the Bill of Worship.”
+
+
+III
+
+It was not until mid-day breakfast on the following morning that husband
+and wife met again. Oliver had slept in town and telephoned about eleven
+o’clock that he would be home immediately, bringing a guest with him:
+and shortly before noon she heard their voices in the hall.
+
+Mr. Francis, who was presently introduced to her, seemed a harmless kind
+of man, she thought, not interesting, though he seemed in earnest about
+this Bill. It was not until breakfast was nearly over that she
+understood who he was.
+
+“Don’t go, Mabel,” said her husband, as she made a movement to rise.
+“You will like to hear about this, I expect. My wife knows all that I
+know,” he added.
+
+Mr. Francis smiled and bowed.
+
+“I may tell her about you, sir?” said Oliver again.
+
+“Why, certainly.”
+
+Then she heard that he had been a Catholic priest a few months before,
+and that Mr. Snowford was in consultation with him as to the ceremonies
+in the Abbey. She was conscious of a sudden interest as she heard this.
+
+“Oh! do talk,” she said. “I want to hear everything.”
+
+It seemed that Mr. Francis had seen the new Minister of Public Worship
+that morning, and had received a definite commission from him to take
+charge of the ceremonies on the first of October. Two dozen of his
+colleagues, too, were to be enrolled among the _ceremoniarii_, at least
+temporarily--and after the event they were to be sent on a lecturing
+tour to organise the national worship throughout the country.
+
+Of course things would be somewhat sloppy at first, said Mr. Francis;
+but by the New Year it was hoped that all would be in order, at least in
+the cathedrals and principal towns.
+
+“It is important,” he said, “that this should be done as soon as
+possible. It is very necessary to make a good impression. There are
+thousands who have the instinct of worship, without knowing how to
+satisfy it.”
+
+“That is perfectly true,” said Oliver. “I have felt that for a long
+time. I suppose it is the deepest instinct in man.”
+
+“As to the ceremonies---” went on the other, with a slightly important
+air. His eyes roved round a moment; then he dived into his
+breast-pocket, and drew out a thin red-covered book.
+
+“Here is the Order of Worship for the Feast of Paternity,” he said. “I
+have had it interleaved, and have made a few notes.”
+
+He began to turn the pages, and Mabel, with considerable excitement,
+drew her chair a little closer to listen.
+
+“That is right, sir,” said the other. “Now give us a little lecture.”
+
+Mr. Francis closed the book on his finger, pushed his plate aside, and
+began to discourse.
+
+“First,” he said, “we must remember that this ritual is based almost
+entirely upon that of the Masons. Three-quarters at least of the entire
+function will be occupied by that. With that the _ceremoniarii_ will not
+interfere, beyond seeing that the insignia are ready in the vestries and
+properly put on. The proper officials will conduct the rest.... I need
+not speak of that then. The difficulties begin with the last quarter.”
+
+He paused, and with a glance of apology began arranging forks and
+glasses before him on the cloth.
+
+“Now here,” he said, “we have the old sanctuary of the abbey. In the
+place of the reredos and Communion table there will be erected the large
+altar of which the ritual speaks, with the steps leading up to it from
+the floor. Behind the altar--extending almost to the old shrine of the
+Confessor--will stand the pedestal with the emblematic figure upon it;
+and--so far as I understand from the absence of directions--each such
+figure will remain in place until the eve of the next quarterly feast.”
+
+“What kind of figure?” put in the girl.
+
+Francis glanced at her husband.
+
+“I understand that Mr. Markenheim has been consulted,” he said. “He will
+design and execute them. Each is to represent its own feast. This for
+Paternity---”
+
+He paused again.
+
+“Yes, Mr. Francis?”
+
+“This one, I understand, is to be the naked figure of a man.”
+
+“A kind of Apollo--or Jupiter, my dear,” put in Oliver.
+
+Yes--that seemed all right, thought Mabel. Mr. Francis’s voice moved on
+hastily.
+
+“A new procession enters at this point, after the discourse,” he said.
+“It is this that will need special marshalling. I suppose no rehearsal
+will be possible?”
+
+“Scarcely,” said Oliver, smiling.
+
+The Master of Ceremonies sighed.
+
+“I feared not. Then we must issue very precise printed instructions.
+Those who take part will withdraw, I imagine, during the hymn, to the
+old chapel of St. Faith. That is what seems to me the best.”
+
+He indicated the chapel.
+
+“After the entrance of the procession all will take their places on
+these two sides--here--and here--while the celebrant with the sacred
+ministers---”
+
+“Eh?”
+
+Mr. Francis permitted a slight grimace to appear on his face; he flushed
+a little.
+
+“The President of Europe---” He broke off. “Ah! that is the point. Will
+the President take part? That is not made clear in the ritual.”
+
+“We think so,” said Oliver. “He is to be approached.”
+
+“Well, if not, I suppose the Minister of Public Worship will officiate.
+He with his supporters pass straight up to the foot of the altar.
+Remember that the figure is still veiled, and that the candles have been
+lighted during the approach of the procession. There follow the
+Aspirations printed in the ritual with the responds. These are sung by
+the choir, and will be most impressive, I think. Then the officiant
+ascends the altar alone, and, standing, declaims the Address, as it is
+called. At the close of it--at the point, that is to say, marked here
+with a star, the thurifers will leave the chapel, four in number. One
+ascends the altar, leaving the others swinging their thurifers at its
+foot--hands his to the officiant and retires. Upon the sounding of a
+bell the curtains are drawn back, the officiant tenses the image in
+silence with four double swings, and, as he ceases the choir sings the
+appointed antiphon.”
+
+He waved his hands.
+
+“The rest is easy,” he said. “We need not discuss that.”
+
+To Mabel’s mind even the previous ceremonies seemed easy enough. But she
+was undeceived.
+
+“You have no idea, Mrs. Brand,” went on the _ceremoniarius_, “of the
+difficulties involved even in such a simple matter as this. The
+stupidity of people is prodigious. I foresee a great deal of hard work
+for us all.... Who is to deliver the discourse, Mr. Brand?”
+
+Oliver shook his head.
+
+“I have no idea,” he said. “I suppose Mr. Snowford will select.”
+
+Mr. Francis looked at him doubtfully.
+
+“What is your opinion of the whole affair, sir?” he said.
+
+Oliver paused a moment.
+
+“I think it is necessary,” he began. “There would not be such a cry for
+worship if it was not a real need. I think too--yes, I think that on the
+whole the ritual is impressive. I do not see how it could be
+bettered....”
+
+“Yes, Oliver?” put in his wife, questioningly.
+
+“No--there is nothing--except ... except I hope the people will
+understand it.”
+
+Mr. Francis broke in.
+
+“My dear sir, worship involves a touch of mystery. You must remember
+that. It was the lack of that that made Empire Day fail in the last
+century. For myself, I think it is admirable. Of course much must depend
+on the manner in which it is presented. I see many details at present
+undecided--the colour of the curtains, and so forth. But the main plan
+is magnificent. It is simple, impressive, and, above all, it is
+unmistakable in its main lesson---”
+
+“And that you take to be--?”
+
+“I take it that it is homage offered to Life,” said the other slowly.
+“Life under four aspects--Maternity corresponds to Christmas and the
+Christian fable; it is the feast of home, love, faithfulness. Life
+itself is approached in spring, teeming, young, passionate. Sustenance
+in midsummer, abundance, comfort, plenty, and the rest, corresponding
+somewhat to the Catholic Corpus Christi; and Paternity, the protective,
+generative, masterful idea, as winter draws on.... I understand it was a
+German thought.”
+
+Oliver nodded.
+
+“Yes,” he said. “And I suppose it will be the business of the speaker to
+explain all this.”
+
+“I take it so. It appears to me far more suggestive than the alternative
+plan--Citizenship, Labour, and so forth. These, after all, are
+subordinate to Life.”
+
+Mr. Francis spoke with an extraordinary suppressed enthusiasm, and the
+priestly look was more evident than ever. It was plain that his heart at
+least demanded worship.
+
+Mabel clasped her hands suddenly.
+
+“I think it is beautiful,” she said softly, “and--and it is so real.”
+
+Mr. Francis turned on her with a glow in his brown eyes.
+
+“Ah! yes, madam. That is it. There is no Faith, as we used to call it:
+it is the vision of Facts that no one can doubt; and the incense
+declares the sole divinity of Life as well as its mystery.”
+
+“What of the figures?” put in Oliver.
+
+“A stone image is impossible, of course. It must be clay for the
+present. Mr. Markenheim is to set to work immediately. If the figures
+are approved they can then be executed in marble.”
+
+Again Mabel spoke with a soft gravity.
+
+“It seems to me,” she said, “that this is the last thing that we needed.
+It is so hard to keep our principles clear--we must have a body for
+them--some kind of expression---”
+
+She paused.
+
+“Yes, Mabel?”
+
+“I do not mean,” she went on, “that some cannot live without it, but
+many cannot. The unimaginative need concrete images. There must be some
+channel for their aspirations to flow through--- Ah! I cannot express
+myself!”
+
+Oliver nodded slowly. He, too, seemed to be in a meditative mood.
+
+“Yes,” he said. “And this, I suppose, will mould men’s thoughts too: it
+will keep out all danger of superstition.”
+
+Mr. Francis turned on him abruptly.
+
+“What do you think of the Pope’s new Religious Order, sir?”
+
+Oliver’s face took on it a tinge of grimness.
+
+“I think it is the worst step he ever took--for himself, I mean. Either
+it is a real effort, in which case it will provoke immense
+indignation--or it is a sham, and will discredit him. Why do you ask?”
+
+“I was wondering whether any disturbance will be made in the abbey.”
+
+“I should be sorry for the brawler.”
+
+A bell rang sharply from the row of telephone labels. Oliver rose and
+went to it. Mabel watched him as he touched a button--mentioned his
+name, and put his ear to the opening.
+
+“It is Snowford’s secretary,” he said abruptly to the two expectant
+faces. “Snowford wants to--ah!”
+
+Again he mentioned his name and listened. They heard a sentence or two
+from him that seemed significant.
+
+“Ah! that is certain, is it? I am sorry.... Yes.... Oh! but that is
+better than nothing.... Yes; he is here.... Indeed. Very well; we will
+be with you directly.”
+
+He looked on the tube, touched the button again, and came back to them.
+
+“I am sorry,” he said. “The President will take no part at the Feast.
+But it is uncertain whether he will not be present. Mr. Snowford wants
+to see us both at once, Mr. Francis. Markenheim is with him.”
+
+But though Mabel was herself disappointed, she thought he looked graver
+than the disappointment warranted.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+I
+
+Percy Franklin, the new Cardinal-Protector of England, came slowly along
+the passage leading from the Pope’s apartments, with Hans Steinmann,
+Cardinal-Protector of Germany, blowing at his side. They entered the
+lift, still in silence, and passed out, two splendid vivid figures, one
+erect and virile, the other bent, fat, and very German from spectacles
+to flat buckled feet.
+
+At the door of Percy’s suite, the Englishman paused, made a little
+gesture of reverence, and went in without a word.
+
+A secretary, young Mr. Brent, lately from England, stood up as his
+patron came in.
+
+“Eminence,” he said, “the English papers are come.”
+
+Percy put out a hand, took a paper, passed on into his inner room, and
+sat down.
+
+There it all was--gigantic headlines, and four columns of print broken
+by startling title phrases in capital letters, after the fashion set by
+America a hundred years ago. No better way even yet had been found of
+misinforming the unintelligent.
+
+He looked at the top. It was the English edition of the _Era_. Then he
+read the headlines. They ran as follows:
+
+“THE NATIONAL WORSHIP. BEWILDERING SPLENDOUR. RELIGIOUS ENTHUSIASM. THE
+ABBEY AND GOD. CATHOLIC FANATIC. EX-PRIESTS AS FUNCTIONARIES.”
+
+He ran his eyes down the page, reading the vivid little phrases, and
+drawing from the whole a kind of impressionist view of the scenes in the
+Abbey on the previous day, of which he had already been informed by the
+telegraph, and the discussion of which had been the purpose of his
+interview just now with the Holy Father.
+
+There plainly was no additional news; and he was laying the paper down
+when his eye caught a name.
+
+“It is understood that Mr. Francis, the _ceremoniarius_ (to whom the
+thanks of all are due for his reverent zeal and skill), will proceed
+shortly to the northern towns to lecture on the Ritual. It is
+interesting to reflect that this gentleman only a few months ago was
+officiating at a Catholic altar. He was assisted in his labours by
+twenty-four confreres with the same experience behind them.”
+
+“Good God!” said Percy aloud. Then he laid the paper down.
+
+But his thoughts had soon left this renegade behind, and once more he
+was running over in his mind the significance of the whole affair, and
+the advice that he had thought it his duty to give just now upstairs.
+
+Briefly, there was no use in disputing the fact that the inauguration of
+Pantheistic worship had been as stupendous a success in England as in
+Germany. France, by the way, was still too busy with the cult of human
+individuals, to develop larger ideas.
+
+But England was deeper; and, somehow, in spite of prophecy, the affair
+had taken place without even a touch of bathos or grotesqueness. It had
+been said that England was too solid and too humorous. Yet there had
+been extraordinary scenes the day before. A great murmur of enthusiasm
+had rolled round the Abbey from end to end as the gorgeous curtains ran
+back, and the huge masculine figure, majestic and overwhelming, coloured
+with exquisite art, had stood out above the blaze of candles against the
+tall screen that shrouded the shrine. Markenheim had done his work well;
+and Mr. Brand’s passionate discourse had well prepared the popular mind
+for the revelation. He had quoted in his peroration passage after
+passage from the Jewish prophets, telling of the City of Peace whose
+walls rose now before their eyes.
+
+“_Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is
+risen upon thee.... For behold I create new heavens and a new earth; and
+the former shall not be remembered nor come into mind.... Violence shall
+no more be heard in thy land, wasting nor destruction within thy
+borders. O thou so long afflicted, tossed with tempest and not
+comforted; behold I will lay thy stones with fair colours, and thy
+foundations with sapphires.... I will make thy windows of agates and thy
+gates of carbuncles, and all thy borders of pleasant stones. Arise,
+shine, for thy light is come._”
+
+As the chink of the censer-chains had sounded in the stillness, with one
+consent the enormous crowd had fallen on its knees, and so remained, as
+the smoke curled up from the hands of the rebel figure who held the
+thurible. Then the organ had begun to blow, and from the huge massed
+chorus in the transepts had rolled out the anthem, broken by one
+passionate cry, from some mad Catholic. But it had been silenced in an
+instant....
+
+It was incredible--utterly incredible, Percy had told himself. Yet the
+incredible had happened; and England had found its worship once
+more--the necessary culmination of unimpeded subjectivity. From the
+provinces had come the like news. In cathedral after cathedral had been
+the same scenes. Markenheim’s masterpiece, executed in four days after
+the passing of the bill, had been reproduced by the ordinary machinery,
+and four thousand replicas had been despatched to every important
+centre. Telegraphic reports had streamed into the London papers that
+everywhere the new movement had been received with acclamation, and that
+human instincts had found adequate expression at last. If there had not
+been a God, mused Percy reminiscently, it would have been necessary to
+invent one. He was astonished, too, at the skill with which the new cult
+had been framed. It moved round no disputable points; there was no
+possibility of divergent political tendencies to mar its success, no
+over-insistence on citizenship, labour and the rest, for those who were
+secretly individualistic and idle. Life was the one fount and centre of
+it all, clad in the gorgeous robes of ancient worship. Of course the
+thought had been Felsenburgh’s, though a German name had been mentioned.
+It was Positivism of a kind, Catholicism without Christianity, Humanity
+worship without its inadequacy. It was not man that was worshipped but
+the Idea of man, deprived of his supernatural principle. Sacrifice,
+too, was recognised--the instinct of oblation without the demand made by
+transcendent Holiness upon the blood-guiltiness of man.... In fact,--in
+fact, said Percy, it was exactly as clever as the devil, and as old as
+Cain.
+
+The advice he had given to the Holy Father just now was a counsel of
+despair, or of hope; he really did not know which. He had urged that a
+stringent decree should be issued, forbidding any acts of violence on
+the part of Catholics. The faithful were to be encouraged to be patient,
+to hold utterly aloof from the worship, to say nothing unless they were
+questioned, to suffer bonds gladly. He had suggested, in company with
+the German Cardinal, that they two should return to their respective
+countries at the close of the year, to encourage the waverers; but the
+answer had been that their vocation was to remain in Rome, unless
+something unforeseen happened.
+
+As for Felsenburgh, there was little news. It was said that he was in
+the East; but further details were secret. Percy understood quite well
+why he had not been present at the worship as had been expected. First,
+it would have been difficult to decide between the two countries that
+had established it; and, secondly, he was too brilliant a politician to
+risk the possible association of failure with his own person; thirdly,
+there was something the matter with the East.
+
+This last point was difficult to understand; it had not yet become
+explicit, but it seemed as if the movement of last year had not yet run
+its course. It was undoubtedly difficult to explain the new President’s
+constant absences from his adopted continent, unless there was something
+that demanded his presence elsewhere; but the extreme discretion of the
+East and the stringent precautions taken by the Empire made it
+impossible to know any details. It was apparently connected with
+religion; there were rumours, portents, prophets, ecstatics there.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Upon Percy himself had fallen a subtle change which he himself was
+recognising. He no longer soared to confidence or sank to despair. He
+said his mass, read his enormous correspondence, meditated strictly;
+and, though he felt nothing he knew everything. There was not a tinge of
+doubt upon his faith, but neither was there emotion in it. He was as one
+who laboured in the depths of the earth, crushed even in imagination,
+yet conscious that somewhere birds sang, and the sun shone, and water
+ran. He understood his own state well enough, and perceived that he had
+come to a reality of faith that was new to him, for it was sheer
+faith--sheer apprehension of the Spiritual--without either the dangers
+or the joys of imaginative vision. He expressed it to himself by saying
+that there were three processes through which God led the soul: the
+first was that of external faith, which assents to all things presented
+by the accustomed authority, practises religion, and is neither
+interested nor doubtful; the second follows the quickening of the
+emotional and perceptive powers of the soul, and is set about with
+consolations, desires, mystical visions and perils; it is in this plane
+that resolutions are taken and vocations found and shipwrecks
+experienced; and the third, mysterious and inexpressible, consists in
+the re-enactment in the purely spiritual sphere of all that has preceded
+(as a play follows a rehearsal), in which God is grasped but not
+experienced, grace is absorbed unconsciously and even distastefully, and
+little by little the inner spirit is conformed in the depths of its
+being, far within the spheres of emotion and intellectual perception, to
+the image and mind of Christ.
+
+So he lay back now, thinking, a long, stately, scarlet figure, in his
+deep chair, staring out over Holy Rome seen through the misty September
+haze. How long, he wondered, would there be peace? To his eyes even
+already the air was black with doom.
+
+He struck his hand-bell at last.
+
+“Bring me Father Blackmore’s Last report,” he said, as his secretary
+appeared.
+
+
+II
+
+Percy’s intuitive faculties were keen by nature and had been vastly
+increased by cultivation. He had never forgotten Father Blackmore’s
+shrewd remarks of a year ago; and one of his first acts as
+Cardinal-Protector had been to appoint that priest on the list of
+English correspondents. Hitherto he had received some dozen letters, and
+not one of them had been without its grain of gold. Especially he had
+noticed that one warning ran through them all, namely, that sooner or
+later there would be some overt act of provocation on the part of
+English Catholics; and it was the memory of this that had inspired his
+vehement entreaties to the Pope this morning. As in the Roman and
+African persecutions of the first three centuries, so now, the greatest
+danger to the Catholic community lay not in the unjust measures of the
+Government but in the indiscreet zeal of the faithful themselves. The
+world desired nothing better than a handle to its blade. The scabbard
+was already cast away.
+
+When the young man had brought the four closely written sheets, dated
+from Westminster, the previous evening, Percy turned at once to the last
+paragraph before the usual Recommendations.
+
+“Mr. Brand’s late secretary, Mr. Phillips, whom your Eminence commended
+to me, has been to see me two or three times. He is in a curious state.
+He has no faith; yet, intellectually, he sees no hope anywhere but in
+the Catholic Church. He has even begged for admission to the Order of
+Christ Crucified, which of course is impossible. But there is no doubt
+he is sincere; otherwise he would have professed Catholicism. I have
+introduced him to many Catholics in the hope that they may help him. I
+should much wish your Eminence to see him.”
+
+Before leaving England, Percy had followed up the acquaintance he had
+made so strangely over Mrs. Brand’s reconciliation to God, and, scarcely
+knowing why, had commended him to the priest. He had not been
+particularly impressed by Mr. Phillips; he had thought him a timid,
+undecided creature, yet he had been struck by the extremely unselfish
+action by which the man had forfeited his position. There must surely be
+a good deal behind.
+
+And now the impulse had come to send for him. Perhaps the spiritual
+atmosphere of Rome would precipitate faith. In any case, the
+conversation of Mr. Brand’s late secretary might be instructive.
+
+He struck the bell again.
+
+“Mr. Brent,” he said, “in your next letter to Father Blackmore, tell him
+that I wish to see the man whom he proposed to send--Mr. Phillips.”
+
+“Yes, Eminence.”
+
+“There is no hurry. He can send him at his leisure.”
+
+“Yes, Eminence.”
+
+“But he must not come till January. That will be time enough, unless
+there is urgent reason.”
+
+“Yes, Eminence.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The development of the Order of Christ Crucified had gone forward with
+almost miraculous success. The appeal issued by the Holy Father
+throughout Christendom had been as fire among stubble. It seemed as if
+the Christian world had reached exactly that point of tension at which a
+new organisation of this nature was needed, and the response had
+startled even the most sanguine. Practically the whole of Rome with its
+suburbs--three millions in all--had run to the enrolling stations in
+St. Peter’s as starving men run to food, and desperate to the storming
+of a breach. For day after day the Pope himself had sat enthroned below
+the altar of the Chair, a glorious, radiant figure, growing ever white
+and weary towards evening, imparting his Blessing with a silent sign to
+each individual of the vast crowd that swarmed up between the barriers,
+fresh from fast and Communion, to kneel before his new Superior and kiss
+the Pontifical ring. The requirements had been as stringent as
+circumstances allowed. Each postulant was obliged to go to confession to
+a specially authorised priest, who examined sharply into motives and
+sincerity, and only one-third of the applicants had been accepted. This,
+the authorities pointed out to the scornful, was not an excessive
+proportion; for it was to be remembered that most of those who had
+presented themselves had already undergone a sifting fierce as fire. Of
+the three millions in Rome, two millions at least were exiles for their
+faith, preferring to live obscure and despised in the shadow of God
+rather than in the desolate glare of their own infidel countries.
+
+On the fifth evening of the enrolment of novices an astonishing incident
+had taken place. The old King of Spain (Queen Victoria’s second son),
+already on the edge of the grave, had just risen and tottered before his
+Ruler; it seemed for an instant as if he would fall, when the Pope
+himself, by a sudden movement, had risen, caught him in his arms and
+kissed him; and then, still standing, had spread his arms abroad and
+delivered a _fervorino_ such as never had been heard before in the
+history of the basilica.
+
+“_Benedictus Dominus!_” he cried, with upraised face and shining eyes.
+“Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for He hath visited and redeemed His
+people. I, John, Vicar of Christ, Servant of Servants, and sinner among
+sinners, bid you be of good courage in the Name of God. By Him Who hung
+on the Cross, I promise eternal life to all who persevere in His Order.
+He Himself has said it. _To him that overcometh I will give a crown of
+life._
+
+“Little children; fear not him that killeth the body. There is no more
+that he can do. God and His Mother are amongst us....”
+
+So his voice had poured on, telling the enormous awe-stricken crowd of
+the blood that already had been shed on the place where they stood, of
+the body of the Apostle that lay scarcely fifty yards away, urging,
+encouraging, inspiring. They had vowed themselves to death, if that were
+God’s Will; and if not, the intention would be taken for the deed. They
+were under obedience now; their wills were no longer theirs but God’s;
+under chastity--for their bodies were bought with a price; under
+poverty, and theirs was the kingdom of heaven.
+
+He had ended by a great silent Benediction of the City and the World:
+and there were not wanting a half-dozen of the faithful who had seen,
+they thought, a white shape in the form of a bird that hung in the air
+while he spoke white as a mist, translucent as water....
+
+The consequent scenes in the city and suburbs had been unparalleled, for
+thousands of families had with one consent dissolved human ties.
+Husbands had found their way to the huge houses on the Quirinal set
+apart for them; wives to the Aventine; while the children, as confident
+as their parents, had swarmed over to the Sisters of St. Vincent who had
+received at the Pope’s orders the gift of three streets to shelter them
+in. Everywhere the smoke of burning went up in the squares where
+household property, rendered useless by the vows of poverty, were
+consumed by their late owners; and daily long trains moved out from the
+station outside the walls carrying jubilant loads of those who were
+despatched by the Pope’s delegates to be the salt of men, consumed in
+their function, and leaven plunged in the vast measures of the infidel
+world. And that infidel world welcomed their coming with bitter
+laughter.
+
+From the rest of Christendom had poured in news of success. The same
+precautions had been observed as in Rome, for the directions issued were
+precise and searching; and day after day came in the long rolls of the
+new Religious drawn up by the diocesan superiors.
+
+Within the last few days, too, other lists had arrived, more glorious
+than all. Not only did reports stream in that already the Order was
+beginning its work and that already broken communications were being
+re-established, that devoted missioners were in process of organising
+themselves, and that hope was once more rising in the most desperate
+hearts; but better than all this was the tidings of victory in another
+sphere. In Paris forty of the new-born Order had been burned alive in
+one day in the Latin quarter, before the Government intervened. From
+Spain, Holland, Russia had come in other names. In Dusseldorf eighteen
+men and boys, surprised at their singing of Prime in the church of Saint
+Laurence, had been cast down one by one into the city-sewer, each
+chanting as he vanished:
+
+“_Christi Fili Dei vivi miserere nobis,_”
+
+and from the darkness had come up the same broken song till it was
+silenced with stones. Meanwhile, the German prisons were thronged with
+the first batches of recusants. The world shrugged its shoulders, and
+declared that they had brought it on themselves, while yet it deprecated
+mob-violence, and requested the attention of the authorities and the
+decisive repression of this new conspiracy of superstition. And within
+St. Peter’s Church the workmen were busy at the long rows of new altars,
+affixing to the stone diptychs the brass-forged names of those who had
+already fulfilled their vows and gained their crowns.
+
+It was the first word of God’s reply to the world’s challenge.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As Christmas drew on it was announced that the Sovereign pontiff would
+sing mass on the last day of the year, at the papal altar of Saint
+Peter’s, on behalf of the Order; and preparations began to be made.
+
+It was to be a kind of public inauguration of the new enterprise; and,
+to the astonishment of all, a special summons was issued to all members
+of the Sacred College throughout the world to be present, unless
+hindered by sickness. It seemed as if the Pope were determined that
+the world should understand that war was declared; for, although the
+command would not involve the absence of any Cardinal from his province
+for more than five days, yet many inconveniences must surely result.
+However, it had been said, and it was to be done.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was a strange Christmas.
+
+Percy was ordered to attend the Pope at his second mass, and himself
+said his three at midnight in his own private oratory. For the first
+time in his life he saw that of which he had heard so often, the
+wonderful old-world Pontifical procession, lit by torches, going through
+the streets from the Lateran to St. Anastasia, where the Pope for the
+last few years had restored the ancient custom discontinued for nearly a
+century-and-a-half. The little basilica was reserved, of course, in
+every corner for the peculiarly privileged; but the streets outside
+along the whole route from the Cathedral to the church--and, indeed, the
+other two sides of the triangle as well, were one dense mass of silent
+heads and flaming torches. The Holy Father was attended at the altar by
+the usual sovereigns; and Percy from his place watched the heavenly
+drama of Christ’s Passion enacted through the veil of His nativity at
+the hands of His old Angelic Vicar. It was hard to perceive Calvary
+here; it was surely the air of Bethlehem, the celestial light, not the
+supernatural darkness, that beamed round the simple altar. It was the
+Child called Wonderful that lay there beneath the old hands, rather than
+the stricken Man of Sorrows.
+
+_Adeste fideles_ sang the choir from the tribune.--Come, let us adore,
+rather than weep; let us exult, be content, be ourselves like little
+children. As He for us became a child, let us become childlike for Him.
+Let us put on the garments of infancy and the shoes of peace. _For the
+Lord hath reigned; He is clothed with beauty: the Lord is clothed with
+strength and hath girded Himself. He hath established the world which
+shall not be moved: His throne is prepared from of old. He is from
+everlasting. Rejoice greatly then, O daughter of Zion, shout for joy, O
+daughter of Jerusalem; behold thy King cometh, to thee, the Holy One,
+the Saviour of the world._ It will be time, then, to suffer by and bye,
+when the Prince of this world cometh upon the Prince of Heaven.
+
+So Percy mused, standing apart in his gorgeousness, striving to make
+himself little and simple. Surely nothing was too hard for God! Might
+not this mystic Birth once more do what it had done before--bring into
+subjection through the might of its weakness every proud thing that
+exalts itself above all that is called God? It had drawn wise Kings once
+across the desert, as well as shepherds from their flocks. It had kings
+about it now, kneeling with the poor and foolish, kings who had laid
+down their crowns, who brought the gold of loyal hearts, the myrrh of
+desired martyrdom, and the incense of a pure faith. Could not republics,
+too, lay aside their splendour, mobs be tamed, selfishness deny itself,
+and wisdom confess its ignorance?...
+
+Then he remembered Felsenburgh; and his heart sickened within him.
+
+
+III
+
+Six days later, Percy rose as usual, said his mass, breakfasted, and
+sat down to say office until his servant should summon him to vest for
+the Pontifical mass.
+
+He had learned to expect bad news now so constantly--of apostasies,
+deaths, losses--that the lull of the previous week had come to him with
+extraordinary refreshment. It appeared to him as if his musings in St.
+Anastasia had been truer than he thought, and that the sweetness of the
+old feast had not yet wholly lost its power even over a world that
+denied its substance. For nothing at all had happened of importance. A
+few more martyrdoms had been chronicled, but they had been isolated
+cases; and of Felsenburgh there had been no tidings at all. Europe
+confessed its ignorance of his business.
+
+On the other hand, to-morrow, Percy knew very well, would be a day of
+extraordinary moment in England and Germany at any rate; for in England
+it was appointed as the first occasion of compulsory worship throughout
+the country, while it was the second in Germany. Men and women would
+have to declare themselves now.
+
+He had seen on the previous evening a photograph of the image that was
+to be worshipped next day in the Abbey; and, in a fit of loathing, had
+torn it to shreds. It represented a nude woman, huge and majestic,
+entrancingly lovely, with head and shoulders thrown back, as one who
+sees a strange and heavenly vision, arms downstretched and hands a
+little raised, with wide fingers, as in astonishment--the whole
+attitude, with feet and knees pressed together, suggestive of
+expectation, hope and wonder; in devilish mockery her long hair was
+crowned with twelve stars. This, then, was the spouse of the other, the
+embodiment of man’s ideal maternity, still waiting for her child....
+
+When the white scraps lay like poisonous snow at his feet, he had sprung
+across the room to his _prie-dieu_, and fallen there in an agony of
+reparation.
+
+“Oh! Mother, Mother!” he cried to the stately Queen of Heaven who, with
+Her true Son long ago in Her arms, looked down on him from Her
+bracket--no more than that.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But he was still again this morning, and celebrated Saint Silvester,
+Pope and Martyr, the last saint in the procession of the Christian year,
+with tolerable equanimity. The sights of last night, the throng of
+officials, the stately, scarlet, unfamiliar figures of the Cardinals who
+had come in from north, south, east and west--these helped to reassure
+him again--unreasonably, as he knew, yet effectually. The very air was
+electric with expectation. All night the piazza had been crowded by a
+huge, silent mob waiting till the opening of the doors at seven o’clock.
+Now the church itself was full, and the piazza full again. Far down the
+street to the river, so far as he could see as he had leaned from his
+window just now, lay that solemn motionless pavement of heads. The roof
+of the colonnade showed a fringe of them, the house-tops were black--and
+this in the bitter cold of a clear, frosty morning, for it was announced
+that after mass and the proceeding of the members of the Order past the
+Pontifical Throne, the Pope would give Apostolic Benediction to the City
+and the World.
+
+Percy finished Terce, closed his book and lay back; his servant would be
+here in a minute now.
+
+His mind began to run over the function, and he reflected that the
+entire Sacred College (with the exception of the Cardinal-Protector of
+Jerusalem, detained by sickness), numbering sixty-four members, would
+take part. This would mean an unique sight by and bye. Eight years
+before, he remembered, after the freedom of Rome, there had been a
+similar assembly; but the Cardinals at that time amounted to no more
+than fifty-three all told, and four had been absent.
+
+Then he heard voices in his ante-room, a quick step, and a loud English
+expostulation. That was curious, and he sat up.
+
+Then he heard a sentence.
+
+“His Eminence must go to vest; it is useless.”
+
+There was a sharp answer, a faint scuffle, and a snatch at the handle.
+This was indecent; so Percy stood up, made three strides of it to the
+door, and tore it open.
+
+A man stood there, whom at first he did not recognise, pale and
+disordered.
+
+“Why---” began Percy, and recoiled.
+
+“Mr. Phillips!” he said.
+
+The other threw out his hands.
+
+“It is I, sir--your Eminence--this moment arrived. It is life and death.
+Your servant tells me---”
+
+“Who sent you?”
+
+“Father Blackmore.”
+
+“Good news or bad?”
+
+The man rolled his eyes towards the servant, who still stood erect and
+offended a yard away; and Percy understood.
+
+He put his hand on the other’s arm, drawing him through the doorway.
+
+“Tap upon this door in two minutes, James,” he said.
+
+They passed across the polished floor together; Percy went to his usual
+place in the window, leaned against the shutter, and spoke.
+
+“Tell me in one sentence, sir,” he said to the breathless man.
+
+“There is a plot among the Catholics. They intend destroying the Abbey
+to-morrow with explosives. I knew that the Pope---”
+
+Percy cut him short with a gesture.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+I
+
+The volor-stage was comparatively empty this afternoon, as the little
+party of six stepped out on to it from the lift. There was nothing to
+distinguish these from ordinary travellers. The two Cardinals of Germany
+and England were wrapped in plain furs, without insignia of any kind;
+their chaplains stood near them, while the two men-servants hurried
+forward with the bags to secure a private compartment.
+
+The four kept complete silence, watching the busy movements of the
+officials on board, staring unseeingly at the sleek, polished monster
+that lay netted in steel at their feet, and the great folded fins that
+would presently be cutting the thin air at a hundred and fifty miles an
+hour.
+
+Then Percy, by a sudden movement, turned from the others, went to the
+open window that looked over Rome, and leaned there with his elbows on
+the sill, looking.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was a strange view before him.
+
+It was darkening now towards sunset, and the sky, primrose-green
+overhead, deepened to a clear tawny orange above the horizon, with a
+sanguine line or two at the edge, and beneath that lay the deep evening
+violet of the city, blotted here and there by the black of cypresses and
+cut by the thin leafless pinnacles of a poplar grove that aspired
+without the walls. But right across the picture rose the enormous dome,
+of an indescribable tint; it was grey, it was violet--it was what the
+eye chose to make it--and through it, giving its solidity the air of a
+bubble, shone the southern sky, flushed too with faint orange. It was
+this that was supreme and dominant; the serrated line of domes, spires
+and pinnacles, the crowded roofs beneath, in the valley dell’ Inferno,
+the fairy hills far away--all were but the annexe to this mighty
+tabernacle of God. Already lights were beginning to shine, as for thirty
+centuries they had shone; thin straight skeins of smoke were ascending
+against the darkening sky. The hum of this Mother of cities was
+beginning to be still, for the keen air kept folks indoors; and the
+evening peace was descending that closed another day and another year.
+Beneath in the narrow streets Percy could see tiny figures, hurrying
+like belated ants; the crack of a whip, the cry of a woman, the wail of
+a child came up to this immense elevation like details of a murmur from
+another world. They, too, would soon be quiet, and there would be peace.
+
+A heavy bell beat faintly from far away, and the drowsy city turned to
+murmur its good-night to the Mother of God. From a thousand towers came
+the tiny melody, floating across the great air spaces, in a thousand
+accents, the solemn bass of St. Peter’s, the mellow tenor of the
+Lateran, the rough cry from some old slum church, the peevish tinkle
+of convents and chapels--all softened and made mystical in this grave
+evening air--it was the wedding of delicate sound and clear light.
+Above, the liquid orange sky; beneath, this sweet, subdued ecstasy of
+bells.
+
+“_Alma Redemptoris Mater_,” whispered Percy, his eyes wet with tears.
+“_Gentle Mother of the Redeemer--the open door of the sky, star of the
+sea--have mercy on sinners._ _The Angel of the Lord announced it to
+Mary, and she conceived of the Holy Ghost_.... _Pour, therefore, Lord,
+Thy grace into our hearts. Let us, who know Christ’s incarnation, rise
+through passion and cross to the glory of Resurrection--through the
+same Christ our Lord._”
+
+Another bell clanged sharply close at hand, calling him down to earth,
+and wrong, and labour and grief; and he turned to see the motionless
+volor itself one blaze of brilliant internal light, and the two priests
+following the German Cardinal across the gangway.
+
+It was the rear compartment that the men had taken; and when he had seen
+that the old man was comfortable, still without a word he passed out
+again into the central passage to see the last of Rome.
+
+The exit-door had now been snapped, and as Percy stood at the opposite
+window looking out at the high wall that would presently sink beneath
+him, throughout the whole of the delicate frame began to run the
+vibration of the electric engine. There was the murmur of talking
+somewhere, a heavy step shook the floor, a bell clanged again, twice,
+and a sweet wind-chord sounded. Again it sounded; the vibration ceased,
+and the edge of the high wall against the tawny sky on which he had
+fixed his eyes sank suddenly like a dropped bar, and he staggered a
+little in his place. A moment later the dome rose again, and itself
+sank, the city, a fringe of towers and a mass of dark roofs, pricked
+with light, span like a whirlpool; the jewelled stars themselves sprang
+this way and that; and with one more long cry the marvellous machine
+righted itself, beat with its wings, and settled down, with the note of
+the flying air passing through rising shrillness into vibrant silence,
+to its long voyage to the north.
+
+Further and further sank the city behind; it was a patch now: greyness
+on black. The sky seemed to grow more huge and all-containing as the
+earth relapsed into darkness; it glowed like a vast dome of wonderful
+glass, darkening even as it glowed; and as Percy dropped his eyes once
+more round the extreme edge of the car the city was but a line and a
+bubble--a line and a swelling--a line, and nothingness.
+
+He drew a long breath, and went back to his friends.
+
+
+II
+
+“Tell me again,” said the old Cardinal, when the two were settled down
+opposite to one another, and the chaplains were gone to another
+compartment. “Who is this man?”
+
+“This man? He was secretary to Oliver Brand, one of our politicians. He
+fetched me to old Mrs. Brand’s death bed, and lost his place in
+consequence. He is in journalism now. He is perfectly honest. No, he is
+not a Catholic, though he longs to be one. That is why they confided in
+him.”
+
+“And they?”
+
+“I know nothing of them, except that they are a desperate set. They have
+enough faith to act, but not enough to be patient.... I suppose they
+thought this man would sympathise. But unfortunately he has a
+conscience, and he also sees that any attempt of this kind would be the
+last straw on the back of toleration. Eminence, do you realise how
+violent the feeling is against us?”
+
+The old man shook his head lamentably.
+
+“Do I not?” he murmured. “And my Germans are in it? Are you sure?”
+
+“Eminence, it is a vast plot. It has been simmering for months. There
+have been meetings every week. They have kept the secret marvellously.
+Your Germans only delayed that the blow might be more complete. And now,
+to-morrow---” Percy drew back with a despairing gesture.
+
+“And the Holy Father?”
+
+“I went to him as soon as mass was over. He withdrew all opposition, and
+sent for you. It is our one chance, Eminence.”
+
+“And you think our plan will hinder it?”
+
+“I have no idea, but I can think of nothing else. I shall go straight to
+the Archbishop and tell him all. We arrive, I believe, at three o’clock,
+and you in Berlin about seven, I suppose, by German time. The function
+is fixed for eleven. By eleven, then, we shall have done all that is
+possible. The Government will know, and they will know, too, that we are
+innocent in Rome. I imagine they will cause it to be announced that the
+Cardinal-Protector and the Archbishop, with his coadjutors, will be
+present in the sacristies. They will double every guard; they will
+parade volors overhead--and then--well! in God’s hands be the rest.”
+
+“Do you think the conspirators will attempt it?”
+
+“I have no idea,” said Percy shortly.
+
+“I understand they have alternative plans.”
+
+“Just so. If all is clear, they intend dropping the explosive from
+above; if not, at least three men have offered to sacrifice themselves
+by taking it into the Abbey themselves.... And you, Eminence?”
+
+The old man eyed him steadily.
+
+“My programme is yours,” he said. “Eminence, have you considered the
+effect in either case? If nothing happens---”
+
+“If nothing happens we shall be accused of a fraud, of seeking to
+advertise ourselves. If anything happens--well, we shall all go before
+God together. Pray God it may be the second,” he added passionately.
+
+“It will be at least easier to bear,” observed the old man.
+
+“I beg your pardon, Eminence. I should not have said that.”
+
+There fell a silence between the two, in which no sound was heard but
+the faint untiring vibration of the screw, and the sudden cough of a man
+in the next compartment. Percy leaned his head wearily on his hand, and
+stared from the window.
+
+The earth was now dark beneath them--an immense emptiness; above, the
+huge engulfing sky was still faintly luminous, and through the high
+frosty mist through which they moved stars glimmered now and again, as
+the car swayed and tacked across the wind.
+
+“It will be cold among the Alps,” murmured Percy. Then he broke off.
+“And I have not one shred of evidence,” he said; “nothing but the word
+of a man.”
+
+“And you are sure?”
+
+“I am sure.”
+
+“Eminence,” said the German suddenly, staring straight into his face,
+“the likeness is extraordinary.”
+
+Percy smiled listlessly. He was tired of bearing that.
+
+“What do you make of it?” persisted the other.
+
+“I have been asked that before,” said Percy. “I have no views.”
+
+“It seems to me that God means something,” murmured the German heavily,
+still staring at him.
+
+“Well, Eminence?”
+
+“A kind of antithesis--a reverse of the medal. I do not know.”
+
+Again there was silence. A chaplain looked in through the glazed door, a
+homely, blue-eyed German, and was waved away once more.
+
+“Eminence,” said the old man abruptly, “there is surely more to speak
+of. Plans to be made.”
+
+Percy shook his head.
+
+“There are no plans to be made,” he said. “We know nothing but the
+fact--no names--nothing. We--we are like children in a tiger’s cage. And
+one of us has just made a gesture in the tiger’s face.”
+
+“I suppose we shall communicate with one another?”
+
+“If we are in existence.”
+
+It was curious how Percy took the lead. He had worn his scarlet for
+about three months, and his companion for twelve years; yet it was the
+younger who dictated plans and arranged. He was scarcely conscious of
+its strangeness, however. Ever since the shocking news of the morning,
+when a new mine had been sprung under the shaking Church, and he had
+watched the stately ceremonial, the gorgeous splendour, the dignified,
+tranquil movements of the Pope and his court, with a secret that burned
+his heart and brain--above all, since that quick interview in which old
+plans had been reversed and a startling decision formed, and a blessing
+given and received, and a farewell looked not uttered--all done in
+half-an-hour--his whole nature had concentrated itself into one keen
+tense force, like a coiled spring. He felt power tingling to his
+finger-tips--power and the dulness of an immense despair. Every prop had
+been cut, every brace severed; he, the City of Rome, the Catholic
+Church, the very supernatural itself, seemed to hang now on one single
+thing--the Finger of God. And if that failed--well, nothing would ever
+matter any more....
+
+He was going now to one of two things--ignominy or death. There was no
+third thing--unless, indeed, the conspirators were actually taken with
+their instruments upon them. But that was impossible. Either they would
+refrain, knowing that God’s ministers would fall with them, and in that
+case there would be the ignominy of a detected fraud, of a miserable
+attempt to win credit. Or they would not refrain; they would count the
+death of a Cardinal and a few bishops a cheap price to pay for
+revenge--and in that case well, there was Death and Judgment. But Percy
+had ceased to fear. No ignominy could be greater than that which he
+already bore--the ignominy of loneliness and discredit. And death could
+be nothing but sweet--it would at least be knowledge and rest. He was
+willing to risk all on God.
+
+The other, with a little gesture of apology, took out his office book
+presently, and began to read.
+
+Percy looked at him with an immense envy. Ah! if only he were as old as
+that! He could bear a year or two more of this misery, but not fifty
+years, he thought. It was an almost endless vista that (even if things
+went well) opened before him, of continual strife, self-repression,
+energy, misrepresentation from his enemies. The Church was sinking
+further every day. What if this new spasm of fervour were no more than
+the dying flare of faith? How could he bear that? He would have to see
+the tide of atheism rise higher and more triumphant every day;
+Felsenburgh had given it an impetus of whose end there was no
+prophesying. Never before had a single man wielded the full power of
+democracy. Then once more he looked forward to the morrow. Oh! if it
+could but end in death!... _Beati mortui qui in Domino moriuntur!_ ...
+
+It was no good; it was cowardly to think in this fashion. After all, God
+was God--He takes up the isles as a very little thing.
+
+Percy took out his office book, found Prime and St. Sylvester, signed
+himself with the cross, and began to pray. A minute later the two
+chaplains slipped in once more, and sat down; and all was silent, save
+for that throb of the screw, and the strange whispering rush of air
+outside.
+
+
+III
+
+It was about nineteen o’clock that the ruddy English conductor looked in
+at the doorway, waking Percy from his doze.
+
+“Dinner will be served in half-an-hour, gentlemen,” he said (speaking
+Esperanto, as the rule was on international cars). “We do not stop at
+Turin to-night.”
+
+He shut the door and went out, and the sound of closing doors came down
+the corridor as he made the same announcement to each compartment.
+
+There were no passengers to descend at Turin, then, reflected Percy; and
+no doubt a wireless message had been received that there were none to
+come on board either. That was good news: it would give him more time in
+London. It might even enable Cardinal Steinmann to catch an earlier
+volor from Paris to Berlin; but he was not sure how they ran. It was a
+pity that the German had not been able to catch the thirteen o’clock
+from Rome to Berlin direct. So he calculated, in a kind of superficial
+insensibility.
+
+He stood up presently to stretch himself. Then he passed out and along
+the corridor to the lavatory to wash his hands.
+
+He became fascinated by the view as he stood before the basin at the
+rear of the car, for even now they were passing over Turin. It was a
+blur of light, vivid and beautiful, that shone beneath him in the midst
+of this gulf of darkness, sweeping away southwards into the gloom as the
+car sped on towards the Alps. How little, he thought, seemed this great
+city seen from above; and yet, how mighty it was! It was from that
+glimmer, already five miles behind, that Italy was controlled; in one of
+these dolls’ houses of which he had caught but a glimpse, men sat in
+council over souls and bodies, and abolished God, and smiled at His
+Church. And God allowed it all, and made no sign. It was there that
+Felsenburgh had been, a month or two ago--Felsenburgh, his double! And
+again the mental sword tore and stabbed at his heart.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A few minutes later, the four ecclesiastics were sitting at their round
+table in a little screened compartment of the dining-room in the bows of
+the air-ship. It was an excellent dinner, served, as usual, from the
+kitchen in the bowels of the volor, and rose, course by course, with a
+smooth click, into the centre of the table. There was a bottle of red
+wine to each diner, and both table and chairs swung easily to the very
+slight motion of the ship. But they did not talk much, for there was
+only one subject possible to the two cardinals, and the chaplains had
+not yet been admitted into the full secret.
+
+It was growing cold now, and even the hot-air foot-rests did not quite
+compensate for the deathly iciness of the breath that began to stream
+down from the Alps, which the ship was now approaching at a slight
+incline. It was necessary to rise at least nine thousand feet from the
+usual level, in order to pass the frontier of the Mont Cenis at a safe
+angle; and at the same time it was necessary to go a little slower over
+the Alps themselves, owing to the extreme rarity of the air, and the
+difficulty in causing the screw to revolve sufficiently quickly to
+counteract it.
+
+“There will be clouds to-night,” said a voice clear and distinct from
+the passage, as the door swung slightly to a movement of the car.
+
+Percy got up and closed it.
+
+The German Cardinal began to grow a little fidgety towards the end of
+dinner.
+
+“I shall go back,” he said at last. “I shall be better in my fur rug.”
+
+His chaplain dutifully went after him, leaving his own dinner
+unfinished, and Percy was left alone with Father Corkran, his English
+chaplain lately from Scotland.
+
+He finished his wine, ate a couple of figs, and then sat staring out
+through the plate-glass window in front.
+
+“Ah!” he said. “Excuse me, father. There are the Alps at last.”
+
+The front of the car consisted of three divisions, in the centre of one
+of which stood the steersman, his eyes looking straight ahead, and his
+hands upon the wheel. On either side of him, separated from him by
+aluminium walls, was contrived a narrow slip of a compartment, with a
+long curved window at the height of a man’s eyes, through which a
+magnificent view could be obtained. It was to one of these that Percy
+went, passing along the corridor, and seeing through half-opened doors
+other parties still over their wine. He pushed the spring door on the
+left and went through.
+
+He had crossed the Alps three times before in his life, and well
+remembered the extraordinary effect they had had on him, especially as
+he had once seen them from a great altitude upon a clear day--an
+eternal, immeasurable sea of white ice, broken by hummocks and wrinkles
+that from below were soaring peaks named and reverenced; and, beyond,
+the spherical curve of the earth’s edge that dropped in a haze of air
+into unutterable space. But this time they seemed more amazing than
+ever, and he looked out on them with the interest of a sick child.
+
+The car was now ascending; rapidly towards the pass up across the huge
+tumbled slopes, ravines, and cliffs that lie like outworks of the
+enormous wall. Seen from this great height they were in themselves
+comparatively insignificant, but they at least suggested the vastness of
+the bastions of which they were no more than buttresses. As Percy
+turned, he could see the moonless sky alight with frosty stars, and the
+dimness of the illumination made the scene even more impressive; but as
+he turned again, there was a change. The vast air about him seemed now
+to be perceived through frosted glass. The velvet blackness of the pine
+forests had faded to heavy grey, the pale glint of water and ice seen
+and gone again in a moment, the monstrous nakedness of rock spires and
+slopes, rising towards him and sliding away again beneath with a
+crawling motion--all these had lost their distinctness of outline, and
+were veiled in invisible white. As he looked yet higher to right and
+left the sight became terrifying, for the giant walls of rock rushing
+towards him, the huge grotesque shapes towering on all sides, ran upward
+into a curtain of cloud visible only from the dancing radiance thrown
+upon it by the brilliantly lighted car. Even as he looked, two straight
+fingers of splendour, resembling horns, shot out, as the bow
+searchlights were turned on; and the car itself, already travelling at
+half-speed, dropped to quarter-speed, and began to sway softly from side
+to side as the huge air-planes beat the mist through which they moved,
+and the antennae of light pierced it. Still up they went, and on--yet
+swift enough to let Percy see one great pinnacle rear itself, elongate,
+sink down into a cruel needle, and vanish into nothingness a thousand
+feet below. The motion grew yet more nauseous, as the car moved up at a
+sharp angle preserving its level, simultaneously rising, advancing and
+swaying. Once, hoarse and sonorous, an unfrozen torrent roared like a
+beast, it seemed within twenty yards, and was dumb again on the instant.
+Now, too, the horns began to cry, long, lamentable hootings, ringing
+sadly in that echoing desolation like the wail of wandering souls; and
+as Percy, awed beyond feeling, wiped the gathering moisture from the
+glass, and stared again, it appeared as if he floated now, motionless
+except for the slight rocking beneath his feet, in a world of whiteness,
+as remote from earth as from heaven, poised in hopeless infinite space,
+blind, alone, frozen, lost in a white hell of desolation.
+
+
+Once, as he stared, a huge whiteness moved towards him through the veil,
+slid slowly sideways and down, disclosing, as the car veered, a gigantic
+slope smooth as oil, with one cluster of black rock cutting it like the
+fingers of a man’s hand groping from a mountainous wave.
+
+Then, as once more the car cried aloud like a lost sheep, there answered
+it, it seemed scarcely ten yards away, first one windy scream of dismay,
+another and another; a clang of bells, a chorus broke out; and the air
+was full of the beating of wings.
+
+
+IV
+
+There was one horrible instant before a clang of a bell, the answering
+scream, and a whirling motion showed that the steersman was alert. Then
+like a stone the car dropped, and Percy clutched at the rail before him
+to steady the terrible sensation of falling into emptiness. He could
+hear behind him the crash of crockery, the bumping of heavy bodies, and
+as the car again checked on its wide wings, a rush of footsteps broke
+out and a cry or two of dismay. Outside, but high and far away, the
+hooting went on; the air was full of it, and in a flash he recognised
+that it could not be one or ten or twenty cars, but at least a hundred
+that had answered the call, and that somewhere overhead were hooting and
+flapping. The invisible ravines and cliffs on all sides took up the
+crying; long wails whooped and moaned and died amid a clash of bells,
+further and further every instant, but now in every direction, behind,
+above, in front, and far to right and left. Once more the car began to
+move, sinking in a long still curve towards the face of the mountain;
+and as it checked, and began to sway again on its huge wings, he turned
+to the door, seeing as he did so, through the cloudy windows in the
+glow of light, a spire of rock not thirty feet below rising from the
+mist, and one smooth shoulder of snow curving away into invisibility.
+
+Within, the car shewed brutal signs of the sudden check: the doors of
+the dining compartments, as he passed along, were flung wide; glasses,
+plates, pools of wine and tumbled fruit rolled to and fro on the heaving
+floors; one man, sitting helplessly on the ground, rolled vacant,
+terrified eyes upon the priest. He glanced in at the door through which
+he had come just now, and Father Corkran staggered up from his seat and
+came towards him, reeling at the motion underfoot; simultaneously there
+was a rush from the opposite door, where a party of Americans had been
+dining; and as Percy, beckoning with his head, turned again to go down
+to the stern-end of the ship, he found the narrow passage blocked with
+the crowd that had run out. A babble of talking and cries made questions
+impossible; and Percy, with his chaplain behind him, gripped the
+aluminium panelling, and step by step began to make his way in search of
+his friends.
+
+Half-way down the passage, as he pushed and struggled, a voice made
+itself heard above the din; and in the momentary silence that followed,
+again sounded the far-away crying of the volors overhead.
+
+“Seats, gentlemen, seats,” roared the voice. “We are moving
+immediately.”
+
+Then the crowd melted as the conductor came through, red-faced and
+determined, and Percy, springing into his wake, found his way clear to
+the stern.
+
+The Cardinal seemed none the worse. He had been asleep, he explained,
+and saved himself in time from rolling on to the floor; but his old face
+twitched as he talked.
+
+“But what is it?” he said. “What is the meaning?”
+
+Father Bechlin related how he had actually seen one of the troop of
+volors within five yards of the window; it was crowded with faces, he
+said, from stem to stern. Then it had soared suddenly, and vanished in
+whorls of mist.
+
+Percy shook his head, saying nothing. He had no explanation.
+
+“They are inquiring, I understand,” said Father Bechlin again. “The
+conductor was at his instrument just now.”
+
+There was nothing to be seen from the windows now. Only, as Percy stared
+out, still dazed with the shock, he saw the cruel needle of rock
+wavering beneath as if seen through water, and the huge shoulder of snow
+swaying softly up and down. It was quieter outside. It appeared that the
+flock had passed, only somewhere from an infinite height still sounded a
+fitful wailing, as if a lonely bird were wandering, lost in space.
+
+“That is the signalling volor,” murmured Percy to himself.
+
+He had no theory--no suggestion. Yet the matter seemed an ominous one.
+It was unheard of that an encounter with a hundred volors should take
+place, and he wondered why they were going southwards. Again the name of
+Felsenburgh came to his mind. What if that sinister man were still
+somewhere overhead?
+
+“Eminence,” began the old man again. But at that instant the car began
+to move.
+
+A bell clanged, a vibration tingled underfoot, and then, soft as a
+flake of snow, the great ship began to rise, its movement perceptible
+only by the sudden drop and vanishing of the spire of rock at which
+Percy still stared. Slowly the snowfield too began to flit downwards, a
+black cleft, whisked smoothly into sight from above, and disappeared
+again below, and a moment later once more the car seemed poised in white
+space as it climbed the slope of air down which it had dropped just now.
+Again the wind-chord rent the atmosphere; and this time the answer was
+as faint and distant as a cry from another world. The speed quickened,
+and the steady throb of the screw began to replace the swaying motion of
+the wings. Again came the hoot, wild and echoing through the barren
+wilderness of rock walls beneath, and again with a sudden impulse the
+car soared. It was going in great circles now, cautious as a cat,
+climbing, climbing, punctuating the ascent with cry after cry, searching
+the blind air for dangers. Once again a vast white slope came into
+sight, illuminated by the glare from the windows, sinking ever more and
+more swiftly, receding and approaching--until for one instant a jagged
+line of rocks grinned like teeth through the mist, dropped away and
+vanished, and with a clash of bells, and a last scream of warning, the
+throb of the screw passed from a whirr to a rising note, and the note to
+stillness, as the huge ship, clear at last of the frontier peaks, shook
+out her wings steady once more, and set out for her humming flight
+through space.... Whatever it was, was behind them now, vanished into
+the thick night.
+
+There was a sound of talking from the interior of the car, hasty,
+breathless voices, questioning, exclaiming, and the authoritative terse
+answer of the guard. A step came along outside, and Percy sprang to meet
+it, but, as he laid his hand on the door, it was pushed from without,
+and to his astonishment the English guard came straight through, closing
+it behind him.
+
+He stood there, looking strangely at the four priests, with compressed
+lips and anxious eyes.
+
+“Well?” cried Percy.
+
+“All right, gentlemen. But I’m thinking you’d better descend at Paris. I
+know who you are, gentlemen--and though I’m not a Catholic---”
+
+He stopped again.
+
+“For God’s sake, man---” began Percy.
+
+“Oh! the news, gentlemen. Well, it was two hundred cars going to Rome.
+There is a Catholic plot, sir, discovered in London---”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“To wipe out the Abbey. So they’re going---”
+
+“Ah!”
+
+“Yes, sir--to wipe out Rome.”
+
+Then he was gone again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+I
+
+It was nearly sixteen o’clock on the same day, the last day of the year,
+that Mabel went into the little church that stood in the street beneath
+her house.
+
+The dark was falling softly layer on layer; across the roofs to westward
+burned the smouldering fire of the winter sunset, and the interior was
+full of the dying light. She had slept a little in her chair that
+afternoon, and had awakened with that strange cleansed sense of spirit
+and mind that sometimes follows such sleep. She wondered later how she
+could have slept at such a time, and above all, how it was that she had
+perceived nothing of that cloud of fear and fury that even now was
+falling over town and country alike. She remembered afterwards an
+unusual busy-ness on the broad tracks beneath her as she had looked out
+on them from her windows, and an unusual calling of horns and whistles;
+but she thought nothing of it, and passed down an hour later for a
+meditation in the church.
+
+She had grown to love the quiet place, and came in often like this to
+steady her thoughts and concentrate them on the significance that lay
+beneath the surface of life--the huge principles upon which all lived,
+and which so plainly were the true realities. Indeed, such devotion was
+becoming almost recognised among certain classes of people. Addresses
+were delivered now and then; little books were being published as guides
+to the interior life, curiously resembling the old Catholic books on
+mental prayer.
+
+She went to-day to her usual seat, sat down, folded her hands, looked
+for a minute or two upon the old stone sanctuary, the white image and
+the darkening window. Then she closed her eyes and began to think,
+according to the method she followed.
+
+First she concentrated her attention on herself, detaching it from all
+that was merely external and transitory, withdrawing it inwards ...
+inwards, until she found that secret spark which, beneath all frailties
+and activities, made her a substantial member of the divine race of
+humankind.
+
+This then was the first step.
+
+The second consisted in an act of the intellect, followed by one of the
+imagination. All men possessed that spark, she considered.... Then she
+sent out her powers, sweeping with the eyes of her mind the seething
+world, seeing beneath the light and dark of the two hemispheres, the
+countless millions of mankind--children coming into the world, old men
+leaving it, the mature rejoicing in it and their own strength. Back
+through the ages she looked, through those centuries of crime and
+blindness, as the race rose through savagery and superstition to a
+knowledge of themselves; on through the ages yet to come, as generation
+followed generation to some climax whose perfection, she told herself,
+she could not fully comprehend because she was not of it. Yet, she told
+herself again, that climax had already been born; the birthpangs were
+over; for had not He come who was the heir of time?...
+
+Then by a third and vivid act she realised the unity of all, the central
+fire of which each spark was but a radiation--that vast passionless
+divine being, realising Himself up through these centuries, one yet
+many, Him whom men had called God, now no longer unknown, but recognised
+as the transcendent total of themselves--Him who now, with the coming of
+the new Saviour, had stirred and awakened and shown Himself as One.
+
+And there she stayed, contemplating the vision of her mind, detaching
+now this virtue, now that for particular assimilation, dwelling on her
+deficiencies, seeing in the whole the fulfilment of all aspirations, the
+sum of all for which men had hoped--that Spirit of Peace, so long
+hindered yet generated too perpetually by the passions of the world,
+forced into outline and being by the energy of individual lives,
+realising itself in pulse after pulse, dominant at last, serene,
+manifest, and triumphant. There she stayed, losing the sense of
+individuality, merging it by a long sustained effort of the will,
+drinking, as she thought, long breaths of the spirit of life and
+love....
+
+Some sound, she supposed afterwards, disturbed her, and she opened her
+eyes; and there before her lay the quiet pavement, glimmering through
+the dusk, the step of the sanctuary, the rostrum on the right, and the
+peaceful space of darkening air above the white Mother-figure and
+against the tracery of the old window. It was here that men had
+worshipped Jesus, that blood-stained Man of Sorrow, who had borne, even
+on His own confession, not peace but a sword. Yet they had knelt, those
+blind and hopeless Christians.... Ah! the pathos of it all, the
+despairing acceptance of any creed that would account for sorrow, the
+wild worship of any God who had claimed to bear it!
+
+And again came the sound, striking across her peace, though as yet she
+did not understand why.
+
+It was nearer now; and she turned in astonishment to look down the dusky
+nave.
+
+It was from without that the sound had come, that strange murmur, that
+rose and fell again as she listened.
+
+She stood up, her heart quickening a little--only once before had she
+heard such a sound, once before, in a square, where men raged about a
+point beneath a platform....
+
+She stepped swiftly out of her seat, passed down the aisle, drew back
+the curtains beneath the west window, lifted the latch and stepped out.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The street, from where she looked over the railings that barred the
+entrance to the church, seemed unusually empty and dark. To right and
+left stretched the houses, overhead the darkening sky was flushed with
+rose; but it seemed as if the public lights had been forgotten. There
+was not a living being to be seen.
+
+She had put her hand on the latch of the gate, to open it and go out,
+when a sudden patter of footsteps made her hesitate; and the next
+instant a child appeared panting, breathless and terrified, running with
+her hands before her.
+
+“They’re coming, they’re coming,” sobbed the child, seeing the face
+looking at her. Then she clung to the bars, staring over her shoulder.
+
+Mabel lifted the latch in an instant; the child sprang in, ran to the
+door and beat against it, then turning, seized her dress and cowered
+against her. Mabel shut the gate.
+
+“There, there,” she said. “Who is it? Who are coming?”
+
+But the child hid her face, drawing at the kindly skirts; and the next
+moment came the roar of voices and the trampling of footsteps.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was not more than a few seconds before the heralds of that grim
+procession came past. First came a flying squadron of children,
+laughing, terrified, fascinated, screaming, turning their heads as they
+ran, with a dog or two yelping among them, and a few women drifting
+sideways along the pavements. A face of a man, Mabel saw as she glanced
+in terror upwards, had appeared at the windows opposite, pale and
+eager--some invalid no doubt dragging himself to see. One group--a
+well-dressed man in grey, a couple of women carrying babies, a
+solemn-faced boy--halted immediately before her on the other side of the
+railings, all talking, none listening, and these too turned their faces
+to the road on the left, up which every instant the clamour and
+trampling grew. Yet she could not ask. Her lips moved; but no sound came
+from them. She was one incarnate apprehension. Across her intense fixity
+moved pictures of no importance of Oliver as he had been at breakfast,
+of her own bedroom with its softened paper, of the dark sanctuary and
+the white figure on which she had looked just now.
+
+They were coming thicker now; a troop of young men with their arms
+linked swayed into sight, all talking or crying aloud, none
+listening--all across the roadway, and behind them surged the crowd,
+like a wave in a stone-fenced channel, male scarcely distinguishable
+from female in that pack of faces, and under that sky that grew darker
+every instant. Except for the noise, which Mabel now hardly noticed, so
+thick and incessant it was, so complete her concentration in the sense
+of sight--except for that, it might have been, from its suddenness and
+overwhelming force, some mob of phantoms trooping on a sudden out of
+some vista of the spiritual world visible across an open space, and
+about to vanish again in obscurity. That empty street was full now on
+this side and that so far as she could see; the young men were
+gone--running or walking she hardly knew--round the corner to the right,
+and the entire space was one stream of heads and faces, pressing so
+fiercely that the group at the railings were detached like weeds and
+drifted too, sideways, clutching at the bars, and swept away too and
+vanished. And all the while the child tugged and tore at her skirts.
+
+Certain things began to appear now above the heads of the crowd--objects
+she could not distinguish in the failing light--poles, and fantastic
+shapes, fragments of stuff resembling banners, moving as if alive,
+turning from side to side, borne from beneath.
+
+Faces, distorted with passion, looked at her from time to time as the
+moving show went past, open mouths cried at her; but she hardly saw
+them. She was watching those strange emblems, straining her eyes through
+the dusk, striving to distinguish the battered broken shapes,
+half-guessing, yet afraid to guess.
+
+Then, on a sudden, from the hidden lamps beneath the eaves, light leaped
+into being--that strong, sweet, familiar light, generated by the great
+engines underground that, in the passion of that catastrophic day, all
+men had forgotten; and in a moment all changed from a mob of phantoms
+and shapes into a pitiless reality of life and death.
+
+Before her moved a great rood, with a figure upon it, of which one arm
+hung from the nailed hand, swinging as it went; an embroidery streamed
+behind with the swiftness of the motion.
+
+And next after it came the naked body of a child, impaled, white and
+ruddy, the head fallen upon the breast, and the arms, too, dangling and
+turning.
+
+And next the figure of a man, hanging by the neck, dressed, it seemed,
+in a kind of black gown and cape, with its black-capped head twisting
+from the twisting rope.
+
+
+II
+
+The same night Oliver Brand came home about an hour before midnight.
+
+For himself, what he had heard and seen that day was still too vivid and
+too imminent for him to judge of it coolly. He had seen, from his
+windows in Whitehall, Parliament Square filled with a mob the like of
+which had not been known in England since the days of Christianity--a
+mob full of a fury that could scarcely draw its origin except from
+sources beyond the reach of sense. Thrice during the hours that followed
+the publication of the Catholic plot and the outbreak of mob-law he had
+communicated with the Prime Minister asking whether nothing could be
+done to allay the tumult; and on both occasions he had received the
+doubtful answer that what could be done would be done, that force was
+inadmissible at present; but that the police were doing all that was
+possible.
+
+As regarded the despatch of the volors to Rome, he had assented by
+silence, as had the rest of the Council. That was, Snowford had said, a
+judicial punitive act, regrettable but necessary. Peace, in this
+instance, could not be secured except on terms of war--or rather, since
+war was obsolete--by the sternness of justice. These Catholics had shown
+themselves the avowed enemies of society; very well, then society must
+defend itself, at least this once. Man was still human. And Oliver had
+listened and said nothing.
+
+As he passed in one of the Government volors over London on his way
+home, he had caught more than one glimpse of what was proceeding beneath
+him. The streets were as bright as day, shadowless and clear in the
+white light, and every roadway was a crawling serpent. From beneath rose
+up a steady roar of voices, soft and woolly, punctuated by cries. From
+here and there ascended the smoke of burning; and once, as he flitted
+over one of the great squares to the south of Battersea, he had seen as
+it were a scattered squadron of ants running as if in fear or
+pursuit.... He knew what was happening.... Well, after all, man was not
+yet perfectly civilised.
+
+He did not like to think of what awaited him at home. Once, about five
+hours earlier, he had listened to his wife’s voice through the
+telephone, and what he had heard had nearly caused him to leave all and
+go to her. Yet he was scarcely prepared for what he found.
+
+As he came into the sitting-room, there was no sound, except that
+far-away hum from the seething streets below. The room seemed strangely
+dark and cold; the only light that entered was through one of the
+windows from which the curtains were withdrawn, and, silhouetted against
+the luminous sky beyond, was the upright figure of a woman, looking and
+listening....
+
+He pressed the knob of the electric light; and Mabel turned slowly
+towards him. She was in her day-dress, with a cloak thrown over her
+shoulders, and her face was almost as that of a stranger. It was
+perfectly colourless, her lips were compressed and her eyes full of an
+emotion which he could not interpret. It might equally have been anger,
+terror or misery.
+
+She stood there in the steady light, motionless, looking at him.
+
+For a moment he did not trust himself to speak. He passed across to the
+window, closed it and drew the curtains. Then he took that rigid figure
+gently by the arm.
+
+“Mabel,” he said, “Mabel.”
+
+She submitted to be drawn towards the sofa, but there was no response to
+his touch. He sat down and looked up at her with a kind of despairing
+apprehension.
+
+“My dear, I am tired out,” he said.
+
+Still she looked at him. There was in her pose that rigidity that actors
+simulate; yet he knew it for the real thing. He had seen that silence
+once or twice before in the presence of a horror--once at any rate, at
+the sight of a splash of blood on her shoe.
+
+“Well, my darling, sit down, at least,” he said.
+
+She obeyed him mechanically--sat, and still stared at him. In the
+silence once more that soft roar rose and died from the invisible world
+of tumult outside the windows. Within here all was quiet. He knew
+perfectly that two things strove within her, her loyalty to her faith
+and her hatred of those crimes in the name of justice. As he looked on
+her he saw that these two were at death grips, that hatred was
+prevailing, and that she herself was little more than a passive
+battlefield. Then, as with a long-drawn howl of a wolf, there surged and
+sank the voices of the mob a mile away, the tension broke.... She threw
+herself forward towards him, he caught her by the wrists, and so she
+rested, clasped in his arms, her face and bosom on his knees, and her
+whole body torn by emotion.
+
+For a full minute neither spoke. Oliver understood well enough, yet at
+present he had no words. He only drew her a little closer to himself,
+kissed her hair two or three times, and settled himself to hold her. He
+began to rehearse what he must say presently.
+
+Then she raised her flushed face for an instant, looked at him
+passionately, dropped her head again and began to sob out broken words.
+
+He could only catch a sentence here and there, yet he knew what she was
+saying....
+
+It was the ruin of all her hopes, she sobbed, the end of her religion.
+Let her die, die and have done with it! It was all gone, gone, swept
+away in this murderous passion of the people of her faith ... they were
+no better than Christians, after all, as fierce as the men on whom they
+avenged themselves, as dark as though the Saviour, Julian, had never
+come; it was all lost ... War and Passion and Murder had returned to the
+body from which she had thought them gone forever.... The burning
+churches, the hunted Catholics, the raging of the streets on which she
+had looked that day, the bodies of the child and the priest carried on
+poles, the burning churches and convents. ... All streamed out,
+incoherent, broken by sobs, details of horror, lamentations, reproaches,
+interpreted by the writhing of her head and hands upon his knees. The
+collapse was complete.
+
+He put his hands again beneath her arms and raised her. He was worn out
+by his work, yet he knew he must quiet her. This was more serious than
+any previous crisis. Yet he knew her power of recovery.
+
+“Sit down, my darling,” he said. “There ... give me your hands. Now
+listen to me.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He made really an admirable defence, for it was what he had been
+repeating to himself all day. Men were not yet perfect, he said; there
+ran in their veins the blood of men who for twenty centuries had been
+Christians.... There must be no despair; faith in man was of the very
+essence of religion, faith in man’s best self, in what he would become,
+not in what at present he actually was. They were at the beginning of
+the new religion, not in its maturity; there must be sourness in the
+young fruit. ... Consider, too, the provocation! Remember the appalling
+crime that these Catholics had contemplated; they had set themselves to
+strike the new Faith in its very heart....
+
+“My darling,” he said, “men are not changed in an instant. What if those
+Christians had succeeded!... I condemn it all as strongly as you. I saw
+a couple of newspapers this afternoon that are as wicked as anything
+that the Christians have ever done. They exulted in all these crimes. It
+will throw the movement back ten years.... Do you think that there are
+not thousands like yourself who hate and detest this violence?... But
+what does faith mean, except that we know that mercy will prevail?
+Faith, patience and hope--these are our weapons.”
+
+He spoke with passionate conviction, his eyes fixed on hers, in a fierce
+endeavour to give her his own confidence, and to reassure the remnants
+of his own doubtfulness. It was true that he too hated what she hated,
+yet he saw things that she did not.... Well, well, he told himself, he
+must remember that she was a woman.
+
+The look of frantic horror passed slowly out of her eyes, giving way to
+acute misery as he talked, and as his personality once more began to
+dominate her own. But it was not yet over.
+
+“But the volors,” she cried, “the volors! That is deliberate; that is
+not the work of the mob.”
+
+“My darling, it is no more deliberate than the other. We are all human,
+we are all immature. Yes, the Council permitted it, ... permitted it,
+remember. The German Government, too, had to yield. We must tame nature
+slowly, we must not break it.”
+
+He talked again for a few minutes, repeating his arguments, soothing,
+reassuring, encouraging; and he saw that he was beginning to prevail.
+But she returned to one of his words.
+
+“Permitted it! And you permitted it.”
+
+“Dear; I said nothing, either for it or against. I tell you that if we
+had forbidden it there would have been yet more murder, and the people
+would have lost their rulers. We were passive, since we could do
+nothing.”
+
+“Ah! but it would have been better to die.... Oh, Oliver, let me die at
+least! I cannot bear it.”
+
+By her hands which he still held he drew her nearer yet to himself.
+
+“Sweetheart,” he said gravely, “cannot you trust me a little? If I could
+tell you all that passed to-day, you would understand. But trust me that
+I am not heartless. And what of Julian Felsenburgh?”
+
+For a moment he saw hesitation in her eyes; her loyalty to him and her
+loathing of all that had happened strove within her. Then once again
+loyalty prevailed, the name of Felsenburgh weighed down the balance, and
+trust came back with a flood of tears.
+
+“Oh, Oliver,” she said, “I know I trust you. But I am so weak, and all
+is so terrible. And He so strong and merciful. And will He be with us
+to-morrow?”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It struck midnight from the clock-tower a mile away as they yet sat and
+talked. She was still tremulous from the struggle; but she looked at him
+smiling, still holding his hands. He saw that the reaction was upon her
+in full force at last.
+
+“The New Year, my husband,” she said, and rose as she said it, drawing
+him after her.
+
+“I wish you a happy New Year,” she said. “Oh help me, Oliver.”
+
+She kissed him, and drew back, still holding his hands, looking at him
+with bright tearful eyes.
+
+“Oliver,” she cried again, “I must tell you this.... Do you know what I
+thought before you came?”
+
+He shook his head, staring at her greedily. How sweet she was! He felt
+her grip tighten on his hands.
+
+“I thought I could not bear it,” she whispered--“that I must end it
+all--ah! you know what I mean.”
+
+His heart flinched as he heard her; and he drew her closer again to
+himself.
+
+“It is all over! it is all over,” she cried. “Ah! do not look like that!
+I could not tell you if it was not.”’
+
+As their lips met again there came the vibration of an electric bell
+from the next room, and Oliver, knowing what it meant, felt even in that
+instant a tremor shake his heart. He loosed her hands, and still smiled
+at her.
+
+“The bell!” she said, with a flash of apprehension.
+
+“But it is all well between us again?”
+
+Her face steadied itself into loyalty and confidence.
+
+“It is all well,” she said; and again the impatient bell tingled. “Go,
+Oliver; I will wait here.”
+
+A minute later he was back again, with a strange look on his white face,
+and his lips compressed. He came straight up to her, taking her once
+more by the hands, and looking steadily into her steady eyes. In the
+hearts of both of them resolve and faith were holding down the emotion
+that was not yet dead. He drew a long breath.
+
+“Yes,” he said in an even voice, “it is over.”
+
+Her lips moved; and that deadly paleness lay on her cheeks. He gripped
+her firmly.
+
+“Listen,” he said. “You must face it. It is over. Rome is gone. Now we
+must build something better.”
+
+She threw herself sobbing into his arms.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+I
+
+Long before dawn on the first morning of the New Year the approaches to
+the Abbey were already blocked. Victoria Street, Great George Street,
+Whitehall--even Millbank Street itself--were full and motionless. Broad
+Sanctuary, divided by the low-walled motor-track, was itself cut into
+great blocks and wedges of people by the ways which the police kept open
+for the passage of important personages, and Palace Yard was kept
+rigidly clear except for one island, occupied by a stand which was
+itself full from top to bottom and end to end. All roofs and parapets
+which commanded a view of the Abbey were also one mass of heads.
+Overhead, like solemn moons, burned the white lights of the electric
+globes.
+
+It was not known at exactly what hour the tumult had steadied itself to
+definite purpose, except to a few weary controllers of the temporary
+turnstiles which had been erected the evening before. It had been
+announced a week previously that, in consideration of the enormous
+demand for seats, all persons who presented their worship-ticket at an
+authorised office, and followed the directions issued by the police,
+would be accounted as having fulfilled the duties of citizenship in that
+respect, and it was generally made known that it was the Government’s
+intention to toll the great bell of the Abbey at the beginning of the
+ceremony and at the incensing of the image, during which period silence
+must be as far as possible preserved by all those within hearing.
+
+London had gone completely mad on the announcement of the Catholic plot
+on the afternoon before. The secret had leaked out about fourteen
+o’clock, an hour after the betrayal of the scheme to Mr. Snowford; and
+practically all commercial activities had ceased on the instant. By
+fifteen-and-a-half all stores were closed, the Stock Exchange, the City
+offices, the West End establishments--all had as by irresistible impulse
+suspended business, and from within two hours after noon until nearly
+midnight, when the police had been adequately reinforced and enabled to
+deal with the situation, whole mobs and armies of men, screaming
+squadrons of women, troops of frantic youths, had paraded the streets,
+howling, denouncing, and murdering. It was not known how many deaths had
+taken place, but there was scarcely a street without the signs of
+outrage. Westminster Cathedral had been sacked, every altar overthrown,
+indescribable indignities performed there. An unknown priest had
+scarcely been able to consume the Blessed Sacrament before he was seized
+and throttled; the Archbishop with eleven priests and two bishops had
+been hanged at the north end of the church, thirty-five convents had
+been destroyed, St. George’s Cathedral burned to the ground; and it was
+reported even, by the evening papers, that it was believed that, for the
+first time since the introduction of Christianity into England, there
+was not one Tabernacle left within twenty miles of the Abbey. “London,”
+explained the _New People_, in huge headlines, “was cleansed at last of
+dingy and fantastic nonsense.”
+
+It was known at about fifteen-and-a-half o’clock that at least seventy
+volors had left for Rome, and half-an-hour later that Berlin had
+reinforced them by sixty more. At midnight, fortunately at a time when
+the police had succeeded in shepherding the crowds into some kind of
+order, the news was flashed on to cloud and placard alike that the grim
+work was done, and that Rome had ceased to exist. The early morning
+papers added a few details, pointing out, of course, the coincidence of
+the fall with the close of the year, relating how, by an astonishing
+chance, practically all the heads of the hierarchy throughout the world
+had been assembled in the Vatican which had been the first object of
+attack, and how these, in desperation, it was supposed, had refused to
+leave the City when the news came by wireless telegraphy that the
+punitive force was on its way. There was not a building left in Rome;
+the entire place, Leonine City, Trastevere, suburbs--everything was
+gone; for the volors, poised at an immense height, had parcelled out the
+City beneath them with extreme care, before beginning to drop the
+explosives; and five minutes after the first roar from beneath and the
+first burst of smoke and flying fragments, the thing was finished. The
+volors had then dispersed in every direction, pursuing the motor and
+rail-tracks along which the population had attempted to escape so soon
+as the news was known; and it was supposed that not less than thirty
+thousand belated fugitives had been annihilated by this foresight. It
+was true, remarked the _Studio_, that many treasures of incalculable
+value had been destroyed, but this was a cheap price to pay for the
+final and complete extermination of the Catholic pest. “There comes a
+point,” it remarked, “when destruction is the only cure for a
+vermin-infested house,” and it proceeded to observe that now that the
+Pope with the entire College of Cardinals, all the ex-Royalties of
+Europe, all the most frantic religionists from the inhabited world who
+had taken up their abode in the “Holy City” were gone at a stroke, a
+recrudescence of the superstition was scarcely to be feared elsewhere.
+Yet care must even now be taken against any relenting. Catholics (if any
+were left bold enough to attempt it) must no longer be allowed to take
+any kind of part in the life of any civilised country. So far as
+messages had come in from other countries, there was but one chorus of
+approval at what had been done.
+
+A few papers regretted the incident, or rather the spirit which had lain
+behind it. It was not seemly, they said, that Humanitarians should have
+recourse to violence; yet not one pretended that anything could be felt
+but thanksgiving for the general result. Ireland, too, must be brought
+into line; they must not dally any longer.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was now brightening slowly towards dawn, and beyond the river through
+the faint wintry haze a crimson streak or two began to burn. But all was
+surprisingly quiet, for this crowd, tired out with an all-night watch,
+chilled by the bitter cold, and intent on what lay before them, had no
+energy left for useless effort. Only from packed square and street and
+lane went up a deep, steady murmur like the sound of the sea a mile
+away, broken now and again by the hoot and clang of a motor and the rush
+of its passage as it tore eastwards round the circle through Broad
+Sanctuary and vanished citywards. And the light broadened and the
+electric globes sickened and paled, and the haze began to clear a
+little, showing, not the fresh blue that had been hoped for from the
+cold of the night, but a high, colourless vault of cloud, washed with
+grey and faint rose-colour, as the sun came up, a ruddy copper disc,
+beyond the river.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At nine o’clock the excitement rose a degree higher. The police between
+Whitehall and the Abbey, looking from their high platforms strung along
+the route, whence they kept watch and controlled the wire palisadings,
+showed a certain activity, and a minute later a police-car whirled
+through the square between the palings, and vanished round the Abbey
+towers. The crowd murmured and shuffled and began to expect, and a cheer
+was raised when a moment later four more cars appeared, bearing the
+Government insignia, and disappeared in the same direction. These were
+the officials, they said, going to Dean’s Yard, where the procession
+would assemble.
+
+At about a quarter to ten the crowd at the west end of Victoria Street
+began to raise its voice in a song, and by the time that was over, and
+the bells had burst out from the Abbey towers, a rumour had somehow made
+its entrance that Felsenburgh was to be present at the ceremony. There
+was no assignable reason for this, neither then nor afterwards; in fact,
+the _Evening Star_ declared that it was one more instance of the
+astonishing instinct of human beings _en masse_; for it was not until an
+hour later that even the Government were made aware of the facts. Yet
+the truth remained that at half-past ten one continuous roar went up,
+drowning even the brazen clamour of the bells, reaching round to
+Whitehall and the crowded pavements of Westminster Bridge, demanding
+Julian Felsenburgh. Yet there had been absolutely no news of the
+President of Europe for the last fortnight, beyond an entirely
+unsupported report that he was somewhere in the East.
+
+And all the while the motors poured from all directions towards the
+Abbey and disappeared under the arch into Dean’s Yard, bearing those
+fortunate persons whose tickets actually admitted them to the church
+itself. Cheers ran and rippled along the lines as the great men were
+recognised--Lord Pemberton, Oliver Brand and his wife, Mr. Caldecott,
+Maxwell, Snowford, with the European delegates--even melancholy-faced
+Mr. Francis himself, the Government _ceremoniarius_, received a
+greeting. But by a quarter to eleven, when the pealing bells paused, the
+stream had stopped, the barriers issued out to stop the roads, the wire
+palisadings vanished, and the crowd for an instant, ceasing its roaring,
+sighed with relief at the relaxed pressure, and surged out into the
+roadways. Then once more the roaring began for Julian Felsenburgh.
+
+The sun was now high, still a copper disc, above the Victoria Tower, but
+paler than an hour ago; the whiteness of the Abbey, the heavy greys of
+Parliament House, the ten thousand tints of house-roofs, heads,
+streamers, placards began to disclose themselves.
+
+A single bell tolled five minutes to the hour, and the moments slipped
+by, until once more the bell stopped, and to the ears of those within
+hearing of the great west doors came the first blare of the huge organ,
+reinforced by trumpets. And then, as sudden and profound as the hush of
+death, there fell an enormous silence.
+
+
+II
+
+As the five-minutes bell began, sounding like a continuous wind-note in
+the great vaults overhead, solemn and persistent, Mabel drew a long
+breath and leaned back in her seat from the rigid position in which for
+the last half-hour she had been staring out at the wonderful sight. She
+seemed to herself to have assimilated it at last, to be herself once
+more, to have drunk her fill of the triumph and the beauty. She was as
+one who looks upon a summer sea on the morning after a storm. And now
+the climax was at hand.
+
+From end to end and side to side the interior of the Abbey presented a
+great broken mosaic of human faces; living slopes, walls, sections and
+curves. The south transept directly opposite to her, from pavement to
+rose window, was one sheet of heads; the floor was paved with them, cut
+in two by the scarlet of the gangway leading from the chapel of St.
+Faith--on the right, the choir beyond the open space before the
+sanctuary was a mass of white figures, scarved and surpliced; the high
+organ gallery, beneath which the screen had been removed, was crowded
+with them, and, far down beneath, the dim nave stretched the same
+endless pale living pavement to the shadow beneath the west window.
+Between every group of columns behind the choir-stalls, before her, to
+right, left, and behind, were platforms contrived in the masonry; and
+the exquisite roof, fan-tracery and soaring capital, alone gave the eye
+an escape from humanity. The whole vast space was full, it seemed, of
+delicate sunlight that streamed in from the artificial light set outside
+each window, and poured the ruby and the purple and the blue from the
+old glass in long shafts of colour across the dusty air, and in broken
+patches on the faces and dresses behind. The murmur of ten thousand
+voices filled the place, supplying, it seemed, a solemn accompaniment to
+that melodious note that now pulsed above it. And finally, more
+significant than all, was the empty carpeted sanctuary at her feet, the
+enormous altar with its flight of steps, the gorgeous curtain and the
+great untenanted sedilia.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mabel needed some such reassurance, for last night, until the coming of
+Oliver, had passed for her as a kind of appalling waking dream. From the
+first shock of what she had seen outside the church, through those hours
+of waiting, with the knowledge that this was the way in which the Spirit
+of Peace asserted its superiority, up to that last moment when, in her
+husband’s arms, she had learned of the Fall of Rome, it had appeared to
+her as if her new world had suddenly corrupted about her. It was
+incredible, she told herself, that this ravening monster, dripping blood
+from claws and teeth, that had arisen roaring in the night, could be the
+Humanity that had become her God. She had thought revenge and cruelty
+and slaughter to be the brood of Christian superstition, dead and buried
+under the new-born angel of light, and now it seemed that the monsters
+yet stirred and lived. All the evening she had sat, walked, lain about
+her quiet house with the horror heavy about her, flinging open a window
+now and again in the icy air to listen with clenched hands to the cries
+and the roarings of the mob that raged in the streets beneath, the
+clanks, the yells and the hoots of the motor-trains that tore up from
+the country to swell the frenzy of the city--to watch the red glow of
+fire, the volumes of smoke that heaved up from the burning chapels and
+convents.
+
+She had questioned, doubted, resisted her doubts, flung out frantic acts
+of faith, attempted to renew the confidence that she attained in her
+meditation, told herself that traditions died slowly; she had knelt,
+crying out to the spirit of peace that lay, as she knew so well, at the
+heart of man, though overwhelmed for the moment by evil passion. A line
+or two ran in her head from one of the old Victorian poets:
+
+You doubt If any one Could think or bid it? How could it come about?...
+Who did it? Not men! Not here! Oh! not beneath the sun.... The torch
+that smouldered till the cup o’er-ran The wrath of God which is the
+wrath of Man!
+
+She had even contemplated death, as she had told her husband--the taking
+of her own life, in a great despair with the world. Seriously she had
+thought of it; it was an escape perfectly in accord with her morality.
+The useless and agonising were put out of the world by common consent;
+the Euthanasia houses witnessed to it. Then why not she?... For she
+could not bear it!... Then Oliver had come, she had fought her way back
+to sanity and confidence; and the phantom had gone again.
+
+How sensible and quiet he had been, she was beginning to tell herself
+now, as the quiet influence of this huge throng in this glorious place
+of worship possessed her once more--how reasonable in his explanation
+that man was even now only convalescent and therefore liable to relapse.
+She had told herself that again and again during the night, but it had
+been different when he had said so. His personality had once more
+prevailed; and the name of Felsenburgh had finished the work.
+
+“If He were but here!” she sighed. But she knew He was far away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was not until a quarter to eleven that she understood that the crowds
+outside were clamouring for Him too, and that knowledge reassured her
+yet further. They knew, then, these wild tigers, where their redemption
+lay; they understood what was their ideal, even if they had not attained
+to it. Ah! if He were but here, there would be no more question: the
+sullen waves would sink beneath His call of peace, the hazy clouds lift,
+the rumble die to silence. But He was away--away on some strange
+business. Well; He knew His work. He would surely come soon again to His
+children who needed Him so terribly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She had the good fortune to be alone in a crowd. Her neighbour, a
+grizzled old man with his daughters beyond, was her only neighbour, and
+a stranger. At her left rose up the red-covered barricade over which she
+could see the sanctuary and the curtain; and her seat in the tribune,
+raised some eight feet above the floor, removed her from any possibility
+of conversation. She was thankful for that: she did not want to talk;
+she wanted only to control her faculties in silence, to reassert her
+faith, to look out over this enormous throng gathered to pay homage to
+the great Spirit whom they had betrayed, to renew her own courage and
+faithfulness. She wondered what the preacher would say, whether there
+would be any note of penitence. Maternity was his subject--that benign
+aspect of universal life--tenderness, love, quiet, receptive, protective
+passion, the spirit that soothes rather than inspires, that busies
+itself with peaceful tasks, that kindles the lights and fires of home,
+that gives sleep, food and welcome....
+
+The bell stopped, and in the instant before the music began she heard,
+clear above the murmur within, the roar of the crowds outside, who still
+demanded their God. Then, with a crash, the huge organ awoke, pierced by
+the cry of the trumpets and the maddening throb of drums. There was no
+delicate prelude here, no slow stirring of life rising through
+labyrinths of mystery to the climax of sight--here rather was full-orbed
+day, the high noon of knowledge and power, the dayspring from on high,
+dawning in mid-heaven. Her heart quickened to meet it, and her reviving
+confidence, still convalescent, stirred and smiled, as the tremendous
+chords blared overhead, telling of triumph full-armed. God was man,
+then, after all--a God who last night had faltered for an hour, but who
+rose again on this morning of a new year, scattering mists, dominant
+over his own passion, all-compelling and all-beloved. God was man, and
+Felsenburgh his Incarnation! Yes, she must believe that! She did
+believe that!
+
+Then she saw how already the long procession was winding up beneath the
+screen, and by imperceptible art the light grew yet more acutely
+beautiful. They were coming, then, those ministers of a pure worship;
+grave men who knew in what they believed, and who, even if they did not
+at this moment thrill with feeling (for she knew that in this respect
+her husband for one did not), yet believed the principles of this
+worship and recognised their need of expression for the majority of
+mankind--coming slowly up in fours and pairs and units, led by robed
+vergers, rippling over the steps, and emerging again into the coloured
+sunlight in all their bravery of Masonic apron, badge and jewel. Surely
+here was reassurance enough.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The sanctuary now held a figure or two. Anxious-faced Mr. Francis, in
+his robes of office, came gravely down the steps and stood awaiting the
+procession, directing with almost imperceptible motions his satellites
+who hovered about the aisles ready to point this way and that to the
+advancing stream; and the western-most seats were already beginning to
+fill, when on a sudden she recognised that something had happened.
+
+Just now the roaring of the mob outside had provided a kind of underbass
+to the music within, imperceptible except to sub-consciousness, but
+clearly discernible in its absence; and this absence was now a fact.
+
+At first she thought that the signal of beginning worship had hushed
+them; and then, with an indescribable thrill, she remembered that in all
+her knowledge only one thing had ever availed to quiet a turbulent
+crowd. Yet she was not sure; it might be an illusion. Even now the mob
+might be roaring still, and she only deaf to it; but again with an
+ecstasy that was very near to agony she perceived that the murmur of
+voices even within the building had ceased, and that some great wave of
+emotion was stirring the sheets and slopes of faces before her as a wind
+stirs wheat. A moment later, and she was on her feet, gripping the rail,
+with her heart like an over-driven engine beating pulses of blood,
+furious and insistent, through every vein; for with great rushing surge
+that sounded like a sigh, heard even above the triumphant tumult
+overhead, the whole enormous assemblage had risen to its feet.
+
+Confusion seemed to break out in the orderly procession. She saw Mr.
+Francis run forward quickly, gesticulating like a conductor, and at his
+signal the long line swayed forward, split, recoiled, and again slid
+swiftly forward, breaking as it did so into twenty streams that poured
+along the seats and filled them in a moment. Men ran and pushed, aprons
+flapped, hands beckoned, all without coherent words. There was a
+knocking of feet, the crash of an overturned chair, and then, as if a
+god had lifted his hand for quiet, the music ceased abruptly, sending a
+wild echo that swooned and died in a moment; a great sigh filled its
+place, and, in the coloured sunshine that lay along the immense length
+of the gangway that ran open now from west to east, far down in the
+distant nave, a single figure was seen advancing.
+
+
+III
+
+What Mabel saw and heard and felt from eleven o’clock to half-an-hour
+after noon on that first morning of the New Year she could never
+adequately remember. For the time she lost the continuous consciousness
+of self, the power of reflection, for she was still weak from her
+struggle; there was no longer in her the process by which events are
+stored, labelled and recorded; she was no more than a being who observed
+as it were in one long act, across which considerations played at
+uncertain intervals. Eyes and ear seemed her sole functions,
+communicating direct with a burning heart.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She did not even know at what point her senses told her that this was
+Felsenburgh. She seemed to have known it even before he entered, and she
+watched Him as in complete silence He came deliberately up the red
+carpet, superbly alone, rising a step or two at the entrance of the
+choir, passing on and up before her. He was in his English judicial
+dress of scarlet and black, but she scarcely noticed it. For her, too,
+no one else existed but, He; this vast assemblage was gone, poised and
+transfigured in one vibrating atmosphere of an immense human emotion.
+There was no one, anywhere, but Julian Felsenburgh. Peace and light
+burned like a glory about Him.
+
+For an instant after passing he disappeared beyond the speaker’s
+tribune, and the instant after reappeared once more, coming up the
+steps. He reached his place--she could see His profile beneath her and
+slightly to the left, pure and keen as the blade of a knife, beneath His
+white hair. He lifted one white-furred sleeve, made a single motion, and
+with a surge and a rumble, the ten thousand were seated. He motioned
+again and with a roar they were on their feet.
+
+Again there was a silence. He stood now, perfectly still, His hands laid
+together on the rail, and His face looking steadily before Him; it
+seemed as if He who had drawn all eyes and stilled all sounds were
+waiting until His domination were complete, and there was but one will,
+one desire, and that beneath His hand. Then He began to speak....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In this again, as Mabel perceived afterwards, there was no precise or
+verbal record within her of what he said; there was no conscious process
+by which she received, tested, or approved what she heard. The nearest
+image under which she could afterwards describe her emotions to herself,
+was that when He spoke it was she who was speaking. Her own thoughts,
+her predispositions, her griefs, her disappointment, her passion, her
+hopes--all these interior acts of the soul known scarcely even to
+herself, down even, it seemed, to the minutest whorls and eddies of
+thought, were, by this man, lifted up, cleansed, kindled, satisfied and
+proclaimed. For the first time in her life she became perfectly aware of
+what human nature meant; for it was her own heart that passed out upon
+the air, borne on that immense voice. Again, as once before for a few
+moments in Paul’s House, it seemed that creation, groaning so long, had
+spoken articulate words at last--had come to growth and coherent thought
+and perfect speech. Yet then He had spoken to men; now it was Man
+Himself speaking. It was not one man who spoke there, it was Man--Man
+conscious of his origin, his destiny, and his pilgrimage between, Man
+sane again after a night of madness--knowing his strength, declaring his
+law, lamenting in a voice as eloquent as stringed instruments his own
+failure to correspond. It was a soliloquy rather than an oration. Rome
+had fallen, English and Italian streets had run with blood, smoke and
+flame had gone up to heaven, because man had for an instant sunk back to
+the tiger. Yet it was done, cried the great voice, and there was no
+repentance; it was done, and ages hence man must still do penance and
+flush scarlet with shame to remember that once he turned his back on
+the risen light.
+
+There was no appeal to the lurid, no picture of the tumbling palaces,
+the running figures, the coughing explosions, the shaking of the earth
+and the dying of the doomed. It was rather with those hot hearts
+shouting in the English and German streets, or aloft in the winter air
+of Italy, the ugly passions that warred there, as the volors rocked at
+their stations, generating and fulfilling revenge, paying back plot with
+plot, and violence with violence. For there, cried the voice, was man as
+he had been, fallen in an instant to the cruel old ages before he had
+learned what he was and why.
+
+There was no repentance, said the voice again, but there was something
+better; and as the hard, stinging tones melted, the girl’s dry eyes of
+shame filled in an instant with tears. There was something better--the
+knowledge of what crimes man was yet capable of, and the will to use
+that knowledge. Rome was gone, and it was a lamentable shame; Rome was
+gone, and the air was the sweeter for it; and then in an instant, like
+the soar of a bird, He was up and away--away from the horrid gulf where
+He had looked just now, from the fragments of charred bodies, and
+tumbled houses and all the signs of man’s disgrace, to the pure air and
+sunlight to which man must once more set his face. Yet He bore with Him
+in that wonderful flight the dew of tears and the aroma of earth. He had
+not spared words with which to lash and whip the naked human heart, and
+He did not spare words to lift up the bleeding, shrinking thing, and
+comfort it with the divine vision of love....
+
+Historically speaking, it was about forty minutes before He turned to
+the shrouded image behind the altar.
+
+“Oh! Maternity!” he cried. “Mother of us all---”
+
+And then, to those who heard Him, the supreme miracle took place.... For
+it seemed now in an instant that it was no longer man who spoke, but One
+who stood upon the stage of the superhuman. The curtain ripped back, as
+one who stood by it tore, panting, at the strings; and there, it seemed,
+face to face stood the Mother above the altar, huge, white and
+protective, and the Child, one passionate incarnation of love, crying to
+her from the tribune.
+
+“Oh! Mother of us all, and Mother of Me!”
+
+So He praised her to her face, that sublime principle of life, declared
+her glories and her strength, her Immaculate Motherhood, her seven
+swords of anguish driven through her heart by the passion and the
+follies of her Son--He promised her great things, the recognition of her
+countless children, the love and service of the unborn, the welcome of
+those yet quickening within the womb. He named her the Wisdom of the
+Most High, that sweetly orders all things, the Gate of Heaven, House of
+Ivory, Comforter of the afflicted, Queen of the World; and, to the
+delirious eyes of those who looked on her it seemed that the grave face
+smiled to hear Him....
+
+A great panting as of some monstrous life began to fill the air as the
+mob swayed behind Him, and the torrential voice poured on. Waves of
+emotion swept up and down; there were cries and sobs, the yelping of a
+man beside himself at last, from somewhere among the crowded seats, the
+crash of a bench, and another and another, and the gangways were full,
+for He no longer held them passive to listen; He was rousing them to
+some supreme act. The tide crawled nearer, and the faces stared no
+longer at the Son but the Mother; the girl in the gallery tore at the
+heavy railing, and sank down sobbing upon her knees. And above all the
+voice pealed on--and the thin hands blanched to whiteness strained from
+the wide and sumptuous sleeves as if to reach across the sanctuary
+itself.
+
+It was a new tale He was telling now, and all to her glory. He was from
+the East, now they knew, come from some triumph. He had been hailed as
+King, adored as Divine, as was meet and right--He, the humble superhuman
+son of a Human Mother--who bore not a sword but peace, not a cross but a
+crown. So it seemed He was saying; yet no man there knew whether He said
+it or not--whether the voice proclaimed it, or their hearts asserted it.
+He was on the steps of the sanctuary now, still with outstretched hands
+and pouring words, and the mob rolled after him to the rumble of ten
+thousand feet and the sighing of ten thousand hearts.... He was at the
+altar; He was upon it. Again in one last cry, as the crowd broke against
+the steps beneath, He hailed her Queen and Mother.
+
+The end came in a moment, swift and inevitable. And for an instant,
+before the girl in the gallery sank down, blind with tears, she saw the
+tiny figure poised there at the knees of the huge image, beneath the
+expectant hands, silent and transfigured in the blaze of light. The
+Mother, it seemed, had found her Son at last.
+
+For an instant she saw it, the soaring columns, the gilding and the
+colours, the swaying heads, the tossing hands. It was a sea that heaved
+before her, lights went up and down, the rose window whirled overhead,
+presences filled the air, heaven flashed away, and the earth shook it
+ecstasy. Then in the heavenly light, to the crash of drums, above the
+screaming of the women and the battering of feet, in one thunder-peal of
+worship ten thousand voices hailed Him Lord and God.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III-THE VICTORY
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+I
+
+The little room where the new Pope sat reading was a model of
+simplicity. Its walls were whitewashed, its roof unpolished rafters, and
+its floor beaten mud. A square table stood in the centre, with a chair
+beside it; a cold brazier laid for lighting, stood in the wide hearth; a
+bookshelf against the wall held a dozen volumes. There were three doors,
+one leading to the private oratory, one to the ante-room, and the third
+to the little paved court. The south windows were shuttered, but through
+the ill-fitting hinges streamed knife-blades of fiery light from the hot
+Eastern day outside.
+
+It was the time of the mid-day siesta, and except for the brisk scything
+of the _cicade_ from the hill-slope behind the house, all was in deep
+silence.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Pope, who had dined an hour before, had hardly shifted His attitude
+in all that time, so intent was He upon His reading. For the while, all
+was put away, His own memory of those last three months, the bitter
+anxiety, the intolerable load of responsibility. The book He held was a
+cheap reprint of the famous biography of Julian Felsenburgh, issued a
+month before, and He was now drawing to an end.
+
+It was a terse, well-written book, composed by an unknown hand, and some
+even suspected it to be the disguised work of Felsenburgh himself. More,
+however, considered that it was written at least with Felsenburgh’s
+consent by one of that small body of intimates whom he had admitted to
+his society--that body which under him now conducted the affairs of West
+and East. From certain indications in the book it had been argued that
+its actual writer was a Westerner.
+
+The main body of the work dealt with his life, or rather with those two
+or three years known to the world, from his rapid rise in American
+politics and his mediation in the East down to the event of five months
+ago, when in swift succession he had been hailed Messiah in Damascus,
+had been formally adored in London, and finally elected by an
+extraordinary majority to the Tribuniciate of the two Americas.
+
+The Pope had read rapidly through these objective facts, for He knew
+them well enough already, and was now studying with close attention the
+summary of his character, or rather, as the author rather sententiously
+explained, the summary of his self-manifestation to the world. He read
+the description of his two main characteristics, his grasp upon words
+and facts; “words, the daughters of earth, were wedded in this man to
+facts, the sons of heaven, and Superman was their offspring.” His minor
+characteristics, too, were noticed, his appetite for literature, his
+astonishing memory, his linguistic powers. He possessed, it appeared,
+both the telescopic and the microscopic eye--he discerned world-wide
+tendencies and movements on the one hand; he had a passionate capacity
+for detail on the other. Various anecdotes illustrated these remarks,
+and a number of terse aphorisms of his were recorded. “No man forgives,”
+he said; “he only understands.” “It needs supreme faith to renounce a
+transcendent God.” “A man who believes in himself is almost capable of
+believing in his neighbour.” Here was a sentence that to the Pope’s mind
+was significant of that sublime egotism that is alone capable of
+confronting the Christian spirit: and again, “To forgive a wrong is to
+condone a crime,” and “The strong man is accessible to no one, but all
+are accessible to him.”
+
+There was a certain pompousness in this array of remarks, but it lay, as
+the Pope saw very well, not in the speaker but in the scribe. To him who
+had seen the speaker it was plain how they had been uttered--with no
+pontifical solemnity, but whirled out in a fiery stream of eloquence, or
+spoken with that strangely moving simplicity that had constituted his
+first assault on London. It was possible to hate Felsenburgh, and to
+fear him; but never to be amused at him.
+
+But plainly the supreme pleasure of the writer was to trace the analogy
+between his hero and nature. In both there was the same apparent
+contradictoriness--the combination of utter tenderness and utter
+ruthlessness. “The power that heals wounds also inflicts them: that
+clothes the dungheap with sweet growths and grasses, breaks, too, into
+fire and earthquake; that causes the partridge to die for her young,
+also makes the shrike with his living larder.” So, too, with
+Felsenburgh; He who had wept over the Fall of Rome, a month later had
+spoken of extermination as an instrument that even now might be
+judicially used in the service of humanity. Only it must be used with
+deliberation, not with passion.
+
+The utterance had aroused extraordinary interest, since it seemed so
+paradoxical from one who preached peace and toleration; and argument
+had broken out all over the world. But beyond enforcing the dispersal of
+the Irish Catholics, and the execution of a few individuals, so far that
+utterance had not been acted upon. Yet the world seemed as a whole to
+have accepted it, and even now to be waiting for its fulfilment.
+
+As the biographer pointed out, the world enclosed in physical nature
+should welcome one who followed its precepts, one who was indeed the
+first to introduce deliberately and confessedly into human affairs such
+laws as those of the Survival of the Fittest and the immorality of
+forgiveness. If there was mystery in the one, there was mystery in the
+other, and both must be accepted if man was to develop.
+
+And the secret of this, it seemed, lay in His personality. To see Him
+was to believe in Him, or rather to accept Him as inevitably true. “We
+do not explain nature or escape from it by sentimental regrets: the hare
+cries like a child, the wounded stag weeps great tears, the robin kills
+his parents; life exists only on condition of death; and these things
+happen however we may weave theories that explain nothing. Life must be
+accepted on those terms; we cannot be wrong if we follow nature; rather
+to accept them is to find peace--our great mother only reveals her
+secrets to those who take her as she is.” So, too, with Felsenburgh. “It
+is not for us to discriminate: His personality is of a kind that does
+not admit it. He is complete and sufficing for those who trust Him and
+are willing to suffer; an hostile and hateful enigma to those who are
+not. We must prepare ourselves for the logical outcome of this doctrine.
+Sentimentality must not be permitted to dominate reason.”
+
+Finally, then, the writer showed how to this Man belonged properly all
+those titles hitherto lavished upon imagined Supreme Beings. It was in
+preparation for Him that these types came into the realms of thought and
+influenced men’s lives.
+
+He was the _Creator_, for it was reserved for Him to bring into being
+the perfect life of union to which all the world had hitherto groaned in
+vain; it was in His own image and likeness that He had made man.
+
+Yet He was the _Redeemer_ too, for that likeness had in one sense always
+underlain the tumult of mistake and conflict. He had brought man out of
+darkness and the shadow of death, guiding their feet into the way of
+peace. He was the _Saviour_ for the same reason--the _Son of Man_, for
+He alone was perfectly human; He was the _Absolute_, for He was the
+content of Ideals; the _Eternal_, for He had lain always in nature’s
+potentiality and secured by His being the continuity of that order; the
+_Infinite_, for all finite things fell short of Him who was more than
+their sum.
+
+He was _Alpha_, then, and _Omega_, the beginning and the end, the first
+and the last. He was _Dominus et Deus noster_ (as Domitian had been, the
+Pope reflected). He was as simple and as complex as life itself--simple
+in its essence, complex in its activities.
+
+And last of all, the supreme proof of His mission lay in the immortal
+nature of His message. There was no more to be added to what He had
+brought to light--for in Him all diverging lines at last found their
+origin and their end. As to whether or no He would prove to be
+personally immortal was an wholly irrelevant thought; it would be indeed
+fitting if through His means the vital principle should disclose its
+last secret; but no more than fitting. Already His spirit was in the
+world; the individual was no more separate from his fellows; death no
+more than a wrinkle that came and went across the inviolable sea. For
+man had learned at last that the race was all and self was nothing; the
+cell had discovered the unity of the body; even, the greatest thinkers
+declared, the consciousness of the individual had yielded the title of
+Personality to the corporate mass of man--and the restlessness of the
+unit had sunk into the peace of a common Humanity, for nothing but this
+could explain the cessation of party strife and national
+competition--and this, above all, had been the work of Felsenburgh.
+
+“_Behold I am with you always_,” quoted the writer in a passionate
+peroration, “_even now in the consummation of the world; and, the
+Comforter is come unto you. I am the Door--the Way, the Truth and the
+Life--the Bread of Life and the Water of Life. My name is Wonderful, the
+Prince of Peace, the Father Everlasting. It is I who am the Desire of
+all nations, the fairest among the children of men--and of my Kingdom
+there shall be no end_.”
+
+The Pope laid down the book, and leaned back, closing his eyes.
+
+
+II
+
+And as for Himself, what had He to say to all this? A Transcendent God
+Who hid Himself, a Divine Saviour Who delayed to come, a Comforter heard
+no longer in wind nor seen in fire!
+
+There, in the next room, was a little wooden altar, and above it an iron
+box, and within that box a silver cup, and within that cup--Something.
+Outside the house, a hundred yards away, lay the domes and plaster roofs
+of a little village called Nazareth; Carmel was on the right, a mile or
+two away, Thabor on the left, the plain of Esdraelon in front; and
+behind, Cana and Galilee, and the quiet lake, and Hermon. And far away
+to the south lay Jerusalem....
+
+It was to this tiny strip of holy land that the Pope had come--the land
+where a Faith had sprouted two thousand years ago, and where, unless God
+spoke in fire from heaven, it would presently be cut down as a cumberer
+of the ground. It was here on this material earth that One had walked
+Whom all men had thought to have been He Who would redeem Israel--in
+this village that He had fetched water and made boxes and chairs, on
+that long lake that His Feet had walked, on that high hill that He had
+flamed in glory, on that smooth, low mountain to the north that He had
+declared that the meek were blessed and should inherit the earth, that
+peacemakers were the children of God, that they who hungered and
+thirsted should be satisfied.
+
+And now it was come to this. Christianity had smouldered away from
+Europe like a sunset on darkening peaks; Eternal Rome was a heap of
+ruins; in East and West alike a man had been set upon the throne of God,
+had been acclaimed as divine. The world had leaped forward; social
+science was supreme; men had learned consistency; they had learned, too,
+the social lessons of Christianity apart from a Divine Teacher, or,
+rather, they said, in spite of Him. There were left, perhaps, three
+millions, perhaps five, at the utmost ten millions--it was impossible to
+know--throughout the entire inhabited globe who still worshipped Jesus
+Christ as God. And the Vicar of Christ sat in a whitewashed room in
+Nazareth, dressed as simply as His master, waiting for the end.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He had done what He could. There had been a week five months ago when
+it had been doubtful whether anything at all could be done. There were
+left three Cardinals alive, Himself, Steinmann, and the Patriarch of
+Jerusalem; the rest lay mangled somewhere in the ruins of Rome. There
+was no precedent to follow; so the two Europeans had made their way out
+to the East, and to the one town in it where quiet still reigned. With
+the disappearance of Greek Christianity there had also vanished the last
+remnants of internecine war in Christendom; and by a kind of tacit
+consent of the world, Christians were allowed a moderate liberty in
+Palestine. Russia, which now held the country as a dependency, had
+sufficient sentiment left to leave it alone; it was true that the holy
+places had been desecrated, and remained now only as spots of
+antiquarian interest; the altars were gone but the sites were yet
+marked, and, although mass could no longer be said there, it was
+understood that private oratories were not forbidden.
+
+It was in this state that the two European Cardinals had found the Holy
+City; it was not thought wise to wear insignia of any description in
+public; and it was practically certain even now that the civilised world
+was unaware of their existence; for within three days of their arrival
+the old Patriarch had died, yet not before Percy Franklin, surely under
+the strangest circumstances since those of the first century, had been
+elected to the Supreme Pontificate. It had all been done in a few
+minutes by the dying man’s bedside. The two old men had insisted. The
+German had even recurred once more to the strange resemblance between
+Percy and Julian Felsenburgh, and had murmured his old half-heard
+remarks about the antithesis, and the Finger of God; and Percy,
+marvelling at his superstition, had accepted, and the election was
+recorded. He had taken the name of Silvester, the last saint in the
+year, and was the third of that title. He had then retired to Nazareth
+with his chaplain; Steinmann had gone back to Germany, and been hanged
+in a riot within a fortnight of his arrival.
+
+The next matter was the creation of new cardinals, and to twenty
+persons, with infinite precautions, briefs had been conveyed. Of these,
+nine had declined; three more had been approached, of whom only one had
+accepted. There were therefore at this moment twelve persons in the
+world who constituted the Sacred College--two Englishmen, of whom
+Corkran was one; two Americans, a Frenchman, a German, an Italian, a
+Spaniard, a Pole, a Chinaman, a Greek, and a Russian. To these were
+entrusted vast districts over which their control was supreme, subject
+only to the Holy Father Himself.
+
+As regarded the Pope’s own life very little need be said. It resembled,
+He thought, in its outward circumstances that of such a man as Leo the
+Great, without His worldly importance or pomp. Theoretically, the
+Christian world was under His dominion; practically, Christian affairs
+were administered by local authorities. It was impossible for a hundred
+reasons for Him to do what He wished with regard to the exchange of
+communications. An elaborate cypher had been designed, and a private
+telegraphic station organised on His roof communicating with another in
+Damascus where Cardinal Corkran had fixed his residence; and from that
+centre messages occasionally were despatched to ecclesiastical
+authorities elsewhere; but, for the most part, there was little to be
+done. The Pope, however, had the satisfaction of knowing that, with
+incredible difficulty, a little progress had been made towards the
+reorganisation of the hierarchy in all countries. Bishops were being
+consecrated freely; there were not less than two thousand of them all
+told, and of priests an unknown number. The Order of Christ Crucified
+was doing excellent work, and the tales of not less than four hundred
+martyrdoms had reached Nazareth during the last two months, accomplished
+mostly at the hands of the mobs.
+
+In other respects, also, as well as in the primary object of the Order’s
+existence (namely, the affording of an opportunity to all who loved God
+to dedicate themselves to Him more perfectly), the new Religious were
+doing good work. The more perilous tasks--the work of communication
+between prelates, missions to persons of suspected integrity--all the
+business, in fact, which was carried on now at the vital risk of the
+agent were entrusted solely to members of the Order. Stringent
+instructions had been issued from Nazareth that no bishop was to expose
+himself unnecessarily; each was to regard himself as the heart of his
+diocese to be protected at all costs save that of Christian honour, and
+in consequence each had surrounded himself with a group of the new
+Religious--men and women--who with extraordinary and generous obedience
+undertook such dangerous tasks as they were capable of performing. It
+was plain enough by now that had it not been for the Order, the Church
+would have been little better than paralysed under these new conditions.
+
+Extraordinary facilities were being issued in all directions. Every
+priest who belonged to the Order received universal jurisdiction subject
+to the bishop, if any, of the diocese in which he might be; mass might
+be said on any day of the year of the Five Wounds, or the Resurrection,
+or Our Lady; and all had the privilege of the portable altar, now
+permitted to be wood. Further ritual requirements were relaxed; mass
+might be said with any decent vessels of any material capable of
+destruction, such as glass or china; bread of any description might be
+used; and no vestments were obligatory except the thin thread that now
+represented the stole; lights were non-essential; none need wear the
+clerical habit; and rosary, even without beads, was always permissible
+instead of the Office.
+
+In this manner priests were rendered capable of giving the sacraments
+and offering the holy sacrifice at the least possible risk to
+themselves; and these relaxations had already proved of enormous benefit
+in the European prisons, where by this time many thousands of Catholics
+were undergoing the penalty of refusing public worship.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Pope’s private life was as simple as His room. He had one Syrian
+priest for His chaplain, and two Syrian servants. He said His mass each
+morning, Himself wearing vestments and His white habit beneath, and
+heard a mass after. He then took His coffee, after changing into the
+tunic and burnous of the country, and spent the morning over business.
+He dined at noon, slept, and rode out, for the country by reason of its
+indeterminate position was still in the simplicity of a hundred years
+ago. He returned at dusk, supped, and worked again till late into the
+night.
+
+That was all. His chaplain sent what messages were necessary to
+Damascus; His servants, themselves ignorant of His dignity, dealt with
+the secular world so far as was required, and the utmost that seemed to
+be known to His few neighbours was that there lived in the late Sheikh’s
+little house on the hill an eccentric European with a telegraph office.
+His servants, themselves devout Catholics, knew Him for a bishop, but no
+more than that. They were told only that there was yet a Pope alive, and
+with that and the sacraments were content.
+
+To sum up, therefore--the Catholic world knew that their Pope lived
+under the name of Silvester; and thirteen persons of the entire human
+race knew that Franklin had been His name, and that the throne of Peter
+rested for the time in Nazareth.
+
+It was, as a Frenchman had said, just a hundred years ago. Catholicism
+survived; but no more.
+
+
+III
+
+And as for His inner life, what can be said of that? He lay now back in
+his wooden chair, thinking with closed eyes.
+
+He could not have described it consistently even to Himself, for indeed
+He scarcely knew it: He acted rather than indulged in reflex thought.
+But the centre of His position was simple faith. The Catholic Religion,
+He knew well enough, gave the only adequate explanation of the universe;
+it did not unlock all mysteries, but it unlocked more than any other key
+known to man; He knew, too, perfectly well, that it was the only system
+of thought that satisfied man as a whole, and accounted for him in his
+essential nature. Further, He saw well enough that the failure of
+Christianity to unite all men one to another rested not upon its
+feebleness but its strength; its lines met in eternity, not in time.
+Besides, He happened to believe it.
+
+But to this foreground there were other moods whose shifting was out of
+his control. In his _exalt_ moods, which came upon Him like a breeze
+from Paradise, the background was bright with hope and drama--He saw
+Himself and His companions as Peter and the Apostles must have regarded
+themselves, as they proclaimed through the world, in temples, slums,
+market-places and private houses, the faith that was to shake and
+transform the world. They had handled the Lord of Life, seen the empty
+sepulchre, grasped the pierced hands of Him Who was their brother and
+their God. It was radiantly true, though not a man believed it; the huge
+superincumbent weight of incredulity could not disturb a fact that was
+as the sun in heaven. Moreover, the very desperateness of the cause was
+their inspiration. There was no temptation to lean upon the arm of
+flesh, for there was none that fought for them but God. Their nakedness
+was their armour, their slow tongues their persuasiveness, their
+weakness demanded God’s strength, and found it. Yet there was this
+difference, and it was a significant one. For Peter the spiritual world
+had an interpretation and a guarantee in the outward events he had
+witnessed. He had handled the Risen Christ, the external corroborated
+the internal. But for Silvester it was not so. For Him it was necessary
+so to grasp spiritual truths in the supernatural sphere that the
+external events of the Incarnation were proved by rather than proved the
+certitude of His spiritual apprehension. Certainly, historically
+speaking, Christianity was true--proved by its records--yet to see that
+needed illumination. He apprehended the power of the Resurrection,
+therefore Christ was risen.
+
+Therefore in heavier moods it was different with him. There were
+periods, lasting sometimes for days together, clouding Him when He
+awoke, stifling Him as He tried to sleep, dulling the very savour of the
+Sacrament and the thrill of the Precious Blood; times in which the
+darkness was so intolerable that even the solid objects of faith
+attenuated themselves to shadow, when half His nature was blind not only
+to Christ, but to God Himself, and the reality of His own
+existence--when His own awful dignity seemed as the insignia of a fool.
+And was it conceivable, His earthly mind demanded, that He and His
+college of twelve and His few thousands should be right, and the entire
+consensus of the civilised world wrong? It was not that the world had
+not heard the message of the Gospel; it had heard little else for two
+thousand years, and now pronounced it false--false in its external
+credentials, and false therefore in its spiritual claims. It was a lost
+cause for which He suffered; He was not the last of an august line, He
+was the smoking wick of a candle of folly; He was the _reductio ad
+absurdam_ of a ludicrous syllogism based on impossible premises. He was
+not worth killing, He and His company of the insane--they were no more
+than the crowned dunces of the world’s school. Sanity sat on the solid
+benches of materialism. And this heaviness waxed so dark sometimes that
+He almost persuaded Himself that His faith was gone; the clamours of
+mind so loud that the whisper of the heart was unheard, the desires for
+earthly peace so fierce that supernatural ambitions were silenced--so
+dense was the gloom, that, hoping against hope, believing against
+knowledge, and loving against truth, He cried as One other had cried on
+another day like this--_Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!_ ... But that, at
+least, He never failed to cry.
+
+One thing alone gave Him power to go on, so far at least as His
+consciousness was concerned, and that was His meditation. He had
+travelled far in the mystical life since His agonies of effort. Now He
+used no deliberate descents into the spiritual world: He threw, as it
+were, His hands over His head, and dropped into spacelessness.
+Consciousness would draw Him up, as a cork, to the surface, but He would
+do no more than repeat His action, until by that cessation of activity,
+which is the supreme energy, He floated in the twilight realm of
+transcendence; and there God would deal with Him--now by an articulate
+sentence, now by a sword of pain, now by an air like the vivifying
+breath of the sea. Sometimes after Communion He would treat Him so,
+sometimes as He fell asleep, sometimes in the whirl of work. Yet His
+consciousness did not seem to retain for long such experiences; five
+minutes later, it might be, He would be wrestling once more with the all
+but sensible phantoms of the mind and the heart.
+
+There He lay, then, in the chair, revolving the intolerable blasphemies
+that He had read. His white hair was thin upon His browned temples, His
+hands were as the hands of a spirit, and His young face lined and
+patched with sorrow. His bare feet protruded from beneath His stained
+tunic, and His old brown burnous lay on the floor beside Him....
+
+It was an hour before He moved, and the sun had already lost half its
+fierceness, when the steps of the horses sounded in the paved court
+outside. Then He sat up, slipped His feet into their shoes, and lifted
+the burnous from the floor, as the door opened and the lean sun-burned
+priest came through.
+
+“The horses, Holiness,” said the man.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Pope spoke not one word that afternoon, until the two came towards
+sunset up the bridle-path that leads between Thabor and Nazareth. They
+had taken their usual round through Cana, mounting a hillock from which
+the long mirror of Gennesareth could be seen, and passing on, always
+bearing to the right, under the shadow of Thabor until once more
+Esdraelon spread itself beneath like a grey-green carpet, a vast circle,
+twenty miles across, sprinkled sparsely with groups of huts, white walls
+and roofs, with Nain visible on the other side, Carmel heaving its long
+form far off on the right, and Nazareth nestling a mile or two away on
+the plateau on which they had halted.
+
+It was a sight of extraordinary peace, and seemed an extract from some
+old picture-book designed centuries ago. Here was no crowd of roofs, no
+pressure of hot humanity, no terrible evidences of civilisation and
+manufactory and strenuous, fruitless effort. A few tired Jews had come
+back to this quiet little land, as old people may return to their native
+place, with no hope of renewing their youth, or refinding their ideals,
+but with a kind of sentimentality that prevails so often over more
+logical motives, and a few more barrack-like houses had been added here
+and there to the obscure villages in sight. But it was very much as it
+had been a hundred years ago.
+
+The plain was half shadowed by Carmel, and half in dusty golden light.
+Overhead the clear Eastern sky was flushed with rose, as it had flushed
+for Abraham, Jacob, and the Son of David. There was no little cloud
+here, as a man’s hand, over the sea, charged with both promise and
+terror; no sound of chariot-wheels from earth or heaven, no vision of
+heavenly horses such as a young man had seen thirty centuries ago in
+this very sky. Here was the old earth and the old heaven, unchanged and
+unchangeable; the patient, returning spring had starred the thin soil
+with flowers of Bethlehem, and those glorious lilies to which Solomon’s
+scarlet garments might not be compared. There was no whisper from the
+Throne as when Gabriel had once stooped through this very air to hail
+Her who was blessed among women, no breath of promise or hope beyond
+that which God sends through every movement of His created robe of life.
+
+As the two halted, and the horses looked out with steady, inquisitive
+eyes at the immensity of light and air beneath them, a soft hooting cry
+broke out, and a shepherd passed below along the hillside a hundred
+yards away, trailing his long shadow behind him, and to the mellow
+tinkle of bells his flock came after, a troop of obedient sheep and
+wilful goats, cropping and following and cropping again as they went on
+to the fold, called by name in that sad minor voice of him who knew
+each, and led instead of driving. The soft clanking grew fainter, the
+shadow of the shepherd shot once to their very feet, as he topped the
+rise, and vanished again as he stepped down once more; and the call grew
+fainter yet, and ceased.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Pope lifted His hand to His eyes for an instant, then smoothed it
+down His face.
+
+He nodded across to a dim patch of white walls glimmering through the
+violet haze of the falling twilight.
+
+“That place, father,” He said, “what is its name?”
+
+The Syrian priest looked across, back once more at the Pope, and across
+again.
+
+“That among the palms, Holiness?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“That is Megiddo,” he said. “Some call it Armageddon.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+I
+
+At twenty-three o’clock that night the Syrian priest went out to watch
+for the coming of the messenger from Tiberias. Nearly two hours
+previously he had heard the cry of the Russian volor that plied from
+Damascus to Tiberias, and Tiberias to Jerusalem, and even as it was the
+messenger was a little late.
+
+These were very primitive arrangements, but Palestine was out of the
+world--a slip of useless country--and it was necessary for a man to ride
+from Tiberias to Nazareth each night with papers from Cardinal Corkran
+to the Pope, and to return with correspondence. It was a dangerous task,
+and the members of the New Order who surrounded the Cardinal undertook
+it by turns. In this manner all matters for which the Pope’s personal
+attention was required, and which were too long and not too urgent,
+could be dealt with at leisure by him, and an answer returned within the
+twenty-four hours.
+
+It was a brilliant moonlit night. The great golden shield was riding
+high above Thabor, shedding its strange metallic light down the long
+slopes and over the moor-like country that rose up from before the
+house-door--casting too heavy black shadows that seemed far more
+concrete and solid than the brilliant pale surfaces of the rock slabs or
+even than the diamond flashes from the quartz and crystal that here and
+there sparkled up the stony pathway. Compared with this clear splendour,
+the yellow light from the shuttered house seemed a hot and tawdry thing;
+and the priest, leaning against the door-post, his eyes alone alight in
+his dark face, sank down at last with a kind of Eastern sensuousness to
+bathe himself in the glory, and to spread his lean, brown hands out to
+it.
+
+This was a very simple man, in faith as well as in life. For him there
+were neither the ecstasies nor the desolations of his master. It was an
+immense and solemn joy to him to live here at the spot of God’s
+Incarnation and in attendance upon His Vicar. As regarded the movements
+of the world, he observed them as a man in a ship watches the heaving of
+the waves far beneath. Of course the world was restless, he half
+perceived, for, as the Latin Doctor had said, all hearts were restless
+until they found their rest in God. _Quare fremuerunt gentes?...
+Adversus Dominum, et adversus Christum ejus!_ As to the end--he was not
+greatly concerned. It might well be that the ship would be overwhelmed,
+but the moment of the catastrophe would be the end of all things
+earthly. The gates of hell shall not prevail: when Rome falls, the world
+falls; and when the world falls, Christ is manifest in power. For
+himself, he imagined that the end was not far away. When he had named
+Megiddo this afternoon it had been in his mind; to him it seemed natural
+that at the consummation of all things Christ’s Vicar should dwell at
+Nazareth where His King had come on earth--and that the Armageddon of
+the Divine John should be within sight of the scene where Christ had
+first taken His earthly sceptre and should take it again. After all, it
+would not be the first battle that Megiddo had seen. Israel and Amalek
+had met here; Israel and Assyria; Sesostris had ridden here and
+Sennacherib. Christian and Turk had contended here, like Michael and
+Satan, over the place where God’s Body had lain. As to the exact method
+of that end, he had no clear views; it would be a battle of some kind,
+and what field could be found more evidently designed for that than this
+huge flat circular plain of Esdraelon, twenty miles across, sufficient
+to hold all the armies of the earth in its embrace? To his view once
+more, ignorant as he was of present statistics, the world was divided
+into two large sections, Christians and heathens, and he supposed them
+very much of a size. Something would happen, troops would land at
+Khaifa, they would stream southwards from Tiberias, Damascus and remote
+Asia, northwards from Jerusalem, Egypt and Africa; eastwards from
+Europe; westwards from Asia again and the far-off Americas. And, surely,
+the time could not be far away, for here was Christ’s Vicar; and, as He
+Himself had said in His gospel of the Advent, _Ubicumque fuerit corpus,
+illie congregabuntur et aquilae._ Of more subtle interpretations of
+prophecy he had no knowledge. For him words were things, not merely
+labels upon ideas. What Christ and St. Paul and St. John had said--these
+things were so. He had escaped, owing chiefly to his isolation from the
+world, that vast expansion of Ritschlian ideas that during the last
+century had been responsible for the desertion by so many of any
+intelligible creed. For others this had been the supreme struggle--the
+difficulty of decision between the facts that words were not things, and
+yet that the things they represented were in themselves objective. But
+to this man, sitting now in the moonlight, listening to the far-off tap
+of hoofs over the hill as the messenger came up from Cana, faith was as
+simple as an exact science. Here Gabriel had descended on wide feathered
+wings from the Throne of God set beyond the stars, the Holy Ghost had
+breathed in a beam of ineffable light, the Word had become Flesh as Mary
+folded her arms and bowed her head to the decree of the Eternal. And
+here once more, he thought, though it was no more than a guess--yet he
+thought that already the running of chariot-wheels was audible--the
+tumult of the hosts of God gathering about the camp of the saints--he
+thought that already beyond the bars of the dark Gabriel set to his lips
+the trumpet of doom and heaven was astir. He might be wrong at this
+time, as others had been wrong at other times, but neither he nor they
+could be wrong for ever; there must some day be an end to the patience
+of God, even though that patience sprang from the eternity of His
+nature. He stood up, as down the pale moonlit path a hundred yards away
+came a pale figure of one who rode, with a leather bag strapped to his
+girdle.
+
+
+II
+
+It would be about three o’clock in the morning that the priest awoke in
+his little mud-walled room next to that of the Holy Father’s, and heard
+a footstep coming up the stairs. Last evening he had left his master as
+usual beginning to open the pile of letters arrived from Cardinal
+Corkran, and himself had gone straight to his bed and slept. He lay now
+a moment or two, still drowsy, listening to the pad of feet, and an
+instant later sat up abruptly, for a deliberate tap had sounded on the
+door. Again it came; he sprang out of bed in his long night-tunic, drew
+it up hastily in his girdle, went to the door and opened it.
+
+The Pope was standing there, with a little lamp in one hand, for the
+dawn had scarcely yet begun, and a paper in the other.
+
+“I beg your pardon, Father; but there is a message I must have sent at
+once to his Eminence.”
+
+Together they went out through the Pope’s room, the priest, still
+half-blind with sleep, passed up the stairs, and emerged into the clear
+cold air of the upper roof. The Pope blew out His lamp, and set it on
+the parapet.
+
+“You will be cold, Father; fetch your cloak.”
+
+“And you, Holiness?”
+
+The other made a little gesture of denial, and went across to the tiny
+temporary shed where the wireless telegraphic instrument stood.
+
+“Fetch your cloak, Father,” He said again over His shoulder. “I will
+ring up meanwhile.”
+
+When the priest came back three minutes later, in his slippers and
+cloak, carrying another cloak also for his master, the Pope was still
+seated at the table. He did not even move His head as the other came up,
+but once more pressed on the lever that, communicating with the
+twelve-foot pole that rose through the pent-house overhead, shot out the
+quivering energy through the eighty miles of glimmering air that lay
+between Nazareth and Damascus.
+
+This simple priest had scarcely even by now become accustomed to this
+extraordinary device invented a century ago and perfected through all
+those years to this precise exactness--that device by which with the
+help of a stick, a bundle of wires, and a box of wheels, something, at
+last established to be at the root of all matter, if not at the very
+root of physical life, spoke across the spaces of the world to a tiny
+receiver tuned by a hair’s breadth to the vibration with which it was
+set in relations.
+
+The air was surprisingly cold, considering the heat that had preceded
+and would follow it, and the priest shivered a little as he stood clear
+of the roof, and stared, now at the motionless figure in the chair
+before him, now at the vast vault of the sky passing, even as he looked,
+from a cold colourless luminosity to a tender tint of yellow, as far
+away beyond Thabor and Moab the dawn began to deepen. From the village
+half-a-mile away arose the crowing of a cock, thin and brazen as a
+trumpet; a dog barked once and was silent again; and then, on a sudden,
+a single stroke upon a bell hung in the roof recalled him in an instant,
+and told him that his work was to begin.
+
+The Pope pressed the lever again at the sound, twice, and then, after a
+pause, once more--waited a moment for an answer, and then when it came,
+rose and signed to the priest to take his place.
+
+The Syrian sat down, handing the extra cloak to his master, and waited
+until the other had settled Himself in a chair set in such a position at
+the side of the table that the face of each was visible to the other.
+Then he waited, with his brown fingers poised above the row of keys,
+looking at the other’s face as He arranged himself to speak. That face,
+he thought, looking out from the hood, seemed paler than ever in this
+cold light of dawn; the black arched eyebrows accentuated this, and even
+the steady lips, preparing to speak, seemed white and bloodless. He had
+His paper in His hand, and His eyes were fixed upon this.
+
+“Make sure it is the Cardinal,” he said abruptly.
+
+The priest tapped off an enquiry, and, with moving lips, raid off the
+printed message, as like magic it precipitated itself on to the tall
+white sheet of paper that faced him.
+
+“It is his Eminence, Holiness,” he said softly. “He is alone at the
+instrument.”
+
+“Very well. Now then; begin.”
+
+“We have received your Eminence’s letter, and have noted the news.... It
+should have been forwarded by telegraphy--why was that not done?”
+
+The voice paused, and the priest who had snapped off the message, more
+quickly than a man could write it, read aloud the answer.
+
+“‘I did not understand that it was urgent. I thought it was but one
+more assault. I had intended to communicate more so soon as I heard
+more.”’
+
+“Of course it was urgent,” came the voice again in the deliberate
+intonation that was used between these two in the case of messages for
+transmission. “Remember that all news of this kind is always urgent.”
+
+“‘I will remember,’ read the priest. ‘I regret my mistake.’”
+
+“You tell us,” went on the Pope, His eyes still downcast on the paper,
+“that this measure is decided upon; you name only three authorities.
+Give me, now, all the authorities you have, if you have more.”
+
+There was a moment’s pause. Then the priest began to read off the names.
+
+“Besides the three Cardinals whose names I sent, the Archbishops of
+Thibet, Cairo, Calcutta and Sydney have all asked if the news was true,
+and for directions if it is true; besides others whose names I can
+communicate if I may leave the table for a moment.’”
+
+“Do so,” said the Pope.
+
+Again there was a pause. Then once more the names began.
+
+“‘The Bishops of Bukarest, the Marquesas Islands and Newfoundland. The
+Franciscans in Japan, the Crutched Friars in Morocco, the Archbishops of
+Manitoba and Portland, and the Cardinal-Archbisbop of Pekin. I have
+despatched two members of Christ Crucified to England.’”
+
+“Tell us when the news first arrived, and how.”
+
+“‘I was called up to the instrument yesterday evening at about twenty
+o’clock. The Archbishop of Sydney was asking, through our station at
+Bombay, whether the news was true. I replied I had heard nothing of it.
+Within ten minutes four more inquiries had come to the same effect; and
+three minutes later Cardinal Ruspoli sent the positive news from Turin.
+This was accompanied by a similar message from Father Petrovski in
+Moscow. Then--- ’”
+
+“Stop. Why did not Cardinal Dolgorovski communicate it?”
+
+“‘He did communicate it three hours later.’”
+
+“Why not at once?”
+
+“‘His Eminence had not heard it.’”
+
+“Find out at what hour the news reached Moscow--not now, but within the
+day.”
+
+“‘I will.’”
+
+“Go on, then.”
+
+“‘Cardinal Malpas communicated it within five minutes of Cardinal
+Ruspoli, and the rest of the inquiries arrived before midnight. China
+reported it at twenty-three.’”
+
+“Then when do you suppose the news was made public?”
+
+“‘It was decided first at the secret London conference, yesterday, at
+about sixteen o’clock by our time. The Plenipotentiaries appear to have
+signed it at that hour. After that it was communicated to the world. It
+was published here half an hour past midnight.’”
+
+“Then Felsenburgh was in London?”
+
+“‘I am not yet sure. Cardinal Malpas tells me that Felsenburgh gave his
+provisional consent on the previous day.’”
+
+“Very good. That is all you know, then?”
+
+“‘I was called up an hour ago by Cardinal Ruspoli again. He tells me
+that he fears a riot in Florence; it will be the first of many
+revolutions, he says.’”
+
+“Does he ask for anything?”
+
+“‘Only for directions.’”
+
+“Tell him that we send him the Apostolic Benediction, and will forward
+directions within the course of two hours. Select twelve members of the
+Order for immediate service.”
+
+“‘I will.’”
+
+“Communicate that message also, as soon as we have finished, to all the
+Sacred College, and bid them communicate it with all discretion to all
+metropolitans and bishops, that priests and people may know that We bear
+them in our heart.”
+
+“‘I will, Holiness.’”
+
+“Tell them, finally, that We had foreseen this long ago; that We commend
+them to the Eternal Father without Whose Providence no sparrow falls to
+the ground. Bid them be quiet and confident; to do nothing, save confess
+their faith when they are questioned. All other directions shall be
+issued to their pastors immediately!”
+
+“‘I will, Holiness.’”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was again a pause.
+
+The Pope had been speaking with the utmost tranquillity as one in a
+dream. His eyes were downcast upon the paper, His whole body as
+motionless as an image. Yet to the priest who listened, despatching the
+Latin messages, and reading aloud the replies, it seemed, although so
+little intelligible news had reached him, as if something very strange
+and great was impending. There was the sense of a peculiar strain in the
+air, and although he drew no deductions from the fact that apparently
+the whole Catholic world was in frantic communication with Damascus, yet
+he remembered his meditations of the evening before as he had waited for
+the messenger. It seemed as if the powers of this world were
+contemplating one more step--with its nature he was not greatly
+concerned.
+
+The Pope spoke again in His natural voice.
+
+“Father,” he said, “what I am about to say now is as if I told it in
+confession. You understand?--Very well. Now begin.”
+
+Then again the intonation began.
+
+“Eminence. We shall say mass of the Holy Ghost in one hour from now. At
+the end of that time, you will cause that all the Sacred College shall
+be in touch with yourself, and waiting for our commands. This new
+decision is unlike any that have preceded it. Surely you understand
+that now. Two or three plans are in our mind, yet We are not sure yet
+which it is that our Lord intends. After mass We shall communicate to
+you that which He shall show Us to be according to His Will. We beg of
+you to say mass also, immediately, for Our intention. Whatever must be
+done must be done quickly. The matter of Cardinal Dolgorovski you may
+leave until later. But we wish to hear the result of your inquiries,
+especially in London, before mid-day. _Benedicat te Omnipotens Deus,
+Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus._”
+
+“‘Amen!’” murmured the priest, reading it from the sheet.
+
+
+III
+
+The little chapel in the house below was scarcely more dignified than
+the other rooms. Of ornaments, except those absolutely essential to
+liturgy and devotion, there were none. In the plaster of the walls were
+indented in slight relief the fourteen stations of the Cross; a small
+stone image of the Mother of God stood in a corner, with an iron-work
+candlestick before it, and on the solid uncarved stone altar, raised on
+a stone step, stood six more iron candlesticks and an iron crucifix. A
+tabernacle, also of iron, shrouded by linen curtains, stood beneath the
+cross; a small stone slab projecting from the wall served as a credence.
+There was but one window, and this looked into the court, so that the
+eyes of strangers might not penetrate.
+
+It seemed to the Syrian priest as he went about his business--laying out
+the vestments in the little sacristy that opened out at one side of the
+altar, preparing the cruets and stripping the covering from the
+altar-cloth--that even that slight work was wearying. There seemed a
+certain oppression in the air. As to how far that was the result of his
+broken rest he did not know, but he feared that it was one more of those
+scirocco days that threatened. That yellowish tinge of dawn had not
+passed with the sun-rising; even now, as he went noiselessly on his bare
+feet between the predella and the _prie-dieu_ where the silent white
+figure was still motionless, he caught now and again, above the roof
+across the tiny court, a glimpse of that faint sand-tinged sky that was
+the promise of beat and heaviness.
+
+He finished at last, lighted the candles, genuflected, and stood with
+bowed head waiting for the Holy Father to rise from His knees. A
+servant’s footstep sounded in the court, coming across to hear mass, and
+simultaneously the Pope rose and went towards the sacristy, where the
+red vestments of God who came by fire were laid ready for the Sacrifice.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Silvester’s bearing at mass was singularly unostentatious. He moved as
+swiftly as any young priest, His voice was quite even and quite low, and
+his pace neither rapid nor pompous. According to tradition, He occupied
+half-an-hour _ab amictu ad amictum_; and even in the tiny empty chapel
+He observed to keep His eyes always downcast. And yet this Syrian never
+served His mass without a thrill of something resembling fear; it was
+not only his knowledge of the awful dignity of this simple celebrant;
+but, although he could not have expressed it so, there was an aroma of
+an emotion about the vestmented figure that affected him almost
+physically--an entire absence of self-consciousness, and in its place
+the consciousness of some other Presence, a perfection of manner even in
+the smallest details that could only arise from absolute recollection.
+Even in Rome in the old days it had been one of the sights of Rome to
+see Father Franklin say mass; seminary students on the eve of ordination
+were sent to that sight to learn the perfect manner and method.
+
+To-day all was as usual, but at the Communion the priest looked up
+suddenly at the moment when the Host had been consumed, with a half
+impression that either a sound or a gesture had invited it; and, as he
+looked, his heart began to beat thick and convulsive at the base of his
+throat. Yet to the outward eyes there was nothing unusual. The figure
+stood there with bowed head, the chin resting on the tips of the long
+fingers, the body absolutely upright, and standing with that curious
+light poise as if no weight rested upon the feet. But to the inner sense
+something was apparent the Syrian could not in the least formulate it to
+himself; but afterwards he reflected that he had stared expecting some
+visible or audible manifestation to take place. It was an impression
+that might be described under the terms of either light or sound; at any
+instant that delicate vivid force, that to the eyes of the soul burned
+beneath the red chasuble and the white alb, might have suddenly welled
+outwards under the appearance of a gush of radiant light rendering
+luminous not only the clear brown flesh seen beneath the white hair, but
+the very texture of the coarse, dead, stained stuffs that swathed the
+rest of the body. Or it might have shown itself in the strain of a long
+chord on strings or wind, as if the mystical union of the dedicated soul
+with the ineffable Godhead and Humanity of Jesus Christ generated such a
+sound as ceaselessly flows out with the river of life from beneath the
+Throne of the Lamb. Or yet once more it might have declared itself under
+the guise of a perfume--the very essence of distilled sweetness--such a
+scent as that which, streaming out through the gross tabernacle of a
+saint’s body, is to those who observe it as the breath of heavenly
+roses....
+
+The moments passed in that hush of purity and peace; sounds came and
+went outside, the rattle of a cart far away, the sawing of the first
+cicada in the coarse grass twenty yards away beyond the wall; some one
+behind the priest was breathing short and thick as under the pressure of
+an intolerable emotion, and yet the figure stood there still, without a
+movement or sway to break the carved motionlessness of the alb-folds or
+the perfect poise of the white-shod feet. When He moved at last to
+uncover the Precious Blood, to lay His hands on the altar and adore, it
+was as if a statue had stirred into life; to the server it was very
+nearly as a shock.
+
+Again, when the chalice was empty, that first impression reasserted
+itself; the human and the external died in the embrace of the Divine and
+Invisible, and once more silence lived and glowed.... And again as the
+spiritual energy sank back again into its origin, Silvester stretched
+out the chalice.
+
+With knees that shook and eyes wide in expectation, the priest rose,
+adored, and went to the credence.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was customary after the Pope’s mass that the priest himself should
+offer the Sacrifice in his presence, but to-day so soon as the vestments
+had been laid one by one on the rough chest, Silvester turned to the
+priest.
+
+“Presently,” he said softly. “Go up, father, at once to the roof, and
+tell the Cardinal to be ready. I shall come in five minutes.”
+
+It was surely a scirocco-day, thought the priest, as he came up on to
+the flat roof. Overhead, instead of the clear blue proper to that hour
+of the morning, lay a pale yellow sky darkening even to brown at the
+horizon. Thabor, before him, hung distant and sombre seen through the
+impalpable atmosphere of sand, and across the plain, as he glanced
+behind him, beyond the white streak of Nain nothing was visible except
+the pale outline of the tops of the hills against the sky. Even at this
+morning hour, too, the air was hot and breathless, broken only by the
+slow-stifling lift of the south-western breeze that, blowing across
+countless miles of sand beyond far-away Egypt, gathered up the heat of
+the huge waterless continent and was pouring it, with scarcely a streak
+of sea to soften its malignity, on this poor strip of land. Carmel, too,
+as he turned again, was swathed about its base with mist, half dry and
+half damp, and above showed its long bull-head running out defiantly
+against the western sky. The very table as he touched it was dry and hot
+to the hand, by mid-day the steel would be intolerable.
+
+He pressed the lever, and waited; pressed it again, and waited again.
+There came the answering ring, and he tapped across the eighty miles of
+air that his Eminence’s presence was required at once. A minute or two
+passed, and then, after another rap of the bell, a line flicked out on
+the new white sheet.
+
+“‘I am here. Is it his Holiness?’”
+
+He felt a hand upon his shoulder, and turned to see Silvester, hooded
+and in white, behind his chair.
+
+“Tell him yes. Ask him if there is further news.”
+
+The Pope went to the chair once more and sat down, and a minute later
+the priest, with growing excitement, read out the answer.
+
+“‘Inquiries are pouring in. Many expect your Holiness to issue a
+challenge. My secretaries have been occupied since four o’clock. The
+anxiety is indescribable. Some are denying that they have a Pope.
+Something must be done at once.’”
+
+“Is that all?” asked the Pope.
+
+Again the priest read out the answer. “‘Yes and no. The news is true. It
+will be inforced immediately. Unless a step is taken immediately there
+will be widespread and final apostasy.’”
+
+“Very good,” murmured the Pope, in his official voice. “Now listen
+carefully, Eminence.” He was silent for a moment, his fingers joined
+beneath his chin as just now at mass. Then he spoke.
+
+“We are about to place ourselves unreservedly in the hands of God. Human
+prudence must no longer restrain us. We command you then, using all
+discretion that is possible, to communicate these wishes of ours to the
+following persons under the strictest secrecy, and to no others
+whatsoever. And for this service you are to employ messengers, taken
+from the Order of Christ Crucified, two for each message, which is not
+to be committed to writing in any form. The members of the Sacred
+College, numbering twelve; the metropolitans and Patriarchs through the
+entire world, numbering twenty-two; the Generals of the Religious
+Orders: the Society of Jesus, the Friars, the Monks Ordinary, and the
+Monks Contemplative four. These persons, thirty-eight in number, with
+the chaplain of your Eminence, who shall act as notary, and my own who
+shall assist him, and Ourself--forty-one all told--these persons are to
+present themselves here at our palace of Nazareth not later than the Eve
+of Pentecost. We feel Ourselves unwilling to decide the steps necessary
+to be taken with reference to the new decree, except we first hear the
+counsel of our advisers, and give them an opportunity of communicating
+freely one with another. These words, as we have spoken them, are to be
+forwarded to all those persons whom we have named; and your Eminence
+will further inform them that our deliberations will not occupy more
+than four days.
+
+“As regards the questions of provisioning the council and all matters of
+that kind, your Eminence will despatch to-day the chaplain of whom we
+have spoken, who with my own chaplain will at once set about
+preparations, and your Eminence will yourself follow, appointing Father
+Marabout to act in your absence, not later than four days hence.
+
+“Finally, to all who have asked explicit directions in the face of this
+new decree, communicate this one sentence, and no more.
+
+“_Lose not your confidence which hath a great reward. For yet a little
+while, and, He that is to come will come and will not delay_.--Silvester
+the Bishop, Servant of the Servants of God.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+I
+
+Oliver Brand stepped out from the Conference Hall in Westminster on the
+Friday evening, so soon as the business was over and the
+Plenipotentiaries had risen from the table, more concerned as to the
+effect of the news upon his wife than upon the world.
+
+He traced the beginning of the change to the day five months ago when
+the President of the World had first declared the development of his
+policy, and while Oliver himself had yielded to that development, and
+from defending it in public had gradually convinced himself of its
+necessity, Mabel, for the first time in her life, had shown herself
+absolutely obstinate.
+
+The woman to his mind seemed to him to have fallen into some kind of
+insanity. Felsenburgh’s declaration had been made a week or two after
+his Acclamation at Westminster, and Mabel had received the news of it at
+first with absolute incredulity.
+
+Then, when there was no longer any doubt that he had declared the
+extermination of the Supernaturalists to be a possible necessity, there
+had been a terrible scene between husband and wife. She had said that
+she had been deceived; that the world’s hope was a monstrous mockery;
+that the reign of universal peace was as far away as ever; that
+Felsenburgh had betrayed his trust and broken his word. There had been
+an appalling scene. He did not even now like to recall it to his
+imagination. She had quieted after a while, but his arguments, delivered
+with infinite patience, seemed to produce very little effect. She
+settled down into silence, hardly answering him. One thing only seemed
+to touch her, and that was when he spoke of the President himself. It
+was becoming plain to him that she was but a woman after all at the
+mercy of a strong personality, but utterly beyond the reach of logic. He
+was very much disappointed. Yet he trusted to time to cure her.
+
+The Government of England had taken swift and skilful steps to reassure
+those who, like Mabel, recoiled from the inevitable logic of the new
+policy. An army of speakers traversed the country, defending and
+explaining; the press was engineered with extraordinary adroitness, and
+it was possible to say that there was not a person among the millions of
+England who had not easy access to the Government’s defence.
+
+Briefly, shorn of rhetoric, their arguments were as follows, and there
+was no doubt that, on the whole, they had the effect of quieting the
+amazed revolt of the more sentimental minds.
+
+Peace, it was pointed out, had for the first time in the world’s history
+become an universal fact. There was no longer one State, however small,
+whose interests were not identical with those of one of the three
+divisions of the world of which it was a dependency, and that first
+stage had been accomplished nearly half-a-century ago. But the second
+stage--the reunion of these three divisions under a common head--an
+infinitely greater achievement than the former, since the conflicting
+interests were incalculably more vast--this had been consummated by a
+single Person, Who, it appeared, had emerged from humanity at the very
+instant when such a Character was demanded. It was surely not much to
+ask that those on whom these benefits had come should assent to the will
+and judgment of Him through whom they had come. This, then, was an
+appeal to faith.
+
+The second main argument was addressed to reason. Persecution, as all
+enlightened persons confessed, was the method of a majority of savages
+who desired to force a set of opinions upon a minority who did not
+spontaneously share them. Now the peculiar malevolence of persecution in
+the past lay, not in the employment of force, but in the abuse of it.
+That any one kingdom should dictate religious opinions to a minority of
+its members was an intolerable tyranny, for no one State possessed the
+right to lay down universal laws, the contrary to which might be held by
+its neighbour. This, however, disguised, was nothing else than the
+Individualism of Nations, a heresy even more disastrous to the
+commonwealth of the world than the Individualism of the Individual. But
+with the arrival of the universal community of interests the whole
+situation was changed. The single personality of the human race had
+succeeded to the incoherence of divided units, and with that
+consummation--which might be compared to a coming of age, an entirely
+new set of rights had come into being. The human race was now a single
+entity with a supreme responsibility towards itself; there were no
+longer any private rights at all, such as had certainly existed, in the
+period previous to this. Man now possessed dominion over every cell
+which composed His Mystical Body, and where any such cell asserted
+itself to the detriment of the Body, the rights of the whole were
+unqualified.
+
+And there was no religion but one that claimed the equal rights of
+universal jurisdiction--and that the Catholic. The sects of the East,
+while each retained characteristics of its own, had yet found in the New
+Man the incarnation of their ideals, and had therefore given in their
+allegiance to the authority of the whole Body of whom He was Head. But
+the very essence of the Catholic Religion was treason to the very idea
+of man. Christians directed their homage to a supposed supernatural
+Being who was not only--so they claimed--outside of the world but
+positively transcended it. Christians, then--leaving aside the mad fable
+of the Incarnation, which might very well be suffered to die of its own
+folly--deliberately severed themselves from that Body of which by human
+generation they had been made members. They were as mortified limbs
+yielding themselves to the domination of an outside force other than
+that which was their only life, and by that very act imperilled the
+entire Body. This madness, then, was the one crime which still deserved
+the name. Murder, theft, rape, even anarchy itself, were as trifling
+faults compared to this monstrous sin, for while these injured indeed
+the Body they did not strike at its heart--individuals suffered, and
+therefore those minor criminals deserved restraint; but the very Life
+was not struck at. But in Christianity there was a poison actually
+deadly. Every cell that became infected with it was infected in that
+very fibre that bound it to the spring of life. This, and this alone,
+was the supreme crime of High Treason against man--and nothing but
+complete removal from the world could be an adequate remedy.
+
+These, then, were the main arguments addressed to that section of the
+world which still recoiled from the deliberate utterance of Felsenburgh,
+and their success had been remarkable. Of course, the logic, in itself
+indisputable, had been dressed in a variety of costumes gilded with
+rhetoric, flushed with passion, and it had done its work in such a
+manner that as summer drew on Felsenburgh had announced privately that
+he proposed to introduce a bill which should carry out to its logical
+conclusion the policy of which he had spoken.
+
+Now, this too, had been accomplished.
+
+
+II
+
+Oliver let himself into his house, and went straight upstairs to Mabel’s
+room. It would not do to let her hear the news from any but his own
+lips. She was not there, and on inquiry he heard that she had gone out
+an hour before.
+
+He was disconcerted at this. The decree had been signed half-an-hour
+earlier, and in answer to an inquiry from Lord Pemberton it had been
+stated that there was no longer any reason for secrecy, and that the
+decision might be communicated to the press. Oliver had hurried away
+immediately in order to make sure that Mabel should hear the news from
+him, and now she was out, and at any moment the placards might tell her
+of what had been done.
+
+He felt extremely uneasy, but for another hour or so was ashamed to act.
+Then he went to the tube and asked another question or two, but the
+servant had no idea of Mabel’s movements; it might be she had gone to
+the church; sometimes she did at this hour. He sent the woman off to
+see, and himself sat down again in the window-seat of his wife’s room,
+staring out disconsolately at the wide array of roofs in the golden
+sunset light, that seemed to his eyes to be strangely beautiful this
+evening. The sky was not that pure gold which it had been every night
+during this last week; there was a touch of rose in it, and this
+extended across the entire vault so far as he could see from west to
+east. He reflected on what he had lately read in an old book to the
+effect that the abolition of smoke had certainly changed evening colours
+for the worse.... There had been a couple of severe earthquakes, too, in
+America--he wondered whether there was any connection.... Then his
+thoughts flew back to Mabel....
+
+It was about ten minutes before he heard her footstep on the stairs, and
+as he stood up she came in.
+
+There was something in her face that told him that she knew everything,
+and his heart sickened at her pale rigidity. There was no fury
+there--nothing but white, hopeless despair, and an immense
+determination. Her lips showed a straight line, and her eyes, beneath
+her white summer hat, seemed contracted to pinpricks. She stood there,
+closing the door mechanically behind her, and made no further movement
+towards him.
+
+“Is it true?” she said.
+
+Oliver drew one steady breath, and sat down again.
+
+“Is what true, my dear?”
+
+“Is it true,” she said again, “that all are to be questioned as to
+whether they believe in God, and to be killed if they confess it?”
+
+Oliver licked his dry lips.
+
+“You put it very harshly,” he said. “The question is, whether the world
+has a right---”
+
+She made a sharp movement with her head.
+
+“It is true then. And you signed it?”
+
+“My dear, I beg you not to make a scene. I am tired out. And I will not
+answer that until you have heard what I have to say.”
+
+“Say it, then.”
+
+“Sit down, then.”
+
+She shook her head.
+
+“Very well, then.... Well, this is the point. The world is one now, not
+many. Individualism is dead. It died when Felsenburgh became President
+of the World. You surely see that absolutely new conditions prevail
+now--there has never been anything like it before. You know all this as
+well as I do.”
+
+Again came that jerk of impatience.
+
+“You will please to hear me out,” he said wearily. “Well, now that this
+has happened, there is a new morality; it is exactly like a child coming
+to the age of reason. We are obliged, therefore, to see that this
+continues--that there is no going back--no mortification--that all the
+limbs are in good health. ‘If thy hand offend thee, cut it off,’ said
+Jesus Christ. Well, that is what we say.... Now, for any one to say that
+they believe in God--I doubt very much whether there is any one who
+really does believe, or understand what it means--but for any one even
+to say so is the very worst crime conceivable: it is high treason. But
+there is going to be no violence; it will all be quite quiet and
+merciful. Why, you have always approved of Euthanasia, as we all do.
+Well, it is that that will be used; and---”
+
+Once more she made a little movement with her hand. The rest of her was
+like an image.
+
+“Is this any use?” she asked.
+
+Oliver stood up. He could not bear the hardness of her voice.
+
+“Mabel, my darling---”
+
+For an instant her lips shook; then again she looked at him with eyes of
+ice.
+
+“I don’t want that,” she said. “It is of no use. Then you did sign it?”
+
+Oliver had a sense of miserable desperation as he looked back at her.
+He would infinitely have preferred that she had stormed and wept.
+
+“Mabel---” he cried again.
+
+“Then you did sign it?”
+
+“I did sign it,” he said at last.
+
+She turned and went towards the door. He sprang after her.
+
+“Mabel, where are you going?”
+
+Then, for the first time in her life, she lied to her husband frankly
+and fully.
+
+“I am going to rest a little,” she said. “I shall see you presently at
+supper.”
+
+He still hesitated, but she met his eyes, pale indeed, but so honest
+that he fell back.
+
+“Very well, my dear.... Mabel, try to understand.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He came down to supper half-an-hour later, primed with logic, and even
+kindled with emotion. The argument seemed to him now so utterly
+convincing; granted the premises that they both accepted and lived by,
+the conclusion was simply inevitable.
+
+He waited a minute or two, and at last went to the tube that
+communicated with the servants’ quarters.
+
+“Where is Mrs. Brand?” he asked.
+
+There was an instant’s silence, and then the answer came:
+
+“She left the house half-an-hour ago, sir. I thought you knew.”
+
+
+III
+
+That same evening Mr. Francis was very busy in his office over the
+details connected with the festival of Sustenance that was to be
+celebrated on the first of July. It was the first time that the
+particular ceremony had taken place, and he was anxious that it should
+be as successful as its predecessors. There were a few differences
+between this and the others, and it was necessary that the
+_ceremoniarii_ should be fully instructed.
+
+So, with his model before him--a miniature replica of the interior of
+the Abbey, with tiny dummy figures on blocks that could be shifted this
+way and that, he was engaged in adding in a minute ecclesiastical hand
+rubrical notes to his copy of the Order of Proceedings.
+
+When the porter therefore rang up a little after twenty-one o’clock,
+that a lady wished to see him, he answered rather brusquely down the
+tube that it was impossible. But the bell rang again, and to his
+impatient question, the reply came up that it was Mrs. Brand below, and
+that she did not ask for more than ten minutes’ conversation. This was
+quite another matter. Oliver Brand was an important personage, and his
+wife therefore had significance, and Mr. Francis apologised, gave
+directions that she was to come to his ante-room, and rose, sighing,
+from his dummy Abbey and officials.
+
+She seemed very quiet this evening, he thought, as he shook hands with
+her a minute later; she wore her veil down, so that he could not see her
+face very well, but her voice seemed to lack its usual vivacity.
+
+“I am so sorry to interrupt you, Mr. Francis,” she said. “I only want to
+ask you one or two questions.”
+
+He smiled at her encouragingly.
+
+“Mr. Brand, no doubt---”
+
+“No,” she said, “Mr. Brand has not sent me. It is entirely my own
+affair. You will see my reasons presently. I will begin at once. I know
+I must not keep you.”
+
+It all seemed rather odd, he thought, but no doubt he would understand
+soon.
+
+“First,” she said, “I think you used to know Father Franklin. He became
+a Cardinal, didn’t he?”
+
+Mr. Francis assented, smiling.
+
+“Do you know if he is alive?”
+
+“No,” he said. “He is dead. He was in Rome, you know, at the time of its
+destruction.”
+
+“Ah! You are sure?”
+
+“Quite sure. Only one Cardinal escaped--Steinmann. He was hanged in
+Berlin; and the Patriarch of Jerusalem died a week or two later.”
+
+“Ah! very well. Well, now, here is a very odd question. I ask for a
+particular reason, which I cannot explain, but you will soon
+understand.... It is this--Why do Catholics believe in God?”
+
+He was so much taken aback that for a moment he sat staring.
+
+“Yes,” she said tranquilly, “it is a very odd question. But---” she
+hesitated. “Well, I will tell you,” she said. “The fact is, that I have
+a friend who is--is in danger from this new law. I want to be able to
+argue with her; and I must know her side. You are the only priest--I
+mean who has been a priest--whom I ever knew, except Father Franklin. So
+I thought you would not mind telling me.”
+
+Her voice was entirely natural; there was not a tremor or a falter in
+it. Mr. Francis smiled genially, rubbing his hands softly together.
+
+“Ah!” he said. “Yes, I see.... Well, that is a very large question.
+Would not to-morrow, perhaps---?”
+
+“I only want just the shortest answer,” she said. “It is really
+important for me to know at once. You see, this new law comes into
+force---”
+
+He nodded.
+
+“Well--very briefly, I should say this: Catholics say that God can be
+perceived by reason; that from the arrangements of the world they can
+deduce that there must have been an Arranger--a Mind, you understand.
+Then they say that they deduce other things about God--that He is Love,
+for example, because of happiness---”
+
+“And the pain?” she interrupted.
+
+He smiled again.
+
+“Yes. That is the point--that is the weak point.”
+
+“But what do they say about that?”
+
+“Well, briefly, they say that pain is the result of sin---”
+
+“And sin? You see, I know nothing at all, Mr. Francis.”
+
+“Well, sin is the rebellion of man’s will against God’s.”
+
+“What do they mean by that?”
+
+“Well, you see, they say that God wanted to be loved by His creatures,
+so He made them free; otherwise they could not really love. But if they
+were free, it means that they could if they liked refuse to love and
+obey God; and that is what is called Sin. You see what nonsense---”
+
+She jerked her head a little.
+
+“Yes, yes,” she said. “But I really want to get at what they think....
+Well, then, that is all?”
+
+Mr. Francis pursed his lips.
+
+“Scarcely,” he said; “that is hardly more than what they call Natural
+Religion. Catholics believe much more than that.”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“My dear Mrs. Brand, it is impossible to put it in a few words. But, in
+brief, they believe that God became man--that Jesus was God, and that He
+did this in order to save them from sin by dying---”
+
+“By bearing pain, you mean?”
+
+“Yes; by dying. Well, what they call the Incarnation is really the
+point. Everything else flows from that. And, once a man believes that, I
+must confess that all the rest follows--even down to scapulars and holy
+water.”
+
+“Mr. Francis, I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”
+
+He smiled indulgently.
+
+“Of course not,” he said; “it is all incredible nonsense. But, you know,
+I did really believe it all once.”
+
+“But it’s unreasonable,” she said.
+
+He made a little demurring sound.
+
+“Yes,” he said, “in one sense, of course it is--utterly unreasonable.
+But in another sense---”
+
+She leaned forward suddenly, and he could catch the glint of her eyes
+beneath her white veil.
+
+“Ah!” she said, almost breathlessly. “That is what I want to hear. Now,
+tell me how they justify it.”
+
+He paused an instant, considering.
+
+“Well,” he said slowly, “as far as I remember, they say that there are
+other faculties besides those of reason. They say, for example, that
+the heart sometimes finds out things that the reason cannot--intuitions,
+you see. For instance, they say that all things such as self-sacrifice
+and chivalry and even art--all come from the heart, that Reason comes
+with them--in rules of technique, for instance--but that it cannot prove
+them; they are quite apart from that.”
+
+“I think I see.”
+
+“Well, they say that Religion is like that--in other words, they
+practically confess that it is merely a matter of emotion.” He paused
+again, trying to be fair. “Well, perhaps they would not say
+that--although it is true. But briefly---”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“Well, they say there is a thing called Faith--a kind of deep conviction
+unlike anything else--supernatural--which God is supposed to give to
+people who desire it--to people who pray for it, and lead good lives,
+and so on---”
+
+“And this Faith?”
+
+“Well, this Faith, acting upon what they call Evidences--this Faith
+makes them absolutely certain that there is a God, that He was made man
+and so on, with the Church and all the rest of it. They say too that
+this is further proved by the effect that their religion has had in the
+world, and by the way it explains man’s nature to himself. You see, it
+is just a case of self-suggestion.”
+
+He heard her sigh, and stopped.
+
+“Is that any clearer, Mrs. Brand?”
+
+“Thank you very much,” she said, “it certainly is clearer. ... And it is
+true that Christians have died for this Faith, whatever it is?”
+
+“Oh! yes. Thousands and thousands. Just as Mohammedans have for theirs.”
+
+“The Mohammedans believe in God, too, don’t they?”
+
+“Well, they did, and I suppose that a few do now. But very few: the rest
+have become esoteric, as they say.”
+
+“And--and which would you say were the most highly evolved people--East
+or West?”
+
+“Oh! West undoubtedly. The East thinks a good deal, but it doesn’t act
+much. And that always leads to confusion--even to stagnation of
+thought.”
+
+“And Christianity certainly has been the Religion of the West up to a
+hundred years ago?”
+
+“Oh! yes.”
+
+She was silent then, and Mr. Francis had time again to reflect how very
+odd all this was. She certainly must be very much attached to this
+Christian friend of hers.
+
+Then she stood up, and he rose with her.
+
+“Thank you so much, Mr. Francis.... Then that is the kind of outline?”
+
+“Well, yes; so far as one can put it in a few words.”
+
+“Thank you.... I mustn’t keep you.”
+
+He went with her towards the door. But within a yard of it she stopped.
+
+“And you, Mr. Francis. You were brought up in all this. Does it ever
+come back to you?”
+
+He smiled.
+
+“Never,” he said, “except as a dream.”
+
+“How do you account for that, then? If it is all self-suggestion, you
+have had thirty years of it.”
+
+She paused; and for a moment he hesitated what to answer.
+
+“How would your old fellow-Catholics account for it?”
+
+“They would say that I had forfeited light--that Faith was withdrawn.”
+
+“And you?”
+
+Again he paused.
+
+“I should say that I had made a stronger self-suggestion the other way.”
+
+“I see.... Good-night, Mr. Francis.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She would not let him come down the lift with her, so when he had seen
+the smooth box drop noiselessly below the level, he went back again to
+his model of the Abbey and the little dummy figures. But, before he
+began to move these about again, he sat for a moment or two with pursed
+lips, staring.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+I
+
+A week later Mabel awoke about dawn; and for a moment or two forgot
+where she was. She even spoke Oliver’s name aloud, staring round the
+unfamiliar room, wondering what she did here. Then she remembered, and
+was silent....
+
+It was the eighth day she had spent in this Home; her probation was
+finished: to-day she was at liberty to do that for which she had come.
+On the Saturday of the previous week she had gone through her private
+examination before the magistrate, stating under the usual conditions of
+secrecy her name, age and home, as well as her reasons for making the
+application for Euthanasia; and all had passed off well. She had
+selected Manchester as being sufficiently remote and sufficiently large
+to secure her freedom from Oliver’s molestation; and her secret had been
+admirably kept. There was not a hint that her husband knew anything of
+her intentions; for, after all, in these cases the police were bound to
+assist the fugitive. Individualism was at least so far recognised as to
+secure to those weary of life the right of relinquishing it. She
+scarcely knew why she had selected this method, except that any other
+seemed impossible. The knife required skill and resolution; firearms
+were unthinkable, and poison, under the new stringent regulations, was
+hard to obtain. Besides, she seriously wished to test her own
+intentions, and to be quite sure that there was no other way than
+this....
+
+Well, she was as certain as ever. The thought had first come to her in
+the mad misery of the outbreak of violence on the last day of the old
+year. Then it had gone again, soothed away by the arguments that man was
+still liable to relapse. Then once more it had recurred, a cold and
+convincing phantom, in the plain daylight revealed by Felsenburgh’s
+Declaration. It had taken up its abode with her then, yet she controlled
+it, hoping against hope that the Declaration would not be carried into
+action, occasionally revolting against its horror. Yet it had never been
+far away; and finally when the policy sprouted into deliberate law, she
+had yielded herself resolutely to its suggestion. That was eight days
+ago; and she had not had one moment of faltering since that.
+
+Yet she had ceased to condemn. The logic had silenced her. All that she
+knew was that she could not bear it; that she had misconceived the New
+Faith; that for her, whatever it was for others, there was no hope....
+She had not even a child of her own.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Those eight days, required by law, had passed very peacefully. She had
+taken with her enough money to enter one of the private homes furnished
+with sufficient comfort to save from distractions those who had been
+accustomed to gentle living: the nurses had been pleasant and
+sympathetic; she had nothing to complain of.
+
+She had suffered, of course, to some degree from reactions. The second
+night after her arrival had been terrible, when, as she lay in bed in
+the hot darkness, her whole sentient life had protested and struggled
+against the fate her will ordained. It had demanded the familiar
+things--the promise of food and breath and human intercourse; it had
+writhed in horror against the blind dark towards which it moved so
+inevitably; and, in the agony had been pacified only by the half-hinted
+promise of some deeper voice suggesting that death was not the end. With
+morning light sanity had come back; the will had reassumed the mastery,
+and, with it, had withdrawn explicitly the implied hope of continued
+existence. She had suffered again for an hour or two from a more
+concrete fear; the memory came back to her of those shocking revelations
+that ten years ago had convulsed England and brought about the
+establishment of these Homes under Government supervision--those
+evidences that for years in the great vivisection laboratories human
+subjects had been practised upon--persons who with the same intentions
+as herself had cut themselves off from the world in private
+euthanasia-houses, to whom had been supplied a gas that suspended
+instead of destroying animation.... But this, too, had passed with the
+return of light. Such things were impossible now under the new
+system--at least, in England. She had refrained from making an end upon
+the Continent for this very reason. There, where sentiment was weaker,
+and logic more imperious, materialism was more consistent. Since men
+were but animals--the conclusion was inevitable.
+
+There had been but one physical drawback, the intolerable heat of the
+days and nights. It seemed, scientists said, that an entirely unexpected
+heat-wave had been generated; there were a dozen theories, most of which
+were mutually exclusive one of another. It was humiliating, she thought,
+that men who professed to have taken the earth under their charge should
+be so completely baffled. The conditions of the weather had of course
+been accompanied by disasters; there had been earthquakes of astonishing
+violence, a ripple had wrecked not less than twenty-five towns in
+America; an island or two had disappeared, and that bewildering Vesuvius
+seemed to be working up for a denouement. But no one knew really the
+explanation. One man had been wild enough to say that some cataclysm had
+taken place in the centre of the earth.... So she had heard from her
+nurse; but she was not greatly interested. It was only tiresome that she
+could not walk much in the garden, and had to be content with sitting in
+her own cool shaded room on the second floor.
+
+There was only one other matter of which she had asked, namely, the
+effect of the new decree; but the nurse did not seem to know much about
+that. It appeared that there had been an outrage or two, but the law had
+not yet been enforced to any great extent; a week, after all, was a
+short time, even though the decree had taken effect at once, and
+magistrates were beginning the prescribed census.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It seemed to her as she lay awake this morning, staring at the tinted
+ceiling, and out now and again at the quiet little room, that the heat
+was worse than ever. For a minute she thought she must have overslept;
+but, as she touched her repeater, it told her that it was scarcely after
+four o’clock. Well, well; she would not have to bear it much longer; she
+thought that about eight it would be time to make an end. There was her
+letter to Oliver yet to be written; and one or two final arrangements to
+be made.
+
+As regarded the morality of what she was doing-the relation, that is to
+say, which her act bore to the common life of man--she had no shadow of
+doubt. It was her belief, as of the whole Humanitarian world, that just
+as bodily pain occasionally justified this termination of life, so also
+did mental pain. There was a certain pitch of distress at which the
+individual was no longer necessary to himself or the world; it was the
+most charitable act that could be performed. But she had never thought
+in old days that that state could ever be hers; Life had been much too
+interesting. But it had come to this: there was no question of it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Perhaps a dozen times in that week she had thought over her conversation
+with Mr. Francis. Her going to him had been little more than
+instinctive; she did just wish to hear what the other side was--whether
+Christianity was as ludicrous as she had always thought. It seemed that
+it was not ludicrous; it was only terribly pathetic. It was just a
+lovely dream--an exquisite piece of poetry. It would be heavenly to
+believe it, but she did not. No--a transcendent God was unthinkable,
+although not quite so unthinkable as a merely immeasurable Man. And as
+for the Incarnation--well, well!
+
+There seemed no way out of it. The Humanity-Religion was the only one.
+Man was God, or at least His highest manifestation; and He was a God
+with which she did not wish to have anything more to do. These faint new
+instincts after something other than intellect and emotion were, she
+knew perfectly well, nothing but refined emotion itself.
+
+She had thought a great deal of Felsenburgh, however, and was astonished
+at her own feelings. He was certainly the most impressive man she had
+ever seen; it did seem very probable indeed that He was what He claimed
+to be--the Incarnation of the ideal Man the first perfect product of
+humanity. But the logic of his position was too much for her. She saw
+now that He was perfectly logical--that He had not been inconsistent in
+denouncing the destruction of Rome and a week later making His
+declaration. It was the passion of one man against another that He
+denounced--of kingdom against kingdom, and sect against sect--for this
+was suicidal for the race. He denounced passion, too, not judicial
+action. Therefore, this new decree was as logical as Himself--it was a
+judicial act on the part of an united world against a tiny majority that
+threatened the principle of life and faith: and it was to be carried out
+with supreme mercy; there was no revenge or passion or partisan spirit
+in it from beginning to end; no more than a man is revengeful or
+passionate when he amputates a diseased limb--Oliver had convinced her
+of that.
+
+Yes, it was logical and sound. And it was because it was so that she
+could not bear it.... But ah! what a sublime man Felsenburgh was; it was
+a joy to her even to recall his speeches and his personality. She would
+have liked to see him again. But it was no good. She had better be done
+with it as tranquilly as possible. And the world must go forward without
+her. She was just tired out with Facts.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She dozed off again presently, and it seemed scarcely five minutes
+before she looked up to see a gentle smiling face of a white-capped
+nurse bending over her.
+
+“It is nearly six o’clock, my dear--the time you told me. I came to see
+about breakfast.”
+
+Mabel drew a long breath. Then she sat up suddenly, throwing back the
+sheet.
+
+
+II
+
+It struck a quarter-past six from the little clock on the mantel-shelf
+as she laid down her pen. Then she took up the closely written sheets,
+leaned back in her deep chair, and began to read.
+
+“HOME OF REST,
+
+“NO 3A MANCHESTER WEST.
+
+“MY DEAR: I am very sorry, but it has come back to me. I really cannot
+go on any longer, so I am going to escape in the only way left, as I
+once told you. I have had a very quiet and happy time here; they have
+been most kind and considerate. You see, of course, from the heading on
+this paper, what I mean....
+
+“Well, you have always been very dear to me; you are still, even at this
+moment. So you have a right to know my reasons so far as I know them
+myself. It is very difficult to understand myself; but it seems to me
+that I am not strong enough to live. So long as I was pleased and
+excited it was all very well--especially when He came. But I think I had
+expected it to be different; I did not understand as I do now how it
+must come to this--how it is all quite logical and right. I could bear
+it, when I thought that they had acted through passion, but this is
+deliberate. I did not realise that Peace must have its laws, and must
+protect itself. And, somehow, that Peace is not what I want. It is being
+alive at all that is wrong.
+
+“Then there is this difficulty. I know how absolutely in agreement you
+are with this new state of affairs; of course you are, because you are
+so much stronger and more logical than I am. But if you have a wife she
+must be of one mind with you. And I am not, any more, at least not with
+my heart, though I see you are right.... Do you understand, my dear?
+
+“If we had had a child, it might have been different. I might have liked
+to go on living for his sake. But Humanity, somehow--Oh! Oliver! I
+can’t--I can’t.
+
+“I know I am wrong, and that you are right--but there it is; I cannot
+change myself. So I am quite sure that I must go.
+
+“Then I want to tell you this--that I am not at all frightened. I never
+can understand why people are--unless, of course, they are Christians. I
+should be horribly frightened if I was one of them. But, you see, we
+both know that there is nothing beyond. It is life that I am frightened
+of--not death. Of course, I should be frightened if there was any pain;
+but the doctors tell me there is absolutely none. It is simply going to
+sleep. The nerves are dead before the brain. I am going to do it myself.
+I don’t want any one else in the room. In a few minutes the nurse
+here--Sister Anne, with whom I have made great friends--will bring in
+the thing, and then she will leave me.
+
+“As regards what happens afterwards, I do not mind at all. Please do
+exactly what you wish. The cremation will take place to-morrow morning
+at noon, so that you can be here if you like. Or you can send
+directions, and they will send on the urn to you. I know you liked to
+have your mother’s urn in the garden; so perhaps you will like mine.
+Please do exactly what you like. And with all my things too. Of course I
+leave them to you.
+
+“Now, my dear, I want to say this--that I am very sorry indeed now that
+I was so tiresome and stupid. I think I did really believe your
+arguments all along. But I did not want to believe them. Do you see now
+why I was so tiresome?
+
+“Oliver, my darling, you have been extraordinarily good to me.... Yes, I
+know I am crying, but I am really very happy. This is such a lovely
+ending. I wish I hadn’t been obliged to make you so anxious during this
+last week: but I had to--I knew you would persuade me against it, if you
+found me, and that would have been worse than ever. I am sorry I told
+you that lie, too. Indeed, it is the first I ever did tell you.
+
+“Well, I don’t think there is much more to say. Oliver, my dear,
+good-bye. I send you my love with all my heart.
+
+“MABEL.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She sat still when she had read it through, and her eyes were still wet
+with tears. Yet it was all perfectly true. She was far happier than she
+could be if she had still the prospect of going back. Life seemed
+entirely blank: death was so obvious an escape; her soul ached for it,
+as a body for sleep.
+
+She directed the envelope, still with a perfectly steady hand, laid it
+on the table, and leaned back once more, glancing again at her untasted
+breakfast.
+
+Then she suddenly began to think of her conversation with Mr. Francis;
+and, by a strange association of ideas, remembered the fall of the volor
+in Brighton, the busy-ness of the priest, and the Euthanasia boxes....
+
+When Sister Anne came in a few minutes later, she was astonished at what
+she saw. The girl crouched at the window, her hands on the sill, staring
+out at the sky in an attitude of unmistakable horror.
+
+Sister Anne came across the room quickly, setting down something on the
+table as she passed. She touched the girl on the shoulder.
+
+“My dear, what is it?”
+
+There was a long sobbing breath, and Mabel turned, rising as she turned,
+and clutched the nurse with one shaking hand, pointing out with the
+other.
+
+“There!” she said. “There--look!”
+
+“Well, my dear, what is it? I see nothing. It is a little dark!”
+
+“Dark!” said the other. “You call that dark! Why, why, it is
+black--black!”
+
+The nurse drew her softly backwards to the chair, turning her from the
+window. She recognised nervous fear; but no more than that. But Mabel
+tore herself free, and wheeled again.
+
+“You call that a little dark,” she said. “Why, look, sister, look!”
+
+Yet there was nothing remarkable to be seen. In front rose up the
+feathery hand of an elm, then the shuttered windows across the court,
+the roof, and above that the morning sky, a little heavy and dusky as
+before a storm; but no more than that.
+
+“Well, what is it, my dear? What do you see?”
+
+“Why, why ... look! look!--There, listen to that.”
+
+A faint far-away rumble sounded as the rolling of a waggon--so faint
+that it might almost be an aural delusion. But the girl’s hands were at
+her ears, and her face was one white wide-eyed mask of terror. The nurse
+threw her arms round her.
+
+“My dear,” she said, “you are not yourself. That is nothing but a little
+heat-thunder. Sit down quietly.”
+
+She could feel the girl’s body shaking beneath her hands, but there was
+no resistance as she drew her to the chair.
+
+“The lights! the lights!” sobbed Mabel.
+
+“Will you promise me to sit quietly, then?”
+
+She nodded; and the nurse went across to the door, smiling tenderly; she
+had seen such things before. A moment later the room was full of
+exquisite sunlight, as she switched the handle. As she turned, she saw
+that Mabel had wheeled herself round in the chair, and with clasped
+hands was still staring out at the sky above the roofs; but she was
+plainly quieter again now. The nurse came back, and put her hand on her
+shoulder.
+
+“You are overwrought, my dear.... Now you must believe me. There is
+nothing to be frightened of. It is just nervous excitement.... Shall I
+pull down the blind?”
+
+Mabel turned her face.... Yes, certainly the light had reassured her.
+Her face was still white and bewildered, but the steady look was coming
+back to her eyes, though, even as she spoke, they wandered back more
+than once to the window.
+
+“Nurse,” she said more quietly, “please look again and tell me if you
+see nothing. If you say there is nothing I will believe that I am going
+mad. No; you must not touch the blind.”
+
+No; there was nothing. The sky was a little dark, as if a blight were
+coming on; but there was hardly more than a veil of cloud, and the light
+was scarcely more than tinged with gloom. It was just such a sky as
+precedes a spring thunderstorm. She said so, clearly and firmly.
+
+Mabel’s face steadied still more.
+
+“Very well, nurse.... Then---”
+
+She turned to the little table by the side on which Sister Anne had set
+down what she had brought into the room.
+
+“Show me, please.”
+
+The nurse still hesitated.
+
+“Are you sure you are not too frightened, my dear? Shall I get you
+anything?”
+
+“I have no more to say,” said Mabel firmly. “Show me, please.”
+
+Sister Anne turned resolutely to the table.
+
+There rested upon it a white-enamelled box, delicately painted with
+flowers. From this box emerged a white flexible tube with a broad
+mouthpiece, fitted with two leather-covered steel clasps. From the side
+of the box nearest the chair protruded a little china handle.
+
+“Now, my dear,” began the nurse quietly, watching the other’s eyes turn
+once again to the window, and then back--“now, my dear, you sit there,
+as you are now. Your head right back, please. When you are ready, you
+put this over your mouth, and clasp the springs behind your head....
+So.... it works quite easily. Then you turn this handle, round that way,
+as far as it will go. And that is all.”
+
+Mabel nodded. She had regained her self-command, and understood plainly
+enough, though even as she spoke once again her eyes strayed away to the
+window.
+
+“That is all,” she said. “And what then?”
+
+The nurse eyed her doubtfully for a moment.
+
+“I understand perfectly,” said Mabel. “And what then?”
+
+“There is nothing more. Breathe naturally. You will feel sleepy almost
+directly. Then you close your eyes, and that is all.”
+
+Mabel laid the tube on the table and stood up. She was completely
+herself now.
+
+“Give me a kiss, sister,” she said.
+
+The nurse nodded and smiled to her once more at the door. But Mabel
+hardly noticed it; again she was looking towards the window.
+
+“I shall come back in half-an-hour,” said Sister Anne.
+
+Then her eyes caught a square of white upon the centre table. “Ah! that
+letter!” she said.
+
+“Yes,” said the girl absently. “Please take it.”
+
+The nurse took it up, glanced at the address, and again at Mabel. Still
+she hesitated.
+
+“In half-an-hour,” she repeated. “There is no hurry at all. It doesn’t
+take five minutes.... Good-bye, my dear.”
+
+But Mabel was still looking out of the window, and made no answer.
+
+
+III
+
+Mabel stood perfectly still until she heard the locking of the door and
+the withdrawal of the key. Then once more she went to the window and
+clasped the sill.
+
+From where she stood there was visible to her first the courtyard
+beneath, with its lawn in the centre, and a couple of trees growing
+there--all plain in the brilliant light that now streamed from her
+window, and secondly, above the roofs, a tremendous pall of ruddy black.
+It was the more terrible from the contrast. Earth, it seemed, was
+capable of light; heaven had failed.
+
+It appeared, too, that there was a curious stillness. The house was,
+usually, quiet enough at this hour: the inhabitants of that place were
+in no mood for bustle: but now it was more than quiet; it was deathly
+still: it was such a hush as precedes the sudden crash of the sky’s
+artillery. But the moments went by, and there was no such crash: only
+once again there sounded a solemn rolling, as of some great wain far
+away; stupendously impressive, for with it to the girl’s ears there
+seemed mingled a murmur of innumerable voices, ghostly crying and
+applause. Then again the hush settled down like wool.
+
+She had begun to understand now. The darkness and the sounds were not
+for all eyes and ears. The nurse had seen and heard nothing
+extraordinary, and the rest of the world of men saw and heard nothing.
+To them it was no more than the hint of a coming storm.
+
+Mabel did not attempt to distinguish between the subjective and the
+objective. It was nothing to her as to whether the sights and sounds
+were generated by her own brain or perceived by some faculty hitherto
+unknown. She seemed to herself to be standing already apart from the
+world which she had known; it was receding from her, or, rather, while
+standing where it had always done, it was melting, transforming itself,
+passing to some other mode of existence. The strangeness seemed no more
+strange than anything else than that ... that little painted box upon
+the table.
+
+Then, hardly knowing what she said, looking steadily upon that appalling
+sky, she began to speak....
+
+“O God!” she said. “If You are really there really there---”
+
+Her voice faltered, and she gripped the sill to steady herself. She
+wondered vaguely why she spoke so; it was neither intellect nor emotion
+that inspired her. Yet she continued....
+
+“O God, I know You are not there--of course You are not. But if You were
+there, I know what I would say to You. I would tell You how puzzled and
+tired I am. No--No--I need not tell You: You would know it. But I would
+say that I was very sorry for all this. Oh! You would know that too. I
+need not say anything at all. O God! I don’t know what I want to say. I
+would like You to look after Oliver, of course, and all Your poor
+Christians. Oh! they will have such a hard time.... God. God--You would
+understand, wouldn’t You?” ...
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Again came the heavy rumble and the solemn bass of a myriad voices; it
+seemed a shade nearer, she thought.... She never liked thunderstorms or
+shouting crowds. They always gave her a headache ...
+
+“Well, well,” she said. “Good-bye, everything---”
+
+Then she was in the chair. The mouthpiece--yes; that was it....
+
+She was furious at the trembling of her hands; twice the spring slipped
+from her polished coils of hair.... Then it was fixed ... and as if a
+breeze fanned her, her sense came back....
+
+She found she could breathe quite easily; there was no resistance--that
+was a comfort; there would be no suffocation about it.... She put out
+her left hand and touched the handle, conscious less of its sudden
+coolness than of the unbearable heat in which the room seemed almost
+suddenly plunged. She could hear the drumming pulses in her temples and
+the roaring of the voices.... She dropped the handle once more, and with
+both hands tore at the loose white wrapper that she had put on this
+morning....
+
+Yes, that was a little easier; she could breathe better so. Again her
+fingers felt for and found the handle, but the sweat streamed from her
+fingers, and for an instant she could not turn the knob. Then it yielded
+suddenly....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For one instant the sweet languid smell struck her consciousness like a
+blow, for she knew it as the scent of death. Then the steady will that
+had borne her so far asserted itself, and she laid her hands softly in
+her lap, breathing deeply and easily.
+
+She had closed her eyes at the turning of the handle, but now opened
+them again, curious to watch the aspect of the fading world. She had
+determined to do this a week ago: she would at least miss nothing of
+this unique last experience.
+
+It seemed at first that there was no change. There was the feathery head
+of the elm, the lead roof opposite, and the terrible sky above. She
+noticed a pigeon, white against the blackness, soar and swoop again out
+of sight in an instant....
+
+... Then the following things happened....
+
+There was a sudden sensation of ecstatic lightness in all her limbs; she
+attempted to lift a hand, and was aware that it was impossible; it was
+no longer hers. She attempted to lower her eyes from that broad strip of
+violet sky, and perceived that that too was impossible. Then she
+understood that the will had already lost touch with the body, that the
+crumbling world had receded to an infinite distance--that was as she had
+expected, but what continued to puzzle her was that her mind was still
+active. It was true that the world she had known had withdrawn itself
+from the dominion of consciousness, as her body had done, except, that
+was, in the sense of hearing, which was still strangely alert; yet there
+was still enough memory to be aware that there was such a world--that
+there were other persons in existence; that men went about their
+business, knowing nothing of what had happened; but faces, names,
+places had all alike gone. In fact, she was conscious of herself in such
+a manner as she had never been before; it seemed as if she had
+penetrated at last into some recess of her being into which hitherto she
+had only looked as through clouded glass. This was very strange, and yet
+it was familiar, too; she had arrived, it seemed, at a centre, round the
+circumference of which she had been circling all her life; and it was
+more than a mere point: it was a distinct space, walled and enclosed....
+At the same instant she knew that hearing, too, was gone....
+
+Then an amazing thing happened--yet it appeared to her that she had
+always known it would happen, although her mind had never articulated
+it. This is what happened.
+
+The enclosure melted, with a sound of breaking, and a limitless space
+was about her--limitless, different to everything else, and alive, and
+astir. It was alive, as a breathing, panting body is alive--self-evident
+and overpowering--it was one, yet it was many; it was immaterial, yet
+absolutely real--real in a sense in which she never dreamed of
+reality....
+
+Yet even this was familiar, as a place often visited in dreams is
+familiar; and then, without warning, something resembling sound or
+light, something which she knew in an instant to be unique, tore across
+it....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then she saw, and understood....
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+I
+
+Oliver had passed the days since Mabel’s disappearance in an
+indescribable horror. He had done all that was possible: he had traced
+her to the station and to Victoria, where he lost her clue; he had
+communicated with the police, and the official answer, telling him
+nothing, had arrived to the effect that there was no news: and it was
+not until the Tuesday following her disappearance that Mr. Francis,
+hearing by chance of his trouble, informed him by telephone that he had
+spoken with her on the Friday night. But there was no satisfaction to be
+got from him--indeed, the news was bad rather than good, for Oliver
+could not but be dismayed at the report of the conversation, in spite of
+Mr. Francis’s assurances that Mrs. Brand had shown no kind of
+inclination to defend the Christian cause.
+
+Two theories gradually emerged, in his mind; either she was gone to the
+protection of some unknown Catholic, or--and he grew sick at the
+thought--she had applied somewhere for Euthanasia as she had once
+threatened, and was now under the care of the Law; such an event was
+sufficiently common since the passing of the Release Act in 1998. And it
+was frightful that he could not condemn it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the Tuesday evening, as he sat heavily in his room, for the hundredth
+time attempting to trace out some coherent line through the maze of
+intercourse he had had with his wife during these past months, his bell
+suddenly rang. It was the red label of Whitehall that had made its
+appearance; and for an instant his heart leaped with hope that it was
+news of her. But at the first words it sank again.
+
+“Brand,” came the sharp fairy voice, “is that you?... Yes, I am
+Snowford. You are wanted at once--at once, you understand. There is an
+extraordinary meeting of the Council at twenty o’clock. The President
+will be there. You understand the urgency. No time for more. Come
+instantly to my room.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Even this message scarcely distracted him. He, with the rest of the
+world, was no longer surprised at the sudden descents of the President.
+He came and vanished again without warning, travelling and working with
+incredible energy, yet always, as it seemed, retaining his personal
+calm.
+
+It was already after nineteen; Oliver supped immediately, and a
+quarter-of-an-hour before the hour presented himself in Snowford’s room,
+where half a dozen of his colleagues were assembled.
+
+That minister came forward to meet him, with a strange excitement in his
+face. He drew him aside by a button.
+
+“See here, Brand, you are wanted to speak first--immediately after the
+President’s Secretary who will open; they are coming from Paris. It is
+about a new matter altogether. He has had information of the whereabouts
+of the Pope.... It seems that there is one.... Oh, you will understand
+presently. Oh, and by the way,” he went on, looking curiously at the
+strained face, “I am sorry to hear of your anxiety. Pemberton told me
+just now.”
+
+Oliver lifted a hand abruptly.
+
+“Tell me,” he said. “What am I wanted to say?”
+
+“Well, the President will have a proposal, we imagine. You know our
+minds well enough. Just explain our attitude towards the Catholics.”
+
+Oliver’s eyes shrank suddenly to two bright lines beneath the lids. He
+nodded.
+
+Cartwright came up presently, an immense, bent old man with a face of
+parchment, as befitted the Lord Chief Justice.
+
+“By the way, Brand, what do you know of a man called Phillips? He seems
+to have mentioned your name.”
+
+“He was my secretary,” said Oliver slowly. “What about him?”
+
+“I think he must be mad. He has given himself up to a magistrate,
+entreating to be examined at once. The magistrate has applied for
+instructions. You see, the Act has scarcely begun to move yet.”
+
+“But what has he done?”
+
+“That’s the difficulty. He says he cannot deny God, neither can he
+affirm Him.--He was your secretary, then?”
+
+“Certainly. I knew he was inclined to Christianity. I had to get rid of
+him for that.”
+
+“Well, he is to be remanded for a week. Perhaps he will be able to make
+up his mind.”
+
+Then the talk shifted off again. Two or three more came up, and all eyed
+Oliver with a certain curiosity; the story was gone about that his wife
+had left him. They wished to see how he took it.
+
+At five minutes before the hour a bell rang, and the door into the
+corridor was thrown open.
+
+“Come, gentlemen,” said the Prime Minister.
+
+The Council Chamber was a long high room on the first floor; its walls
+from floor to ceiling were lined with books. A noiseless rubber carpet
+was underfoot. There were no windows; the room was lighted artificially.
+A long table, set round with armed chairs, ran the length of the floor,
+eight on either side; and the Presidential chair, raised on a dais,
+stood at the head.
+
+Each man went straight to his chair in silence, and remained there,
+waiting.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The room was beautifully cool, in spite of the absence of windows, and
+was a pleasant contrast to the hot evening outside through which most of
+these men had come. They, too, had wondered at the surprising weather,
+and had smiled at the conflict of the infallible. But they were not
+thinking about that now: the coming of the President was a matter which
+always silenced the most loquacious. Besides, this time, they understood
+that the affair was more serious than usual.
+
+At one minute before the hour, again a bell sounded, four times, and
+ceased; and at the signal each man turned instinctively to the high
+sliding door behind the Presidential chair. There was dead silence
+within and without: the huge Government offices were luxuriously
+provided with sound-deadening apparatus, and not even the rolling of the
+vast motors within a hundred yards was able to send a vibration through
+the layers of rubber on which the walls rested. There was only one noise
+that could penetrate, and that the sound of thunder. The experts were at
+present unable to exclude this.
+
+Again the silence seemed to fall in one yet deeper veil. Then the door
+opened, and a figure came swiftly through, followed by Another in black
+and scarlet.
+
+
+II
+
+He passed straight up to the chair, followed by two secretaries, bowed
+slightly to this side and that, sat down and made a little gesture. Then
+they, too, were in their chairs, upright and intent. For perhaps the
+hundredth time, Oliver, staring upon the President, marvelled at the
+quietness and the astounding personality of Him. He was in the English
+judicial dress that had passed down through centuries--black and scarlet
+with sleeves of white fur and a crimson sash--and that had lately been
+adopted as the English presidential costume of him who stood at the head
+of the legislature. But it was in His personality, in the atmosphere
+that flowed from Him, that the marvel lay. It was as the scent of the
+sea to the physical nature--it exhilarated, cleansed, kindled,
+intoxicated. It was as inexplicably attractive as a cherry orchard in
+spring, as affecting as the cry of stringed instruments, as compelling
+as a storm. So writers had said. They compared it to a stream of clear
+water, to the flash of a gem, to the love of woman. They lost all
+decency sometimes; they said it fitted all moods, as the voice of many
+waters; they called it again and again, as explicitly as possible, the
+Divine Nature perfectly Incarnate at last....
+
+Then Oliver’s reflections dropped from him like a mantle, for the
+President, with downcast eyes and head thrown back, made a little
+gesture to the ruddy-faced secretary on His right; and this man, without
+a movement, began to speak like an impersonal actor repeating his part.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+“Gentlemen,” he said, in an even, resonant voice, “the President is come
+direct from Paris. This afternoon His Honour was in Berlin; this
+morning, early, in Moscow. Yesterday in New York. To-night His Honour
+must be in Turin; and to-morrow will begin to return through Spain,
+North Africa, Greece and the southeastern states.”
+
+This was the usual formula for such speeches. The President spoke but
+little himself now; but was careful for the information of his subjects
+on occasions like this. His secretaries were perfectly trained, and this
+speaker was no exception. After a slight pause, he continued:
+
+“This is the business, gentlemen.
+
+“Last Thursday, as you are aware, the Plenipotentaries signed the Test
+Act in this room, and it was immediately communicated all over the
+world. At sixteen o’clock His Honour received a message from a man named
+Dolgorovski--who is, it is understood, one of the Cardinals of the
+Catholic Church. This he claimed; and on inquiry it was found to be a
+fact. His information confirmed what was already suspected--namely, that
+there was a man claiming to be Pope, who had created (so the phrase is)
+other cardinals, shortly after the destruction of Rome, subsequent to
+which his own election took place in Jerusalem. It appears that this
+Pope, with a good deal of statesmanship, has chosen to keep his own name
+and place of residence a secret from even his own followers, with the
+exception of the twelve cardinals; that he has done a great deal,
+through the instrumentality of one of his cardinals in particular, and
+through his new Order in general, towards the reorganisation of the
+Catholic Church; and that at this moment he is living, apart from the
+world, in complete security.
+
+“His Honour blames Himself that He did not do more than suspect
+something of the kind--misled, He thinks, by a belief that if there had
+been a Pope, news would have been heard of it from other quarters, for,
+as is well known, the entire structure of the Christian Church rests
+upon him as upon a rock. Further, His Honour thinks inquiries should
+have been made in the very place where now it is understood that this
+Pope is living.
+
+“The man’s name, gentlemen, is Franklin---”
+
+Oliver started uncontrollably, but relapsed again to bright-eyed
+intelligence as for an instant the President glanced up from his
+motionlessness.
+
+“Franklin,” repeated the secretary, “and he is living in Nazareth,
+where, it is said, the Founder of Christianity passed His youth.
+
+“Now this, gentlemen, His Honour heard on Thursday in last week. He
+caused inquiries to be made, and on Friday morning received further
+intelligence from Dolgorovski that this Pope had summoned to Nazareth a
+meeting of his cardinals, and certain other officials, from all over the
+world, to consider what steps should be taken in view of the new Test
+Act. This His Honour takes to show an extreme want of statesmanship
+which seems hard to reconcile with his former action. These persons are
+summoned by special messengers to meet on Saturday next, and will begin
+their deliberations after some Christian ceremonies on the following
+morning.
+
+“You wish, gentlemen, no doubt, to know Dolgorovski’s motives in making
+all this known. His Honour is satisfied that they are genuine. The man
+has been losing belief in his religion; in fact, he has come to see that
+this religion is the supreme obstacle to the consolidation of the race.
+He has esteemed it his duty, therefore, to lay this information before
+His Honour. It is interesting as an historical parallel to reflect that
+the same kind of incident marked the rise of Christianity as will mark,
+it is thought, its final extinction--namely, the informing on the part
+of one of the leaders of the place and method by which the principal
+personage may be best approached. It is also, surely, very significant
+that the scene of the extinction of Christianity is identical with that
+of its inauguration....
+
+“Well, gentlemen, His Honour’s proposal is as follows, carrying out the
+Declaration to which you all acceded. It is that a force should proceed
+during the night of Saturday next to Palestine, and on the Sunday
+morning, when these men will be all gathered together, that this force
+should finish as swiftly and mercifully as possible the work to which
+the Powers have set their hands. So far, the comment of the Governments
+which have been consulted has been unanimous, and there is little doubt
+that the rest will be equally so. His Honour felt that He could not act
+in so grave a matter on His own responsibility; it is not merely local;
+it is a catholic administration of justice, and will have results wider
+than it is safe minutely to prophesy.
+
+“It is not necessary to enter into His Honour’s reasons. They are
+already well known to you; but before asking for your opinion, He
+desires me to indicate what He thinks, in the event of your approval,
+should be the method of action.
+
+“Each Government, it is proposed, should take part in the final scene,
+for it is something of a symbolic action; and for this purpose it is
+thought well that each of the three Departments of the World should
+depute volors, to the number of the constituting States, one hundred and
+twenty-two all told, to set about the business. These volors should have
+no common meeting-ground, otherwise the news will surely penetrate to
+Nazareth, for it is understood that, this new Order of Christ Crucified
+has a highly organised system of espionage. The rendezvous, then, should
+be no other than Nazareth itself; and the time of meeting should be, it
+is thought, not later than nine o’clock according to Palestine
+reckoning. These details, however, can be decided and communicated as
+soon as a determination has been formed as regards the entire scheme.
+
+“With respect to the exact method of carrying out the conclusion, His
+Honour is inclined to think it will be more merciful to enter into no
+negotiations with the persons concerned. An opportunity should be given
+to the inhabitants of the village to make their escape if they so desire
+it, and then, with the explosives that the force should carry, the end
+can be practically instantaneous.
+
+“For Himself, His Honour proposes to be there in person, and further
+that the actual discharge should take place from His own car. It seems
+but suitable that the world which has done His Honour the goodness to
+elect Him to its Presidentship should act through His hands; and this
+would be at least some slight token of respect to a superstition which,
+however infamous, is yet the one and only force capable of withstanding
+the true progress of man.
+
+“His Honour promises you, gentlemen, that in the event of this plan
+being carried out, we shall be no more troubled with Christianity.
+Already the moral effect of the Test Act has been prodigious. It is
+understood that, by tens of thousands, Catholics, numbering among them
+even members of this new fanatical Religious Order, have been renouncing
+their follies even in these few days; and a final blow struck now at the
+very heart and head of the Catholic Church, eliminating, as it would do,
+the actual body on which the entire organisation subsists, would render
+its resurrection impossible. It is a well-known fact that, granted the
+extinction of the line of Popes, together with those necessary for its
+continuance, there could be no longer any question amongst even the most
+ignorant that the claim of Jesus had ceased to be either reasonable or
+possible. Even the Order that has provided the sinews for this new
+movement must cease to exist.
+
+“Dolgorovski, of course, is the difficulty, for it is not certainly
+known whether one Cardinal would be considered sufficient for the
+propagation of the line; and, although reluctantly, His Honour feels
+bound to suggest that at the conclusion of the affair, Dolgorovski,
+also, who will not, of course, be with his fellows at Nazareth, should
+be mercifully removed from even the danger of a relapse....
+
+“His Honour, then, asks you, gentlemen, as briefly as possible, to state
+your views on the points of which I have had the privilege of speaking.”
+
+The quiet business-like voice ceased.
+
+He had spoken throughout in the manner with which he had begun; his eyes
+had been downcast throughout; his voice had been tranquil and
+restrained. His deportment had been admirable.
+
+There was an instant’s silence, and all eyes settled steadily again upon
+the motionless figure in black and scarlet and the ivory face.
+
+Then Oliver stood up. His face was as white as paper; his eyes bright
+and dilated.
+
+“Sir,” he said, “I have no doubt that we are all of one mind. I need say
+no more than that, so far as I am a representative of my colleagues, we
+assent to the proposal, and leave all details in your Honour’s hands.”
+
+The President lifted his eyes, and ran them swiftly along the rigid
+faces turned to him.
+
+Then, in the breathless hush, he spoke for the first time in his strange
+voice, now as passionless as a frozen river.
+
+“Is there any other proposal?”
+
+There was a murmur of assent as the men rose to their feet.
+
+“Thank you, gentlemen,” said the secretary.
+
+
+III
+
+It was a little before seven o’clock on the morning of Saturday that
+Oliver stepped out of the motor that had carried him to Wimbledon
+Common, and began to go up the steps of the old volor-stage, abandoned
+five years ago. It had been thought better, in view of the extreme
+secrecy that was to be kept, that England’s representative in the
+expedition should start from a comparatively unknown point, and this old
+stage, in disuse now, except for occasional trials of new Government
+machines, had been selected. Even the lift had been removed, and it was
+necessary to climb the hundred and fifty steps on foot.
+
+It was with a certain unwillingness that he had accepted this post among
+the four delegates, for nothing had been heard of his wife, and it was
+terrible to him to leave London while her fate was as yet doubtful. On
+the whole, he was less inclined than ever now to accept the Euthanasia
+theory; he had spoken to one or two of her friends, all of whom declared
+that she had never even hinted at such an end. And, again, although he
+was well aware of the eight-day law in the matter, even if she had
+determined on such a step there was nothing to show that she was yet in
+England, and, in fact, it was more than likely that if she were bent on
+such an act she would go abroad for it, where laxer conditions
+prevailed. In short, it seemed that he could do no good by remaining in
+England, and the temptation to be present at the final act of justice in
+the East by which land, and, in fact, it was more than likely that if
+she were to be wiped out, and Franklin, too, among them--Franklin, that
+parody of the Lord of the World--this, added to the opinion of his
+colleagues in the Government, and the curious sense, never absent from
+him now, that Felsenburgh’s approval was a thing to die for if
+necessary--these things had finally prevailed. He left behind him at
+home his secretary, with instructions that no expense was to be spared
+in communicating with him should any news of his wife arrive during his
+absence.
+
+It was terribly hot this morning, and, by the time that he reached the
+top he noticed that the monster in the net was already fitted into its
+white aluminium casing, and that the fans within the corridor and saloon
+were already active. He stepped inside to secure a seat in the saloon,
+set his bag down, and after a word or two with the guard, who, of
+course, had not yet been informed of their destination, learning that
+the others were not yet come, he went out again on to the platform for
+coolness’ sake, and to brood in peace.
+
+London looked strange this morning, he thought. Here beneath him was the
+common, parched somewhat with the intense heat of the previous week,
+stretching for perhaps half-a-mile--tumbled ground, smooth stretches of
+turf, and the heads of heavy trees up to the first house-roofs, set,
+too, it seemed, in bowers of foliage. Then beyond that began the serried
+array, line beyond line, broken in one spot by the gleam of a
+river-reach, and then on again fading beyond eyesight. But what
+surprised him was the density of the air; it was now, as old books
+related it had been in the days of smoke. There was no freshness, no
+translucence of morning atmosphere; it was impossible to point in any
+one direction to the source of this veiling gloom, for on all sides it
+was the same. Even the sky overhead lacked its blue; it appeared painted
+with a muddy brush, and the sun shewed the same faint tinge of red. Yes,
+it was like that, he said wearily to himself--like a second-rate sketch;
+there was no sense of mystery as of a veiled city, but rather unreality.
+The shadows seemed lacking in definiteness, the outlines and grouping in
+coherence. A storm was wanted, he reflected; or even, it might be, one
+more earthquake on the other side of the world would, in wonderful
+illustration of the globe’s unity, relieve the pressure on this side.
+Well, well; the journey would be worth taking even for the interest of
+observing climatic changes; but it would be terribly hot, he mused, by
+the time the south of France was reached.
+
+Then his thoughts leaped back to their own gnawing misery.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was another ten minutes before he saw the scarlet Government motor,
+with awnings out, slide up the road from the direction of Fulham; and
+yet five minutes more before the three men appeared with their servants
+behind them--Maxwell, Snowford and Cartwright, all alike, as was Oliver,
+in white duck from head to foot.
+
+They did not speak one word of their business, for the officials were
+going to and fro, and it was advisable to guard against even the
+smallest possibility of betrayal. The guard had been told that the volor
+was required for a three days’ journey, that provisions were to be taken
+in for that period, and that the first point towards which the course
+was to lie was the centre of the South Downs. There would be no stopping
+for at least a day and a night.
+
+Further instructions had reached them from the President on the previous
+morning, by which time He had completed His visitation, and received the
+assent of the Emergency Councils of the world. This Snowford commented
+upon in an undertone, and added a word or two as to details, as the four
+stood together looking out over the city.
+
+Briefly, the plan was as follows, at least so far as it concerned
+England. The volor was to approach Palestine from the direction of the
+Mediterranean, observing to get into touch with France on her left and
+Spain on her right within ten miles of the eastern end of Crete. The
+approximate hour was fixed at twenty-three (eastern time). At this point
+she was to show her night signal, a scarlet line on a white field; and
+in the event of her failing to observe her neighbours was to circle at
+that point, at a height of eight hundred feet, until either the two were
+sighted or further instructions were received. For the purpose of
+dealing with emergencies, the President’s car, which would finally make
+its entrance from the south, was to be accompanied by an _aide-de-camp_
+capable of moving at a very high speed, whose signals were to be taken
+as Felsenburgh’s own.
+
+So soon as the circle was completed, having Esdraelon as its centre with
+a radius of five hundred and forty miles, the volors were to advance,
+dropping gradually to within five hundred feet of sea-level, and
+diminishing their distance one from another from the twenty-five miles
+or so at which they would first find themselves, until they were as near
+as safety allowed. In this manner the advance at a pace of fifty miles
+an hour from the moment that the circle was arranged would bring them
+within sight of Nazareth at about nine o’clock on the Sunday morning.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The guard came up to the four as they stood there silent.
+
+“We are ready, gentlemen,” he said.
+
+“What do you think of the weather?” asked Snowford abruptly.
+
+The guard pursed his lips.
+
+“A little thunder, I expect, sir,” he said.
+
+Oliver looked at him curiously.
+
+“No more than that?” he asked.
+
+“I should say a storm, sir,” observed the guard shortly.
+
+Snowford turned towards the gangway.
+
+“Well, we had best be off: we can lose time further on, if we wish.”
+
+It was about five minutes more before all was ready. From the stern of
+the boat came a faint smell of cooking, for breakfast would be served
+immediately, and a white-capped cook protruded his head for an instant,
+to question the guard. The four sat down in the gorgeous saloon in the
+bows; Oliver silent by himself, the other three talking in low voices
+together. Once more the guard passed through to his compartment at the
+prow, glancing as he went to see that all were seated; and an instant
+later came the clang of the signal. Then through all the length of the
+boat--for she was the fastest ship that England possessed--passed the
+thrill of the propeller beginning to work up speed; and simultaneously
+Oliver, staring sideways through the plate-glass window, saw the rail
+drop away, and the long line of London, pale beneath the tinged sky,
+surge up suddenly. He caught a glimpse of a little group of persons
+staring up from below, and they, too, dropped in a great swirl, and
+vanished. Then, with a flash of dusty green, the Common had vanished,
+and a pavement of house-roofs began to stream beneath, the long lines of
+streets on this side and that turning like spokes of a gigantic wheel;
+once more this pavement thinned, showing green again as between
+infrequently laid cobble-stones; then they, too, were gone, and the
+country was open beneath.
+
+Snowford rose, staggering a little.
+
+“I may as well tell the guard now,” he said. “Then we need not be
+interrupted again.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+I
+
+The Syrian awoke from a dream that a myriad faces were looking into his
+own, eager, attentive and horrible, in his corner of the roof-top, and
+sat up sweating and gasping aloud for breath. For an instant he thought
+that he was really dying, and that the spiritual world was about him.
+Then, as he struggled, sense came back, and he stood up, drawing long
+breaths of the stifling night air.
+
+Above him the sky was as the pit, black and empty; there was not a
+glimmer of light, though the moon was surely up. He had seen her four
+hours before, a red sickle, swing slowly out from Thabor. Across the
+plain, as he looked from the parapet, there was nothing. For a few yards
+there lay across the broken ground a single crooked lance of light from
+a half-closed shutter; and beneath that, nothing. To the north again,
+nothing; to the west a glimmer, pale as a moth’s wing, from the
+house-roofs of Nazareth; to the east, nothing. He might be on a
+tower-top in space, except for that line of light and that grey glimmer
+that evaded the eye.
+
+On the roof, however, it was possible to make out at least outlines, for
+the dormer trap had been left open at the head of the stairs, and from
+somewhere within the depths of the house there stole up a faint
+refracted light.
+
+There was a white bundle in that corner; that would be the pillow of the
+Benedictine abbot. He had seen him lay himself down there some time--was
+it four hours or four centuries ago? There was a grey shape stretched
+along that pale wall--the Friar, he thought; there were other irregular
+outlines breaking the face of the parapet, here and there along the
+sides.
+
+Very softly, for he knew the caprices of sleep, he stepped across the
+paved roof to the opposite parapet and looked over, for there yet hung
+about him a desire for reassurance that he was still in company with
+flesh and blood. Yes, indeed he was still on earth; for there was a real
+and distinct light burning among the tumbled rocks, and beside it,
+delicate as a miniature, the head and shoulders of a man, writing. And
+in the circle of light were other figures, pale, broken patches on which
+men lay; a pole or two, erected with the thought of a tent to follow; a
+little pile of luggage with a rug across it; and beyond the circle other
+outlines and shapes faded away into the stupendous blackness.
+
+Then the writing man moved his head, and a monstrous shadow fled across
+the ground; a yelp as of a strangling dog broke out suddenly close
+behind him, and, as he turned, a moaning figure sat up on the roof,
+sobbing itself awake. Another moved at the sound, and then as, sighing,
+the former relapsed heavily against the wall, once more the priest went
+back to his place, still doubtful as to the reality of all that he saw,
+and the breathless silence came down again as a pall.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He woke again from dreamless sleep, and there was a change. From his
+corner, as he raised his heavy eyes, there met them what seemed an
+unbearable brightness; then, as he looked, it resolved itself into a
+candle-flame, and beyond it a white sleeve, and higher yet a white face
+and throat. He understood, and rose reeling; it was the messenger come
+to fetch him as had been arranged.
+
+As he passed across the space, once he looked round him, and it seemed
+that the dawn must have come, for that appalling sky overhead was
+visible at last. An enormous vault, smoke-coloured and opaque, seemed to
+curve away to the ghostly horizons on either side where the far-away
+hills raised sharp shapes as if cut in paper. Carmel was before him; at
+least he thought it was that--a bull head and shoulders thrusting itself
+forward and ending in an abrupt descent, and beyond that again the
+glimmering sky. There were no clouds, no outlines to break the huge,
+smooth, dusky dome beneath the centre of which this house-roof seemed
+poised. Across the parapet, as he glanced to the right before descending
+the steps, stretched Esdraelon, sad-coloured and sombre, into the
+metallic distance. It was all as unreal as some fantastic picture by one
+who had never looked upon clear sunlight. The silence was complete and
+profound.
+
+Straight down through the wheeling shadows he went, following the
+white-hooded head and figure down the stairs, along the tiny passage,
+stumbling once against the feet of one who slept with limbs tossed loose
+like a tired dog; the feet drew back mechanically, and a little moan
+broke from the shadows. Then he went on, passing the servant who stood
+aside, and entered.
+
+There were half-a-dozen men gathered here, silent, white figures
+standing apart one from the other, who genuflected as the Pope came in
+simultaneously through the opposite door, and again stood white-faced
+and attentive. He ran his eyes over them as he stopped, waiting behind
+his master’s chair--there were two he knew, remembering them from last
+night--dark-faced Cardinal Ruspoli, and the lean Australian Archbishop,
+besides Cardinal Corkran, who stood by his chair at the Pope’s own
+table, with papers laid ready.
+
+Silvester sat down, and with a little gesture caused the others to sit
+too. Then He began at once in that quiet tired voice that his servant
+knew so well.
+
+“Eminences-we are all here, I think. We need lose no more time, then....
+Cardinal Corkran has something to communicate---” He turned a little.
+“Father, sit down, if you please. This will occupy a little while.”
+
+The priest went across to the stone window-seat, whence he could watch
+the Pope’s face in the light of the two candles that now stood on the
+table between him and the Cardinal-Secretary. Then the Cardinal began,
+glancing up from his papers.
+
+“Holiness. I had better begin a little way back. Their Eminences have
+not heard the details properly....
+
+“I received at Damascus, on last Friday week, inquiries from various
+prelates in different parts of the world, as to the actual measure
+concerning the new policy of persecution. At first I could tell them
+nothing positively, for it was not until after twenty o’clock that
+Cardinal Ruspoli, in Turin, informed me of the facts. Cardinal Malpas
+confirmed them a few minutes later, and the Cardinal Archbishop of Pekin
+at twenty-three. Before mid-day on Saturday I received final
+confirmation from my messengers in London.
+
+“I was at first surprised that Cardinal Dolgorovski did not communicate
+it; for almost simultaneously with the Turin message I received one from
+a priest of the Order of Christ Crucified in Moscow, to which, of
+course, I paid no attention. (It is our rule, Eminences, to treat
+unauthorised communications in that way.) His Holiness, however, bade me
+make inquiries, and I learned from Father Petrovoski and others that the
+Government placards published the news at twenty o’clock--by our time.
+It was curious, therefore, that the Cardinal had not seen it; if he had
+seen it, it was, of course, his duty to acquaint me immediately.
+
+“Since that time, however, the following facts have come out. It is
+established beyond a doubt that Cardinal Dolgorovski received a visitor
+in the course of the evening. His own chaplain, who, your Eminences are
+perhaps aware, has been very active in Russia on behalf of the Church,
+informs me of this privately. Yet the Cardinal asserts, in explanation
+of his silence, that he was alone during those hours, and had given
+orders that no one was to be admitted to his presence without urgent
+cause. This, of course, confirmed His Holiness’s opinion, but I received
+orders from Him to act as if nothing had happened, and to command the
+Cardinal’s presence here with the rest of the Sacred College. To this I
+received an intimation that he would be present. Yesterday, however, a
+little before mid-day, I received a further message that his Eminency
+had met with a slight accident, but that he yet hoped to present himself
+in time for the deliberations. Since then no further news has arrived.”
+
+There was a dead silence.
+
+Then the Pope turned to the Syrian priest.
+
+“Father,” he said, “it was you who received his Eminency’s messages.
+Have you anything to add to this?”
+
+“No, Holiness.”
+
+He turned again.
+
+“My son,” he said, “report to Us publicly what you have already
+reported to Us in private.”
+
+A small, bright-eyed man moved out of the shadows.
+
+“Holiness, it was I who conveyed the message to Cardinal Dolgorovski. He
+refused at first to receive me. When I reached his presence and
+communicated the command he was silent; then he smiled; then he told me
+to carry back the message that he would obey.”
+
+Again the Pope was silent.
+
+Then suddenly the tall Australian stood up.
+
+“Holiness,” he said, “I was once intimate with that man. It was partly
+through my means that he sought reception into the Catholic Church. This
+was not less than fourteen years ago, when the fortunes of the Church
+seemed about to prosper.... Our friendly relations ceased two years ago,
+and I may say that, from what I know of him, I find no difficulty in
+believing---”
+
+As his voice shook with passion and he faltered, Silvester raised his
+hand.
+
+“We desire no recriminations. Even the evidence is now useless, for what
+was to be done has been done. For ourselves, we have no doubt as to its
+nature.... It was to this man that Christ gave the morsel through our
+hands, saying _Quod faces, fac cities. Cum ergo accepisset Me buccellam,
+exivit continuo. Erat autem nox._”
+
+Again fell the silence, and in the pause sounded a long half-vocal sigh
+from without the door. It came and went as a sleeper turned, for the
+passage was crowded with exhausted men--as a soul might sigh that passed
+from light to darkness.
+
+Then Silvester spoke again. And as He spoke He began, as if
+mechanically, to tear up a long paper, written with lists of names, that
+lay before Him.
+
+“Eminences, it is three hours after dawn. In two hours more We shall say
+mass in your presence, and give Holy Communion. During those two hours
+We commission you to communicate this news to all who are assembled
+here; and further, We bestow on each and all of you jurisdiction apart
+from all previous rules of time and place; we give a Plenary Indulgence
+to all who confess and communicate this day. Father--” he turned to the
+Syrian--“Father, you will now expose the Blessed Sacrament in the
+chapel, after which you will proceed to the village and inform the
+inhabitants that if they wish to save their lives they had best be gone
+immediately--immediately, you understand.”
+
+The Syrian started from his daze.
+
+“Holiness,” he stammered, stretching out a hand, “the lists, the lists!”
+
+(He had seen what these were.)
+
+But Silvester only smiled as He tossed the fragments on to the table.
+Then He stood up.
+
+“You need not trouble, my son.... We shall not need these any more....
+
+“One last word, Eminences.... If there is one heart here that doubts or
+is afraid, I have a word to say.”
+
+He paused, with an extraordinarily simple deliberateness, ran the eyes
+round the tense faces turned to Him.
+
+“I have had a Vision of God,” He said softly. “I walk no more by faith,
+but by sight.”
+
+
+II
+
+An hour later the priest toiled back in the hot twilight up the path
+from the village, followed by half-a-dozen silent men, twenty yards
+behind, whose curiosity exceeded their credulousness. He had left a few
+more standing bewildered at the doors of the little mud-houses; and had
+seen perhaps a hundred families, weighted with domestic articles, pour
+like a stream down the rocky path that led to Khaifa. He had been cursed
+by some, even threatened; stared upon by others; mocked by a few. The
+fanatical said that the Christians had brought God’s wrath upon the
+place, and the darkness upon the sky: the sun was dying, for these
+hounds were too evil for him to look upon and live. Others again seemed
+to see nothing remarkable in the state of the weather....
+
+There was no change in that sky from its state an hour before, except
+that perhaps it had lightened a little as the sun climbed higher behind
+that impenetrable dusky shroud. Hills, grass, men’s faces--all bore to
+the priest’s eyes the look of unreality; they were as things seen in a
+dream by eyes that roll with sleep through lids weighted with lead. Even
+to other physical senses that unreality was present; and once more he
+remembered his dream, thankful that that horror at least was absent. But
+silence seemed other than a negation of sound, it was a thing in itself,
+an affirmation, unruffled by the sound of footsteps, the thin barking of
+dogs, the murmur of voices. It appeared as if the stillness of eternity
+had descended and embraced the world’s activities, and as if that world,
+in a desperate attempt to assert its own reality, was braced in a set,
+motionless, noiseless, breathless effort to hold itself in being. What
+Silvester had said just now was beginning to be true of this man also.
+The touch of the powdery soil and the warm pebbles beneath the priest’s
+bare feet seemed something apart from the consciousness that usually
+regards the things of sense as more real and more intimate than the
+things of spirit. Matter still had a reality, still occupied space, but
+it was of a subjective nature, the result of internal rather than
+external powers. He appeared to himself already to be scarcely more than
+a soul, intent and steady, united by a thread only to the body and the
+world with which he was yet in relations. He knew that the appalling
+heat was there; once even, before his eyes a patch of beaten ground
+cracked and lisped as water that touches hot iron, as he trod upon it.
+He could feel the heat upon his forehead and hands, his whole body was
+swathed and soaked in it; yet he regarded it as from an outside
+standpoint, as a man with neuritis perceives that the pain is no longer
+in his hand but in the pillow which supports it. So, too, with what his
+eyes looked upon and his ears heard; so, too, with that faint bitter
+taste that lay upon his lips and nostrils. There was no longer in him
+fear or even hope--he regarded himself, the world, and even the
+enshrouding and awful Presence of spirit as facts with which he had but
+little to do. He was scarcely even interested; still less was he
+distressed. There was Thabor before him--at least what once had been
+Thabor, now it was no more than a huge and dusky dome-shape which
+impressed itself upon his retina and informed his passive brain of its
+existence and outline, though that existence seemed no better than that
+of a dissolving phantom.
+
+It seemed then almost natural--or at least as natural as all else--as he
+came in through the passage and opened the chapel-door, to see that the
+floor was crowded with prostrate motionless figures. There they lay, all
+alike in the white burnous which he had given out last night; and, with
+forehead on arms, as during the singing of the Litany of the Saints at
+an ordination, lay the figure he knew best and loved more than all the
+world, the shoulders and white hair at a slight elevation upon the
+single altar step. Above the plain altar itself burned the six tall
+candles; and in the midst, on the mean little throne, stood the
+white-metal monstrance, with its White Centre....
+
+Then he, too, dropped, and lay as he was....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He did not know how long it was before the circling observant
+consciousness, the flow of slow images, the vibration of particular
+thoughts, ceased and stilled as a pool rocks quietly to peace after the
+dropped stone has long lain still. But it came at last--that superb
+tranquillity, possible only when the senses are physically awake, with
+which God, perhaps once in a lifetime, rewards the aspiring trustful
+soul--that point of complete rest in the heart of the Fount of all
+existence with which one day He will reward eternally the spirits of His
+children. There was no thought in him of articulating this experience,
+of analysing its elements, or fingering this or that strain of ecstatic
+joy. The time for self-regarding was passed. It was enough that the
+experience was there, although he was not even self-reflective enough to
+tell himself so. He had passed from that circle whence the soul looks
+within, from that circle, too, whence it looks upon objective glory, to
+that very centre where it reposes--and the first sign to him that time
+had passed was the murmur of words, heard distinctly and understood,
+although with that apartness with which a drowsy man perceives a message
+from without--heard as through a veil through which nothing but thinnest
+essence could transpire.
+
+_Spiritus Domini replevit orbem terrarum.... The Spirit of the Lord hath
+fulfilled all things, alleluia: and that which contains all things hath
+knowledge of the voice, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia._
+
+_Exsurgat Deus_ (and the voice rose ever so slightly). “_Let God arise
+and let His enemies be scattered; and let them who hate Him flee before
+His face._”
+
+_Gloria Patri...._
+
+Then he raised his heavy head; and a phantom figure stood there in red
+vestments, seeming to float rather than to stand, with thin hands
+outstretched, and white cap on white hair seen in the gleam of the
+steady candle-flames; another, also in white, kneeled on the step....
+
+_Kyrie eleison ... Gloria in excelsis Deo ..._ those things passed like
+a shadow-show, with movements and rustlings, but he perceived rather the
+light which cast them. He heard _Deus qui in hodierna die ..._ but his
+passive mind gave no pulse of reflex action, no stir of understanding
+until these words. _Cum complerentur dies Pentecostes...._
+
+“_When the day of Pentecost was fully come, all the disciples were with
+one accord in the same place; and there came from heaven suddenly a
+sound, as of a mighty wind approaching, and it filled the house where
+they were sitting...._”
+
+Then he remembered and understood.... It was Pentecost then! And with
+memory a shred of reflection came back. Where then was the wind, and the
+flame, and the earthquake, and the secret voice? Yet the world was
+silent, rigid in its last effort at self-assertion: there was no tremor
+to show that God remembered; no actual point of light, yet, breaking the
+appalling vault of gloom that lay over sea and land to reveal that He
+burned there in eternity, transcendent and dominant; not even a voice;
+and at that he understood yet more. He perceived that that world, whose
+monstrous parody his sleep had presented to him in the night, was other
+than that he had feared it to be; it was sweet, not terrible; friendly,
+not hostile; clear, not stifling; and home, not exile. There were
+presences here, but not those gluttonous, lustful things that had looked
+on him last night.... He dropped his head again upon his hands, at once
+ashamed and content; and again he sank down to depths of glimmering
+inner peace....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Not again, for a while, did he perceive what he did or thought, or what
+passed there, five yards away on the low step. Once only a ripple passed
+across that sea of glass, a ripple of fire and sound like a rising star
+that flicks a line of light across a sleeping lake, like a thin thread
+of vibration streaming from a quivering string across the stillness of a
+deep night--and be perceived for an instant as in a formless mirror that
+a lower nature was struck into existence and into union with the Divine
+nature at the same moment.... And then no more again but the great
+encompassing hush, the sense of the innermost heart of reality, till he
+found himself kneeling at the rail, and knew that That which alone truly
+existed on earth approached him with the swiftness of thought and the
+ardour of Divine Love....
+
+Then, as the mass ended, and he raised his passive happy soul to receive
+the last gift of God, there was a cry, a sudden clamour in the passage,
+and a man stood in the doorway, gabbling Arabic.
+
+
+III
+
+Yet even at that sound and sight his soul scarcely tightened the languid
+threads that united it through every fibre of his body with the world of
+sense. He saw and heard the tumult in the passage, frantic eyes and
+mouths crying aloud, and, in strange contrast, the pale ecstatic faces
+of those princes who turned and looked; even within the tranquil
+presence-chamber of the spirit where two beings, Incarnate God and all
+but Discarnate Man, were locked in embrace, a certain mental process
+went on. Yet all was still as apart from him as a lighted stage and its
+drama from a self-contained spectator. In the material world, now as
+attenuated as a mirage, events were at hand; but to his soul, balanced
+now on reality and awake to facts, these things were but a spectacle....
+
+He turned to the altar again, and there, as he had known it would be, in
+the midst of clear light, all was at peace: the celebrant, seen as
+through molten glass, adored as He murmured the mystery of the
+Word-made-Flesh, and once more passing to the centre, sank upon His
+knees.
+
+Again the priest understood; for thought was no longer the process of a
+mind, rather it was the glance of a spirit. He knew all now; and, by an
+inevitable impulse, his throat began to sing aloud words that, as he
+sang, opened for the first time as flowers telling their secret to the
+sun.
+
+_O Salutaris Hostia
+Qui coeli pandis ostium. . . ._
+
+They were all singing now; even the Mohammedan catechumen who had burst
+in a moment ago sang with the rest, his lean head thrust out and his
+arms tight across his breast; the tiny chapel rang with the forty
+voices, and the vast world thrilled to hear it....
+
+Still singing, the priest saw the veil laid as by a phantom upon the
+Pontiff’s shoulders; there was a movement, a surge of figures--shadows
+only in the midst of substance,
+
+_... Uni Trinoque Domino ...._
+
+--and the Pope stood erect, Himself a pallor in the heart of light, with
+spectral folds of silk dripping from His shoulders, His hands swathed in
+them, and His down-bent head hidden by the silver-rayed monstrance and
+That which it bore....
+
+_... Qui vitam sine termino
+Nobis donet in patria ...._
+
+... They were moving now, and the world of life swung with them; of so
+much was he aware. He was out in the passage, among the white, frenzied
+faces that with bared teeth stared up at that sight, silenced at last by
+the thunder of _Pange Lingua_, and the radiance of those who passed out
+to eternal life.... At the corner he turned for an instant to see the
+six pale flames move along a dozen yards behind, as spear-heads about a
+King, and in the midst the silver rays and the White Heart of God....
+Then he was out, and the battle lay in array....
+
+That sky on which he had looked an hour ago had passed from darkness
+charged with light to light overlaid with darkness--from glimmering
+night to Wrathful Day--and that light was red....
+
+From behind Thabor on the left to Carmel on the far right, above the
+hills twenty miles away rested an enormous vault of colour; here were no
+gradations from zenith to horizon; all was the one deep smoulder of
+crimson as of the glow of iron. It was such a colour as men have seen at
+sunsets after rain, while the clouds, more translucent each instant,
+transmit the glory they cannot contain. Here, too, was the sun, pale as
+the Host, set like a fragile wafer above the Mount of Transfiguration,
+and there, far down in the west where men had once cried upon Baal in
+vain, hung the sickle of the white moon. Yet all was no more than
+stained light that lies broken across carven work of stone....
+
+_... In suprema nocte coena,_
+
+sang the myriad voices,
+
+_Recumbens cum fratribus
+Observata lege plena
+Cibis in legalibus
+Cibum turbae duodenae
+Se dat suis manibus ...._
+
+He saw, too, poised as motes in light, that ring of strange
+fish-creatures, white as milk, except where the angry glory turned their
+backs to flame, white-winged like floating moths, from the tiny shape
+far to the south to the monster at hand scarcely five hundred yards
+away; and even as he looked, singing as he looked, he understood that
+the circle was nearer, and perceived that these as yet knew nothing....
+
+_Verbum caro, panem verum
+Verbo carnem efficit ....
+
+They were nearer still, until now even at his feet there slid along the
+ground the shadow of a monstrous bird, pale and undefined, as between
+the wan sun and himself moved out the vast shape that a moment ago hung
+above the Hill.... Then again it backed across and waited ...
+
+_Et si census deficit
+Ad formandum cor sincerum
+Sola fides sufficit ...._
+
+He had halted and turned, going in the midst of his fellows, hearing,
+he thought, the thrill of harping and the throb of heavenly drums; and,
+across the space, moved now the six flames, steady as if cut of steel in
+that stupendous poise of heaven and earth; and in their centre the
+silver-rayed glory and the Whiteness of God made Man....
+
+... Then, with a roar, came the thunder again, pealing in circle beyond
+circle of those tremendous Presences--Thrones and Powers--who,
+themselves to the world as substance to shadow, are but shadows again
+beneath the apex and within the ring of Absolute Deity.... The thunder
+broke loose, shaking the earth that now cringed on the quivering edge of
+dissolution....
+
+TANTUM ERGO SACRAMENTUM
+VENEREMUR CERNUI
+ET ANTIQUUM DOCUMENTUM
+NOVO CEDAT RITUI.
+
+Ah! yes; it was He for whom God waited now--He who far up beneath that
+trembling shadow of a dome, itself but the piteous core of unimagined
+splendour, came in His swift chariot, blind to all save that on which He
+had fixed His eyes so long, unaware that His world corrupted about Him,
+His shadow moving like a pale cloud across the ghostly plain where
+Israel had fought and Sennacherib boasted--that plain lighted now with a
+yet deeper glow, as heaven, kindling to glory beyond glory of yet
+fiercer spiritual flame, still restrained the power knit at last to the
+relief of final revelation, and for the last time the voices sang....
+
+PRAESTET FIDES SUPPLEMENTUM
+SENSUUM DEFECTUI ....
+
+... He was coming now, swifter than ever, the heir of temporal ages and
+the Exile of eternity, the final piteous Prince of rebels, the creature
+against God, blinder than the sun which paled and the earth that shook;
+and, as He came, passing even then through the last material stage to
+the thinness of a spirit-fabric, the floating circle swirled behind Him,
+tossing like phantom birds in the wake of a phantom ship.... He was
+coming, and the earth, rent once again in its allegiance, shrank and
+reeled in the agony of divided homage....
+
+... He was coming--and already the shadow swept off the plain and
+vanished, and the pale netted wings were rising to the cheek; and the
+great bell clanged, and the long sweet chord rang out--not more than
+whispers heard across the pealing storm of everlasting praise....
+
+.... GENITORI GENITOQUE
+LAUS ET JUBILATIO
+SALUS HONOR VIRTUS QUOQUE
+SIT ET BENEDICTIO
+PROCEDENTI AB UTROQUE
+COMPAR SIT LAUDATIO.
+
+and once more
+
+PROCEDENTI AB UTROQUE
+COMPAR SIT LAUDATIO ....
+
+Then this world passed, and the glory of it.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LORD OF THE WORLD ***
+
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diff --git a/old/14021-0.zip b/old/14021-0.zip
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+<!DOCTYPE html>
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
+<head>
+    <meta charset="UTF-8">
+    <title>
+      Lord of the World | Project Gutenberg
+    </title>
+    <link rel="icon" href="images/cover.jpg" type="image/x-cover">
+    <style> /* <![CDATA[ */
+
+body {
+    margin-left: 10%;
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+</head>
+<body>
+<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Lord of the World, by Robert Hugh Benson</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
+at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you
+are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the
+country where you are located before using this eBook.
+</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: Lord of the World</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Robert Hugh Benson</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: November 11, 2004 [EBook #14021]<br>
+[Last updated: February 19, 2023]</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Character set encoding: UTF-8</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: Geoff Horton</div>
+<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LORD OF THE WORLD ***</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h1 class="nobreak" id="LORD_OF_THE_WORLD">LORD OF THE WORLD</h1>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center p2">BY<br> <span class="big">ROBERT HUGH BENSON</span></p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2>Dedication</h2>
+
+<p class="center">CLAVI DOMUS DAVID</p>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2>PREFACE</h2>
+
+<p>I am perfectly aware that this is a terribly sensational book, and open
+to innumerable criticisms on that account, as well as on many others.
+But I did not know how else to express the principles I desired (and
+which I passionately believe to be true) except by producing their lines
+to a sensational point. I have tried, however, not to scream unduly
+loud, and to retain, so far as possible, reverence and consideration for
+the opinions of other people. Whether I have succeeded in that attempt
+is quite another matter.</p>
+
+<p class="right">Robert Hugh Benson.</p>
+
+<p class="right">CAMBRIDGE 1907.</p>
+
+</div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CONTENTS">CONTENTS</h2>
+</div>
+
+<table class="autotable">
+<tr><td>
+<a href="#PROLOGUE">PROLOGUE</a>
+</td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+<a href="#BOOK_I-THE_ADVENT">BOOK I</a>
+</td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+THE ADVENT
+</td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+<a href="#BOOK_II-THE_ENCOUNTER">BOOK II</a>
+</td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+THE ENCOUNTER
+</td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+<a href="#BOOK_III-THE_VICTORY">BOOK III</a>
+</td></tr>
+<tr><td>THE VICTORY
+</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="PROLOGUE">PROLOGUE</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<p class="center">Persons who do not like tiresome prologues, need not read this one. It
+is essential only to the situation, not to the story.</p>
+
+
+<p class="p2">“You must give me a moment,” said the old man, leaning back.</p>
+
+<p>Percy resettled himself in his chair and waited, chin on hand.</p>
+
+<p>It was a very silent room in which the three men sat, furnished with the
+extreme common sense of the period. It had neither window nor door; for
+it was now sixty years since the world, recognising that space is not
+confined to the surface of the globe, had begun to burrow in earnest.
+Old Mr. Templeton’s house stood some forty feet below the level of the
+Thames embankment, in what was considered a somewhat commodious
+position, for he had only a hundred yards to walk before he reached the
+station of the Second Central Motor-circle, and a quarter of a mile to
+the volor-station at Blackfriars. He was over ninety years old, however,
+and seldom left his house now. The room itself was lined throughout with
+the delicate green jade-enamel prescribed by the Board of Health, and
+was suffused with the artificial sunlight discovered by the great Reuter
+forty years before; it had the colour-tone of a spring wood, and was
+warmed and ventilated through the classical frieze grating to the exact
+temperature of 18 degrees Centigrade. Mr. Templeton was a plain man,
+content to live as his father had lived before him. The furniture, too,
+was a little old-fashioned in make and design, constructed however
+according to the prevailing system of soft asbestos enamel welded over
+iron, indestructible, pleasant to the touch, and resembling mahogany. A
+couple of book-cases well filled ran on either side of the bronze
+pedestal electric fire before which sat the three men; and in the
+further corners stood the hydraulic lifts that gave entrance, the one to
+the bedroom, the other to the corridor fifty feet up which opened on to
+the Embankment.</p>
+
+<p>Father Percy Franklin, the elder of the two priests, was rather a
+remarkable-looking man, not more than thirty-five years old, but with
+hair that was white throughout; his grey eyes, under black eyebrows,
+were peculiarly bright and almost passionate; but his prominent nose and
+chin and the extreme decisiveness of his mouth reassured the observer as
+to his will. Strangers usually looked twice at him.</p>
+
+<p>Father Francis, however, sitting in his upright chair on the other side
+of the hearth, brought down the average; for, though his brown eyes were
+pleasant and pathetic, there was no strength in his face; there was even
+a tendency to feminine melancholy in the corners of his mouth and the
+marked droop of his eyelids.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Templeton was just a very old man, with a strong face in folds,
+clean-shaven like the rest of the world, and was now lying back on his
+water-pillows with the quilt over his feet.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>At last he spoke, glancing first at Percy, on his left.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” he said, “it is a great business to remember exactly; but this
+is how I put it to myself.”</p>
+
+<p>“In England our party was first seriously alarmed at the Labour
+Parliament of 1917. That showed us how deeply Herveism had impregnated
+the whole social atmosphere. There had been Socialists before, but none
+like Gustave Herve in his old age—at least no one of the same power.
+He, perhaps you have read, taught absolute Materialism and Socialism
+developed to their logical issues. Patriotism, he said, was a relic of
+barbarism; and sensual enjoyment was the only certain good. Of course,
+every one laughed at him. It was said that without religion there could
+be no adequate motive among the masses for even the simplest social
+order. But he was right, it seemed. After the fall of the French Church
+at the beginning of the century and the massacres of 1914, the
+bourgeoisie settled down to organise itself; and that extraordinary
+movement began in earnest, pushed through by the middle classes, with no
+patriotism, no class distinctions, practically no army. Of course,
+Freemasonry directed it all. This spread to Germany, where the influence
+of Karl Marx had already—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, sir,” put in Percy smoothly, “but what of England, if you don’t
+mind—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, yes; England. Well, in 1917 the Labour party gathered up the reins,
+and Communism really began. That was long before I can remember, of
+course, but my father used to date it from then. The only wonder was
+that things did not go forward more quickly; but I suppose there was a
+good deal of Tory leaven left. Besides, centuries generally run slower
+than is expected, especially after beginning with an impulse. But the
+new order began then; and the Communists have never suffered a serious
+reverse since, except the little one in ’25. Blenkin founded ‘The New
+People’ then; and the ‘Times’ dropped out; but it was not, strangely
+enough, till ’35 that the House of Lords fell for the last time. The
+Established Church had gone finally in ’29.”</p>
+
+<p>“And the religious effect of that?” asked Percy swiftly, as the old man
+paused to cough slightly, lifting his inhaler. The priest was anxious to
+keep to the point.</p>
+
+<p>“It was an effect itself,” said the other, “rather than a cause. You
+see, the Ritualists, as they used to call them, after a desperate
+attempt to get into the Labour swim, came into the Church after the
+Convocation of ’19, when the Nicene Creed dropped out; and there was no
+real enthusiasm except among them. But so far as there was an effect
+from the final Disestablishment, I think it was that what was left of
+the State Church melted into the Free Church, and the Free Church was,
+after all, nothing more than a little sentiment. The Bible was
+completely given up as an authority after the renewed German attacks in
+the twenties; and the Divinity of our Lord, some think, had gone all but
+in name by the beginning of the century. The Kenotic theory had provided
+for that. Then there was that strange little movement among the Free
+Churchmen even earlier; when ministers who did no more than follow the
+swim—who were sensitive to draughts, so to speak—broke off from their
+old positions. It is curious to read in the history of the time how they
+were hailed as independent thinkers. It was just exactly what they were
+not.... Where was I? Oh, yes.... Well, that cleared the ground for us,
+and the Church made extraordinary progress for a while—extraordinary,
+that is, under the circumstances, because you must remember, things were
+very different from twenty, or even ten, years before. I mean that,
+roughly speaking, the severing of the sheep and the goats had begun. The
+religious people were practically all Catholics and Individualists; the
+irreligious people rejected the supernatural altogether, and were, to a
+man, Materialists and Communists. But we made progress because we had a
+few exceptional men—Delaney the philosopher, McArthur and Largent, the
+philanthropists, and so on. It really seemed as if Delaney and his
+disciples might carry everything before them. You remember his
+‘Analogy’? Oh, yes, it is all in the text-books....</p>
+
+<p>“Well, then, at the close of the Vatican Council, which had been called
+in the nineteenth century, and never dissolved, we lost a great number
+through the final definitions. The ‘Exodus of the Intellectuals’ the
+world called it—-”</p>
+
+<p>“The Biblical decisions,” put in the younger priest.</p>
+
+<p>“That partly; and the whole conflict that began with the rise of
+Modernism at the beginning of the century but much more the condemnation
+of Delaney, and of the New Transcendentalism generally, as it was then
+understood. He died outside the Church, you know. Then there was the
+condemnation of Sciotti’s book on Comparative Religion.... After that
+the Communists went on by strides, although by very slow ones. It seems
+extraordinary to you, I dare say, but you cannot imagine the excitement
+when the <i>Necessary Trades Bill</i> became law in ’60. People thought that
+all enterprise would stop when so many professions were nationalised;
+but, you know, it didn’t. Certainly the nation was behind it.”</p>
+
+<p>“What year was the <i>Two-Thirds Majority Bill</i> passed?” asked Percy.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! long before—within a year or two of the fall of the House of
+Lords. It was necessary, I think, or the Individualists would have gone
+raving mad.... Well, the <i>Necessary Trades Bill</i> was inevitable: people
+had begun to see that even so far back as the time when the railways
+were municipalised. For a while there was a burst of art; because all
+the Individualists who could went in for it (it was then that the Toller
+school was founded); but they soon drifted back into Government
+employment; after all, the six-per-cent limit for all individual
+enterprise was not much of a temptation; and Government paid well.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; but I cannot understand the present state of affairs. You said
+just now that things went slowly?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” said the old man, “but you must remember the Poor Laws. That
+established the Communists for ever. Certainly Braithwaite knew his
+business.”</p>
+
+<p>The younger priest looked up inquiringly.</p>
+
+<p>“The abolition of the old workhouse system,” said Mr. Templeton. “It is
+all ancient history to you, of course; but I remember as if it was
+yesterday. It was that which brought down what was still called the
+Monarchy and the Universities.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah,” said Percy. “I should like to hear you talk about that, sir.”</p>
+
+<p>“Presently, father.... Well, this is what Braithwaite did. By the old
+system all paupers were treated alike, and resented it. By the new
+system there were the three grades that we have now, and the
+enfranchisement of the two higher grades. Only the absolutely worthless
+were assigned to the third grade, and treated more or less as
+criminals—of course after careful examination. Then there was the
+reorganisation of the Old Age Pensions. Well, don’t you see how strong
+that made the Communists? The Individualists—they were still called
+Tories when I was a boy—the Individualists have had no chance since.
+They are no more than a worn-out drag now. The whole of the working
+classes—and that meant ninety-nine of a hundred—were all against
+them.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy looked up; but the other went on.</p>
+
+<p>“Then there was the Prison Reform Bill under Macpherson, and the
+abolition of capital punishment; there was the final Education Act of
+’59, whereby dogmatic secularism was established; the practical
+abolition of inheritance under the reformation of the Death Duties—-”</p>
+
+<p>“I forget what the old system was,” said Percy.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, it seems incredible, but the old system was that all paid alike.
+First came the Heirloom Act, and then the change by which inherited
+wealth paid three times the duty of earned wealth, leading up to the
+acceptance of Karl Marx’s doctrines in ’89—but the former came in
+’77.... Well, all these things kept England up to the level of the
+Continent; she had only been just in time to join in with the final
+scheme of Western Free Trade. That was the first effect, you remember,
+of the Socialists’ victory in Germany.”</p>
+
+<p>“And how did we keep out of the Eastern War?” asked Percy anxiously.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! that’s a long story; but, in a word, America stopped us; so we lost
+India and Australia. I think that was the nearest to the downfall of the
+Communists since ’25. But Braithwaite got out of it very cleverly by
+getting us the protectorate of South Africa once and for all. He was an
+old man then, too.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Templeton stopped to cough again. Father Francis sighed and shifted
+in his chair.</p>
+
+<p>“And America?” asked Percy.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah! all that is very complicated. But she knew her strength and annexed
+Canada the same year. That was when we were at our weakest.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy stood up.</p>
+
+<p>“Have you a Comparative Atlas, sir?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>The old man pointed to a shelf.</p>
+
+<p>“There,” he said.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Percy looked at the sheets a minute or two in silence, spreading them on
+his knees.</p>
+
+<p>“It is all much simpler, certainly,” he murmured, glancing first at the
+old complicated colouring of the beginning of the twentieth century, and
+then at the three great washes of the twenty-first.</p>
+
+<p>He moved his finger along Asia. The words EASTERN EMPIRE ran across the
+pale yellow, from the Ural Mountains on the left to the Behring Straits
+on the right, curling round in giant letters through India, Australia,
+and New Zealand. He glanced at the red; it was considerably smaller, but
+still important enough, considering that it covered not only Europe
+proper, but all Russia up to the Ural Mountains, and Africa to the
+south. The blue-labelled AMERICAN REPUBLIC swept over the whole of that
+continent, and disappeared right round to the left of the Western
+Hemisphere in a shower of blue sparks on the white sea.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, it’s simpler,” said the old man drily.</p>
+
+<p>Percy shut the book and set it by his chair.</p>
+
+<p>“And what next, sir? What will happen?”</p>
+
+<p>The old Tory statesman smiled.</p>
+
+<p>“God knows,” he said. “If the Eastern Empire chooses to move, we can do
+nothing. I don’t know why they have not moved. I suppose it is because
+of religious differences.”</p>
+
+<p>“Europe will not split?” asked the priest.</p>
+
+<p>“No, no. We know our danger now. And America would certainly help us.
+But, all the same, God help us—or you, I should rather say—if the
+Empire does move! She knows her strength at last.”</p>
+
+<p>There was silence for a moment or two. A faint vibration trembled
+through the deep-sunk room as some huge machine went past on the broad
+boulevard overhead.</p>
+
+<p>“Prophesy, sir,” said Percy suddenly. “I mean about religion.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Templeton inhaled another long breath from his instrument. Then
+again he took up his discourse.</p>
+
+<p>“Briefly,” he said, “there are three forces—Catholicism,
+Humanitarianism, and the Eastern religions. About the third I cannot
+prophesy, though I think the Sufis will be victorious. Anything may
+happen; Esotericism is making enormous strides—and that means
+Pantheism; and the blending of the Chinese and Japanese dynasties throws
+out all our calculations. But in Europe and America, there is no doubt
+that the struggle lies between the other two. We can neglect everything
+else. And, I think, if you wish me to say what I think, that, humanly
+speaking, Catholicism will decrease rapidly now. It is perfectly true
+that Protestantism is dead. Men do recognise at last that a supernatural
+Religion involves an absolute authority, and that Private Judgment in
+matters of faith is nothing else than the beginning of disintegration.
+And it is also true that since the Catholic Church is the only
+institution that even claims supernatural authority, with all its
+merciless logic, she has again the allegiance of practically all
+Christians who have any supernatural belief left. There are a few
+faddists left, especially in America and here; but they are negligible.
+That is all very well; but, on the other hand, you must remember that
+Humanitarianism, contrary to all persons’ expectations, is becoming an
+actual religion itself, though anti-supernatural. It is Pantheism; it is
+developing a ritual under Freemasonry; it has a creed, ‘God is Man,’ and
+the rest. It has therefore a real food of a sort to offer to religious
+cravings; it idealises, and yet it makes no demand upon the spiritual
+faculties. Then, they have the use of all the churches except ours, and
+all the Cathedrals; and they are beginning at last to encourage
+sentiment. Then, they may display their symbols and we may not: I think
+that they will be established legally in another ten years at the
+latest.</p>
+
+<p>“Now, we Catholics, remember, are losing; we have lost steadily for more
+than fifty years. I suppose that we have, nominally, about one-fortieth
+of America now—and that is the result of the Catholic movement of the
+early twenties. In France and Spain we are nowhere; in Germany we are
+less. We hold our position in the East, certainly; but even there we
+have not more than one in two hundred—so the statistics say—and we are
+scattered. In Italy? Well, we have Rome again to ourselves, but nothing
+else; here, we have Ireland altogether and perhaps one in sixty of
+England, Wales and Scotland; but we had one in forty seventy years ago.
+Then there is the enormous progress of psychology—all clean against us
+for at least a century. First, you see, there was Materialism, pure and
+simple that failed more or less—it was too crude—until psychology came
+to the rescue. Now psychology claims all the rest of the ground; and the
+supernatural sense seems accounted for. That’s the claim. No, father, we
+are losing; and we shall go on losing, and I think we must even be ready
+for a catastrophe at any moment.”</p>
+
+<p>“But—-” began Percy.</p>
+
+<p>“You think that weak for an old man on the edge of the grave. Well, it
+is what I think. I see no hope. In fact, it seems to me that even now
+something may come on us quickly. No; I see no hope until—-”</p>
+
+<p>Percy looked up sharply.</p>
+
+<p>“Until our Lord comes back,” said the old statesman.</p>
+
+<p>Father Francis sighed once more, and there fell a silence.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>“And the fall of the Universities?” said Percy at last.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear father, it was exactly like the fall of the Monasteries under
+Henry VIII—the same results, the same arguments, the same incidents.
+They were the strongholds of Individualism, as the Monasteries were the
+strongholds of Papalism; and they were regarded with the same kind of
+awe and envy. Then the usual sort of remarks began about the amount of
+port wine drunk; and suddenly people said that they had done their work,
+that the inmates were mistaking means for ends; and there was a great
+deal more reason for saying it. After all, granted the supernatural,
+Religious Houses are an obvious consequence; but the object of secular
+education is presumably the production of something visible—either
+character or competence; and it became quite impossible to prove that
+the Universities produced either—which was worth having. The
+distinction between ου and με is not an end in itself;
+and the kind of person produced by its study was not one which appealed
+to England in the twentieth century. I am not sure that it appealed even
+to me much (and I was always a strong Individualist)—except by way of
+pathos—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes?” said Percy.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, it was pathetic enough. The Science Schools of Cambridge and the
+Colonial Department of Oxford were the last hope; and then those went.
+The old dons crept about with their books, but nobody wanted them—they
+were too purely theoretical; some drifted into the poorhouses, first or
+second grade; some were taken care of by charitable clergymen; there was
+that attempt to concentrate in Dublin; but it failed, and people soon
+forgot them. The buildings, as you know, were used for all kinds of
+things. Oxford became an engineering establishment for a while, and
+Cambridge a kind of Government laboratory. I was at King’s College, you
+know. Of course it was all as horrible as it could be—though I am glad
+they kept the chapel open even as a museum. It was not nice to see the
+chantries filled with anatomical specimens. However, I don’t think it
+was much worse than keeping stoves and surplices in them.”</p>
+
+<p>“What happened to you?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! I was in Parliament very soon; and I had a little money of my own,
+too. But it was very hard on some of them; they had little pensions, at
+least all who were past work. And yet, I don’t know: I suppose it had
+to come. They were very little more than picturesque survivals, you
+know; and had not even the grace of a religious faith about them.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy sighed again, looking at the humorously reminiscent face of the
+old man. Then he suddenly changed the subject again.</p>
+
+<p>“What about this European parliament?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>The old man started.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh!... I think it will pass,” he said, “if a man can be found to push
+it. All this last century has been leading up to it, as you see.
+Patriotism has been dying fast; but it ought to have died, like slavery
+and so forth, under the influence of the Catholic Church. As it is, the
+work has been done without the Church; and the result is that the world
+is beginning to range itself against us: it is an organised antagonism—
+a kind of Catholic anti-Church. Democracy has done what the Divine
+Monarchy should have done. If the proposal passes I think we may expect
+something like persecution once more.... But, again, the Eastern
+invasion may save us, if it comes off.... I do not know....”</p>
+
+<p>Percy sat still yet a moment; then he stood up suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>“I must go, sir,” he said, relapsing into Esperanto. “It is past
+nineteen o’clock. Thank you so much. Are you coming, father?”</p>
+
+<p>Father Francis stood up also, in the dark grey suit permitted to
+priests, and took up his hat.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, father,” said the old man again, “come again some day, if I
+haven’t been too discursive. I suppose you have to write your letter
+yet?”</p>
+
+<p>Percy nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“I did half of it this morning,” he said, “but I felt I wanted another
+bird’s-eye view before I could understand properly: I am so grateful to
+you for giving it me. It is really a great labour, this daily letter to
+the Cardinal-Protector. I am thinking of resigning if I am allowed.”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear father, don’t do that. If I may say so to your face, I think
+you have a very shrewd mind; and unless Rome has balanced information
+she can do nothing. I don’t suppose your colleagues are as careful as
+yourself.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy smiled, lifting his dark eyebrows deprecatingly.</p>
+
+<p>“Come, father,” he said.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The two priests parted at the steps of the corridor, and Percy stood for
+a minute or two staring out at the familiar autumn scene, trying to
+understand what it all meant. What he had heard downstairs seemed
+strangely to illuminate that vision of splendid prosperity that lay
+before him.</p>
+
+<p>The air was as bright as day; artificial sunlight had carried all before
+it, and London now knew no difference between dark and light. He stood
+in a kind of glazed cloister, heavily floored with a preparation of
+rubber on which footsteps made no sound. Beneath him, at the foot of the
+stairs, poured an endless double line of persons severed by a partition,
+going to right and left, noiselessly, except for the murmur of Esperanto
+talking that sounded ceaselessly as they went. Through the clear,
+hardened glass of the public passage showed a broad sleek black roadway,
+ribbed from side to side, and puckered in the centre, significantly
+empty, but even as he stood there a note sounded far away from Old
+Westminster, like the hum of a giant hive, rising as it came, and an
+instant later a transparent thing shot past, flashing from every angle,
+and the note died to a hum again and a silence as the great Government
+motor from the south whirled eastwards with the mails. This was a
+privileged roadway; nothing but state-vehicles were allowed to use it,
+and those at a speed not exceeding one hundred miles an hour.</p>
+
+<p>Other noises were subdued in this city of rubber; the passenger-circles
+were a hundred yards away, and the subterranean traffic lay too deep for
+anything but a vibration to make itself felt. It was to remove this
+vibration, and silence the hum of the ordinary vehicles, that the
+Government experts had been working for the last twenty years.</p>
+
+<p>Once again before he moved there came a long cry from overhead,
+startlingly beautiful and piercing, and, as he lifted his eyes from the
+glimpse of the steady river which alone had refused to be transformed,
+he saw high above him against the heavy illuminated clouds, a long
+slender object, glowing with soft light, slide northwards and vanish on
+outstretched wings. That musical cry, he told himself, was the voice of
+one of the European line of volors announcing its arrival in the capital
+of Great Britain.</p>
+
+<p>“Until our Lord comes back,” he thought to himself; and for an instant
+the old misery stabbed at his heart. How difficult it was to hold the
+eyes focussed on that far horizon when this world lay in the foreground
+so compelling in its splendour and its strength! Oh, he had argued with
+Father Francis an hour ago that size was not the same as greatness, and
+that an insistent external could not exclude a subtle internal; and he
+had believed what he had then said; but the doubt yet remained till he
+silenced it by a fierce effort, crying in his heart to the Poor Man of
+Nazareth to keep his heart as the heart of a little child.</p>
+
+<p>Then he set his lips, wondering how long Father Francis would bear the
+pressure, and went down the steps.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="BOOK_I-THE_ADVENT">BOOK I-THE ADVENT</h2>
+</div>
+
+<h3>CHAPTER I</h3>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>Oliver Brand, the new member for Croydon (4), sat in his study, looking
+out of the window over the top of his typewriter.</p>
+
+<p>His house stood facing northwards at the extreme end of a spur of the
+Surrey Hills, now cut and tunnelled out of all recognition; only to a
+Communist the view was an inspiriting one. Immediately below the wide
+windows the embanked ground fell away rapidly for perhaps a hundred
+feet, ending in a high wall, and beyond that the world and works of men
+were triumphant as far as eye could see. Two vast tracks like streaked
+race-courses, each not less than a quarter of a mile in width, and sunk
+twenty feet below the surface of the ground, swept up to a meeting a
+mile ahead at the huge junction. Of those, that on his left was the
+First Trunk road to Brighton, inscribed in capital letters in the
+Railroad Guide, that to the right the Second Trunk to the Tunbridge and
+Hastings district. Each was divided length-ways by a cement wall, on one
+side of which, on steel rails, ran the electric trams, and on the other
+lay the motor-track itself again divided into three, on which ran, first
+the Government coaches at a speed of one hundred and fifty miles an
+hour, second the private motors at not more than sixty, third the cheap
+Government line at thirty, with stations every five miles. This was
+further bordered by a road confined to pedestrians, cyclists and
+ordinary cars on which no vehicle was allowed to move at more than
+twelve miles an hour.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond these great tracks lay an immense plain of house-roofs, with
+short towers here and there marking public buildings, from the Caterham
+district on the left to Croydon in front, all clear and bright in
+smokeless air; and far away to the west and north showed the low
+suburban hills against the April sky.</p>
+
+<p>There was surprisingly little sound, considering the pressure of the
+population; and, with the exception of the buzz of the steel rails as a
+train fled north or south, and the occasional sweet chord of the great
+motors as they neared or left the junction, there was little to be heard
+in this study except a smooth, soothing murmur that filled the air like
+the murmur of bees in a garden.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver loved every hint of human life—all busy sights and sounds—and
+was listening now, smiling faintly to himself as he stared out into the
+clear air. Then he set his lips, laid his fingers on the keys once more,
+and went on speech-constructing.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>He was very fortunate in the situation of his house. It stood in an
+angle of one of those huge spider-webs with which the country was
+covered, and for his purposes was all that he could expect. It was close
+enough to London to be extremely cheap, for all wealthy persons had
+retired at least a hundred miles from the throbbing heart of England;
+and yet it was as quiet as he could wish. He was within ten minutes of
+Westminster on the one side, and twenty minutes of the sea on the other,
+and his constituency lay before him like a raised map. Further, since
+the great London termini were but ten minutes away, there were at his
+disposal the First Trunk lines to every big town in England. For a
+politician of no great means, who was asked to speak at Edinburgh on one
+evening and in Marseilles on the next, he was as well placed as any man
+in Europe.</p>
+
+<p>He was a pleasant-looking man, not much over thirty years old; black
+wire-haired, clean-shaven, thin, virile, magnetic, blue-eyed and
+white-skinned; and he appeared this day extremely content with himself
+and the world. His lips moved slightly as he worked, his eyes enlarged
+and diminished with excitement, and more than once he paused and stared
+out again, smiling and flushed.</p>
+
+<p>Then a door opened; a middle-aged man came nervously in with a bundle of
+papers, laid them down on the table without a word, and turned to go
+out. Oliver lifted his hand for attention, snapped a lever, and spoke.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, Mr. Phillips?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“There is news from the East, sir,” said the secretary.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver shot a glance sideways, and laid his hand on the bundle.</p>
+
+<p>“Any complete message?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“No, sir; it is interrupted again. Mr. Felsenburgh’s name is mentioned.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver did not seem to hear; he lifted the flimsy printed sheets with a
+sudden movement, and began turning them.</p>
+
+<p>“The fourth from the top, Mr. Brand,” said the secretary.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver jerked his head impatiently, and the other went out as if at a
+signal.</p>
+
+<p>The fourth sheet from the top, printed in red on green, seemed to absorb
+Oliver’s attention altogether, for he read it through two or three
+times, leaning back motionless in his chair. Then he sighed, and stared
+again through the window.</p>
+
+<p>Then once more the door opened, and a tall girl came in.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, my dear?” she observed.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver shook his head, with compressed lips.</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing definite,” he said. “Even less than usual. Listen.”</p>
+
+<p>He took up the green sheet and began to read aloud as the girl sat down
+in a window-seat on his left.</p>
+
+<p>She was a very charming-looking creature, tall and slender, with
+serious, ardent grey eyes, firm red lips, and a beautiful carriage of
+head and shoulders. She had walked slowly across the room as Oliver took
+up the paper, and now sat back in her brown dress in a very graceful and
+stately attitude. She seemed to listen with a deliberate kind of
+patience; but her eyes flickered with interest.</p>
+
+<p>“‘Irkutsk—April fourteen—Yesterday—as—usual—But—rumoured—
+defection—from—Sufi—party—Troops—continue—gathering—
+Felsenburgh—addressed—Buddhist—crowd—Attempt—on—Llama—last—
+Friday—work—of—Anarchists—Felsenburgh—leaving—for—Moscow—as
+—arranged—he....’ There—that is absolutely all,” ended Oliver
+dispiritedly. “It’s interrupted as usual.”</p>
+
+<p>The girl began to swing a foot.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t understand in the least,” she said. “Who is Felsenburgh, after
+all?”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear child, that is what all the world is asking. Nothing is known
+except that he was included in the American deputation at the last
+moment. The <i>Herald</i> published his life last week; but it has been
+contradicted. It is certain that he is quite a young man, and that he
+has been quite obscure until now.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, he is not obscure now,” observed the girl.</p>
+
+<p>“I know; it seems as if he were running the whole thing. One never hears
+a word of the others. It’s lucky he’s on the right side.”</p>
+
+<p>“And what do you think?”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver turned vacant eyes again out of the window.</p>
+
+<p>“I think it is touch and go,” he said. “The only remarkable thing is
+that here hardly anybody seems to realise it. It’s too big for the
+imagination, I suppose. There is no doubt that the East has been
+preparing for a descent on Europe for these last five years. They have
+only been checked by America; and this is one last attempt to stop them.
+But why Felsenburgh should come to the front—-” he broke off. “He must
+be a good linguist, at any rate. This is at least the fifth crowd he has
+addressed; perhaps he is just the American interpreter. Christ! I wonder
+who he is.”</p>
+
+<p>“Has he any other name?”</p>
+
+<p>“Julian, I believe. One message said so.”</p>
+
+<p>“How did this come through?”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“Private enterprise,” he said. “The European agencies have stopped work.
+Every telegraph station is guarded night and day. There are lines of
+volors strung out on every frontier. The Empire means to settle this
+business without us.”</p>
+
+<p>“And if it goes wrong?”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear Mabel—if hell breaks loose—-” he threw out his hands
+deprecatingly.</p>
+
+<p>“And what is the Government doing?”</p>
+
+<p>“Working night and day; so is the rest of Europe. It’ll be Armageddon
+with a vengeance if it comes to war.”</p>
+
+<p>“What chance do you see?”</p>
+
+<p>“I see two chances,” said Oliver slowly: “one, that they may be afraid
+of America, and may hold their hands from sheer fear; the other that
+they may be induced to hold their hands from charity; if only they can
+be made to understand that co-operation is the one hope of the world.
+But those damned religions of theirs—-”</p>
+
+<p>The girl sighed, and looked out again on to the wide plain of
+house-roofs below the window.</p>
+
+<p>The situation was indeed as serious as it could be. That huge Empire,
+consisting of a federalism of States under the Son of Heaven (made
+possible by the merging of the Japanese and Chinese dynasties and the
+fall of Russia), had been consolidating its forces and learning its own
+power during the last thirty-five years, ever since, in fact, it had
+laid its lean yellow hands upon Australia and India. While the rest of
+the world had learned the folly of war, ever since the fall of the
+Russian republic under the combined attack of the yellow races, the last
+had grasped its possibilities. It seemed now as if the civilisation of
+the last century was to be swept back once more into chaos. It was not
+that the mob of the East cared very greatly; it was their rulers who had
+begun to stretch themselves after an almost eternal lethargy, and it was
+hard to imagine how they could be checked at this point. There was a
+touch of grimness too in the rumour that religious fanaticism was behind
+the movement, and that the patient East proposed at last to proselytise
+by the modern equivalents of fire and sword those who had laid aside for
+the most part all religious beliefs except that in Humanity. To Oliver
+it was simply maddening. As he looked from his window and saw that vast
+limit of London laid peaceably before him, as his imagination ran out
+over Europe and saw everywhere that steady triumph of common sense and
+fact over the wild fairy-stories of Christianity, it seemed intolerable
+that there should be even a possibility that all this should be swept
+back again into the barbarous turmoil of sects and dogmas; for no less
+than this would be the result if the East laid hands on Europe. Even
+Catholicism would revive, he told himself, that strange faith that had
+blazed so often as persecution had been dashed to quench it; and, of all
+forms of faith, to Oliver’s mind Catholicism was the most grotesque and
+enslaving. And the prospect of all this honestly troubled him, far more
+than the thought of the physical catastrophe and bloodshed that would
+fall on Europe with the advent of the East. There was but one hope on
+the religious side, as he had told Mabel a dozen times, and that was
+that the Quietistic Pantheism which for the last century had made such
+giant strides in East and West alike, among Mohammedans, Buddhists,
+Hindus, Confucianists and the rest, should avail to check the
+supernatural frenzy that inspired their exoteric brethren. Pantheism, he
+understood, was what he held himself; for him “God” was the developing
+sum of created life, and impersonal Unity was the essence of His being;
+competition then was the great heresy that set men one against another
+and delayed all progress; for, to his mind, progress lay in the merging
+of the individual in the family, of the family in the commonwealth, of
+the commonwealth in the continent, and of the continent in the world.
+Finally, the world itself at any moment was no more than the mood of
+impersonal life. It was, in fact, the Catholic idea with the
+supernatural left out, a union of earthly fortunes, an abandonment of
+individualism on the one side, and of supernaturalism on the other. It
+was treason to appeal from God Immanent to God Transcendent; there was
+no God transcendent; God, so far as He could be known, was man.</p>
+
+<p>Yet these two, husband and wife after a fashion—for they had entered
+into that terminable contract now recognised explicitly by the
+State—these two were very far from sharing in the usual heavy dulness
+of mere materialists. The world, for them, beat with one ardent life
+blossoming in flower and beast and man, a torrent of beautiful vigour
+flowing from a deep source and irrigating all that moved or felt. Its
+romance was the more appreciable because it was comprehensible to the
+minds that sprang from it; there were mysteries in it, but mysteries
+that enticed rather than baffled, for they unfolded new glories with
+every discovery that man could make; even inanimate objects, the fossil,
+the electric current, the far-off stars, these were dust thrown off by
+the Spirit of the World—fragrant with His Presence and eloquent of His
+Nature. For example, the announcement made by Klein, the astronomer,
+twenty years before, that the inhabitation of certain planets had become
+a certified fact—how vastly this had altered men’s views of themselves.
+But the one condition of progress and the building of Jerusalem, on the
+planet that happened to be men’s dwelling place, was peace, not the
+sword which Christ brought or that which Mahomet wielded; but peace that
+arose from, not passed, understanding; the peace that sprang from a
+knowledge that man was all and was able to develop himself only by
+sympathy with his fellows. To Oliver and his wife, then, the last
+century seemed like a revelation; little by little the old superstitions
+had died, and the new light broadened; the Spirit of the World had
+roused Himself, the sun had dawned in the west; and now with horror and
+loathing they had seen the clouds gather once more in the quarter whence
+all superstition had had its birth.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Mabel got up presently and came across to her husband.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear,” she said, “you must not be downhearted. It all may pass as it
+passed before. It is a great thing that they are listening to America at
+all. And this Mr. Felsenburgh seems to be on the right side.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver took her hand and kissed it.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>Oliver seemed altogether depressed at breakfast, half an hour later. His
+mother, an old lady of nearly eighty, who never appeared till noon,
+seemed to see it at once, for after a look or two at him and a word, she
+subsided into silence behind her plate.</p>
+
+<p>It was a pleasant little room in which they sat, immediately behind
+Oliver’s own, and was furnished, according to universal custom, in light
+green. Its windows looked out upon a strip of garden at the back, and
+the high creeper-grown wall that separated that domain from the next.
+The furniture, too, was of the usual sort; a sensible round table stood
+in the middle, with three tall arm-chairs, with the proper angles and
+rests, drawn up to it; and the centre of it, resting apparently on a
+broad round column, held the dishes. It was thirty years now since the
+practice of placing the dining-room above the kitchen, and of raising
+and lowering the courses by hydraulic power into the centre of the
+dining-table, had become universal in the houses of the well-to-do. The
+floor consisted entirely of the asbestos cork preparation invented in
+America, noiseless, clean, and pleasant to both foot and eye.</p>
+
+<p>Mabel broke the silence.</p>
+
+<p>“And your speech to-morrow?” she asked, taking up her fork.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver brightened a little, and began to discourse.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed that Birmingham was beginning to fret. They were crying out
+once more for free trade with America: European facilities were not
+enough, and it was Oliver’s business to keep them quiet. It was useless,
+he proposed to tell them, to agitate until the Eastern business was
+settled: they must not bother the Government with such details just now.
+He was to tell them, too, that the Government was wholly on their side;
+that it was bound to come soon.</p>
+
+<p>“They are pig-headed,” he added fiercely; “pig-headed and selfish; they
+are like children who cry for food ten minutes before dinner-time: it is
+bound to come if they will wait a little.”</p>
+
+<p>“And you will tell them so?”</p>
+
+<p>“That they are pig-headed? Certainly.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel looked at her husband with a pleased twinkle in her eyes. She knew
+perfectly well that his popularity rested largely on his outspokenness:
+folks liked to be scolded and abused by a genial bold man who danced and
+gesticulated in a magnetic fury; she liked it herself.</p>
+
+<p>“How shall you go?” she asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Volor. I shall catch the eighteen o’clock at Blackfriars; the meeting
+is at nineteen, and I shall be back at twenty-one.”</p>
+
+<p>He addressed himself vigorously to his <i>entree</i>, and his mother looked
+up with a patient, old-woman smile.</p>
+
+<p>Mabel began to drum her fingers softly on the damask.</p>
+
+<p>“Please make haste, my dear,” she said; “I have to be at Brighton at
+three.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver gulped his last mouthful, pushed his plate over the line, glanced
+to see if all plates were there, and then put his hand beneath the
+table.</p>
+
+<p>Instantly, without a sound, the centre-piece vanished, and the three
+waited unconcernedly while the clink of dishes came from beneath.</p>
+
+<p>Old Mrs. Brand was a hale-looking old lady, rosy and wrinkled, with the
+mantilla head-dress of fifty years ago; but she, too, looked a little
+depressed this morning. The <i>entree</i> was not very successful, she
+thought; the new food-stuff was not up to the old, it was a trifle
+gritty: she would see about it afterwards. There was a clink, a soft
+sound like a push, and the centre-piece snapped into its place, bearing
+an admirable imitation of a roasted fowl.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver and his wife were alone again for a minute or two after breakfast
+before Mabel started down the path to catch the 14¹⁄₂ o’clock 4th grade
+sub-trunk line to the junction.</p>
+
+<p>“What’s the matter with mother?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! it’s the food-stuff again: she’s never got accustomed to it; she
+says it doesn’t suit her.”</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing else?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, my dear, I am sure of it. She hasn’t said a word lately.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver watched his wife go down the path, reassured. He had been a
+little troubled once or twice lately by an odd word or two that his
+mother had let fall. She had been brought up a Christian for a few
+years, and it seemed to him sometimes as if it had left a taint. There
+was an old “Garden of the Soul” that she liked to keep by her, though
+she always protested with an appearance of scorn that it was nothing but
+nonsense. Still, Oliver would have preferred that she had burned it:
+superstition was a desperate thing for retaining life, and, as the brain
+weakened, might conceivably reassert itself. Christianity was both wild
+and dull, he told himself, wild because of its obvious grotesqueness and
+impossibility, and dull because it was so utterly apart from the
+exhilarating stream of human life; it crept dustily about still, he
+knew, in little dark churches here and there; it screamed with
+hysterical sentimentality in Westminster Cathedral which he had once
+entered and looked upon with a kind of disgusted fury; it gabbled
+strange, false words to the incompetent and the old and the half-witted.
+But it would be too dreadful if his own mother ever looked upon it again
+with favour.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver himself, ever since he could remember, had been violently opposed
+to the concessions to Rome and Ireland. It was intolerable that these
+two places should be definitely yielded up to this foolish, treacherous
+nonsense: they were hot-beds of sedition; plague-spots on the face of
+humanity. He had never agreed with those who said that it was better
+that all the poison of the West should be gathered rather than
+dispersed. But, at any rate, there it was. Rome had been given up wholly
+to that old man in white in exchange for all the parish churches and
+cathedrals of Italy, and it was understood that mediaeval darkness
+reigned there supreme; and Ireland, after receiving Home Rule thirty
+years before, had declared for Catholicism, and opened her arms to
+Individualism in its most virulent form. England had laughed and
+assented, for she was saved from a quantity of agitation by the
+immediate departure of half her Catholic population for that island, and
+had, consistently with her Communist-colonial policy, granted every
+facility for Individualism to reduce itself there <i>ad absurdum</i>. All
+kinds of funny things were happening there: Oliver had read with a
+bitter amusement of new appearances there, of a Woman in Blue and
+shrines raised where her feet had rested; but he was scarcely amused at
+Rome, for the movement to Turin of the Italian Government had deprived
+the Republic of quite a quantity of sentimental prestige, and had haloed
+the old religious nonsense with all the meretriciousness of historical
+association. However, it obviously could not last much longer: the world
+was beginning to understand at last.</p>
+
+<p>He stood a moment or two at the door after his wife had gone, drinking
+in reassurance from that glorious vision of solid sense that spread
+itself before his eyes: the endless house-roofs; the high glass vaults
+of the public baths and gymnasiums; the pinnacled schools where
+Citizenship was taught each morning; the spider-like cranes and
+scaffoldings that rose here and there; and even the few pricking spires
+did not disconcert him. There it stretched away into the grey haze of
+London, really beautiful, this vast hive of men and women who had
+learned at least the primary lesson of the gospel that there was no God
+but man, no priest but the politician, no prophet but the schoolmaster.</p>
+
+<p>Then he went back once more to his speech-constructing.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Mabel, too, was a little thoughtful as she sat with her paper on her
+lap, spinning down the broad line to Brighton. This Eastern news was
+more disconcerting to her than she allowed her husband to see; yet it
+seemed incredible that there could be any real danger of invasion. This
+Western life was so sensible and peaceful; folks had their feet at last
+upon the rock, and it was unthinkable that they could ever be forced
+back on to the mud-flats: it was contrary to the whole law of
+development. Yet she could not but recognise that catastrophe seemed one
+of nature’s methods....</p>
+
+<p>She sat very quiet, glancing once or twice at the meagre little scrap
+of news, and read the leading article upon it: that too seemed
+significant of dismay. A couple of men were talking in the
+half-compartment beyond on the same subject; one described the
+Government engineering works that he had visited, the breathless haste
+that dominated them; the other put in interrogations and questions.
+There was not much comfort there. There were no windows through which
+she could look; on the main lines the speed was too great for the eyes;
+the long compartment flooded with soft light bounded her horizon. She
+stared at the moulded white ceiling, the delicious oak-framed paintings,
+the deep spring-seats, the mellow globes overhead that poured out
+radiance, at a mother and child diagonally opposite her. Then the great
+chord sounded; the faint vibration increased ever so slightly; and an
+instant later the automatic doors ran back, and she stepped out on to
+the platform of Brighton station.</p>
+
+<p>As she went down the steps leading to the station square she noticed a
+priest going before her. He seemed a very upright and sturdy old man,
+for though his hair was white he walked steadily and strongly. At the
+foot of the steps he stopped and half turned, and then, to her surprise,
+she saw that his face was that of a young man, fine-featured and strong,
+with black eyebrows and very bright grey eyes. Then she passed on and
+began to cross the square in the direction of her aunt’s house.</p>
+
+<p>Then without the slightest warning, except one shrill hoot from
+overhead, a number of things happened.</p>
+
+<p>A great shadow whirled across the sunlight at her feet, a sound of
+rending tore the air, and a noise like a giant’s sigh; and, as she
+stopped bewildered, with a noise like ten thousand smashed kettles, a
+huge thing crashed on the rubber pavement before her, where it lay,
+filling half the square, writhing long wings on its upper side that beat
+and whirled like the flappers of some ghastly extinct monster, pouring
+out human screams, and beginning almost instantly to crawl with broken
+life.</p>
+
+<p>Mabel scarcely knew what happened next; but she found herself a moment
+later forced forward by some violent pressure from behind, till she
+stood shaking from head to foot, with some kind of smashed body of a man
+moaning and stretching at her feet. There was a sort of articulate
+language coming from it; she caught distinctly the names of Jesus and
+Mary; then a voice hissed suddenly in her ears:</p>
+
+<p>“Let me through. I am a priest.”</p>
+
+<p>She stood there a moment longer, dazed by the suddenness of the whole
+affair, and watched almost unintelligently the grey-haired young priest
+on his knees, with his coat torn open, and a crucifix out; she saw him
+bend close, wave his hand in a swift sign, and heard a murmur of a
+language she did not know. Then he was up again, holding the crucifix
+before him, and she saw him begin to move forward into the midst of the
+red-flooded pavement, looking this way and that as if for a signal. Down
+the steps of the great hospital on her right came figures running now,
+hatless, each carrying what looked like an old-fashioned camera. She
+knew what those men were, and her heart leaped in relief. They were the
+ministers of euthanasia. Then she felt herself taken by the shoulder and
+pulled back, and immediately found herself in the front rank of a crowd
+that was swaying and crying out, and behind a line of police and
+civilians who had formed themselves into a cordon to keep the pressure
+back.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>Oliver was in a panic of terror as his mother, half an hour later, ran
+in with the news that one of the Government volors had fallen in the
+station square at Brighton just after the 14¹⁄₂ train had discharged
+its passengers. He knew quite well what that meant, for he remembered
+one such accident ten years before, just after the law forbidding
+private volors had been passed. It meant that every living creature in
+it was killed and probably many more in the place where it fell—and
+what then? The message was clear enough; she would certainly be in the
+square at that time.</p>
+
+<p>He sent a desperate wire to her aunt asking for news; and sat, shaking
+in his chair, awaiting the answer. His mother sat by him.</p>
+
+<p>“Please God—-” she sobbed out once, and stopped confounded as he turned
+on her.</p>
+
+<p>But Fate was merciful, and three minutes before Mr. Phillips toiled up
+the path with the answer, Mabel herself came into the room, rather pale
+and smiling.</p>
+
+<p>“Christ!” cried Oliver, and gave one huge sob as he sprang up.</p>
+
+<p>She had not a great deal to tell him. There was no explanation of the
+disaster published as yet; it seemed that the wings on one side had
+simply ceased to work.</p>
+
+<p>She described the shadow, the hiss of sound, and the crash.</p>
+
+<p>Then she stopped.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, my dear?” said her husband, still rather white beneath the eyes
+as he sat close to her patting her hand.</p>
+
+<p>“There was a priest there,” said Mabel. “I saw him before, at the
+station.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver gave a little hysterical snort of laughter.</p>
+
+<p>“He was on his knees at once,” she said, “with his crucifix, even before
+the doctors came. My dear, do people really believe all that?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, they think they do,” said her husband.</p>
+
+<p>“It was all so—so sudden; and there he was, just as if he had been
+expecting it all. Oliver, how can they?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, people will believe anything if they begin early enough.”</p>
+
+<p>“And the man seemed to believe it, too—the dying man, I mean. I saw his
+eyes.”</p>
+
+<p>She stopped.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, my dear?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oliver, what do you say to people when they are dying?”</p>
+
+<p>“Say! Why, nothing! What can I say? But I don’t think I’ve ever seen any
+one die.”</p>
+
+<p>“Nor have I till to-day,” said the girl, and shivered a little. “The
+euthanasia people were soon at work.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver took her hand gently.</p>
+
+<p>“My darling, it must have been frightful. Why, you’re trembling still.”</p>
+
+<p>“No; but listen.... You know, if I had had anything to say I could have
+said it too. They were all just in front of me: I wondered; then I knew
+I hadn’t. I couldn’t possibly have talked about Humanity.”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear, it’s all very sad; but you know it doesn’t really matter. It’s
+all over.”</p>
+
+<p>“And—and they’ve just stopped?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, yes.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel compressed her lips a little; then she sighed. She had an agitated
+sort of meditation in the train. She knew perfectly that it was sheer
+nerves; but she could not just yet shake them off. As she had said, it
+was the first time she had seen death.</p>
+
+<p>“And that priest—that priest doesn’t think so?”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear, I’ll tell you what he believes. He believes that that man whom
+he showed the crucifix to, and said those words over, is alive
+somewhere, in spite of his brain being dead: he is not quite sure where;
+but he is either in a kind of smelting works being slowly burned; or, if
+he is very lucky, and that piece of wood took effect, he is somewhere
+beyond the clouds, before Three Persons who are only One although They
+are Three; that there are quantities of other people there, a Woman in
+Blue, a great many others in white with their heads under their arms,
+and still more with their heads on one side; and that they’ve all got
+harps and go on singing for ever and ever, and walking about on the
+clouds, and liking it very much indeed. He thinks, too, that all these
+nice people are perpetually looking down upon the aforesaid
+smelting-works, and praising the Three Great Persons for making them.
+That’s what the priest believes. Now you know it’s not likely; that kind
+of thing may be very nice, but it isn’t true.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel smiled pleasantly. She had never heard it put so well.</p>
+
+<p>“No, my dear, you’re quite right. That sort of thing isn’t true. How can
+he believe it? He looked quite intelligent!”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear girl, if I had told you in your cradle that the moon was green
+cheese, and had hammered at you ever since, every day and all day, that
+it was, you’d very nearly believe it by now. Why, you know in your heart
+that the euthanatisers are the real priests. Of course you do.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel sighed with satisfaction and stood up.</p>
+
+<p>“Oliver, you’re a most comforting person. I do like you! There! I must
+go to my room: I’m all shaky still.”</p>
+
+<p>Half across the room she stopped and put out a shoe.</p>
+
+<p>“Why—-” she began faintly.</p>
+
+<p>There was a curious rusty-looking splash upon it; and her husband saw
+her turn white. He rose abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear,” he said, “don’t be foolish.”</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him, smiled bravely, and went out.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>When she was gone, he still sat on a moment where she had left him. Dear
+me! how pleased he was! He did not like to think of what life would have
+been without her. He had known her since she was twelve—that was seven
+years ago-and last year they had gone together to the district official
+to make their contract. She had really become very necessary to him. Of
+course the world could get on without her, and he supposed that he could
+too; but he did not want to have to try. He knew perfectly well, for it
+was his creed of human love, that there was between them a double
+affection, of mind as well as body; and there was absolutely nothing
+else: but he loved her quick intuitions, and to hear his own thought
+echoed so perfectly. It was like two flames added together to make a
+third taller than either: of course one flame could burn without the
+other—in fact, one would have to, one day—but meantime the warmth and
+light were exhilarating. Yes, he was delighted that she happened to be
+clear of the falling volor.</p>
+
+<p>He gave no more thought to his exposition of the Christian creed; it was
+a mere commonplace to him that Catholics believed that kind of thing; it
+was no more blasphemous to his mind so to describe it, than it would be
+to laugh at a Fijian idol with mother-of-pearl eyes, and a horse-hair
+wig; it was simply impossible to treat it seriously. He, too, had
+wondered once or twice in his life how human beings could believe such
+rubbish; but psychology had helped him, and he knew now well enough that
+suggestion will do almost anything. And it was this hateful thing that
+had so long restrained the euthanasia movement with all its splendid
+mercy.</p>
+
+<p>His brows wrinkled a little as he remembered his mother’s exclamation,
+“Please God”; then he smiled at the poor old thing and her pathetic
+childishness, and turned once more to his table, thinking in spite of
+himself of his wife’s hesitation as she had seen the splash of blood on
+her shoe. Blood! Yes; that was as much a fact as anything else. How was
+it to be dealt with? Why, by the glorious creed of Humanity—that
+splendid God who died and rose again ten thousand times a day, who had
+died daily like the old cracked fanatic Saul of Tarsus, ever since the
+world began, and who rose again, not once like the Carpenter’s Son, but
+with every child that came into the world. That was the answer; and was
+it not overwhelmingly sufficient?</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Phillips came in an hour later with another bundle of papers.</p>
+
+<p>“No more news from the East, sir,” he said.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>Percy Franklin’s correspondence with the Cardinal-Protector of England
+occupied him directly for at least two hours every day, and for nearly
+eight hours indirectly.</p>
+
+<p>For the past eight years the methods of the Holy See had once more been
+revised with a view to modern needs, and now every important province
+throughout the world possessed not only an administrative metropolitan
+but a representative in Rome whose business it was to be in touch with
+the Pope on the one side and the people he represented on the other. In
+other words, centralisation had gone forward rapidly, in accordance with
+the laws of life; and, with centralisation, freedom of method and
+expansion of power. England’s Cardinal-Protector was one Abbot Martin, a
+Benedictine, and it was Percy’s business, as of a dozen more bishops,
+priests and laymen (with whom, by the way, he was forbidden to hold any
+formal consultation), to write a long daily letter to him on affairs
+that came under his notice.</p>
+
+<p>It was a curious life, therefore, that Percy led. He had a couple of
+rooms assigned to him in Archbishop’s House at Westminster, and was
+attached loosely to the Cathedral staff, although with considerable
+liberty. He rose early, and went to meditation for an hour, after which
+he said his mass. He took his coffee soon after, said a little office,
+and then settled down to map out his letter. At ten o’clock he was ready
+to receive callers, and till noon he was generally busy with both those
+who came to see him on their own responsibility and his staff of
+half-a-dozen reporters whose business it was to bring him marked
+paragraphs in the newspapers and their own comments. He then breakfasted
+with the other priests in the house, and set out soon after to call on
+people whose opinion was necessary, returning for a cup of tea soon
+after sixteen o’clock. Then he settled down, after the rest of his
+office and a visit to the Blessed Sacrament, to compose his letter,
+which though short, needed a great deal of care and sifting. After
+dinner he made a few notes for next day, received visitors again, and
+went to bed soon after twenty-two o’clock. Twice a week it was his
+business to assist at Vespers in the afternoon, and he usually sang high
+mass on Saturdays.</p>
+
+<p>It was, therefore, a curiously distracting life, with peculiar dangers.</p>
+
+<p>It was one day, a week or two after his visit to Brighton, that he was
+just finishing his letter, when his servant looked in to tell him that
+Father Francis was below.</p>
+
+<p>“In ten minutes,” said Percy, without looking up.</p>
+
+<p>He snapped off his last lines, drew out the sheet, and settled down to
+read it over, translating it unconsciously from Latin to English.</p>
+
+<p>“WESTMINSTER, May 14th.</p>
+
+<p>“EMINENCE: Since yesterday I have a little more information. It appears
+certain that the Bill establishing Esperanto for all State purposes will
+be brought in in June. I have had this from Johnson. This, as I have
+pointed out before, is the very last stone in our consolidation with the
+continent, which, at present, is to be regretted.... A great access of
+Jews to Freemasonry is to be expected; hitherto they have held aloof to
+some extent, but the ‘abolition of the Idea of God’ is tending to draw
+in those Jews, now greatly on the increase once more, who repudiate all
+notion of a personal Messiah. It is ‘Humanity’ here, too, that is at
+work. To-day I heard the Rabbi Simeon speak to this effect in the City,
+and was impressed by the applause he received.... Yet among others an
+expectation is growing that a man will presently be found to lead the
+Communist movement and unite their forces more closely. I enclose a
+verbose cutting from the <i>New People</i> to that effect; and it is echoed
+everywhere. They say that the cause must give birth to one such soon;
+that they have had prophets and precursors for a hundred years past, and
+lately a cessation of them. It is strange how this coincides
+superficially with Christian ideas. Your Eminence will observe that a
+simile of the ‘ninth wave’ is used with some eloquence.... I hear to-day
+of the secession of an old Catholic family, the Wargraves of Norfolk,
+with their chaplain Micklem, who it seems has been busy in this
+direction for some while. The <i>Epoch</i> announces it with satisfaction,
+owing to the peculiar circumstances; but unhappily such events are not
+uncommon now.... There is much distrust among the laity. Seven priests
+in Westminster diocese have left us within the last three months; on the
+other hand, I have pleasure in telling your Eminence that his Grace
+received into Catholic Communion this morning the ex-Anglican Bishop of
+Carlisle, with half-a-dozen of his clergy. This has been expected for
+some weeks past. I append also cuttings from the <i>Tribune</i>, the <i>London
+Trumpet</i>, and the <i>Observer</i>, with my comments upon them. Your Eminence
+will see how great the excitement is with regard to the last.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Recommendation.</i> That formal excommunication of the Wargraves and
+these eight priests should be issued in Norfolk and Westminster
+respectively, and no further notice taken.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy laid down the sheet, gathered up the half dozen other papers that
+contained his extracts and running commentary, signed the last, and
+slipped the whole into the printed envelope that lay ready.</p>
+
+<p>Then he took up his biretta and went to the lift.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The moment he came into the glass-doored parlour he saw that the crisis
+was come, if not passed already. Father Francis looked miserably ill,
+but there was a curious hardness, too, about his eyes and mouth, as he
+stood waiting. He shook his head abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>“I have come to say good-bye, father. I can bear it no more.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy was careful to show no emotion at all. He made a little sign to a
+chair, and himself sat down too. “It is an end of everything,” said the
+other again in a perfectly steady voice. “I believe nothing. I have
+believed nothing for a year now.”</p>
+
+<p>“You have felt nothing, you mean,” said Percy.</p>
+
+<p>“That won’t do, father,” went on the other. “I tell you there is nothing
+left. I can’t even argue now. It is just good-bye.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy had nothing to say. He had talked to this man during a period of
+over eight months, ever since Father Francis had first confided in him
+that his faith was going. He understood perfectly what a strain it had
+been; he felt bitterly compassionate towards this poor creature who had
+become caught up somehow into the dizzy triumphant whirl of the New
+Humanity. External facts were horribly strong just now; and faith,
+except to one who had learned that Will and Grace were all and emotion
+nothing, was as a child crawling about in the midst of some huge
+machinery: it might survive or it might not; but it required nerves of
+steel to keep steady. It was hard to know where blame could be assigned;
+yet Percy’s faith told him that there was blame due. In the ages of
+faith a very inadequate grasp of religion would pass muster; in these
+searching days none but the humble and the pure could stand the test for
+long, unless indeed they were protected by a miracle of ignorance. The
+alliance of Psychology and Materialism did indeed seem, looked at from
+one angle, to account for everything; it needed a robust supernatural
+perception to understand their practical inadequacy. And as regards
+Father Francis’s personal responsibility, he could not help feeling that
+the other had allowed ceremonial to play too great a part in his
+religion, and prayer too little. In him the external had absorbed the
+internal.</p>
+
+<p>So he did not allow his sympathy to show itself in his bright eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“You think it my fault, of course,” said the other sharply.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear father,” said Percy, motionless in his chair, “I know it is
+your fault. Listen to me. You say Christianity is absurd and impossible.
+Now, you know, it cannot be that! It may be untrue—I am not speaking of
+that now, even though I am perfectly certain that it is absolutely
+true—but it cannot be absurd so long as educated and virtuous people
+continue to hold it. To say that it is absurd is simple pride; it is to
+dismiss all who believe in it as not merely mistaken, but unintelligent
+as well—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Very well, then,” interrupted the other; “then suppose I withdraw that,
+and simply say that I do not believe it to be true.”</p>
+
+<p>“You do not withdraw it,” continued Percy serenely; “you still really
+believe it to be absurd: you have told me so a dozen times. Well, I
+repeat, that is pride, and quite sufficient to account for it all. It is
+the moral attitude that matters. There may be other things too—-”</p>
+
+<p>Father Francis looked up sharply.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! the old story!” he said sneeringly.</p>
+
+<p>“If you tell me on your word of honour that there is no woman in the
+case, or no particular programme of sin you propose to work out, I shall
+believe you. But it is an old story, as you say.”</p>
+
+<p>“I swear to you there is not,” cried the other.</p>
+
+<p>“Thank God then!” said Percy. “There are fewer obstacles to a return of
+faith.”</p>
+
+<p>There was silence for a moment after that. Percy had really no more to
+say. He had talked to him of the inner life again and again, in which
+verities are seen to be true, and acts of faith are ratified; he had
+urged prayer and humility till he was almost weary of the names; and had
+been met by the retort that this was to advise sheer self-hypnotism; and
+he had despaired of making clear to one who did not see it for himself
+that while Love and Faith may be called self-hypnotism from one angle,
+yet from another they are as much realities as, for example, artistic
+faculties, and need similar cultivation; that they produce a conviction
+that they are convictions, that they handle and taste things which when
+handled and tasted are overwhelmingly more real and objective than the
+things of sense. Evidences seemed to mean nothing to this man.</p>
+
+<p>So he was silent now, chilled himself by the presence of this crisis,
+looking unseeingly out upon the plain, little old-world parlour, its
+tall window, its strip of matting, conscious chiefly of the dreary
+hopelessness of this human brother of his who had eyes but did not see,
+ears and was deaf. He wished he would say good-bye, and go. There was no
+more to be done.</p>
+
+<p>Father Francis, who had been sitting in a lax kind of huddle, seemed to
+know his thoughts, and sat up suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>“You are tired of me,” he said. “I will go.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am not tired of you, my dear father,” said Percy simply. “I am only
+terribly sorry. You see I know that it is all true.”</p>
+
+<p>The other looked at him heavily.</p>
+
+<p>“And I know that it is not,” he said. “It is very beautiful; I wish I
+could believe it. I don’t think I shall be ever happy again—but—but
+there it is.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy sighed. He had told him so often that the heart is as divine a
+gift as the mind, and that to neglect it in the search for God is to
+seek ruin, but this priest had scarcely seen the application to himself.
+He had answered with the old psychological arguments that the
+suggestions of education accounted for everything.</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose you will cast me off,” said the other.</p>
+
+<p>“It is you who are leaving me,” said Percy. “I cannot follow, if you
+mean that.”</p>
+
+<p>“But—but cannot we be friends?”</p>
+
+<p>A sudden heat touched the elder priest’s heart.</p>
+
+<p>“Friends?” he said. “Is sentimentality all you mean by friendship? What
+kind of friends can we be?”</p>
+
+<p>The other’s face became suddenly heavy.</p>
+
+<p>“I thought so.”</p>
+
+<p>“John!” cried Percy. “You see that, do you not? How can we pretend
+anything when you do not believe in God? For I do you the honour of
+thinking that you do not.”</p>
+
+<p>Francis sprang up.</p>
+
+<p>“Well—-” he snapped. “I could not have believed—I am going.”</p>
+
+<p>He wheeled towards the door.</p>
+
+<p>“John!” said Percy again. “Are you going like this? Can you not shake
+hands?”</p>
+
+<p>The other wheeled again, with heavy anger in his face.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, you said you could not be friends with me!”</p>
+
+<p>Percy’s mouth opened. Then he understood, and smiled. “Oh! that is all
+you mean by friendship, is it?—I beg your pardon. Oh! we can be polite
+to one another, if you like.”</p>
+
+<p>He still stood holding out his hand. Father Francis looked at it a
+moment, his lips shook: then once more he turned, and went out without a
+word.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>Percy stood motionless until he heard the automatic bell outside tell
+him that Father Francis was really gone, then he went out himself and
+turned towards the long passage leading to the Cathedral. As he passed
+out through the sacristy he heard far in front the murmur of an organ,
+and on coming through into the chapel used as a parish church he
+perceived that Vespers were not yet over in the great choir. He came
+straight down the aisle, turned to the right, crossed the centre and
+knelt down.</p>
+
+<p>It was drawing on towards sunset, and the huge dark place was lighted
+here and there by patches of ruddy London light that lay on the gorgeous
+marble and gildings finished at last by a wealthy convert. In front of
+him rose up the choir, with a line of white surpliced and furred canons
+on either side, and the vast baldachino in the midst, beneath which
+burned the six lights as they had burned day by day for more than a
+century; behind that again lay the high line of the apse-choir with the
+dim, window-pierced vault above where Christ reigned in majesty. He let
+his eyes wander round for a few moments before beginning his deliberate
+prayer, drinking in the glory of the place, listening to the thunderous
+chorus, the peal of the organ, and the thin mellow voice of the priest.
+There on the left shone the refracted glow of the lamps that burned
+before the Lord in the Sacrament, on the right a dozen candles winked
+here and there at the foot of the gaunt images, high overhead hung the
+gigantic cross with that lean, emaciated Poor Man Who called all who
+looked on Him to the embraces of a God.</p>
+
+<p>Then he hid his face in his hands, drew a couple of long breaths, and
+set to work.</p>
+
+<p>He began, as his custom was in mental prayer, by a deliberate act of
+self-exclusion from the world of sense. Under the image of sinking
+beneath a surface he forced himself downwards and inwards, till the peal
+of the organ, the shuffle of footsteps, the rigidity of the chair-back
+beneath his wrists—all seemed apart and external, and he was left a
+single person with a beating heart, an intellect that suggested image
+after image, and emotions that were too languid to stir themselves. Then
+he made his second descent, renounced all that he possessed and was, and
+became conscious that even the body was left behind, and that his mind
+and heart, awed by the Presence in which they found themselves, clung
+close and obedient to the will which was their lord and protector. He
+drew another long breath, or two, as he felt that Presence surge about
+him; he repeated a few mechanical words, and sank to that peace which
+follows the relinquishment of thought.</p>
+
+<p>There he rested for a while. Far above him sounded the ecstatic music,
+the cry of trumpets and the shrilling of the flutes; but they were as
+insignificant street-noises to one who was falling asleep. He was within
+the veil of things now, beyond the barriers of sense and reflection, in
+that secret place to which he had learned the road by endless effort, in
+that strange region where realities are evident, where perceptions go to
+and fro with the swiftness of light, where the swaying will catches now
+this, now that act, moulds it and speeds it; where all things meet,
+where truth is known and handled and tasted, where God Immanent is one
+with God Transcendent, where the meaning of the external world is
+evident through its inner side, and the Church and its mysteries are
+seen from within a haze of glory.</p>
+
+<p>So he lay a few moments, absorbing and resting.</p>
+
+<p>Then he aroused himself to consciousness and began to speak.</p>
+
+<p>“Lord, I am here, and Thou art here. I know Thee. There is nothing else
+but Thou and I.... I lay this all in Thy hands—Thy apostate priest, Thy
+people, the world, and myself. I spread it before Thee—I spread it
+before Thee.”</p>
+
+<p>He paused, poised in the act, till all of which he thought lay like a
+plain before a peak.</p>
+
+<p>... “Myself, Lord—there but for Thy grace should I be going, in
+darkness and misery. It is Thou Who dost preserve me. Maintain and
+finish Thy work within my soul. Let me not falter for one instant. If
+Thou withdraw Thy hand I fall into utter nothingness.”</p>
+
+<p>So his soul stood a moment, with outstretched appealing hands, helpless
+and confident. Then the will flickered in self-consciousness, and he
+repeated acts of faith, hope and love to steady it. Then he drew another
+long breath, feeling the Presence tingle and shake about him, and began
+again.</p>
+
+<p>“Lord; look on Thy people. Many are falling from Thee. <i>Ne in aeternum
+irascaris nobis. Ne in aeternum irascaris nobis</i>.... I unite myself with
+all saints and angels and Mary Queen of Heaven; look on them and me, and
+hear us. <i>Emitte lucem tuam et veritatem tuam.</i> Thy light and Thy truth!
+Lay not on us heavier burdens than we can bear. Lord, why dost Thou not
+speak!”</p>
+
+<p>He writhed himself forward in a passion of expectant desire, hearing his
+muscles crack in the effort. Once more he relaxed himself; and the swift
+play of wordless acts began which he knew to be the very heart of
+prayer. The eyes of his soul flew hither and thither, from Calvary to
+heaven and back again to the tossing troubled earth. He saw Christ dying
+of desolation while the earth rocked and groaned; Christ reigning as a
+priest upon His Throne in robes of light, Christ patient and inexorably
+silent within the Sacramental species; and to each in turn he directed
+the eyes of the Eternal Father....</p>
+
+<p>Then he waited for communications, and they came, so soft and delicate,
+passing like shadows, that his will sweated blood and tears in the
+effort to catch and fix them and correspond....</p>
+
+<p>He saw the Body Mystical in its agony, strained over the world as on a
+cross, silent with pain; he saw this and that nerve wrenched and
+twisted, till pain presented it to himself as under the guise of flashes
+of colour; he saw the life-blood drop by drop run down from His head and
+hands and feet. The world was gathered mocking and good-humoured
+beneath. “<i>He saved others: Himself He cannot save.... Let Christ come
+down from the Cross and we will believe.</i>” Far away behind bushes and
+in holes of the ground the friends of Jesus peeped and sobbed; Mary
+herself was silent, pierced by seven swords; the disciple whom He loved
+had no words of comfort.</p>
+
+<p>He saw, too, how no word would be spoken from heaven; the angels
+themselves were bidden to put sword into sheath, and wait on the eternal
+patience of God, for the agony was hardly yet begun; there were a
+thousand horrors yet before the end could come, that final sum of
+crucifixion.... He must wait and watch, content to stand there and do
+nothing; and the Resurrection must seem to him no more than a dreamed-of
+hope. There was the Sabbath yet to come, while the Body Mystical must
+lie in its sepulchre cut off from light, and even the dignity of the
+Cross must be withdrawn and the knowledge that Jesus lived. That inner
+world, to which by long effort he had learned the way, was all alight
+with agony; it was bitter as brine, it was of that pale luminosity that
+is the utmost product of pain, it hummed in his ears with a note that
+rose to a scream ... it pressed upon him, penetrated him, stretched him
+as on a rack.... And with that his will grew sick and nerveless.</p>
+
+<p>“Lord! I cannot bear it!” he moaned....</p>
+
+<p>In an instant he was back again, drawing long breaths of misery. He
+passed his tongue over his lips, and opened his eyes on the darkening
+apse before him. The organ was silent now, and the choir was gone, and
+the lights out. The sunset colour, too, had faded from the walls, and
+grim cold faces looked down on him from wall and vault. He was back
+again on the surface of life; the vision had melted; he scarcely knew
+what it was that he had seen.</p>
+
+<p>But he must gather up the threads, and by sheer effort absorb them. He
+must pay his duty, too, to the Lord that gave Himself to the senses as
+well as to the inner spirit. So he rose, stiff and constrained, and
+passed across to the Chapel of the Holy Sacrament.</p>
+
+<p>As he came out from the block of chairs, very upright and tall, with his
+biretta once more on his white hair, he saw an old woman watching him
+very closely. He hesitated an instant, wondering whether she were a
+penitent, and as he hesitated she made a movement towards him.</p>
+
+<p>“I beg your pardon, sir,” she began.</p>
+
+<p>She was not a Catholic then. He lifted his biretta.</p>
+
+<p>“Can I do anything for you?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“I beg your pardon, sir, but were you at Brighton, at the accident two
+months ago?”</p>
+
+<p>“I was.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah! I thought so: my daughter-in-law saw you then.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy had a spasm of impatience: he was a little tired of being
+identified by his white hair and young face.</p>
+
+<p>“Were you there, madam?”</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him doubtfully and curiously, moving her old, eyes up and
+down his figure. Then she recollected herself.</p>
+
+<p>“No, sir; it was my daughter-in-law—I beg your pardon, sir, but—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Well?” asked Percy, trying to keep the impatience out of his voice.</p>
+
+<p>“Are you the Archbishop, sir?”</p>
+
+<p>The priest smiled, showing his white teeth.</p>
+
+<p>“No, madam; I am just a poor priest. Dr. Cholmondeley is Archbishop. I
+am Father Percy Franklin.”</p>
+
+<p>She said nothing, but still looking at him made a little old-world
+movement of a bow; and Percy passed on to the dim, splendid chapel to
+pay his devotions.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>There was great talk that night at dinner among the priests as to the
+extraordinary spread of Freemasonry. It had been going on for many years
+now, and Catholics perfectly recognised its dangers, for the profession
+of Masonry had been for some centuries rendered incompatible with
+religion through the Church’s unswerving condemnation of it. A man must
+choose between that and his faith. Things had developed extraordinarily
+during the last century. First there had been the organised assault upon
+the Church in France; and what Catholics had always suspected then
+became a certainty in the revelations of 1918, when P. Gerome, the
+Dominican and ex-Mason, had made his disclosures with regard to the
+Mark-Masons. It had become evident then that Catholics had been right,
+and that Masonry, in its higher grades at least, had been responsible
+throughout the world for the strange movement against religion. But he
+had died in his bed, and the public had been impressed by that fact.
+Then came the splendid donations in France and Italy—to hospitals,
+orphanages, and the like; and once more suspicion began to disappear.
+After all, it seemed—and continued to seem—for seventy years and more
+that Masonry was nothing more than a vast philanthropical society. Now
+once more men had their doubts.</p>
+
+<p>“I hear that Felsenburgh is a Mason,” observed Monsignor Macintosh, the
+Cathedral Administrator. “A Grand-Master or something.”</p>
+
+<p>“But who is Felsenburgh?” put in a young priest.</p>
+
+<p>Monsignor pursed his lips and shook his head. He was one of those humble
+persons as proud of ignorance as others of knowledge. He boasted that he
+never read the papers nor any book except those that had received the
+<i>imprimatur</i>; it was a priest’s business, he often remarked, to preserve
+the faith, not to acquire worldly knowledge. Percy had occasionally
+rather envied his point of view.</p>
+
+<p>“He’s a mystery,” said another priest, Father Blackmore; “but he seems
+to be causing great excitement. They were selling his ‘Life’ to-day on
+the Embankment.”</p>
+
+<p>“I met an American senator,” put in Percy, “three days ago, who told me
+that even there they know nothing of him, except his extraordinary
+eloquence. He only appeared last year, and seems to have carried
+everything before him by quite unusual methods. He is a great linguist,
+too. That is why they took him to Irkutsk.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, the Masons—-” went on Monsignor. “It is very serious. In the
+last month four of my penitents have left me because of it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Their inclusion of women was their master-stroke,” growled Father
+Blackmore, helping himself to claret.</p>
+
+<p>“It is extraordinary that they hesitated so long about that,” observed
+Percy.</p>
+
+<p>A couple of the others added their evidence. It appeared that they, too,
+had lost penitents lately through the spread of Masonry. It was rumoured
+that a Pastoral was a-preparing upstairs on the subject.</p>
+
+<p>Monsignor shook his head ominously.</p>
+
+<p>“More is wanted than that,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Percy pointed out that the Church had said her last word several
+centuries ago. She had laid her excommunication on all members of secret
+societies, and there was really no more that she could do.</p>
+
+<p>“Except bring it before her children again and again,” put in Monsignor.
+“I shall preach on it next Sunday.”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Percy dotted down a note when he reached his room, determining to say
+another word or two on the subject to the Cardinal-Protector. He had
+mentioned Freemasonry often before, but it seemed time for another
+remark. Then he opened his letters, first turning to one which he
+recognised as from the Cardinal.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed a curious coincidence, as he read a series of questions that
+Cardinal Martin’s letter contained, that one of them should be on this
+very subject. It ran as follows:</p>
+
+<p>“What of Masonry? Felsenburgh is said to be one. Gather all the gossip
+you can about him. Send any English or American biographies of him. Are
+you still losing Catholics through Masonry?”</p>
+
+<p>He ran his eyes down the rest of the questions. They chiefly referred to
+previous remarks of his own, but twice, even in them, Felsenburgh’s name
+appeared.</p>
+
+<p>He laid the paper down and considered a little.</p>
+
+<p>It was very curious, he thought, how this man’s name was in every one’s
+mouth, in spite of the fact that so little was known about him. He had
+bought in the streets, out of curiosity, three photographs that
+professed to represent this strange person, and though one of them might
+be genuine they all three could not be. He drew them out of a
+pigeon-hole, and spread them before him.</p>
+
+<p>One represented a fierce, bearded creature like a Cossack, with round
+staring eyes. No; intrinsic evidence condemned this: it was exactly how
+a coarse imagination would have pictured a man who seemed to be having a
+great influence in the East.</p>
+
+<p>The second showed a fat face with little eyes and a chin-beard. That
+might conceivably be genuine: he turned it over and saw the name of a
+New York firm on the back. Then he turned to the third. This presented a
+long, clean-shaven face with pince-nez, undeniably clever, but scarcely
+strong: and Felsenburgh was obviously a strong man.</p>
+
+<p>Percy inclined to think the second was the most probable; but they were
+all unconvincing; and he shuffled them carelessly together and replaced
+them.</p>
+
+<p>Then he put his elbows on the table, and began to think.</p>
+
+<p>He tried to remember what Mr. Varhaus, the American senator, had told
+him of Felsenburgh; yet it did not seem sufficient to account for the
+facts. Felsenburgh, it seemed, had employed none of those methods common
+in modern politics. He controlled no newspapers, vituperated nobody,
+championed nobody: he had no picked underlings; he used no bribes; there
+were no monstrous crimes alleged against him. It seemed rather as if his
+originality lay in his clean hands and his stainless past—that, and his
+magnetic character. He was the kind of figure that belonged rather to
+the age of chivalry: a pure, clean, compelling personality, like a
+radiant child. He had taken people by surprise, then, rising out of the
+heaving dun-coloured waters of American socialism like a vision—from
+those waters so fiercely restrained from breaking into storm over since
+the extraordinary social revolution under Mr. Hearst’s disciples, a
+century ago. That had been the end of plutocracy; the famous old laws of
+1914 had burst some of the stinking bubbles of the time; and the
+enactments of 1916 and 1917 had prevented their forming again in any
+thing like their previous force. It had been the salvation of America,
+undoubtedly, even if that salvation were of a dreary and uninspiring
+description; and now out of the flat socialistic level had arisen this
+romantic figure utterly unlike any that had preceded it.... So the
+senator had hinted.... It was too complicated for Percy just now, and he
+gave it up.</p>
+
+<p>It was a weary world, he told himself, turning his eyes homewards.
+Everything seemed so hopeless and ineffective. He tried not to reflect
+on his fellow-priests, but for the fiftieth time he could not help
+seeing that they were not the men for the present situation. It was not
+that he preferred himself; he knew perfectly well that he, too, was
+fully as incompetent: had he not proved to be so with poor Father
+Francis, and scores of others who had clutched at him in their agony
+during the last ten years? Even the Archbishop, holy man as he was, with
+all his childlike faith—was that the man to lead English Catholics and
+confound their enemies? There seemed no giants on the earth in these
+days. What in the world was to be done? He buried his face in his
+hands....</p>
+
+<p>Yes; what was wanted was a new Order in the Church; the old ones were
+rule-bound through no fault of their own. An Order was wanted without
+habit or tonsure, without traditions or customs, an Order with nothing
+but entire and whole-hearted devotion, without pride even in their most
+sacred privileges, without a past history in which they might take
+complacent refuge. They must be <i>franc-tireurs</i> of Christ’s Army; like
+the Jesuits, but without their fatal reputation, which, again, was no
+fault of their own. ... But there must be a Founder—Who, in God’s Name?
+—a Founder <i>nudus sequens Christum nudum</i>.... Yes—<i>Franc-tireurs</i>
+—priests, bishops, laymen and women—with the three vows of course, and
+a special clause forbidding utterly and for ever their ownership of
+corporate wealth.—Every gift received must be handed to the bishop of
+the diocese in which it was given, who must provide them himself with
+necessaries of life and travel. Oh!—what could they not do?... He was
+off in a rhapsody.</p>
+
+<p>Presently he recovered, and called himself a fool. Was not that scheme
+as old as the eternal hills, and as useless for practical purposes? Why,
+it had been the dream of every zealous man since the First Year of
+Salvation that such an Order should be founded!... He was a fool....</p>
+
+<p>Then once more he began to think of it all over again.</p>
+
+<p>Surely it was this which was wanted against the Masons; and women,
+too.—Had not scheme after scheme broken down because men had forgotten
+the power of women? It was that lack that had ruined Napoleon: he had
+trusted Josephine, and she had failed him; so he had trusted no other
+woman. In the Catholic Church, too, woman had been given no active work
+but either menial or connected with education: and was there not room
+for other activities than those? Well, it was useless to think of it. It
+was not his affair. If <i>Papa Angelicus</i> who now reigned in Rome had not
+thought of it, why should a foolish, conceited priest in Westminster set
+himself up to do so?</p>
+
+<p>So he beat himself on the breast once more, and took up his office-book.</p>
+
+<p>He finished in half an hour, and again sat thinking; but this time it
+was of poor Father Francis. He wondered what he was doing now; whether
+he had taken off the Roman collar of Christ’s familiar slaves? The poor
+devil! And how far was he, Percy Franklin, responsible?</p>
+
+<p>When a tap came at his door presently, and Father Blackmore looked in
+for a talk before going to bed, Percy told him what had happened.</p>
+
+<p>Father Blackmore removed his pipe and sighed deliberately.</p>
+
+<p>“I knew it was coming,” he said. “Well, well.”</p>
+
+<p>“He has been honest enough,” explained Percy. “He told me eight months
+ago he was in trouble.”</p>
+
+<p>Father Blackmore drew upon his pipe thoughtfully.</p>
+
+<p>“Father Franklin,” he said, “things are really very serious. There is
+the same story everywhere. What in the world is happening?”</p>
+
+<p>Percy paused before answering.</p>
+
+<p>“I think these things go in waves,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Waves, do you think?” said the other.</p>
+
+<p>“What else?”</p>
+
+<p>Father Blackmore looked at him intently.</p>
+
+<p>“It is more like a dead calm, it seems to me,” he said. “Have you ever
+been in a typhoon?”</p>
+
+<p>Percy shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” went on the other, “the most ominous thing is the calm. The sea
+is like oil; you feel half-dead: you can do nothing. Then comes the
+storm.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy looked at him, interested. He had not seen this mood in the priest
+before.</p>
+
+<p>“Before every great crash there comes this calm. It is always so in
+history. It was so before the Eastern War; it was so before the French
+Revolution. It was so before the Reformation. There is a kind of oily
+heaving; and everything is languid. So everything has been in America,
+too, for over eighty years.... Father Franklin, I think something is
+going to happen.”</p>
+
+<p>“Tell me,” said Percy, leaning forward.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I saw Templeton a week before he died, and he put the idea in my
+head.... Look here, father. It may be this Eastern affair that is coming
+on us; but somehow I don’t think it is. It is in religion that something
+is going to happen. At least, so I think.... Father, who in God’s name
+is Felsenburgh?”</p>
+
+<p>Percy was so startled at the sudden introduction of this name again,
+that he stared a moment without speaking.</p>
+
+<p>Outside, the summer night was very still. There was a faint vibration
+now and again from the underground track that ran twenty yards from the
+house where they sat; but the streets were quiet enough round the
+Cathedral. Once a hoot rang far away, as if some ominous bird of passage
+were crossing between London and the stars, and once the cry of a woman
+sounded thin and shrill from the direction of the river. For the rest
+there was no more than the solemn, subdued hum that never ceased now
+night or day.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; Felsenburgh,” said Father Blackmore once more. “I cannot get that
+man out of my head. And yet, what do I know of him? What does any one
+know of him?”</p>
+
+<p>Percy licked his lips to answer, and drew a breath to still the beating
+of his heart. He could not imagine why he felt excited. After all, who
+was old Blackmore to frighten him? But old Blackmore went on before he
+could speak.</p>
+
+<p>“See how people are leaving the Church! The Wargraves, the Hendersons,
+Sir James Bartlet, Lady Magnier, and then all the priests. Now they’re
+not all knaves—I wish they were; it would be so much easier to talk of
+it. But Sir James Bartlet, last month! Now, there’s a man who has spent
+half his fortune on the Church, and he doesn’t resent it even now. He
+says that any religion is better than none, but that, for himself, he
+just can’t believe any longer. Now what does all that mean?... I tell
+you something is going to happen. God knows what! And I can’t get
+Felsenburgh out of my head.... Father Franklin—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes?”</p>
+
+<p>“Have you noticed how few great men we’ve got? It’s not like fifty years
+ago, or even thirty. Then there were Mason, Selborne, Sherbrook, and
+half-a-dozen others. There was Brightman, too, as Archbishop: and now!
+Then the Communists, too. Braithwaite is dead fifteen years. Certainly
+he was big enough; but he was always speaking of the future, not of the
+present; and tell me what big man they have had since then! And now
+there’s this new man, whom no one knows, who came forward in America a
+few months ago, and whose name is in every one’s mouth. Very well,
+then!”</p>
+
+<p>Percy knitted his forehead.</p>
+
+<p>“I am not sure that I understand,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Father Blackmore knocked his pipe out before answering.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, this,” he said, standing up. “I can’t help thinking Felsenburgh
+is going to do something. I don’t know what; it may be for us or against
+us. But he is a Mason, remember that.... Well, well; I dare say I’m an
+old fool. Good-night.”</p>
+
+<p>“One moment, father,” said Percy slowly. “Do you mean—? Good Lord! What
+do you mean?” He stopped, looking at the other.</p>
+
+<p>The old priest stared back under his bushy eyebrows; it seemed to Percy
+as if he, too, were afraid of something in spite of his easy talk; but
+he made no sign.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Percy stood perfectly still a moment when the door was shut. Then he
+moved across to his <i>prie-dieu</i>.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>Old Mrs. Brand and Mabel were seated at a window of the new Admiralty
+Offices in Trafalgar Square to see Oliver deliver his speech on the
+fiftieth anniversary of the passing of the Poor Laws Reform.</p>
+
+<p>It was an inspiriting sight, this bright June morning, to see the crowds
+gathering round Braithwaite’s statue. That politician, dead fifteen
+years before, was represented in his famous attitude, with arms
+outstretched and down dropped, his head up and one foot slightly
+advanced, and to-day was decked, as was becoming more and more usual on
+such occasions, in his Masonic insignia. It was he who had given
+immense impetus to that secret movement by his declaration in the House
+that the key of future progress and brotherhood of nations was in the
+hands of the Order. It was through this alone that the false unity of
+the Church with its fantastic spiritual fraternity could be
+counteracted. St. Paul had been right, he declared, in his desire to
+break down the partition-walls between nations, and wrong only in his
+exaltation of Jesus Christ. Thus he had preluded his speech on the Poor
+Law question, pointing to the true charity that existed among Masons
+apart from religious motive, and appealing to the famous benefactions on
+the Continent; and in the enthusiasm of the Bill’s success the Order had
+received a great accession of members.</p>
+
+<p>Old Mrs. Brand was in her best to-day, and looked out with considerable
+excitement at the huge throng gathered to hear her son speak. A platform
+was erected round the bronze statue at such a height that the statesman
+appeared to be one of the speakers, though at a slightly higher
+elevation, and this platform was hung with roses, surmounted by a
+sounding-board, and set with a chair and table.</p>
+
+<p>The whole square round about was paved with heads and resonant with
+sound, the murmurs of thousands of voices, overpowered now and again by
+the crash of brass and thunder of drums as the Benefit Societies and
+democratic Guilds, each headed by a banner, deployed from North, South,
+East and West, and converged towards the wide railed space about the
+platform where room was reserved for them. The windows on every side
+were packed with faces; tall stands were erected along the front of the
+National Gallery and St. Martin’s Church, garden-beds of colour behind
+the mute, white statues that faced outwards round the square; from
+Braithwaite in front, past the Victorians—John Davidson, John Burns,
+and the rest—round to Hampden and de Montfort towards the north. The
+old column was gone, with its lions. Nelson had not been found
+advantageous to the <i>Entente Cordiale</i>, nor the lions to the new art;
+and in their place stretched a wide pavement broken by slopes of steps
+that led up to the National Gallery.</p>
+
+<p>Overhead the roofs showed crowded friezes of heads against the blue
+summer sky. Not less than one hundred thousand persons, it was estimated
+in the evening papers, were collected within sight and sound of the
+platform by noon.</p>
+
+<p>As the clocks began to tell the hour, two figures appeared from behind
+the statue and came forward, and, in an instant, the murmurs of talk
+rose into cheering.</p>
+
+<p>Old Lord Pemberton came first, a grey-haired, upright man, whose father
+had been active in denouncing the House of which he was a member on the
+occasion of its fall over seventy years ago, and his son had succeeded
+him worthily. This man was now a member of the Government, and sat for
+Manchester (3); and it was he who was to be chairman on this auspicious
+occasion. Behind him came Oliver, bareheaded and spruce, and even at
+that distance his mother and wife could see his brisk movement, his
+sudden smile and nod as his name emerged from the storm of sound that
+surged round the platform. Lord Pemberton came forward, lifted his hand
+and made a signal; and in a moment the thin cheering died under the
+sudden roll of drums beneath that preluded the Masonic Hymn.</p>
+
+<p>There was no doubt that these Londoners could sing. It was as if a giant
+voice hummed the sonorous melody, rising to enthusiasm till the music of
+massed bands followed it as a flag follows a flag-stick. The hymn was
+one composed ten years before, and all England was familiar with it.
+Old Mrs. Bland lifted the printed paper mechanically to her eyes, and
+saw the words that she knew so well:</p>
+
+<p>“<i>The Lord that dwells in earth and sea.</i>” ...</p>
+
+<p>She glanced down the verses, that from the Humanitarian point of view
+had been composed with both skill and ardour. They had a religious ring;
+the unintelligent Christian could sing them without a qualm; yet their
+sense was plain enough—the old human creed that man was all. Even
+Christ’s, words themselves were quoted. The kingdom of God, it was said,
+lay within the human heart, and the greatest of all graces was Charity.</p>
+
+<p>She glanced at Mabel, and saw that the girl was singing with all her
+might, with her eyes fixed on her husband’s dark figure a hundred yards
+away, and her soul pouring through them. So the mother, too, began to
+move her lips in chorus with that vast volume of sound.</p>
+
+<p>As the hymn died away, and before the cheering could begin again, old
+Lord Pemberton was standing forward on the edge of the platform, and his
+thin, metallic voice piped a sentence or two across the tinkling splash
+of the fountains behind him. Then he stepped back, and Oliver came
+forward.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It was too far for the two to hear what was said, but Mabel slipped a
+paper, smiling tremulously, into the old lady’s hand, and herself bent
+forward to listen.</p>
+
+<p>Old Mrs. Brand looked at that, too, knowing that it was an analysis of
+her son’s speech, and aware that she would not be able to hear his
+words.</p>
+
+<p>There was an exordium first, congratulating all who were present to do
+honour to the great man who presided from his pedestal on the occasion
+of this great anniversary. Then there came a retrospect, comparing the
+old state of England with the present. Fifty years ago, the speaker
+said, poverty was still a disgrace, now it was so no longer. It was in
+the causes that led to poverty that the disgrace or the merit lay. Who
+would not honour a man worn out in the service of his country, or
+overcome at last by circumstances against which his efforts could not
+prevail?... He enumerated the reforms passed fifty years before on this
+very day, by which the nation once and for all declared the glory of
+poverty and man’s sympathy with the unfortunate.</p>
+
+<p>So he had told them he was to sing the praise of patient poverty and its
+reward, and that, he supposed, together with a few periods on the reform
+of the prison laws, would form the first half of his speech.</p>
+
+<p>The second part was to be a panegyric of Braithwaite, treating him as
+the Precursor of a movement that even now had begun.</p>
+
+<p>Old Mrs. Brand leaned back in her seat, and looked about her.</p>
+
+<p>The window where they sat had been reserved for them; two arm-chairs
+filled the space, but immediately behind there were others, standing
+very silent now, craning forward, watching, too, with parted lips: a
+couple of women with an old man directly behind, and other faces visible
+again behind them. Their obvious absorption made the old lady a little
+ashamed of her distraction, and she turned resolutely once more to the
+square.</p>
+
+<p>Ah! he was working up now to his panegyric! The tiny dark figure was
+back, a yard nearer the statue, and as she looked, his hand went up and
+he wheeled, pointing, as a murmur of applause drowned for an instant the
+minute, resonant voice. Then again he was forward, half crouching—for
+he was a born actor—and a storm of laughter rippled round the throng of
+heads. She heard an indrawn hiss behind her chair, and the next instant
+an exclamation from Mabel.... What was that?</p>
+
+<p>There was a sharp crack, and the tiny gesticulating figure staggered
+back a step. The old man at the table was up in a moment, and
+simultaneously a violent commotion bubbled and heaved like water about a
+rock at a point in the crowd immediately outside the railed space where
+the bands were massed, and directly opposite the front of the platform.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Brand, bewildered and dazed, found herself standing up, clutching
+the window rail, while the girl gripped her, crying out something she
+could not understand. A great roaring filled the square, the heads
+tossed this way and that, like corn under a squall of wind. Then Oliver
+was forward again, pointing and crying out, for she could see his
+gestures; and she sank back quickly, the blood racing through her old
+veins, and her heart hammering at the base of her throat.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear, my dear, what is it?” she sobbed.</p>
+
+<p>But Mabel was up, too, staring out at her husband; and a quick babble of
+talk and exclamations from behind made itself audible in spite of the
+roaring tumult of the square.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>Oliver told them the explanation of the whole affair that evening at
+home, leaning back in his chair, with one arm bandaged and in a sling.</p>
+
+<p>They had not been able to get near him at the time; the excitement in
+the square had been too fierce; but a messenger had come to his wife
+with the news that her husband was only slightly wounded, and was in the
+hands of the doctors.</p>
+
+<p>“He was a Catholic,” explained the drawn-faced Oliver. “He must have
+come ready, for his repeater was found loaded. Well, there was no chance
+for a priest this time.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel nodded slowly: she had read of the man’s fate on the placards.</p>
+
+<p>“He was killed—trampled and strangled instantly,” said Oliver. “I did
+what I could: you saw me. But—well, I dare say it was more merciful.”</p>
+
+<p>“But you did what you could, my dear?” said the old lady, anxiously,
+from her corner.</p>
+
+<p>“I called out to them, mother, but they wouldn’t hear me.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel leaned forward—-</p>
+
+<p>“Oliver, I know this sounds stupid of me; but—but I wish they had not
+killed him.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver smiled at her. He knew this tender trait in her.</p>
+
+<p>“It would have been more perfect if they had not,” she said. Then she
+broke off and sat back.</p>
+
+<p>“Why did he shoot just then?” she asked.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver turned his eyes for an instant towards his mother, but she was
+knitting tranquilly.</p>
+
+<p>Then he answered with a curious deliberateness.</p>
+
+<p>“I said that Braithwaite had done more for the world by one speech than
+Jesus and all His saints put together.” He was aware that the
+knitting-needles stopped for a second; then they went on again as
+before.</p>
+
+<p>“But he must have meant to do it anyhow,” continued Oliver.</p>
+
+<p>“How do they know he was a Catholic?” asked the girl again.</p>
+
+<p>“There was a rosary on him; and then he just had time to call on his
+God.”</p>
+
+<p>“And nothing more is known?”</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing more. He was well dressed, though.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver leaned back a little wearily and closed his eyes; his arm still
+throbbed intolerably. But he was very happy at heart. It was true that
+he had been wounded by a fanatic, but he was not sorry to bear pain in
+such a cause, and it was obvious that the sympathy of England was with
+him. Mr. Phillips even now was busy in the next room, answering the
+telegrams that poured in every moment. Caldecott, the Prime Minister,
+Maxwell, Snowford and a dozen others had wired instantly their
+congratulations, and from every part of England streamed in message
+after message. It was an immense stroke for the Communists; their
+spokesman had been assaulted during the discharge of his duty, speaking
+in defence of his principles; it was an incalculable gain for them, and
+loss for the Individualists, that confessors were not all on one side
+after all. The huge electric placards over London had winked out the
+facts in Esperanto as Oliver stepped into the train at twilight.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Oliver Brand wounded.... Catholic assailant.... Indignation of the
+country.... Well-deserved fate of assassin</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>He was pleased, too, that he honestly had done his best to save the man.
+Even in that moment of sudden and acute pain he had cried out for a fair
+trial; but he had been too late. He had seen the starting eyes roll up
+in the crimson face, and the horrid grin come and go as the hands had
+clutched and torn at his throat. Then the face had vanished and a heavy
+trampling began where it had disappeared. Oh! there was some passion and
+loyalty left in England!</p>
+
+<p>His mother got up presently and went out, still without a word; and
+Mabel turned to him, laying a hand on his knee.</p>
+
+<p>“Are you too tired to talk, my dear?”</p>
+
+<p>He opened his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“Of course not, my darling. What is it?”</p>
+
+<p>“What do you think will be the effect?”</p>
+
+<p>He raised himself a little, looking out as usual through the darkening
+windows on to that astonishing view. Everywhere now lights were
+glowing, a sea of mellow moons just above the houses, and above the
+mysterious heavy blue of a summer evening.</p>
+
+<p>“The effect?” he said. “It can be nothing but good. It was time that
+something happened. My dear, I feel very downcast sometimes, as you
+know. Well, I do not think I shall be again. I have been afraid
+sometimes that we were losing all our spirit, and that the old Tories
+were partly right when they prophesied what Communism would do. But
+after this—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Well?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well; we have shown that we can shed our blood too. It is in the nick
+of time, too, just at the crisis. I don’t want to exaggerate; it is only
+a scratch—but it was so deliberate, and—and so dramatic. The poor
+devil could not have chosen a worse moment. People won’t forget it.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel’s eyes shone with pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>“You poor dear!” she said. “Are you in pain?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not much. Besides, Christ! what do I care? If only this infernal
+Eastern affair would end!”</p>
+
+<p>He knew he was feverish and irritable, and made a great effort to drive
+it down.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, my dear!” he went on, flushed a little. “If they would not be such
+heavy fools: they don’t understand; they don’t understand.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Oliver?”</p>
+
+<p>“They don’t understand what a glorious thing it all is: Humanity, Life,
+Truth at last, and the death of Folly! But haven’t I told them a hundred
+times?”</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him with kindling eyes. She loved to see him like this,
+his confident, flushed face, the enthusiasm in his blue eyes; and the
+knowledge of his pain pricked her feeling with passion. She bent forward
+and kissed him suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear, I am so proud of you. Oh, Oliver!”</p>
+
+<p>He said nothing; but she could see what she loved to see, that response
+to her own heart; and so they sat in silence while the sky darkened yet
+more, and the click of the writer in the next room told them that the
+world was alive and that they had a share in its affairs.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver stirred presently.</p>
+
+<p>“Did you notice anything just now, sweetheart—when I said that about
+Jesus Christ?”</p>
+
+<p>“She stopped knitting for a moment,” said the girl.</p>
+
+<p>He nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“You saw that too, then.... Mabel, do you think she is falling back?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! she is getting old,” said the girl lightly. “Of course she looks
+back a little.”</p>
+
+<p>“But you don’t think—it would be too awful!”</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>“No, no, my dear; you’re excited and tired. It’s just a little
+sentiment.... Oliver, I don’t think I would say that kind of thing
+before her.”</p>
+
+<p>“But she hears it everywhere now.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, she doesn’t. Remember she hardly ever goes out. Besides, she hates
+it. After all, she was brought up a Catholic.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver nodded, and lay back again, looking dreamily out.</p>
+
+<p>“Isn’t it astonishing the way in which suggestion lasts? She can’t get
+it out of her head, even after fifty years. Well, watch her, won’t
+you?... By the way ...”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes?”</p>
+
+<p>“There’s a little more news from the East. They say Felsenburgh’s
+running the whole thing now. The Empire is sending him everywhere—
+Tobolsk, Benares, Yakutsk—everywhere; and he’s been to Australia.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel sat up briskly.</p>
+
+<p>“Isn’t that very hopeful?”</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose so. There’s no doubt that the Sufis are winning; but for how
+long is another question. Besides, the troops don’t disperse.”</p>
+
+<p>“And Europe?”</p>
+
+<p>“Europe is arming as fast as possible. I hear we are to meet the Powers
+next week at Paris. I must go.”</p>
+
+<p>“Your arm, my dear?”</p>
+
+<p>“My arm must get well. It will have to go with me, anyhow.”</p>
+
+<p>“Tell me some more.”</p>
+
+<p>“There is no more. But it is just as certain as it can be that this is
+the crisis. If the East can be persuaded to hold its hand now, it will
+never be likely to raise it again. It will mean free trade all over the
+world, I suppose, and all that kind of thing. But if not—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Well?”</p>
+
+<p>“If not, there will be a catastrophe such as never has been even
+imagined. The whole human race will be at war, and either East or West
+will be simply wiped out. These new Benninschein explosives will make
+certain of that.”</p>
+
+<p>“But is it absolutely certain that the East has got them?”</p>
+
+<p>“Absolutely. Benninschein sold them simultaneously to East and West;
+then he died, luckily for him.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel had heard this kind of talk before, but her imagination simply
+refused to grasp it. A duel of East and West under these new conditions
+was an unthinkable thing. There had been no European war within living
+memory, and the Eastern wars of the last century had been under the old
+conditions. Now, if tales were true, entire towns would be destroyed
+with a single shell. The new conditions were unimaginable. Military
+experts prophesied extravagantly, contradicting one another on vital
+points; the whole procedure of war was a matter of theory; there were no
+precedents with which to compare it. It was as if archers disputed as to
+the results of cordite. Only one thing was certain—that the East had
+every modern engine, and, as regards male population, half as much
+again as the rest of the world put together; and the conclusion to be
+drawn from these premisses was not reassuring to England.</p>
+
+<p>But imagination simply refused to speak. The daily papers had a short,
+careful leading article every day, founded upon the scraps of news that
+stole out from the conferences on the other side of the world;
+Felsenburgh’s name appeared more frequently than ever: otherwise there
+seemed to be a kind of hush. Nothing suffered very much; trade went on;
+European stocks were not appreciably lower than usual; men still built
+houses, married wives, begat sons and daughters, did their business and
+went to the theatre, for the mere reason that there was no good in
+anything else. They could neither save nor precipitate the situation; it
+was on too large a scale. Occasionally people went mad—people who had
+succeeded in goading their imagination to a height whence a glimpse of
+reality could be obtained; and there was a diffused atmosphere of
+tenseness. But that was all. Not many speeches were made on the subject;
+it had been found inadvisable. After all, there was nothing to do but to
+wait.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>Mabel remembered her husband’s advice to watch, and for a few days did
+her best. But there was nothing that alarmed her. The old lady was a
+little quiet, perhaps, but went about her minute affairs as usual. She
+asked the girl to read to her sometimes, and listened unblenching to
+whatever was offered her; she attended in the kitchen daily, organised
+varieties of food, and appeared interested in all that concerned her
+son. She packed his bag with her own hands, set out his furs for the
+swift flight to Paris, and waved to him from the window as he went down
+the little path towards the junction. He would be gone three days, he
+said.</p>
+
+<p>It was on the evening of the second day that she fell ill; and Mabel,
+running upstairs, in alarm at the message of the servant, found her
+rather flushed and agitated in her chair.</p>
+
+<p>“It is nothing, my dear,” said the old lady tremulously; and she added
+the description of a symptom or two.</p>
+
+<p>Mabel got her to bed, sent for the doctor, and sat down to wait.</p>
+
+<p>She was sincerely fond of the old lady, and had always found her
+presence in the house a quiet sort of delight. The effect of her upon
+the mind was as that of an easy-chair upon the body. The old lady was so
+tranquil and human, so absorbed in small external matters, so
+reminiscent now and then of the days of her youth, so utterly without
+resentment or peevishness. It seemed curiously pathetic to the girl to
+watch that quiet old spirit approach its extinction, or rather, as Mabel
+believed, its loss of personality in the reabsorption into the Spirit of
+Life which informed the world. She found less difficulty in
+contemplating the end of a vigorous soul, for in that case she imagined
+a kind of energetic rush of force back into the origin of things; but in
+this peaceful old lady there was so little energy; her whole point, so
+to speak, lay in the delicate little fabric of personality, built out of
+fragile things into an entity far more significant than the sum of its
+component parts: the death of a flower, reflected Mabel, is sadder than
+the death of a lion; the breaking of a piece of china more irreparable
+than the ruin of a palace.</p>
+
+<p>“It is syncope,” said the doctor when he came in. “She may die at any
+time; she may live ten years.”</p>
+
+<p>“There is no need to telegraph for Mr. Brand?”</p>
+
+<p>He made a little deprecating movement with his hands.</p>
+
+<p>“It is not certain that she will die—it is not imminent?” she asked.</p>
+
+<p>“No, no; she may live ten years, I said.”</p>
+
+<p>He added a word or two of advice as to the use of the oxygen injector,
+and went away.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The old lady was lying quietly in bed, when the girl went up, and put
+out a wrinkled hand.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, my dear?” she asked.</p>
+
+<p>“It is just a little weakness, mother. You must lie quiet and do
+nothing. Shall I read to you?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, my dear; I will think a little.”</p>
+
+<p>It was no part of Mabel’s idea to duty to tell her that she was in
+danger, for there was no past to set straight, no Judge to be
+confronted. Death was an ending, not a beginning. It was a peaceful
+Gospel; at least, it became peaceful as soon as the end had come.</p>
+
+<p>So the girl went downstairs once more, with a quiet little ache at her
+heart that refused to be still.</p>
+
+<p>What a strange and beautiful thing death was, she told herself—this
+resolution of a chord that had hung suspended for thirty, fifty or
+seventy years—back again into the stillness of the huge Instrument that
+was all in all to itself. Those same notes would be struck again, were
+being struck again even now all over the world, though with an infinite
+delicacy of difference in the touch; but that particular emotion was
+gone: it was foolish to think that it was sounding eternally elsewhere,
+for there was no elsewhere. She, too, herself would cease one day, let
+her see to it that the tone was pure and lovely.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Mr. Phillips arrived the next morning as usual, just as Mabel had left
+the old lady’s room, and asked news of her.</p>
+
+<p>“She is a little better, I think,” said Mabel. “She must be very quiet
+all day.”</p>
+
+<p>The secretary bowed and turned aside into Oliver’s room, where a heap of
+letters lay to be answered.</p>
+
+<p>A couple of hours later, as Mabel went upstairs once more, she met Mr.
+Phillips coming down. He looked a little flushed under his sallow skin.</p>
+
+<p>“Mrs. Brand sent for me,” he said. “She wished to know whether Mr.
+Oliver would be back to-night.”</p>
+
+<p>“He will, will he not? You have not heard?”</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Brand said he would be here for a late dinner. He will reach London
+at nineteen.”</p>
+
+<p>“And is there any other news?”</p>
+
+<p>He compressed his lips.</p>
+
+<p>“There are rumours,” he said. “Mr. Brand wired to me an hour ago.”</p>
+
+<p>He seemed moved at something, and Mabel looked at him in astonishment.</p>
+
+<p>“It is not Eastern news?” she asked.</p>
+
+<p>His eyebrows wrinkled a little.</p>
+
+<p>“You must forgive me, Mrs. Brand,” he said. “I am not at liberty to say
+anything.”</p>
+
+<p>She was not offended, for she trusted her husband too well; but she went
+on into the sick-room with her heart beating.</p>
+
+<p>The old lady, too, seemed excited. She lay in bed with a clear flush in
+her white cheeks, and hardly smiled at all to the girl’s greeting.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, you have seen Mr. Phillips, then?” said Mabel.</p>
+
+<p>Old Mrs. Brand looked at her sharply an instant, but said nothing.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t excite yourself, mother. Oliver will be back to-night.”</p>
+
+<p>The old lady drew a long breath.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t trouble about me, my dear,” she said. “I shall do very well now.
+He will be back to dinner, will he not?”</p>
+
+<p>“If the volor is not late. Now, mother, are you ready for breakfast?”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Mabel passed an afternoon of considerable agitation. It was certain that
+something had happened. The secretary, who breakfasted with her in the
+parlour looking on to the garden, had appeared strangely excited. He had
+told her that he would be away the rest of the day: Mr. Oliver had given
+him his instructions. He had refrained from all discussion of the
+Eastern question, and he had given her no news of the Paris Convention;
+he only repeated that Mr. Oliver would be back that night. Then he had
+gone of in a hurry half-an-hour later.</p>
+
+<p>The old lady seemed asleep when the girl went up afterwards, and Mabel
+did not like to disturb her. Neither did she like to leave the house; so
+she walked by herself in the garden, thinking and hoping and fearing,
+till the long shadow lay across the path, and the tumbled platform of
+roofs was bathed in a dusty green haze from the west.</p>
+
+<p>As she came in she took up the evening paper, but there was no news
+there except to the effect that the Convention would close that
+afternoon.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Twenty o’clock came, but there was no sign of Oliver. The Paris volor
+should have arrived an hour before, but Mabel, staring out into the
+darkening heavens had seen the stars come out like jewels one by one,
+but no slender winged fish pass overhead. Of course she might have
+missed it; there was no depending on its exact course; but she had seen
+it a hundred times before, and wondered unreasonably why she had not
+seen it now. But she would not sit down to dinner, and paced up and
+down in her white dress, turning again and again to the window,
+listening to the soft rush of the trains, the faint hoots from the
+track, and the musical chords from the junction a mile away. The lights
+were up by now, and the vast sweep of the towns looked like fairyland
+between the earthly light and the heavenly darkness. Why did not Oliver
+come, or at least let her know why he did not?</p>
+
+<p>Once she went upstairs, miserably anxious herself, to reassure the old
+lady, and found her again very drowsy.</p>
+
+<p>“He is not come,” she said. “I dare say he may be kept in Paris.”</p>
+
+<p>The old face on the pillow nodded and murmured, and Mabel went down
+again. It was now an hour after dinner-time.</p>
+
+<p>Oh! there were a hundred things that might have kept him. He had often
+been later than this: he might have missed the volor he meant to catch;
+the Convention might have been prolonged; he might be exhausted, and
+think it better to sleep in Paris after all, and have forgotten to wire.
+He might even have wired to Mr. Phillips, and the secretary have
+forgotten to pass on the message.</p>
+
+<p>She went at last, hopelessly, to the telephone, and looked at it. There
+it was, that round silent mouth, that little row of labelled buttons.
+She half decided to touch them one by one, and inquire whether anything
+had been heard of her husband: there was his club, his office in
+Whitehall, Mr. Phillips’s house, Parliament-house, and the rest. But she
+hesitated, telling herself to be patient. Oliver hated interference, and
+he would surely soon remember and relieve her anxiety.</p>
+
+<p>Then, even as she turned away, the bell rang sharply, and a white label
+flashed into sight.—WHITEHALL.</p>
+
+<p>She pressed the corresponding button, and, her hand shaking so much that
+she could scarcely hold the receiver to her ear, she listened.</p>
+
+<p>“Who is there?”</p>
+
+<p>Her heart leaped at the sound of her husband’s voice, tiny and minute
+across the miles of wire.</p>
+
+<p>“I—Mabel,” she said. “Alone here.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! Mabel. Very well. I am back: all is well. Now listen. Can you
+hear?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, yes.”</p>
+
+<p>“The best has happened. It is all over in the East. Felsenburgh has done
+it. Now listen. I cannot come home to-night. It will be announced in
+Paul’s House in two hours from now. We are communicating with the Press.
+Come up here to me at once. You must be present.... Can you hear?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes.”</p>
+
+<p>“Come then at once. It will be the greatest thing in history. Tell no
+one. Come before the rush begins. In half-an-hour the way will be
+stopped.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oliver.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes? Quick.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mother is ill. Shall I leave her?”</p>
+
+<p>“How ill?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, no immediate danger. The doctor has seen her.”</p>
+
+<p>There was silence for a moment.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; come then. We will go back to-night anyhow, then. Tell her we
+shall be late.”</p>
+
+<p>“Very well.”</p>
+
+<p>“... Yes, you must come. Felsenburgh will be there.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>On the same afternoon Percy received a visitor.</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing exceptional about him; and Percy, as he came
+downstairs in his walking-dress and looked at him in the light from the
+tall parlour-window, came to no conclusion at all as to his business and
+person, except that he was not a Catholic.</p>
+
+<p>“You wished to see me,” said the priest, indicating a chair.</p>
+
+<p>“I fear I must not stop long.”</p>
+
+<p>“I shall not keep you long,” said the stranger eagerly. “My business is
+done in five minutes.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy waited with his eyes cast down.</p>
+
+<p>“A—a certain person has sent me to you. She was a Catholic once; she
+wishes to return to the Church.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy made a little movement with his head. It was a message he did not
+very often receive in these days.</p>
+
+<p>“You will come, sir, will you not? You will promise me?”</p>
+
+<p>The man seemed greatly agitated; his sallow face showed a little shining
+with sweat, and his eyes were piteous.</p>
+
+<p>“Of course I will come,” said Percy, smiling.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, sir; but you do not know who she is. It—it would make a great
+stir, sir, if it was known. It must not be known, sir; you will promise
+me that, too?”</p>
+
+<p>“I must not make any promise of that kind,” said the priest gently. “I
+do not know the circumstances yet.”</p>
+
+<p>The stranger licked his lips nervously.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, sir,” he said hastily, “you will say nothing till you have seen
+her? You can promise me that.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! certainly,” said the priest.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, sir, you had better not know my name. It—it may make it easier
+for you and for me. And—and, if you please, sir, the lady is ill; you
+must come to-day, if you please, but not until the evening. Will
+twenty-two o’clock be convenient, sir?”</p>
+
+<p>“Where is it?” asked Percy abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>“It—it is near Croydon junction. I will write down the address
+presently. And you will not come until twenty-two o’clock, sir?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why not now?”</p>
+
+<p>“Because the—the others may be there. They will be away then; I know
+that.”</p>
+
+<p>This was rather suspicious, Percy thought: discreditable plots had been
+known before. But he could not refuse outright.</p>
+
+<p>“Why does she not send for her parish-priest?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“She she does not know who he is, sir; she saw you once in the
+Cathedral, sir, and asked you for your name. Do you remember, sir?—an
+old lady?”</p>
+
+<p>Percy did dimly remember something of the kind a month or two before;
+but he could not be certain, and said so.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, sir, you will come, will you not?”</p>
+
+<p>“I must communicate with Father Dolan,” said the priest. “If he gives me
+permission—-”</p>
+
+<p>“If you please, sir, Father—Father Dolan must not know her name. You
+will not tell him?”</p>
+
+<p>“I do not know it myself yet,” said the priest, smiling.</p>
+
+<p>The stranger sat back abruptly at that, and his face worked.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, sir, let me tell you this first. This old lady’s son is my
+employer, and a very prominent Communist. She lives with him and his
+wife. The other two will be away to-night. That is why I am asking you
+all this. And now, you will come, sir?”</p>
+
+<p>Percy looked at him steadily for a moment or two. Certainly, if this was
+a conspiracy, the conspirators were feeble folk. Then he answered:</p>
+
+<p>“I will come, sir; I promise. Now the name.”</p>
+
+<p>The stranger again licked his lips nervously, and glanced timidly from
+side to side. Then he seemed to gather his resolution; he leaned forward
+and whispered sharply.</p>
+
+<p>“The old lady’s name is Brand, sir—the mother of Mr. Oliver Brand.”</p>
+
+<p>For a moment Percy was bewildered. It was too extraordinary to be true.
+He knew Mr. Oliver Brand’s name only too well; it was he who, by God’s
+permission, was doing more in England at this moment against the
+Catholic cause than any other man alive; and it was he whom the
+Trafalgar Square incident had raised into such eminent popularity. And
+now, here was his mother—-</p>
+
+<p>He turned fiercely upon the man.</p>
+
+<p>“I do not know what you are, sir—whether you believe in God or not; but
+will you swear to me on your religion and your honour that all this is
+true?”</p>
+
+<p>The timid eyes met his, and wavered; but it was the wavering of
+weakness, not of treachery.</p>
+
+<p>“I—I swear it, sir; by God Almighty.”</p>
+
+<p>“Are you a Catholic?”</p>
+
+<p>The man shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“But I believe in God,” he said. “At least, I think so.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy leaned back, trying to realise exactly what it all meant. There
+was no triumph in his mind—that kind of emotion was not his weakness;
+there was fear of a kind, excitement, bewilderment, and under all a
+satisfaction that God’s grace was so sovereign. If it could reach this
+woman, who could be too far removed for it to take effect? Presently he
+noticed the other looking at him anxiously.</p>
+
+<p>“You are afraid, sir? You are not going back from your promise?”</p>
+
+<p>That dispersed the cloud a little, and Percy smiled.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! no,” he said. “I will be there at twenty-two o’clock. ... Is death
+imminent?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, sir; it is syncope. She is recovered a little this morning.”</p>
+
+<p>The priest passed his hand over his eyes and stood up.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I will be there,” he said. “Shall you be there, sir?”</p>
+
+<p>The other shook his head, standing up too.</p>
+
+<p>“I must be with Mr. Brand, sir; there is to be a meeting to-night; but I
+must not speak of that.... No, sir; ask for Mrs. Brand, and say that she
+is expecting you. They will take you upstairs at once.”</p>
+
+<p>“I must not say I am a priest, I suppose?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, sir; if you please.”</p>
+
+<p>He drew out a pocket-book, scribbled in it a moment, tore out the sheet,
+and handed it to the priest.</p>
+
+<p>“The address, sir. Will you kindly destroy that when you have copied it?
+I—I do not wish to lose my place, sir, if it can be helped.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy stood twisting the paper in his fingers a moment.</p>
+
+<p>“Why are you not a Catholic yourself?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>The man shook his head mutely. Then he took up his hat, and went towards
+the door.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Percy passed a very emotional afternoon.</p>
+
+<p>For the last month or two little had happened to encourage him. He had
+been obliged to report half-a-dozen more significant secessions, and
+hardly a conversion of any kind. There was no doubt at all that the tide
+was setting steadily against the Church. The mad act in Trafalgar
+Square, too, had done incalculable harm last week: men were saying more
+than ever, and the papers storming, that the Church’s reliance on the
+supernatural was belied by every one of her public acts. “Scratch a
+Catholic and find an assassin” had been the text of a leading article in
+the <i>New People</i>, and Percy himself was dismayed at the folly of the
+attempt. It was true that the Archbishop had formally repudiated both
+the act and the motive from the Cathedral pulpit, but that too had only
+served as an opportunity hastily taken up by the principal papers, to
+recall the continual policy of the Church to avail herself of violence
+while she repudiated the violent. The horrible death of the man had in
+no way appeased popular indignation; there were not even wanting
+suggestions that the man had been seen coming out of Archbishop’s House
+an hour before the attempt at assassination had taken place.</p>
+
+<p>And now here, with dramatic swiftness, had come a message that the
+hero’s own mother desired reconciliation with the Church that had
+attempted to murder her son.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Again and again that afternoon, as Percy sped northwards on his visit to
+a priest in Worcester, and southwards once more as the lights began to
+shine towards evening, he wondered whether this were not a plot after
+all—some kind of retaliation, an attempt to trap him. Yet he had
+promised to say nothing, and to go.</p>
+
+<p>He finished his daily letter after dinner as usual, with a curious sense
+of fatality; addressed and stamped it. Then he went downstairs, in his
+walking-dress, to Father Blackmore’s room.</p>
+
+<p>“Will you hear my confession, father?” he said abruptly.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>Victoria Station, still named after the great nineteenth-century Queen,
+was neither more nor less busy than usual as he came into it
+half-an-hour later. The vast platform, sunk now nearly two hundred feet
+below the ground level, showed the double crowd of passengers entering
+and leaving town. Those on the extreme left, towards whom Percy began to
+descend in the open glazed lift, were by far the most numerous, and the
+stream at the lift-entrance made it necessary for him to move slowly.</p>
+
+<p>He arrived at last, walking in the soft light on the noiseless ribbed
+rubber, and stood by the door of the long car that ran straight through
+to the Junction. It was the last of a series of a dozen or more, each of
+which slid off minute by minute. Then, still watching the endless
+movement of the lifts ascending and descending between the entrances of
+the upper end of the station, he stepped in and sat down.</p>
+
+<p>He felt quiet now that he had actually started. He had made his
+confession, just in order to make certain of his own soul, though
+scarcely expecting any definite danger, and sat now, his grey suit and
+straw hat in no way distinguishing him as a priest (for a general leave
+was given by the authorities to dress so for any adequate reason). Since
+the case was not imminent, he had not brought stocks or pyx—Father
+Dolan had wired to him that he might fetch them if he wished from St.
+Joseph’s, near the Junction. He had only the violet thread in his
+pocket, such as was customary for sick calls.</p>
+
+<p>He was sliding along peaceably enough, fixing his eyes on the empty seat
+opposite, and trying to preserve complete collectedness when the car
+abruptly stopped. He looked out, astonished, and saw by the white
+enamelled walks twenty feet from the window that they were already in
+the tunnel. The stoppage might arise from many causes, and he was not
+greatly excited, nor did it seem that others in the carriage took it
+very seriously; he could hear, after a moment’s silence, the talking
+recommence beyond the partition.</p>
+
+<p>Then there came, echoed by the walls, the sound of shouting from far
+away, mingled with hoots and chords; it grew louder. The talking in the
+carriage stopped. He heard a window thrown up, and the next instant a
+car tore past, going back to the station although on the down line. This
+must be looked into, thought Percy: something certainly was happening;
+so he got up and went across the empty compartment to the further
+window. Again came the crying of voices, again the signals, and once
+more a car whirled past, followed almost immediately by another. There
+was a jerk—a smooth movement. Percy staggered and fell into a seat, as
+the carriage in which he was seated itself began to move backwards.</p>
+
+<p>There was a clamour now in the next compartment, and Percy made his way
+there through the door, only to find half-a-dozen men with their heads
+thrust from the windows, who paid absolutely no attention to his
+inquiries. So he stood there, aware that they knew no more than himself,
+waiting for an explanation from some one. It was disgraceful, he told
+himself, that any misadventure should so disorganise the line.</p>
+
+<p>Twice the car stopped; each time it moved on again after a hoot or two,
+and at last drew up at the platform whence it had started, although a
+hundred yards further out.</p>
+
+<p>Ah! there was no doubt that something had happened! The instant he
+opened the door a great roar met his ears, and as he sprang on to the
+platform and looked up at the end of the station, he began to
+understand.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>From right to left of the huge interior, across the platforms, swelling
+every instant, surged an enormous swaying, roaring crowd. The flight of
+steps, twenty yards broad, used only in cases of emergency, resembled a
+gigantic black cataract nearly two hundred feet in height. Each car as
+it drew up discharged more and more men and women, who ran like ants
+towards the assembly of their fellows. The noise was indescribable, the
+shouting of men, the screaming of women, the clang and hoot of the huge
+machines, and three or four times the brazen cry of a trumpet, as an
+emergency door was flung open overhead, and a small swirl of crowd
+poured through it towards the streets beyond. But after one look Percy
+looked no more at the people; for there, high up beneath the clock, on
+the Government signal board, flared out monstrous letters of fire,
+telling in Esperanto and English, the message for which England had
+grown sick. He read it a dozen times before he moved, staring, as at a
+supernatural sight which might denote the triumph of either heaven or
+hell.</p>
+
+<p>“EASTERN CONVENTION DISPERSED.</p>
+
+<p>PEACE, NOT WAR.</p>
+
+<p>UNIVERSAL BROTHERHOOD ESTABLISHED.</p>
+
+<p>FELSENBURGH IN LONDON TO-NIGHT.”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>It was not until nearly two hours later that Percy was standing at the
+house beyond the Junction.</p>
+
+<p>He had argued, expostulated, threatened, but the officials were like
+men possessed. Half of them had disappeared in the rush to the City, for
+it had leaked out, in spite of the Government’s precautions, that Paul’s
+House, known once as St. Paul’s Cathedral, was to be the scene of
+Felsenburgh’s reception. The others seemed demented; one man on the
+platform had dropped dead from nervous exhaustion, but no one appeared
+to care; and the body lay huddled beneath a seat. Again and again Percy
+had been swept away by a rush, as he struggled from platform to platform
+in his search for a car that would take him to Croydon. It seemed that
+there was none to be had, and the useless carriages collected like
+drift-wood between the platforms, as others whirled up from the country
+bringing loads of frantic, delirious men, who vanished like smoke from
+the white rubber-boards. The platforms were continually crowded, and as
+continually emptied, and it was not until half-an-hour before midnight
+that the block began to move outwards again.</p>
+
+<p>Well, he was here at last, dishevelled, hatless and exhausted, looking
+up at the dark windows.</p>
+
+<p>He scarcely knew what he thought of the whole matter. War, of course,
+was terrible. And such a war as this would have been too terrible for
+the imagination to visualise; but to the priest’s mind there were other
+things even worse. What of universal peace—peace, that is to say,
+established by others than Christ’s method? Or was God behind even this?
+The questions were hopeless.</p>
+
+<p>Felsenburgh—it was he then who had done this thing—this thing
+undoubtedly greater than any secular event hitherto known in
+civilisation. What manner of man was he? What was his character, his
+motive, his method? How would he use his success?... So the points flew
+before him like a stream of sparks, each, it might be, harmless; each,
+equally, capable of setting a world on fire. Meanwhile here was an old
+woman who desired to be reconciled with God before she died....</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>He touched the button again, three or four times, and waited. Then a
+light sprang out overhead, and he knew that he was heard.</p>
+
+<p>“I was sent for,” he exclaimed to the bewildered maid. “I should have
+been here at twenty-two: I was prevented by the rush.”</p>
+
+<p>She babbled out a question at him.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, it is true, I believe,” he said. “It is peace, not war. Kindly
+take me upstairs.”</p>
+
+<p>He went through the hall with a curious sense of guilt. This was Brand’s
+house then—that vivid orator, so bitterly eloquent against God; and
+here was he, a priest, slinking in under cover of night. Well, well, it
+was not of his appointment.</p>
+
+<p>At the door of an upstairs room the maid turned to him.</p>
+
+<p>“A doctor, sir?” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“That is my affair,” said Percy briefly, and opened the door.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>A little wailing cry broke from the corner, before he had time to close
+the door again.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! thank God! I thought He had forgotten me. You are a priest,
+father?”</p>
+
+<p>“I am a priest. Do you not remember seeing me in the Cathedral?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, yes, sir; I saw you praying, father. Oh! thank God, thank God!”</p>
+
+<p>Percy stood looking down at her a moment, seeing her flushed old face in
+the nightcap, her bright sunken eyes and her tremulous hands. Yes; this
+was genuine enough.</p>
+
+<p>“Now, my child,” he said, “tell me.”</p>
+
+<p>“My confession, father.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy drew out the purple thread, slipped it over his shoulders, and sat
+down by the bed.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>But she would not let him go for a while after that.</p>
+
+<p>“Tell me, father. When will you bring me Holy Communion?”</p>
+
+<p>He hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>“I understand that Mr. Brand and his wife know nothing of all this?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, father.”</p>
+
+<p>“Tell me, are you very ill?”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know, father. They will not tell me. I thought I was gone last
+night.”</p>
+
+<p>“When would you wish me to bring you Holy Communion? I will do as you
+say.”</p>
+
+<p>“Shall I send to you in a day or two? Father, ought I to tell him?”</p>
+
+<p>“You are not obliged.”</p>
+
+<p>“I will if I ought.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, think about it, and let me know.... You have heard what has
+happened?”</p>
+
+<p>She nodded, but almost uninterestedly; and Percy was conscious of a tiny
+prick of compunction at his own heart. After all, the reconciling of a
+soul to God was a greater thing than the reconciling of East to West.</p>
+
+<p>“It may make a difference to Mr. Brand,” he said. “He will be a great
+man, now, you know.”</p>
+
+<p>She still looked at him in silence, smiling a little. Percy was
+astonished at the youthfulness of that old face. Then her face changed.</p>
+
+<p>“Father, I must not keep you; but tell me this—Who is this man?”</p>
+
+<p>“Felsenburgh?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes.”</p>
+
+<p>“No one knows. We shall know more to-morrow. He is in town to-night.”</p>
+
+<p>She looked so strange that Percy for an instant thought it was a
+seizure. Her face seemed to fall away in a kind of emotion, half
+cunning, half fear.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, my child?”</p>
+
+<p>“Father, I am a little afraid when I think of that man. He cannot harm
+me, can he? I am safe now? I am a Catholic—?”</p>
+
+<p>“My child, of course you are safe. What is the matter? How can this man
+injure you?”</p>
+
+<p>But the look of terror was still there, and Percy came a step nearer.</p>
+
+<p>“You must not give way to fancies,” he said. “Just commit yourself to
+our Blessed Lord. This man can do you no harm.”</p>
+
+<p>He was speaking now as to a child; but it was of no use. Her old mouth
+was still sucked in, and her eyes wandered past him into the gloom of
+the room behind.</p>
+
+<p>“My child, tell me what is the matter. What do you know of Felsenburgh?
+You have been dreaming.”</p>
+
+<p>She nodded suddenly and energetically, and Percy for the first time felt
+his heart give a little leap of apprehension. Was this old woman out of
+her mind, then? Or why was it that that name seemed to him sinister?
+Then he remembered that Father Blackmore had once talked like this. He
+made an effort, and sat down once more.</p>
+
+<p>“Now tell me plainly,” he said. “You have been dreaming. What have you
+dreamt?”</p>
+
+<p>She raised herself a little in bed, again glancing round the room; then
+she put out her old ringed hand for one of his, and he gave it,
+wondering.</p>
+
+<p>“The door is shut, father? There is no one listening?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, no, my child. Why are you trembling? You must not be
+superstitious.”</p>
+
+<p>“Father, I will tell you. Dreams are nonsense, are they not? Well, at
+least, this is what I dreamt.</p>
+
+<p>“I was somewhere in a great house; I do not know where it was. It was a
+house I have never seen. It was one of the old houses, and it was very
+dark. I was a child, I thought, and I was ... I was afraid of something.
+The passages were all dark, and I went crying in the dark, looking for a
+light, and there was none. Then I heard a voice talking, a great way
+off. Father—-”</p>
+
+<p>Her hand gripped his more tightly, and again her eyes went round the
+room.</p>
+
+<p>With great difficulty Percy repressed a sigh. Yet he dared not leave her
+just now. The house was very still; only from outside now and again
+sounded the clang of the cars, as they sped countrywards again from the
+congested town, and once the sound of great shouting. He wondered what
+time it was.</p>
+
+<p>“Had you better tell me now?” he asked, still talking with a patient
+simplicity. “What time will they be back?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not yet,” she whispered. “Mabel said not till two o’clock. What time
+is it now, father?”</p>
+
+<p>He pulled out his watch with his disengaged hand.</p>
+
+<p>“It is not yet one,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Very well, listen, father.... I was in this house; and I heard that
+talking; and I ran along the passages, till I saw light below a door;
+and then I stopped.... Nearer, father.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy was a little awed in spite of himself. Her voice had suddenly
+dropped to a whisper, and her old eyes seemed to hold him strangely.</p>
+
+<p>“I stopped, father; I dared not go in. I could hear the talking, and I
+could see the light; and I dared not go in. Father, it was Felsenburgh
+in that room.”</p>
+
+<p>From beneath came the sudden snap of a door; then the sound of
+footsteps. Percy turned his head abruptly, and at the same moment heard
+a swift indrawn breath from the old woman.</p>
+
+<p>“Hush!” he said. “Who is that?”</p>
+
+<p>Two voices were talking in the hall below now, and at the sound the old
+woman relaxed her hold.</p>
+
+<p>“I—I thought it to be him,” she murmured.</p>
+
+<p>Percy stood up; he could see that she did not understand the situation.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, my child,” he said quietly, “but who is it?”</p>
+
+<p>“My son and his wife,” she said; then her face changed once more.
+“Why—why, father—-”</p>
+
+<p>Her voice died in her throat, as a step vibrated outside. For a moment
+there was complete silence; then a whisper, plainly audible, in a girl’s
+voice.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, her light is burning. Come in, Oliver, but softly.”</p>
+
+<p>Then the handle turned.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>There was an exclamation, then silence, as a tall, beautiful girl with
+flushed face and shining grey eyes came forward and stopped, followed by
+a man whom Percy knew at once from his pictures. A little whimpering
+sounded from the bed, and the priest lifted his hand instinctively to
+silence it.</p>
+
+<p>“Why,” said Mabel; and then stared at the man with the young face and
+the white hair.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver opened his lips and closed them again. He, too, had a strange
+excitement in his face. Then he spoke.</p>
+
+<p>“Who is this?” he said deliberately.</p>
+
+<p>“Oliver,” cried the girl, turning to him abruptly, “this is the priest I
+saw—-”</p>
+
+<p>“A priest!” said the other, and came forward a step. “Why, I thought—-”</p>
+
+
+<p>Percy drew a breath to steady that maddening vibration in his throat.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, I am a priest,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Again the whimpering broke out from the bed; and Percy, half turning
+again to silence it, saw the girl mechanically loosen the clasp of the
+thin dust cloak over her white dress.</p>
+
+<p>“You sent for him, mother?” snapped the man, with a tremble in his
+voice, and with a sudden jerk forward of his whole body. But the girl
+put out her hand.</p>
+
+<p>“Quietly, my dear,” she said. “Now, sir—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, I am a priest,” said Percy again, strung up now to a desperate
+resistance of will, hardly knowing what he said.</p>
+
+<p>“And you come to my house!” exclaimed the man. He came a step nearer,
+and half recoiled. “You swear you are a priest?” he said. “You have been
+here all this evening?”</p>
+
+<p>“Since midnight.”</p>
+
+<p>“And you are not—-” he stopped again.</p>
+
+<p>Mabel stepped straight between them.</p>
+
+<p>“Oliver,” she said, still with that air of suppressed excitement, “we
+must not have a scene here. The poor dear is too ill. Will you come
+downstairs, sir?”</p>
+
+<p>Percy took a step towards the door, and Oliver moved slightly aside.
+Then the priest stopped, turned and lifted his hand.</p>
+
+<p>“God bless you!” he said simply, to the muttering figure in the bed.
+Then he went out, and waited outside the door.</p>
+
+<p>He could hear a low talking within; then a compassionate murmur from the
+girl’s voice; then Oliver was beside him, trembling all over, as white
+as ashes, and made a silent gesture as he went past him down the stairs.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The whole thing seemed to Percy like some incredible dream; it was all
+so unexpected, so untrue to life. He felt conscious of an enormous shame
+at the sordidness of the affair, and at the same time of a kind of
+hopeless recklessness. The worst had happened and the best—that was his
+sole comfort.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver pushed a door open, touched a button, and went through into the
+suddenly lit room, followed by Percy. Still in silence, he pointed to a
+chair, Percy sat down, and Oliver stood before the fireplace, his hands
+deep in the pockets of his jacket, slightly turned away.</p>
+
+<p>Percy’s concentrated senses became aware of every detail of the
+room—the deep springy green carpet, smooth under his feet, the straight
+hanging thin silk curtains, the half-dozen low tables with a wealth of
+flowers upon them, and the books that lined the walls. The whole room
+was heavy with the scent of roses, although the windows were wide, and
+the night-breeze stirred the curtains continually. It was a woman’s
+room, he told himself. Then he looked at the man’s figure, lithe, tense,
+upright; the dark grey suit not unlike his own, the beautiful curve of
+the jaw, the clear pale complexion, the thin nose, the protruding curve
+of idealism over the eyes, and the dark hair. It was a poet’s face, he
+told himself, and the whole personality was a living and vivid one. Then
+he turned a little and rose as the door opened, and Mabel came in,
+closing it behind her.</p>
+
+<p>She came straight across to her husband, and put a hand on his shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>“Sit down, my dear,” she said. “We must talk a little. Please sit down,
+sir.”</p>
+
+<p>The three sat down, Percy on one side, and the husband and wife on a
+straight-backed settle opposite.</p>
+
+<p>The girl began again.</p>
+
+<p>“This must be arranged at once,” she said, “but we must have no tragedy.
+Oliver, do you understand? You must not make a scene. Leave this to me.”</p>
+
+<p>She spoke with a curious gaiety; and Percy to his astonishment saw that
+she was quite sincere: there was not the hint of cynicism.</p>
+
+<p>“Oliver, my dear,” she said again, “don’t mouth like that! It is all
+perfectly right. I am going to manage this.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy saw a venomous look directed at him by the man; the girl saw it
+too, moving her strong humorous eyes from one to the other. She put her
+hand on his knee.</p>
+
+<p>“Oliver, attend! Don’t look at this gentleman so bitterly. He has done
+no harm.”</p>
+
+<p>“No harm!” whispered the other.</p>
+
+<p>“No—no harm in the world. What does it matter what that poor dear
+upstairs thinks? Now, sir, would you mind telling us why you came here?”</p>
+
+<p>Percy drew another breath. He had not expected this line.</p>
+
+<p>“I came here to receive Mrs. Brand back into the Church,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“And you have done so?”</p>
+
+<p>“I have done so.”</p>
+
+<p>“Would you mind telling us your name? It makes it so much more
+convenient.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy hesitated. Then he determined to meet her on her own ground.</p>
+
+<p>“Certainly. My name is Franklin.”</p>
+
+<p>“Father Franklin?” asked the girl, with just the faintest tinge of
+mocking emphasis on the first word.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. Father Percy Franklin, from Archbishop’s House, Westminster,” said
+the priest steadily.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, then, Father Percy Franklin; can you tell us why you came here? I
+mean, who sent for you?”</p>
+
+<p>“Mrs. Brand sent for me.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, but by what means?”</p>
+
+<p>“That I must not say.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, very good.... May we know what good comes of being ‘received into
+the Church?’”</p>
+
+<p>“By being received into the Church, the soul is reconciled to God.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! (Oliver, be quiet.) And how do you do it, Father Franklin?”</p>
+
+<p>Percy stood up abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>“This is no good, madam,” he said. “What is the use of these questions?”</p>
+
+<p>The girl looked at him in open-eyed astonishment, still with her hand on
+her husband’s knee.</p>
+
+<p>“The use, Father Franklin! Why, we want to know. There is no church law
+against your telling us, is there?”</p>
+
+<p>Percy hesitated again. He did not understand in the least what she was
+after. Then he saw that he would give them an advantage if he lost his
+head at all: so he sat down again.</p>
+
+<p>“Certainly not. I will tell you if you wish to know. I heard Mrs.
+Brand’s confession, and gave her absolution.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! yes; and that does it, then? And what next?”</p>
+
+<p>“She ought to receive Holy Communion, and anointing, if she is in danger
+of death.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver twitched suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>“Christ!” he said softly.</p>
+
+<p>“Oliver!” cried the girl entreatingly. “Please leave this to me. It is
+much better so.—And then, I suppose, Father Franklin, you want to give
+those other things to my mother, too?”</p>
+
+<p>“They are not absolutely necessary,” said the priest, feeling, he did
+not know why, that he was somehow playing a losing game.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! they are not necessary? But you would like to?”</p>
+
+<p>“I shall do so if possible. But I have done what is necessary.”</p>
+
+<p>It required all his will to keep quiet. He was as a man who had armed
+himself in steel, only to find that his enemy was in the form of a
+subtle vapour. He simply had not an idea what to do next. He would have
+given anything for the man to have risen and flown at his throat, for
+this girl was too much for them both.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” she said softly. “Well, it is hardly to be expected that my
+husband should give you leave to come here again. But I am very glad
+that you have done what you think necessary. No doubt it will be a
+satisfaction to you, Father Franklin, and to the poor old thing
+upstairs, too. While we—- <i>we</i>—” she pressed her husband’s knee—“we
+do not mind at all. Oh!—but there is one thing more.”</p>
+
+<p>“If you please,” said Percy, wondering what on earth was coming.</p>
+
+<p>“You Christians—forgive me if I say anything rude—but, you know, you
+Christians have a reputation for counting heads, and making the most of
+converts. We shall be so much obliged, Father Franklin, if you will
+give us your word not to advertise this—this incident. It would
+distress my husband, and give him a great deal of trouble.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mrs. Brand—-” began the priest.</p>
+
+<p>“One moment.... You see, we have not treated you badly. There has been
+no violence. We will promise not to make scenes with my mother. Will you
+promise us that?”</p>
+
+<p>Percy had had time to consider, and he answered instantly.</p>
+
+<p>“Certainly, I will promise that.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel sighed contentedly.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, that is all right. We are so much obliged.... And I think we may
+say this, that perhaps after consideration my husband may see his way to
+letting you come here again to do Communion and—and the other thing—-”</p>
+
+<p>Again that spasm shook the man beside her.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, we will see about that. At any rate, we know your address, and
+can let you know.... By the way, Father Franklin, are you going back to
+Westminster to-night?”</p>
+
+<p>He bowed.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah! I hope you will get through. You will find London very much
+excited. Perhaps you heard—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Felsenburgh?” said Percy.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. Julian Felsenburgh,” said the girl softly, again with that strange
+excitement suddenly alight in her eyes. “Julian Felsenburgh,” she
+repeated. “He is there, you know. He will stay in England for the
+present.”</p>
+
+<p>Again Percy was conscious of that slight touch of fear at the mention of
+that name.</p>
+
+<p>“I understand there is to be peace,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>The girl rose and her husband with her.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” she said, almost compassionately, “there is to be peace. Peace at
+last.” (She moved half a step towards him, and her face glowed like a
+rose of fire. Her hand rose a little.) “Go back to London, Father
+Franklin, and use your eyes. You will see him, I dare say, and you will
+see more besides.” (Her voice began to vibrate.) “And you will
+understand, perhaps, why we have treated you like this—why we are no
+longer afraid of you—why we are willing that my mother should do as
+she pleases. Oh! you will understand, Father Franklin if not to-night,
+to-morrow; or if not to-morrow, at least in a very short time.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mabel!” cried her husband.</p>
+
+<p>The girl wheeled, and threw her arms round him, and kissed him on the
+mouth.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! I am not ashamed, Oliver, my dear. Let him go and see for himself.
+Good-night, Father Franklin.”</p>
+
+<p>As he went towards the door, hearing the ping of the bell that some one
+touched in the room behind him, he turned once more, dazed and
+bewildered; and there were the two, husband and wife, standing in the
+soft, sunny light, as if transfigured. The girl had her arm round the
+man’s shoulder, and stood upright and radiant as a pillar of fire; and
+even on the man’s face there was no anger now—nothing but an almost
+supernatural pride and confidence. They were both smiling.</p>
+
+<p>Then Percy passed out into the soft, summer night.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>Percy understood nothing except that he was afraid, as he sat in the
+crowded car that whirled him up to London. He scarcely even heard the
+talk round him, although it was loud and continuous; and what he heard
+meant little to him. He understood only that there had been strange
+scenes, that London was said to have gone suddenly mad, that Felsenburgh
+had spoken that night in Paul’s House.</p>
+
+<p>He was afraid at the way in which he had been treated, and he asked
+himself dully again and again what it was that had inspired that
+treatment; it seemed that he had been in the presence of the
+supernatural; he was conscious of shivering a little, and of the
+symptoms of an intolerable sleepiness. It was scarcely strange to him
+that he should be sitting in a crowded car at two o’clock of a summer
+dawn.</p>
+
+<p>Thrice the car stopped, and he stared out at the signs of confusion that
+were everywhere; at the figures that ran in the twilight between the
+tracks, at a couple of wrecked carriages, a tumble of tarpaulins; he
+listened mechanically to the hoots and cries that sounded everywhere.</p>
+
+<p>As he stepped out at last on to the platform, he found it very much as
+he had left it two hours before. There was the same desperate rush as
+the car discharged its load, the same dead body beneath the seat; and
+above all, as he ran helplessly behind the crowd, scarcely knowing
+whither he ran or why, above him burned the same stupendous message
+beneath the clock. Then he found himself in the lift, and a minute later
+he was out on the steps behind the station.</p>
+
+<p>There, too, was an astonishing sight. The lamps still burned overhead,
+but beyond them lay the first pale streaks of the false dawn. The street
+that ran now straight to the old royal palace, uniting there, as at the
+centre of a web, with those that came from Westminster, the Mall and
+Hyde Park, was one solid pavement of heads. On this side and that rose
+up the hotels and “Houses of Joy,” the windows all ablaze with light,
+solemn and triumphant as if to welcome a king; while far ahead against
+the sky stood the monstrous palace outlined in fire, and alight from
+within like all other houses within view. The noise was bewildering. It
+was impossible to distinguish one sound from another. Voices, horns,
+drums, the tramp of a thousand footsteps on the rubber pavements, the
+sombre roll of wheels from the station behind—all united in one
+overwhelmingly solemn booming, overscored by shriller notes.</p>
+
+<p>It was impossible to move.</p>
+
+<p>He found himself standing in a position of extraordinary advantage, at
+the very top of the broad flight of steps that led down into the old
+station yard, now a wide space that united, on the left the broad road
+to the palace, and on the right Victoria Street, that showed like all
+else one vivid perspective of lights and heads. Against the sky on his
+right rose up the illuminated head of the Cathedral Campanile. It
+appeared to him as if he had known that in some previous existence.</p>
+
+<p>He edged himself mechanically a foot or two to his left, till he clasped
+a pillar; then he waited, trying not to analyse his emotions, but to
+absorb them.</p>
+
+<p>Gradually he became aware that this crowd was as no other that he had
+ever seen. To his psychical sense it seemed to him that it possessed a
+unity unlike any other. There was magnetism in the air. There was a
+sensation as if a creative act were in process, whereby thousands of
+individual cells were being welded more and more perfectly every instant
+into one huge sentient being with one will, one emotion, and one head.
+The crying of voices seemed significant only as the stirrings of this
+creative power which so expressed itself. Here rested this giant
+humanity, stretching to his sight in living limbs so far as he could see
+on every side, waiting, waiting for some consummation—stretching, too,
+as his tired brain began to guess, down every thoroughfare of the vast
+city.</p>
+
+<p>He did not even ask himself for what they waited. He knew, yet he did
+not know. He knew it was for a revelation—for something that should
+crown their aspirations, and fix them so for ever.</p>
+
+<p>He had a sense that he had seen all this before; and, like a child, he
+began to ask himself where it could have happened, until he remembered
+that it was so that he had once dreamt of the Judgment Day—of humanity
+gathered to meet Jesus Christ—Jesus Christ! Ah! how tiny that Figure
+seemed to him now—how far away—real indeed, but insignificant to
+himself—how hopelessly apart from this tremendous life! He glanced up
+at the Campanile. Yes; there was a piece of the True Cross there, was
+there not?—a little piece of the wood on which a Poor Man had died
+twenty centuries ago.... Well, well. It was a long way off....</p>
+
+<p>He did not quite understand what was happening to him. “Sweet Jesus, be
+to me not a Judge but a Saviour,” he whispered beneath his breath,
+gripping the granite of the pillar; and a moment later knew how futile
+was that prayer. It was gone like a breath in this vast, vivid
+atmosphere of man. He had said mass, had he not? this morning—in white
+vestments.—Yes; he had believed it all then—desperately, but truly;
+and now....</p>
+
+<p>To look into the future was as useless as to look into the past. There
+was no future, and no past: it was all one eternal instant, present and
+final....</p>
+
+<p>Then he let go of effort, and again began to see with his bodily eyes.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The dawn was coming up the sky now, a steady soft brightening that
+appeared in spite of its sovereignty to be as nothing compared with the
+brilliant light of the streets. “We need no sun,” he whispered, smiling
+piteously; “no sun or light of a candle. We have our light on earth—the
+light that lighteneth every man....”</p>
+
+<p>The Campanile seemed further away than ever now, in that ghostly glimmer
+of dawn—more and more helpless every moment, compared with the
+beautiful vivid shining of the streets.</p>
+
+<p>Then he listened to the sounds, and it seemed to him as if somewhere,
+far down eastwards, there was a silence beginning. He jerked his head
+impatiently, as a man behind him began to talk rapidly and confusedly.
+Why would he not be silent, and let silence be heard?... The man stopped
+presently, and out of the distance there swelled up a roar, as soft as
+the roll of a summer tide; it passed up towards him from the right; it
+was about him, dinning in his ears. There was no longer any individual
+voice: it was the breathing of the giant that had been born; he was
+crying out too; he did not know what he said, but he could not be
+silent. His veins and nerves seemed alight with wine; and as he stared
+down the long street, hearing the huge cry ebb from him and move toward
+the palace, he knew why he had cried, and why he was now silent.</p>
+
+<p>A slender, fish-shaped thing, as white as milk, as ghostly as a shadow,
+and as beautiful as the dawn, slid into sight half-a-mile away, turned
+and came towards him, floating, as it seemed, on the very wave of
+silence that it created, up, up the long curving street on outstretched
+wings, not twenty feet above the heads of the crowd. There was one great
+sigh, and then silence once more.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>When Percy could think consciously again—for his will was only capable
+of efforts as a clock of ticks—the strange white thing was nearer. He
+told himself that he had seen a hundred such before; and at the same
+instant that this was different from all others.</p>
+
+<p>Then it was nearer still, floating slowly, slowly, like a gull over the
+sea; he could make out its smooth nose, its low parapet beyond, the
+steersman’s head motionless; he could even hear now the soft winnowing
+of the screw—and then he saw that for which he had waited.</p>
+
+<p>High on the central deck there stood a chair, draped, too, in white,
+with some insignia visible above its back; and in the chair sat the
+figure of a man, motionless and lonely. He made no sign as he came; his
+dark dress showed vividedly against the whiteness; his head was raised,
+and he turned it gently now and again from side to side.</p>
+
+<p>It came nearer still, in the profound stillness; the head turned, and
+for an instant the face was plainly visible in the soft, radiant light.</p>
+
+<p>It was a pale face, strongly marked, as of a young man, with arched,
+black eyebrows, thin lips, and white hair.</p>
+
+<p>Then the face turned once more, the steersman shifted his head, and the
+beautiful shape, wheeling a little, passed the corner, and moved up
+towards the palace.</p>
+
+<p>There was an hysterical yelp somewhere, a cry, and again the tempestuous
+groan broke out.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="BOOK_II-THE_ENCOUNTER">BOOK II-THE ENCOUNTER</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="2CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>Oliver Brand was seated at his desk, on the evening of the next day,
+reading the leading article of the <i>New People</i>, evening edition.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>“We have had time,” he read, “to recover ourselves a little from the
+intoxication of last night. Before embarking on prophecy, it will be as
+well to recall the facts. Up to yesterday evening our anxiety with
+regard to the Eastern crisis continued; and when twenty-one o’clock
+struck there were not more than forty persons in London—the English
+delegates, that is to say—who knew positively that the danger was over.
+Between that moment and half-an-hour later the Government took a few
+discreet steps: a select number of persons were informed; the police
+were called out, with half-a-dozen regiments, to preserve order; Paul’s
+House was cleared; the railroad companies were warned; and at the half
+hour precisely the announcement was made by means of the electric
+placards in every quarter of London, as well as in all large provincial
+towns. We have not space now to adequately describe the admirable manner
+in which the public authorities did their duty; it is enough to say that
+not more than seventy fatalities took place in the whole of London; nor
+is it our business to criticise the action of the Government, in
+choosing this mode of making the announcement.</p>
+
+<p>“By twenty-two o’clock Paul’s House was filled in every corner, the Old
+Choir was reserved for members of Parliament and public officials, the
+quarter-dome galleries were filled with ladies, and to the rest of the
+floor the public was freely admitted. The volor-police also inform us
+now that for about the distance of one mile in every direction round
+this centre every thoroughfare was blocked with pedestrians, and, two
+hours later, as we all know, practically all the main streets of the
+whole of London were in the same condition.</p>
+
+<p>“It was an excellent choice by which Mr. OLIVER BRAND was selected as
+the first speaker. His arm was still in bandages; and the appeal of his
+figure as well as his passionate words struck the first explicit note of
+the evening. A report of his words will be found in another column. In
+their turns, the PRIME MINISTER, Mr. SNOWFORD, the FIRST MINISTER OF THE
+ADMIRALTY, THE SECRETARY FOR EASTERN AFFAIRS, and LORD PEMBERTON, all
+spoke a few words, corroborating the extraordinary news. At a quarter
+before twenty-three, the noise of cheering outside announced the arrival
+of the American delegates from Paris, and one by one these ascended the
+platform by the south gates of the Old Choir. Each spoke in turn. It is
+impossible to appreciate words spoken at such a moment as this; but
+perhaps it is not invidious to name Mr. MARKHAM as the orator who above
+all others appealed to those who were privileged to hear him. It was he,
+too, who told us explicitly what others had merely mentioned, to the
+effect that the success of the American efforts was entirely due to Mr.
+JULIAN FELSENBURGH. As yet Mr. FELSENBURGH had not arrived; but in
+answer to a roar of inquiry, Mr. MARKHAM announced that this gentleman
+would be amongst them in a few minutes. He then proceeded to describe to
+us, so far as was possible in a few sentences, the methods by which Mr.
+FELSENBURGH had accomplished what is probably the most astonishing task
+known to history. It seems from his words that Mr. FELSENBURGH (whose
+biography, so far as it is known, we give in another column) is probably
+the greatest orator that the world has ever known—we use these words
+deliberately. All languages seem the same to him; he delivered speeches
+during the eight months through which the Eastern Convention lasted, in
+no less than fifteen tongues. Of his manner in speaking we shall have a
+few remarks to make presently. He showed also, Mr. MARKHAM told us, the
+most astonishing knowledge, not only of human nature, but of every trait
+under which that divine thing manifests itself. He appeared acquainted
+with the history, the prejudices, the fears, the hopes, the expectations
+of all the innumerable sects and castes of the East to whom it was his
+business to speak. In fact, as Mr. MARKHAM said, he is probably the
+first perfect product of that new cosmopolitan creation to which the
+world has laboured throughout its history. In no less than nine
+places—Damascus, Irkutsk, Constantinople, Calcutta, Benares, Nanking,
+among them—he was hailed as Messiah by a Mohammedan mob. Finally, in
+America, where this extraordinary figure has arisen, all speak well of
+him. He has been guilty of none of those crimes—there is not one that
+convicts him of sin—those crimes of the Yellow Press, of corruption, of
+commercial or political bullying which have so stained the past of all
+those old politicians who made the sister continent what she has become.
+Mr. FELSENBURGH has not even formed a party. He, and not his underlings,
+have conquered. Those who were present in Paul’s House on this occasion
+will understand us when we say that the effect of those words was
+indescribable.</p>
+
+<p>“When Mr. MARKHAM sat down, there was a silence; then, in order to quiet
+the rising excitement, the organist struck the first chords of the
+Masonic Hymn; the words were taken up, and presently not only the whole
+interior of the building rang with it, but outside, too, the people
+responded, and the city of London for a few moments became indeed a
+temple of the Lord.</p>
+
+<p>“Now indeed we come to the most difficult part of our task, and it is
+better to confess at once that anything resembling journalistic
+descriptiveness must be resolutely laid aside. The greatest things are
+best told in the simplest words.</p>
+
+<p>“Towards the close of the fourth verse, a figure in a plain dark suit
+was observed ascending the steps of the platform. For a moment this
+attracted no attention, but when it was seen that a sudden movement had
+broken out among the delegates, the singing began to falter; and it
+ceased altogether as the figure, after a slight inclination to right and
+left, passed up the further steps that led to the rostrum. Then occurred
+a curious incident. The organist aloft at first did not seem to
+understand, and continued playing, but a sound broke out from the crowd
+resembling a kind of groan, and instantly he ceased. But no cheering
+followed. Instead a profound silence dominated in an instant the huge
+throng; this, by some strange magnetism, communicated itself to those
+without the building, and when Mr. FELSENBURGH uttered his first words,
+it was in a stillness that was like a living thing. We leave the
+explanation of this phenomenon to the expert in psychology.</p>
+
+<p>“Of his actual words we have nothing to say. So far as we are aware no
+reporter made notes at the moment; but the speech, delivered in
+Esperanto, was a very simple one, and very short. It consisted of a
+brief announcement of the great fact of Universal Brotherhood, a
+congratulation to all who were yet alive to witness this consummation of
+history; and, at the end, an ascription of praise to that Spirit of the
+World whose incarnation was now accomplished.</p>
+
+<p>“So much we can say; but we can say nothing as to the impression of the
+personality who stood there. In appearance the man seemed to be about
+thirty-three years of age, clean-shaven, upright, with white hair and
+dark eyes and brows; he stood motionless with his hands on the rail, he
+made but one gesture that drew a kind of sob from the crowd, he spoke
+these words slowly, distinctly, and in a clear voice; then he stood
+waiting.</p>
+
+<p>“There was no response but a sigh which sounded in the ears of at least
+one who heard it as if the whole world drew breath for the first time;
+and then that strange heart-shaking silence fell again. Many were
+weeping silently, the lips of thousands moved without a sound, and all
+faces were turned to that simple figure, as if the hope of every soul
+were centred there. So, if we may believe it, the eyes of many,
+centuries ago, were turned on one known now to history as JESUS OF
+NAZARETH.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. FELSENBURGH stood so a moment longer, then he turned down the
+steps, passed across the platform and disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>“Of what took place outside we have received the following account from
+an eye-witness. The white volor, so well known now to all who were in
+London that night, had remained stationary outside the little south door
+of the Old Choir aisle, poised about twenty feet above the ground.
+Gradually it became known to the crowd, in those few minutes, who it was
+who had arrived in it, and upon Mr. FELSENBURGH’S reappearance that same
+strange groan sounded through the whole length of Paul’s Churchyard,
+followed by the same silence. The volor descended; the master stepped on
+board, and once more the vessel rose to a height of twenty feet. It was
+thought at first that some speech would be made, but none was necessary;
+and after a moment’s pause, the volor began that wonderful parade which
+London will never forget. Four times during the night Mr. FELSENBURGH
+went round the enormous metropolis, speaking no word; and everywhere the
+groan preceded and followed him, while silence accompanied his actual
+passage. Two hours after sunrise the white ship rose over Hampstead and
+disappeared towards the North; and since then he, whom we call, in
+truth, the Saviour of the world, has not been seen.</p>
+
+<p>“And now what remains to be said?</p>
+
+<p>“Comment is useless. It is enough to say in one short sentence that the
+new era has begun, to which prophets and kings, and the suffering, the
+dying, all who labour and are heavy-laden, have aspired in vain. Not
+only has intercontinental rivalry ceased to exist, but the strife of
+home dissensions has ceased also. Of him who has been the herald of its
+inauguration we have nothing more to say. Time alone can show what is
+yet left for him to do.</p>
+
+<p>“But what has been done is as follows. The Eastern peril has been for
+ever dissipated. It is understood now, by fanatic barbarians as well as
+by civilised nations, that the reign of War is ended. ‘Not peace but a
+sword,’ said CHRIST; and bitterly true have those words proved to be.
+‘Not a sword but peace’ is the retort, articulate at last, from those
+who have renounced CHRIST’S claims or have never accepted them. The
+principle of love and union learned however falteringly in the West
+during the last century, has been taken up in the East as well. There
+shall be no more an appeal to arms, but to justice; no longer a crying
+after a God Who hides Himself, but to Man who has learned his own
+Divinity. The Supernatural is dead; rather, we know now that it never
+yet has been alive. What remains is to work out this new lesson, to
+bring every action, word and thought to the bar of Love and Justice; and
+this will be, no doubt, the task of years. Every code must be reversed;
+every barrier thrown down; party must unite with party, country with
+country, and continent with continent. There is no longer the fear of
+fear, the dread of the hereafter, or the paralysis of strife. Man has
+groaned long enough in the travails of birth; his blood has been poured
+out like water through his own foolishness; but at length he understands
+himself and is at peace.</p>
+
+<p>“Let it be seen at least that England is not behind the nations in this
+work of reformation; let no national isolation, pride of race, or
+drunkenness of wealth hold her hands back from this enormous work. The
+responsibility is incalculable, but the victory certain. Let us go
+softly, humbled by the knowledge of our crimes in the past, confident in
+the hope of our achievements in the future, towards that reward which is
+in sight at last—the reward hidden so long by the selfishness of men,
+the darkness of religion, and the strife of tongues—the reward promised
+by one who knew not what he said and denied what he asserted—Blessed
+are the meek, the peacemakers, the merciful, for they shall inherit the
+earth, be named the children of God, and find mercy.”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Oliver, white to the lips, with his wife kneeling now beside him, turned
+the page and read one more short paragraph, marked as being the latest
+news.</p>
+
+<p>“It is understood that the Government is in communication with Mr.
+Felsenburgh.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h4 class="nobreak" id="II">II</h4>
+</div>
+
+<p>“Ah! it is journalese,” said Oliver, at last, leaning back. “Tawdry
+stuff! But—but the thing!”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel got up, passed across to the window-seat, and sat down. Her lips
+opened once or twice, but she said nothing.</p>
+
+<p>“My darling,” cried the man, “have you nothing to say?”</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him tremulously a moment.</p>
+
+<p>“Say!” she said. “As you said, What is the use of words?”</p>
+
+<p>“Tell me again,” said Oliver. “How do I know it is not a dream?”</p>
+
+<p>“A dream,” she said. “Was there ever a dream like this?”</p>
+
+<p>Again she got up restlessly, came across the floor, and knelt down by
+her husband once more, taking his hands in hers.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear,” she said, “I tell you it is not a dream. It is reality at
+last. I was there too—do you not remember? You waited for me when all
+was over—when He was gone out—we saw Him together, you and I. We heard
+Him—you on the platform and I in the gallery. We saw Him again pass up
+the Embankment as we stood in the crowd. Then we came home and we found
+the priest.”</p>
+
+<p>Her face was transfigured as she spoke. It was as of one who saw a
+Divine Vision. She spoke very quietly, without excitement or hysteria.
+Oliver stared at her a moment; then he bent forward and kissed her
+gently.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, my darling; it is true. But I want to hear it again and again.
+Tell me again what you saw.”</p>
+
+<p>“I saw the Son of Man,” she said. “Oh! there is no other phrase. The
+Saviour of the world, as that paper says. I knew Him in my heart as soon
+as I saw Him—as we all did—as soon as He stood there holding the rail.
+It was like a glory round his head. I understand it all now. It was He
+for whom we have waited so long; and He has come, bringing Peace and
+Goodwill in His hands. When He spoke, I knew it again. His voice was
+as—as the sound of the sea—as simple as that—as—as lamentable—as
+strong as that.—Did you not hear it?”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver bowed his head.</p>
+
+<p>“I can trust Him for all the rest,” went on the girl softly. “I do not
+know where He is, nor when He will come back, nor what He will do. I
+suppose there is a great deal for Him to do, before He is fully
+known—laws, reforms—that will be your business, my dear. And the rest
+of us must wait, and love, and be content.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver again lifted his face and looked at her.</p>
+
+<p>“Mabel, my dear—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! I knew it even last night,” she said, “but I did not know that I
+knew it till I awoke to-day and remembered. I dreamed of Him all
+night.... Oliver, where is He?”</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, I know where He is, but I am under oath—-”</p>
+
+<p>She nodded quickly, and stood up.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. I should not have asked that. Well, we are content to wait.”</p>
+
+<p>There was silence for a moment or two. Oliver broke it.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear, what do you mean when you say that He is not yet known?”</p>
+
+<p>“I mean just that,” she said. “The rest only know what He has done—not
+what He is; but that, too, will come in time.”</p>
+
+<p>“And meanwhile—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Meanwhile, you must work; the rest will come by and bye. Oh! Oliver, be
+strong and faithful.”</p>
+
+<p>She kissed him quickly, and went out.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Oliver sat on without moving, staring, as his habit was, out at the wide
+view beyond his windows. This time yesterday he was leaving Paris,
+knowing the fact indeed—for the delegates had arrived an hour
+before—but ignorant of the Man. Now he knew the Man as well—at least
+he had seen Him, heard Him, and stood enchanted under the glow of His
+personality. He could explain it to himself no more than could any one
+else—unless, perhaps, it were Mabel. The others had been as he had
+been: awed and overcome, yet at the same time kindled in the very depths
+of their souls. They had come out—Snowford, Cartwright, Pemberton, and
+the rest—on to the steps of Paul’s House, following that strange
+figure. They had intended to say something, but they were dumb as they
+saw the sea of white faces, heard the groan and the silence, and
+experienced that compelling wave of magnetism that surged up like
+something physical, as the volor rose and started on that indescribable
+progress.</p>
+
+<p>Once more he had seen Him, as he and Mabel stood together on the deck of
+the electric boat that carried them south. The white ship had passed
+along overhead, smooth and steady, above the heads of that vast
+multitude, bearing Him who, if any had the right to that title, was
+indeed the Saviour of the world. Then they had come home, and found the
+priest.</p>
+
+<p>That, too, had been a shock to him; for, at first sight, it seemed that
+this priest was the very man he had seen ascend the rostrum two hours
+before. It was an extraordinary likeness—the same young face and white
+hair. Mabel, of course, had not noticed it; for she had only seen
+Felsenburgh at a great distance; and he himself had soon been reassured.
+And as for his mother—it was terrible enough; if it had not been for
+Mabel there would have been violence done last night. How collected and
+reasonable she had been! And, as for his mother—he must leave her alone
+for the present. By and bye, perhaps, something might be done. The
+future! It was that which engrossed him—the future, and the absorbing
+power of the personality under whose dominion he had fallen last night.
+All else seemed insignificant now—even his mother’s defection, her
+illness—all paled before this new dawn of an unknown sun. And in an
+hour he would know more; he was summoned to Westminster to a meeting of
+the whole House; their proposals to Felsenburgh were to be formulated;
+it was intended to offer him a great position.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, as Mabel had said; this was now their work—to carry into
+effect the new principle that had suddenly become incarnate in this
+grey-haired young American—the principle of Universal Brotherhood.
+It would mean enormous labour; all foreign relations would have to
+be readjusted—trade, policy, methods of government—all demanded
+re-statement. Europe was already organised internally on a basis of
+mutual protection: that basis was now gone. There was no more any
+protection, because there was no more any menace. Enormous labour,
+too, awaited the Government in other directions. A Blue-book must be
+prepared, containing a complete report of the proceedings in the East,
+together with the text of the Treaty which had been laid before them
+in Paris, signed by the Eastern Emperor, the feudal kings, the Turkish
+Republic, and countersigned by the American plenipotentiaries....
+Finally, even home politics required reform: the friction of old strife
+between centre and extremes must cease forthwith—there must be but one
+party now, and that at the Prophet’s disposal.... He grew bewildered
+as he regarded the prospect, and saw how the whole plane of the world
+was shifted, how the entire foundation of western life required
+readjustment. It was a Revolution indeed, a cataclysm more stupendous
+than even invasion itself; but it was the conversion of darkness into
+light, and chaos into order.</p>
+
+<p>He drew a deep breath, and so sat pondering.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Mabel came down to him half-an-hour later, as he dined early before
+starting for Whitehall.</p>
+
+<p>“Mother is quieter,” she said. “We must be very patient, Oliver. Have
+you decided yet as to whether the priest is to come again?”</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“I can think of nothing,” he said, “but of what I have to do. You
+decide, my dear; I leave it in your hands.”</p>
+
+<p>She nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“I will talk to her again presently. Just now she can understand very
+little of what has happened.... What time shall you be home?”</p>
+
+<p>“Probably not to-night. We shall sit all night.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, dear. And what shall I tell Mr. Phillips?”</p>
+
+<p>“I will telephone in the morning.... Mabel, do you remember what I told
+you about the priest?”</p>
+
+<p>“His likeness to the other?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. What do you make of that?”</p>
+
+<p>She smiled.</p>
+
+<p>“I make nothing at all of it. Why should they not be alike?”</p>
+
+<p>He took a fig from the dish, and swallowed it, and stood up.</p>
+
+<p>“It is only very curious,” he said. “Now, good-night, my dear.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h4 class="nobreak" id="III">III</h4>
+</div>
+
+<p>“Oh, mother,” said Mabel, kneeling by the bed; “cannot you understand
+what has happened?”</p>
+
+<p>She had tried desperately to tell the old lady of the extraordinary
+change that had taken place in the world—and without success. It seemed
+to her that some great issue depended on it; that it would be piteous if
+the old woman went out into the dark unconscious of what had come. It
+was as if a Christian knelt by the death-bed of a Jew on the first
+Easter Monday. But the old lady lay in her bed, terrified but obdurate.</p>
+
+<p>“Mother,” said the girl, “let me tell you again. Do you not understand
+that all which Jesus Christ promised has come true, though in another
+way? The reign of God has really begun; but we know now who God is. You
+said just now you wanted the Forgiveness of Sins; well, you have that;
+we all have it, because there is no such thing as sin. There is only
+Crime. And then Communion. You used to believe that that made you a
+partaker of God; well, we are all partakers of God, because we are human
+beings. Don’t you see that Christianity is only one way of saying all
+that? I dare say it was the only way, for a time; but that is all over
+now. Oh! and how much better this is! It is true—true. You can see it
+to be true!”</p>
+
+<p>She paused a moment, forcing herself to look at that piteous old face,
+the flushed wrinkled cheeks, the writhing knotted hands on the coverlet.</p>
+
+<p>“Look how Christianity has failed—how it has divided people; think of
+all the cruelties—the Inquisition, the Religious Wars; the separations
+between husband and wife and parents and children—the disobedience to
+the State, the treasons. Oh! you cannot believe that these were right.
+What kind of a God would that be! And then Hell; how could you ever have
+believed in that?... Oh! mother, don’t believe anything so frightful....
+Don’t you understand that that God has gone—that He never existed at
+all—that it was all a hideous nightmare; and that now we all know at
+last what the truth is.... Mother! think of what happened last
+night—how He came—the Man of whom you were so frightened. I told you
+what He was like—so quiet and strong—how every one was silent—of
+the—the extraordinary atmosphere, and how six millions of people saw
+Him. And think what He has done—how He has healed all the old
+wounds—how the whole world is at peace at last—and of what is going to
+happen. Oh! mother, give up those horrible old lies; give them up; be
+brave.”</p>
+
+<p>“The priest, the priest!” moaned the old woman at last.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! no, no, no—not the priest; he can do nothing. He knows it’s all
+lies, too!”</p>
+
+<p>“The priest! the priest!” moaned the other again. “He can tell you; he
+knows the answer.”</p>
+
+<p>Her face was convulsed with effort, and her old fingers fumbled and
+twisted with the rosary. Mabel grew suddenly frightened, and stood up.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! mother!” She stooped and kissed her. “There! I won’t say any more
+now. But just think about it quietly. Don’t be in the least afraid; it
+is all perfectly right.”</p>
+
+<p>She stood a moment, still looking compassionately down; torn by sympathy
+and desire. No! it was no use now; she must wait till the next day.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll look in again presently,” she said, “when you have had dinner.
+Mother! don’t look like that! Kiss me!”</p>
+
+<p>It was astonishing, she told herself that evening, how any one could be
+so blind. And what a confession of weakness, too, to call only for the
+priest! It was ludicrous, absurd! She herself was filled with an
+extraordinary peace. Even death itself seemed now no longer terrible,
+for was not death swallowed up in victory? She contrasted the selfish
+individualism of the Christian, who sobbed and shrank from death, or, at
+the best, thought of it only as the gate to his own eternal life, with
+the free altruism of the New Believer who asked no more than that Man
+should live and grow, that the Spirit of the World should triumph and
+reveal Himself, while he, the unit, was content to sink back into that
+reservoir of energy from which he drew his life. At this moment she
+would have suffered anything, faced death cheerfully—she contemplated
+even the old woman upstairs with pity—for was it not piteous that death
+should not bring her to herself and reality?</p>
+
+<p>She was in a quiet whirl of intoxication; it was as if the heavy veil of
+sense had rolled back at last and shown a sweet, eternal landscape
+behind—a shadowless land of peace where the lion lay down with the
+lamb, and the leopard with the kid. There should be war no more: that
+bloody spectre was dead, and with him the brood of evil that lived in
+his shadow—superstition, conflict, terror, and unreality. The idols
+were smashed, and rats had run out; Jehovah was fallen; the wild-eyed
+dreamer of Galilee was in his grave; the reign of priests was ended. And
+in their place stood a strange, quiet figure of indomitable power and
+unruffled tenderness.... He whom she had seen—the Son of Man, the
+Saviour of the world, as she had called Him just now—He who bore these
+titles was no longer a monstrous figure, half God and half man, claiming
+both natures and possessing neither; one who was tempted without
+temptation, and who conquered without merit, as his followers said. Here
+was one instead whom she could follow, a god indeed and a man as well—a
+god because human, and a man because so divine.</p>
+
+<p>She said no more that night. She looked into the bedroom for a few
+minutes, and saw the old woman asleep. Her old hand lay out on the
+coverlet, and still between the fingers was twisted the silly string of
+beads. Mabel went softly across in the shaded light, and tried to detach
+it; but the wrinkled fingers writhed and closed, and a murmur came from
+the half-open lips. Ah! how piteous it was, thought the girl, how
+hopeless that a soul should flow out into such darkness, unwilling to
+make the supreme, generous surrender, and lay down its life because life
+itself demanded it!</p>
+
+<p>Then she went to her own room.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The clocks were chiming three, and the grey dawn lay on the walls, when
+she awoke to find by her bed the woman who had sat with the old lady.</p>
+
+<p>“Come at once, madam; Mrs. Brand is dying.”</p>
+
+
+<h4>IV</h4>
+
+<p>Oliver was with them by six o’clock; he came straight up into his
+mother’s room to find that all was over.</p>
+
+<p>The room was full of the morning light and the clean air, and a bubble
+of bird-music poured in from the lawn. But his wife knelt by the bed,
+still holding the wrinkled hands of the old woman, her face buried in
+her arms. The face of his mother was quieter than he had ever seen it,
+the lines showed only like the faintest shadows on an alabaster mask;
+her lips were set in a smile. He looked for a moment, waiting until the
+spasm that caught his throat had died again. Then he put his hand on his
+wife’s shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>“When?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Mabel lifted her face.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! Oliver,” she murmured. “It was an hour ago. ... Look at this.”</p>
+
+<p>She released the dead hands and showed the rosary still twisted there;
+it had snapped in the last struggle, and a brown bead lay beneath the
+fingers.</p>
+
+<p>“I did what I could,” sobbed Mabel. “I was not hard with her. But she
+would not listen. She kept on crying out for the priest as long as she
+could speak.”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear....” began the man. Then he, too, went down on his knees by
+his wife, leaned forward and kissed the rosary, while tears blinded him.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, yes,” he said. “Leave her in peace. I would not move it for the
+world: it was her toy, was it not?”</p>
+
+<p>The girl stared at him, astonished.</p>
+
+<p>“We can be generous, too,” he said. “We have all the world at last. And
+she—she has lost nothing: it was too late.”</p>
+
+<p>“I did what I could.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, my darling, and you were right. But she was too old; she could not
+understand.”</p>
+
+<p>He paused.</p>
+
+<p>“Euthanasia?” he whispered with something very like tenderness.</p>
+
+<p>She nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” she said; “just as the last agony began. She resisted, but I knew
+you would wish it.”</p>
+
+<p>They talked together for an hour in the garden before Oliver went to his
+room; and he began to tell her presently of all that had passed.</p>
+
+<p>“He has refused,” he said. “We offered to create an office for Him; He
+was to have been called Consultor, and he refused it two hours ago. But
+He has promised to be at our service.... No, I must not tell you where
+He is.... He will return to America soon, we think; but He will not
+leave us. We have drawn up a programme, and it is to be sent to Him
+presently.... Yes, we were unanimous.”</p>
+
+<p>“And the programme?”</p>
+
+<p>“It concerns the Franchise, the Poor Laws and Trade. I can tell you no
+more than that. It was He who suggested the points. But we are not sure
+if we understand Him yet.”</p>
+
+<p>“But, my dear—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; it is quite extraordinary. I have never seen such things. There
+was practically no argument.”</p>
+
+<p>“Do the people understand?”</p>
+
+<p>“I think so. We shall have to guard against a reaction. They say that
+the Catholics will be in danger. There is an article this morning in the
+<i>Era</i>. The proofs were sent to us for sanction. It suggests that means
+must be taken to protect the Catholics.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel smiled.</p>
+
+<p>“It is a strange irony,” he said. “But they have a right to exist. How
+far they have a right to share in the government is another matter. That
+will come before us, I think, in a week or two.”</p>
+
+<p>“Tell me more about Him.”</p>
+
+<p>“There is really nothing to tell; we know nothing, except that He is the
+supreme force in the world. France is in a ferment, and has offered him
+Dictatorship. That, too, He has refused. Germany has made the same
+proposal as ourselves; Italy, the same as France, with the title of
+Perpetual Tribune. America has done nothing yet, and Spain is divided.”</p>
+
+<p>“And the East?”</p>
+
+<p>“The Emperor thanked Him; no more than that.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel drew a long breath, and stood looking out across the heat haze
+that was beginning to rise from the town beneath. These were matters so
+vast that she could not take them in. But to her imagination Europe lay
+like a busy hive, moving to and fro in the sunshine. She saw the blue
+distance of France, the towns of Germany, the Alps, and beyond them the
+Pyrenees and sun-baked Spain; and all were intent on the same business,
+to capture if they could this astonishing figure that had risen over the
+world. Sober England, too, was alight with zeal. Each country desired
+nothing better than that this man should rule over them; and He had
+refused them all.</p>
+
+<p>“He has refused them all!” she repeated breathlessly.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, all. We think He may be waiting to hear from America. He still
+holds office there, you know.”</p>
+
+<p>“How old is He?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not more than thirty-two or three. He has only been in office a few
+months. Before that He lived alone in Vermont. Then He stood for the
+Senate; then He made a speech or two; then He was appointed delegate,
+though no one seems to have realised His power. And the rest we know.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel shook her head meditatively.</p>
+
+<p>“We know nothing,” she said. “Nothing; nothing! Where did He learn His
+languages?”</p>
+
+<p>“It is supposed that He travelled for many years. But no one knows. He
+has said nothing.”</p>
+
+<p>She turned swiftly to her husband.</p>
+
+<p>“But what does it all mean? What is His power? Tell me, Oliver?”</p>
+
+<p>He smiled back, shaking his head.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, Markham said that it was his incorruption—that and his oratory;
+but that explains nothing.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, it explains nothing,” said the girl.</p>
+
+<p>“It is just personality,” went on Oliver, “at least, that’s the label to
+use. But that, too, is only a label.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, just a label. But it is that. They all felt it in Paul’s House,
+and in the streets afterwards. Did you not feel it?”</p>
+
+<p>“Feel it!” cried the man, with shining eyes. “Why, I would die for Him!”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>They went back to the house presently, and it was not till they reached
+the door that either said a word about the dead old woman who lay
+upstairs.</p>
+
+<p>“They are with her now,” said Mabel softly. “I will communicate with the
+people.”</p>
+
+<p>He nodded gravely.</p>
+
+<p>“It had better be this afternoon,” he said. “I have a spare hour at
+fourteen o’clock. Oh! by the way, Mabel, do you know who took the
+message to the priest?”</p>
+
+<p>“I think so.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, it was Phillips. I saw him last night. He will not come here
+again.”</p>
+
+<p>“Did he confess it?”</p>
+
+<p>“He did. He was most offensive.”</p>
+
+<p>But Oliver’s face softened again as he nodded to his wife at the foot of
+the stairs, and turned to go up once more to his mother’s room.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="2CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>It seemed to Percy Franklin as he drew near Rome, sliding five hundred
+feet high through the summer dawn, that he was approaching the very
+gates of heaven, or, still better, he was as a child coming home. For
+what he had left behind him ten hours before in London was not a bad
+specimen, he thought, of the superior mansions of hell. It was a world
+whence God seemed to have withdrawn Himself, leaving it indeed in a
+state of profound complacency—a state without hope or faith, but a
+condition in which, although life continued, there was absent the one
+essential to well-being. It was not that there was not expectation—for
+London was on tip-toe with excitement. There were rumours of all kinds:
+Felsenburgh was coming back; he was back; he had never gone. He was to
+be President of the Council, Prime Minister, Tribune, with full
+capacities of democratic government and personal sacro-sanctity, even
+King—if not Emperor of the West. The entire constitution was to be
+remodelled, there was to be a complete rearrangement of the pieces;
+crime was to be abolished by the mysterious power that had killed war;
+there was to be free food—the secret of life was discovered, there was
+to be no more death—so the rumours ran.... Yet that was lacking, to the
+priest’s mind, which made life worth living....</p>
+
+<p>In Paris, while the volor waited at the great station at Montmartre,
+once known as the Church of the Sacred Heart, he had heard the roaring
+of the mob in love with life at last, and seen the banners go past. As
+it rose again over the suburbs he had seen the long lines of trains
+streaming in, visible as bright serpents in the brilliant glory of the
+electric globes, bringing the country folk up to the Council of the
+Nation which the legislators, mad with drama, had summoned to decide the
+great question. At Lyons it had been the same. The night was as clear as
+the day, and as full of sound. Mid France was arriving to register its
+votes.</p>
+
+<p>He had fallen asleep as the cold air of the Alps began to envelop the
+car, and had caught but glimpses of the solemn moonlit peaks below him,
+the black profundities of the gulfs, the silver glint of the shield-like
+lakes, and the soft glow of Interlaken and the towns in the Rhone
+valley. Once he had been moved in spite of himself, as one of the huge
+German volors had passed in the night, a blaze of ghostly lights and
+gilding, resembling a huge moth with antennae of electric light, and the
+two ships had saluted one another through half a league of silent air,
+with a pathetic cry as of two strange night-birds who have no leisure to
+pause. Milan and Turin had been quiet, for Italy was organised on other
+principles than France, and Florence was not yet half awake. And now the
+Campagna was slipping past like a grey-green rug, wrinkled and tumbled,
+five hundred feet beneath, and Rome was all but in sight. The indicator
+above his seat moved its finger from one hundred to ninety miles.</p>
+
+<p>He shook off the doze at last, and drew out his office book; but as he
+pronounced the words his attention was elsewhere, and, when Prime was
+said, he closed the book once more, propped himself more comfortably,
+drawing the furs round him, and stretching his feet on the empty seat
+opposite. He was alone in his compartment; the three men who had come in
+at Paris had descended at Turin.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>He had been remarkably relieved when the message had come three days
+before from the Cardinal-Protector, bidding him make arrangements for a
+long absence from England, and, as soon as that was done, to come to
+Rome. He understood that the ecclesiastical authorities were really
+disturbed at last.</p>
+
+<p>He reviewed the last day or two, considering the report he would have to
+present. Since his last letter, three days before, seven notable
+apostasies had taken place in Westminster diocese alone, two priests and
+five important laymen. There was talk of revolt on all sides; he had
+seen a threatening document, called a “petition,” demanding the right to
+dispense with all ecclesiastical vestments, signed by one hundred and
+twenty priests from England and Wales. The “petitioners” pointed out
+that persecution was coming swiftly at the hands of the mob; that the
+Government was not sincere in the promises of protection; they hinted
+that religious loyalty was already strained to breaking-point even in
+the case of the most faithful, and that with all but those it had
+already broken.</p>
+
+<p>And as to his comments Percy was clear. He would tell the authorities,
+as he had already told them fifty times, that it was not persecution
+that mattered; it was this new outburst of enthusiasm for Humanity—an
+enthusiasm which had waxed a hundredfold more hot since the coming of
+Felsenburgh and the publication of the Eastern news—which was melting
+the hearts of all but the very few. Man had suddenly fallen in love with
+man. The conventional were rubbing their eyes and wondering why they had
+ever believed, or even dreamed, that there was a God to love, asking one
+another what was the secret of the spell that had held them so long.
+Christianity and Theism were passing together from the world’s mind as a
+morning mist passes when the sun comes up. His recommendations—? Yes,
+he had those clear, and ran them over in his mind with a sense of
+despair.</p>
+
+<p>For himself, he scarcely knew if he believed what he professed. His
+emotions seemed to have been finally extinguished in the vision of the
+white car and the silence of the crowd that evening three weeks before.
+It had been so horribly real and positive; the delicate aspirations and
+hopes of the soul appeared so shadowy when compared with that burning,
+heart-shaking passion of the people. He had never seen anything like it;
+no congregation under the spell of the most kindling preacher alive had
+ever responded with one-tenth of the fervour with which that irreligious
+crowd, standing in the cold dawn of the London streets, had greeted the
+coming of their saviour. And as for the man himself—Percy could not
+analyse what it was that possessed him as he had stared, muttering the
+name of Jesus, on that quiet figure in black with features and hair so
+like his own. He only knew that a hand had gripped his heart—a hand
+warm, not cold—and had quenched, it seemed, all sense of religious
+conviction. It had only been with an effort that sickened him to
+remember, that he had refrained from that interior act of capitulation
+that is so familiar to all who have cultivated an inner life and
+understand what failure means. There had been one citadel that had not
+flung wide its gates—all else had yielded. His emotions had been
+stormed, his intellect silenced, his memory of grace obscured, a
+spiritual nausea had sickened his soul, yet the secret fortress of the
+will had, in an agony, held fast the doors and refused to cry out and
+call Felsenburgh king.</p>
+
+<p>Ah! how he had prayed during those three weeks! It appeared to him that
+he had done little else; there had been no peace. Lances of doubt thrust
+again and again through door and window; masses of argument had crashed
+from above; he had been on the alert day and night, repelling this,
+blindly, and denying that, endeavouring to keep his foothold on the
+slippery plane of the supernatural, sending up cry after cry to the Lord
+Who hid Himself. He had slept with his crucifix in his hand, he had
+awakened himself by kissing it; while he wrote, talked, ate, walked, and
+sat in cars, the inner life had been busy-making frantic speechless acts
+of faith in a religion which his intellect denied and from which his
+emotions shrank. There had been moments of ecstasy—now in a crowded
+street, when he recognised that God was all, that the Creator was the
+key to the creature’s life, that a humble act of adoration was
+transcendently greater than the most noble natural act, that the
+Supernatural was the origin and end of existence there had come to him
+such moments in the night, in the silence of the Cathedral, when the
+lamp flickered, and a soundless air had breathed from the iron door of
+the tabernacle. Then again passion ebbed, and left him stranded on
+misery, but set with a determination (which might equally be that of
+pride or faith) that no power in earth or hell should hinder him from
+professing Christianity even if he could not realise it. It was
+Christianity alone that made life tolerable.</p>
+
+<p>Percy drew a long vibrating breath, and changed his position; for far
+away his unseeing eyes had descried a dome, like a blue bubble set on a
+carpet of green; and his brain had interrupted itself to tell him that
+this was Rome. He got up presently, passed out of his compartment, and
+moved forward up the central gangway, seeing, as he went, through the
+glass doors to right and left his fellow-passengers, some still asleep,
+some staring out at the view, some reading. He put his eye to the glass
+square in the door, and for a minute or two watched, fascinated, the
+steady figure of the steerer at his post. There he stood motionless, his
+hands on the steel circle that directed the vast wings, his eyes on the
+wind-gauge that revealed to him as on the face of a clock both the force
+and the direction of the high gusts; now and again his hands moved
+slightly, and the huge fans responded, now lifting, now lowering.
+Beneath him and in front, fixed on a circular table, were the glass
+domes of various indicators—Percy did not know the meaning of half—one
+seemed a kind of barometer, intended, he guessed, to declare the height
+at which they were travelling, another a compass. And beyond, through
+the curved windows, lay the enormous sky. Well, it was all very
+wonderful, thought the priest, and it was with the force of which all
+this was but one symptom that the supernatural had to compete.</p>
+
+<p>He sighed, turned, and went back to his compartment.</p>
+
+<p>It was an astonishing vision that began presently to open before
+him—scarcely beautiful except for its strangeness, and as unreal as a
+raised map. Far to his right, as he could see through the glass doors,
+lay the grey line of the sea against the luminous sky, rising and
+falling ever so slightly as the car, apparently motionless, tilted
+imperceptibly against the western breeze; the only other movement was
+the faint pulsation of the huge throbbing screw in the rear. To the left
+stretched the limitless country, flitting beneath, in glimpses seen
+between the motionless wings, with here and there the streak of a
+village, flattened out of recognition, or the flash of water, and
+bounded far away by the low masses of the Umbrian hills; while in front,
+seen and gone again as the car veered, lay the confused line of Rome and
+the huge new suburbs, all crowned by the great dome growing every
+instant. Around, above and beneath, his eyes were conscious of wide
+air-spaces, overhead deepening into lapis-lazuli down to horizons of
+pale turquoise. The only sound, of which he had long ceased to be
+directly conscious, was that of the steady rush of air, less shrill now
+as the speed began to drop down—down—to forty miles an hour. There was
+a clang of a bell, and immediately he was aware of a sense of faint
+sickness as the car dropped in a glorious swoop, and he staggered a
+little as he grasped his rugs together. When he looked again the motion
+seemed to have ceased; he could see towers ahead, a line of house-roofs,
+and beneath he caught a glimpse of a road and more roofs with patches of
+green between. A bell clanged again, and a long sweet cry followed. On
+all sides he could hear the movement of feet; a guard in uniform passed
+swiftly along the glazed corridor; again came the faint nausea; and as
+he looked up once more from his luggage for an instant he saw the dome,
+grey now and lined, almost on a level with his own eyes, huge against
+the vivid sky. The world span round for a moment; he shut his eyes, and
+when he looked again walls seemed to heave up past him and stop,
+swaying. There was the last bell, a faint vibration as the car grounded
+in the steel-netted dock; a line of faces rocked and grew still outside
+the windows, and Percy passed out towards the doors, carrying his bags.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>He still felt a sense of insecure motion as he sat alone over coffee an
+hour later in one of the remote rooms of the Vatican; but there was a
+sense of exhilaration as well, as his tired brain realised where he was.
+It had been strange to drive over the rattling stones in the weedy
+little cab, such as he remembered ten years ago when he had left Rome,
+newly ordained. While the world had moved on, Rome had stood still; she
+had other affairs to think of than physical improvements, now that the
+spiritual weight of the earth rested entirely upon her shoulders. All
+had seemed unchanged—or rather it had reverted to the condition of
+nearly one hundred and fifty years ago. Histories related how the
+improvements of the Italian government had gradually dropped out of use
+as soon as the city, eighty years before, had been given her
+independence; the trains ceased to run; volors were not allowed to enter
+the walls; the new buildings, permitted to remain, had been converted to
+ecclesiastical use; the Quirinal became the offices of the “Red Pope”;
+the embassies, huge seminaries; even the Vatican itself, with the
+exception of the upper floor, had become the abode of the Sacred
+College, who surrounded the Supreme Pontiff as stars their sun.</p>
+
+<p>It was an extraordinary city, said antiquarians—the one living example
+of the old days. Here were to be seen the ancient inconveniences, the
+insanitary horrors, the incarnation of a world given over to dreaming.
+The old Church pomp was back, too; the cardinals drove again in gilt
+coaches; the Pope rode on his white mule; the Blessed Sacrament went
+through the ill-smelling streets with the sound of bells and the light
+of lanterns. A brilliant description of it had interested the civilised
+world immensely for about forty-eight hours; the appalling retrogression
+was still used occasionally as the text for violent denunciations by the
+poorly educated; the well-educated had ceased to do anything but take
+for granted that superstition and progress were irreconcilable enemies.</p>
+
+<p>Yet Percy, even in the glimpses he had had in the streets, as he drove
+from the volor station outside the People’s Gate, of the old peasant
+dresses, the blue and red-fringed wine carts, the cabbage-strewn
+gutters, the wet clothes flapping on strings, the mules and
+horses—strange though these were, he had found them a refreshment. It
+had seemed to remind him that man was human, and not divine as the rest
+of the world proclaimed—human, and therefore careless and
+individualistic; human, and therefore occupied with interests other than
+those of speed, cleanliness, and precision.</p>
+
+<p>The room in which he sat now by the window with shading blinds, for the
+sun was already hot, seemed to revert back even further than to a
+century-and-a-half. The old damask and gilding that he had expected was
+gone, and its absence gave the impression of great severity. There was a
+wide deal table running the length of the room, with upright wooden arm
+chairs set against it; the floor was red-tiled, with strips of matting
+for the feet, the white, distempered walls had only a couple of old
+pictures hung upon them, and a large crucifix flanked by candles stood
+on a little altar by the further door. There was no more furniture than
+that, with the exception of a writing-desk between the windows, on which
+stood a typewriter. That jarred somehow on his sense of fitness, and he
+wondered at it.</p>
+
+<p>He finished the last drop of coffee in the thick-rimmed white cup, and
+sat back in his chair.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Already the burden was lighter, and he was astonished at the swiftness
+with which it had become so. Life looked simpler here; the interior
+world was taken more for granted; it was not even a matter of debate.
+There it was, imperious and objective, and through it glimmered to the
+eyes of the soul the old Figures that had become shrouded behind the
+rush of worldly circumstance. The very shadow of God appeared to rest
+here; it was no longer impossible to realise that the saints watched and
+interceded, that Mary sat on her throne, that the white disc on the
+altar was Jesus Christ. Percy was not yet at peace after all, he had
+been but an hour in Rome; and air, charged with never so much grace,
+could scarcely do more than it had done. But he felt more at ease, less
+desperately anxious, more childlike, more content to rest on the
+authority that claimed without explanation, and asserted that the world,
+as a matter of fact, proved by evidences without and within, was made
+this way and not that, for this purpose and not the other. Yet he had
+used the conveniences which he hated; he had left London a bare twelve
+hours before, and now here he sat in a place which was either a stagnant
+backwater of life, or else the very mid-current of it; he was not yet
+sure which.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>There was a step outside, a handle was turned; and the
+Cardinal-Protector came through.</p>
+
+<p>Percy had not seen him for four years, and for a moment scarcely
+recognised him.</p>
+
+<p>It was a very old man that he saw now, bent and feeble, his face
+covered with wrinkles, crowned by very thin, white hair, and the little
+scarlet cap on top; he was in his black Benedictine habit with a plain
+abbatial cross on his breast, and walked hesitatingly, with a black
+stick. The only sign of vigour was in the narrow bright slit of his
+eyes showing beneath drooping lids. He held out his hand, smiling, and
+Percy, remembering in time that he was in the Vatican, bowed low only
+as he kissed the amethyst.</p>
+
+<p>“Welcome to Rome, father,” said the old man, speaking with an unexpected
+briskness. “They told me you were here half-an-hour ago; I thought I
+would leave you to wash and have your coffee.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy murmured something.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; you are tired, no doubt,” said the Cardinal, pulling out a chair.</p>
+
+<p>“Indeed not, your Eminence. I slept excellently.”</p>
+
+<p>The Cardinal made a little gesture to a chair.</p>
+
+<p>“But I must have a word with you. The Holy Father wishes to see you at
+eleven o’clock.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy started a little.</p>
+
+<p>“We move quickly in these days, father.... There is no time to dawdle.
+You understand that you are to remain in Rome for the present?”</p>
+
+<p>“I have made all arrangements for that, your Eminence.”</p>
+
+<p>“That is very well.... We are pleased with you here, Father Franklin.
+The Holy Father has been greatly impressed by your comments. You have
+foreseen things in a very remarkable manner.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy flushed with pleasure. It was almost the first hint of
+encouragement he had had. Cardinal Martin went on.</p>
+
+<p>“I may say that you are considered our most valuable
+correspondent—certainly in England. That is why you are summoned. You
+are to help us here in future—a kind of consultor: any one can relate
+facts; not every one can understand them.... You look very young,
+father. How old are you?”</p>
+
+<p>“I am thirty-three, your Eminence.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah! your white hair helps you.... Now, father, will you come with me
+into my room? It is now eight o’clock. I will keep you till nine—no
+longer. Then you shall have some rest, and at eleven I shall take you up
+to his Holiness.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy rose with a strange sense of elation, and ran to open the door for
+the Cardinal to go through.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>At a few minutes before eleven Percy came out of his little white-washed
+room in his new ferraiuola, soutane and buckle shoes, and tapped at the
+door of the Cardinal’s room.</p>
+
+<p>He felt a great deal more self-possessed now. He had talked to the
+Cardinal freely and strongly, had described the effect that Felsenburgh
+had had upon London, and even the paralysis that had seized upon
+himself. He had stated his belief that they were on the edge of a
+movement unparalleled in history: he related little scenes that he had
+witnessed—a group kneeling before a picture of Felsenburgh, a dying man
+calling him by name, the aspect of the crowd that had waited in
+Westminster to hear the result of the offer made to the stranger. He
+showed him half-a-dozen cuttings from newspapers, pointing out their
+hysterical enthusiasm; he even went so far as to venture upon prophecy,
+and to declare his belief that persecution was within reasonable
+distance.</p>
+
+<p>“The world seems very oddly alive,” he said; “it is as if the whole
+thing was flushed and nervous.”</p>
+
+<p>The Cardinal nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“We, too,” he said, “even we feel it.”</p>
+
+<p>For the rest the Cardinal had sat watching him out of his narrow eyes,
+nodding from time to time, putting an occasional question, but listening
+throughout with great attention.</p>
+
+<p>“And your recommendations, father—-” he had said, and then interrupted
+himself. “No, that is too much to ask. The Holy Father will speak of
+that.”</p>
+
+<p>He had congratulated him upon his Latin then—for they had spoken in
+that language throughout this second interview; and Percy had explained
+how loyal Catholic England had been in obeying the order, given ten
+years before, that Latin should become to the Church what Esperanto was
+becoming to the world.</p>
+
+<p>“That is very well,” said the old man. “His Holiness will be pleased at
+that.”</p>
+
+<p>At his second tap the door opened and the Cardinal came out, taking him
+by the arm without a word; and together they turned to the lift
+entrance.</p>
+
+<p>Percy ventured to make a remark as they slid noiselessly up towards the
+papal apartment.</p>
+
+<p>“I am surprised at the lift, your Eminence, and the typewriter in the
+audience-room.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, father?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, all the rest of Rome is back in the old days.”</p>
+
+<p>The Cardinal looked at him, puzzled.</p>
+
+<p>“Is it? I suppose it is. I never thought of that.”</p>
+
+<p>A Swiss guard flung back the door of the lift, saluted and went before
+them along the plain flagged passage to where his comrade stood. Then he
+saluted again and went back. A Pontifical chamberlain, in all the sombre
+glory of purple, black, and a Spanish ruff, peeped from the door, and
+made haste to open it. It really seemed almost incredible that such
+things still existed.</p>
+
+<p>“In a moment, your Eminence,” he said in Latin. “Will your Eminence wait
+here?”</p>
+
+<p>It was a little square room, with half-a-dozen doors, plainly contrived
+out of one of the huge old halls, for it was immensely high, and the
+tarnished gilt cornice vanished directly in two places into the white
+walls. The partitions, too, seemed thin; for as the two men sat down
+there was a murmur of voices faintly audible, the shuffling of
+footsteps, and the old eternal click of the typewriter from which Percy
+hoped he had escaped. They were alone in the room, which was furnished
+with the same simplicity as the Cardinal’s—giving the impression of a
+curious mingling of ascetic poverty and dignity by its red-tiled floor,
+its white walls, its altar and two vast bronze candlesticks of
+incalculable value that stood on the dais. The shutters here, too, were
+drawn; and there was nothing to distract Percy from the excitement that
+surged up now tenfold in heart and brain.</p>
+
+<p>It was <i>Papa Angelicus</i> whom he was about to see; that amazing old man
+who had been appointed Secretary of State just fifty years ago, at the
+age of thirty, and Pope nine years previously. It was he who had carried
+out the extraordinary policy of yielding the churches throughout the
+whole of Italy to the Government, in exchange for the temporal lordship
+of Rome, and who had since set himself to make it a city of saints. He
+had cared, it appeared, nothing whatever for the world’s opinion; his
+policy, so far as it could be called one, consisted in a very simple
+thing: he had declared in Epistle after Epistle that the object of the
+Church was to do glory to God by producing supernatural virtues in man,
+and that nothing at all was of any significance or importance except so
+far as it effected this object. He had further maintained that since
+Peter was the Rock, the City of Peter was the Capital of the world, and
+should set an example to its dependency: this could not be done unless
+Peter ruled his City, and therefore he had sacrificed every church and
+ecclesiastical building in the country for that one end. Then he had set
+about ruling his city: he had said that on the whole the latter-day
+discoveries of man tended to distract immortal souls from a
+contemplation of eternal verities—not that these discoveries could be
+anything but good in themselves, since after all they gave insight into
+the wonderful laws of God—but that at present they were too exciting to
+the imagination. So he had removed the trams, the volors, the
+laboratories, the manufactories—saying that there was plenty of room
+for them outside Rome—and had allowed them to be planted in the
+suburbs: in their place he had raised shrines, religious houses and
+Calvaries. Then he had attended further to the souls of his subjects.
+Since Rome was of limited area, and, still more because the world
+corrupted without its proper salt, he allowed no man under the age of
+fifty to live within its walls for more than one month in each year,
+except those who received his permit. They might live, of course,
+immediately outside the city (and they did, by tens of thousands), but
+they were to understand that by doing so they sinned against the spirit,
+though not the letter, of their Father’s wishes. Then he had divided the
+city into national quarters, saying that as each nation had its peculiar
+virtues, each was to let its light shine steadily in its proper place.
+Rents had instantly begun to rise, so he had legislated against that by
+reserving in each quarter a number of streets at fixed prices, and had
+issued an ipso facto excommunication against all who erred in this
+respect. The rest were abandoned to the millionaires. He had retained
+the Leonine City entirely at his own disposal. Then he had restored
+Capital Punishment, with as much serene gravity as that with which he
+had made himself the derision of the civilised world in other matters,
+saying that though human life was holy, human virtue was more holy
+still; and he had added to the crime of murder, the crimes of adultery,
+idolatry and apostasy, for which this punishment was theoretically
+sanctioned. There had not been, however, more than two such executions
+in the eight years of his reign, since criminals, of course, with the
+exception of devoted believers, instantly made their way to the suburbs,
+where they were no longer under his jurisdiction.</p>
+
+<p>But he had not stayed here. He had sent once more ambassadors to every
+country in the world, informing the Government of each of their arrival.
+No attention was paid to this, beyond that of laughter; but he had
+continued, undisturbed, to claim his rights, and, meanwhile, used his
+legates for the important work of disseminating his views. Epistles
+appeared from time to time in every town, laying down the principles of
+the papal claims with as much tranquillity as if they were everywhere
+acknowledged. Freemasonry was steadily denounced, as well as democratic
+ideas of every kind; men were urged to remember their immortal souls and
+the Majesty of God, and to reflect upon the fact that in a few years all
+would be called to give their account to Him Who was Creator and Ruler
+of the world, Whose Vicar was John XXIV, P.P., whose name and seal were
+appended.</p>
+
+<p>That was a line of action that took the world completely by surprise.
+People had expected hysteria, argument, and passionate exhortation;
+disguised emissaries, plots, and protests. There were none of these. It
+was as if progress had not yet begun, and volors were uninvented, as if
+the entire universe had not come to disbelieve in God, and to discover
+that itself was God. Here was this silly old man, talking in his sleep,
+babbling of the Cross, and the inner life and the forgiveness of sins,
+exactly as his predecessors had talked two thousand years before. Well,
+it was only one sign more that Rome had lost not only its power, but its
+common sense as well. It was really time that something should be done.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>And this was the man, thought Percy, <i>Papa Angelicus</i>, whom he was to
+see in a minute or two.</p>
+
+<p>The Cardinal put his hand on the priest’s knee as the door opened, and a
+purple prelate appeared, bowing.</p>
+
+<p>“Only this,” he said. “Be absolutely frank.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy stood up, trembling. Then he followed his patron towards the inner
+door.</p>
+
+
+<h4>IV</h4>
+
+<p>A white figure sat in the green gloom, beside a great writing-table,
+three or four yards away, but with the chair wheeled round to face the
+door by which the two entered. So much Percy saw as he performed the
+first genuflection. Then he dropped his eyes, advanced, genuflected
+again with the other, advanced once more, and for the third time
+genuflected, lifting the thin white hand, stretched out, to his lips. He
+heard the door close as he stood up.</p>
+
+<p>“Father Franklin, Holiness,” said the Cardinal’s voice at his ear.</p>
+
+<p>A white-sleeved arm waved to a couple of chairs set a yard away, and the
+two sat down.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>While the Cardinal, talking in slow Latin, said a few sentences,
+explaining that this was the English priest whose correspondence had
+been found so useful, Percy began to look with all his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>He knew the Pope’s face well, from a hundred photographs and moving
+pictures; even his gestures were familiar to him, the slight bowing of
+the head in assent, the tiny eloquent movement of the hands; but Percy,
+with a sense of being platitudinal, told himself that the living
+presence was very different.</p>
+
+<p>It was a very upright old man that he saw in the chair before him, of
+medium height and girth, with hands clasping the bosses of his
+chair-arms, and an appearance of great and deliberate dignity. But it
+was at the face chiefly that he looked, dropping his gaze three or four
+times, as the Pope’s blue eyes turned on him. They were extraordinary
+eyes, reminding him of what historians said of Pius X.; the lids drew
+straight lines across them, giving him the look of a hawk, but the rest
+of the face contradicted them. There was no sharpness in that. It was
+neither thin nor fat, but beautifully modelled in an oval outline: the
+lips were clean-cut, with a look of passion in their curves; the nose
+came down in an aquiline sweep, ending in chiselled nostrils; the chin
+was firm and cloven, and the poise of the whole head was strangely
+youthful. It was a face of great generosity and sweetness, set at an
+angle between defiance and humility, but ecclesiastical from ear to ear
+and brow to chin; the forehead was slightly compressed at the temples,
+and beneath the white cap lay white hair. It had been the subject of
+laughter at the music-halls nine years before, when the composite face
+of well-known priests had been thrown on a screen, side by side with the
+new Pope’s, for the two were almost indistinguishable.</p>
+
+<p>Percy found himself trying to sum it up, but nothing came to him except
+the word “priest.” It was that, and that was all. <i>Ecce sacerdos
+magnus!</i> He was astonished at the look of youth, for the Pope was
+eighty-eight this year; yet his figure was as upright as that of a man
+of fifty, his shoulders unbowed, his head set on them like an athlete’s,
+and his wrinkles scarcely perceptible in the half light. <i>Papa
+Angelicus!</i> reflected Percy.</p>
+
+<p>The Cardinal ceased his explanations, and made a little gesture. Percy
+drew up all his faculties tense and tight to answer the questions that
+he knew were coming.</p>
+
+<p>“I welcome you, my son,” said a very soft, resonant voice.</p>
+
+<p>Percy bowed, desperately, from the waist.</p>
+
+<p>The Pope dropped his eyes again, lifted a paper-weight with his left
+hand, and began to play with it gently as he talked.</p>
+
+<p>“Now, my son, deliver a little discourse. I suggest to you three
+heads—what has happened, what is happening, what will happen, with a
+peroration as to what should happen.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy drew a long breath, settled himself back, clasped the fingers of
+his left hand in the fingers of his right, fixed his eyes firmly upon
+the cross-embroidered red shoe opposite, and began. (Had he not
+rehearsed this a hundred times!)</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>He first stated his theme; to the effect that all the forces of the
+civilised world were concentrating into two camps—the world and God. Up
+to the present time the forces of the world had been incoherent and
+spasmodic, breaking out in various ways—revolutions and wars had been
+like the movements of a mob, undisciplined, unskilled, and unrestrained.
+To meet this, the Church, too, had acted through her Catholicity—
+dispersion rather than concentration: <i>franc-tireurs</i> had been opposed
+to <i>franc-tireurs</i>. But during the last hundred years there had been
+indications that the method of warfare was to change. Europe, at any
+rate, had grown weary of internal strife; the unions first of Labour,
+then of Capital, then of Labour and Capital combined, illustrated this
+in the economic sphere; the peaceful partition of Africa in the
+political sphere; the spread of Humanitarian religion in the spiritual
+sphere. Over against this must be placed the increased centralisation of
+the Church. By the wisdom of her pontiffs, over-ruled by God Almighty,
+the lines had been drawing tighter every year. He instanced the
+abolition of all local usages, including those so long cherished by the
+East, the establishment of the Cardinal-Protectorates in Rome, the
+enforced merging of all friars into one Order, though retaining their
+familiar names, under the authority of the supreme General; all monks,
+with the exception of the Carthusians, the Carmelites and the Trappists,
+into another; of the three excepted into a third; and the classification
+of nuns after the same plan. Further, he remarked on the more recent
+decrees, establishing the sense of the Vatican decision on
+infallibility, the new version of Canon Law, the immense simplification
+that had taken place in ecclesiastical government, the hierarchy,
+rubrics and the affairs of missionary countries, with the new and
+extraordinary privileges granted to mission priests. At this point he
+became aware that his self-consciousness had left him, and he began,
+even with little gestures, and a slightly raised voice, to enlarge on
+the significance of the last month’s events.</p>
+
+<p>All that had gone before, he said, pointed to what had now actually
+taken place—namely, the reconciliation of the world on a basis other
+than that of Divine Truth. It was the intention of God and of His Vicars
+to reconcile all men in Christ Jesus; but the corner-stone had once more
+been rejected, and instead of the chaos that the pious had prophesied,
+there was coming into existence a unity unlike anything known in
+history. This was the more deadly from the fact that it contained so
+many elements of indubitable good. War, apparently, was now extinct, and
+it was not Christianity that had done it; union was now seen to be
+better than disunion, and the lesson had been learned apart from the
+Church. In fact, natural virtues had suddenly waxed luxuriant, and
+supernatural virtues were despised. Friendliness took the place of
+charity, contentment the place of hope, and knowledge the place of
+faith.</p>
+
+<p>Percy stopped, he had become conscious that he was preaching a kind of
+sermon.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, my son,” said the kind voice. “What else?”</p>
+
+<p>What else?... Very well, continued Percy, movements such as these
+brought forth men, and the Man of this movement was Julian Felsenburgh.
+He had accomplished a work that—apart from God—seemed miraculous. He
+had broken down the eternal division between East and West, coming
+himself from the continent that alone could produce such powers; he had
+prevailed by sheer force of personality over the two supreme tyrants of
+life—religious fanaticism and party government. His influence over the
+impassive English was another miracle, yet he had also set on fire
+France, Germany, and Spain. Percy here described one or two of his
+little scenes, saying that it was like the vision of a god: and he
+quoted freely some of the titles given to the Man by sober, unhysterical
+newspapers. Felsenburgh was called the Son of Man, because he was so
+pure-bred a cosmopolitan; the Saviour of the World, because he had slain
+war and himself survived—even—even—here Percy’s voice faltered—even
+Incarnate God, because he was the perfect representative of divine man.</p>
+
+<p>The quiet, priestly face watching opposite never winced or moved; and he
+went on.</p>
+
+<p>Persecution, he said, was coming. There had been a riot or two already.
+But persecution was not to be feared. It would no doubt cause
+apostasies, as it had always done, but these were deplorable only on
+account of the individual apostates. On the other hand, it would
+reassure the faithful; and purge out the half-hearted. Once, in the
+early ages, Satan’s attack had been made on the bodily side, with whips
+and fire and beasts; in the sixteenth century it had been on the
+intellectual side; in the twentieth century on the springs of moral and
+spiritual life. Now it seemed as if the assault was on all three planes
+at once. But what was chiefly to be feared was the positive influence of
+Humanitarianism: it was coming, like the kingdom of God, with power; it
+was crushing the imaginative and the romantic, it was assuming rather
+than asserting its own truth; it was smothering with bolsters instead of
+wounding and stimulating with steel or controversy. It seemed to be
+forcing its way, almost objectively, into the inner world. Persons who
+had scarcely heard its name were professing its tenets; priests absorbed
+it, as they absorbed God in Communion—he mentioned the names of the
+recent apostates—children drank it in like Christianity itself. The
+soul “naturally Christian” seemed to be becoming “the soul naturally
+infidel.” Persecution, cried the priest, was to be welcomed like
+salvation, prayed for, and grasped; but he feared that the authorities
+were too shrewd, and knew the antidote and the poison apart. There might
+be individual martyrdoms—in fact there would be, and very many—but
+they would be in spite of secular government, not because of it.
+Finally, he expected, Humanitarianism would presently put on the dress
+of liturgy and sacrifice, and when that was done, the Church’s cause,
+unless God intervened, would be over.</p>
+
+<p>Percy sat back, trembling.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, my son. And what do you think should be done?”</p>
+
+<p>Percy flung out his hands.</p>
+
+<p>“Holy Father—the mass, prayer, the rosary. These first and last. The
+world denies their power: it is on their power that Christians must
+throw all their weight. All things in Jesus Christ—in Jesus Christ,
+first and last. Nothing else can avail. He must do all, for we can do
+nothing.”</p>
+
+<p>The white head bowed. Then it rose erect.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, my son.... But so long as Jesus Christ deigns to use us, we must
+be used. He is Prophet and King as well as Priest. We then, too, must be
+prophet and king as well as priest. What of Prophecy and Royalty?”</p>
+
+<p>The voice thrilled Percy like a trumpet.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Holiness.... For prophecy, then, let us preach charity; for
+Royalty, let us reign on crosses. We must love and suffer....” (He drew
+one sobbing breath.) “Your Holiness has preached charity always. Let
+charity then issue in good deeds. Let us be foremost in them; let us
+engage in trade honestly, in family life chastely, in government
+uprightly. And as for suffering—ah! Holiness!”</p>
+
+<p>His old scheme leaped back to his mind, and stood poised there
+convincing and imperious.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, my son, speak plainly.”</p>
+
+<p>“Your Holiness—it is old—old as Rome—every fool has desired it: a new
+Order, Holiness—a new Order,” he stammered.</p>
+
+<p>The white hand dropped the paper-weight; the Pope leaned forward,
+looking intently at the priest.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, my son?”</p>
+
+<p>Percy threw himself on his knees.</p>
+
+<p>“A new Order, Holiness—no habit or badge—subject to your Holiness
+only—freer than Jesuits, poorer than Franciscans, more mortified than
+Carthusians: men and women alike—the three vows with the intention of
+martyrdom; the Pantheon for their Church; each bishop responsible for
+their sustenance; a lieutenant in each country.... (Holiness, it is the
+thought of a fool.) ... And Christ Crucified for their patron.”</p>
+
+<p>The Pope stood up abruptly—so abruptly that Cardinal Martin sprang up
+too, apprehensive and terrified. It seemed that this young man had gone
+too far.</p>
+
+<p>Then the Pope sat down again, extending his hand.</p>
+
+<p>“God bless you, my son. You have leave to go.... Will your Eminence stay
+for a few minutes?”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="2CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>The Cardinal said very little to Percy when they met again that evening,
+beyond congratulating him on the way he had borne himself with the Pope.
+It seemed that the priest had done right by his extreme frankness. Then
+he told him of his duties.</p>
+
+<p>Percy was to retain the couple of rooms that had been put at his
+disposal; he was to say mass, as a rule, in the Cardinal’s oratory; and
+after that, at nine, he was to present himself for instructions: he was
+to dine at noon with the Cardinal, after which he was to consider
+himself at liberty till <i>Ave Maria</i>: then, once more he was to be at his
+master’s disposal until supper. The work he would principally have to do
+would be the reading of all English correspondence, and the drawing up
+of a report upon it.</p>
+
+<p>Percy found it a very pleasant and serene life, and the sense of home
+deepened every day. He had an abundance of time to himself, which he
+occupied resolutely in relaxation. From eight to nine he usually walked
+abroad, going sedately through the streets with his senses passive,
+looking into churches, watching the people, and gradually absorbing the
+strange naturalness of life under ancient conditions. At times it
+appeared to him like an historical dream; at times it seemed that there
+was no other reality; that the silent, tense world of modern
+civilisation was itself a phantom, and that here was the simple
+naturalness of the soul’s childhood back again. Even the reading of the
+English correspondence did not greatly affect him, for the stream of his
+mind was beginning to run clear again in this sweet old channel; and he
+read, dissected, analysed and diagnosed with a deepening tranquillity.</p>
+
+<p>There was not, after all, a great deal of news. It was a kind of lull
+after storm. Felsenburgh was still in retirement; he had refused the
+offers made to him by France and Italy, as that of England; and,
+although nothing definite was announced, it seemed that he was confining
+himself at present to an unofficial attitude. Meanwhile the Parliaments
+of Europe were busy in the preliminary stages of code-revision. Nothing
+would be done, it was understood, until the autumn sessions.</p>
+
+<p>Life in Rome was very strange. The city had now become not only the
+centre of faith but, in a sense, a microcosm of it. It was divided into
+four huge quarters—Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Teutonic and Eastern—besides
+Trastevere, which was occupied almost entirely by Papal offices,
+seminaries, and schools. Anglo-Saxondom occupied the southwestern
+quarter, now entirely covered with houses, including the Aventine, the
+Celian and Testaccio. The Latins inhabited old Rome, between the Course
+and the river; the Teutons the northeastern quarter, bounded on the
+south by St. Laurence’s Street; and the Easterns the remaining quarter,
+of which the centre was the Lateran. In this manner the true Romans were
+scarcely conscious of intrusion; they possessed a multitude of their own
+churches, they were allowed to revel in narrow, dark streets and hold
+their markets; and it was here that Percy usually walked, in a passion
+of historical retrospect. But the other quarters were strange enough,
+too. It was curious to see how a progeny of Gothic churches, served by
+northern priests, had grown up naturally in the Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic
+districts, and how the wide, grey streets, the neat pavements, the
+severe houses, showed how the northerns had not yet realised the
+requirements of southern life. The Easterns, on the other hand,
+resembled the Latins; their streets were as narrow and dark, their
+smells as overwhelming, their churches as dirty and as homely, and their
+colours even more brilliant.</p>
+
+<p>Outside the walls the confusion was indescribable. If the city
+represented a carved miniature of the world, the suburbs represented the
+same model broken into a thousand pieces, tumbled in a bag and shot out
+at random. So far as the eye could see, on all sides from the roof of
+the Vatican, there stretched an endless plain of house-roofs, broken by
+spires, towers, domes and chimneys, under which lived human beings of
+every race beneath the sun. Here were the great manufactories, the
+monster buildings of the new world, the stations, the schools, the
+offices, all under secular dominion, yet surrounded by six millions of
+souls who lived here for love of religion. It was these who had
+despaired of modern life, tired out with change and effort, who had fled
+from the new system for refuge to the Church, but who could not obtain
+leave to live in the city itself. New houses were continually springing
+up in all directions. A gigantic compass, fixed by one leg in Rome, and
+with a span of five miles, would, if twirled, revolve through packed
+streets through its entire circle. Beyond that too houses stretched into
+the indefinite distance.</p>
+
+<p>But Percy did not realise the significance of all that he saw, until the
+occasion of the Pope’s name-day towards the end of August.</p>
+
+<p>It was yet cool and early, when he followed his patron, whom he was to
+serve as chaplain, along the broad passages of the Vatican towards the
+room where the Pope and Cardinals were to assemble. Through a window, as
+he looked out into the Piazza, the crowd was yet more dense, if that
+were possible, than it had been an hour before. The huge oval square was
+cobbled with heads, through which ran a broad road, kept by papal troops
+for the passage of the carriages; and up the broad ribbon, white in the
+eastern light, came monstrous vehicles, a blaze of gilding and colour
+and cream tint; slow cheers swelled up and died, and through all came
+the rush and patter of wheels over the stones, like the sound of a
+tide-swept pebbly beach.</p>
+
+<p>As they waited in an ante-chamber, halted by the pressure in front and
+behind—a pack of scarlet and white and purple—he looked out again, and
+realised what he had known only intellectually before, that here before
+his eyes was the royalty of the old world assembled—and he began to
+perceive its significance.</p>
+
+<p>Round the steps of the basilica spread a great fan of coaches, each
+yoked to eight horses—the white of France and Spain, the black of
+Germany, Italy and Russia, and the cream-coloured of England. Those
+stood out in the near half-circle, and beyond was the sweep of the
+lesser powers: Greece, Norway, Sweden, Roumania and the Balkan States.
+One, the Turk, was alone wanting, he reminded himself. The emblems of
+some were visible—eagles, lions, leopards—guarding the royal crown
+above the roof of each. From the foot of the steps to the head ran a
+broad scarlet carpet, lined with soldiers.</p>
+
+<p>Percy leaned against the shutter, and began to meditate. Here was all
+that was left of Royalty. He had seen their palaces before, here and
+there in the various quarters, with standards flying, and
+scarlet-liveried men lounging on the steps. He had raised his hat a
+dozen times as a landau thundered past him up the Course; he had even
+seen the lilies of France and the leopards of England pass together in
+the solemn parade of the Pincian Hill. He had read in the papers every
+now and again during the last five years that family after family had
+made its way to Rome, after papal recognition had been granted; he had
+been told by the Cardinal on the previous evening that William of
+England, with his Consort, had landed at Ostia in the morning and that
+the tale of the Powers was complete. But he had never before realised
+the stupendous, overwhelming fact of the assembly of the world’s royalty
+under the shadow of Peter’s Throne, nor the appalling danger that its
+presence constituted in the midst of a democratic world. That world, he
+knew, affected to laugh at the folly and the childishness of it all—at
+the desperate play-acting of Divine Right on the part of fallen and
+despised families; but the same world, he knew very well, had not yet
+lost quite all its sentiment; and if that sentiment should happen to
+become resentful—-</p>
+
+<p>The pressure relaxed; Percy slipped out of the recess, and followed in
+the slow-moving stream.</p>
+
+<p>Half-an-hour later he was in his place among the ecclesiastics, as the
+papal procession came out through the glimmering dusk of the chapel of
+the Blessed Sacrament into the nave of the enormous church; but even
+before he had entered the chapel he heard the quiet roar of recognition
+and the cry of the trumpets that greeted the Supreme Pontiff as he came
+out, a hundred yards ahead, borne on the <i>sedia gestatoria</i>, with the
+fans going behind him. When Percy himself came out, five minutes later,
+walking in his quaternion, and saw the sight that was waiting, he
+remembered with a sudden throb at his heart that other sight he had seen
+in London in a summer dawn three months before....</p>
+
+<p>Far ahead, seeming to cleave its way through the surging heads, like the
+poop of an ancient ship, moved the canopy beneath which sat the Lord of
+the world, and between him and the priest, as if it were the wake of
+that same ship, swayed the gorgeous procession—Protonotaries Apostolic,
+Generals of Religious Orders and the rest—making its way along with
+white, gold, scarlet and silver foam between the living banks on either
+side. Overhead hung the splendid barrel of the roof, and far in front
+the haven of God’s altar reared its monstrous pillars, beneath which
+burned the seven yellow stars that were the harbour lights of sanctity.
+It was an astonishing sight, but too vast and bewildering to do anything
+but oppress the observers with a consciousness of their own futility.
+The enormous enclosed air, the giant statues, the dim and distant roofs,
+the indescribable concert of sound—of the movement of feet, the murmur
+of ten thousand voices, the peal of organs like the crying of gnats, the
+thin celestial music—the faint suggestive smell of incense and men and
+bruised bay and myrtle—and, supreme above all, the vibrant atmosphere
+of human emotion, shot with supernatural aspiration, as the Hope of the
+World, the holder of Divine Vice-Royalty, passed on his way to stand
+between God and man—this affected the priest as the action of a drug
+that at once lulls and stimulates, that blinds while it gives new
+vision, that deafens while it opens stopped ears, that exalts while it
+plunges into new gulfs of consciousness. Here, then, was the other
+formulated answer to the problem of life. The two Cities of Augustine
+lay for him to choose. The one was that of a world self-originated,
+self-organised and self-sufficient, interpreted by such men as Marx and
+Herve, socialists, materialists, and, in the end, hedonists, summed up
+at last in Felsenburgh. The other lay displayed in the sight he saw
+before him, telling of a Creator and of a creation, of a Divine purpose,
+a redemption, and a world transcendent and eternal from which all sprang
+and to which all moved. One of the two, John and Julian, was the Vicar,
+and the other the Ape, of God.... And Percy’s heart in one more spasm of
+conviction made its choice....</p>
+
+<p>But the summit was not yet reached.</p>
+
+<p>As Percy came at last out from the nave beneath the dome, on his way to
+the tribune beyond the papal throne, he became aware of a new element.</p>
+
+<p>A great space was cleared about the altar and confession, extending, as
+he could see at least on his side, to the point that marked the entrance
+to the transepts; at this point ran rails straight across from side to
+side, continuing the lines of the nave. Beyond this red-hung barrier lay
+a gradual slope of faces, white and motionless; a glimmer of steel
+bounded it, and above, a third of the distance down the transept, rose
+in solemn serried array a line of canopies. These were of scarlet, like
+cardinalitial baldachini, but upon the upright surface of each burned
+gigantic coats supported by beasts and topped by crowns. Under each was
+a figure or two—no more—in splendid isolation, and through the
+interspaces between the thrones showed again a misty slope of faces.</p>
+
+<p>His heart quickened as he saw it—as he swept his eyes round and across
+to the right and saw as in a mirror the replica of the left in the right
+transept. It was there then that they sat—those lonely survivors of
+that strange company of persons who, till half-a-century ago, had
+reigned as God’s temporal Vicegerents with the consent of their
+subjects. They were unrecognised, now, save by Him from whom they drew
+their sovereignty—pinnacles clustering and hanging from a dome, from
+which the walls had been withdrawn. These were men and women who had
+learned at last that power comes from above, and their title to rule
+came not from their subjects but from the Supreme Ruler of
+all—shepherds without sheep, captains without soldiers to command. It
+was piteous—horribly piteous, yet inspiring. The act of faith was so
+sublime; and Percy’s heart quickened as he understood it. These, then,
+men and women like himself, were not ashamed to appeal from man to God,
+to assume insignia which the world regarded as playthings, but which to
+them were emblems of supernatural commission. Was there not mirrored
+here, he asked himself, some far-off shadow of One Who rode on the colt
+of an ass amid the sneers of the great and the enthusiasm of
+children?...</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It was yet more kindling as the mass went on, and he saw the male
+sovereigns come down to do their services at the altar, and to go to and
+fro between it and the Throne. There they went bareheaded, the stately
+silent figures. The English king, once again <i>Fidei Defensor</i>, bore the
+train in place of the old king of Spain, who, with the Austrian Emperor,
+alone of all European sovereigns, had preserved the unbroken continuity
+of faith. The old man leaned over his fald-stool, mumbling and weeping,
+even crying out now and again in love and devotion, as, like Simeon, he
+saw his Salvation. The Austrian Emperor twice administered the Lavabo;
+the German sovereign, who had lost his throne and all but his life upon
+his conversion four years before, by a new privilege placed and withdrew
+the cushion, as his Lord kneeled before the Lord of them both. So
+movement by movement the gorgeous drama was enacted; the murmuring of
+the crowds died to a stillness that was but one wordless prayer as the
+tiny White Disc rose between the white hands, and the thin angelic music
+pealed in the dome. For here was the one hope of these thousands, as
+mighty and as little as once within the Manger. There was none other
+that fought for them but only God. Surely then, if the blood of men and
+the tears of women could not avail to move the Judge and Observer of all
+from His silence, surely at least here the bloodless Death of His only
+Son, that once on Calvary had darkened heaven and rent the earth,
+pleaded now with such sorrowful splendour upon this island of faith amid
+a sea of laughter and hatred—this at least must avail! How could it
+not?</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Percy had just sat down, tired out with the long ceremonies, when the
+door opened abruptly, and the Cardinal, still in his robes, came in
+swiftly, shutting the door behind him.</p>
+
+<p>“Father Franklin,” he said, in a strange breathless voice, “there is the
+worst of news. Felsenburgh is appointed President of Europe.”</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>It was late that night before Percy returned, completely exhausted by
+his labours. For hour after hour he had sat with the Cardinal, opening
+despatches that poured into the electric receivers from all over Europe,
+and were brought in one by one into the quiet sitting-room. Three times
+in the afternoon the Cardinal had been sent for, once by the Pope and
+twice to the Quirinal.</p>
+
+<p>There was no doubt at all that the news was true; and it seemed that
+Felsenburgh must have waited deliberately for the offer. All others he
+had refused. There had been a Convention of the Powers, each of whom had
+been anxious to secure him, and each of whom had severally failed; these
+private claims had been withdrawn, and an united message sent. The new
+proposal was to the effect that Felsenburgh should assume a position
+hitherto undreamed of in democracy; that he should receive a House of
+Government in every capital of Europe; that his veto of any measure
+should be final for three years; that any measure he chose to introduce
+three times in three consecutive years should become law; that his title
+should be that of President of Europe. From his side practically nothing
+was asked, except that he should refuse any other official position
+offered him that did not receive the sanction of all the Powers. And all
+this, Percy saw very well, involved the danger of an united Europe
+increased tenfold. It involved all the stupendous force of Socialism
+directed by a brilliant individual. It was the combination of the
+strongest characteristics of the two methods of government. The offer
+had been accepted by Felsenburgh after eight hours’ silence.</p>
+
+<p>It was remarkable, too, to observe how the news had been accepted by the
+two other divisions of the world. The East was enthusiastic; America was
+divided. But in any case America was powerless: the balance of the world
+was overwhelmingly against her.</p>
+
+<p>Percy threw himself, as he was, on to his bed, and lay there with
+drumming pulses, closed eyes and a huge despair at his heart. The world
+indeed had risen like a giant over the horizons of Rome, and the holy
+city was no better now than a sand castle before a tide. So much he
+grasped. As to how ruin would come, in what form and from what
+direction, he neither knew nor cared. Only he knew now that it would
+come.</p>
+
+<p>He had learned by now something of his own temperament; and he turned
+his eyes inwards to observe himself bitterly, as a doctor in mortal
+disease might with a dreadful complacency diagnose his own symptoms. It
+was even a relief to turn from the monstrous mechanism of the world to
+see in miniature one hopeless human heart. For his own religion he no
+longer feared; he knew, as absolutely as a man may know the colour of
+his eyes, that it was secure again and beyond shaking. During those
+weeks in Rome the cloudy deposit had run clear and the channel was once
+more visible. Or, better still, that vast erection of dogma, ceremony,
+custom and morals in which he had been educated, and on which he had
+looked all his life (as a man may stare upon some great set-piece that
+bewilders him), seeing now one spark of light, now another, flare and
+wane in the darkness, had little by little kindled and revealed itself
+in one stupendous blaze of divine fire that explains itself. Huge
+principles, once bewildering and even repellent, were again luminously
+self-evident; he saw, for example, that while Humanity-Religion
+endeavoured to abolish suffering the Divine Religion embraced it, so
+that the blind pangs even of beasts were within the Father’s Will and
+Scheme; or that while from one angle one colour only of the web of life
+was visible—material, or intellectual, or artistic—from another the
+Supernatural was as eminently obvious. Humanity-Religion could only be
+true if at least half of man’s nature, aspirations and sorrows were
+ignored. Christianity, on the other hand, at least included and
+accounted for these, even if it did not explain them. This ... and this
+... and this ... all made the one and perfect whole. There was the
+Catholic Faith, more certain to him than the existence of himself: it
+was true and alive. He might be damned, but God reigned. He might go
+mad, but Jesus Christ was Incarnate Deity, proving Himself so by death
+and Resurrection, and John his Vicar. These things were as the bones of
+the Universe—facts beyond doubting—if they were not true, nothing
+anywhere was anything but a dream.</p>
+
+<p>Difficulties?—Why, there were ten thousand. He did not in the least
+understand why God had made the world as it was, nor how Hell could be
+the creation of Love, nor how bread was transubstantiated into the Body
+of God but—well, these things were so. He had travelled far, he began
+to see, from his old status of faith, when he had believed that divine
+truth could be demonstrated on intellectual grounds. He had learned now
+(he knew not how) that the supernatural cried to the supernatural; the
+Christ without to the Christ within; that pure human reason indeed could
+not contradict, yet neither could it adequately prove the mysteries of
+faith, except on premisses visible only to him who receives Revelation
+as a fact; that it is the moral state, rather than the intellectual, to
+which the Spirit of God speaks with the greater certitude. That which he
+had both learned and taught he now knew, that Faith, having, like man
+himself, a body and a spirit—an historical expression and an inner
+verity—speaks now by one, now by another. This man believes because he
+sees—accepts the Incarnation or the Church from its credentials; that
+man, perceiving that these things are spiritual facts, yields himself
+wholly to the message and authority of her who alone professes them, as
+well as to the manifestation of them upon the historical plane; and in
+the darkness leans upon her arm. Or, best of all, because he has
+believed, now he sees.</p>
+
+<p>So he looked with a kind of interested indolence at other tracts of his
+nature.</p>
+
+<p>First, there was his intellect, puzzled beyond description, demanding,
+Why, why, why? Why was it allowed? How was it conceivable that God did
+not intervene, and that the Father of men could permit His dear world to
+be so ranged against Him? What did He mean to do? Was this eternal
+silence never to be broken? It was very well for those that had the
+Faith, but what of the countless millions who were settling down in
+contented blasphemy? Were these not, too, His children and the sheep of
+His pasture? What was the Catholic Church made for if not to convert the
+world, and why then had Almighty God allowed it, on the one side, to
+dwindle to a handful, and, on the other, the world to find its peace
+apart from Him?</p>
+
+<p>He considered his emotions, but there was no comfort there, no stimulus.
+Oh! yes; he could pray still, by mere cold acts of the will, and his
+theology told him that God accepted such. He could say “<i>Adveniat regnum
+tuum. ... Fiat voluntas tua</i>,” five thousand times a day, if God wanted
+that; but there was no sting or touch, no sense of vibration through the
+cords that his will threw up to the Heavenly Throne. What in the world
+then did God want him to do? Was it just then to repeat formulas, to lie
+still, to open despatches, to listen through the telephone, and to
+suffer?</p>
+
+<p>And then the rest of the world—the madness that had seized upon the
+nations; the amazing stories that had poured in that day of the men in
+Paris, who, raving like Bacchantes, had stripped themselves naked in the
+Place de Concorde, and stabbed themselves to the heart, crying out to
+thunders of applause that life was too enthralling to be endured; of the
+woman who sang herself mad last night in Spain, and fell laughing and
+foaming in the concert hall at Seville; of the crucifixion of the
+Catholics that morning in the Pyrenees, and the apostasy of three
+bishops in Germany.... And this ... and this ... and a thousand more
+horrors were permitted, and God made no sign and spoke no word....</p>
+
+<p>There was a tap, and Percy sprang up as the Cardinal came in.</p>
+
+<p>He looked horribly worn; and his eyes had a kind of sunken brilliance
+that revealed fever. He made a little motion to Percy to sit down, and
+himself sat in the deep chair, trembling a little, and gathering his
+buckled feet beneath his red-buttoned cassock.</p>
+
+<p>“You must forgive me, father,” he said. “I am anxious for the Bishop’s
+safety. He should be here by now.”</p>
+
+<p>This was the Bishop of Southwark, Percy remembered, who had left England
+early that morning.</p>
+
+<p>“He is coming straight through, your Eminence?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; he should have been here by twenty-three. It is after midnight, is
+it not?”</p>
+
+<p>As he spoke, the bells chimed out the half-hour.</p>
+
+<p>It was nearly quiet now. All day the air had been full of sound; mobs
+had paraded the suburbs; the gates of the City had been barred, yet that
+was only an earnest of what was to be expected when the world understood
+itself.</p>
+
+<p>The Cardinal seemed to recover himself after a few minutes’ silence.</p>
+
+<p>“You look tired out, father,” he said kindly.</p>
+
+<p>Percy smiled.</p>
+
+<p>“And your Eminence?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>The old man smiled too.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, yes,” he said. “I shall not last much longer, father. And then it
+will be you to suffer.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy sat up, suddenly, sick at heart.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, yes,” said the Cardinal. “The Holy Father has arranged it. You are
+to succeed me, you know. It need be no secret.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy drew a long trembling breath.</p>
+
+<p>“Eminence,” he began piteously.</p>
+
+<p>The other lifted a thin old hand.</p>
+
+<p>“I understand all that,” he said softly. “You wish to die, is it not
+so?—and be at peace. There are many who wish that. But we must suffer
+first. <i>Et pati et mori</i>. Father Franklin, there must be no faltering.”</p>
+
+<p>There was a long silence.</p>
+
+<p>The news was too stunning to convey anything to the priest but a sense
+of horrible shock. The thought had simply never entered his mind that
+he, a man under forty, should be considered eligible to succeed this
+wise, patient old prelate. As for the honour—Percy was past that now,
+even had he thought of it. There was but one view before him—of a long
+and intolerable journey, on a road that went uphill, to be traversed
+with a burden on his shoulders that he could not support.</p>
+
+<p>Yet he recognised its inevitability. The fact was announced to him as
+indisputable; it was to be; there was nothing to be said. But it was as
+if one more gulf had opened, and he stared into it with a dull, sick
+horror, incapable of expression.</p>
+
+<p>The Cardinal first broke the silence.</p>
+
+<p>“Father Franklin,” he said, “I have seen to-day a picture of
+Felsenburgh. Do you know whom I at first took it for?”</p>
+
+<p>Percy smiled listlessly.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, father, I took it for you. Now, what do you make of that?”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t understand, Eminence.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why—-” He broke off, suddenly changing the subject.</p>
+
+<p>“There was a murder in the City to-day,” he said. “A Catholic stabbed a
+blasphemer.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy glanced at him again.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! yes; he has not attempted to escape,” went on the old man. “He is
+in gaol.”</p>
+
+<p>“And—-”</p>
+
+<p>“He will be executed. The trial will begin to-morrow.... It is sad
+enough. It is the first murder for eight months.”</p>
+
+<p>The irony of the position was evident enough to Percy as he sat
+listening to the deepening silence outside in the starlit night. Here
+was this poor city pretending that nothing was the matter, quietly
+administering its derided justice; and there, outside, were the forces
+gathering that would put an end to all. His enthusiasm seemed dead.
+There was no thrill from the thought of the splendid disregard of
+material facts of which this was one tiny instance, none of despairing
+courage or drunken recklessness. He felt like one who watches a fly
+washing his face on the cylinder of an engine—the huge steel slides
+along bearing the tiny life towards enormous death—another moment and
+it will be over; and yet the watcher cannot interfere. The supernatural
+thus lay, perfect and alive, but immeasurably tiny; the huge forces were
+in motion, the world was heaving up, and Percy could do nothing but
+stare and frown. Yet, as has been said, there was no shadow on his
+faith; the fly he knew was greater than the engine from the superiority
+of its order of life; if it were crushed, life would not be the final
+sufferer; so much he knew, but how it was so, he did not know.</p>
+
+<p>As the two sat there, again came a step and a tap; and a servant’s face
+looked in.</p>
+
+<p>“His Lordship is come, Eminence,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>The Cardinal rose painfully, supporting himself by the table. Then he
+paused, seeming to remember something, and fumbled in his pocket.</p>
+
+<p>“See that, father,” he said, and pushed a small silver disc towards the
+priest. “No; when I am gone.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy closed the door and came back, taking up the little round object.</p>
+
+<p>It was a coin, fresh from the mint. On one side was the familiar wreath
+with the word “fivepence” in the midst, with its Esperanto equivalent
+beneath, and on the other the profile of a man, with an inscription.
+Percy turned it to read:</p>
+
+<p>“JULIAN FELSENBURGH, LA PREZIDANTE DE UROPO.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h4>III</h4>
+</div>
+
+<p>It was at ten o’clock on the following morning that the Cardinals were
+summoned to the Pope’s presence to hear the allocution.</p>
+
+<p>Percy, from his seat among the Consultors, watched them come in, men of
+every nation and temperament and age—the Italians all together,
+gesticulating, and flashing teeth; the Anglo-Saxons steady-faced and
+serious; an old French Cardinal leaning on his stick, walking with the
+English Benedictine. It was one of the great plain stately rooms of
+which the Vatican now chiefly consisted, seated length wise like a
+chapel. At the lower end, traversed by the gangway, were the seats of
+the Consultors; at the upper end, the dais with the papal throne. Three
+or four benches with desks before them, standing out beyond the
+Consultors’ seats, were reserved for the arrivals of the day before
+—prelates and priests who had poured into Rome from every European
+country on the announcement of the amazing news.</p>
+
+<p>Percy had not an idea as to what would be said. It was scarcely possible
+that nothing but platitudes would be uttered, yet what else could be
+said in view of the complete doubtfulness of the situation? All that was
+known even this morning was that the Presidentship of Europe was a fact;
+the little silver coin he had seen witnessed to that; that there had
+been an outburst of persecution, repressed sternly by local authorities;
+and that Felsenburgh was to-day to begin his tour from capital to
+capital. He was expected in Turin by the end of the week. From every
+Catholic centre throughout the world had come in messages imploring
+guidance; it was said that apostasy was rising like a tidal wave, that
+persecution threatened everywhere, and that even bishops were beginning
+to yield.</p>
+
+<p>As for the Holy Father, all was doubtful. Those who knew, said nothing;
+and the only rumour that escaped was to the effect that he had spent all
+night in prayer at the tomb of the Apostle....</p>
+
+<p>The murmur died suddenly to a rustle and a silence; there was a ripple
+of sinking heads along the seats as the door beside the canopy opened,
+and a moment later John, <i>Pater Patrum</i>, was on his throne.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>At first Percy understood nothing. He stared only, as at a picture,
+through the dusty sunlight that poured in through the shrouded windows,
+at the scarlet lines to right and left, up to the huge scarlet canopy,
+and the white figure that sat there. Certainly, these southerners
+understood the power of effect. It was as vivid and impressive as a
+vision of the Host in a jewelled monstrance. Every accessory was
+gorgeous, the high room, the colour of the robes, the chains and
+crosses, and as the eye moved along to its climax it was met by a piece
+of dead white—as if glory was exhausted and declared itself impotent to
+tell the supreme secret. Scarlet and purple and gold were well enough
+for those who stood on the steps of the throne—they needed it; but for
+Him who sat there nothing was needed. Let colours die and sounds faint
+in the presence of God’s Viceroy. Yet what expression was required found
+itself adequately provided in that beautiful oval face, the poised
+imperious head, the sweet brilliant eyes and the clean-curved lips that
+spoke so strongly. There was not a sound in the room, not a rustle, nor
+a breathing—even without it seemed as if the world were allowing the
+supernatural to state its defence uninterruptedly, before summing up and
+clamouring condemnation.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Percy made a violent effort at self-repression, clenched his hands and
+listened.</p>
+
+<p>“... Since this then is so, sons in Jesus Christ, it is for us to
+answer. We wrestle not, as the Doctor of the Gentiles teaches us,
+<i>against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against
+the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of
+wickedness in the high places. Wherefore<i>, he continues, </i>take unto you
+the armour of God<i>; and he further declares to us its nature—</i>the
+girdle of truth, the breastplate of justice, the shoes of peace, the
+shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit.</i></p>
+
+<p>“By this, therefore, the Word of God bids us to war, but not with the
+weapons of this world, for neither is His kingdom of this world; and it
+is to remind you of the principles of this warfare that we have summoned
+you to Our Presence.”</p>
+
+<p>The voice paused, and there was a rustling sigh along the seats. Then
+the voice continued on a slightly higher note.</p>
+
+<p>“It has ever been the wisdom of Our predecessors, as is also their duty,
+while keeping silence at certain seasons, at others to speak freely the
+whole counsel of God. From this duty We Ourself must not be deterred by
+the knowledge of Our own weakness and ignorance, but to trust rather
+that He Who has placed Us on this throne will deign to speak through Our
+mouth and use Our words to His glory.</p>
+
+<p>“First, then, it is necessary to utter Our sentence as to the new
+movement, as men call it, which has latterly been inaugurated by the
+rulers of this world.</p>
+
+<p>“We are not unmindful of the blessings of peace and unity, nor do We
+forget that the appearance of these things has been the fruit of much
+that we have condemned. It is this appearance of peace that has deceived
+many, causing them to doubt the promise of the Prince of Peace that it
+is through Him alone that we have access to the Father. That true peace,
+passing understanding, concerns not only the relations of men between
+themselves, but, supremely, the relations of men with their Maker; and
+it is in this necessary point that the efforts of the world are found
+wanting. It is not indeed to be wondered at that in a world which has
+rejected God this necessary matter should be forgotten. Men have
+thought—led astray by seducers—that the unity of nations was the
+greatest prize of this life, forgetting the words of our Saviour, Who
+said that He came to bring not peace but a sword, and that it is through
+many tribulations that we enter God’s Kingdom. First, then, there should
+be established the peace of man with God, and after that the unity of
+man with man will follow. <i>Seek ye first</i>, said Jesus Christ, <i>the
+kingdom of God—and then all these things shall be added unto you.</i></p>
+
+<p>“First, then, We once more condemn and anathematise the opinions of
+those who teach and believe the contrary of this; and we renew once more
+all the condemnations uttered by Ourself or Our predecessors against all
+those societies, organisations and communities that have been formed for
+the furtherance of an unity on another than a divine foundation; and We
+remind Our children throughout the world that it is forbidden to them to
+enter or to aid or to approve in any manner whatsoever any of those
+bodies named in such condemnations.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy moved in his seat, conscious of a touch of impatience.... The
+manner was superb, tranquil and stately as a river; but the matter a
+trifle banal. Here was this old reprobation of Freemasonry, repeated in
+unoriginal language.</p>
+
+<p>“Secondly,” went on the steady voice, “We wish to make known to you Our
+desires for the future; and here We tread on what many have considered
+dangerous ground.”</p>
+
+<p>Again came that rustle. Percy saw more than one cardinal lean forward
+with hand crooked at ear to hear the better. It was evident that
+something important was coming.</p>
+
+<p>“There are many points,” went on the high voice, “of which it is not Our
+intention to speak at this time, for of their own nature they are
+secret, and must be treated of on another occasion. But what We say
+here, We say to the world. Since the assaults of Our enemies are both
+open and secret, so too must be Our defences. This then is Our
+intention.”</p>
+
+<p>The Pope paused again, lifted one hand as if mechanically to his breast,
+and grasped the cross that hung there.</p>
+
+<p>“While the army of Christ is one, it consists of many divisions, each of
+which has its proper function and object. In times past God has raised
+up companies of His servants to do this or that particular work—the
+sons of St. Francis to preach poverty, those of St. Bernard to labour in
+prayer with all holy women dedicating themselves to this purpose, the
+Society of Jesus for the education of youth and the conversion of the
+heathen—together with all the other Religious Orders whose names are
+known throughout the world. Each such company was raised up at a
+particular season of need, and each has corresponded nobly with the
+divine vocation. It has also been the especial glory of each, for the
+furtherance of its intention, while pursuing its end, to cut off from
+itself all such activities (good in themselves) which would hinder that
+work for which God had called it into being—following in this matter
+the words of our Redeemer, <i>Every branch that beareth fruit, He purgeth
+it that it may bring forth more fruit.</i> At this present season, then, it
+appears to Our Humility that all such Orders (which once more We commend
+and bless) are not perfectly suited by the very conditions of their
+respective Rules to perform the great work which the time requires. Our
+warfare lies not with ignorance in particular, whether of the heathens
+to whom the Gospel has not yet come, or of those whose fathers have
+rejected it, nor with <i>the deceitful riches of this world</i>, nor with
+<i>science falsely so-called</i>, nor indeed with any one of those
+strongholds of infidelity against whom We have laboured in the past.
+Rather it appears as if at last the time was come of which the apostle
+spoke when he said that <i>that day shall not come, except there come a
+falling away first, and that Man of Sin be revealed, the Son of
+Perdition, who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called
+God.</i></p>
+
+<p>“It is not with this or that force that we are concerned, but rather
+with the unveiled immensity of that power whose time was foretold, and
+whose destruction is prepared.”</p>
+
+<p>The voice paused again, and Percy gripped the rail before him to stay
+the trembling of his hands. There was no rustle now, nothing but a
+silence that tingled and shook. The Pope drew a long breath, turned his
+head slowly to right and left, and went on more deliberately than ever.</p>
+
+<p>“It seems good, then, to Our Humility, that the Vicar of Christ should
+himself invite God’s children to this new warfare; and it is Our
+intention to enroll under the title of the Order of Christ Crucified the
+names of all who offer themselves to this supreme service. In doing this
+We are aware of the novelty of Our action, and the disregard of all such
+precautions as have been necessary in the past. We take counsel in this
+matter with none save Him Who we believe has inspired it.</p>
+
+<p>“First, then, let Us say, that although obedient service will be
+required from all who shall be admitted to this Order, Our primary
+intention in instituting it lies in God’s regard rather than in man’s,
+in appealing to Him Who asks our generosity rather than to those who
+deny it, and dedicating once more by a formal and deliberate act our
+souls and bodies to the heavenly Will and service of Him Who alone can
+rightly claim such offering, and will accept our poverty.</p>
+
+<p>“Briefly, we dictate only the following conditions.</p>
+
+<p>“None shall be capable of entering the Order except such as shall be
+above the age of seventeen years.</p>
+
+<p>“No badge, habit, nor insignia shall be attached to it.</p>
+
+<p>“The Three Evangelical Counsels shall be the foundation of the Rule, to
+which we add a fourth intention, namely, that of a desire to receive the
+crown of martyrdom and a purpose of embracing it.</p>
+
+<p>“The bishop of every diocese, if he himself shall enter the Order, shall
+be the superior within the limits of his own jurisdiction, and alone
+shall be exempt from the literal observance of the Vow of Poverty so
+long as he retains his see. Such bishops as do not feel the vocation to
+the Order shall retain their sees under the usual conditions, but shall
+have no Religious claim on the members of the Order.</p>
+
+<p>“Further, We announce Our intention of Ourself entering the Order as its
+supreme prelate, and of making Our profession within the course of a few
+days.</p>
+
+<p>“Further, We declare that in Our Own pontificate none shall be elevated
+to the Sacred College save those who have made their profession in the
+Order; and We shall dedicate shortly the Basilica of St. Peter and St.
+Paul as the central church of the Order, in which church We shall raise
+to the altars without any delay those happy souls who shall lay down
+their lives in the pursuance of their vocation.</p>
+
+<p>“Of that vocation it is unnecessary to speak beyond indicating that it
+may be pursued under any conditions laid down by the Superiors. As
+regards the novitiate, its conditions and requirements, we shall shortly
+issue the necessary directions. Each diocesan superior (for it is Our
+hope that none will hold back) shall have all such rights as usually
+appertain to Religious Superiors, and shall be empowered to employ his
+subjects in any work that, in his opinion, shall subserve the glory of
+God and the salvation of souls. It is Our Own intention to employ in Our
+service none except those who shall make their profession.”</p>
+
+<p>He raised his eyes once more, seemingly without emotion, then he
+continued:</p>
+
+<p>“So far, then, We have determined. On other matters We shall take
+counsel immediately; but it is Our wish that these words shall be
+communicated to all the world, that there may be no delay in making
+known what it is that Christ through His Vicar asks of all who profess
+the Divine Name. We offer no rewards except those which God Himself has
+promised to those that love Him, and lay down their life for Him; no
+promise of peace, save of that which passeth understanding; no home save
+that which befits pilgrims and sojourners who seek a City to come; no
+honour save the world’s contempt; no life, save that which is hid with
+Christ in God.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="2CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>Oliver Brand, seated in his little private room at Whitehall, was
+expecting a visitor. It was already close upon ten o’clock, and at
+half-past he must be in the House. He had hoped that Mr. Francis,
+whoever he might be, would not detain him long. Even now, every moment
+was a respite, for the work had become simply prodigious during the last
+weeks.</p>
+
+<p>But he was not reprieved for more than a minute, for the last boom from
+the Victoria Tower had scarcely ceased to throb when the door opened and
+a clerkly voice uttered the name he was expecting.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver shot one quick look at the stranger, at his drooping lids and
+down-turned mouth, summed him up fairly and accurately in the moments
+during which they seated themselves, and went briskly to business.</p>
+
+<p>“At twenty-five minutes past, sir, I must leave this room,” he said.
+“Until then—-” he made a little gesture.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Francis reassured him.</p>
+
+<p>“Thank you, Mr. Brand—that is ample time. Then, if you will excuse
+me—-” He groped in his breast-pocket, and drew out a long envelope.</p>
+
+<p>“I will leave this with you,” he said, “when I go. It sets out our
+desires at length and our names. And this is what I have to say, sir.”</p>
+
+<p>He sat back, crossed his legs, and went on, with a touch of eagerness in
+his voice.</p>
+
+<p>“I am a kind of deputation, as you know,” he said. “We have something
+both to ask and to offer. I am chosen because it was my own idea. First,
+may I ask a question?”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver bowed.</p>
+
+<p>“I wish to ask nothing that I ought not. But I believe it is practically
+certain, is it not?—that Divine Worship is to be restored throughout
+the kingdom?”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver smiled.</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose so,” he said. “The bill has been read for the third time,
+and, as you know, the President is to speak upon it this evening.”</p>
+
+<p>“He will not veto it?”</p>
+
+<p>“We suppose not. He has assented to it in Germany.”</p>
+
+<p>“Just so,” said Mr. Francis. “And if he assents here, I suppose it will
+become law immediately.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver leaned over this table, and drew out the green paper that
+contained the Bill.</p>
+
+<p>“You have this, of course—-” he said. “Well, it becomes law at once;
+and the first feast will be observed on the first of October.
+‘Paternity,’ is it not? Yes, Paternity.”</p>
+
+<p>“There will be something of a rush then,” said the other eagerly. “Why,
+that is only a week hence.”</p>
+
+<p>“I have not charge of this department,” said Oliver, laying back the
+Bill. “But I understand that the ritual will be that already in use in
+Germany. There is no reason why we should be peculiar.”</p>
+
+<p>“And the Abbey will be used?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, yes.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, sir,” said Mr. Francis, “of course I know the Government
+Commission has studied it all very closely, and no doubt has its own
+plans. But it appears to me that they will want all the experience they
+can get.”</p>
+
+<p>“No doubt.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, Mr. Brand, the society which I represent consists entirely of men
+who were once Catholic priests. We number about two hundred in London. I
+will leave a pamphlet with you, if I may, stating our objects, our
+constitution, and so on. It seemed to us that here was a matter in which
+our past experience might be of service to the Government. Catholic
+ceremonies, as you know, are very intricate, and some of us studied them
+very deeply in old days. We used to say that Masters of Ceremonies were
+born, not made, and we have a fair number of those amongst us. But
+indeed every priest is something of a ceremonialist.”</p>
+
+<p>He paused.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Mr. Francis?”</p>
+
+<p>“I am sure the Government realises the immense importance of all going
+smoothly. If Divine Service was at all grotesque or disorderly, it would
+largely defeat its own object. So I have been deputed to see you, Mr.
+Brand, and to suggest to you that here is a body of men—reckon it as at
+least twenty-five—who have had special experience in this kind of
+thing, and are perfectly ready to put themselves at the disposal of the
+Government.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver could not resist a faint flicker of a smile at the corner of his
+mouth. It was a very grim bit of irony, he thought, but it seemed
+sensible enough.</p>
+
+<p>“I quite understand, Mr. Francis. It seems a very reasonable suggestion.
+But I do not think I am the proper person. Mr. Snowford—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, yes, sir, I know. But your speech the other day inspired us all.
+You said exactly what was in all our hearts—that the world could not
+live without worship; and that now that God was found at last—-”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver waved his hand. He hated even a touch of flattery.</p>
+
+<p>“It is very good of you, Mr. Francis. I will certainly speak to Mr.
+Snowford. I understand that you offer yourselves as—as Masters of
+Ceremonies—?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, sir; and sacristans. I have studied the German ritual very
+carefully; it is more elaborate than I had thought it. It will need a
+good deal of adroitness. I imagine that you will want at least a dozen
+<i>Ceremoniarii</i> in the Abbey; and a dozen more in the vestries will
+scarcely be too much.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver nodded abruptly, looking curiously at the eager pathetic face of
+the man opposite him; yet it had something, too, of that mask-like
+priestly look that he had seen before in others like him. This was
+evidently a devotee.</p>
+
+<p>“You are all Masons, of course?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, of course, Mr. Brand.”</p>
+
+<p>“Very good. I will speak to Mr. Snowford to-day if I can catch him.”</p>
+
+<p>He glanced at the clock. There were yet three or four minutes.</p>
+
+<p>“You have seen the new appointment in Rome, sir,” went on Mr. Francis.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver shook his head. He was not particularly interested in Rome just
+now.</p>
+
+<p>“Cardinal Martin is dead—he died on Tuesday—and his place is already
+filled.”</p>
+
+<p>“Indeed, sir?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes—the new man was once a friend of mine—Franklin, his name
+is—Percy Franklin.”</p>
+
+<p>“Eh?”</p>
+
+<p>“What is the matter, Mr. Brand? Did you know him?”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver was eyeing him darkly, a little pale.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; I knew him,” he said quietly. “At least, I think so.”</p>
+
+<p>“He was at Westminster until a month or two ago.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, yes,” said Oliver, still looking at him. “And you knew him, Mr.
+Francis?”</p>
+
+<p>“I knew him—yes.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah!—well, I should like to have a talk some day about him.”</p>
+
+<p>He broke off. It yet wanted a minute to his time.</p>
+
+<p>“And that is all?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“That is all my actual business, sir,” answered the other. “But I hope
+you will allow me to say how much we all appreciate what you have done,
+Mr. Brand. I do not think it is possible for any, except ourselves, to
+understand what the loss of worship means to us. It was very strange at
+first—-”</p>
+
+<p>His voice trembled a little, and he stopped. Oliver felt interested, and
+checked himself in his movement to rise.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Mr. Francis?”</p>
+
+<p>The melancholy brown eyes turned on him full.</p>
+
+<p>“It was an illusion, of course, sir—we know that. But I, at any rate,
+dare to hope that it was not all wasted—all our aspirations and
+penitence and praise. We mistook our God, but none the less it reached
+Him—it found its way to the Spirit of the World. It taught us that the
+individual was nothing, and that He was all. And now—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, sir,” said the other softly. He was really touched.</p>
+
+<p>The sad brown eyes opened full.</p>
+
+<p>“And now Mr. Felsenburgh is come.” He swallowed in his throat. “Julian
+Felsenburgh!” There was a world of sudden passion in his gentle voice,
+and Oliver’s own heart responded.</p>
+
+<p>“I know, sir,” he said; “I know all that you mean.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! to have a Saviour at last!” cried Francis. “One that can be seen
+and handled and praised to His Face! It is like a dream—too good to be
+true!”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver glanced at the clock, and rose abruptly, holding out his hand.</p>
+
+<p>“Forgive me, sir. I must not stay. You have touched me very deeply.... I
+will speak to Snowford. Your address is here, I understand?”</p>
+
+<p>He pointed to the papers.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Mr. Brand. There is one more question.”</p>
+
+<p>“I must not stay, sir,” said Oliver, shaking his head.</p>
+
+<p>“One instant—is it true that this worship will be compulsory?”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver bowed as he gathered up his papers.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>Mabel, seated in the gallery that evening behind the President’s chair,
+had already glanced at her watch half-a-dozen times in the last hour,
+hoping each time that twenty-one o’clock was nearer than she feared. She
+knew well enough by now that the President of Europe would not be
+half-a-minute either before or after his time. His supreme punctuality
+was famous all over the continent. He had said Twenty-One, so it was to
+be twenty-one.</p>
+
+<p>A sharp bell-note impinged from beneath, and in a moment the drawling
+voice of the speaker stopped. Once more she lifted her wrist, saw that
+it wanted five minutes of the hour; then she leaned forward from her
+corner and stared down into the House.</p>
+
+<p>A great change had passed over it at the metallic noise. All down the
+long brown seats members were shifting and arranging themselves more
+decorously, uncrossing their legs, slipping their hats beneath the
+leather fringes. As she looked, too, she saw the President of the House
+coming down the three steps from his chair, for Another would need it in
+a few moments.</p>
+
+<p>The house was full from end to end; a late comer ran in from the
+twilight of the south door and looked distractedly about him in the full
+light before he saw his vacant place. The galleries at the lower end
+were occupied too, down there, where she had failed to obtain a seat.
+Yet from all the crowded interior there was no sound but a sibilant
+whispering; from the passages behind she could hear again the quick
+bell-note repeat itself as the lobbies were cleared; and from Parliament
+Square outside once more came the heavy murmur of the crowd that had
+been inaudible for the last twenty minutes. When that ceased she would
+know that he was come.</p>
+
+<p>How strange and wonderful it was to be here—on this night of all, when
+the President was to speak! A month ago he had assented to a similar
+Bill in Germany, and had delivered a speech on the same subject at
+Turin. To-morrow he was to be in Spain. No one knew where he had been
+during the past week. A rumour had spread that his volor had been seen
+passing over Lake Como, and had been instantly contradicted. No one knew
+either what he would say to-night. It might be three words or twenty
+thousand. There were a few clauses in the Bill—notably those bearing on
+the point as to when the new worship was to be made compulsory on all
+subjects over the age of seven—it might be he would object and veto
+these. In that case all must be done again, and the Bill re-passed,
+unless the House accepted his amendment instantly by acclamation.</p>
+
+<p>Mabel herself was inclined to these clauses. They provided that,
+although worship was to be offered in every parish church of England on
+the ensuing first day of October, this was not to be compulsory on all
+subjects till the New Year; whereas, Germany, who had passed the Bill
+only a month before, had caused it to come into full force immediately,
+thus compelling all her Catholic subjects either to leave the country
+without delay or suffer the penalties. These penalties were not
+vindictive: on a first offence a week’s detention only was to be given;
+on the second, one month’s imprisonment; on the third, one year’s; and
+on the fourth, perpetual imprisonment until the criminal yielded. These
+were merciful terms, it seemed; for even imprisonment itself meant no
+more than reasonable confinement and employment on Government works.
+There were no mediaeval horrors here; and the act of worship demanded
+was so little, too; it consisted of no more than bodily presence in the
+church or cathedral on the four new festivals of Maternity, Life,
+Sustenance and Paternity, celebrated on the first day of each quarter.
+Sunday worship was to be purely voluntary.</p>
+
+<p>She could not understand how any man could refuse this homage. These
+four things were facts—they were the manifestations of what she called
+the Spirit of the World—and if others called that Power God, yet surely
+these ought to be considered as His functions. Where then was the
+difficulty? It was not as if Christian worship were not permitted, under
+the usual regulations. Catholics could still go to mass. And yet
+appalling things were threatened in Germany: not less than twelve
+thousand persons had already left for Rome; and it was rumoured that
+forty thousand would refuse this simple act of homage a few days hence.
+It bewildered and angered her to think of it.</p>
+
+<p>For herself the new worship was a crowning sign of the triumph of
+Humanity. Her heart had yearned for some such thing as this—some
+public corporate profession of what all now believed. She had so
+resented the dulness of folk who were content with action and never
+considered its springs. Surely this instinct within her was a true one;
+she desired to stand with her fellows in some solemn place, consecrated
+not by priests but by the will of man; to have as her inspirers sweet
+singing and the peal of organs; to utter her sorrow with thousands
+beside her at her own feebleness of immolation before the Spirit of all;
+to sing aloud her praise of the glory of life, and to offer by sacrifice
+and incense an emblematic homage to That from which she drew her being,
+and to whom one day she must render it again. Ah! these Christians had
+understood human nature, she had told herself a hundred times: it was
+true that they had degraded it, darkened light, poisoned thought,
+misinterpreted instinct; but they had understood that man must worship
+—must worship or sink.</p>
+
+<p>For herself she intended to go at least once a week to the little old
+church half-a-mile away from her home, to kneel there before the sunlit
+sanctuary, to meditate on sweet mysteries, to present herself to That
+which she was yearning to love, and to drink, it might be, new draughts
+of life and power.</p>
+
+<p>Ah! but the Bill must pass first.... She clenched her hands on the rail,
+and stared steadily before her on the ranks of heads, the open gangways,
+the great mace on the table, and heard, above the murmur of the crowd
+outside and the dying whispers within, her own heart beat.</p>
+
+<p>She could not see Him, she knew. He would come in from beneath through
+the door that none but He might use, straight into the seat beneath the
+canopy. But she would hear His voice—that must be joy enough for
+her....</p>
+
+<p>Ah! there was silence now outside; the soft roar had died. He had come
+then. And through swimming eyes she saw the long ridges of heads rise
+beneath her, and through drumming ears heard the murmur of many feet.
+All faces looked this way; and she watched them as a mirror to see the
+reflected light of His presence. There was a gentle sobbing somewhere in
+the air—was it her own or another’s? ... the click of a door; a great
+mellow booming over-head, shock after shock, as the huge tenor bells
+tolled their three strokes; and, in an instant, over the white faces
+passed a ripple, as if some breeze of passion shook the souls within;
+there was a swaying here and there; and a passionless voice spoke half a
+dozen words in Esperanto, out of sight:</p>
+
+<p>“Englishmen, I assent to the Bill of Worship.”</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>It was not until mid-day breakfast on the following morning that husband
+and wife met again. Oliver had slept in town and telephoned about eleven
+o’clock that he would be home immediately, bringing a guest with him:
+and shortly before noon she heard their voices in the hall.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Francis, who was presently introduced to her, seemed a harmless kind
+of man, she thought, not interesting, though he seemed in earnest about
+this Bill. It was not until breakfast was nearly over that she
+understood who he was.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t go, Mabel,” said her husband, as she made a movement to rise.
+“You will like to hear about this, I expect. My wife knows all that I
+know,” he added.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Francis smiled and bowed.</p>
+
+<p>“I may tell her about you, sir?” said Oliver again.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, certainly.”</p>
+
+<p>Then she heard that he had been a Catholic priest a few months before,
+and that Mr. Snowford was in consultation with him as to the ceremonies
+in the Abbey. She was conscious of a sudden interest as she heard this.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! do talk,” she said. “I want to hear everything.”</p>
+
+<p>It seemed that Mr. Francis had seen the new Minister of Public Worship
+that morning, and had received a definite commission from him to take
+charge of the ceremonies on the first of October. Two dozen of his
+colleagues, too, were to be enrolled among the <i>ceremoniarii</i>, at least
+temporarily—and after the event they were to be sent on a lecturing
+tour to organise the national worship throughout the country.</p>
+
+<p>Of course things would be somewhat sloppy at first, said Mr. Francis;
+but by the New Year it was hoped that all would be in order, at least in
+the cathedrals and principal towns.</p>
+
+<p>“It is important,” he said, “that this should be done as soon as
+possible. It is very necessary to make a good impression. There are
+thousands who have the instinct of worship, without knowing how to
+satisfy it.”</p>
+
+<p>“That is perfectly true,” said Oliver. “I have felt that for a long
+time. I suppose it is the deepest instinct in man.”</p>
+
+<p>“As to the ceremonies—-” went on the other, with a slightly important
+air. His eyes roved round a moment; then he dived into his
+breast-pocket, and drew out a thin red-covered book.</p>
+
+<p>“Here is the Order of Worship for the Feast of Paternity,” he said. “I
+have had it interleaved, and have made a few notes.”</p>
+
+<p>He began to turn the pages, and Mabel, with considerable excitement,
+drew her chair a little closer to listen.</p>
+
+<p>“That is right, sir,” said the other. “Now give us a little lecture.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Francis closed the book on his finger, pushed his plate aside, and
+began to discourse.</p>
+
+<p>“First,” he said, “we must remember that this ritual is based almost
+entirely upon that of the Masons. Three-quarters at least of the entire
+function will be occupied by that. With that the <i>ceremoniarii</i> will not
+interfere, beyond seeing that the insignia are ready in the vestries and
+properly put on. The proper officials will conduct the rest.... I need
+not speak of that then. The difficulties begin with the last quarter.”</p>
+
+<p>He paused, and with a glance of apology began arranging forks and
+glasses before him on the cloth.</p>
+
+<p>“Now here,” he said, “we have the old sanctuary of the abbey. In the
+place of the reredos and Communion table there will be erected the large
+altar of which the ritual speaks, with the steps leading up to it from
+the floor. Behind the altar—extending almost to the old shrine of the
+Confessor—will stand the pedestal with the emblematic figure upon it;
+and—so far as I understand from the absence of directions—each such
+figure will remain in place until the eve of the next quarterly feast.”</p>
+
+<p>“What kind of figure?” put in the girl.</p>
+
+<p>Francis glanced at her husband.</p>
+
+<p>“I understand that Mr. Markenheim has been consulted,” he said. “He will
+design and execute them. Each is to represent its own feast. This for
+Paternity—-”</p>
+
+<p>He paused again.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Mr. Francis?”</p>
+
+<p>“This one, I understand, is to be the naked figure of a man.”</p>
+
+<p>“A kind of Apollo—or Jupiter, my dear,” put in Oliver.</p>
+
+<p>Yes—that seemed all right, thought Mabel. Mr. Francis’s voice moved on
+hastily.</p>
+
+<p>“A new procession enters at this point, after the discourse,” he said.
+“It is this that will need special marshalling. I suppose no rehearsal
+will be possible?”</p>
+
+<p>“Scarcely,” said Oliver, smiling.</p>
+
+<p>The Master of Ceremonies sighed.</p>
+
+<p>“I feared not. Then we must issue very precise printed instructions.
+Those who take part will withdraw, I imagine, during the hymn, to the
+old chapel of St. Faith. That is what seems to me the best.”</p>
+
+<p>He indicated the chapel.</p>
+
+<p>“After the entrance of the procession all will take their places on
+these two sides—here—and here—while the celebrant with the sacred
+ministers—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Eh?”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Francis permitted a slight grimace to appear on his face; he flushed
+a little.</p>
+
+<p>“The President of Europe—-” He broke off. “Ah! that is the point. Will
+the President take part? That is not made clear in the ritual.”</p>
+
+<p>“We think so,” said Oliver. “He is to be approached.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, if not, I suppose the Minister of Public Worship will officiate.
+He with his supporters pass straight up to the foot of the altar.
+Remember that the figure is still veiled, and that the candles have been
+lighted during the approach of the procession. There follow the
+Aspirations printed in the ritual with the responds. These are sung by
+the choir, and will be most impressive, I think. Then the officiant
+ascends the altar alone, and, standing, declaims the Address, as it is
+called. At the close of it—at the point, that is to say, marked here
+with a star, the thurifers will leave the chapel, four in number. One
+ascends the altar, leaving the others swinging their thurifers at its
+foot—hands his to the officiant and retires. Upon the sounding of a
+bell the curtains are drawn back, the officiant tenses the image in
+silence with four double swings, and, as he ceases the choir sings the
+appointed antiphon.”</p>
+
+<p>He waved his hands.</p>
+
+<p>“The rest is easy,” he said. “We need not discuss that.”</p>
+
+<p>To Mabel’s mind even the previous ceremonies seemed easy enough. But she
+was undeceived.</p>
+
+<p>“You have no idea, Mrs. Brand,” went on the <i>ceremoniarius</i>, “of the
+difficulties involved even in such a simple matter as this. The
+stupidity of people is prodigious. I foresee a great deal of hard work
+for us all.... Who is to deliver the discourse, Mr. Brand?”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“I have no idea,” he said. “I suppose Mr. Snowford will select.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Francis looked at him doubtfully.</p>
+
+<p>“What is your opinion of the whole affair, sir?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver paused a moment.</p>
+
+<p>“I think it is necessary,” he began. “There would not be such a cry for
+worship if it was not a real need. I think too—yes, I think that on the
+whole the ritual is impressive. I do not see how it could be
+bettered....”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Oliver?” put in his wife, questioningly.</p>
+
+<p>“No—there is nothing—except ... except I hope the people will
+understand it.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Francis broke in.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear sir, worship involves a touch of mystery. You must remember
+that. It was the lack of that that made Empire Day fail in the last
+century. For myself, I think it is admirable. Of course much must depend
+on the manner in which it is presented. I see many details at present
+undecided—the colour of the curtains, and so forth. But the main plan
+is magnificent. It is simple, impressive, and, above all, it is
+unmistakable in its main lesson—-”</p>
+
+<p>“And that you take to be—?”</p>
+
+<p>“I take it that it is homage offered to Life,” said the other slowly.
+“Life under four aspects—Maternity corresponds to Christmas and the
+Christian fable; it is the feast of home, love, faithfulness. Life
+itself is approached in spring, teeming, young, passionate. Sustenance
+in midsummer, abundance, comfort, plenty, and the rest, corresponding
+somewhat to the Catholic Corpus Christi; and Paternity, the protective,
+generative, masterful idea, as winter draws on.... I understand it was a
+German thought.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” he said. “And I suppose it will be the business of the speaker to
+explain all this.”</p>
+
+<p>“I take it so. It appears to me far more suggestive than the alternative
+plan—Citizenship, Labour, and so forth. These, after all, are
+subordinate to Life.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Francis spoke with an extraordinary suppressed enthusiasm, and the
+priestly look was more evident than ever. It was plain that his heart at
+least demanded worship.</p>
+
+<p>Mabel clasped her hands suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>“I think it is beautiful,” she said softly, “and—and it is so real.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Francis turned on her with a glow in his brown eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah! yes, madam. That is it. There is no Faith, as we used to call it:
+it is the vision of Facts that no one can doubt; and the incense
+declares the sole divinity of Life as well as its mystery.”</p>
+
+<p>“What of the figures?” put in Oliver.</p>
+
+<p>“A stone image is impossible, of course. It must be clay for the
+present. Mr. Markenheim is to set to work immediately. If the figures
+are approved they can then be executed in marble.”</p>
+
+<p>Again Mabel spoke with a soft gravity.</p>
+
+<p>“It seems to me,” she said, “that this is the last thing that we needed.
+It is so hard to keep our principles clear—we must have a body for
+them—some kind of expression—-”</p>
+
+<p>She paused.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Mabel?”</p>
+
+<p>“I do not mean,” she went on, “that some cannot live without it, but
+many cannot. The unimaginative need concrete images. There must be some
+channel for their aspirations to flow through—- Ah! I cannot express
+myself!”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver nodded slowly. He, too, seemed to be in a meditative mood.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” he said. “And this, I suppose, will mould men’s thoughts too: it
+will keep out all danger of superstition.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Francis turned on him abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>“What do you think of the Pope’s new Religious Order, sir?”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver’s face took on it a tinge of grimness.</p>
+
+<p>“I think it is the worst step he ever took—for himself, I mean. Either
+it is a real effort, in which case it will provoke immense
+indignation—or it is a sham, and will discredit him. Why do you ask?”</p>
+
+<p>“I was wondering whether any disturbance will be made in the abbey.”</p>
+
+<p>“I should be sorry for the brawler.”</p>
+
+<p>A bell rang sharply from the row of telephone labels. Oliver rose and
+went to it. Mabel watched him as he touched a button—mentioned his
+name, and put his ear to the opening.</p>
+
+<p>“It is Snowford’s secretary,” he said abruptly to the two expectant
+faces. “Snowford wants to—ah!”</p>
+
+<p>Again he mentioned his name and listened. They heard a sentence or two
+from him that seemed significant.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah! that is certain, is it? I am sorry.... Yes.... Oh! but that is
+better than nothing.... Yes; he is here.... Indeed. Very well; we will
+be with you directly.”</p>
+
+<p>He looked on the tube, touched the button again, and came back to them.</p>
+
+<p>“I am sorry,” he said. “The President will take no part at the Feast.
+But it is uncertain whether he will not be present. Mr. Snowford wants
+to see us both at once, Mr. Francis. Markenheim is with him.”</p>
+
+<p>But though Mabel was herself disappointed, she thought he looked graver
+than the disappointment warranted.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="2CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>Percy Franklin, the new Cardinal-Protector of England, came slowly along
+the passage leading from the Pope’s apartments, with Hans Steinmann,
+Cardinal-Protector of Germany, blowing at his side. They entered the
+lift, still in silence, and passed out, two splendid vivid figures, one
+erect and virile, the other bent, fat, and very German from spectacles
+to flat buckled feet.</p>
+
+<p>At the door of Percy’s suite, the Englishman paused, made a little
+gesture of reverence, and went in without a word.</p>
+
+<p>A secretary, young Mr. Brent, lately from England, stood up as his
+patron came in.</p>
+
+<p>“Eminence,” he said, “the English papers are come.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy put out a hand, took a paper, passed on into his inner room, and
+sat down.</p>
+
+<p>There it all was—gigantic headlines, and four columns of print broken
+by startling title phrases in capital letters, after the fashion set by
+America a hundred years ago. No better way even yet had been found of
+misinforming the unintelligent.</p>
+
+<p>He looked at the top. It was the English edition of the <i>Era</i>. Then he
+read the headlines. They ran as follows:</p>
+
+<p>“THE NATIONAL WORSHIP. BEWILDERING SPLENDOUR. RELIGIOUS ENTHUSIASM. THE
+ABBEY AND GOD. CATHOLIC FANATIC. EX-PRIESTS AS FUNCTIONARIES.”</p>
+
+<p>He ran his eyes down the page, reading the vivid little phrases, and
+drawing from the whole a kind of impressionist view of the scenes in the
+Abbey on the previous day, of which he had already been informed by the
+telegraph, and the discussion of which had been the purpose of his
+interview just now with the Holy Father.</p>
+
+<p>There plainly was no additional news; and he was laying the paper down
+when his eye caught a name.</p>
+
+<p>“It is understood that Mr. Francis, the <i>ceremoniarius</i> (to whom the
+thanks of all are due for his reverent zeal and skill), will proceed
+shortly to the northern towns to lecture on the Ritual. It is
+interesting to reflect that this gentleman only a few months ago was
+officiating at a Catholic altar. He was assisted in his labours by
+twenty-four confreres with the same experience behind them.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good God!” said Percy aloud. Then he laid the paper down.</p>
+
+<p>But his thoughts had soon left this renegade behind, and once more he
+was running over in his mind the significance of the whole affair, and
+the advice that he had thought it his duty to give just now upstairs.</p>
+
+<p>Briefly, there was no use in disputing the fact that the inauguration of
+Pantheistic worship had been as stupendous a success in England as in
+Germany. France, by the way, was still too busy with the cult of human
+individuals, to develop larger ideas.</p>
+
+<p>But England was deeper; and, somehow, in spite of prophecy, the affair
+had taken place without even a touch of bathos or grotesqueness. It had
+been said that England was too solid and too humorous. Yet there had
+been extraordinary scenes the day before. A great murmur of enthusiasm
+had rolled round the Abbey from end to end as the gorgeous curtains ran
+back, and the huge masculine figure, majestic and overwhelming, coloured
+with exquisite art, had stood out above the blaze of candles against the
+tall screen that shrouded the shrine. Markenheim had done his work well;
+and Mr. Brand’s passionate discourse had well prepared the popular mind
+for the revelation. He had quoted in his peroration passage after
+passage from the Jewish prophets, telling of the City of Peace whose
+walls rose now before their eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is
+risen upon thee.... For behold I create new heavens and a new earth; and
+the former shall not be remembered nor come into mind.... Violence shall
+no more be heard in thy land, wasting nor destruction within thy
+borders. O thou so long afflicted, tossed with tempest and not
+comforted; behold I will lay thy stones with fair colours, and thy
+foundations with sapphires.... I will make thy windows of agates and thy
+gates of carbuncles, and all thy borders of pleasant stones. Arise,
+shine, for thy light is come.</i>”</p>
+
+<p>As the chink of the censer-chains had sounded in the stillness, with one
+consent the enormous crowd had fallen on its knees, and so remained, as
+the smoke curled up from the hands of the rebel figure who held the
+thurible. Then the organ had begun to blow, and from the huge massed
+chorus in the transepts had rolled out the anthem, broken by one
+passionate cry, from some mad Catholic. But it had been silenced in an
+instant....</p>
+
+<p>It was incredible—utterly incredible, Percy had told himself. Yet the
+incredible had happened; and England had found its worship once
+more—the necessary culmination of unimpeded subjectivity. From the
+provinces had come the like news. In cathedral after cathedral had been
+the same scenes. Markenheim’s masterpiece, executed in four days after
+the passing of the bill, had been reproduced by the ordinary machinery,
+and four thousand replicas had been despatched to every important
+centre. Telegraphic reports had streamed into the London papers that
+everywhere the new movement had been received with acclamation, and that
+human instincts had found adequate expression at last. If there had not
+been a God, mused Percy reminiscently, it would have been necessary to
+invent one. He was astonished, too, at the skill with which the new cult
+had been framed. It moved round no disputable points; there was no
+possibility of divergent political tendencies to mar its success, no
+over-insistence on citizenship, labour and the rest, for those who were
+secretly individualistic and idle. Life was the one fount and centre of
+it all, clad in the gorgeous robes of ancient worship. Of course the
+thought had been Felsenburgh’s, though a German name had been mentioned.
+It was Positivism of a kind, Catholicism without Christianity, Humanity
+worship without its inadequacy. It was not man that was worshipped but
+the Idea of man, deprived of his supernatural principle. Sacrifice,
+too, was recognised—the instinct of oblation without the demand made by
+transcendent Holiness upon the blood-guiltiness of man.... In fact,—in
+fact, said Percy, it was exactly as clever as the devil, and as old as
+Cain.</p>
+
+<p>The advice he had given to the Holy Father just now was a counsel of
+despair, or of hope; he really did not know which. He had urged that a
+stringent decree should be issued, forbidding any acts of violence on
+the part of Catholics. The faithful were to be encouraged to be patient,
+to hold utterly aloof from the worship, to say nothing unless they were
+questioned, to suffer bonds gladly. He had suggested, in company with
+the German Cardinal, that they two should return to their respective
+countries at the close of the year, to encourage the waverers; but the
+answer had been that their vocation was to remain in Rome, unless
+something unforeseen happened.</p>
+
+<p>As for Felsenburgh, there was little news. It was said that he was in
+the East; but further details were secret. Percy understood quite well
+why he had not been present at the worship as had been expected. First,
+it would have been difficult to decide between the two countries that
+had established it; and, secondly, he was too brilliant a politician to
+risk the possible association of failure with his own person; thirdly,
+there was something the matter with the East.</p>
+
+<p>This last point was difficult to understand; it had not yet become
+explicit, but it seemed as if the movement of last year had not yet run
+its course. It was undoubtedly difficult to explain the new President’s
+constant absences from his adopted continent, unless there was something
+that demanded his presence elsewhere; but the extreme discretion of the
+East and the stringent precautions taken by the Empire made it
+impossible to know any details. It was apparently connected with
+religion; there were rumours, portents, prophets, ecstatics there.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Upon Percy himself had fallen a subtle change which he himself was
+recognising. He no longer soared to confidence or sank to despair. He
+said his mass, read his enormous correspondence, meditated strictly;
+and, though he felt nothing he knew everything. There was not a tinge of
+doubt upon his faith, but neither was there emotion in it. He was as one
+who laboured in the depths of the earth, crushed even in imagination,
+yet conscious that somewhere birds sang, and the sun shone, and water
+ran. He understood his own state well enough, and perceived that he had
+come to a reality of faith that was new to him, for it was sheer
+faith—sheer apprehension of the Spiritual—without either the dangers
+or the joys of imaginative vision. He expressed it to himself by saying
+that there were three processes through which God led the soul: the
+first was that of external faith, which assents to all things presented
+by the accustomed authority, practises religion, and is neither
+interested nor doubtful; the second follows the quickening of the
+emotional and perceptive powers of the soul, and is set about with
+consolations, desires, mystical visions and perils; it is in this plane
+that resolutions are taken and vocations found and shipwrecks
+experienced; and the third, mysterious and inexpressible, consists in
+the re-enactment in the purely spiritual sphere of all that has preceded
+(as a play follows a rehearsal), in which God is grasped but not
+experienced, grace is absorbed unconsciously and even distastefully, and
+little by little the inner spirit is conformed in the depths of its
+being, far within the spheres of emotion and intellectual perception, to
+the image and mind of Christ.</p>
+
+<p>So he lay back now, thinking, a long, stately, scarlet figure, in his
+deep chair, staring out over Holy Rome seen through the misty September
+haze. How long, he wondered, would there be peace? To his eyes even
+already the air was black with doom.</p>
+
+<p>He struck his hand-bell at last.</p>
+
+<p>“Bring me Father Blackmore’s Last report,” he said, as his secretary
+appeared.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>Percy’s intuitive faculties were keen by nature and had been vastly
+increased by cultivation. He had never forgotten Father Blackmore’s
+shrewd remarks of a year ago; and one of his first acts as
+Cardinal-Protector had been to appoint that priest on the list of
+English correspondents. Hitherto he had received some dozen letters, and
+not one of them had been without its grain of gold. Especially he had
+noticed that one warning ran through them all, namely, that sooner or
+later there would be some overt act of provocation on the part of
+English Catholics; and it was the memory of this that had inspired his
+vehement entreaties to the Pope this morning. As in the Roman and
+African persecutions of the first three centuries, so now, the greatest
+danger to the Catholic community lay not in the unjust measures of the
+Government but in the indiscreet zeal of the faithful themselves. The
+world desired nothing better than a handle to its blade. The scabbard
+was already cast away.</p>
+
+<p>When the young man had brought the four closely written sheets, dated
+from Westminster, the previous evening, Percy turned at once to the last
+paragraph before the usual Recommendations.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Brand’s late secretary, Mr. Phillips, whom your Eminence commended
+to me, has been to see me two or three times. He is in a curious state.
+He has no faith; yet, intellectually, he sees no hope anywhere but in
+the Catholic Church. He has even begged for admission to the Order of
+Christ Crucified, which of course is impossible. But there is no doubt
+he is sincere; otherwise he would have professed Catholicism. I have
+introduced him to many Catholics in the hope that they may help him. I
+should much wish your Eminence to see him.”</p>
+
+<p>Before leaving England, Percy had followed up the acquaintance he had
+made so strangely over Mrs. Brand’s reconciliation to God, and, scarcely
+knowing why, had commended him to the priest. He had not been
+particularly impressed by Mr. Phillips; he had thought him a timid,
+undecided creature, yet he had been struck by the extremely unselfish
+action by which the man had forfeited his position. There must surely be
+a good deal behind.</p>
+
+<p>And now the impulse had come to send for him. Perhaps the spiritual
+atmosphere of Rome would precipitate faith. In any case, the
+conversation of Mr. Brand’s late secretary might be instructive.</p>
+
+<p>He struck the bell again.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Brent,” he said, “in your next letter to Father Blackmore, tell him
+that I wish to see the man whom he proposed to send—Mr. Phillips.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Eminence.”</p>
+
+<p>“There is no hurry. He can send him at his leisure.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Eminence.”</p>
+
+<p>“But he must not come till January. That will be time enough, unless
+there is urgent reason.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Eminence.”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The development of the Order of Christ Crucified had gone forward with
+almost miraculous success. The appeal issued by the Holy Father
+throughout Christendom had been as fire among stubble. It seemed as if
+the Christian world had reached exactly that point of tension at which a
+new organisation of this nature was needed, and the response had
+startled even the most sanguine. Practically the whole of Rome with its
+suburbs—three millions in all—had run to the enrolling stations in
+St. Peter’s as starving men run to food, and desperate to the storming
+of a breach. For day after day the Pope himself had sat enthroned below
+the altar of the Chair, a glorious, radiant figure, growing ever white
+and weary towards evening, imparting his Blessing with a silent sign to
+each individual of the vast crowd that swarmed up between the barriers,
+fresh from fast and Communion, to kneel before his new Superior and kiss
+the Pontifical ring. The requirements had been as stringent as
+circumstances allowed. Each postulant was obliged to go to confession to
+a specially authorised priest, who examined sharply into motives and
+sincerity, and only one-third of the applicants had been accepted. This,
+the authorities pointed out to the scornful, was not an excessive
+proportion; for it was to be remembered that most of those who had
+presented themselves had already undergone a sifting fierce as fire. Of
+the three millions in Rome, two millions at least were exiles for their
+faith, preferring to live obscure and despised in the shadow of God
+rather than in the desolate glare of their own infidel countries.</p>
+
+<p>On the fifth evening of the enrolment of novices an astonishing incident
+had taken place. The old King of Spain (Queen Victoria’s second son),
+already on the edge of the grave, had just risen and tottered before his
+Ruler; it seemed for an instant as if he would fall, when the Pope
+himself, by a sudden movement, had risen, caught him in his arms and
+kissed him; and then, still standing, had spread his arms abroad and
+delivered a <i>fervorino</i> such as never had been heard before in the
+history of the basilica.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Benedictus Dominus!</i>” he cried, with upraised face and shining eyes.
+“Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for He hath visited and redeemed His
+people. I, John, Vicar of Christ, Servant of Servants, and sinner among
+sinners, bid you be of good courage in the Name of God. By Him Who hung
+on the Cross, I promise eternal life to all who persevere in His Order.
+He Himself has said it. <i>To him that overcometh I will give a crown of
+life.</i></p>
+
+<p>“Little children; fear not him that killeth the body. There is no more
+that he can do. God and His Mother are amongst us....”</p>
+
+<p>So his voice had poured on, telling the enormous awe-stricken crowd of
+the blood that already had been shed on the place where they stood, of
+the body of the Apostle that lay scarcely fifty yards away, urging,
+encouraging, inspiring. They had vowed themselves to death, if that were
+God’s Will; and if not, the intention would be taken for the deed. They
+were under obedience now; their wills were no longer theirs but God’s;
+under chastity—for their bodies were bought with a price; under
+poverty, and theirs was the kingdom of heaven.</p>
+
+<p>He had ended by a great silent Benediction of the City and the World:
+and there were not wanting a half-dozen of the faithful who had seen,
+they thought, a white shape in the form of a bird that hung in the air
+while he spoke white as a mist, translucent as water....</p>
+
+<p>The consequent scenes in the city and suburbs had been unparalleled, for
+thousands of families had with one consent dissolved human ties.
+Husbands had found their way to the huge houses on the Quirinal set
+apart for them; wives to the Aventine; while the children, as confident
+as their parents, had swarmed over to the Sisters of St. Vincent who had
+received at the Pope’s orders the gift of three streets to shelter them
+in. Everywhere the smoke of burning went up in the squares where
+household property, rendered useless by the vows of poverty, were
+consumed by their late owners; and daily long trains moved out from the
+station outside the walls carrying jubilant loads of those who were
+despatched by the Pope’s delegates to be the salt of men, consumed in
+their function, and leaven plunged in the vast measures of the infidel
+world. And that infidel world welcomed their coming with bitter
+laughter.</p>
+
+<p>From the rest of Christendom had poured in news of success. The same
+precautions had been observed as in Rome, for the directions issued were
+precise and searching; and day after day came in the long rolls of the
+new Religious drawn up by the diocesan superiors.</p>
+
+<p>Within the last few days, too, other lists had arrived, more glorious
+than all. Not only did reports stream in that already the Order was
+beginning its work and that already broken communications were being
+re-established, that devoted missioners were in process of organising
+themselves, and that hope was once more rising in the most desperate
+hearts; but better than all this was the tidings of victory in another
+sphere. In Paris forty of the new-born Order had been burned alive in
+one day in the Latin quarter, before the Government intervened. From
+Spain, Holland, Russia had come in other names. In Dusseldorf eighteen
+men and boys, surprised at their singing of Prime in the church of Saint
+Laurence, had been cast down one by one into the city-sewer, each
+chanting as he vanished:</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Christi Fili Dei vivi miserere nobis,</i>”</p>
+
+<p>and from the darkness had come up the same broken song till it was
+silenced with stones. Meanwhile, the German prisons were thronged with
+the first batches of recusants. The world shrugged its shoulders, and
+declared that they had brought it on themselves, while yet it deprecated
+mob-violence, and requested the attention of the authorities and the
+decisive repression of this new conspiracy of superstition. And within
+St. Peter’s Church the workmen were busy at the long rows of new altars,
+affixing to the stone diptychs the brass-forged names of those who had
+already fulfilled their vows and gained their crowns.</p>
+
+<p>It was the first word of God’s reply to the world’s challenge.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>As Christmas drew on it was announced that the Sovereign pontiff would
+sing mass on the last day of the year, at the papal altar of Saint
+Peter’s, on behalf of the Order; and preparations began to be made.</p>
+
+<p>It was to be a kind of public inauguration of the new enterprise; and,
+to the astonishment of all, a special summons was issued to all members
+of the Sacred College throughout the world to be present, unless
+hindered by sickness. It seemed as if the Pope were determined that
+the world should understand that war was declared; for, although the
+command would not involve the absence of any Cardinal from his province
+for more than five days, yet many inconveniences must surely result.
+However, it had been said, and it was to be done.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It was a strange Christmas.</p>
+
+<p>Percy was ordered to attend the Pope at his second mass, and himself
+said his three at midnight in his own private oratory. For the first
+time in his life he saw that of which he had heard so often, the
+wonderful old-world Pontifical procession, lit by torches, going through
+the streets from the Lateran to St. Anastasia, where the Pope for the
+last few years had restored the ancient custom discontinued for nearly a
+century-and-a-half. The little basilica was reserved, of course, in
+every corner for the peculiarly privileged; but the streets outside
+along the whole route from the Cathedral to the church—and, indeed, the
+other two sides of the triangle as well, were one dense mass of silent
+heads and flaming torches. The Holy Father was attended at the altar by
+the usual sovereigns; and Percy from his place watched the heavenly
+drama of Christ’s Passion enacted through the veil of His nativity at
+the hands of His old Angelic Vicar. It was hard to perceive Calvary
+here; it was surely the air of Bethlehem, the celestial light, not the
+supernatural darkness, that beamed round the simple altar. It was the
+Child called Wonderful that lay there beneath the old hands, rather than
+the stricken Man of Sorrows.</p>
+
+<p><i>Adeste fideles</i> sang the choir from the tribune.—Come, let us adore,
+rather than weep; let us exult, be content, be ourselves like little
+children. As He for us became a child, let us become childlike for Him.
+Let us put on the garments of infancy and the shoes of peace. <i>For the
+Lord hath reigned; He is clothed with beauty: the Lord is clothed with
+strength and hath girded Himself. He hath established the world which
+shall not be moved: His throne is prepared from of old. He is from
+everlasting. Rejoice greatly then, O daughter of Zion, shout for joy, O
+daughter of Jerusalem; behold thy King cometh, to thee, the Holy One,
+the Saviour of the world.</i> It will be time, then, to suffer by and bye,
+when the Prince of this world cometh upon the Prince of Heaven.</p>
+
+<p>So Percy mused, standing apart in his gorgeousness, striving to make
+himself little and simple. Surely nothing was too hard for God! Might
+not this mystic Birth once more do what it had done before—bring into
+subjection through the might of its weakness every proud thing that
+exalts itself above all that is called God? It had drawn wise Kings once
+across the desert, as well as shepherds from their flocks. It had kings
+about it now, kneeling with the poor and foolish, kings who had laid
+down their crowns, who brought the gold of loyal hearts, the myrrh of
+desired martyrdom, and the incense of a pure faith. Could not republics,
+too, lay aside their splendour, mobs be tamed, selfishness deny itself,
+and wisdom confess its ignorance?...</p>
+
+<p>Then he remembered Felsenburgh; and his heart sickened within him.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>Six days later, Percy rose as usual, said his mass, breakfasted, and
+sat down to say office until his servant should summon him to vest for
+the Pontifical mass.</p>
+
+<p>He had learned to expect bad news now so constantly—of apostasies,
+deaths, losses—that the lull of the previous week had come to him with
+extraordinary refreshment. It appeared to him as if his musings in St.
+Anastasia had been truer than he thought, and that the sweetness of the
+old feast had not yet wholly lost its power even over a world that
+denied its substance. For nothing at all had happened of importance. A
+few more martyrdoms had been chronicled, but they had been isolated
+cases; and of Felsenburgh there had been no tidings at all. Europe
+confessed its ignorance of his business.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, to-morrow, Percy knew very well, would be a day of
+extraordinary moment in England and Germany at any rate; for in England
+it was appointed as the first occasion of compulsory worship throughout
+the country, while it was the second in Germany. Men and women would
+have to declare themselves now.</p>
+
+<p>He had seen on the previous evening a photograph of the image that was
+to be worshipped next day in the Abbey; and, in a fit of loathing, had
+torn it to shreds. It represented a nude woman, huge and majestic,
+entrancingly lovely, with head and shoulders thrown back, as one who
+sees a strange and heavenly vision, arms downstretched and hands a
+little raised, with wide fingers, as in astonishment—the whole
+attitude, with feet and knees pressed together, suggestive of
+expectation, hope and wonder; in devilish mockery her long hair was
+crowned with twelve stars. This, then, was the spouse of the other, the
+embodiment of man’s ideal maternity, still waiting for her child....</p>
+
+<p>When the white scraps lay like poisonous snow at his feet, he had sprung
+across the room to his <i>prie-dieu</i>, and fallen there in an agony of
+reparation.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! Mother, Mother!” he cried to the stately Queen of Heaven who, with
+Her true Son long ago in Her arms, looked down on him from Her
+bracket—no more than that.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>But he was still again this morning, and celebrated Saint Silvester,
+Pope and Martyr, the last saint in the procession of the Christian year,
+with tolerable equanimity. The sights of last night, the throng of
+officials, the stately, scarlet, unfamiliar figures of the Cardinals who
+had come in from north, south, east and west—these helped to reassure
+him again—unreasonably, as he knew, yet effectually. The very air was
+electric with expectation. All night the piazza had been crowded by a
+huge, silent mob waiting till the opening of the doors at seven o’clock.
+Now the church itself was full, and the piazza full again. Far down the
+street to the river, so far as he could see as he had leaned from his
+window just now, lay that solemn motionless pavement of heads. The roof
+of the colonnade showed a fringe of them, the house-tops were black—and
+this in the bitter cold of a clear, frosty morning, for it was announced
+that after mass and the proceeding of the members of the Order past the
+Pontifical Throne, the Pope would give Apostolic Benediction to the City
+and the World.</p>
+
+<p>Percy finished Terce, closed his book and lay back; his servant would be
+here in a minute now.</p>
+
+<p>His mind began to run over the function, and he reflected that the
+entire Sacred College (with the exception of the Cardinal-Protector of
+Jerusalem, detained by sickness), numbering sixty-four members, would
+take part. This would mean an unique sight by and bye. Eight years
+before, he remembered, after the freedom of Rome, there had been a
+similar assembly; but the Cardinals at that time amounted to no more
+than fifty-three all told, and four had been absent.</p>
+
+<p>Then he heard voices in his ante-room, a quick step, and a loud English
+expostulation. That was curious, and he sat up.</p>
+
+<p>Then he heard a sentence.</p>
+
+<p>“His Eminence must go to vest; it is useless.”</p>
+
+<p>There was a sharp answer, a faint scuffle, and a snatch at the handle.
+This was indecent; so Percy stood up, made three strides of it to the
+door, and tore it open.</p>
+
+<p>A man stood there, whom at first he did not recognise, pale and
+disordered.</p>
+
+<p>“Why—-” began Percy, and recoiled.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Phillips!” he said.</p>
+
+<p>The other threw out his hands.</p>
+
+<p>“It is I, sir—your Eminence—this moment arrived. It is life and death.
+Your servant tells me—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Who sent you?”</p>
+
+<p>“Father Blackmore.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good news or bad?”</p>
+
+<p>The man rolled his eyes towards the servant, who still stood erect and
+offended a yard away; and Percy understood.</p>
+
+<p>He put his hand on the other’s arm, drawing him through the doorway.</p>
+
+<p>“Tap upon this door in two minutes, James,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>They passed across the polished floor together; Percy went to his usual
+place in the window, leaned against the shutter, and spoke.</p>
+
+<p>“Tell me in one sentence, sir,” he said to the breathless man.</p>
+
+<p>“There is a plot among the Catholics. They intend destroying the Abbey
+to-morrow with explosives. I knew that the Pope—-”</p>
+
+<p>Percy cut him short with a gesture.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="2CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>The volor-stage was comparatively empty this afternoon, as the little
+party of six stepped out on to it from the lift. There was nothing to
+distinguish these from ordinary travellers. The two Cardinals of Germany
+and England were wrapped in plain furs, without insignia of any kind;
+their chaplains stood near them, while the two men-servants hurried
+forward with the bags to secure a private compartment.</p>
+
+<p>The four kept complete silence, watching the busy movements of the
+officials on board, staring unseeingly at the sleek, polished monster
+that lay netted in steel at their feet, and the great folded fins that
+would presently be cutting the thin air at a hundred and fifty miles an
+hour.</p>
+
+<p>Then Percy, by a sudden movement, turned from the others, went to the
+open window that looked over Rome, and leaned there with his elbows on
+the sill, looking.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It was a strange view before him.</p>
+
+<p>It was darkening now towards sunset, and the sky, primrose-green
+overhead, deepened to a clear tawny orange above the horizon, with a
+sanguine line or two at the edge, and beneath that lay the deep evening
+violet of the city, blotted here and there by the black of cypresses and
+cut by the thin leafless pinnacles of a poplar grove that aspired
+without the walls. But right across the picture rose the enormous dome,
+of an indescribable tint; it was grey, it was violet—it was what the
+eye chose to make it—and through it, giving its solidity the air of a
+bubble, shone the southern sky, flushed too with faint orange. It was
+this that was supreme and dominant; the serrated line of domes, spires
+and pinnacles, the crowded roofs beneath, in the valley dell’ Inferno,
+the fairy hills far away—all were but the annexe to this mighty
+tabernacle of God. Already lights were beginning to shine, as for thirty
+centuries they had shone; thin straight skeins of smoke were ascending
+against the darkening sky. The hum of this Mother of cities was
+beginning to be still, for the keen air kept folks indoors; and the
+evening peace was descending that closed another day and another year.
+Beneath in the narrow streets Percy could see tiny figures, hurrying
+like belated ants; the crack of a whip, the cry of a woman, the wail of
+a child came up to this immense elevation like details of a murmur from
+another world. They, too, would soon be quiet, and there would be peace.</p>
+
+<p>A heavy bell beat faintly from far away, and the drowsy city turned to
+murmur its good-night to the Mother of God. From a thousand towers came
+the tiny melody, floating across the great air spaces, in a thousand
+accents, the solemn bass of St. Peter’s, the mellow tenor of the
+Lateran, the rough cry from some old slum church, the peevish tinkle
+of convents and chapels—all softened and made mystical in this grave
+evening air—it was the wedding of delicate sound and clear light.
+Above, the liquid orange sky; beneath, this sweet, subdued ecstasy of
+bells.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Alma Redemptoris Mater</i>,” whispered Percy, his eyes wet with tears.
+“<i>Gentle Mother of the Redeemer—the open door of the sky, star of the
+sea—have mercy on sinners.</i> <i>The Angel of the Lord announced it to
+Mary, and she conceived of the Holy Ghost</i>.... <i>Pour, therefore, Lord,
+Thy grace into our hearts. Let us, who know Christ’s incarnation, rise
+through passion and cross to the glory of Resurrection—through the
+same Christ our Lord.</i>”</p>
+
+<p>Another bell clanged sharply close at hand, calling him down to earth,
+and wrong, and labour and grief; and he turned to see the motionless
+volor itself one blaze of brilliant internal light, and the two priests
+following the German Cardinal across the gangway.</p>
+
+<p>It was the rear compartment that the men had taken; and when he had seen
+that the old man was comfortable, still without a word he passed out
+again into the central passage to see the last of Rome.</p>
+
+<p>The exit-door had now been snapped, and as Percy stood at the opposite
+window looking out at the high wall that would presently sink beneath
+him, throughout the whole of the delicate frame began to run the
+vibration of the electric engine. There was the murmur of talking
+somewhere, a heavy step shook the floor, a bell clanged again, twice,
+and a sweet wind-chord sounded. Again it sounded; the vibration ceased,
+and the edge of the high wall against the tawny sky on which he had
+fixed his eyes sank suddenly like a dropped bar, and he staggered a
+little in his place. A moment later the dome rose again, and itself
+sank, the city, a fringe of towers and a mass of dark roofs, pricked
+with light, span like a whirlpool; the jewelled stars themselves sprang
+this way and that; and with one more long cry the marvellous machine
+righted itself, beat with its wings, and settled down, with the note of
+the flying air passing through rising shrillness into vibrant silence,
+to its long voyage to the north.</p>
+
+<p>Further and further sank the city behind; it was a patch now: greyness
+on black. The sky seemed to grow more huge and all-containing as the
+earth relapsed into darkness; it glowed like a vast dome of wonderful
+glass, darkening even as it glowed; and as Percy dropped his eyes once
+more round the extreme edge of the car the city was but a line and a
+bubble—a line and a swelling—a line, and nothingness.</p>
+
+<p>He drew a long breath, and went back to his friends.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>“Tell me again,” said the old Cardinal, when the two were settled down
+opposite to one another, and the chaplains were gone to another
+compartment. “Who is this man?”</p>
+
+<p>“This man? He was secretary to Oliver Brand, one of our politicians. He
+fetched me to old Mrs. Brand’s death bed, and lost his place in
+consequence. He is in journalism now. He is perfectly honest. No, he is
+not a Catholic, though he longs to be one. That is why they confided in
+him.”</p>
+
+<p>“And they?”</p>
+
+<p>“I know nothing of them, except that they are a desperate set. They have
+enough faith to act, but not enough to be patient.... I suppose they
+thought this man would sympathise. But unfortunately he has a
+conscience, and he also sees that any attempt of this kind would be the
+last straw on the back of toleration. Eminence, do you realise how
+violent the feeling is against us?”</p>
+
+<p>The old man shook his head lamentably.</p>
+
+<p>“Do I not?” he murmured. “And my Germans are in it? Are you sure?”</p>
+
+<p>“Eminence, it is a vast plot. It has been simmering for months. There
+have been meetings every week. They have kept the secret marvellously.
+Your Germans only delayed that the blow might be more complete. And now,
+to-morrow—-” Percy drew back with a despairing gesture.</p>
+
+<p>“And the Holy Father?”</p>
+
+<p>“I went to him as soon as mass was over. He withdrew all opposition, and
+sent for you. It is our one chance, Eminence.”</p>
+
+<p>“And you think our plan will hinder it?”</p>
+
+<p>“I have no idea, but I can think of nothing else. I shall go straight to
+the Archbishop and tell him all. We arrive, I believe, at three o’clock,
+and you in Berlin about seven, I suppose, by German time. The function
+is fixed for eleven. By eleven, then, we shall have done all that is
+possible. The Government will know, and they will know, too, that we are
+innocent in Rome. I imagine they will cause it to be announced that the
+Cardinal-Protector and the Archbishop, with his coadjutors, will be
+present in the sacristies. They will double every guard; they will
+parade volors overhead—and then—well! in God’s hands be the rest.”</p>
+
+<p>“Do you think the conspirators will attempt it?”</p>
+
+<p>“I have no idea,” said Percy shortly.</p>
+
+<p>“I understand they have alternative plans.”</p>
+
+<p>“Just so. If all is clear, they intend dropping the explosive from
+above; if not, at least three men have offered to sacrifice themselves
+by taking it into the Abbey themselves.... And you, Eminence?”</p>
+
+<p>The old man eyed him steadily.</p>
+
+<p>“My programme is yours,” he said. “Eminence, have you considered the
+effect in either case? If nothing happens—-”</p>
+
+<p>“If nothing happens we shall be accused of a fraud, of seeking to
+advertise ourselves. If anything happens—well, we shall all go before
+God together. Pray God it may be the second,” he added passionately.</p>
+
+<p>“It will be at least easier to bear,” observed the old man.</p>
+
+<p>“I beg your pardon, Eminence. I should not have said that.”</p>
+
+<p>There fell a silence between the two, in which no sound was heard but
+the faint untiring vibration of the screw, and the sudden cough of a man
+in the next compartment. Percy leaned his head wearily on his hand, and
+stared from the window.</p>
+
+<p>The earth was now dark beneath them—an immense emptiness; above, the
+huge engulfing sky was still faintly luminous, and through the high
+frosty mist through which they moved stars glimmered now and again, as
+the car swayed and tacked across the wind.</p>
+
+<p>“It will be cold among the Alps,” murmured Percy. Then he broke off.
+“And I have not one shred of evidence,” he said; “nothing but the word
+of a man.”</p>
+
+<p>“And you are sure?”</p>
+
+<p>“I am sure.”</p>
+
+<p>“Eminence,” said the German suddenly, staring straight into his face,
+“the likeness is extraordinary.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy smiled listlessly. He was tired of bearing that.</p>
+
+<p>“What do you make of it?” persisted the other.</p>
+
+<p>“I have been asked that before,” said Percy. “I have no views.”</p>
+
+<p>“It seems to me that God means something,” murmured the German heavily,
+still staring at him.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, Eminence?”</p>
+
+<p>“A kind of antithesis—a reverse of the medal. I do not know.”</p>
+
+<p>Again there was silence. A chaplain looked in through the glazed door, a
+homely, blue-eyed German, and was waved away once more.</p>
+
+<p>“Eminence,” said the old man abruptly, “there is surely more to speak
+of. Plans to be made.”</p>
+
+<p>Percy shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“There are no plans to be made,” he said. “We know nothing but the
+fact—no names—nothing. We—we are like children in a tiger’s cage. And
+one of us has just made a gesture in the tiger’s face.”</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose we shall communicate with one another?”</p>
+
+<p>“If we are in existence.”</p>
+
+<p>It was curious how Percy took the lead. He had worn his scarlet for
+about three months, and his companion for twelve years; yet it was the
+younger who dictated plans and arranged. He was scarcely conscious of
+its strangeness, however. Ever since the shocking news of the morning,
+when a new mine had been sprung under the shaking Church, and he had
+watched the stately ceremonial, the gorgeous splendour, the dignified,
+tranquil movements of the Pope and his court, with a secret that burned
+his heart and brain—above all, since that quick interview in which old
+plans had been reversed and a startling decision formed, and a blessing
+given and received, and a farewell looked not uttered—all done in
+half-an-hour—his whole nature had concentrated itself into one keen
+tense force, like a coiled spring. He felt power tingling to his
+finger-tips—power and the dulness of an immense despair. Every prop had
+been cut, every brace severed; he, the City of Rome, the Catholic
+Church, the very supernatural itself, seemed to hang now on one single
+thing—the Finger of God. And if that failed—well, nothing would ever
+matter any more....</p>
+
+<p>He was going now to one of two things—ignominy or death. There was no
+third thing—unless, indeed, the conspirators were actually taken with
+their instruments upon them. But that was impossible. Either they would
+refrain, knowing that God’s ministers would fall with them, and in that
+case there would be the ignominy of a detected fraud, of a miserable
+attempt to win credit. Or they would not refrain; they would count the
+death of a Cardinal and a few bishops a cheap price to pay for
+revenge—and in that case well, there was Death and Judgment. But Percy
+had ceased to fear. No ignominy could be greater than that which he
+already bore—the ignominy of loneliness and discredit. And death could
+be nothing but sweet—it would at least be knowledge and rest. He was
+willing to risk all on God.</p>
+
+<p>The other, with a little gesture of apology, took out his office book
+presently, and began to read.</p>
+
+<p>Percy looked at him with an immense envy. Ah! if only he were as old as
+that! He could bear a year or two more of this misery, but not fifty
+years, he thought. It was an almost endless vista that (even if things
+went well) opened before him, of continual strife, self-repression,
+energy, misrepresentation from his enemies. The Church was sinking
+further every day. What if this new spasm of fervour were no more than
+the dying flare of faith? How could he bear that? He would have to see
+the tide of atheism rise higher and more triumphant every day;
+Felsenburgh had given it an impetus of whose end there was no
+prophesying. Never before had a single man wielded the full power of
+democracy. Then once more he looked forward to the morrow. Oh! if it
+could but end in death!... <i>Beati mortui qui in Domino moriuntur!</i> ...</p>
+
+<p>It was no good; it was cowardly to think in this fashion. After all, God
+was God—He takes up the isles as a very little thing.</p>
+
+<p>Percy took out his office book, found Prime and St. Sylvester, signed
+himself with the cross, and began to pray. A minute later the two
+chaplains slipped in once more, and sat down; and all was silent, save
+for that throb of the screw, and the strange whispering rush of air
+outside.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>It was about nineteen o’clock that the ruddy English conductor looked in
+at the doorway, waking Percy from his doze.</p>
+
+<p>“Dinner will be served in half-an-hour, gentlemen,” he said (speaking
+Esperanto, as the rule was on international cars). “We do not stop at
+Turin to-night.”</p>
+
+<p>He shut the door and went out, and the sound of closing doors came down
+the corridor as he made the same announcement to each compartment.</p>
+
+<p>There were no passengers to descend at Turin, then, reflected Percy; and
+no doubt a wireless message had been received that there were none to
+come on board either. That was good news: it would give him more time in
+London. It might even enable Cardinal Steinmann to catch an earlier
+volor from Paris to Berlin; but he was not sure how they ran. It was a
+pity that the German had not been able to catch the thirteen o’clock
+from Rome to Berlin direct. So he calculated, in a kind of superficial
+insensibility.</p>
+
+<p>He stood up presently to stretch himself. Then he passed out and along
+the corridor to the lavatory to wash his hands.</p>
+
+<p>He became fascinated by the view as he stood before the basin at the
+rear of the car, for even now they were passing over Turin. It was a
+blur of light, vivid and beautiful, that shone beneath him in the midst
+of this gulf of darkness, sweeping away southwards into the gloom as the
+car sped on towards the Alps. How little, he thought, seemed this great
+city seen from above; and yet, how mighty it was! It was from that
+glimmer, already five miles behind, that Italy was controlled; in one of
+these dolls’ houses of which he had caught but a glimpse, men sat in
+council over souls and bodies, and abolished God, and smiled at His
+Church. And God allowed it all, and made no sign. It was there that
+Felsenburgh had been, a month or two ago—Felsenburgh, his double! And
+again the mental sword tore and stabbed at his heart.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>A few minutes later, the four ecclesiastics were sitting at their round
+table in a little screened compartment of the dining-room in the bows of
+the air-ship. It was an excellent dinner, served, as usual, from the
+kitchen in the bowels of the volor, and rose, course by course, with a
+smooth click, into the centre of the table. There was a bottle of red
+wine to each diner, and both table and chairs swung easily to the very
+slight motion of the ship. But they did not talk much, for there was
+only one subject possible to the two cardinals, and the chaplains had
+not yet been admitted into the full secret.</p>
+
+<p>It was growing cold now, and even the hot-air foot-rests did not quite
+compensate for the deathly iciness of the breath that began to stream
+down from the Alps, which the ship was now approaching at a slight
+incline. It was necessary to rise at least nine thousand feet from the
+usual level, in order to pass the frontier of the Mont Cenis at a safe
+angle; and at the same time it was necessary to go a little slower over
+the Alps themselves, owing to the extreme rarity of the air, and the
+difficulty in causing the screw to revolve sufficiently quickly to
+counteract it.</p>
+
+<p>“There will be clouds to-night,” said a voice clear and distinct from
+the passage, as the door swung slightly to a movement of the car.</p>
+
+<p>Percy got up and closed it.</p>
+
+<p>The German Cardinal began to grow a little fidgety towards the end of
+dinner.</p>
+
+<p>“I shall go back,” he said at last. “I shall be better in my fur rug.”</p>
+
+<p>His chaplain dutifully went after him, leaving his own dinner
+unfinished, and Percy was left alone with Father Corkran, his English
+chaplain lately from Scotland.</p>
+
+<p>He finished his wine, ate a couple of figs, and then sat staring out
+through the plate-glass window in front.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah!” he said. “Excuse me, father. There are the Alps at last.”</p>
+
+<p>The front of the car consisted of three divisions, in the centre of one
+of which stood the steersman, his eyes looking straight ahead, and his
+hands upon the wheel. On either side of him, separated from him by
+aluminium walls, was contrived a narrow slip of a compartment, with a
+long curved window at the height of a man’s eyes, through which a
+magnificent view could be obtained. It was to one of these that Percy
+went, passing along the corridor, and seeing through half-opened doors
+other parties still over their wine. He pushed the spring door on the
+left and went through.</p>
+
+<p>He had crossed the Alps three times before in his life, and well
+remembered the extraordinary effect they had had on him, especially as
+he had once seen them from a great altitude upon a clear day—an
+eternal, immeasurable sea of white ice, broken by hummocks and wrinkles
+that from below were soaring peaks named and reverenced; and, beyond,
+the spherical curve of the earth’s edge that dropped in a haze of air
+into unutterable space. But this time they seemed more amazing than
+ever, and he looked out on them with the interest of a sick child.</p>
+
+<p>The car was now ascending; rapidly towards the pass up across the huge
+tumbled slopes, ravines, and cliffs that lie like outworks of the
+enormous wall. Seen from this great height they were in themselves
+comparatively insignificant, but they at least suggested the vastness of
+the bastions of which they were no more than buttresses. As Percy
+turned, he could see the moonless sky alight with frosty stars, and the
+dimness of the illumination made the scene even more impressive; but as
+he turned again, there was a change. The vast air about him seemed now
+to be perceived through frosted glass. The velvet blackness of the pine
+forests had faded to heavy grey, the pale glint of water and ice seen
+and gone again in a moment, the monstrous nakedness of rock spires and
+slopes, rising towards him and sliding away again beneath with a
+crawling motion—all these had lost their distinctness of outline, and
+were veiled in invisible white. As he looked yet higher to right and
+left the sight became terrifying, for the giant walls of rock rushing
+towards him, the huge grotesque shapes towering on all sides, ran upward
+into a curtain of cloud visible only from the dancing radiance thrown
+upon it by the brilliantly lighted car. Even as he looked, two straight
+fingers of splendour, resembling horns, shot out, as the bow
+searchlights were turned on; and the car itself, already travelling at
+half-speed, dropped to quarter-speed, and began to sway softly from side
+to side as the huge air-planes beat the mist through which they moved,
+and the antennae of light pierced it. Still up they went, and on—yet
+swift enough to let Percy see one great pinnacle rear itself, elongate,
+sink down into a cruel needle, and vanish into nothingness a thousand
+feet below. The motion grew yet more nauseous, as the car moved up at a
+sharp angle preserving its level, simultaneously rising, advancing and
+swaying. Once, hoarse and sonorous, an unfrozen torrent roared like a
+beast, it seemed within twenty yards, and was dumb again on the instant.
+Now, too, the horns began to cry, long, lamentable hootings, ringing
+sadly in that echoing desolation like the wail of wandering souls; and
+as Percy, awed beyond feeling, wiped the gathering moisture from the
+glass, and stared again, it appeared as if he floated now, motionless
+except for the slight rocking beneath his feet, in a world of whiteness,
+as remote from earth as from heaven, poised in hopeless infinite space,
+blind, alone, frozen, lost in a white hell of desolation.</p>
+
+
+<p>Once, as he stared, a huge whiteness moved towards him through the veil,
+slid slowly sideways and down, disclosing, as the car veered, a gigantic
+slope smooth as oil, with one cluster of black rock cutting it like the
+fingers of a man’s hand groping from a mountainous wave.</p>
+
+<p>Then, as once more the car cried aloud like a lost sheep, there answered
+it, it seemed scarcely ten yards away, first one windy scream of dismay,
+another and another; a clang of bells, a chorus broke out; and the air
+was full of the beating of wings.</p>
+
+
+<h4>IV</h4>
+
+<p>There was one horrible instant before a clang of a bell, the answering
+scream, and a whirling motion showed that the steersman was alert. Then
+like a stone the car dropped, and Percy clutched at the rail before him
+to steady the terrible sensation of falling into emptiness. He could
+hear behind him the crash of crockery, the bumping of heavy bodies, and
+as the car again checked on its wide wings, a rush of footsteps broke
+out and a cry or two of dismay. Outside, but high and far away, the
+hooting went on; the air was full of it, and in a flash he recognised
+that it could not be one or ten or twenty cars, but at least a hundred
+that had answered the call, and that somewhere overhead were hooting and
+flapping. The invisible ravines and cliffs on all sides took up the
+crying; long wails whooped and moaned and died amid a clash of bells,
+further and further every instant, but now in every direction, behind,
+above, in front, and far to right and left. Once more the car began to
+move, sinking in a long still curve towards the face of the mountain;
+and as it checked, and began to sway again on its huge wings, he turned
+to the door, seeing as he did so, through the cloudy windows in the
+glow of light, a spire of rock not thirty feet below rising from the
+mist, and one smooth shoulder of snow curving away into invisibility.</p>
+
+<p>Within, the car shewed brutal signs of the sudden check: the doors of
+the dining compartments, as he passed along, were flung wide; glasses,
+plates, pools of wine and tumbled fruit rolled to and fro on the heaving
+floors; one man, sitting helplessly on the ground, rolled vacant,
+terrified eyes upon the priest. He glanced in at the door through which
+he had come just now, and Father Corkran staggered up from his seat and
+came towards him, reeling at the motion underfoot; simultaneously there
+was a rush from the opposite door, where a party of Americans had been
+dining; and as Percy, beckoning with his head, turned again to go down
+to the stern-end of the ship, he found the narrow passage blocked with
+the crowd that had run out. A babble of talking and cries made questions
+impossible; and Percy, with his chaplain behind him, gripped the
+aluminium panelling, and step by step began to make his way in search of
+his friends.</p>
+
+<p>Half-way down the passage, as he pushed and struggled, a voice made
+itself heard above the din; and in the momentary silence that followed,
+again sounded the far-away crying of the volors overhead.</p>
+
+<p>“Seats, gentlemen, seats,” roared the voice. “We are moving
+immediately.”</p>
+
+<p>Then the crowd melted as the conductor came through, red-faced and
+determined, and Percy, springing into his wake, found his way clear to
+the stern.</p>
+
+<p>The Cardinal seemed none the worse. He had been asleep, he explained,
+and saved himself in time from rolling on to the floor; but his old face
+twitched as he talked.</p>
+
+<p>“But what is it?” he said. “What is the meaning?”</p>
+
+<p>Father Bechlin related how he had actually seen one of the troop of
+volors within five yards of the window; it was crowded with faces, he
+said, from stem to stern. Then it had soared suddenly, and vanished in
+whorls of mist.</p>
+
+<p>Percy shook his head, saying nothing. He had no explanation.</p>
+
+<p>“They are inquiring, I understand,” said Father Bechlin again. “The
+conductor was at his instrument just now.”</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing to be seen from the windows now. Only, as Percy stared
+out, still dazed with the shock, he saw the cruel needle of rock
+wavering beneath as if seen through water, and the huge shoulder of snow
+swaying softly up and down. It was quieter outside. It appeared that the
+flock had passed, only somewhere from an infinite height still sounded a
+fitful wailing, as if a lonely bird were wandering, lost in space.</p>
+
+<p>“That is the signalling volor,” murmured Percy to himself.</p>
+
+<p>He had no theory—no suggestion. Yet the matter seemed an ominous one.
+It was unheard of that an encounter with a hundred volors should take
+place, and he wondered why they were going southwards. Again the name of
+Felsenburgh came to his mind. What if that sinister man were still
+somewhere overhead?</p>
+
+<p>“Eminence,” began the old man again. But at that instant the car began
+to move.</p>
+
+<p>A bell clanged, a vibration tingled underfoot, and then, soft as a
+flake of snow, the great ship began to rise, its movement perceptible
+only by the sudden drop and vanishing of the spire of rock at which
+Percy still stared. Slowly the snowfield too began to flit downwards, a
+black cleft, whisked smoothly into sight from above, and disappeared
+again below, and a moment later once more the car seemed poised in white
+space as it climbed the slope of air down which it had dropped just now.
+Again the wind-chord rent the atmosphere; and this time the answer was
+as faint and distant as a cry from another world. The speed quickened,
+and the steady throb of the screw began to replace the swaying motion of
+the wings. Again came the hoot, wild and echoing through the barren
+wilderness of rock walls beneath, and again with a sudden impulse the
+car soared. It was going in great circles now, cautious as a cat,
+climbing, climbing, punctuating the ascent with cry after cry, searching
+the blind air for dangers. Once again a vast white slope came into
+sight, illuminated by the glare from the windows, sinking ever more and
+more swiftly, receding and approaching—until for one instant a jagged
+line of rocks grinned like teeth through the mist, dropped away and
+vanished, and with a clash of bells, and a last scream of warning, the
+throb of the screw passed from a whirr to a rising note, and the note to
+stillness, as the huge ship, clear at last of the frontier peaks, shook
+out her wings steady once more, and set out for her humming flight
+through space.... Whatever it was, was behind them now, vanished into
+the thick night.</p>
+
+<p>There was a sound of talking from the interior of the car, hasty,
+breathless voices, questioning, exclaiming, and the authoritative terse
+answer of the guard. A step came along outside, and Percy sprang to meet
+it, but, as he laid his hand on the door, it was pushed from without,
+and to his astonishment the English guard came straight through, closing
+it behind him.</p>
+
+<p>He stood there, looking strangely at the four priests, with compressed
+lips and anxious eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“Well?” cried Percy.</p>
+
+<p>“All right, gentlemen. But I’m thinking you’d better descend at Paris. I
+know who you are, gentlemen—and though I’m not a Catholic—-”</p>
+
+<p>He stopped again.</p>
+
+<p>“For God’s sake, man—-” began Percy.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! the news, gentlemen. Well, it was two hundred cars going to Rome.
+There is a Catholic plot, sir, discovered in London—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Well?”</p>
+
+<p>“To wipe out the Abbey. So they’re going—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah!”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, sir—to wipe out Rome.”</p>
+
+<p>Then he was gone again.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="2CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>It was nearly sixteen o’clock on the same day, the last day of the year,
+that Mabel went into the little church that stood in the street beneath
+her house.</p>
+
+<p>The dark was falling softly layer on layer; across the roofs to westward
+burned the smouldering fire of the winter sunset, and the interior was
+full of the dying light. She had slept a little in her chair that
+afternoon, and had awakened with that strange cleansed sense of spirit
+and mind that sometimes follows such sleep. She wondered later how she
+could have slept at such a time, and above all, how it was that she had
+perceived nothing of that cloud of fear and fury that even now was
+falling over town and country alike. She remembered afterwards an
+unusual busy-ness on the broad tracks beneath her as she had looked out
+on them from her windows, and an unusual calling of horns and whistles;
+but she thought nothing of it, and passed down an hour later for a
+meditation in the church.</p>
+
+<p>She had grown to love the quiet place, and came in often like this to
+steady her thoughts and concentrate them on the significance that lay
+beneath the surface of life—the huge principles upon which all lived,
+and which so plainly were the true realities. Indeed, such devotion was
+becoming almost recognised among certain classes of people. Addresses
+were delivered now and then; little books were being published as guides
+to the interior life, curiously resembling the old Catholic books on
+mental prayer.</p>
+
+<p>She went to-day to her usual seat, sat down, folded her hands, looked
+for a minute or two upon the old stone sanctuary, the white image and
+the darkening window. Then she closed her eyes and began to think,
+according to the method she followed.</p>
+
+<p>First she concentrated her attention on herself, detaching it from all
+that was merely external and transitory, withdrawing it inwards ...
+inwards, until she found that secret spark which, beneath all frailties
+and activities, made her a substantial member of the divine race of
+humankind.</p>
+
+<p>This then was the first step.</p>
+
+<p>The second consisted in an act of the intellect, followed by one of the
+imagination. All men possessed that spark, she considered.... Then she
+sent out her powers, sweeping with the eyes of her mind the seething
+world, seeing beneath the light and dark of the two hemispheres, the
+countless millions of mankind—children coming into the world, old men
+leaving it, the mature rejoicing in it and their own strength. Back
+through the ages she looked, through those centuries of crime and
+blindness, as the race rose through savagery and superstition to a
+knowledge of themselves; on through the ages yet to come, as generation
+followed generation to some climax whose perfection, she told herself,
+she could not fully comprehend because she was not of it. Yet, she told
+herself again, that climax had already been born; the birthpangs were
+over; for had not He come who was the heir of time?...</p>
+
+<p>Then by a third and vivid act she realised the unity of all, the central
+fire of which each spark was but a radiation—that vast passionless
+divine being, realising Himself up through these centuries, one yet
+many, Him whom men had called God, now no longer unknown, but recognised
+as the transcendent total of themselves—Him who now, with the coming of
+the new Saviour, had stirred and awakened and shown Himself as One.</p>
+
+<p>And there she stayed, contemplating the vision of her mind, detaching
+now this virtue, now that for particular assimilation, dwelling on her
+deficiencies, seeing in the whole the fulfilment of all aspirations, the
+sum of all for which men had hoped—that Spirit of Peace, so long
+hindered yet generated too perpetually by the passions of the world,
+forced into outline and being by the energy of individual lives,
+realising itself in pulse after pulse, dominant at last, serene,
+manifest, and triumphant. There she stayed, losing the sense of
+individuality, merging it by a long sustained effort of the will,
+drinking, as she thought, long breaths of the spirit of life and
+love....</p>
+
+<p>Some sound, she supposed afterwards, disturbed her, and she opened her
+eyes; and there before her lay the quiet pavement, glimmering through
+the dusk, the step of the sanctuary, the rostrum on the right, and the
+peaceful space of darkening air above the white Mother-figure and
+against the tracery of the old window. It was here that men had
+worshipped Jesus, that blood-stained Man of Sorrow, who had borne, even
+on His own confession, not peace but a sword. Yet they had knelt, those
+blind and hopeless Christians.... Ah! the pathos of it all, the
+despairing acceptance of any creed that would account for sorrow, the
+wild worship of any God who had claimed to bear it!</p>
+
+<p>And again came the sound, striking across her peace, though as yet she
+did not understand why.</p>
+
+<p>It was nearer now; and she turned in astonishment to look down the dusky
+nave.</p>
+
+<p>It was from without that the sound had come, that strange murmur, that
+rose and fell again as she listened.</p>
+
+<p>She stood up, her heart quickening a little—only once before had she
+heard such a sound, once before, in a square, where men raged about a
+point beneath a platform....</p>
+
+<p>She stepped swiftly out of her seat, passed down the aisle, drew back
+the curtains beneath the west window, lifted the latch and stepped out.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The street, from where she looked over the railings that barred the
+entrance to the church, seemed unusually empty and dark. To right and
+left stretched the houses, overhead the darkening sky was flushed with
+rose; but it seemed as if the public lights had been forgotten. There
+was not a living being to be seen.</p>
+
+<p>She had put her hand on the latch of the gate, to open it and go out,
+when a sudden patter of footsteps made her hesitate; and the next
+instant a child appeared panting, breathless and terrified, running with
+her hands before her.</p>
+
+<p>“They’re coming, they’re coming,” sobbed the child, seeing the face
+looking at her. Then she clung to the bars, staring over her shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>Mabel lifted the latch in an instant; the child sprang in, ran to the
+door and beat against it, then turning, seized her dress and cowered
+against her. Mabel shut the gate.</p>
+
+<p>“There, there,” she said. “Who is it? Who are coming?”</p>
+
+<p>But the child hid her face, drawing at the kindly skirts; and the next
+moment came the roar of voices and the trampling of footsteps.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It was not more than a few seconds before the heralds of that grim
+procession came past. First came a flying squadron of children,
+laughing, terrified, fascinated, screaming, turning their heads as they
+ran, with a dog or two yelping among them, and a few women drifting
+sideways along the pavements. A face of a man, Mabel saw as she glanced
+in terror upwards, had appeared at the windows opposite, pale and
+eager—some invalid no doubt dragging himself to see. One group—a
+well-dressed man in grey, a couple of women carrying babies, a
+solemn-faced boy—halted immediately before her on the other side of the
+railings, all talking, none listening, and these too turned their faces
+to the road on the left, up which every instant the clamour and
+trampling grew. Yet she could not ask. Her lips moved; but no sound came
+from them. She was one incarnate apprehension. Across her intense fixity
+moved pictures of no importance of Oliver as he had been at breakfast,
+of her own bedroom with its softened paper, of the dark sanctuary and
+the white figure on which she had looked just now.</p>
+
+<p>They were coming thicker now; a troop of young men with their arms
+linked swayed into sight, all talking or crying aloud, none
+listening—all across the roadway, and behind them surged the crowd,
+like a wave in a stone-fenced channel, male scarcely distinguishable
+from female in that pack of faces, and under that sky that grew darker
+every instant. Except for the noise, which Mabel now hardly noticed, so
+thick and incessant it was, so complete her concentration in the sense
+of sight—except for that, it might have been, from its suddenness and
+overwhelming force, some mob of phantoms trooping on a sudden out of
+some vista of the spiritual world visible across an open space, and
+about to vanish again in obscurity. That empty street was full now on
+this side and that so far as she could see; the young men were
+gone—running or walking she hardly knew—round the corner to the right,
+and the entire space was one stream of heads and faces, pressing so
+fiercely that the group at the railings were detached like weeds and
+drifted too, sideways, clutching at the bars, and swept away too and
+vanished. And all the while the child tugged and tore at her skirts.</p>
+
+<p>Certain things began to appear now above the heads of the crowd—objects
+she could not distinguish in the failing light—poles, and fantastic
+shapes, fragments of stuff resembling banners, moving as if alive,
+turning from side to side, borne from beneath.</p>
+
+<p>Faces, distorted with passion, looked at her from time to time as the
+moving show went past, open mouths cried at her; but she hardly saw
+them. She was watching those strange emblems, straining her eyes through
+the dusk, striving to distinguish the battered broken shapes,
+half-guessing, yet afraid to guess.</p>
+
+<p>Then, on a sudden, from the hidden lamps beneath the eaves, light leaped
+into being—that strong, sweet, familiar light, generated by the great
+engines underground that, in the passion of that catastrophic day, all
+men had forgotten; and in a moment all changed from a mob of phantoms
+and shapes into a pitiless reality of life and death.</p>
+
+<p>Before her moved a great rood, with a figure upon it, of which one arm
+hung from the nailed hand, swinging as it went; an embroidery streamed
+behind with the swiftness of the motion.</p>
+
+<p>And next after it came the naked body of a child, impaled, white and
+ruddy, the head fallen upon the breast, and the arms, too, dangling and
+turning.</p>
+
+<p>And next the figure of a man, hanging by the neck, dressed, it seemed,
+in a kind of black gown and cape, with its black-capped head twisting
+from the twisting rope.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>The same night Oliver Brand came home about an hour before midnight.</p>
+
+<p>For himself, what he had heard and seen that day was still too vivid and
+too imminent for him to judge of it coolly. He had seen, from his
+windows in Whitehall, Parliament Square filled with a mob the like of
+which had not been known in England since the days of Christianity—a
+mob full of a fury that could scarcely draw its origin except from
+sources beyond the reach of sense. Thrice during the hours that followed
+the publication of the Catholic plot and the outbreak of mob-law he had
+communicated with the Prime Minister asking whether nothing could be
+done to allay the tumult; and on both occasions he had received the
+doubtful answer that what could be done would be done, that force was
+inadmissible at present; but that the police were doing all that was
+possible.</p>
+
+<p>As regarded the despatch of the volors to Rome, he had assented by
+silence, as had the rest of the Council. That was, Snowford had said, a
+judicial punitive act, regrettable but necessary. Peace, in this
+instance, could not be secured except on terms of war—or rather, since
+war was obsolete—by the sternness of justice. These Catholics had shown
+themselves the avowed enemies of society; very well, then society must
+defend itself, at least this once. Man was still human. And Oliver had
+listened and said nothing.</p>
+
+<p>As he passed in one of the Government volors over London on his way
+home, he had caught more than one glimpse of what was proceeding beneath
+him. The streets were as bright as day, shadowless and clear in the
+white light, and every roadway was a crawling serpent. From beneath rose
+up a steady roar of voices, soft and woolly, punctuated by cries. From
+here and there ascended the smoke of burning; and once, as he flitted
+over one of the great squares to the south of Battersea, he had seen as
+it were a scattered squadron of ants running as if in fear or
+pursuit.... He knew what was happening.... Well, after all, man was not
+yet perfectly civilised.</p>
+
+<p>He did not like to think of what awaited him at home. Once, about five
+hours earlier, he had listened to his wife’s voice through the
+telephone, and what he had heard had nearly caused him to leave all and
+go to her. Yet he was scarcely prepared for what he found.</p>
+
+<p>As he came into the sitting-room, there was no sound, except that
+far-away hum from the seething streets below. The room seemed strangely
+dark and cold; the only light that entered was through one of the
+windows from which the curtains were withdrawn, and, silhouetted against
+the luminous sky beyond, was the upright figure of a woman, looking and
+listening....</p>
+
+<p>He pressed the knob of the electric light; and Mabel turned slowly
+towards him. She was in her day-dress, with a cloak thrown over her
+shoulders, and her face was almost as that of a stranger. It was
+perfectly colourless, her lips were compressed and her eyes full of an
+emotion which he could not interpret. It might equally have been anger,
+terror or misery.</p>
+
+<p>She stood there in the steady light, motionless, looking at him.</p>
+
+<p>For a moment he did not trust himself to speak. He passed across to the
+window, closed it and drew the curtains. Then he took that rigid figure
+gently by the arm.</p>
+
+<p>“Mabel,” he said, “Mabel.”</p>
+
+<p>She submitted to be drawn towards the sofa, but there was no response to
+his touch. He sat down and looked up at her with a kind of despairing
+apprehension.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear, I am tired out,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Still she looked at him. There was in her pose that rigidity that actors
+simulate; yet he knew it for the real thing. He had seen that silence
+once or twice before in the presence of a horror—once at any rate, at
+the sight of a splash of blood on her shoe.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, my darling, sit down, at least,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>She obeyed him mechanically—sat, and still stared at him. In the
+silence once more that soft roar rose and died from the invisible world
+of tumult outside the windows. Within here all was quiet. He knew
+perfectly that two things strove within her, her loyalty to her faith
+and her hatred of those crimes in the name of justice. As he looked on
+her he saw that these two were at death grips, that hatred was
+prevailing, and that she herself was little more than a passive
+battlefield. Then, as with a long-drawn howl of a wolf, there surged and
+sank the voices of the mob a mile away, the tension broke.... She threw
+herself forward towards him, he caught her by the wrists, and so she
+rested, clasped in his arms, her face and bosom on his knees, and her
+whole body torn by emotion.</p>
+
+<p>For a full minute neither spoke. Oliver understood well enough, yet at
+present he had no words. He only drew her a little closer to himself,
+kissed her hair two or three times, and settled himself to hold her. He
+began to rehearse what he must say presently.</p>
+
+<p>Then she raised her flushed face for an instant, looked at him
+passionately, dropped her head again and began to sob out broken words.</p>
+
+<p>He could only catch a sentence here and there, yet he knew what she was
+saying....</p>
+
+<p>It was the ruin of all her hopes, she sobbed, the end of her religion.
+Let her die, die and have done with it! It was all gone, gone, swept
+away in this murderous passion of the people of her faith ... they were
+no better than Christians, after all, as fierce as the men on whom they
+avenged themselves, as dark as though the Saviour, Julian, had never
+come; it was all lost ... War and Passion and Murder had returned to the
+body from which she had thought them gone forever.... The burning
+churches, the hunted Catholics, the raging of the streets on which she
+had looked that day, the bodies of the child and the priest carried on
+poles, the burning churches and convents. ... All streamed out,
+incoherent, broken by sobs, details of horror, lamentations, reproaches,
+interpreted by the writhing of her head and hands upon his knees. The
+collapse was complete.</p>
+
+<p>He put his hands again beneath her arms and raised her. He was worn out
+by his work, yet he knew he must quiet her. This was more serious than
+any previous crisis. Yet he knew her power of recovery.</p>
+
+<p>“Sit down, my darling,” he said. “There ... give me your hands. Now
+listen to me.”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>He made really an admirable defence, for it was what he had been
+repeating to himself all day. Men were not yet perfect, he said; there
+ran in their veins the blood of men who for twenty centuries had been
+Christians.... There must be no despair; faith in man was of the very
+essence of religion, faith in man’s best self, in what he would become,
+not in what at present he actually was. They were at the beginning of
+the new religion, not in its maturity; there must be sourness in the
+young fruit. ... Consider, too, the provocation! Remember the appalling
+crime that these Catholics had contemplated; they had set themselves to
+strike the new Faith in its very heart....</p>
+
+<p>“My darling,” he said, “men are not changed in an instant. What if those
+Christians had succeeded!... I condemn it all as strongly as you. I saw
+a couple of newspapers this afternoon that are as wicked as anything
+that the Christians have ever done. They exulted in all these crimes. It
+will throw the movement back ten years.... Do you think that there are
+not thousands like yourself who hate and detest this violence?... But
+what does faith mean, except that we know that mercy will prevail?
+Faith, patience and hope—these are our weapons.”</p>
+
+<p>He spoke with passionate conviction, his eyes fixed on hers, in a fierce
+endeavour to give her his own confidence, and to reassure the remnants
+of his own doubtfulness. It was true that he too hated what she hated,
+yet he saw things that she did not.... Well, well, he told himself, he
+must remember that she was a woman.</p>
+
+<p>The look of frantic horror passed slowly out of her eyes, giving way to
+acute misery as he talked, and as his personality once more began to
+dominate her own. But it was not yet over.</p>
+
+<p>“But the volors,” she cried, “the volors! That is deliberate; that is
+not the work of the mob.”</p>
+
+<p>“My darling, it is no more deliberate than the other. We are all human,
+we are all immature. Yes, the Council permitted it, ... permitted it,
+remember. The German Government, too, had to yield. We must tame nature
+slowly, we must not break it.”</p>
+
+<p>He talked again for a few minutes, repeating his arguments, soothing,
+reassuring, encouraging; and he saw that he was beginning to prevail.
+But she returned to one of his words.</p>
+
+<p>“Permitted it! And you permitted it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Dear; I said nothing, either for it or against. I tell you that if we
+had forbidden it there would have been yet more murder, and the people
+would have lost their rulers. We were passive, since we could do
+nothing.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah! but it would have been better to die.... Oh, Oliver, let me die at
+least! I cannot bear it.”</p>
+
+<p>By her hands which he still held he drew her nearer yet to himself.</p>
+
+<p>“Sweetheart,” he said gravely, “cannot you trust me a little? If I could
+tell you all that passed to-day, you would understand. But trust me that
+I am not heartless. And what of Julian Felsenburgh?”</p>
+
+<p>For a moment he saw hesitation in her eyes; her loyalty to him and her
+loathing of all that had happened strove within her. Then once again
+loyalty prevailed, the name of Felsenburgh weighed down the balance, and
+trust came back with a flood of tears.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Oliver,” she said, “I know I trust you. But I am so weak, and all
+is so terrible. And He so strong and merciful. And will He be with us
+to-morrow?”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It struck midnight from the clock-tower a mile away as they yet sat and
+talked. She was still tremulous from the struggle; but she looked at him
+smiling, still holding his hands. He saw that the reaction was upon her
+in full force at last.</p>
+
+<p>“The New Year, my husband,” she said, and rose as she said it, drawing
+him after her.</p>
+
+<p>“I wish you a happy New Year,” she said. “Oh help me, Oliver.”</p>
+
+<p>She kissed him, and drew back, still holding his hands, looking at him
+with bright tearful eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“Oliver,” she cried again, “I must tell you this.... Do you know what I
+thought before you came?”</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head, staring at her greedily. How sweet she was! He felt
+her grip tighten on his hands.</p>
+
+<p>“I thought I could not bear it,” she whispered—“that I must end it
+all—ah! you know what I mean.”</p>
+
+<p>His heart flinched as he heard her; and he drew her closer again to
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>“It is all over! it is all over,” she cried. “Ah! do not look like that!
+I could not tell you if it was not.”’</p>
+
+<p>As their lips met again there came the vibration of an electric bell
+from the next room, and Oliver, knowing what it meant, felt even in that
+instant a tremor shake his heart. He loosed her hands, and still smiled
+at her.</p>
+
+<p>“The bell!” she said, with a flash of apprehension.</p>
+
+<p>“But it is all well between us again?”</p>
+
+<p>Her face steadied itself into loyalty and confidence.</p>
+
+<p>“It is all well,” she said; and again the impatient bell tingled. “Go,
+Oliver; I will wait here.”</p>
+
+<p>A minute later he was back again, with a strange look on his white face,
+and his lips compressed. He came straight up to her, taking her once
+more by the hands, and looking steadily into her steady eyes. In the
+hearts of both of them resolve and faith were holding down the emotion
+that was not yet dead. He drew a long breath.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” he said in an even voice, “it is over.”</p>
+
+<p>Her lips moved; and that deadly paleness lay on her cheeks. He gripped
+her firmly.</p>
+
+<p>“Listen,” he said. “You must face it. It is over. Rome is gone. Now we
+must build something better.”</p>
+
+<p>She threw herself sobbing into his arms.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="2CHAPTER_VIII">CHAPTER VIII</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>Long before dawn on the first morning of the New Year the approaches to
+the Abbey were already blocked. Victoria Street, Great George Street,
+Whitehall—even Millbank Street itself—were full and motionless. Broad
+Sanctuary, divided by the low-walled motor-track, was itself cut into
+great blocks and wedges of people by the ways which the police kept open
+for the passage of important personages, and Palace Yard was kept
+rigidly clear except for one island, occupied by a stand which was
+itself full from top to bottom and end to end. All roofs and parapets
+which commanded a view of the Abbey were also one mass of heads.
+Overhead, like solemn moons, burned the white lights of the electric
+globes.</p>
+
+<p>It was not known at exactly what hour the tumult had steadied itself to
+definite purpose, except to a few weary controllers of the temporary
+turnstiles which had been erected the evening before. It had been
+announced a week previously that, in consideration of the enormous
+demand for seats, all persons who presented their worship-ticket at an
+authorised office, and followed the directions issued by the police,
+would be accounted as having fulfilled the duties of citizenship in that
+respect, and it was generally made known that it was the Government’s
+intention to toll the great bell of the Abbey at the beginning of the
+ceremony and at the incensing of the image, during which period silence
+must be as far as possible preserved by all those within hearing.</p>
+
+<p>London had gone completely mad on the announcement of the Catholic plot
+on the afternoon before. The secret had leaked out about fourteen
+o’clock, an hour after the betrayal of the scheme to Mr. Snowford; and
+practically all commercial activities had ceased on the instant. By
+fifteen-and-a-half all stores were closed, the Stock Exchange, the City
+offices, the West End establishments—all had as by irresistible impulse
+suspended business, and from within two hours after noon until nearly
+midnight, when the police had been adequately reinforced and enabled to
+deal with the situation, whole mobs and armies of men, screaming
+squadrons of women, troops of frantic youths, had paraded the streets,
+howling, denouncing, and murdering. It was not known how many deaths had
+taken place, but there was scarcely a street without the signs of
+outrage. Westminster Cathedral had been sacked, every altar overthrown,
+indescribable indignities performed there. An unknown priest had
+scarcely been able to consume the Blessed Sacrament before he was seized
+and throttled; the Archbishop with eleven priests and two bishops had
+been hanged at the north end of the church, thirty-five convents had
+been destroyed, St. George’s Cathedral burned to the ground; and it was
+reported even, by the evening papers, that it was believed that, for the
+first time since the introduction of Christianity into England, there
+was not one Tabernacle left within twenty miles of the Abbey. “London,”
+explained the <i>New People</i>, in huge headlines, “was cleansed at last of
+dingy and fantastic nonsense.”</p>
+
+<p>It was known at about fifteen-and-a-half o’clock that at least seventy
+volors had left for Rome, and half-an-hour later that Berlin had
+reinforced them by sixty more. At midnight, fortunately at a time when
+the police had succeeded in shepherding the crowds into some kind of
+order, the news was flashed on to cloud and placard alike that the grim
+work was done, and that Rome had ceased to exist. The early morning
+papers added a few details, pointing out, of course, the coincidence of
+the fall with the close of the year, relating how, by an astonishing
+chance, practically all the heads of the hierarchy throughout the world
+had been assembled in the Vatican which had been the first object of
+attack, and how these, in desperation, it was supposed, had refused to
+leave the City when the news came by wireless telegraphy that the
+punitive force was on its way. There was not a building left in Rome;
+the entire place, Leonine City, Trastevere, suburbs—everything was
+gone; for the volors, poised at an immense height, had parcelled out the
+City beneath them with extreme care, before beginning to drop the
+explosives; and five minutes after the first roar from beneath and the
+first burst of smoke and flying fragments, the thing was finished. The
+volors had then dispersed in every direction, pursuing the motor and
+rail-tracks along which the population had attempted to escape so soon
+as the news was known; and it was supposed that not less than thirty
+thousand belated fugitives had been annihilated by this foresight. It
+was true, remarked the <i>Studio</i>, that many treasures of incalculable
+value had been destroyed, but this was a cheap price to pay for the
+final and complete extermination of the Catholic pest. “There comes a
+point,” it remarked, “when destruction is the only cure for a
+vermin-infested house,” and it proceeded to observe that now that the
+Pope with the entire College of Cardinals, all the ex-Royalties of
+Europe, all the most frantic religionists from the inhabited world who
+had taken up their abode in the “Holy City” were gone at a stroke, a
+recrudescence of the superstition was scarcely to be feared elsewhere.
+Yet care must even now be taken against any relenting. Catholics (if any
+were left bold enough to attempt it) must no longer be allowed to take
+any kind of part in the life of any civilised country. So far as
+messages had come in from other countries, there was but one chorus of
+approval at what had been done.</p>
+
+<p>A few papers regretted the incident, or rather the spirit which had lain
+behind it. It was not seemly, they said, that Humanitarians should have
+recourse to violence; yet not one pretended that anything could be felt
+but thanksgiving for the general result. Ireland, too, must be brought
+into line; they must not dally any longer.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It was now brightening slowly towards dawn, and beyond the river through
+the faint wintry haze a crimson streak or two began to burn. But all was
+surprisingly quiet, for this crowd, tired out with an all-night watch,
+chilled by the bitter cold, and intent on what lay before them, had no
+energy left for useless effort. Only from packed square and street and
+lane went up a deep, steady murmur like the sound of the sea a mile
+away, broken now and again by the hoot and clang of a motor and the rush
+of its passage as it tore eastwards round the circle through Broad
+Sanctuary and vanished citywards. And the light broadened and the
+electric globes sickened and paled, and the haze began to clear a
+little, showing, not the fresh blue that had been hoped for from the
+cold of the night, but a high, colourless vault of cloud, washed with
+grey and faint rose-colour, as the sun came up, a ruddy copper disc,
+beyond the river.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>At nine o’clock the excitement rose a degree higher. The police between
+Whitehall and the Abbey, looking from their high platforms strung along
+the route, whence they kept watch and controlled the wire palisadings,
+showed a certain activity, and a minute later a police-car whirled
+through the square between the palings, and vanished round the Abbey
+towers. The crowd murmured and shuffled and began to expect, and a cheer
+was raised when a moment later four more cars appeared, bearing the
+Government insignia, and disappeared in the same direction. These were
+the officials, they said, going to Dean’s Yard, where the procession
+would assemble.</p>
+
+<p>At about a quarter to ten the crowd at the west end of Victoria Street
+began to raise its voice in a song, and by the time that was over, and
+the bells had burst out from the Abbey towers, a rumour had somehow made
+its entrance that Felsenburgh was to be present at the ceremony. There
+was no assignable reason for this, neither then nor afterwards; in fact,
+the <i>Evening Star</i> declared that it was one more instance of the
+astonishing instinct of human beings <i>en masse</i>; for it was not until an
+hour later that even the Government were made aware of the facts. Yet
+the truth remained that at half-past ten one continuous roar went up,
+drowning even the brazen clamour of the bells, reaching round to
+Whitehall and the crowded pavements of Westminster Bridge, demanding
+Julian Felsenburgh. Yet there had been absolutely no news of the
+President of Europe for the last fortnight, beyond an entirely
+unsupported report that he was somewhere in the East.</p>
+
+<p>And all the while the motors poured from all directions towards the
+Abbey and disappeared under the arch into Dean’s Yard, bearing those
+fortunate persons whose tickets actually admitted them to the church
+itself. Cheers ran and rippled along the lines as the great men were
+recognised—Lord Pemberton, Oliver Brand and his wife, Mr. Caldecott,
+Maxwell, Snowford, with the European delegates—even melancholy-faced
+Mr. Francis himself, the Government <i>ceremoniarius</i>, received a
+greeting. But by a quarter to eleven, when the pealing bells paused, the
+stream had stopped, the barriers issued out to stop the roads, the wire
+palisadings vanished, and the crowd for an instant, ceasing its roaring,
+sighed with relief at the relaxed pressure, and surged out into the
+roadways. Then once more the roaring began for Julian Felsenburgh.</p>
+
+<p>The sun was now high, still a copper disc, above the Victoria Tower, but
+paler than an hour ago; the whiteness of the Abbey, the heavy greys of
+Parliament House, the ten thousand tints of house-roofs, heads,
+streamers, placards began to disclose themselves.</p>
+
+<p>A single bell tolled five minutes to the hour, and the moments slipped
+by, until once more the bell stopped, and to the ears of those within
+hearing of the great west doors came the first blare of the huge organ,
+reinforced by trumpets. And then, as sudden and profound as the hush of
+death, there fell an enormous silence.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>As the five-minutes bell began, sounding like a continuous wind-note in
+the great vaults overhead, solemn and persistent, Mabel drew a long
+breath and leaned back in her seat from the rigid position in which for
+the last half-hour she had been staring out at the wonderful sight. She
+seemed to herself to have assimilated it at last, to be herself once
+more, to have drunk her fill of the triumph and the beauty. She was as
+one who looks upon a summer sea on the morning after a storm. And now
+the climax was at hand.</p>
+
+<p>From end to end and side to side the interior of the Abbey presented a
+great broken mosaic of human faces; living slopes, walls, sections and
+curves. The south transept directly opposite to her, from pavement to
+rose window, was one sheet of heads; the floor was paved with them, cut
+in two by the scarlet of the gangway leading from the chapel of St.
+Faith—on the right, the choir beyond the open space before the
+sanctuary was a mass of white figures, scarved and surpliced; the high
+organ gallery, beneath which the screen had been removed, was crowded
+with them, and, far down beneath, the dim nave stretched the same
+endless pale living pavement to the shadow beneath the west window.
+Between every group of columns behind the choir-stalls, before her, to
+right, left, and behind, were platforms contrived in the masonry; and
+the exquisite roof, fan-tracery and soaring capital, alone gave the eye
+an escape from humanity. The whole vast space was full, it seemed, of
+delicate sunlight that streamed in from the artificial light set outside
+each window, and poured the ruby and the purple and the blue from the
+old glass in long shafts of colour across the dusty air, and in broken
+patches on the faces and dresses behind. The murmur of ten thousand
+voices filled the place, supplying, it seemed, a solemn accompaniment to
+that melodious note that now pulsed above it. And finally, more
+significant than all, was the empty carpeted sanctuary at her feet, the
+enormous altar with its flight of steps, the gorgeous curtain and the
+great untenanted sedilia.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Mabel needed some such reassurance, for last night, until the coming of
+Oliver, had passed for her as a kind of appalling waking dream. From the
+first shock of what she had seen outside the church, through those hours
+of waiting, with the knowledge that this was the way in which the Spirit
+of Peace asserted its superiority, up to that last moment when, in her
+husband’s arms, she had learned of the Fall of Rome, it had appeared to
+her as if her new world had suddenly corrupted about her. It was
+incredible, she told herself, that this ravening monster, dripping blood
+from claws and teeth, that had arisen roaring in the night, could be the
+Humanity that had become her God. She had thought revenge and cruelty
+and slaughter to be the brood of Christian superstition, dead and buried
+under the new-born angel of light, and now it seemed that the monsters
+yet stirred and lived. All the evening she had sat, walked, lain about
+her quiet house with the horror heavy about her, flinging open a window
+now and again in the icy air to listen with clenched hands to the cries
+and the roarings of the mob that raged in the streets beneath, the
+clanks, the yells and the hoots of the motor-trains that tore up from
+the country to swell the frenzy of the city—to watch the red glow of
+fire, the volumes of smoke that heaved up from the burning chapels and
+convents.</p>
+
+<p>She had questioned, doubted, resisted her doubts, flung out frantic acts
+of faith, attempted to renew the confidence that she attained in her
+meditation, told herself that traditions died slowly; she had knelt,
+crying out to the spirit of peace that lay, as she knew so well, at the
+heart of man, though overwhelmed for the moment by evil passion. A line
+or two ran in her head from one of the old Victorian poets:</p>
+
+<p>You doubt If any one Could think or bid it? How could it come about?...
+Who did it? Not men! Not here! Oh! not beneath the sun.... The torch
+that smouldered till the cup o’er-ran The wrath of God which is the
+wrath of Man!</p>
+
+<p>She had even contemplated death, as she had told her husband—the taking
+of her own life, in a great despair with the world. Seriously she had
+thought of it; it was an escape perfectly in accord with her morality.
+The useless and agonising were put out of the world by common consent;
+the Euthanasia houses witnessed to it. Then why not she?... For she
+could not bear it!... Then Oliver had come, she had fought her way back
+to sanity and confidence; and the phantom had gone again.</p>
+
+<p>How sensible and quiet he had been, she was beginning to tell herself
+now, as the quiet influence of this huge throng in this glorious place
+of worship possessed her once more—how reasonable in his explanation
+that man was even now only convalescent and therefore liable to relapse.
+She had told herself that again and again during the night, but it had
+been different when he had said so. His personality had once more
+prevailed; and the name of Felsenburgh had finished the work.</p>
+
+<p>“If He were but here!” she sighed. But she knew He was far away.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It was not until a quarter to eleven that she understood that the crowds
+outside were clamouring for Him too, and that knowledge reassured her
+yet further. They knew, then, these wild tigers, where their redemption
+lay; they understood what was their ideal, even if they had not attained
+to it. Ah! if He were but here, there would be no more question: the
+sullen waves would sink beneath His call of peace, the hazy clouds lift,
+the rumble die to silence. But He was away—away on some strange
+business. Well; He knew His work. He would surely come soon again to His
+children who needed Him so terribly.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>She had the good fortune to be alone in a crowd. Her neighbour, a
+grizzled old man with his daughters beyond, was her only neighbour, and
+a stranger. At her left rose up the red-covered barricade over which she
+could see the sanctuary and the curtain; and her seat in the tribune,
+raised some eight feet above the floor, removed her from any possibility
+of conversation. She was thankful for that: she did not want to talk;
+she wanted only to control her faculties in silence, to reassert her
+faith, to look out over this enormous throng gathered to pay homage to
+the great Spirit whom they had betrayed, to renew her own courage and
+faithfulness. She wondered what the preacher would say, whether there
+would be any note of penitence. Maternity was his subject—that benign
+aspect of universal life—tenderness, love, quiet, receptive, protective
+passion, the spirit that soothes rather than inspires, that busies
+itself with peaceful tasks, that kindles the lights and fires of home,
+that gives sleep, food and welcome....</p>
+
+<p>The bell stopped, and in the instant before the music began she heard,
+clear above the murmur within, the roar of the crowds outside, who still
+demanded their God. Then, with a crash, the huge organ awoke, pierced by
+the cry of the trumpets and the maddening throb of drums. There was no
+delicate prelude here, no slow stirring of life rising through
+labyrinths of mystery to the climax of sight—here rather was full-orbed
+day, the high noon of knowledge and power, the dayspring from on high,
+dawning in mid-heaven. Her heart quickened to meet it, and her reviving
+confidence, still convalescent, stirred and smiled, as the tremendous
+chords blared overhead, telling of triumph full-armed. God was man,
+then, after all—a God who last night had faltered for an hour, but who
+rose again on this morning of a new year, scattering mists, dominant
+over his own passion, all-compelling and all-beloved. God was man, and
+Felsenburgh his Incarnation! Yes, she must believe that! She did
+believe that!</p>
+
+<p>Then she saw how already the long procession was winding up beneath the
+screen, and by imperceptible art the light grew yet more acutely
+beautiful. They were coming, then, those ministers of a pure worship;
+grave men who knew in what they believed, and who, even if they did not
+at this moment thrill with feeling (for she knew that in this respect
+her husband for one did not), yet believed the principles of this
+worship and recognised their need of expression for the majority of
+mankind—coming slowly up in fours and pairs and units, led by robed
+vergers, rippling over the steps, and emerging again into the coloured
+sunlight in all their bravery of Masonic apron, badge and jewel. Surely
+here was reassurance enough.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The sanctuary now held a figure or two. Anxious-faced Mr. Francis, in
+his robes of office, came gravely down the steps and stood awaiting the
+procession, directing with almost imperceptible motions his satellites
+who hovered about the aisles ready to point this way and that to the
+advancing stream; and the western-most seats were already beginning to
+fill, when on a sudden she recognised that something had happened.</p>
+
+<p>Just now the roaring of the mob outside had provided a kind of underbass
+to the music within, imperceptible except to sub-consciousness, but
+clearly discernible in its absence; and this absence was now a fact.</p>
+
+<p>At first she thought that the signal of beginning worship had hushed
+them; and then, with an indescribable thrill, she remembered that in all
+her knowledge only one thing had ever availed to quiet a turbulent
+crowd. Yet she was not sure; it might be an illusion. Even now the mob
+might be roaring still, and she only deaf to it; but again with an
+ecstasy that was very near to agony she perceived that the murmur of
+voices even within the building had ceased, and that some great wave of
+emotion was stirring the sheets and slopes of faces before her as a wind
+stirs wheat. A moment later, and she was on her feet, gripping the rail,
+with her heart like an over-driven engine beating pulses of blood,
+furious and insistent, through every vein; for with great rushing surge
+that sounded like a sigh, heard even above the triumphant tumult
+overhead, the whole enormous assemblage had risen to its feet.</p>
+
+<p>Confusion seemed to break out in the orderly procession. She saw Mr.
+Francis run forward quickly, gesticulating like a conductor, and at his
+signal the long line swayed forward, split, recoiled, and again slid
+swiftly forward, breaking as it did so into twenty streams that poured
+along the seats and filled them in a moment. Men ran and pushed, aprons
+flapped, hands beckoned, all without coherent words. There was a
+knocking of feet, the crash of an overturned chair, and then, as if a
+god had lifted his hand for quiet, the music ceased abruptly, sending a
+wild echo that swooned and died in a moment; a great sigh filled its
+place, and, in the coloured sunshine that lay along the immense length
+of the gangway that ran open now from west to east, far down in the
+distant nave, a single figure was seen advancing.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>What Mabel saw and heard and felt from eleven o’clock to half-an-hour
+after noon on that first morning of the New Year she could never
+adequately remember. For the time she lost the continuous consciousness
+of self, the power of reflection, for she was still weak from her
+struggle; there was no longer in her the process by which events are
+stored, labelled and recorded; she was no more than a being who observed
+as it were in one long act, across which considerations played at
+uncertain intervals. Eyes and ear seemed her sole functions,
+communicating direct with a burning heart.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>She did not even know at what point her senses told her that this was
+Felsenburgh. She seemed to have known it even before he entered, and she
+watched Him as in complete silence He came deliberately up the red
+carpet, superbly alone, rising a step or two at the entrance of the
+choir, passing on and up before her. He was in his English judicial
+dress of scarlet and black, but she scarcely noticed it. For her, too,
+no one else existed but, He; this vast assemblage was gone, poised and
+transfigured in one vibrating atmosphere of an immense human emotion.
+There was no one, anywhere, but Julian Felsenburgh. Peace and light
+burned like a glory about Him.</p>
+
+<p>For an instant after passing he disappeared beyond the speaker’s
+tribune, and the instant after reappeared once more, coming up the
+steps. He reached his place—she could see His profile beneath her and
+slightly to the left, pure and keen as the blade of a knife, beneath His
+white hair. He lifted one white-furred sleeve, made a single motion, and
+with a surge and a rumble, the ten thousand were seated. He motioned
+again and with a roar they were on their feet.</p>
+
+<p>Again there was a silence. He stood now, perfectly still, His hands laid
+together on the rail, and His face looking steadily before Him; it
+seemed as if He who had drawn all eyes and stilled all sounds were
+waiting until His domination were complete, and there was but one will,
+one desire, and that beneath His hand. Then He began to speak....</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>In this again, as Mabel perceived afterwards, there was no precise or
+verbal record within her of what he said; there was no conscious process
+by which she received, tested, or approved what she heard. The nearest
+image under which she could afterwards describe her emotions to herself,
+was that when He spoke it was she who was speaking. Her own thoughts,
+her predispositions, her griefs, her disappointment, her passion, her
+hopes—all these interior acts of the soul known scarcely even to
+herself, down even, it seemed, to the minutest whorls and eddies of
+thought, were, by this man, lifted up, cleansed, kindled, satisfied and
+proclaimed. For the first time in her life she became perfectly aware of
+what human nature meant; for it was her own heart that passed out upon
+the air, borne on that immense voice. Again, as once before for a few
+moments in Paul’s House, it seemed that creation, groaning so long, had
+spoken articulate words at last—had come to growth and coherent thought
+and perfect speech. Yet then He had spoken to men; now it was Man
+Himself speaking. It was not one man who spoke there, it was Man—Man
+conscious of his origin, his destiny, and his pilgrimage between, Man
+sane again after a night of madness—knowing his strength, declaring his
+law, lamenting in a voice as eloquent as stringed instruments his own
+failure to correspond. It was a soliloquy rather than an oration. Rome
+had fallen, English and Italian streets had run with blood, smoke and
+flame had gone up to heaven, because man had for an instant sunk back to
+the tiger. Yet it was done, cried the great voice, and there was no
+repentance; it was done, and ages hence man must still do penance and
+flush scarlet with shame to remember that once he turned his back on
+the risen light.</p>
+
+<p>There was no appeal to the lurid, no picture of the tumbling palaces,
+the running figures, the coughing explosions, the shaking of the earth
+and the dying of the doomed. It was rather with those hot hearts
+shouting in the English and German streets, or aloft in the winter air
+of Italy, the ugly passions that warred there, as the volors rocked at
+their stations, generating and fulfilling revenge, paying back plot with
+plot, and violence with violence. For there, cried the voice, was man as
+he had been, fallen in an instant to the cruel old ages before he had
+learned what he was and why.</p>
+
+<p>There was no repentance, said the voice again, but there was something
+better; and as the hard, stinging tones melted, the girl’s dry eyes of
+shame filled in an instant with tears. There was something better—the
+knowledge of what crimes man was yet capable of, and the will to use
+that knowledge. Rome was gone, and it was a lamentable shame; Rome was
+gone, and the air was the sweeter for it; and then in an instant, like
+the soar of a bird, He was up and away—away from the horrid gulf where
+He had looked just now, from the fragments of charred bodies, and
+tumbled houses and all the signs of man’s disgrace, to the pure air and
+sunlight to which man must once more set his face. Yet He bore with Him
+in that wonderful flight the dew of tears and the aroma of earth. He had
+not spared words with which to lash and whip the naked human heart, and
+He did not spare words to lift up the bleeding, shrinking thing, and
+comfort it with the divine vision of love....</p>
+
+<p>Historically speaking, it was about forty minutes before He turned to
+the shrouded image behind the altar.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! Maternity!” he cried. “Mother of us all—-”</p>
+
+<p>And then, to those who heard Him, the supreme miracle took place.... For
+it seemed now in an instant that it was no longer man who spoke, but One
+who stood upon the stage of the superhuman. The curtain ripped back, as
+one who stood by it tore, panting, at the strings; and there, it seemed,
+face to face stood the Mother above the altar, huge, white and
+protective, and the Child, one passionate incarnation of love, crying to
+her from the tribune.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! Mother of us all, and Mother of Me!”</p>
+
+<p>So He praised her to her face, that sublime principle of life, declared
+her glories and her strength, her Immaculate Motherhood, her seven
+swords of anguish driven through her heart by the passion and the
+follies of her Son—He promised her great things, the recognition of her
+countless children, the love and service of the unborn, the welcome of
+those yet quickening within the womb. He named her the Wisdom of the
+Most High, that sweetly orders all things, the Gate of Heaven, House of
+Ivory, Comforter of the afflicted, Queen of the World; and, to the
+delirious eyes of those who looked on her it seemed that the grave face
+smiled to hear Him....</p>
+
+<p>A great panting as of some monstrous life began to fill the air as the
+mob swayed behind Him, and the torrential voice poured on. Waves of
+emotion swept up and down; there were cries and sobs, the yelping of a
+man beside himself at last, from somewhere among the crowded seats, the
+crash of a bench, and another and another, and the gangways were full,
+for He no longer held them passive to listen; He was rousing them to
+some supreme act. The tide crawled nearer, and the faces stared no
+longer at the Son but the Mother; the girl in the gallery tore at the
+heavy railing, and sank down sobbing upon her knees. And above all the
+voice pealed on—and the thin hands blanched to whiteness strained from
+the wide and sumptuous sleeves as if to reach across the sanctuary
+itself.</p>
+
+<p>It was a new tale He was telling now, and all to her glory. He was from
+the East, now they knew, come from some triumph. He had been hailed as
+King, adored as Divine, as was meet and right—He, the humble superhuman
+son of a Human Mother—who bore not a sword but peace, not a cross but a
+crown. So it seemed He was saying; yet no man there knew whether He said
+it or not—whether the voice proclaimed it, or their hearts asserted it.
+He was on the steps of the sanctuary now, still with outstretched hands
+and pouring words, and the mob rolled after him to the rumble of ten
+thousand feet and the sighing of ten thousand hearts.... He was at the
+altar; He was upon it. Again in one last cry, as the crowd broke against
+the steps beneath, He hailed her Queen and Mother.</p>
+
+<p>The end came in a moment, swift and inevitable. And for an instant,
+before the girl in the gallery sank down, blind with tears, she saw the
+tiny figure poised there at the knees of the huge image, beneath the
+expectant hands, silent and transfigured in the blaze of light. The
+Mother, it seemed, had found her Son at last.</p>
+
+<p>For an instant she saw it, the soaring columns, the gilding and the
+colours, the swaying heads, the tossing hands. It was a sea that heaved
+before her, lights went up and down, the rose window whirled overhead,
+presences filled the air, heaven flashed away, and the earth shook it
+ecstasy. Then in the heavenly light, to the crash of drums, above the
+screaming of the women and the battering of feet, in one thunder-peal of
+worship ten thousand voices hailed Him Lord and God.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="BOOK_III-THE_VICTORY">BOOK III-THE VICTORY</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="3CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>The little room where the new Pope sat reading was a model of
+simplicity. Its walls were whitewashed, its roof unpolished rafters, and
+its floor beaten mud. A square table stood in the centre, with a chair
+beside it; a cold brazier laid for lighting, stood in the wide hearth; a
+bookshelf against the wall held a dozen volumes. There were three doors,
+one leading to the private oratory, one to the ante-room, and the third
+to the little paved court. The south windows were shuttered, but through
+the ill-fitting hinges streamed knife-blades of fiery light from the hot
+Eastern day outside.</p>
+
+<p>It was the time of the mid-day siesta, and except for the brisk scything
+of the <i>cicade</i> from the hill-slope behind the house, all was in deep
+silence.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The Pope, who had dined an hour before, had hardly shifted His attitude
+in all that time, so intent was He upon His reading. For the while, all
+was put away, His own memory of those last three months, the bitter
+anxiety, the intolerable load of responsibility. The book He held was a
+cheap reprint of the famous biography of Julian Felsenburgh, issued a
+month before, and He was now drawing to an end.</p>
+
+<p>It was a terse, well-written book, composed by an unknown hand, and some
+even suspected it to be the disguised work of Felsenburgh himself. More,
+however, considered that it was written at least with Felsenburgh’s
+consent by one of that small body of intimates whom he had admitted to
+his society—that body which under him now conducted the affairs of West
+and East. From certain indications in the book it had been argued that
+its actual writer was a Westerner.</p>
+
+<p>The main body of the work dealt with his life, or rather with those two
+or three years known to the world, from his rapid rise in American
+politics and his mediation in the East down to the event of five months
+ago, when in swift succession he had been hailed Messiah in Damascus,
+had been formally adored in London, and finally elected by an
+extraordinary majority to the Tribuniciate of the two Americas.</p>
+
+<p>The Pope had read rapidly through these objective facts, for He knew
+them well enough already, and was now studying with close attention the
+summary of his character, or rather, as the author rather sententiously
+explained, the summary of his self-manifestation to the world. He read
+the description of his two main characteristics, his grasp upon words
+and facts; “words, the daughters of earth, were wedded in this man to
+facts, the sons of heaven, and Superman was their offspring.” His minor
+characteristics, too, were noticed, his appetite for literature, his
+astonishing memory, his linguistic powers. He possessed, it appeared,
+both the telescopic and the microscopic eye—he discerned world-wide
+tendencies and movements on the one hand; he had a passionate capacity
+for detail on the other. Various anecdotes illustrated these remarks,
+and a number of terse aphorisms of his were recorded. “No man forgives,”
+he said; “he only understands.” “It needs supreme faith to renounce a
+transcendent God.” “A man who believes in himself is almost capable of
+believing in his neighbour.” Here was a sentence that to the Pope’s mind
+was significant of that sublime egotism that is alone capable of
+confronting the Christian spirit: and again, “To forgive a wrong is to
+condone a crime,” and “The strong man is accessible to no one, but all
+are accessible to him.”</p>
+
+<p>There was a certain pompousness in this array of remarks, but it lay, as
+the Pope saw very well, not in the speaker but in the scribe. To him who
+had seen the speaker it was plain how they had been uttered—with no
+pontifical solemnity, but whirled out in a fiery stream of eloquence, or
+spoken with that strangely moving simplicity that had constituted his
+first assault on London. It was possible to hate Felsenburgh, and to
+fear him; but never to be amused at him.</p>
+
+<p>But plainly the supreme pleasure of the writer was to trace the analogy
+between his hero and nature. In both there was the same apparent
+contradictoriness—the combination of utter tenderness and utter
+ruthlessness. “The power that heals wounds also inflicts them: that
+clothes the dungheap with sweet growths and grasses, breaks, too, into
+fire and earthquake; that causes the partridge to die for her young,
+also makes the shrike with his living larder.” So, too, with
+Felsenburgh; He who had wept over the Fall of Rome, a month later had
+spoken of extermination as an instrument that even now might be
+judicially used in the service of humanity. Only it must be used with
+deliberation, not with passion.</p>
+
+<p>The utterance had aroused extraordinary interest, since it seemed so
+paradoxical from one who preached peace and toleration; and argument
+had broken out all over the world. But beyond enforcing the dispersal of
+the Irish Catholics, and the execution of a few individuals, so far that
+utterance had not been acted upon. Yet the world seemed as a whole to
+have accepted it, and even now to be waiting for its fulfilment.</p>
+
+<p>As the biographer pointed out, the world enclosed in physical nature
+should welcome one who followed its precepts, one who was indeed the
+first to introduce deliberately and confessedly into human affairs such
+laws as those of the Survival of the Fittest and the immorality of
+forgiveness. If there was mystery in the one, there was mystery in the
+other, and both must be accepted if man was to develop.</p>
+
+<p>And the secret of this, it seemed, lay in His personality. To see Him
+was to believe in Him, or rather to accept Him as inevitably true. “We
+do not explain nature or escape from it by sentimental regrets: the hare
+cries like a child, the wounded stag weeps great tears, the robin kills
+his parents; life exists only on condition of death; and these things
+happen however we may weave theories that explain nothing. Life must be
+accepted on those terms; we cannot be wrong if we follow nature; rather
+to accept them is to find peace—our great mother only reveals her
+secrets to those who take her as she is.” So, too, with Felsenburgh. “It
+is not for us to discriminate: His personality is of a kind that does
+not admit it. He is complete and sufficing for those who trust Him and
+are willing to suffer; an hostile and hateful enigma to those who are
+not. We must prepare ourselves for the logical outcome of this doctrine.
+Sentimentality must not be permitted to dominate reason.”</p>
+
+<p>Finally, then, the writer showed how to this Man belonged properly all
+those titles hitherto lavished upon imagined Supreme Beings. It was in
+preparation for Him that these types came into the realms of thought and
+influenced men’s lives.</p>
+
+<p>He was the <i>Creator</i>, for it was reserved for Him to bring into being
+the perfect life of union to which all the world had hitherto groaned in
+vain; it was in His own image and likeness that He had made man.</p>
+
+<p>Yet He was the <i>Redeemer</i> too, for that likeness had in one sense always
+underlain the tumult of mistake and conflict. He had brought man out of
+darkness and the shadow of death, guiding their feet into the way of
+peace. He was the <i>Saviour</i> for the same reason—the <i>Son of Man</i>, for
+He alone was perfectly human; He was the <i>Absolute</i>, for He was the
+content of Ideals; the <i>Eternal</i>, for He had lain always in nature’s
+potentiality and secured by His being the continuity of that order; the
+<i>Infinite</i>, for all finite things fell short of Him who was more than
+their sum.</p>
+
+<p>He was <i>Alpha</i>, then, and <i>Omega</i>, the beginning and the end, the first
+and the last. He was <i>Dominus et Deus noster</i> (as Domitian had been, the
+Pope reflected). He was as simple and as complex as life itself—simple
+in its essence, complex in its activities.</p>
+
+<p>And last of all, the supreme proof of His mission lay in the immortal
+nature of His message. There was no more to be added to what He had
+brought to light—for in Him all diverging lines at last found their
+origin and their end. As to whether or no He would prove to be
+personally immortal was an wholly irrelevant thought; it would be indeed
+fitting if through His means the vital principle should disclose its
+last secret; but no more than fitting. Already His spirit was in the
+world; the individual was no more separate from his fellows; death no
+more than a wrinkle that came and went across the inviolable sea. For
+man had learned at last that the race was all and self was nothing; the
+cell had discovered the unity of the body; even, the greatest thinkers
+declared, the consciousness of the individual had yielded the title of
+Personality to the corporate mass of man—and the restlessness of the
+unit had sunk into the peace of a common Humanity, for nothing but this
+could explain the cessation of party strife and national
+competition—and this, above all, had been the work of Felsenburgh.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Behold I am with you always</i>,” quoted the writer in a passionate
+peroration, “<i>even now in the consummation of the world; and, the
+Comforter is come unto you. I am the Door—the Way, the Truth and the
+Life—the Bread of Life and the Water of Life. My name is Wonderful, the
+Prince of Peace, the Father Everlasting. It is I who am the Desire of
+all nations, the fairest among the children of men—and of my Kingdom
+there shall be no end</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>The Pope laid down the book, and leaned back, closing his eyes.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>And as for Himself, what had He to say to all this? A Transcendent God
+Who hid Himself, a Divine Saviour Who delayed to come, a Comforter heard
+no longer in wind nor seen in fire!</p>
+
+<p>There, in the next room, was a little wooden altar, and above it an iron
+box, and within that box a silver cup, and within that cup—Something.
+Outside the house, a hundred yards away, lay the domes and plaster roofs
+of a little village called Nazareth; Carmel was on the right, a mile or
+two away, Thabor on the left, the plain of Esdraelon in front; and
+behind, Cana and Galilee, and the quiet lake, and Hermon. And far away
+to the south lay Jerusalem....</p>
+
+<p>It was to this tiny strip of holy land that the Pope had come—the land
+where a Faith had sprouted two thousand years ago, and where, unless God
+spoke in fire from heaven, it would presently be cut down as a cumberer
+of the ground. It was here on this material earth that One had walked
+Whom all men had thought to have been He Who would redeem Israel—in
+this village that He had fetched water and made boxes and chairs, on
+that long lake that His Feet had walked, on that high hill that He had
+flamed in glory, on that smooth, low mountain to the north that He had
+declared that the meek were blessed and should inherit the earth, that
+peacemakers were the children of God, that they who hungered and
+thirsted should be satisfied.</p>
+
+<p>And now it was come to this. Christianity had smouldered away from
+Europe like a sunset on darkening peaks; Eternal Rome was a heap of
+ruins; in East and West alike a man had been set upon the throne of God,
+had been acclaimed as divine. The world had leaped forward; social
+science was supreme; men had learned consistency; they had learned, too,
+the social lessons of Christianity apart from a Divine Teacher, or,
+rather, they said, in spite of Him. There were left, perhaps, three
+millions, perhaps five, at the utmost ten millions—it was impossible to
+know—throughout the entire inhabited globe who still worshipped Jesus
+Christ as God. And the Vicar of Christ sat in a whitewashed room in
+Nazareth, dressed as simply as His master, waiting for the end.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>He had done what He could. There had been a week five months ago when
+it had been doubtful whether anything at all could be done. There were
+left three Cardinals alive, Himself, Steinmann, and the Patriarch of
+Jerusalem; the rest lay mangled somewhere in the ruins of Rome. There
+was no precedent to follow; so the two Europeans had made their way out
+to the East, and to the one town in it where quiet still reigned. With
+the disappearance of Greek Christianity there had also vanished the last
+remnants of internecine war in Christendom; and by a kind of tacit
+consent of the world, Christians were allowed a moderate liberty in
+Palestine. Russia, which now held the country as a dependency, had
+sufficient sentiment left to leave it alone; it was true that the holy
+places had been desecrated, and remained now only as spots of
+antiquarian interest; the altars were gone but the sites were yet
+marked, and, although mass could no longer be said there, it was
+understood that private oratories were not forbidden.</p>
+
+<p>It was in this state that the two European Cardinals had found the Holy
+City; it was not thought wise to wear insignia of any description in
+public; and it was practically certain even now that the civilised world
+was unaware of their existence; for within three days of their arrival
+the old Patriarch had died, yet not before Percy Franklin, surely under
+the strangest circumstances since those of the first century, had been
+elected to the Supreme Pontificate. It had all been done in a few
+minutes by the dying man’s bedside. The two old men had insisted. The
+German had even recurred once more to the strange resemblance between
+Percy and Julian Felsenburgh, and had murmured his old half-heard
+remarks about the antithesis, and the Finger of God; and Percy,
+marvelling at his superstition, had accepted, and the election was
+recorded. He had taken the name of Silvester, the last saint in the
+year, and was the third of that title. He had then retired to Nazareth
+with his chaplain; Steinmann had gone back to Germany, and been hanged
+in a riot within a fortnight of his arrival.</p>
+
+<p>The next matter was the creation of new cardinals, and to twenty
+persons, with infinite precautions, briefs had been conveyed. Of these,
+nine had declined; three more had been approached, of whom only one had
+accepted. There were therefore at this moment twelve persons in the
+world who constituted the Sacred College—two Englishmen, of whom
+Corkran was one; two Americans, a Frenchman, a German, an Italian, a
+Spaniard, a Pole, a Chinaman, a Greek, and a Russian. To these were
+entrusted vast districts over which their control was supreme, subject
+only to the Holy Father Himself.</p>
+
+<p>As regarded the Pope’s own life very little need be said. It resembled,
+He thought, in its outward circumstances that of such a man as Leo the
+Great, without His worldly importance or pomp. Theoretically, the
+Christian world was under His dominion; practically, Christian affairs
+were administered by local authorities. It was impossible for a hundred
+reasons for Him to do what He wished with regard to the exchange of
+communications. An elaborate cypher had been designed, and a private
+telegraphic station organised on His roof communicating with another in
+Damascus where Cardinal Corkran had fixed his residence; and from that
+centre messages occasionally were despatched to ecclesiastical
+authorities elsewhere; but, for the most part, there was little to be
+done. The Pope, however, had the satisfaction of knowing that, with
+incredible difficulty, a little progress had been made towards the
+reorganisation of the hierarchy in all countries. Bishops were being
+consecrated freely; there were not less than two thousand of them all
+told, and of priests an unknown number. The Order of Christ Crucified
+was doing excellent work, and the tales of not less than four hundred
+martyrdoms had reached Nazareth during the last two months, accomplished
+mostly at the hands of the mobs.</p>
+
+<p>In other respects, also, as well as in the primary object of the Order’s
+existence (namely, the affording of an opportunity to all who loved God
+to dedicate themselves to Him more perfectly), the new Religious were
+doing good work. The more perilous tasks—the work of communication
+between prelates, missions to persons of suspected integrity—all the
+business, in fact, which was carried on now at the vital risk of the
+agent were entrusted solely to members of the Order. Stringent
+instructions had been issued from Nazareth that no bishop was to expose
+himself unnecessarily; each was to regard himself as the heart of his
+diocese to be protected at all costs save that of Christian honour, and
+in consequence each had surrounded himself with a group of the new
+Religious—men and women—who with extraordinary and generous obedience
+undertook such dangerous tasks as they were capable of performing. It
+was plain enough by now that had it not been for the Order, the Church
+would have been little better than paralysed under these new conditions.</p>
+
+<p>Extraordinary facilities were being issued in all directions. Every
+priest who belonged to the Order received universal jurisdiction subject
+to the bishop, if any, of the diocese in which he might be; mass might
+be said on any day of the year of the Five Wounds, or the Resurrection,
+or Our Lady; and all had the privilege of the portable altar, now
+permitted to be wood. Further ritual requirements were relaxed; mass
+might be said with any decent vessels of any material capable of
+destruction, such as glass or china; bread of any description might be
+used; and no vestments were obligatory except the thin thread that now
+represented the stole; lights were non-essential; none need wear the
+clerical habit; and rosary, even without beads, was always permissible
+instead of the Office.</p>
+
+<p>In this manner priests were rendered capable of giving the sacraments
+and offering the holy sacrifice at the least possible risk to
+themselves; and these relaxations had already proved of enormous benefit
+in the European prisons, where by this time many thousands of Catholics
+were undergoing the penalty of refusing public worship.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The Pope’s private life was as simple as His room. He had one Syrian
+priest for His chaplain, and two Syrian servants. He said His mass each
+morning, Himself wearing vestments and His white habit beneath, and
+heard a mass after. He then took His coffee, after changing into the
+tunic and burnous of the country, and spent the morning over business.
+He dined at noon, slept, and rode out, for the country by reason of its
+indeterminate position was still in the simplicity of a hundred years
+ago. He returned at dusk, supped, and worked again till late into the
+night.</p>
+
+<p>That was all. His chaplain sent what messages were necessary to
+Damascus; His servants, themselves ignorant of His dignity, dealt with
+the secular world so far as was required, and the utmost that seemed to
+be known to His few neighbours was that there lived in the late Sheikh’s
+little house on the hill an eccentric European with a telegraph office.
+His servants, themselves devout Catholics, knew Him for a bishop, but no
+more than that. They were told only that there was yet a Pope alive, and
+with that and the sacraments were content.</p>
+
+<p>To sum up, therefore—the Catholic world knew that their Pope lived
+under the name of Silvester; and thirteen persons of the entire human
+race knew that Franklin had been His name, and that the throne of Peter
+rested for the time in Nazareth.</p>
+
+<p>It was, as a Frenchman had said, just a hundred years ago. Catholicism
+survived; but no more.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>And as for His inner life, what can be said of that? He lay now back in
+his wooden chair, thinking with closed eyes.</p>
+
+<p>He could not have described it consistently even to Himself, for indeed
+He scarcely knew it: He acted rather than indulged in reflex thought.
+But the centre of His position was simple faith. The Catholic Religion,
+He knew well enough, gave the only adequate explanation of the universe;
+it did not unlock all mysteries, but it unlocked more than any other key
+known to man; He knew, too, perfectly well, that it was the only system
+of thought that satisfied man as a whole, and accounted for him in his
+essential nature. Further, He saw well enough that the failure of
+Christianity to unite all men one to another rested not upon its
+feebleness but its strength; its lines met in eternity, not in time.
+Besides, He happened to believe it.</p>
+
+<p>But to this foreground there were other moods whose shifting was out of
+his control. In his <i>exalt</i> moods, which came upon Him like a breeze
+from Paradise, the background was bright with hope and drama—He saw
+Himself and His companions as Peter and the Apostles must have regarded
+themselves, as they proclaimed through the world, in temples, slums,
+market-places and private houses, the faith that was to shake and
+transform the world. They had handled the Lord of Life, seen the empty
+sepulchre, grasped the pierced hands of Him Who was their brother and
+their God. It was radiantly true, though not a man believed it; the huge
+superincumbent weight of incredulity could not disturb a fact that was
+as the sun in heaven. Moreover, the very desperateness of the cause was
+their inspiration. There was no temptation to lean upon the arm of
+flesh, for there was none that fought for them but God. Their nakedness
+was their armour, their slow tongues their persuasiveness, their
+weakness demanded God’s strength, and found it. Yet there was this
+difference, and it was a significant one. For Peter the spiritual world
+had an interpretation and a guarantee in the outward events he had
+witnessed. He had handled the Risen Christ, the external corroborated
+the internal. But for Silvester it was not so. For Him it was necessary
+so to grasp spiritual truths in the supernatural sphere that the
+external events of the Incarnation were proved by rather than proved the
+certitude of His spiritual apprehension. Certainly, historically
+speaking, Christianity was true—proved by its records—yet to see that
+needed illumination. He apprehended the power of the Resurrection,
+therefore Christ was risen.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore in heavier moods it was different with him. There were
+periods, lasting sometimes for days together, clouding Him when He
+awoke, stifling Him as He tried to sleep, dulling the very savour of the
+Sacrament and the thrill of the Precious Blood; times in which the
+darkness was so intolerable that even the solid objects of faith
+attenuated themselves to shadow, when half His nature was blind not only
+to Christ, but to God Himself, and the reality of His own
+existence—when His own awful dignity seemed as the insignia of a fool.
+And was it conceivable, His earthly mind demanded, that He and His
+college of twelve and His few thousands should be right, and the entire
+consensus of the civilised world wrong? It was not that the world had
+not heard the message of the Gospel; it had heard little else for two
+thousand years, and now pronounced it false—false in its external
+credentials, and false therefore in its spiritual claims. It was a lost
+cause for which He suffered; He was not the last of an august line, He
+was the smoking wick of a candle of folly; He was the <i>reductio ad
+absurdam</i> of a ludicrous syllogism based on impossible premises. He was
+not worth killing, He and His company of the insane—they were no more
+than the crowned dunces of the world’s school. Sanity sat on the solid
+benches of materialism. And this heaviness waxed so dark sometimes that
+He almost persuaded Himself that His faith was gone; the clamours of
+mind so loud that the whisper of the heart was unheard, the desires for
+earthly peace so fierce that supernatural ambitions were silenced—so
+dense was the gloom, that, hoping against hope, believing against
+knowledge, and loving against truth, He cried as One other had cried on
+another day like this—<i>Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!</i> ... But that, at
+least, He never failed to cry.</p>
+
+<p>One thing alone gave Him power to go on, so far at least as His
+consciousness was concerned, and that was His meditation. He had
+travelled far in the mystical life since His agonies of effort. Now He
+used no deliberate descents into the spiritual world: He threw, as it
+were, His hands over His head, and dropped into spacelessness.
+Consciousness would draw Him up, as a cork, to the surface, but He would
+do no more than repeat His action, until by that cessation of activity,
+which is the supreme energy, He floated in the twilight realm of
+transcendence; and there God would deal with Him—now by an articulate
+sentence, now by a sword of pain, now by an air like the vivifying
+breath of the sea. Sometimes after Communion He would treat Him so,
+sometimes as He fell asleep, sometimes in the whirl of work. Yet His
+consciousness did not seem to retain for long such experiences; five
+minutes later, it might be, He would be wrestling once more with the all
+but sensible phantoms of the mind and the heart.</p>
+
+<p>There He lay, then, in the chair, revolving the intolerable blasphemies
+that He had read. His white hair was thin upon His browned temples, His
+hands were as the hands of a spirit, and His young face lined and
+patched with sorrow. His bare feet protruded from beneath His stained
+tunic, and His old brown burnous lay on the floor beside Him....</p>
+
+<p>It was an hour before He moved, and the sun had already lost half its
+fierceness, when the steps of the horses sounded in the paved court
+outside. Then He sat up, slipped His feet into their shoes, and lifted
+the burnous from the floor, as the door opened and the lean sun-burned
+priest came through.</p>
+
+<p>“The horses, Holiness,” said the man.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The Pope spoke not one word that afternoon, until the two came towards
+sunset up the bridle-path that leads between Thabor and Nazareth. They
+had taken their usual round through Cana, mounting a hillock from which
+the long mirror of Gennesareth could be seen, and passing on, always
+bearing to the right, under the shadow of Thabor until once more
+Esdraelon spread itself beneath like a grey-green carpet, a vast circle,
+twenty miles across, sprinkled sparsely with groups of huts, white walls
+and roofs, with Nain visible on the other side, Carmel heaving its long
+form far off on the right, and Nazareth nestling a mile or two away on
+the plateau on which they had halted.</p>
+
+<p>It was a sight of extraordinary peace, and seemed an extract from some
+old picture-book designed centuries ago. Here was no crowd of roofs, no
+pressure of hot humanity, no terrible evidences of civilisation and
+manufactory and strenuous, fruitless effort. A few tired Jews had come
+back to this quiet little land, as old people may return to their native
+place, with no hope of renewing their youth, or refinding their ideals,
+but with a kind of sentimentality that prevails so often over more
+logical motives, and a few more barrack-like houses had been added here
+and there to the obscure villages in sight. But it was very much as it
+had been a hundred years ago.</p>
+
+<p>The plain was half shadowed by Carmel, and half in dusty golden light.
+Overhead the clear Eastern sky was flushed with rose, as it had flushed
+for Abraham, Jacob, and the Son of David. There was no little cloud
+here, as a man’s hand, over the sea, charged with both promise and
+terror; no sound of chariot-wheels from earth or heaven, no vision of
+heavenly horses such as a young man had seen thirty centuries ago in
+this very sky. Here was the old earth and the old heaven, unchanged and
+unchangeable; the patient, returning spring had starred the thin soil
+with flowers of Bethlehem, and those glorious lilies to which Solomon’s
+scarlet garments might not be compared. There was no whisper from the
+Throne as when Gabriel had once stooped through this very air to hail
+Her who was blessed among women, no breath of promise or hope beyond
+that which God sends through every movement of His created robe of life.</p>
+
+<p>As the two halted, and the horses looked out with steady, inquisitive
+eyes at the immensity of light and air beneath them, a soft hooting cry
+broke out, and a shepherd passed below along the hillside a hundred
+yards away, trailing his long shadow behind him, and to the mellow
+tinkle of bells his flock came after, a troop of obedient sheep and
+wilful goats, cropping and following and cropping again as they went on
+to the fold, called by name in that sad minor voice of him who knew
+each, and led instead of driving. The soft clanking grew fainter, the
+shadow of the shepherd shot once to their very feet, as he topped the
+rise, and vanished again as he stepped down once more; and the call grew
+fainter yet, and ceased.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The Pope lifted His hand to His eyes for an instant, then smoothed it
+down His face.</p>
+
+<p>He nodded across to a dim patch of white walls glimmering through the
+violet haze of the falling twilight.</p>
+
+<p>“That place, father,” He said, “what is its name?”</p>
+
+<p>The Syrian priest looked across, back once more at the Pope, and across
+again.</p>
+
+<p>“That among the palms, Holiness?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes.”</p>
+
+<p>“That is Megiddo,” he said. “Some call it Armageddon.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="3CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>At twenty-three o’clock that night the Syrian priest went out to watch
+for the coming of the messenger from Tiberias. Nearly two hours
+previously he had heard the cry of the Russian volor that plied from
+Damascus to Tiberias, and Tiberias to Jerusalem, and even as it was the
+messenger was a little late.</p>
+
+<p>These were very primitive arrangements, but Palestine was out of the
+world—a slip of useless country—and it was necessary for a man to ride
+from Tiberias to Nazareth each night with papers from Cardinal Corkran
+to the Pope, and to return with correspondence. It was a dangerous task,
+and the members of the New Order who surrounded the Cardinal undertook
+it by turns. In this manner all matters for which the Pope’s personal
+attention was required, and which were too long and not too urgent,
+could be dealt with at leisure by him, and an answer returned within the
+twenty-four hours.</p>
+
+<p>It was a brilliant moonlit night. The great golden shield was riding
+high above Thabor, shedding its strange metallic light down the long
+slopes and over the moor-like country that rose up from before the
+house-door—casting too heavy black shadows that seemed far more
+concrete and solid than the brilliant pale surfaces of the rock slabs or
+even than the diamond flashes from the quartz and crystal that here and
+there sparkled up the stony pathway. Compared with this clear splendour,
+the yellow light from the shuttered house seemed a hot and tawdry thing;
+and the priest, leaning against the door-post, his eyes alone alight in
+his dark face, sank down at last with a kind of Eastern sensuousness to
+bathe himself in the glory, and to spread his lean, brown hands out to
+it.</p>
+
+<p>This was a very simple man, in faith as well as in life. For him there
+were neither the ecstasies nor the desolations of his master. It was an
+immense and solemn joy to him to live here at the spot of God’s
+Incarnation and in attendance upon His Vicar. As regarded the movements
+of the world, he observed them as a man in a ship watches the heaving of
+the waves far beneath. Of course the world was restless, he half
+perceived, for, as the Latin Doctor had said, all hearts were restless
+until they found their rest in God. <i>Quare fremuerunt gentes?...
+Adversus Dominum, et adversus Christum ejus!</i> As to the end—he was not
+greatly concerned. It might well be that the ship would be overwhelmed,
+but the moment of the catastrophe would be the end of all things
+earthly. The gates of hell shall not prevail: when Rome falls, the world
+falls; and when the world falls, Christ is manifest in power. For
+himself, he imagined that the end was not far away. When he had named
+Megiddo this afternoon it had been in his mind; to him it seemed natural
+that at the consummation of all things Christ’s Vicar should dwell at
+Nazareth where His King had come on earth—and that the Armageddon of
+the Divine John should be within sight of the scene where Christ had
+first taken His earthly sceptre and should take it again. After all, it
+would not be the first battle that Megiddo had seen. Israel and Amalek
+had met here; Israel and Assyria; Sesostris had ridden here and
+Sennacherib. Christian and Turk had contended here, like Michael and
+Satan, over the place where God’s Body had lain. As to the exact method
+of that end, he had no clear views; it would be a battle of some kind,
+and what field could be found more evidently designed for that than this
+huge flat circular plain of Esdraelon, twenty miles across, sufficient
+to hold all the armies of the earth in its embrace? To his view once
+more, ignorant as he was of present statistics, the world was divided
+into two large sections, Christians and heathens, and he supposed them
+very much of a size. Something would happen, troops would land at
+Khaifa, they would stream southwards from Tiberias, Damascus and remote
+Asia, northwards from Jerusalem, Egypt and Africa; eastwards from
+Europe; westwards from Asia again and the far-off Americas. And, surely,
+the time could not be far away, for here was Christ’s Vicar; and, as He
+Himself had said in His gospel of the Advent, <i>Ubicumque fuerit corpus,
+illie congregabuntur et aquilae.</i> Of more subtle interpretations of
+prophecy he had no knowledge. For him words were things, not merely
+labels upon ideas. What Christ and St. Paul and St. John had said—these
+things were so. He had escaped, owing chiefly to his isolation from the
+world, that vast expansion of Ritschlian ideas that during the last
+century had been responsible for the desertion by so many of any
+intelligible creed. For others this had been the supreme struggle—the
+difficulty of decision between the facts that words were not things, and
+yet that the things they represented were in themselves objective. But
+to this man, sitting now in the moonlight, listening to the far-off tap
+of hoofs over the hill as the messenger came up from Cana, faith was as
+simple as an exact science. Here Gabriel had descended on wide feathered
+wings from the Throne of God set beyond the stars, the Holy Ghost had
+breathed in a beam of ineffable light, the Word had become Flesh as Mary
+folded her arms and bowed her head to the decree of the Eternal. And
+here once more, he thought, though it was no more than a guess—yet he
+thought that already the running of chariot-wheels was audible—the
+tumult of the hosts of God gathering about the camp of the saints—he
+thought that already beyond the bars of the dark Gabriel set to his lips
+the trumpet of doom and heaven was astir. He might be wrong at this
+time, as others had been wrong at other times, but neither he nor they
+could be wrong for ever; there must some day be an end to the patience
+of God, even though that patience sprang from the eternity of His
+nature. He stood up, as down the pale moonlit path a hundred yards away
+came a pale figure of one who rode, with a leather bag strapped to his
+girdle.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>It would be about three o’clock in the morning that the priest awoke in
+his little mud-walled room next to that of the Holy Father’s, and heard
+a footstep coming up the stairs. Last evening he had left his master as
+usual beginning to open the pile of letters arrived from Cardinal
+Corkran, and himself had gone straight to his bed and slept. He lay now
+a moment or two, still drowsy, listening to the pad of feet, and an
+instant later sat up abruptly, for a deliberate tap had sounded on the
+door. Again it came; he sprang out of bed in his long night-tunic, drew
+it up hastily in his girdle, went to the door and opened it.</p>
+
+<p>The Pope was standing there, with a little lamp in one hand, for the
+dawn had scarcely yet begun, and a paper in the other.</p>
+
+<p>“I beg your pardon, Father; but there is a message I must have sent at
+once to his Eminence.”</p>
+
+<p>Together they went out through the Pope’s room, the priest, still
+half-blind with sleep, passed up the stairs, and emerged into the clear
+cold air of the upper roof. The Pope blew out His lamp, and set it on
+the parapet.</p>
+
+<p>“You will be cold, Father; fetch your cloak.”</p>
+
+<p>“And you, Holiness?”</p>
+
+<p>The other made a little gesture of denial, and went across to the tiny
+temporary shed where the wireless telegraphic instrument stood.</p>
+
+<p>“Fetch your cloak, Father,” He said again over His shoulder. “I will
+ring up meanwhile.”</p>
+
+<p>When the priest came back three minutes later, in his slippers and
+cloak, carrying another cloak also for his master, the Pope was still
+seated at the table. He did not even move His head as the other came up,
+but once more pressed on the lever that, communicating with the
+twelve-foot pole that rose through the pent-house overhead, shot out the
+quivering energy through the eighty miles of glimmering air that lay
+between Nazareth and Damascus.</p>
+
+<p>This simple priest had scarcely even by now become accustomed to this
+extraordinary device invented a century ago and perfected through all
+those years to this precise exactness—that device by which with the
+help of a stick, a bundle of wires, and a box of wheels, something, at
+last established to be at the root of all matter, if not at the very
+root of physical life, spoke across the spaces of the world to a tiny
+receiver tuned by a hair’s breadth to the vibration with which it was
+set in relations.</p>
+
+<p>The air was surprisingly cold, considering the heat that had preceded
+and would follow it, and the priest shivered a little as he stood clear
+of the roof, and stared, now at the motionless figure in the chair
+before him, now at the vast vault of the sky passing, even as he looked,
+from a cold colourless luminosity to a tender tint of yellow, as far
+away beyond Thabor and Moab the dawn began to deepen. From the village
+half-a-mile away arose the crowing of a cock, thin and brazen as a
+trumpet; a dog barked once and was silent again; and then, on a sudden,
+a single stroke upon a bell hung in the roof recalled him in an instant,
+and told him that his work was to begin.</p>
+
+<p>The Pope pressed the lever again at the sound, twice, and then, after a
+pause, once more—waited a moment for an answer, and then when it came,
+rose and signed to the priest to take his place.</p>
+
+<p>The Syrian sat down, handing the extra cloak to his master, and waited
+until the other had settled Himself in a chair set in such a position at
+the side of the table that the face of each was visible to the other.
+Then he waited, with his brown fingers poised above the row of keys,
+looking at the other’s face as He arranged himself to speak. That face,
+he thought, looking out from the hood, seemed paler than ever in this
+cold light of dawn; the black arched eyebrows accentuated this, and even
+the steady lips, preparing to speak, seemed white and bloodless. He had
+His paper in His hand, and His eyes were fixed upon this.</p>
+
+<p>“Make sure it is the Cardinal,” he said abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>The priest tapped off an enquiry, and, with moving lips, raid off the
+printed message, as like magic it precipitated itself on to the tall
+white sheet of paper that faced him.</p>
+
+<p>“It is his Eminence, Holiness,” he said softly. “He is alone at the
+instrument.”</p>
+
+<p>“Very well. Now then; begin.”</p>
+
+<p>“We have received your Eminence’s letter, and have noted the news.... It
+should have been forwarded by telegraphy—why was that not done?”</p>
+
+<p>The voice paused, and the priest who had snapped off the message, more
+quickly than a man could write it, read aloud the answer.</p>
+
+<p>“‘I did not understand that it was urgent. I thought it was but one
+more assault. I had intended to communicate more so soon as I heard
+more.”’</p>
+
+<p>“Of course it was urgent,” came the voice again in the deliberate
+intonation that was used between these two in the case of messages for
+transmission. “Remember that all news of this kind is always urgent.”</p>
+
+<p>“‘I will remember,’ read the priest. ‘I regret my mistake.’”</p>
+
+<p>“You tell us,” went on the Pope, His eyes still downcast on the paper,
+“that this measure is decided upon; you name only three authorities.
+Give me, now, all the authorities you have, if you have more.”</p>
+
+<p>There was a moment’s pause. Then the priest began to read off the names.</p>
+
+<p>“Besides the three Cardinals whose names I sent, the Archbishops of
+Thibet, Cairo, Calcutta and Sydney have all asked if the news was true,
+and for directions if it is true; besides others whose names I can
+communicate if I may leave the table for a moment.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Do so,” said the Pope.</p>
+
+<p>Again there was a pause. Then once more the names began.</p>
+
+<p>“‘The Bishops of Bukarest, the Marquesas Islands and Newfoundland. The
+Franciscans in Japan, the Crutched Friars in Morocco, the Archbishops of
+Manitoba and Portland, and the Cardinal-Archbisbop of Pekin. I have
+despatched two members of Christ Crucified to England.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Tell us when the news first arrived, and how.”</p>
+
+<p>“‘I was called up to the instrument yesterday evening at about twenty
+o’clock. The Archbishop of Sydney was asking, through our station at
+Bombay, whether the news was true. I replied I had heard nothing of it.
+Within ten minutes four more inquiries had come to the same effect; and
+three minutes later Cardinal Ruspoli sent the positive news from Turin.
+This was accompanied by a similar message from Father Petrovski in
+Moscow. Then—- ’”</p>
+
+<p>“Stop. Why did not Cardinal Dolgorovski communicate it?”</p>
+
+<p>“‘He did communicate it three hours later.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Why not at once?”</p>
+
+<p>“‘His Eminence had not heard it.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Find out at what hour the news reached Moscow—not now, but within the
+day.”</p>
+
+<p>“‘I will.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Go on, then.”</p>
+
+<p>“‘Cardinal Malpas communicated it within five minutes of Cardinal
+Ruspoli, and the rest of the inquiries arrived before midnight. China
+reported it at twenty-three.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Then when do you suppose the news was made public?”</p>
+
+<p>“‘It was decided first at the secret London conference, yesterday, at
+about sixteen o’clock by our time. The Plenipotentiaries appear to have
+signed it at that hour. After that it was communicated to the world. It
+was published here half an hour past midnight.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Then Felsenburgh was in London?”</p>
+
+<p>“‘I am not yet sure. Cardinal Malpas tells me that Felsenburgh gave his
+provisional consent on the previous day.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Very good. That is all you know, then?”</p>
+
+<p>“‘I was called up an hour ago by Cardinal Ruspoli again. He tells me
+that he fears a riot in Florence; it will be the first of many
+revolutions, he says.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Does he ask for anything?”</p>
+
+<p>“‘Only for directions.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Tell him that we send him the Apostolic Benediction, and will forward
+directions within the course of two hours. Select twelve members of the
+Order for immediate service.”</p>
+
+<p>“‘I will.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Communicate that message also, as soon as we have finished, to all the
+Sacred College, and bid them communicate it with all discretion to all
+metropolitans and bishops, that priests and people may know that We bear
+them in our heart.”</p>
+
+<p>“‘I will, Holiness.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Tell them, finally, that We had foreseen this long ago; that We commend
+them to the Eternal Father without Whose Providence no sparrow falls to
+the ground. Bid them be quiet and confident; to do nothing, save confess
+their faith when they are questioned. All other directions shall be
+issued to their pastors immediately!”</p>
+
+<p>“‘I will, Holiness.’”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>There was again a pause.</p>
+
+<p>The Pope had been speaking with the utmost tranquillity as one in a
+dream. His eyes were downcast upon the paper, His whole body as
+motionless as an image. Yet to the priest who listened, despatching the
+Latin messages, and reading aloud the replies, it seemed, although so
+little intelligible news had reached him, as if something very strange
+and great was impending. There was the sense of a peculiar strain in the
+air, and although he drew no deductions from the fact that apparently
+the whole Catholic world was in frantic communication with Damascus, yet
+he remembered his meditations of the evening before as he had waited for
+the messenger. It seemed as if the powers of this world were
+contemplating one more step—with its nature he was not greatly
+concerned.</p>
+
+<p>The Pope spoke again in His natural voice.</p>
+
+<p>“Father,” he said, “what I am about to say now is as if I told it in
+confession. You understand?—Very well. Now begin.”</p>
+
+<p>Then again the intonation began.</p>
+
+<p>“Eminence. We shall say mass of the Holy Ghost in one hour from now. At
+the end of that time, you will cause that all the Sacred College shall
+be in touch with yourself, and waiting for our commands. This new
+decision is unlike any that have preceded it. Surely you understand
+that now. Two or three plans are in our mind, yet We are not sure yet
+which it is that our Lord intends. After mass We shall communicate to
+you that which He shall show Us to be according to His Will. We beg of
+you to say mass also, immediately, for Our intention. Whatever must be
+done must be done quickly. The matter of Cardinal Dolgorovski you may
+leave until later. But we wish to hear the result of your inquiries,
+especially in London, before mid-day. <i>Benedicat te Omnipotens Deus,
+Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus.</i>”</p>
+
+<p>“‘Amen!’” murmured the priest, reading it from the sheet.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>The little chapel in the house below was scarcely more dignified than
+the other rooms. Of ornaments, except those absolutely essential to
+liturgy and devotion, there were none. In the plaster of the walls were
+indented in slight relief the fourteen stations of the Cross; a small
+stone image of the Mother of God stood in a corner, with an iron-work
+candlestick before it, and on the solid uncarved stone altar, raised on
+a stone step, stood six more iron candlesticks and an iron crucifix. A
+tabernacle, also of iron, shrouded by linen curtains, stood beneath the
+cross; a small stone slab projecting from the wall served as a credence.
+There was but one window, and this looked into the court, so that the
+eyes of strangers might not penetrate.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed to the Syrian priest as he went about his business—laying out
+the vestments in the little sacristy that opened out at one side of the
+altar, preparing the cruets and stripping the covering from the
+altar-cloth—that even that slight work was wearying. There seemed a
+certain oppression in the air. As to how far that was the result of his
+broken rest he did not know, but he feared that it was one more of those
+scirocco days that threatened. That yellowish tinge of dawn had not
+passed with the sun-rising; even now, as he went noiselessly on his bare
+feet between the predella and the <i>prie-dieu</i> where the silent white
+figure was still motionless, he caught now and again, above the roof
+across the tiny court, a glimpse of that faint sand-tinged sky that was
+the promise of beat and heaviness.</p>
+
+<p>He finished at last, lighted the candles, genuflected, and stood with
+bowed head waiting for the Holy Father to rise from His knees. A
+servant’s footstep sounded in the court, coming across to hear mass, and
+simultaneously the Pope rose and went towards the sacristy, where the
+red vestments of God who came by fire were laid ready for the Sacrifice.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Silvester’s bearing at mass was singularly unostentatious. He moved as
+swiftly as any young priest, His voice was quite even and quite low, and
+his pace neither rapid nor pompous. According to tradition, He occupied
+half-an-hour <i>ab amictu ad amictum</i>; and even in the tiny empty chapel
+He observed to keep His eyes always downcast. And yet this Syrian never
+served His mass without a thrill of something resembling fear; it was
+not only his knowledge of the awful dignity of this simple celebrant;
+but, although he could not have expressed it so, there was an aroma of
+an emotion about the vestmented figure that affected him almost
+physically—an entire absence of self-consciousness, and in its place
+the consciousness of some other Presence, a perfection of manner even in
+the smallest details that could only arise from absolute recollection.
+Even in Rome in the old days it had been one of the sights of Rome to
+see Father Franklin say mass; seminary students on the eve of ordination
+were sent to that sight to learn the perfect manner and method.</p>
+
+<p>To-day all was as usual, but at the Communion the priest looked up
+suddenly at the moment when the Host had been consumed, with a half
+impression that either a sound or a gesture had invited it; and, as he
+looked, his heart began to beat thick and convulsive at the base of his
+throat. Yet to the outward eyes there was nothing unusual. The figure
+stood there with bowed head, the chin resting on the tips of the long
+fingers, the body absolutely upright, and standing with that curious
+light poise as if no weight rested upon the feet. But to the inner sense
+something was apparent the Syrian could not in the least formulate it to
+himself; but afterwards he reflected that he had stared expecting some
+visible or audible manifestation to take place. It was an impression
+that might be described under the terms of either light or sound; at any
+instant that delicate vivid force, that to the eyes of the soul burned
+beneath the red chasuble and the white alb, might have suddenly welled
+outwards under the appearance of a gush of radiant light rendering
+luminous not only the clear brown flesh seen beneath the white hair, but
+the very texture of the coarse, dead, stained stuffs that swathed the
+rest of the body. Or it might have shown itself in the strain of a long
+chord on strings or wind, as if the mystical union of the dedicated soul
+with the ineffable Godhead and Humanity of Jesus Christ generated such a
+sound as ceaselessly flows out with the river of life from beneath the
+Throne of the Lamb. Or yet once more it might have declared itself under
+the guise of a perfume—the very essence of distilled sweetness—such a
+scent as that which, streaming out through the gross tabernacle of a
+saint’s body, is to those who observe it as the breath of heavenly
+roses....</p>
+
+<p>The moments passed in that hush of purity and peace; sounds came and
+went outside, the rattle of a cart far away, the sawing of the first
+cicada in the coarse grass twenty yards away beyond the wall; some one
+behind the priest was breathing short and thick as under the pressure of
+an intolerable emotion, and yet the figure stood there still, without a
+movement or sway to break the carved motionlessness of the alb-folds or
+the perfect poise of the white-shod feet. When He moved at last to
+uncover the Precious Blood, to lay His hands on the altar and adore, it
+was as if a statue had stirred into life; to the server it was very
+nearly as a shock.</p>
+
+<p>Again, when the chalice was empty, that first impression reasserted
+itself; the human and the external died in the embrace of the Divine and
+Invisible, and once more silence lived and glowed.... And again as the
+spiritual energy sank back again into its origin, Silvester stretched
+out the chalice.</p>
+
+<p>With knees that shook and eyes wide in expectation, the priest rose,
+adored, and went to the credence.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It was customary after the Pope’s mass that the priest himself should
+offer the Sacrifice in his presence, but to-day so soon as the vestments
+had been laid one by one on the rough chest, Silvester turned to the
+priest.</p>
+
+<p>“Presently,” he said softly. “Go up, father, at once to the roof, and
+tell the Cardinal to be ready. I shall come in five minutes.”</p>
+
+<p>It was surely a scirocco-day, thought the priest, as he came up on to
+the flat roof. Overhead, instead of the clear blue proper to that hour
+of the morning, lay a pale yellow sky darkening even to brown at the
+horizon. Thabor, before him, hung distant and sombre seen through the
+impalpable atmosphere of sand, and across the plain, as he glanced
+behind him, beyond the white streak of Nain nothing was visible except
+the pale outline of the tops of the hills against the sky. Even at this
+morning hour, too, the air was hot and breathless, broken only by the
+slow-stifling lift of the south-western breeze that, blowing across
+countless miles of sand beyond far-away Egypt, gathered up the heat of
+the huge waterless continent and was pouring it, with scarcely a streak
+of sea to soften its malignity, on this poor strip of land. Carmel, too,
+as he turned again, was swathed about its base with mist, half dry and
+half damp, and above showed its long bull-head running out defiantly
+against the western sky. The very table as he touched it was dry and hot
+to the hand, by mid-day the steel would be intolerable.</p>
+
+<p>He pressed the lever, and waited; pressed it again, and waited again.
+There came the answering ring, and he tapped across the eighty miles of
+air that his Eminence’s presence was required at once. A minute or two
+passed, and then, after another rap of the bell, a line flicked out on
+the new white sheet.</p>
+
+<p>“‘I am here. Is it his Holiness?’”</p>
+
+<p>He felt a hand upon his shoulder, and turned to see Silvester, hooded
+and in white, behind his chair.</p>
+
+<p>“Tell him yes. Ask him if there is further news.”</p>
+
+<p>The Pope went to the chair once more and sat down, and a minute later
+the priest, with growing excitement, read out the answer.</p>
+
+<p>“‘Inquiries are pouring in. Many expect your Holiness to issue a
+challenge. My secretaries have been occupied since four o’clock. The
+anxiety is indescribable. Some are denying that they have a Pope.
+Something must be done at once.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Is that all?” asked the Pope.</p>
+
+<p>Again the priest read out the answer. “‘Yes and no. The news is true. It
+will be inforced immediately. Unless a step is taken immediately there
+will be widespread and final apostasy.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Very good,” murmured the Pope, in his official voice. “Now listen
+carefully, Eminence.” He was silent for a moment, his fingers joined
+beneath his chin as just now at mass. Then he spoke.</p>
+
+<p>“We are about to place ourselves unreservedly in the hands of God. Human
+prudence must no longer restrain us. We command you then, using all
+discretion that is possible, to communicate these wishes of ours to the
+following persons under the strictest secrecy, and to no others
+whatsoever. And for this service you are to employ messengers, taken
+from the Order of Christ Crucified, two for each message, which is not
+to be committed to writing in any form. The members of the Sacred
+College, numbering twelve; the metropolitans and Patriarchs through the
+entire world, numbering twenty-two; the Generals of the Religious
+Orders: the Society of Jesus, the Friars, the Monks Ordinary, and the
+Monks Contemplative four. These persons, thirty-eight in number, with
+the chaplain of your Eminence, who shall act as notary, and my own who
+shall assist him, and Ourself—forty-one all told—these persons are to
+present themselves here at our palace of Nazareth not later than the Eve
+of Pentecost. We feel Ourselves unwilling to decide the steps necessary
+to be taken with reference to the new decree, except we first hear the
+counsel of our advisers, and give them an opportunity of communicating
+freely one with another. These words, as we have spoken them, are to be
+forwarded to all those persons whom we have named; and your Eminence
+will further inform them that our deliberations will not occupy more
+than four days.</p>
+
+<p>“As regards the questions of provisioning the council and all matters of
+that kind, your Eminence will despatch to-day the chaplain of whom we
+have spoken, who with my own chaplain will at once set about
+preparations, and your Eminence will yourself follow, appointing Father
+Marabout to act in your absence, not later than four days hence.</p>
+
+<p>“Finally, to all who have asked explicit directions in the face of this
+new decree, communicate this one sentence, and no more.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Lose not your confidence which hath a great reward. For yet a little
+while, and, He that is to come will come and will not delay</i>.—Silvester
+the Bishop, Servant of the Servants of God.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="3CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>Oliver Brand stepped out from the Conference Hall in Westminster on the
+Friday evening, so soon as the business was over and the
+Plenipotentiaries had risen from the table, more concerned as to the
+effect of the news upon his wife than upon the world.</p>
+
+<p>He traced the beginning of the change to the day five months ago when
+the President of the World had first declared the development of his
+policy, and while Oliver himself had yielded to that development, and
+from defending it in public had gradually convinced himself of its
+necessity, Mabel, for the first time in her life, had shown herself
+absolutely obstinate.</p>
+
+<p>The woman to his mind seemed to him to have fallen into some kind of
+insanity. Felsenburgh’s declaration had been made a week or two after
+his Acclamation at Westminster, and Mabel had received the news of it at
+first with absolute incredulity.</p>
+
+<p>Then, when there was no longer any doubt that he had declared the
+extermination of the Supernaturalists to be a possible necessity, there
+had been a terrible scene between husband and wife. She had said that
+she had been deceived; that the world’s hope was a monstrous mockery;
+that the reign of universal peace was as far away as ever; that
+Felsenburgh had betrayed his trust and broken his word. There had been
+an appalling scene. He did not even now like to recall it to his
+imagination. She had quieted after a while, but his arguments, delivered
+with infinite patience, seemed to produce very little effect. She
+settled down into silence, hardly answering him. One thing only seemed
+to touch her, and that was when he spoke of the President himself. It
+was becoming plain to him that she was but a woman after all at the
+mercy of a strong personality, but utterly beyond the reach of logic. He
+was very much disappointed. Yet he trusted to time to cure her.</p>
+
+<p>The Government of England had taken swift and skilful steps to reassure
+those who, like Mabel, recoiled from the inevitable logic of the new
+policy. An army of speakers traversed the country, defending and
+explaining; the press was engineered with extraordinary adroitness, and
+it was possible to say that there was not a person among the millions of
+England who had not easy access to the Government’s defence.</p>
+
+<p>Briefly, shorn of rhetoric, their arguments were as follows, and there
+was no doubt that, on the whole, they had the effect of quieting the
+amazed revolt of the more sentimental minds.</p>
+
+<p>Peace, it was pointed out, had for the first time in the world’s history
+become an universal fact. There was no longer one State, however small,
+whose interests were not identical with those of one of the three
+divisions of the world of which it was a dependency, and that first
+stage had been accomplished nearly half-a-century ago. But the second
+stage—the reunion of these three divisions under a common head—an
+infinitely greater achievement than the former, since the conflicting
+interests were incalculably more vast—this had been consummated by a
+single Person, Who, it appeared, had emerged from humanity at the very
+instant when such a Character was demanded. It was surely not much to
+ask that those on whom these benefits had come should assent to the will
+and judgment of Him through whom they had come. This, then, was an
+appeal to faith.</p>
+
+<p>The second main argument was addressed to reason. Persecution, as all
+enlightened persons confessed, was the method of a majority of savages
+who desired to force a set of opinions upon a minority who did not
+spontaneously share them. Now the peculiar malevolence of persecution in
+the past lay, not in the employment of force, but in the abuse of it.
+That any one kingdom should dictate religious opinions to a minority of
+its members was an intolerable tyranny, for no one State possessed the
+right to lay down universal laws, the contrary to which might be held by
+its neighbour. This, however, disguised, was nothing else than the
+Individualism of Nations, a heresy even more disastrous to the
+commonwealth of the world than the Individualism of the Individual. But
+with the arrival of the universal community of interests the whole
+situation was changed. The single personality of the human race had
+succeeded to the incoherence of divided units, and with that
+consummation—which might be compared to a coming of age, an entirely
+new set of rights had come into being. The human race was now a single
+entity with a supreme responsibility towards itself; there were no
+longer any private rights at all, such as had certainly existed, in the
+period previous to this. Man now possessed dominion over every cell
+which composed His Mystical Body, and where any such cell asserted
+itself to the detriment of the Body, the rights of the whole were
+unqualified.</p>
+
+<p>And there was no religion but one that claimed the equal rights of
+universal jurisdiction—and that the Catholic. The sects of the East,
+while each retained characteristics of its own, had yet found in the New
+Man the incarnation of their ideals, and had therefore given in their
+allegiance to the authority of the whole Body of whom He was Head. But
+the very essence of the Catholic Religion was treason to the very idea
+of man. Christians directed their homage to a supposed supernatural
+Being who was not only—so they claimed—outside of the world but
+positively transcended it. Christians, then—leaving aside the mad fable
+of the Incarnation, which might very well be suffered to die of its own
+folly—deliberately severed themselves from that Body of which by human
+generation they had been made members. They were as mortified limbs
+yielding themselves to the domination of an outside force other than
+that which was their only life, and by that very act imperilled the
+entire Body. This madness, then, was the one crime which still deserved
+the name. Murder, theft, rape, even anarchy itself, were as trifling
+faults compared to this monstrous sin, for while these injured indeed
+the Body they did not strike at its heart—individuals suffered, and
+therefore those minor criminals deserved restraint; but the very Life
+was not struck at. But in Christianity there was a poison actually
+deadly. Every cell that became infected with it was infected in that
+very fibre that bound it to the spring of life. This, and this alone,
+was the supreme crime of High Treason against man—and nothing but
+complete removal from the world could be an adequate remedy.</p>
+
+<p>These, then, were the main arguments addressed to that section of the
+world which still recoiled from the deliberate utterance of Felsenburgh,
+and their success had been remarkable. Of course, the logic, in itself
+indisputable, had been dressed in a variety of costumes gilded with
+rhetoric, flushed with passion, and it had done its work in such a
+manner that as summer drew on Felsenburgh had announced privately that
+he proposed to introduce a bill which should carry out to its logical
+conclusion the policy of which he had spoken.</p>
+
+<p>Now, this too, had been accomplished.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>Oliver let himself into his house, and went straight upstairs to Mabel’s
+room. It would not do to let her hear the news from any but his own
+lips. She was not there, and on inquiry he heard that she had gone out
+an hour before.</p>
+
+<p>He was disconcerted at this. The decree had been signed half-an-hour
+earlier, and in answer to an inquiry from Lord Pemberton it had been
+stated that there was no longer any reason for secrecy, and that the
+decision might be communicated to the press. Oliver had hurried away
+immediately in order to make sure that Mabel should hear the news from
+him, and now she was out, and at any moment the placards might tell her
+of what had been done.</p>
+
+<p>He felt extremely uneasy, but for another hour or so was ashamed to act.
+Then he went to the tube and asked another question or two, but the
+servant had no idea of Mabel’s movements; it might be she had gone to
+the church; sometimes she did at this hour. He sent the woman off to
+see, and himself sat down again in the window-seat of his wife’s room,
+staring out disconsolately at the wide array of roofs in the golden
+sunset light, that seemed to his eyes to be strangely beautiful this
+evening. The sky was not that pure gold which it had been every night
+during this last week; there was a touch of rose in it, and this
+extended across the entire vault so far as he could see from west to
+east. He reflected on what he had lately read in an old book to the
+effect that the abolition of smoke had certainly changed evening colours
+for the worse.... There had been a couple of severe earthquakes, too, in
+America—he wondered whether there was any connection.... Then his
+thoughts flew back to Mabel....</p>
+
+<p>It was about ten minutes before he heard her footstep on the stairs, and
+as he stood up she came in.</p>
+
+<p>There was something in her face that told him that she knew everything,
+and his heart sickened at her pale rigidity. There was no fury
+there—nothing but white, hopeless despair, and an immense
+determination. Her lips showed a straight line, and her eyes, beneath
+her white summer hat, seemed contracted to pinpricks. She stood there,
+closing the door mechanically behind her, and made no further movement
+towards him.</p>
+
+<p>“Is it true?” she said.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver drew one steady breath, and sat down again.</p>
+
+<p>“Is what true, my dear?”</p>
+
+<p>“Is it true,” she said again, “that all are to be questioned as to
+whether they believe in God, and to be killed if they confess it?”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver licked his dry lips.</p>
+
+<p>“You put it very harshly,” he said. “The question is, whether the world
+has a right—-”</p>
+
+<p>She made a sharp movement with her head.</p>
+
+<p>“It is true then. And you signed it?”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear, I beg you not to make a scene. I am tired out. And I will not
+answer that until you have heard what I have to say.”</p>
+
+<p>“Say it, then.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sit down, then.”</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>“Very well, then.... Well, this is the point. The world is one now, not
+many. Individualism is dead. It died when Felsenburgh became President
+of the World. You surely see that absolutely new conditions prevail
+now—there has never been anything like it before. You know all this as
+well as I do.”</p>
+
+<p>Again came that jerk of impatience.</p>
+
+<p>“You will please to hear me out,” he said wearily. “Well, now that this
+has happened, there is a new morality; it is exactly like a child coming
+to the age of reason. We are obliged, therefore, to see that this
+continues—that there is no going back—no mortification—that all the
+limbs are in good health. ‘If thy hand offend thee, cut it off,’ said
+Jesus Christ. Well, that is what we say.... Now, for any one to say that
+they believe in God—I doubt very much whether there is any one who
+really does believe, or understand what it means—but for any one even
+to say so is the very worst crime conceivable: it is high treason. But
+there is going to be no violence; it will all be quite quiet and
+merciful. Why, you have always approved of Euthanasia, as we all do.
+Well, it is that that will be used; and—-”</p>
+
+<p>Once more she made a little movement with her hand. The rest of her was
+like an image.</p>
+
+<p>“Is this any use?” she asked.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver stood up. He could not bear the hardness of her voice.</p>
+
+<p>“Mabel, my darling—-”</p>
+
+<p>For an instant her lips shook; then again she looked at him with eyes of
+ice.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t want that,” she said. “It is of no use. Then you did sign it?”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver had a sense of miserable desperation as he looked back at her.
+He would infinitely have preferred that she had stormed and wept.</p>
+
+<p>“Mabel—-” he cried again.</p>
+
+<p>“Then you did sign it?”</p>
+
+<p>“I did sign it,” he said at last.</p>
+
+<p>She turned and went towards the door. He sprang after her.</p>
+
+<p>“Mabel, where are you going?”</p>
+
+<p>Then, for the first time in her life, she lied to her husband frankly
+and fully.</p>
+
+<p>“I am going to rest a little,” she said. “I shall see you presently at
+supper.”</p>
+
+<p>He still hesitated, but she met his eyes, pale indeed, but so honest
+that he fell back.</p>
+
+<p>“Very well, my dear.... Mabel, try to understand.”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>He came down to supper half-an-hour later, primed with logic, and even
+kindled with emotion. The argument seemed to him now so utterly
+convincing; granted the premises that they both accepted and lived by,
+the conclusion was simply inevitable.</p>
+
+<p>He waited a minute or two, and at last went to the tube that
+communicated with the servants’ quarters.</p>
+
+<p>“Where is Mrs. Brand?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>There was an instant’s silence, and then the answer came:</p>
+
+<p>“She left the house half-an-hour ago, sir. I thought you knew.”</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>That same evening Mr. Francis was very busy in his office over the
+details connected with the festival of Sustenance that was to be
+celebrated on the first of July. It was the first time that the
+particular ceremony had taken place, and he was anxious that it should
+be as successful as its predecessors. There were a few differences
+between this and the others, and it was necessary that the
+<i>ceremoniarii</i> should be fully instructed.</p>
+
+<p>So, with his model before him—a miniature replica of the interior of
+the Abbey, with tiny dummy figures on blocks that could be shifted this
+way and that, he was engaged in adding in a minute ecclesiastical hand
+rubrical notes to his copy of the Order of Proceedings.</p>
+
+<p>When the porter therefore rang up a little after twenty-one o’clock,
+that a lady wished to see him, he answered rather brusquely down the
+tube that it was impossible. But the bell rang again, and to his
+impatient question, the reply came up that it was Mrs. Brand below, and
+that she did not ask for more than ten minutes’ conversation. This was
+quite another matter. Oliver Brand was an important personage, and his
+wife therefore had significance, and Mr. Francis apologised, gave
+directions that she was to come to his ante-room, and rose, sighing,
+from his dummy Abbey and officials.</p>
+
+<p>She seemed very quiet this evening, he thought, as he shook hands with
+her a minute later; she wore her veil down, so that he could not see her
+face very well, but her voice seemed to lack its usual vivacity.</p>
+
+<p>“I am so sorry to interrupt you, Mr. Francis,” she said. “I only want to
+ask you one or two questions.”</p>
+
+<p>He smiled at her encouragingly.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Brand, no doubt—-”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” she said, “Mr. Brand has not sent me. It is entirely my own
+affair. You will see my reasons presently. I will begin at once. I know
+I must not keep you.”</p>
+
+<p>It all seemed rather odd, he thought, but no doubt he would understand
+soon.</p>
+
+<p>“First,” she said, “I think you used to know Father Franklin. He became
+a Cardinal, didn’t he?”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Francis assented, smiling.</p>
+
+<p>“Do you know if he is alive?”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” he said. “He is dead. He was in Rome, you know, at the time of its
+destruction.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah! You are sure?”</p>
+
+<p>“Quite sure. Only one Cardinal escaped—Steinmann. He was hanged in
+Berlin; and the Patriarch of Jerusalem died a week or two later.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah! very well. Well, now, here is a very odd question. I ask for a
+particular reason, which I cannot explain, but you will soon
+understand.... It is this—Why do Catholics believe in God?”</p>
+
+<p>He was so much taken aback that for a moment he sat staring.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” she said tranquilly, “it is a very odd question. But—-” she
+hesitated. “Well, I will tell you,” she said. “The fact is, that I have
+a friend who is—is in danger from this new law. I want to be able to
+argue with her; and I must know her side. You are the only priest—I
+mean who has been a priest—whom I ever knew, except Father Franklin. So
+I thought you would not mind telling me.”</p>
+
+<p>Her voice was entirely natural; there was not a tremor or a falter in
+it. Mr. Francis smiled genially, rubbing his hands softly together.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah!” he said. “Yes, I see.... Well, that is a very large question.
+Would not to-morrow, perhaps—-?”</p>
+
+<p>“I only want just the shortest answer,” she said. “It is really
+important for me to know at once. You see, this new law comes into
+force—-”</p>
+
+<p>He nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“Well—very briefly, I should say this: Catholics say that God can be
+perceived by reason; that from the arrangements of the world they can
+deduce that there must have been an Arranger—a Mind, you understand.
+Then they say that they deduce other things about God—that He is Love,
+for example, because of happiness—-”</p>
+
+<p>“And the pain?” she interrupted.</p>
+
+<p>He smiled again.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. That is the point—that is the weak point.”</p>
+
+<p>“But what do they say about that?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, briefly, they say that pain is the result of sin—-”</p>
+
+<p>“And sin? You see, I know nothing at all, Mr. Francis.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, sin is the rebellion of man’s will against God’s.”</p>
+
+<p>“What do they mean by that?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, you see, they say that God wanted to be loved by His creatures,
+so He made them free; otherwise they could not really love. But if they
+were free, it means that they could if they liked refuse to love and
+obey God; and that is what is called Sin. You see what nonsense—-”</p>
+
+<p>She jerked her head a little.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, yes,” she said. “But I really want to get at what they think....
+Well, then, that is all?”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Francis pursed his lips.</p>
+
+<p>“Scarcely,” he said; “that is hardly more than what they call Natural
+Religion. Catholics believe much more than that.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well?”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear Mrs. Brand, it is impossible to put it in a few words. But, in
+brief, they believe that God became man—that Jesus was God, and that He
+did this in order to save them from sin by dying—-”</p>
+
+<p>“By bearing pain, you mean?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; by dying. Well, what they call the Incarnation is really the
+point. Everything else flows from that. And, once a man believes that, I
+must confess that all the rest follows—even down to scapulars and holy
+water.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Francis, I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”</p>
+
+<p>He smiled indulgently.</p>
+
+<p>“Of course not,” he said; “it is all incredible nonsense. But, you know,
+I did really believe it all once.”</p>
+
+<p>“But it’s unreasonable,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>He made a little demurring sound.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” he said, “in one sense, of course it is—utterly unreasonable.
+But in another sense—-”</p>
+
+<p>She leaned forward suddenly, and he could catch the glint of her eyes
+beneath her white veil.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah!” she said, almost breathlessly. “That is what I want to hear. Now,
+tell me how they justify it.”</p>
+
+<p>He paused an instant, considering.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” he said slowly, “as far as I remember, they say that there are
+other faculties besides those of reason. They say, for example, that
+the heart sometimes finds out things that the reason cannot—intuitions,
+you see. For instance, they say that all things such as self-sacrifice
+and chivalry and even art—all come from the heart, that Reason comes
+with them—in rules of technique, for instance—but that it cannot prove
+them; they are quite apart from that.”</p>
+
+<p>“I think I see.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, they say that Religion is like that—in other words, they
+practically confess that it is merely a matter of emotion.” He paused
+again, trying to be fair. “Well, perhaps they would not say
+that—although it is true. But briefly—-”</p>
+
+<p>“Well?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, they say there is a thing called Faith—a kind of deep conviction
+unlike anything else—supernatural—which God is supposed to give to
+people who desire it—to people who pray for it, and lead good lives,
+and so on—-”</p>
+
+<p>“And this Faith?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, this Faith, acting upon what they call Evidences—this Faith
+makes them absolutely certain that there is a God, that He was made man
+and so on, with the Church and all the rest of it. They say too that
+this is further proved by the effect that their religion has had in the
+world, and by the way it explains man’s nature to himself. You see, it
+is just a case of self-suggestion.”</p>
+
+<p>He heard her sigh, and stopped.</p>
+
+<p>“Is that any clearer, Mrs. Brand?”</p>
+
+<p>“Thank you very much,” she said, “it certainly is clearer. ... And it is
+true that Christians have died for this Faith, whatever it is?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! yes. Thousands and thousands. Just as Mohammedans have for theirs.”</p>
+
+<p>“The Mohammedans believe in God, too, don’t they?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, they did, and I suppose that a few do now. But very few: the rest
+have become esoteric, as they say.”</p>
+
+<p>“And—and which would you say were the most highly evolved people—East
+or West?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! West undoubtedly. The East thinks a good deal, but it doesn’t act
+much. And that always leads to confusion—even to stagnation of
+thought.”</p>
+
+<p>“And Christianity certainly has been the Religion of the West up to a
+hundred years ago?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! yes.”</p>
+
+<p>She was silent then, and Mr. Francis had time again to reflect how very
+odd all this was. She certainly must be very much attached to this
+Christian friend of hers.</p>
+
+<p>Then she stood up, and he rose with her.</p>
+
+<p>“Thank you so much, Mr. Francis.... Then that is the kind of outline?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, yes; so far as one can put it in a few words.”</p>
+
+<p>“Thank you.... I mustn’t keep you.”</p>
+
+<p>He went with her towards the door. But within a yard of it she stopped.</p>
+
+<p>“And you, Mr. Francis. You were brought up in all this. Does it ever
+come back to you?”</p>
+
+<p>He smiled.</p>
+
+<p>“Never,” he said, “except as a dream.”</p>
+
+<p>“How do you account for that, then? If it is all self-suggestion, you
+have had thirty years of it.”</p>
+
+<p>She paused; and for a moment he hesitated what to answer.</p>
+
+<p>“How would your old fellow-Catholics account for it?”</p>
+
+<p>“They would say that I had forfeited light—that Faith was withdrawn.”</p>
+
+<p>“And you?”</p>
+
+<p>Again he paused.</p>
+
+<p>“I should say that I had made a stronger self-suggestion the other way.”</p>
+
+<p>“I see.... Good-night, Mr. Francis.”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>She would not let him come down the lift with her, so when he had seen
+the smooth box drop noiselessly below the level, he went back again to
+his model of the Abbey and the little dummy figures. But, before he
+began to move these about again, he sat for a moment or two with pursed
+lips, staring.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="3CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>A week later Mabel awoke about dawn; and for a moment or two forgot
+where she was. She even spoke Oliver’s name aloud, staring round the
+unfamiliar room, wondering what she did here. Then she remembered, and
+was silent....</p>
+
+<p>It was the eighth day she had spent in this Home; her probation was
+finished: to-day she was at liberty to do that for which she had come.
+On the Saturday of the previous week she had gone through her private
+examination before the magistrate, stating under the usual conditions of
+secrecy her name, age and home, as well as her reasons for making the
+application for Euthanasia; and all had passed off well. She had
+selected Manchester as being sufficiently remote and sufficiently large
+to secure her freedom from Oliver’s molestation; and her secret had been
+admirably kept. There was not a hint that her husband knew anything of
+her intentions; for, after all, in these cases the police were bound to
+assist the fugitive. Individualism was at least so far recognised as to
+secure to those weary of life the right of relinquishing it. She
+scarcely knew why she had selected this method, except that any other
+seemed impossible. The knife required skill and resolution; firearms
+were unthinkable, and poison, under the new stringent regulations, was
+hard to obtain. Besides, she seriously wished to test her own
+intentions, and to be quite sure that there was no other way than
+this....</p>
+
+<p>Well, she was as certain as ever. The thought had first come to her in
+the mad misery of the outbreak of violence on the last day of the old
+year. Then it had gone again, soothed away by the arguments that man was
+still liable to relapse. Then once more it had recurred, a cold and
+convincing phantom, in the plain daylight revealed by Felsenburgh’s
+Declaration. It had taken up its abode with her then, yet she controlled
+it, hoping against hope that the Declaration would not be carried into
+action, occasionally revolting against its horror. Yet it had never been
+far away; and finally when the policy sprouted into deliberate law, she
+had yielded herself resolutely to its suggestion. That was eight days
+ago; and she had not had one moment of faltering since that.</p>
+
+<p>Yet she had ceased to condemn. The logic had silenced her. All that she
+knew was that she could not bear it; that she had misconceived the New
+Faith; that for her, whatever it was for others, there was no hope....
+She had not even a child of her own.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Those eight days, required by law, had passed very peacefully. She had
+taken with her enough money to enter one of the private homes furnished
+with sufficient comfort to save from distractions those who had been
+accustomed to gentle living: the nurses had been pleasant and
+sympathetic; she had nothing to complain of.</p>
+
+<p>She had suffered, of course, to some degree from reactions. The second
+night after her arrival had been terrible, when, as she lay in bed in
+the hot darkness, her whole sentient life had protested and struggled
+against the fate her will ordained. It had demanded the familiar
+things—the promise of food and breath and human intercourse; it had
+writhed in horror against the blind dark towards which it moved so
+inevitably; and, in the agony had been pacified only by the half-hinted
+promise of some deeper voice suggesting that death was not the end. With
+morning light sanity had come back; the will had reassumed the mastery,
+and, with it, had withdrawn explicitly the implied hope of continued
+existence. She had suffered again for an hour or two from a more
+concrete fear; the memory came back to her of those shocking revelations
+that ten years ago had convulsed England and brought about the
+establishment of these Homes under Government supervision—those
+evidences that for years in the great vivisection laboratories human
+subjects had been practised upon—persons who with the same intentions
+as herself had cut themselves off from the world in private
+euthanasia-houses, to whom had been supplied a gas that suspended
+instead of destroying animation.... But this, too, had passed with the
+return of light. Such things were impossible now under the new
+system—at least, in England. She had refrained from making an end upon
+the Continent for this very reason. There, where sentiment was weaker,
+and logic more imperious, materialism was more consistent. Since men
+were but animals—the conclusion was inevitable.</p>
+
+<p>There had been but one physical drawback, the intolerable heat of the
+days and nights. It seemed, scientists said, that an entirely unexpected
+heat-wave had been generated; there were a dozen theories, most of which
+were mutually exclusive one of another. It was humiliating, she thought,
+that men who professed to have taken the earth under their charge should
+be so completely baffled. The conditions of the weather had of course
+been accompanied by disasters; there had been earthquakes of astonishing
+violence, a ripple had wrecked not less than twenty-five towns in
+America; an island or two had disappeared, and that bewildering Vesuvius
+seemed to be working up for a denouement. But no one knew really the
+explanation. One man had been wild enough to say that some cataclysm had
+taken place in the centre of the earth.... So she had heard from her
+nurse; but she was not greatly interested. It was only tiresome that she
+could not walk much in the garden, and had to be content with sitting in
+her own cool shaded room on the second floor.</p>
+
+<p>There was only one other matter of which she had asked, namely, the
+effect of the new decree; but the nurse did not seem to know much about
+that. It appeared that there had been an outrage or two, but the law had
+not yet been enforced to any great extent; a week, after all, was a
+short time, even though the decree had taken effect at once, and
+magistrates were beginning the prescribed census.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It seemed to her as she lay awake this morning, staring at the tinted
+ceiling, and out now and again at the quiet little room, that the heat
+was worse than ever. For a minute she thought she must have overslept;
+but, as she touched her repeater, it told her that it was scarcely after
+four o’clock. Well, well; she would not have to bear it much longer; she
+thought that about eight it would be time to make an end. There was her
+letter to Oliver yet to be written; and one or two final arrangements to
+be made.</p>
+
+<p>As regarded the morality of what she was doing-the relation, that is to
+say, which her act bore to the common life of man—she had no shadow of
+doubt. It was her belief, as of the whole Humanitarian world, that just
+as bodily pain occasionally justified this termination of life, so also
+did mental pain. There was a certain pitch of distress at which the
+individual was no longer necessary to himself or the world; it was the
+most charitable act that could be performed. But she had never thought
+in old days that that state could ever be hers; Life had been much too
+interesting. But it had come to this: there was no question of it.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Perhaps a dozen times in that week she had thought over her conversation
+with Mr. Francis. Her going to him had been little more than
+instinctive; she did just wish to hear what the other side was—whether
+Christianity was as ludicrous as she had always thought. It seemed that
+it was not ludicrous; it was only terribly pathetic. It was just a
+lovely dream—an exquisite piece of poetry. It would be heavenly to
+believe it, but she did not. No—a transcendent God was unthinkable,
+although not quite so unthinkable as a merely immeasurable Man. And as
+for the Incarnation—well, well!</p>
+
+<p>There seemed no way out of it. The Humanity-Religion was the only one.
+Man was God, or at least His highest manifestation; and He was a God
+with which she did not wish to have anything more to do. These faint new
+instincts after something other than intellect and emotion were, she
+knew perfectly well, nothing but refined emotion itself.</p>
+
+<p>She had thought a great deal of Felsenburgh, however, and was astonished
+at her own feelings. He was certainly the most impressive man she had
+ever seen; it did seem very probable indeed that He was what He claimed
+to be—the Incarnation of the ideal Man the first perfect product of
+humanity. But the logic of his position was too much for her. She saw
+now that He was perfectly logical—that He had not been inconsistent in
+denouncing the destruction of Rome and a week later making His
+declaration. It was the passion of one man against another that He
+denounced—of kingdom against kingdom, and sect against sect—for this
+was suicidal for the race. He denounced passion, too, not judicial
+action. Therefore, this new decree was as logical as Himself—it was a
+judicial act on the part of an united world against a tiny majority that
+threatened the principle of life and faith: and it was to be carried out
+with supreme mercy; there was no revenge or passion or partisan spirit
+in it from beginning to end; no more than a man is revengeful or
+passionate when he amputates a diseased limb—Oliver had convinced her
+of that.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, it was logical and sound. And it was because it was so that she
+could not bear it.... But ah! what a sublime man Felsenburgh was; it was
+a joy to her even to recall his speeches and his personality. She would
+have liked to see him again. But it was no good. She had better be done
+with it as tranquilly as possible. And the world must go forward without
+her. She was just tired out with Facts.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>She dozed off again presently, and it seemed scarcely five minutes
+before she looked up to see a gentle smiling face of a white-capped
+nurse bending over her.</p>
+
+<p>“It is nearly six o’clock, my dear—the time you told me. I came to see
+about breakfast.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel drew a long breath. Then she sat up suddenly, throwing back the
+sheet.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>It struck a quarter-past six from the little clock on the mantel-shelf
+as she laid down her pen. Then she took up the closely written sheets,
+leaned back in her deep chair, and began to read.</p>
+
+<p>“HOME OF REST,</p>
+
+<p>“NO 3A MANCHESTER WEST.</p>
+
+<p>“MY DEAR: I am very sorry, but it has come back to me. I really cannot
+go on any longer, so I am going to escape in the only way left, as I
+once told you. I have had a very quiet and happy time here; they have
+been most kind and considerate. You see, of course, from the heading on
+this paper, what I mean....</p>
+
+<p>“Well, you have always been very dear to me; you are still, even at this
+moment. So you have a right to know my reasons so far as I know them
+myself. It is very difficult to understand myself; but it seems to me
+that I am not strong enough to live. So long as I was pleased and
+excited it was all very well—especially when He came. But I think I had
+expected it to be different; I did not understand as I do now how it
+must come to this—how it is all quite logical and right. I could bear
+it, when I thought that they had acted through passion, but this is
+deliberate. I did not realise that Peace must have its laws, and must
+protect itself. And, somehow, that Peace is not what I want. It is being
+alive at all that is wrong.</p>
+
+<p>“Then there is this difficulty. I know how absolutely in agreement you
+are with this new state of affairs; of course you are, because you are
+so much stronger and more logical than I am. But if you have a wife she
+must be of one mind with you. And I am not, any more, at least not with
+my heart, though I see you are right.... Do you understand, my dear?</p>
+
+<p>“If we had had a child, it might have been different. I might have liked
+to go on living for his sake. But Humanity, somehow—Oh! Oliver! I
+can’t—I can’t.</p>
+
+<p>“I know I am wrong, and that you are right—but there it is; I cannot
+change myself. So I am quite sure that I must go.</p>
+
+<p>“Then I want to tell you this—that I am not at all frightened. I never
+can understand why people are—unless, of course, they are Christians. I
+should be horribly frightened if I was one of them. But, you see, we
+both know that there is nothing beyond. It is life that I am frightened
+of—not death. Of course, I should be frightened if there was any pain;
+but the doctors tell me there is absolutely none. It is simply going to
+sleep. The nerves are dead before the brain. I am going to do it myself.
+I don’t want any one else in the room. In a few minutes the nurse
+here—Sister Anne, with whom I have made great friends—will bring in
+the thing, and then she will leave me.</p>
+
+<p>“As regards what happens afterwards, I do not mind at all. Please do
+exactly what you wish. The cremation will take place to-morrow morning
+at noon, so that you can be here if you like. Or you can send
+directions, and they will send on the urn to you. I know you liked to
+have your mother’s urn in the garden; so perhaps you will like mine.
+Please do exactly what you like. And with all my things too. Of course I
+leave them to you.</p>
+
+<p>“Now, my dear, I want to say this—that I am very sorry indeed now that
+I was so tiresome and stupid. I think I did really believe your
+arguments all along. But I did not want to believe them. Do you see now
+why I was so tiresome?</p>
+
+<p>“Oliver, my darling, you have been extraordinarily good to me.... Yes, I
+know I am crying, but I am really very happy. This is such a lovely
+ending. I wish I hadn’t been obliged to make you so anxious during this
+last week: but I had to—I knew you would persuade me against it, if you
+found me, and that would have been worse than ever. I am sorry I told
+you that lie, too. Indeed, it is the first I ever did tell you.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I don’t think there is much more to say. Oliver, my dear,
+good-bye. I send you my love with all my heart.</p>
+
+<p>“MABEL.”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>She sat still when she had read it through, and her eyes were still wet
+with tears. Yet it was all perfectly true. She was far happier than she
+could be if she had still the prospect of going back. Life seemed
+entirely blank: death was so obvious an escape; her soul ached for it,
+as a body for sleep.</p>
+
+<p>She directed the envelope, still with a perfectly steady hand, laid it
+on the table, and leaned back once more, glancing again at her untasted
+breakfast.</p>
+
+<p>Then she suddenly began to think of her conversation with Mr. Francis;
+and, by a strange association of ideas, remembered the fall of the volor
+in Brighton, the busy-ness of the priest, and the Euthanasia boxes....</p>
+
+<p>When Sister Anne came in a few minutes later, she was astonished at what
+she saw. The girl crouched at the window, her hands on the sill, staring
+out at the sky in an attitude of unmistakable horror.</p>
+
+<p>Sister Anne came across the room quickly, setting down something on the
+table as she passed. She touched the girl on the shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear, what is it?”</p>
+
+<p>There was a long sobbing breath, and Mabel turned, rising as she turned,
+and clutched the nurse with one shaking hand, pointing out with the
+other.</p>
+
+<p>“There!” she said. “There—look!”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, my dear, what is it? I see nothing. It is a little dark!”</p>
+
+<p>“Dark!” said the other. “You call that dark! Why, why, it is
+black—black!”</p>
+
+<p>The nurse drew her softly backwards to the chair, turning her from the
+window. She recognised nervous fear; but no more than that. But Mabel
+tore herself free, and wheeled again.</p>
+
+<p>“You call that a little dark,” she said. “Why, look, sister, look!”</p>
+
+<p>Yet there was nothing remarkable to be seen. In front rose up the
+feathery hand of an elm, then the shuttered windows across the court,
+the roof, and above that the morning sky, a little heavy and dusky as
+before a storm; but no more than that.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, what is it, my dear? What do you see?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, why ... look! look!—There, listen to that.”</p>
+
+<p>A faint far-away rumble sounded as the rolling of a waggon—so faint
+that it might almost be an aural delusion. But the girl’s hands were at
+her ears, and her face was one white wide-eyed mask of terror. The nurse
+threw her arms round her.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear,” she said, “you are not yourself. That is nothing but a little
+heat-thunder. Sit down quietly.”</p>
+
+<p>She could feel the girl’s body shaking beneath her hands, but there was
+no resistance as she drew her to the chair.</p>
+
+<p>“The lights! the lights!” sobbed Mabel.</p>
+
+<p>“Will you promise me to sit quietly, then?”</p>
+
+<p>She nodded; and the nurse went across to the door, smiling tenderly; she
+had seen such things before. A moment later the room was full of
+exquisite sunlight, as she switched the handle. As she turned, she saw
+that Mabel had wheeled herself round in the chair, and with clasped
+hands was still staring out at the sky above the roofs; but she was
+plainly quieter again now. The nurse came back, and put her hand on her
+shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>“You are overwrought, my dear.... Now you must believe me. There is
+nothing to be frightened of. It is just nervous excitement.... Shall I
+pull down the blind?”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel turned her face.... Yes, certainly the light had reassured her.
+Her face was still white and bewildered, but the steady look was coming
+back to her eyes, though, even as she spoke, they wandered back more
+than once to the window.</p>
+
+<p>“Nurse,” she said more quietly, “please look again and tell me if you
+see nothing. If you say there is nothing I will believe that I am going
+mad. No; you must not touch the blind.”</p>
+
+<p>No; there was nothing. The sky was a little dark, as if a blight were
+coming on; but there was hardly more than a veil of cloud, and the light
+was scarcely more than tinged with gloom. It was just such a sky as
+precedes a spring thunderstorm. She said so, clearly and firmly.</p>
+
+<p>Mabel’s face steadied still more.</p>
+
+<p>“Very well, nurse.... Then—-”</p>
+
+<p>She turned to the little table by the side on which Sister Anne had set
+down what she had brought into the room.</p>
+
+<p>“Show me, please.”</p>
+
+<p>The nurse still hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>“Are you sure you are not too frightened, my dear? Shall I get you
+anything?”</p>
+
+<p>“I have no more to say,” said Mabel firmly. “Show me, please.”</p>
+
+<p>Sister Anne turned resolutely to the table.</p>
+
+<p>There rested upon it a white-enamelled box, delicately painted with
+flowers. From this box emerged a white flexible tube with a broad
+mouthpiece, fitted with two leather-covered steel clasps. From the side
+of the box nearest the chair protruded a little china handle.</p>
+
+<p>“Now, my dear,” began the nurse quietly, watching the other’s eyes turn
+once again to the window, and then back—“now, my dear, you sit there,
+as you are now. Your head right back, please. When you are ready, you
+put this over your mouth, and clasp the springs behind your head....
+So.... it works quite easily. Then you turn this handle, round that way,
+as far as it will go. And that is all.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel nodded. She had regained her self-command, and understood plainly
+enough, though even as she spoke once again her eyes strayed away to the
+window.</p>
+
+<p>“That is all,” she said. “And what then?”</p>
+
+<p>The nurse eyed her doubtfully for a moment.</p>
+
+<p>“I understand perfectly,” said Mabel. “And what then?”</p>
+
+<p>“There is nothing more. Breathe naturally. You will feel sleepy almost
+directly. Then you close your eyes, and that is all.”</p>
+
+<p>Mabel laid the tube on the table and stood up. She was completely
+herself now.</p>
+
+<p>“Give me a kiss, sister,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>The nurse nodded and smiled to her once more at the door. But Mabel
+hardly noticed it; again she was looking towards the window.</p>
+
+<p>“I shall come back in half-an-hour,” said Sister Anne.</p>
+
+<p>Then her eyes caught a square of white upon the centre table. “Ah! that
+letter!” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” said the girl absently. “Please take it.”</p>
+
+<p>The nurse took it up, glanced at the address, and again at Mabel. Still
+she hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>“In half-an-hour,” she repeated. “There is no hurry at all. It doesn’t
+take five minutes.... Good-bye, my dear.”</p>
+
+<p>But Mabel was still looking out of the window, and made no answer.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>Mabel stood perfectly still until she heard the locking of the door and
+the withdrawal of the key. Then once more she went to the window and
+clasped the sill.</p>
+
+<p>From where she stood there was visible to her first the courtyard
+beneath, with its lawn in the centre, and a couple of trees growing
+there—all plain in the brilliant light that now streamed from her
+window, and secondly, above the roofs, a tremendous pall of ruddy black.
+It was the more terrible from the contrast. Earth, it seemed, was
+capable of light; heaven had failed.</p>
+
+<p>It appeared, too, that there was a curious stillness. The house was,
+usually, quiet enough at this hour: the inhabitants of that place were
+in no mood for bustle: but now it was more than quiet; it was deathly
+still: it was such a hush as precedes the sudden crash of the sky’s
+artillery. But the moments went by, and there was no such crash: only
+once again there sounded a solemn rolling, as of some great wain far
+away; stupendously impressive, for with it to the girl’s ears there
+seemed mingled a murmur of innumerable voices, ghostly crying and
+applause. Then again the hush settled down like wool.</p>
+
+<p>She had begun to understand now. The darkness and the sounds were not
+for all eyes and ears. The nurse had seen and heard nothing
+extraordinary, and the rest of the world of men saw and heard nothing.
+To them it was no more than the hint of a coming storm.</p>
+
+<p>Mabel did not attempt to distinguish between the subjective and the
+objective. It was nothing to her as to whether the sights and sounds
+were generated by her own brain or perceived by some faculty hitherto
+unknown. She seemed to herself to be standing already apart from the
+world which she had known; it was receding from her, or, rather, while
+standing where it had always done, it was melting, transforming itself,
+passing to some other mode of existence. The strangeness seemed no more
+strange than anything else than that ... that little painted box upon
+the table.</p>
+
+<p>Then, hardly knowing what she said, looking steadily upon that appalling
+sky, she began to speak....</p>
+
+<p>“O God!” she said. “If You are really there really there—-”</p>
+
+<p>Her voice faltered, and she gripped the sill to steady herself. She
+wondered vaguely why she spoke so; it was neither intellect nor emotion
+that inspired her. Yet she continued....</p>
+
+<p>“O God, I know You are not there—of course You are not. But if You were
+there, I know what I would say to You. I would tell You how puzzled and
+tired I am. No—No—I need not tell You: You would know it. But I would
+say that I was very sorry for all this. Oh! You would know that too. I
+need not say anything at all. O God! I don’t know what I want to say. I
+would like You to look after Oliver, of course, and all Your poor
+Christians. Oh! they will have such a hard time.... God. God—You would
+understand, wouldn’t You?” ...</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Again came the heavy rumble and the solemn bass of a myriad voices; it
+seemed a shade nearer, she thought.... She never liked thunderstorms or
+shouting crowds. They always gave her a headache ...</p>
+
+<p>“Well, well,” she said. “Good-bye, everything—-”</p>
+
+<p>Then she was in the chair. The mouthpiece—yes; that was it....</p>
+
+<p>She was furious at the trembling of her hands; twice the spring slipped
+from her polished coils of hair.... Then it was fixed ... and as if a
+breeze fanned her, her sense came back....</p>
+
+<p>She found she could breathe quite easily; there was no resistance—that
+was a comfort; there would be no suffocation about it.... She put out
+her left hand and touched the handle, conscious less of its sudden
+coolness than of the unbearable heat in which the room seemed almost
+suddenly plunged. She could hear the drumming pulses in her temples and
+the roaring of the voices.... She dropped the handle once more, and with
+both hands tore at the loose white wrapper that she had put on this
+morning....</p>
+
+<p>Yes, that was a little easier; she could breathe better so. Again her
+fingers felt for and found the handle, but the sweat streamed from her
+fingers, and for an instant she could not turn the knob. Then it yielded
+suddenly....</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>For one instant the sweet languid smell struck her consciousness like a
+blow, for she knew it as the scent of death. Then the steady will that
+had borne her so far asserted itself, and she laid her hands softly in
+her lap, breathing deeply and easily.</p>
+
+<p>She had closed her eyes at the turning of the handle, but now opened
+them again, curious to watch the aspect of the fading world. She had
+determined to do this a week ago: she would at least miss nothing of
+this unique last experience.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed at first that there was no change. There was the feathery head
+of the elm, the lead roof opposite, and the terrible sky above. She
+noticed a pigeon, white against the blackness, soar and swoop again out
+of sight in an instant....</p>
+
+<p>... Then the following things happened....</p>
+
+<p>There was a sudden sensation of ecstatic lightness in all her limbs; she
+attempted to lift a hand, and was aware that it was impossible; it was
+no longer hers. She attempted to lower her eyes from that broad strip of
+violet sky, and perceived that that too was impossible. Then she
+understood that the will had already lost touch with the body, that the
+crumbling world had receded to an infinite distance—that was as she had
+expected, but what continued to puzzle her was that her mind was still
+active. It was true that the world she had known had withdrawn itself
+from the dominion of consciousness, as her body had done, except, that
+was, in the sense of hearing, which was still strangely alert; yet there
+was still enough memory to be aware that there was such a world—that
+there were other persons in existence; that men went about their
+business, knowing nothing of what had happened; but faces, names,
+places had all alike gone. In fact, she was conscious of herself in such
+a manner as she had never been before; it seemed as if she had
+penetrated at last into some recess of her being into which hitherto she
+had only looked as through clouded glass. This was very strange, and yet
+it was familiar, too; she had arrived, it seemed, at a centre, round the
+circumference of which she had been circling all her life; and it was
+more than a mere point: it was a distinct space, walled and enclosed....
+At the same instant she knew that hearing, too, was gone....</p>
+
+<p>Then an amazing thing happened—yet it appeared to her that she had
+always known it would happen, although her mind had never articulated
+it. This is what happened.</p>
+
+<p>The enclosure melted, with a sound of breaking, and a limitless space
+was about her—limitless, different to everything else, and alive, and
+astir. It was alive, as a breathing, panting body is alive—self-evident
+and overpowering—it was one, yet it was many; it was immaterial, yet
+absolutely real—real in a sense in which she never dreamed of
+reality....</p>
+
+<p>Yet even this was familiar, as a place often visited in dreams is
+familiar; and then, without warning, something resembling sound or
+light, something which she knew in an instant to be unique, tore across
+it....</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Then she saw, and understood....</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="3CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>Oliver had passed the days since Mabel’s disappearance in an
+indescribable horror. He had done all that was possible: he had traced
+her to the station and to Victoria, where he lost her clue; he had
+communicated with the police, and the official answer, telling him
+nothing, had arrived to the effect that there was no news: and it was
+not until the Tuesday following her disappearance that Mr. Francis,
+hearing by chance of his trouble, informed him by telephone that he had
+spoken with her on the Friday night. But there was no satisfaction to be
+got from him—indeed, the news was bad rather than good, for Oliver
+could not but be dismayed at the report of the conversation, in spite of
+Mr. Francis’s assurances that Mrs. Brand had shown no kind of
+inclination to defend the Christian cause.</p>
+
+<p>Two theories gradually emerged, in his mind; either she was gone to the
+protection of some unknown Catholic, or—and he grew sick at the
+thought—she had applied somewhere for Euthanasia as she had once
+threatened, and was now under the care of the Law; such an event was
+sufficiently common since the passing of the Release Act in 1998. And it
+was frightful that he could not condemn it.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>On the Tuesday evening, as he sat heavily in his room, for the hundredth
+time attempting to trace out some coherent line through the maze of
+intercourse he had had with his wife during these past months, his bell
+suddenly rang. It was the red label of Whitehall that had made its
+appearance; and for an instant his heart leaped with hope that it was
+news of her. But at the first words it sank again.</p>
+
+<p>“Brand,” came the sharp fairy voice, “is that you?... Yes, I am
+Snowford. You are wanted at once—at once, you understand. There is an
+extraordinary meeting of the Council at twenty o’clock. The President
+will be there. You understand the urgency. No time for more. Come
+instantly to my room.”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Even this message scarcely distracted him. He, with the rest of the
+world, was no longer surprised at the sudden descents of the President.
+He came and vanished again without warning, travelling and working with
+incredible energy, yet always, as it seemed, retaining his personal
+calm.</p>
+
+<p>It was already after nineteen; Oliver supped immediately, and a
+quarter-of-an-hour before the hour presented himself in Snowford’s room,
+where half a dozen of his colleagues were assembled.</p>
+
+<p>That minister came forward to meet him, with a strange excitement in his
+face. He drew him aside by a button.</p>
+
+<p>“See here, Brand, you are wanted to speak first—immediately after the
+President’s Secretary who will open; they are coming from Paris. It is
+about a new matter altogether. He has had information of the whereabouts
+of the Pope.... It seems that there is one.... Oh, you will understand
+presently. Oh, and by the way,” he went on, looking curiously at the
+strained face, “I am sorry to hear of your anxiety. Pemberton told me
+just now.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver lifted a hand abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>“Tell me,” he said. “What am I wanted to say?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, the President will have a proposal, we imagine. You know our
+minds well enough. Just explain our attitude towards the Catholics.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver’s eyes shrank suddenly to two bright lines beneath the lids. He
+nodded.</p>
+
+<p>Cartwright came up presently, an immense, bent old man with a face of
+parchment, as befitted the Lord Chief Justice.</p>
+
+<p>“By the way, Brand, what do you know of a man called Phillips? He seems
+to have mentioned your name.”</p>
+
+<p>“He was my secretary,” said Oliver slowly. “What about him?”</p>
+
+<p>“I think he must be mad. He has given himself up to a magistrate,
+entreating to be examined at once. The magistrate has applied for
+instructions. You see, the Act has scarcely begun to move yet.”</p>
+
+<p>“But what has he done?”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s the difficulty. He says he cannot deny God, neither can he
+affirm Him.—He was your secretary, then?”</p>
+
+<p>“Certainly. I knew he was inclined to Christianity. I had to get rid of
+him for that.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, he is to be remanded for a week. Perhaps he will be able to make
+up his mind.”</p>
+
+<p>Then the talk shifted off again. Two or three more came up, and all eyed
+Oliver with a certain curiosity; the story was gone about that his wife
+had left him. They wished to see how he took it.</p>
+
+<p>At five minutes before the hour a bell rang, and the door into the
+corridor was thrown open.</p>
+
+<p>“Come, gentlemen,” said the Prime Minister.</p>
+
+<p>The Council Chamber was a long high room on the first floor; its walls
+from floor to ceiling were lined with books. A noiseless rubber carpet
+was underfoot. There were no windows; the room was lighted artificially.
+A long table, set round with armed chairs, ran the length of the floor,
+eight on either side; and the Presidential chair, raised on a dais,
+stood at the head.</p>
+
+<p>Each man went straight to his chair in silence, and remained there,
+waiting.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The room was beautifully cool, in spite of the absence of windows, and
+was a pleasant contrast to the hot evening outside through which most of
+these men had come. They, too, had wondered at the surprising weather,
+and had smiled at the conflict of the infallible. But they were not
+thinking about that now: the coming of the President was a matter which
+always silenced the most loquacious. Besides, this time, they understood
+that the affair was more serious than usual.</p>
+
+<p>At one minute before the hour, again a bell sounded, four times, and
+ceased; and at the signal each man turned instinctively to the high
+sliding door behind the Presidential chair. There was dead silence
+within and without: the huge Government offices were luxuriously
+provided with sound-deadening apparatus, and not even the rolling of the
+vast motors within a hundred yards was able to send a vibration through
+the layers of rubber on which the walls rested. There was only one noise
+that could penetrate, and that the sound of thunder. The experts were at
+present unable to exclude this.</p>
+
+<p>Again the silence seemed to fall in one yet deeper veil. Then the door
+opened, and a figure came swiftly through, followed by Another in black
+and scarlet.</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>He passed straight up to the chair, followed by two secretaries, bowed
+slightly to this side and that, sat down and made a little gesture. Then
+they, too, were in their chairs, upright and intent. For perhaps the
+hundredth time, Oliver, staring upon the President, marvelled at the
+quietness and the astounding personality of Him. He was in the English
+judicial dress that had passed down through centuries—black and scarlet
+with sleeves of white fur and a crimson sash—and that had lately been
+adopted as the English presidential costume of him who stood at the head
+of the legislature. But it was in His personality, in the atmosphere
+that flowed from Him, that the marvel lay. It was as the scent of the
+sea to the physical nature—it exhilarated, cleansed, kindled,
+intoxicated. It was as inexplicably attractive as a cherry orchard in
+spring, as affecting as the cry of stringed instruments, as compelling
+as a storm. So writers had said. They compared it to a stream of clear
+water, to the flash of a gem, to the love of woman. They lost all
+decency sometimes; they said it fitted all moods, as the voice of many
+waters; they called it again and again, as explicitly as possible, the
+Divine Nature perfectly Incarnate at last....</p>
+
+<p>Then Oliver’s reflections dropped from him like a mantle, for the
+President, with downcast eyes and head thrown back, made a little
+gesture to the ruddy-faced secretary on His right; and this man, without
+a movement, began to speak like an impersonal actor repeating his part.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>“Gentlemen,” he said, in an even, resonant voice, “the President is come
+direct from Paris. This afternoon His Honour was in Berlin; this
+morning, early, in Moscow. Yesterday in New York. To-night His Honour
+must be in Turin; and to-morrow will begin to return through Spain,
+North Africa, Greece and the southeastern states.”</p>
+
+<p>This was the usual formula for such speeches. The President spoke but
+little himself now; but was careful for the information of his subjects
+on occasions like this. His secretaries were perfectly trained, and this
+speaker was no exception. After a slight pause, he continued:</p>
+
+<p>“This is the business, gentlemen.</p>
+
+<p>“Last Thursday, as you are aware, the Plenipotentaries signed the Test
+Act in this room, and it was immediately communicated all over the
+world. At sixteen o’clock His Honour received a message from a man named
+Dolgorovski—who is, it is understood, one of the Cardinals of the
+Catholic Church. This he claimed; and on inquiry it was found to be a
+fact. His information confirmed what was already suspected—namely, that
+there was a man claiming to be Pope, who had created (so the phrase is)
+other cardinals, shortly after the destruction of Rome, subsequent to
+which his own election took place in Jerusalem. It appears that this
+Pope, with a good deal of statesmanship, has chosen to keep his own name
+and place of residence a secret from even his own followers, with the
+exception of the twelve cardinals; that he has done a great deal,
+through the instrumentality of one of his cardinals in particular, and
+through his new Order in general, towards the reorganisation of the
+Catholic Church; and that at this moment he is living, apart from the
+world, in complete security.</p>
+
+<p>“His Honour blames Himself that He did not do more than suspect
+something of the kind—misled, He thinks, by a belief that if there had
+been a Pope, news would have been heard of it from other quarters, for,
+as is well known, the entire structure of the Christian Church rests
+upon him as upon a rock. Further, His Honour thinks inquiries should
+have been made in the very place where now it is understood that this
+Pope is living.</p>
+
+<p>“The man’s name, gentlemen, is Franklin—-”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver started uncontrollably, but relapsed again to bright-eyed
+intelligence as for an instant the President glanced up from his
+motionlessness.</p>
+
+<p>“Franklin,” repeated the secretary, “and he is living in Nazareth,
+where, it is said, the Founder of Christianity passed His youth.</p>
+
+<p>“Now this, gentlemen, His Honour heard on Thursday in last week. He
+caused inquiries to be made, and on Friday morning received further
+intelligence from Dolgorovski that this Pope had summoned to Nazareth a
+meeting of his cardinals, and certain other officials, from all over the
+world, to consider what steps should be taken in view of the new Test
+Act. This His Honour takes to show an extreme want of statesmanship
+which seems hard to reconcile with his former action. These persons are
+summoned by special messengers to meet on Saturday next, and will begin
+their deliberations after some Christian ceremonies on the following
+morning.</p>
+
+<p>“You wish, gentlemen, no doubt, to know Dolgorovski’s motives in making
+all this known. His Honour is satisfied that they are genuine. The man
+has been losing belief in his religion; in fact, he has come to see that
+this religion is the supreme obstacle to the consolidation of the race.
+He has esteemed it his duty, therefore, to lay this information before
+His Honour. It is interesting as an historical parallel to reflect that
+the same kind of incident marked the rise of Christianity as will mark,
+it is thought, its final extinction—namely, the informing on the part
+of one of the leaders of the place and method by which the principal
+personage may be best approached. It is also, surely, very significant
+that the scene of the extinction of Christianity is identical with that
+of its inauguration....</p>
+
+<p>“Well, gentlemen, His Honour’s proposal is as follows, carrying out the
+Declaration to which you all acceded. It is that a force should proceed
+during the night of Saturday next to Palestine, and on the Sunday
+morning, when these men will be all gathered together, that this force
+should finish as swiftly and mercifully as possible the work to which
+the Powers have set their hands. So far, the comment of the Governments
+which have been consulted has been unanimous, and there is little doubt
+that the rest will be equally so. His Honour felt that He could not act
+in so grave a matter on His own responsibility; it is not merely local;
+it is a catholic administration of justice, and will have results wider
+than it is safe minutely to prophesy.</p>
+
+<p>“It is not necessary to enter into His Honour’s reasons. They are
+already well known to you; but before asking for your opinion, He
+desires me to indicate what He thinks, in the event of your approval,
+should be the method of action.</p>
+
+<p>“Each Government, it is proposed, should take part in the final scene,
+for it is something of a symbolic action; and for this purpose it is
+thought well that each of the three Departments of the World should
+depute volors, to the number of the constituting States, one hundred and
+twenty-two all told, to set about the business. These volors should have
+no common meeting-ground, otherwise the news will surely penetrate to
+Nazareth, for it is understood that, this new Order of Christ Crucified
+has a highly organised system of espionage. The rendezvous, then, should
+be no other than Nazareth itself; and the time of meeting should be, it
+is thought, not later than nine o’clock according to Palestine
+reckoning. These details, however, can be decided and communicated as
+soon as a determination has been formed as regards the entire scheme.</p>
+
+<p>“With respect to the exact method of carrying out the conclusion, His
+Honour is inclined to think it will be more merciful to enter into no
+negotiations with the persons concerned. An opportunity should be given
+to the inhabitants of the village to make their escape if they so desire
+it, and then, with the explosives that the force should carry, the end
+can be practically instantaneous.</p>
+
+<p>“For Himself, His Honour proposes to be there in person, and further
+that the actual discharge should take place from His own car. It seems
+but suitable that the world which has done His Honour the goodness to
+elect Him to its Presidentship should act through His hands; and this
+would be at least some slight token of respect to a superstition which,
+however infamous, is yet the one and only force capable of withstanding
+the true progress of man.</p>
+
+<p>“His Honour promises you, gentlemen, that in the event of this plan
+being carried out, we shall be no more troubled with Christianity.
+Already the moral effect of the Test Act has been prodigious. It is
+understood that, by tens of thousands, Catholics, numbering among them
+even members of this new fanatical Religious Order, have been renouncing
+their follies even in these few days; and a final blow struck now at the
+very heart and head of the Catholic Church, eliminating, as it would do,
+the actual body on which the entire organisation subsists, would render
+its resurrection impossible. It is a well-known fact that, granted the
+extinction of the line of Popes, together with those necessary for its
+continuance, there could be no longer any question amongst even the most
+ignorant that the claim of Jesus had ceased to be either reasonable or
+possible. Even the Order that has provided the sinews for this new
+movement must cease to exist.</p>
+
+<p>“Dolgorovski, of course, is the difficulty, for it is not certainly
+known whether one Cardinal would be considered sufficient for the
+propagation of the line; and, although reluctantly, His Honour feels
+bound to suggest that at the conclusion of the affair, Dolgorovski,
+also, who will not, of course, be with his fellows at Nazareth, should
+be mercifully removed from even the danger of a relapse....</p>
+
+<p>“His Honour, then, asks you, gentlemen, as briefly as possible, to state
+your views on the points of which I have had the privilege of speaking.”</p>
+
+<p>The quiet business-like voice ceased.</p>
+
+<p>He had spoken throughout in the manner with which he had begun; his eyes
+had been downcast throughout; his voice had been tranquil and
+restrained. His deportment had been admirable.</p>
+
+<p>There was an instant’s silence, and all eyes settled steadily again upon
+the motionless figure in black and scarlet and the ivory face.</p>
+
+<p>Then Oliver stood up. His face was as white as paper; his eyes bright
+and dilated.</p>
+
+<p>“Sir,” he said, “I have no doubt that we are all of one mind. I need say
+no more than that, so far as I am a representative of my colleagues, we
+assent to the proposal, and leave all details in your Honour’s hands.”</p>
+
+<p>The President lifted his eyes, and ran them swiftly along the rigid
+faces turned to him.</p>
+
+<p>Then, in the breathless hush, he spoke for the first time in his strange
+voice, now as passionless as a frozen river.</p>
+
+<p>“Is there any other proposal?”</p>
+
+<p>There was a murmur of assent as the men rose to their feet.</p>
+
+<p>“Thank you, gentlemen,” said the secretary.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>It was a little before seven o’clock on the morning of Saturday that
+Oliver stepped out of the motor that had carried him to Wimbledon
+Common, and began to go up the steps of the old volor-stage, abandoned
+five years ago. It had been thought better, in view of the extreme
+secrecy that was to be kept, that England’s representative in the
+expedition should start from a comparatively unknown point, and this old
+stage, in disuse now, except for occasional trials of new Government
+machines, had been selected. Even the lift had been removed, and it was
+necessary to climb the hundred and fifty steps on foot.</p>
+
+<p>It was with a certain unwillingness that he had accepted this post among
+the four delegates, for nothing had been heard of his wife, and it was
+terrible to him to leave London while her fate was as yet doubtful. On
+the whole, he was less inclined than ever now to accept the Euthanasia
+theory; he had spoken to one or two of her friends, all of whom declared
+that she had never even hinted at such an end. And, again, although he
+was well aware of the eight-day law in the matter, even if she had
+determined on such a step there was nothing to show that she was yet in
+England, and, in fact, it was more than likely that if she were bent on
+such an act she would go abroad for it, where laxer conditions
+prevailed. In short, it seemed that he could do no good by remaining in
+England, and the temptation to be present at the final act of justice in
+the East by which land, and, in fact, it was more than likely that if
+she were to be wiped out, and Franklin, too, among them—Franklin, that
+parody of the Lord of the World—this, added to the opinion of his
+colleagues in the Government, and the curious sense, never absent from
+him now, that Felsenburgh’s approval was a thing to die for if
+necessary—these things had finally prevailed. He left behind him at
+home his secretary, with instructions that no expense was to be spared
+in communicating with him should any news of his wife arrive during his
+absence.</p>
+
+<p>It was terribly hot this morning, and, by the time that he reached the
+top he noticed that the monster in the net was already fitted into its
+white aluminium casing, and that the fans within the corridor and saloon
+were already active. He stepped inside to secure a seat in the saloon,
+set his bag down, and after a word or two with the guard, who, of
+course, had not yet been informed of their destination, learning that
+the others were not yet come, he went out again on to the platform for
+coolness’ sake, and to brood in peace.</p>
+
+<p>London looked strange this morning, he thought. Here beneath him was the
+common, parched somewhat with the intense heat of the previous week,
+stretching for perhaps half-a-mile—tumbled ground, smooth stretches of
+turf, and the heads of heavy trees up to the first house-roofs, set,
+too, it seemed, in bowers of foliage. Then beyond that began the serried
+array, line beyond line, broken in one spot by the gleam of a
+river-reach, and then on again fading beyond eyesight. But what
+surprised him was the density of the air; it was now, as old books
+related it had been in the days of smoke. There was no freshness, no
+translucence of morning atmosphere; it was impossible to point in any
+one direction to the source of this veiling gloom, for on all sides it
+was the same. Even the sky overhead lacked its blue; it appeared painted
+with a muddy brush, and the sun shewed the same faint tinge of red. Yes,
+it was like that, he said wearily to himself—like a second-rate sketch;
+there was no sense of mystery as of a veiled city, but rather unreality.
+The shadows seemed lacking in definiteness, the outlines and grouping in
+coherence. A storm was wanted, he reflected; or even, it might be, one
+more earthquake on the other side of the world would, in wonderful
+illustration of the globe’s unity, relieve the pressure on this side.
+Well, well; the journey would be worth taking even for the interest of
+observing climatic changes; but it would be terribly hot, he mused, by
+the time the south of France was reached.</p>
+
+<p>Then his thoughts leaped back to their own gnawing misery.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It was another ten minutes before he saw the scarlet Government motor,
+with awnings out, slide up the road from the direction of Fulham; and
+yet five minutes more before the three men appeared with their servants
+behind them—Maxwell, Snowford and Cartwright, all alike, as was Oliver,
+in white duck from head to foot.</p>
+
+<p>They did not speak one word of their business, for the officials were
+going to and fro, and it was advisable to guard against even the
+smallest possibility of betrayal. The guard had been told that the volor
+was required for a three days’ journey, that provisions were to be taken
+in for that period, and that the first point towards which the course
+was to lie was the centre of the South Downs. There would be no stopping
+for at least a day and a night.</p>
+
+<p>Further instructions had reached them from the President on the previous
+morning, by which time He had completed His visitation, and received the
+assent of the Emergency Councils of the world. This Snowford commented
+upon in an undertone, and added a word or two as to details, as the four
+stood together looking out over the city.</p>
+
+<p>Briefly, the plan was as follows, at least so far as it concerned
+England. The volor was to approach Palestine from the direction of the
+Mediterranean, observing to get into touch with France on her left and
+Spain on her right within ten miles of the eastern end of Crete. The
+approximate hour was fixed at twenty-three (eastern time). At this point
+she was to show her night signal, a scarlet line on a white field; and
+in the event of her failing to observe her neighbours was to circle at
+that point, at a height of eight hundred feet, until either the two were
+sighted or further instructions were received. For the purpose of
+dealing with emergencies, the President’s car, which would finally make
+its entrance from the south, was to be accompanied by an <i>aide-de-camp</i>
+capable of moving at a very high speed, whose signals were to be taken
+as Felsenburgh’s own.</p>
+
+<p>So soon as the circle was completed, having Esdraelon as its centre with
+a radius of five hundred and forty miles, the volors were to advance,
+dropping gradually to within five hundred feet of sea-level, and
+diminishing their distance one from another from the twenty-five miles
+or so at which they would first find themselves, until they were as near
+as safety allowed. In this manner the advance at a pace of fifty miles
+an hour from the moment that the circle was arranged would bring them
+within sight of Nazareth at about nine o’clock on the Sunday morning.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The guard came up to the four as they stood there silent.</p>
+
+<p>“We are ready, gentlemen,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“What do you think of the weather?” asked Snowford abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>The guard pursed his lips.</p>
+
+<p>“A little thunder, I expect, sir,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Oliver looked at him curiously.</p>
+
+<p>“No more than that?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“I should say a storm, sir,” observed the guard shortly.</p>
+
+<p>Snowford turned towards the gangway.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, we had best be off: we can lose time further on, if we wish.”</p>
+
+<p>It was about five minutes more before all was ready. From the stern of
+the boat came a faint smell of cooking, for breakfast would be served
+immediately, and a white-capped cook protruded his head for an instant,
+to question the guard. The four sat down in the gorgeous saloon in the
+bows; Oliver silent by himself, the other three talking in low voices
+together. Once more the guard passed through to his compartment at the
+prow, glancing as he went to see that all were seated; and an instant
+later came the clang of the signal. Then through all the length of the
+boat—for she was the fastest ship that England possessed—passed the
+thrill of the propeller beginning to work up speed; and simultaneously
+Oliver, staring sideways through the plate-glass window, saw the rail
+drop away, and the long line of London, pale beneath the tinged sky,
+surge up suddenly. He caught a glimpse of a little group of persons
+staring up from below, and they, too, dropped in a great swirl, and
+vanished. Then, with a flash of dusty green, the Common had vanished,
+and a pavement of house-roofs began to stream beneath, the long lines of
+streets on this side and that turning like spokes of a gigantic wheel;
+once more this pavement thinned, showing green again as between
+infrequently laid cobble-stones; then they, too, were gone, and the
+country was open beneath.</p>
+
+<p>Snowford rose, staggering a little.</p>
+
+<p>“I may as well tell the guard now,” he said. “Then we need not be
+interrupted again.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="3CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p>The Syrian awoke from a dream that a myriad faces were looking into his
+own, eager, attentive and horrible, in his corner of the roof-top, and
+sat up sweating and gasping aloud for breath. For an instant he thought
+that he was really dying, and that the spiritual world was about him.
+Then, as he struggled, sense came back, and he stood up, drawing long
+breaths of the stifling night air.</p>
+
+<p>Above him the sky was as the pit, black and empty; there was not a
+glimmer of light, though the moon was surely up. He had seen her four
+hours before, a red sickle, swing slowly out from Thabor. Across the
+plain, as he looked from the parapet, there was nothing. For a few yards
+there lay across the broken ground a single crooked lance of light from
+a half-closed shutter; and beneath that, nothing. To the north again,
+nothing; to the west a glimmer, pale as a moth’s wing, from the
+house-roofs of Nazareth; to the east, nothing. He might be on a
+tower-top in space, except for that line of light and that grey glimmer
+that evaded the eye.</p>
+
+<p>On the roof, however, it was possible to make out at least outlines, for
+the dormer trap had been left open at the head of the stairs, and from
+somewhere within the depths of the house there stole up a faint
+refracted light.</p>
+
+<p>There was a white bundle in that corner; that would be the pillow of the
+Benedictine abbot. He had seen him lay himself down there some time—was
+it four hours or four centuries ago? There was a grey shape stretched
+along that pale wall—the Friar, he thought; there were other irregular
+outlines breaking the face of the parapet, here and there along the
+sides.</p>
+
+<p>Very softly, for he knew the caprices of sleep, he stepped across the
+paved roof to the opposite parapet and looked over, for there yet hung
+about him a desire for reassurance that he was still in company with
+flesh and blood. Yes, indeed he was still on earth; for there was a real
+and distinct light burning among the tumbled rocks, and beside it,
+delicate as a miniature, the head and shoulders of a man, writing. And
+in the circle of light were other figures, pale, broken patches on which
+men lay; a pole or two, erected with the thought of a tent to follow; a
+little pile of luggage with a rug across it; and beyond the circle other
+outlines and shapes faded away into the stupendous blackness.</p>
+
+<p>Then the writing man moved his head, and a monstrous shadow fled across
+the ground; a yelp as of a strangling dog broke out suddenly close
+behind him, and, as he turned, a moaning figure sat up on the roof,
+sobbing itself awake. Another moved at the sound, and then as, sighing,
+the former relapsed heavily against the wall, once more the priest went
+back to his place, still doubtful as to the reality of all that he saw,
+and the breathless silence came down again as a pall.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>He woke again from dreamless sleep, and there was a change. From his
+corner, as he raised his heavy eyes, there met them what seemed an
+unbearable brightness; then, as he looked, it resolved itself into a
+candle-flame, and beyond it a white sleeve, and higher yet a white face
+and throat. He understood, and rose reeling; it was the messenger come
+to fetch him as had been arranged.</p>
+
+<p>As he passed across the space, once he looked round him, and it seemed
+that the dawn must have come, for that appalling sky overhead was
+visible at last. An enormous vault, smoke-coloured and opaque, seemed to
+curve away to the ghostly horizons on either side where the far-away
+hills raised sharp shapes as if cut in paper. Carmel was before him; at
+least he thought it was that—a bull head and shoulders thrusting itself
+forward and ending in an abrupt descent, and beyond that again the
+glimmering sky. There were no clouds, no outlines to break the huge,
+smooth, dusky dome beneath the centre of which this house-roof seemed
+poised. Across the parapet, as he glanced to the right before descending
+the steps, stretched Esdraelon, sad-coloured and sombre, into the
+metallic distance. It was all as unreal as some fantastic picture by one
+who had never looked upon clear sunlight. The silence was complete and
+profound.</p>
+
+<p>Straight down through the wheeling shadows he went, following the
+white-hooded head and figure down the stairs, along the tiny passage,
+stumbling once against the feet of one who slept with limbs tossed loose
+like a tired dog; the feet drew back mechanically, and a little moan
+broke from the shadows. Then he went on, passing the servant who stood
+aside, and entered.</p>
+
+<p>There were half-a-dozen men gathered here, silent, white figures
+standing apart one from the other, who genuflected as the Pope came in
+simultaneously through the opposite door, and again stood white-faced
+and attentive. He ran his eyes over them as he stopped, waiting behind
+his master’s chair—there were two he knew, remembering them from last
+night—dark-faced Cardinal Ruspoli, and the lean Australian Archbishop,
+besides Cardinal Corkran, who stood by his chair at the Pope’s own
+table, with papers laid ready.</p>
+
+<p>Silvester sat down, and with a little gesture caused the others to sit
+too. Then He began at once in that quiet tired voice that his servant
+knew so well.</p>
+
+<p>“Eminences-we are all here, I think. We need lose no more time, then....
+Cardinal Corkran has something to communicate—-” He turned a little.
+“Father, sit down, if you please. This will occupy a little while.”</p>
+
+<p>The priest went across to the stone window-seat, whence he could watch
+the Pope’s face in the light of the two candles that now stood on the
+table between him and the Cardinal-Secretary. Then the Cardinal began,
+glancing up from his papers.</p>
+
+<p>“Holiness. I had better begin a little way back. Their Eminences have
+not heard the details properly....</p>
+
+<p>“I received at Damascus, on last Friday week, inquiries from various
+prelates in different parts of the world, as to the actual measure
+concerning the new policy of persecution. At first I could tell them
+nothing positively, for it was not until after twenty o’clock that
+Cardinal Ruspoli, in Turin, informed me of the facts. Cardinal Malpas
+confirmed them a few minutes later, and the Cardinal Archbishop of Pekin
+at twenty-three. Before mid-day on Saturday I received final
+confirmation from my messengers in London.</p>
+
+<p>“I was at first surprised that Cardinal Dolgorovski did not communicate
+it; for almost simultaneously with the Turin message I received one from
+a priest of the Order of Christ Crucified in Moscow, to which, of
+course, I paid no attention. (It is our rule, Eminences, to treat
+unauthorised communications in that way.) His Holiness, however, bade me
+make inquiries, and I learned from Father Petrovoski and others that the
+Government placards published the news at twenty o’clock—by our time.
+It was curious, therefore, that the Cardinal had not seen it; if he had
+seen it, it was, of course, his duty to acquaint me immediately.</p>
+
+<p>“Since that time, however, the following facts have come out. It is
+established beyond a doubt that Cardinal Dolgorovski received a visitor
+in the course of the evening. His own chaplain, who, your Eminences are
+perhaps aware, has been very active in Russia on behalf of the Church,
+informs me of this privately. Yet the Cardinal asserts, in explanation
+of his silence, that he was alone during those hours, and had given
+orders that no one was to be admitted to his presence without urgent
+cause. This, of course, confirmed His Holiness’s opinion, but I received
+orders from Him to act as if nothing had happened, and to command the
+Cardinal’s presence here with the rest of the Sacred College. To this I
+received an intimation that he would be present. Yesterday, however, a
+little before mid-day, I received a further message that his Eminency
+had met with a slight accident, but that he yet hoped to present himself
+in time for the deliberations. Since then no further news has arrived.”</p>
+
+<p>There was a dead silence.</p>
+
+<p>Then the Pope turned to the Syrian priest.</p>
+
+<p>“Father,” he said, “it was you who received his Eminency’s messages.
+Have you anything to add to this?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, Holiness.”</p>
+
+<p>He turned again.</p>
+
+<p>“My son,” he said, “report to Us publicly what you have already
+reported to Us in private.”</p>
+
+<p>A small, bright-eyed man moved out of the shadows.</p>
+
+<p>“Holiness, it was I who conveyed the message to Cardinal Dolgorovski. He
+refused at first to receive me. When I reached his presence and
+communicated the command he was silent; then he smiled; then he told me
+to carry back the message that he would obey.”</p>
+
+<p>Again the Pope was silent.</p>
+
+<p>Then suddenly the tall Australian stood up.</p>
+
+<p>“Holiness,” he said, “I was once intimate with that man. It was partly
+through my means that he sought reception into the Catholic Church. This
+was not less than fourteen years ago, when the fortunes of the Church
+seemed about to prosper.... Our friendly relations ceased two years ago,
+and I may say that, from what I know of him, I find no difficulty in
+believing—-”</p>
+
+<p>As his voice shook with passion and he faltered, Silvester raised his
+hand.</p>
+
+<p>“We desire no recriminations. Even the evidence is now useless, for what
+was to be done has been done. For ourselves, we have no doubt as to its
+nature.... It was to this man that Christ gave the morsel through our
+hands, saying <i>Quod faces, fac cities. Cum ergo accepisset Me buccellam,
+exivit continuo. Erat autem nox.</i>”</p>
+
+<p>Again fell the silence, and in the pause sounded a long half-vocal sigh
+from without the door. It came and went as a sleeper turned, for the
+passage was crowded with exhausted men—as a soul might sigh that passed
+from light to darkness.</p>
+
+<p>Then Silvester spoke again. And as He spoke He began, as if
+mechanically, to tear up a long paper, written with lists of names, that
+lay before Him.</p>
+
+<p>“Eminences, it is three hours after dawn. In two hours more We shall say
+mass in your presence, and give Holy Communion. During those two hours
+We commission you to communicate this news to all who are assembled
+here; and further, We bestow on each and all of you jurisdiction apart
+from all previous rules of time and place; we give a Plenary Indulgence
+to all who confess and communicate this day. Father—” he turned to the
+Syrian—“Father, you will now expose the Blessed Sacrament in the
+chapel, after which you will proceed to the village and inform the
+inhabitants that if they wish to save their lives they had best be gone
+immediately—immediately, you understand.”</p>
+
+<p>The Syrian started from his daze.</p>
+
+<p>“Holiness,” he stammered, stretching out a hand, “the lists, the lists!”</p>
+
+<p>(He had seen what these were.)</p>
+
+<p>But Silvester only smiled as He tossed the fragments on to the table.
+Then He stood up.</p>
+
+<p>“You need not trouble, my son.... We shall not need these any more....</p>
+
+<p>“One last word, Eminences.... If there is one heart here that doubts or
+is afraid, I have a word to say.”</p>
+
+<p>He paused, with an extraordinarily simple deliberateness, ran the eyes
+round the tense faces turned to Him.</p>
+
+<p>“I have had a Vision of God,” He said softly. “I walk no more by faith,
+but by sight.”</p>
+
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p>An hour later the priest toiled back in the hot twilight up the path
+from the village, followed by half-a-dozen silent men, twenty yards
+behind, whose curiosity exceeded their credulousness. He had left a few
+more standing bewildered at the doors of the little mud-houses; and had
+seen perhaps a hundred families, weighted with domestic articles, pour
+like a stream down the rocky path that led to Khaifa. He had been cursed
+by some, even threatened; stared upon by others; mocked by a few. The
+fanatical said that the Christians had brought God’s wrath upon the
+place, and the darkness upon the sky: the sun was dying, for these
+hounds were too evil for him to look upon and live. Others again seemed
+to see nothing remarkable in the state of the weather....</p>
+
+<p>There was no change in that sky from its state an hour before, except
+that perhaps it had lightened a little as the sun climbed higher behind
+that impenetrable dusky shroud. Hills, grass, men’s faces—all bore to
+the priest’s eyes the look of unreality; they were as things seen in a
+dream by eyes that roll with sleep through lids weighted with lead. Even
+to other physical senses that unreality was present; and once more he
+remembered his dream, thankful that that horror at least was absent. But
+silence seemed other than a negation of sound, it was a thing in itself,
+an affirmation, unruffled by the sound of footsteps, the thin barking of
+dogs, the murmur of voices. It appeared as if the stillness of eternity
+had descended and embraced the world’s activities, and as if that world,
+in a desperate attempt to assert its own reality, was braced in a set,
+motionless, noiseless, breathless effort to hold itself in being. What
+Silvester had said just now was beginning to be true of this man also.
+The touch of the powdery soil and the warm pebbles beneath the priest’s
+bare feet seemed something apart from the consciousness that usually
+regards the things of sense as more real and more intimate than the
+things of spirit. Matter still had a reality, still occupied space, but
+it was of a subjective nature, the result of internal rather than
+external powers. He appeared to himself already to be scarcely more than
+a soul, intent and steady, united by a thread only to the body and the
+world with which he was yet in relations. He knew that the appalling
+heat was there; once even, before his eyes a patch of beaten ground
+cracked and lisped as water that touches hot iron, as he trod upon it.
+He could feel the heat upon his forehead and hands, his whole body was
+swathed and soaked in it; yet he regarded it as from an outside
+standpoint, as a man with neuritis perceives that the pain is no longer
+in his hand but in the pillow which supports it. So, too, with what his
+eyes looked upon and his ears heard; so, too, with that faint bitter
+taste that lay upon his lips and nostrils. There was no longer in him
+fear or even hope—he regarded himself, the world, and even the
+enshrouding and awful Presence of spirit as facts with which he had but
+little to do. He was scarcely even interested; still less was he
+distressed. There was Thabor before him—at least what once had been
+Thabor, now it was no more than a huge and dusky dome-shape which
+impressed itself upon his retina and informed his passive brain of its
+existence and outline, though that existence seemed no better than that
+of a dissolving phantom.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed then almost natural—or at least as natural as all else—as he
+came in through the passage and opened the chapel-door, to see that the
+floor was crowded with prostrate motionless figures. There they lay, all
+alike in the white burnous which he had given out last night; and, with
+forehead on arms, as during the singing of the Litany of the Saints at
+an ordination, lay the figure he knew best and loved more than all the
+world, the shoulders and white hair at a slight elevation upon the
+single altar step. Above the plain altar itself burned the six tall
+candles; and in the midst, on the mean little throne, stood the
+white-metal monstrance, with its White Centre....</p>
+
+<p>Then he, too, dropped, and lay as he was....</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>He did not know how long it was before the circling observant
+consciousness, the flow of slow images, the vibration of particular
+thoughts, ceased and stilled as a pool rocks quietly to peace after the
+dropped stone has long lain still. But it came at last—that superb
+tranquillity, possible only when the senses are physically awake, with
+which God, perhaps once in a lifetime, rewards the aspiring trustful
+soul—that point of complete rest in the heart of the Fount of all
+existence with which one day He will reward eternally the spirits of His
+children. There was no thought in him of articulating this experience,
+of analysing its elements, or fingering this or that strain of ecstatic
+joy. The time for self-regarding was passed. It was enough that the
+experience was there, although he was not even self-reflective enough to
+tell himself so. He had passed from that circle whence the soul looks
+within, from that circle, too, whence it looks upon objective glory, to
+that very centre where it reposes—and the first sign to him that time
+had passed was the murmur of words, heard distinctly and understood,
+although with that apartness with which a drowsy man perceives a message
+from without—heard as through a veil through which nothing but thinnest
+essence could transpire.</p>
+
+<p><i>Spiritus Domini replevit orbem terrarum.... The Spirit of the Lord hath
+fulfilled all things, alleluia: and that which contains all things hath
+knowledge of the voice, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Exsurgat Deus</i> (and the voice rose ever so slightly). “<i>Let God arise
+and let His enemies be scattered; and let them who hate Him flee before
+His face.</i>”</p>
+
+<p><i>Gloria Patri....</i></p>
+
+<p>Then he raised his heavy head; and a phantom figure stood there in red
+vestments, seeming to float rather than to stand, with thin hands
+outstretched, and white cap on white hair seen in the gleam of the
+steady candle-flames; another, also in white, kneeled on the step....</p>
+
+<p><i>Kyrie eleison ... Gloria in excelsis Deo ...</i> those things passed like
+a shadow-show, with movements and rustlings, but he perceived rather the
+light which cast them. He heard <i>Deus qui in hodierna die ...</i> but his
+passive mind gave no pulse of reflex action, no stir of understanding
+until these words. <i>Cum complerentur dies Pentecostes....</i></p>
+
+<p>“<i>When the day of Pentecost was fully come, all the disciples were with
+one accord in the same place; and there came from heaven suddenly a
+sound, as of a mighty wind approaching, and it filled the house where
+they were sitting....</i>”</p>
+
+<p>Then he remembered and understood.... It was Pentecost then! And with
+memory a shred of reflection came back. Where then was the wind, and the
+flame, and the earthquake, and the secret voice? Yet the world was
+silent, rigid in its last effort at self-assertion: there was no tremor
+to show that God remembered; no actual point of light, yet, breaking the
+appalling vault of gloom that lay over sea and land to reveal that He
+burned there in eternity, transcendent and dominant; not even a voice;
+and at that he understood yet more. He perceived that that world, whose
+monstrous parody his sleep had presented to him in the night, was other
+than that he had feared it to be; it was sweet, not terrible; friendly,
+not hostile; clear, not stifling; and home, not exile. There were
+presences here, but not those gluttonous, lustful things that had looked
+on him last night.... He dropped his head again upon his hands, at once
+ashamed and content; and again he sank down to depths of glimmering
+inner peace....</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Not again, for a while, did he perceive what he did or thought, or what
+passed there, five yards away on the low step. Once only a ripple passed
+across that sea of glass, a ripple of fire and sound like a rising star
+that flicks a line of light across a sleeping lake, like a thin thread
+of vibration streaming from a quivering string across the stillness of a
+deep night—and be perceived for an instant as in a formless mirror that
+a lower nature was struck into existence and into union with the Divine
+nature at the same moment.... And then no more again but the great
+encompassing hush, the sense of the innermost heart of reality, till he
+found himself kneeling at the rail, and knew that That which alone truly
+existed on earth approached him with the swiftness of thought and the
+ardour of Divine Love....</p>
+
+<p>Then, as the mass ended, and he raised his passive happy soul to receive
+the last gift of God, there was a cry, a sudden clamour in the passage,
+and a man stood in the doorway, gabbling Arabic.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p>Yet even at that sound and sight his soul scarcely tightened the languid
+threads that united it through every fibre of his body with the world of
+sense. He saw and heard the tumult in the passage, frantic eyes and
+mouths crying aloud, and, in strange contrast, the pale ecstatic faces
+of those princes who turned and looked; even within the tranquil
+presence-chamber of the spirit where two beings, Incarnate God and all
+but Discarnate Man, were locked in embrace, a certain mental process
+went on. Yet all was still as apart from him as a lighted stage and its
+drama from a self-contained spectator. In the material world, now as
+attenuated as a mirage, events were at hand; but to his soul, balanced
+now on reality and awake to facts, these things were but a spectacle....</p>
+
+<p>He turned to the altar again, and there, as he had known it would be, in
+the midst of clear light, all was at peace: the celebrant, seen as
+through molten glass, adored as He murmured the mystery of the
+Word-made-Flesh, and once more passing to the centre, sank upon His
+knees.</p>
+
+<p>Again the priest understood; for thought was no longer the process of a
+mind, rather it was the glance of a spirit. He knew all now; and, by an
+inevitable impulse, his throat began to sing aloud words that, as he
+sang, opened for the first time as flowers telling their secret to the
+sun.</p>
+
+<p><i>O Salutaris Hostia
+Qui coeli pandis ostium. . . .</i></p>
+
+<p>They were all singing now; even the Mohammedan catechumen who had burst
+in a moment ago sang with the rest, his lean head thrust out and his
+arms tight across his breast; the tiny chapel rang with the forty
+voices, and the vast world thrilled to hear it....</p>
+
+<p>Still singing, the priest saw the veil laid as by a phantom upon the
+Pontiff’s shoulders; there was a movement, a surge of figures—shadows
+only in the midst of substance,</p>
+
+<p><i>... Uni Trinoque Domino ....</i></p>
+
+<p>—and the Pope stood erect, Himself a pallor in the heart of light, with
+spectral folds of silk dripping from His shoulders, His hands swathed in
+them, and His down-bent head hidden by the silver-rayed monstrance and
+That which it bore....</p>
+
+<p><i>... Qui vitam sine termino
+Nobis donet in patria ....</i></p>
+
+<p>... They were moving now, and the world of life swung with them; of so
+much was he aware. He was out in the passage, among the white, frenzied
+faces that with bared teeth stared up at that sight, silenced at last by
+the thunder of <i>Pange Lingua</i>, and the radiance of those who passed out
+to eternal life.... At the corner he turned for an instant to see the
+six pale flames move along a dozen yards behind, as spear-heads about a
+King, and in the midst the silver rays and the White Heart of God....
+Then he was out, and the battle lay in array....</p>
+
+<p>That sky on which he had looked an hour ago had passed from darkness
+charged with light to light overlaid with darkness—from glimmering
+night to Wrathful Day—and that light was red....</p>
+
+<p>From behind Thabor on the left to Carmel on the far right, above the
+hills twenty miles away rested an enormous vault of colour; here were no
+gradations from zenith to horizon; all was the one deep smoulder of
+crimson as of the glow of iron. It was such a colour as men have seen at
+sunsets after rain, while the clouds, more translucent each instant,
+transmit the glory they cannot contain. Here, too, was the sun, pale as
+the Host, set like a fragile wafer above the Mount of Transfiguration,
+and there, far down in the west where men had once cried upon Baal in
+vain, hung the sickle of the white moon. Yet all was no more than
+stained light that lies broken across carven work of stone....</p>
+
+<p class="poetry"><i>... In suprema nocte coena,</i></p>
+
+<p class="p0">sang the myriad voices,</p>
+
+<p class="poetry"><i>Recumbens cum fratribus
+Observata lege plena
+Cibis in legalibus
+Cibum turbae duodenae
+Se dat suis manibus ....</i></p>
+
+<p>He saw, too, poised as motes in light, that ring of strange
+fish-creatures, white as milk, except where the angry glory turned their
+backs to flame, white-winged like floating moths, from the tiny shape
+far to the south to the monster at hand scarcely five hundred yards
+away; and even as he looked, singing as he looked, he understood that
+the circle was nearer, and perceived that these as yet knew nothing....</p>
+
+<p class="poetry"><i>Verbum caro, panem verum
+Verbo carnem efficit ....</i></p>
+
+<p>They were nearer still, until now even at his feet there slid along the
+ground the shadow of a monstrous bird, pale and undefined, as between
+the wan sun and himself moved out the vast shape that a moment ago hung
+above the Hill.... Then again it backed across and waited ...</p>
+
+<p class="poetry"><i>Et si census deficit
+Ad formandum cor sincerum
+Sola fides sufficit ....</i></p>
+
+<p>He had halted and turned, going in the midst of his fellows, hearing,
+he thought, the thrill of harping and the throb of heavenly drums; and,
+across the space, moved now the six flames, steady as if cut of steel in
+that stupendous poise of heaven and earth; and in their centre the
+silver-rayed glory and the Whiteness of God made Man....</p>
+
+<p>... Then, with a roar, came the thunder again, pealing in circle beyond
+circle of those tremendous Presences—Thrones and Powers—who,
+themselves to the world as substance to shadow, are but shadows again
+beneath the apex and within the ring of Absolute Deity.... The thunder
+broke loose, shaking the earth that now cringed on the quivering edge of
+dissolution....</p>
+
+<p class="poetry">TANTUM ERGO SACRAMENTUM
+VENEREMUR CERNUI
+ET ANTIQUUM DOCUMENTUM
+NOVO CEDAT RITUI.</p>
+
+<p>Ah! yes; it was He for whom God waited now—He who far up beneath that
+trembling shadow of a dome, itself but the piteous core of unimagined
+splendour, came in His swift chariot, blind to all save that on which He
+had fixed His eyes so long, unaware that His world corrupted about Him,
+His shadow moving like a pale cloud across the ghostly plain where
+Israel had fought and Sennacherib boasted—that plain lighted now with a
+yet deeper glow, as heaven, kindling to glory beyond glory of yet
+fiercer spiritual flame, still restrained the power knit at last to the
+relief of final revelation, and for the last time the voices sang....</p>
+
+<p class="poetry">PRAESTET FIDES SUPPLEMENTUM
+SENSUUM DEFECTUI ....</p>
+
+<p>... He was coming now, swifter than ever, the heir of temporal ages and
+the Exile of eternity, the final piteous Prince of rebels, the creature
+against God, blinder than the sun which paled and the earth that shook;
+and, as He came, passing even then through the last material stage to
+the thinness of a spirit-fabric, the floating circle swirled behind Him,
+tossing like phantom birds in the wake of a phantom ship.... He was
+coming, and the earth, rent once again in its allegiance, shrank and
+reeled in the agony of divided homage....</p>
+
+<p>... He was coming—and already the shadow swept off the plain and
+vanished, and the pale netted wings were rising to the cheek; and the
+great bell clanged, and the long sweet chord rang out—not more than
+whispers heard across the pealing storm of everlasting praise....</p>
+
+<p class="poetry">.... GENITORI GENITOQUE
+LAUS ET JUBILATIO
+SALUS HONOR VIRTUS QUOQUE
+SIT ET BENEDICTIO
+PROCEDENTI AB UTROQUE
+COMPAR SIT LAUDATIO.</p>
+
+<p class="p0">and once more</p>
+
+<p class="poetry">PROCEDENTI AB UTROQUE
+COMPAR SIT LAUDATIO ....</p>
+
+<p>Then this world passed, and the glory of it.</p>
+
+<p class="center p4">THE END</p>
+
+
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diff --git a/old/14021-h/images/cover.jpg b/old/14021-h/images/cover.jpg
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--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/14021-h/images/cover.jpg
diff --git a/old/old/14021.txt b/old/old/14021.txt
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+++ b/old/old/14021.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,12141 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lord of the World, by Robert Hugh Benson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Lord of the World
+
+Author: Robert Hugh Benson
+
+Release Date: November 11, 2004 [EBook #14021]
+[Last updated: March 21, 2015]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LORD OF THE WORLD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Geoff Horton
+
+
+
+
+
+LORD OF THE WORLD
+
+BY ROBERT HUGH BENSON
+
+Dedication
+
+CLAVI DOMUS DAVID
+
+PREFACE
+
+I am perfectly aware that this is a terribly sensational book, and open
+to innumerable criticisms on that account, as well as on many others.
+But I did not know how else to express the principles I desired (and
+which I passionately believe to be true) except by producing their lines
+to a sensational point. I have tried, however, not to scream unduly
+loud, and to retain, so far as possible, reverence and consideration for
+the opinions of other people. Whether I have succeeded in that attempt
+is quite another matter.
+
+Robert Hugh Benson.
+
+CAMBRIDGE 1907.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+PROLOGUE
+
+BOOK I
+
+THE ADVENT
+
+BOOK II
+
+THE ENCOUNTER
+
+BOOK III
+
+THE VICTORY
+
+
+Persons who do not like tiresome prologues, need not read this one. It
+is essential only to the situation, not to the story.
+
+
+
+PROLOGUE
+
+"You must give me a moment," said the old man, leaning back.
+
+Percy resettled himself in his chair and waited, chin on hand.
+
+It was a very silent room in which the three men sat, furnished with the
+extreme common sense of the period. It had neither window nor door; for
+it was now sixty years since the world, recognising that space is not
+confined to the surface of the globe, had begun to burrow in earnest.
+Old Mr. Templeton's house stood some forty feet below the level of the
+Thames embankment, in what was considered a somewhat commodious
+position, for he had only a hundred yards to walk before he reached the
+station of the Second Central Motor-circle, and a quarter of a mile to
+the volor-station at Blackfriars. He was over ninety years old, however,
+and seldom left his house now. The room itself was lined throughout with
+the delicate green jade-enamel prescribed by the Board of Health, and
+was suffused with the artificial sunlight discovered by the great Reuter
+forty years before; it had the colour-tone of a spring wood, and was
+warmed and ventilated through the classical frieze grating to the exact
+temperature of 18 degrees Centigrade. Mr. Templeton was a plain man,
+content to live as his father had lived before him. The furniture, too,
+was a little old-fashioned in make and design, constructed however
+according to the prevailing system of soft asbestos enamel welded over
+iron, indestructible, pleasant to the touch, and resembling mahogany. A
+couple of book-cases well filled ran on either side of the bronze
+pedestal electric fire before which sat the three men; and in the
+further corners stood the hydraulic lifts that gave entrance, the one to
+the bedroom, the other to the corridor fifty feet up which opened on to
+the Embankment.
+
+Father Percy Franklin, the elder of the two priests, was rather a
+remarkable-looking man, not more than thirty-five years old, but with
+hair that was white throughout; his grey eyes, under black eyebrows,
+were peculiarly bright and almost passionate; but his prominent nose and
+chin and the extreme decisiveness of his mouth reassured the observer as
+to his will. Strangers usually looked twice at him.
+
+Father Francis, however, sitting in his upright chair on the other side
+of the hearth, brought down the average; for, though his brown eyes were
+pleasant and pathetic, there was no strength in his face; there was even
+a tendency to feminine melancholy in the corners of his mouth and the
+marked droop of his eyelids.
+
+Mr. Templeton was just a very old man, with a strong face in folds,
+clean-shaven like the rest of the world, and was now lying back on his
+water-pillows with the quilt over his feet.
+
+* * * * *
+
+At last he spoke, glancing first at Percy, on his left.
+
+"Well," he said, "it is a great business to remember exactly; but this
+is how I put it to myself."
+
+"In England our party was first seriously alarmed at the Labour
+Parliament of 1917. That showed us how deeply Herveism had impregnated
+the whole social atmosphere. There had been Socialists before, but none
+like Gustave Herve in his old age--at least no one of the same power.
+He, perhaps you have read, taught absolute Materialism and Socialism
+developed to their logical issues. Patriotism, he said, was a relic of
+barbarism; and sensual enjoyment was the only certain good. Of course,
+every one laughed at him. It was said that without religion there could
+be no adequate motive among the masses for even the simplest social
+order. But he was right, it seemed. After the fall of the French Church
+at the beginning of the century and the massacres of 1914, the
+bourgeoisie settled down to organise itself; and that extraordinary
+movement began in earnest, pushed through by the middle classes, with no
+patriotism, no class distinctions, practically no army. Of course,
+Freemasonry directed it all. This spread to Germany, where the influence
+of Karl Marx had already---"
+
+"Yes, sir," put in Percy smoothly, "but what of England, if you don't
+mind---"
+
+"Ah, yes; England. Well, in 1917 the Labour party gathered up the reins,
+and Communism really began. That was long before I can remember, of
+course, but my father used to date it from then. The only wonder was
+that things did not go forward more quickly; but I suppose there was a
+good deal of Tory leaven left. Besides, centuries generally run slower
+than is expected, especially after beginning with an impulse. But the
+new order began then; and the Communists have never suffered a serious
+reverse since, except the little one in '25. Blenkin founded 'The New
+People' then; and the 'Times' dropped out; but it was not, strangely
+enough, till '35 that the House of Lords fell for the last time. The
+Established Church had gone finally in '29."
+
+"And the religious effect of that?" asked Percy swiftly, as the old man
+paused to cough slightly, lifting his inhaler. The priest was anxious to
+keep to the point.
+
+"It was an effect itself," said the other, "rather than a cause. You
+see, the Ritualists, as they used to call them, after a desperate
+attempt to get into the Labour swim, came into the Church after the
+Convocation of '19, when the Nicene Creed dropped out; and there was no
+real enthusiasm except among them. But so far as there was an effect
+from the final Disestablishment, I think it was that what was left of
+the State Church melted into the Free Church, and the Free Church was,
+after all, nothing more than a little sentiment. The Bible was
+completely given up as an authority after the renewed German attacks in
+the twenties; and the Divinity of our Lord, some think, had gone all but
+in name by the beginning of the century. The Kenotic theory had provided
+for that. Then there was that strange little movement among the Free
+Churchmen even earlier; when ministers who did no more than follow the
+swim--who were sensitive to draughts, so to speak--broke off from their
+old positions. It is curious to read in the history of the time how they
+were hailed as independent thinkers. It was just exactly what they were
+not.... Where was I? Oh, yes.... Well, that cleared the ground for us,
+and the Church made extraordinary progress for a while--extraordinary,
+that is, under the circumstances, because you must remember, things were
+very different from twenty, or even ten, years before. I mean that,
+roughly speaking, the severing of the sheep and the goats had begun. The
+religious people were practically all Catholics and Individualists; the
+irreligious people rejected the supernatural altogether, and were, to a
+man, Materialists and Communists. But we made progress because we had a
+few exceptional men--Delaney the philosopher, McArthur and Largent, the
+philanthropists, and so on. It really seemed as if Delaney and his
+disciples might carry everything before them. You remember his
+'Analogy'? Oh, yes, it is all in the text-books....
+
+"Well, then, at the close of the Vatican Council, which had been called
+in the nineteenth century, and never dissolved, we lost a great number
+through the final definitions. The 'Exodus of the Intellectuals' the
+world called it---"
+
+"The Biblical decisions," put in the younger priest.
+
+"That partly; and the whole conflict that began with the rise of
+Modernism at the beginning of the century but much more the condemnation
+of Delaney, and of the New Transcendentalism generally, as it was then
+understood. He died outside the Church, you know. Then there was the
+condemnation of Sciotti's book on Comparative Religion.... After that
+the Communists went on by strides, although by very slow ones. It seems
+extraordinary to you, I dare say, but you cannot imagine the excitement
+when the _Necessary Trades Bill_ became law in '60. People thought that
+all enterprise would stop when so many professions were nationalised;
+but, you know, it didn't. Certainly the nation was behind it."
+
+"What year was the _Two-Thirds Majority Bill_ passed?" asked Percy.
+
+"Oh! long before--within a year or two of the fall of the House of
+Lords. It was necessary, I think, or the Individualists would have gone
+raving mad.... Well, the _Necessary Trades Bill_ was inevitable: people
+had begun to see that even so far back as the time when the railways
+were municipalised. For a while there was a burst of art; because all
+the Individualists who could went in for it (it was then that the Toller
+school was founded); but they soon drifted back into Government
+employment; after all, the six-per-cent limit for all individual
+enterprise was not much of a temptation; and Government paid well."
+
+Percy shook his head.
+
+"Yes; but I cannot understand the present state of affairs. You said
+just now that things went slowly?"
+
+"Yes," said the old man, "but you must remember the Poor Laws. That
+established the Communists for ever. Certainly Braithwaite knew his
+business."
+
+The younger priest looked up inquiringly.
+
+"The abolition of the old workhouse system," said Mr. Templeton. "It is
+all ancient history to you, of course; but I remember as if it was
+yesterday. It was that which brought down what was still called the
+Monarchy and the Universities."
+
+"Ah," said Percy. "I should like to hear you talk about that, sir."
+
+"Presently, father.... Well, this is what Braithwaite did. By the old
+system all paupers were treated alike, and resented it. By the new
+system there were the three grades that we have now, and the
+enfranchisement of the two higher grades. Only the absolutely worthless
+were assigned to the third grade, and treated more or less as
+criminals--of course after careful examination. Then there was the
+reorganisation of the Old Age Pensions. Well, don't you see how strong
+that made the Communists? The Individualists--they were still called
+Tories when I was a boy--the Individualists have had no chance since.
+They are no more than a worn-out drag now. The whole of the working
+classes--and that meant ninety-nine of a hundred--were all against
+them."
+
+Percy looked up; but the other went on.
+
+"Then there was the Prison Reform Bill under Macpherson, and the
+abolition of capital punishment; there was the final Education Act of
+'59, whereby dogmatic secularism was established; the practical
+abolition of inheritance under the reformation of the Death Duties---"
+
+"I forget what the old system was," said Percy.
+
+"Why, it seems incredible, but the old system was that all paid alike.
+First came the Heirloom Act, and then the change by which inherited
+wealth paid three times the duty of earned wealth, leading up to the
+acceptance of Karl Marx's doctrines in '89--but the former came in
+'77.... Well, all these things kept England up to the level of the
+Continent; she had only been just in time to join in with the final
+scheme of Western Free Trade. That was the first effect, you remember,
+of the Socialists' victory in Germany."
+
+"And how did we keep out of the Eastern War?" asked Percy anxiously.
+
+"Oh! that's a long story; but, in a word, America stopped us; so we lost
+India and Australia. I think that was the nearest to the downfall of the
+Communists since '25. But Braithwaite got out of it very cleverly by
+getting us the protectorate of South Africa once and for all. He was an
+old man then, too."
+
+Mr. Templeton stopped to cough again. Father Francis sighed and shifted
+in his chair.
+
+"And America?" asked Percy.
+
+"Ah! all that is very complicated. But she knew her strength and annexed
+Canada the same year. That was when we were at our weakest."
+
+Percy stood up.
+
+"Have you a Comparative Atlas, sir?" he asked.
+
+The old man pointed to a shelf.
+
+"There," he said.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Percy looked at the sheets a minute or two in silence, spreading them on
+his knees.
+
+"It is all much simpler, certainly," he murmured, glancing first at the
+old complicated colouring of the beginning of the twentieth century, and
+then at the three great washes of the twenty-first.
+
+He moved his finger along Asia. The words EASTERN EMPIRE ran across the
+pale yellow, from the Ural Mountains on the left to the Behring Straits
+on the right, curling round in giant letters through India, Australia,
+and New Zealand. He glanced at the red; it was considerably smaller, but
+still important enough, considering that it covered not only Europe
+proper, but all Russia up to the Ural Mountains, and Africa to the
+south. The blue-labelled AMERICAN REPUBLIC swept over the whole of that
+continent, and disappeared right round to the left of the Western
+Hemisphere in a shower of blue sparks on the white sea.
+
+"Yes, it's simpler," said the old man drily.
+
+Percy shut the book and set it by his chair.
+
+"And what next, sir? What will happen?"
+
+The old Tory statesman smiled.
+
+"God knows," he said. "If the Eastern Empire chooses to move, we can do
+nothing. I don't know why they have not moved. I suppose it is because
+of religious differences."
+
+"Europe will not split?" asked the priest.
+
+"No, no. We know our danger now. And America would certainly help us.
+But, all the same, God help us--or you, I should rather say--if the
+Empire does move! She knows her strength at last."
+
+There was silence for a moment or two. A faint vibration trembled
+through the deep-sunk room as some huge machine went past on the broad
+boulevard overhead.
+
+"Prophesy, sir," said Percy suddenly. "I mean about religion."
+
+Mr. Templeton inhaled another long breath from his instrument. Then
+again he took up his discourse.
+
+"Briefly," he said, "there are three forces--Catholicism,
+Humanitarianism, and the Eastern religions. About the third I cannot
+prophesy, though I think the Sufis will be victorious. Anything may
+happen; Esotericism is making enormous strides--and that means
+Pantheism; and the blending of the Chinese and Japanese dynasties throws
+out all our calculations. But in Europe and America, there is no doubt
+that the struggle lies between the other two. We can neglect everything
+else. And, I think, if you wish me to say what I think, that, humanly
+speaking, Catholicism will decrease rapidly now. It is perfectly true
+that Protestantism is dead. Men do recognise at last that a supernatural
+Religion involves an absolute authority, and that Private Judgment in
+matters of faith is nothing else than the beginning of disintegration.
+And it is also true that since the Catholic Church is the only
+institution that even claims supernatural authority, with all its
+merciless logic, she has again the allegiance of practically all
+Christians who have any supernatural belief left. There are a few
+faddists left, especially in America and here; but they are negligible.
+That is all very well; but, on the other hand, you must remember that
+Humanitarianism, contrary to all persons' expectations, is becoming an
+actual religion itself, though anti-supernatural. It is Pantheism; it is
+developing a ritual under Freemasonry; it has a creed, 'God is Man,' and
+the rest. It has therefore a real food of a sort to offer to religious
+cravings; it idealises, and yet it makes no demand upon the spiritual
+faculties. Then, they have the use of all the churches except ours, and
+all the Cathedrals; and they are beginning at last to encourage
+sentiment. Then, they may display their symbols and we may not: I think
+that they will be established legally in another ten years at the
+latest.
+
+"Now, we Catholics, remember, are losing; we have lost steadily for more
+than fifty years. I suppose that we have, nominally, about one-fortieth
+of America now--and that is the result of the Catholic movement of the
+early twenties. In France and Spain we are nowhere; in Germany we are
+less. We hold our position in the East, certainly; but even there we
+have not more than one in two hundred--so the statistics say--and we are
+scattered. In Italy? Well, we have Rome again to ourselves, but nothing
+else; here, we have Ireland altogether and perhaps one in sixty of
+England, Wales and Scotland; but we had one in forty seventy years ago.
+Then there is the enormous progress of psychology--all clean against us
+for at least a century. First, you see, there was Materialism, pure and
+simple that failed more or less--it was too crude--until psychology came
+to the rescue. Now psychology claims all the rest of the ground; and the
+supernatural sense seems accounted for. That's the claim. No, father, we
+are losing; and we shall go on losing, and I think we must even be ready
+for a catastrophe at any moment."
+
+"But---" began Percy.
+
+"You think that weak for an old man on the edge of the grave. Well, it
+is what I think. I see no hope. In fact, it seems to me that even now
+something may come on us quickly. No; I see no hope until---"
+
+Percy looked up sharply.
+
+"Until our Lord comes back," said the old statesman.
+
+Father Francis sighed once more, and there fell a silence.
+
+* * * * *
+
+"And the fall of the Universities?" said Percy at last.
+
+"My dear father, it was exactly like the fall of the Monasteries under
+Henry VIII--the same results, the same arguments, the same incidents.
+They were the strongholds of Individualism, as the Monasteries were the
+strongholds of Papalism; and they were regarded with the same kind of
+awe and envy. Then the usual sort of remarks began about the amount of
+port wine drunk; and suddenly people said that they had done their work,
+that the inmates were mistaking means for ends; and there was a great
+deal more reason for saying it. After all, granted the supernatural,
+Religious Houses are an obvious consequence; but the object of secular
+education is presumably the production of something visible--either
+character or competence; and it became quite impossible to prove that
+the Universities produced either--which was worth having. The
+distinction between [Greek: ou] and [Greek: me] is not an end in itself;
+and the kind of person produced by its study was not one which appealed
+to England in the twentieth century. I am not sure that it appealed even
+to me much (and I was always a strong Individualist)--except by way of
+pathos---"
+
+"Yes?" said Percy.
+
+"Oh, it was pathetic enough. The Science Schools of Cambridge and the
+Colonial Department of Oxford were the last hope; and then those went.
+The old dons crept about with their books, but nobody wanted them--they
+were too purely theoretical; some drifted into the poorhouses, first or
+second grade; some were taken care of by charitable clergymen; there was
+that attempt to concentrate in Dublin; but it failed, and people soon
+forgot them. The buildings, as you know, were used for all kinds of
+things. Oxford became an engineering establishment for a while, and
+Cambridge a kind of Government laboratory. I was at King's College, you
+know. Of course it was all as horrible as it could be--though I am glad
+they kept the chapel open even as a museum. It was not nice to see the
+chantries filled with anatomical specimens. However, I don't think it
+was much worse than keeping stoves and surplices in them."
+
+"What happened to you?"
+
+"Oh! I was in Parliament very soon; and I had a little money of my own,
+too. But it was very hard on some of them; they had little pensions, at
+least all who were past work. And yet, I don't know: I suppose it had
+to come. They were very little more than picturesque survivals, you
+know; and had not even the grace of a religious faith about them."
+
+Percy sighed again, looking at the humorously reminiscent face of the
+old man. Then he suddenly changed the subject again.
+
+"What about this European parliament?" he said.
+
+The old man started.
+
+"Oh!... I think it will pass," he said, "if a man can be found to push
+it. All this last century has been leading up to it, as you see.
+Patriotism has been dying fast; but it ought to have died, like slavery
+and so forth, under the influence of the Catholic Church. As it is, the
+work has been done without the Church; and the result is that the world
+is beginning to range itself against us: it is an organised antagonism--
+a kind of Catholic anti-Church. Democracy has done what the Divine
+Monarchy should have done. If the proposal passes I think we may expect
+something like persecution once more.... But, again, the Eastern
+invasion may save us, if it comes off.... I do not know...."
+
+Percy sat still yet a moment; then he stood up suddenly.
+
+"I must go, sir," he said, relapsing into Esperanto. "It is past
+nineteen o'clock. Thank you so much. Are you coming, father?"
+
+Father Francis stood up also, in the dark grey suit permitted to
+priests, and took up his hat.
+
+"Well, father," said the old man again, "come again some day, if I
+haven't been too discursive. I suppose you have to write your letter
+yet?"
+
+Percy nodded.
+
+"I did half of it this morning," he said, "but I felt I wanted another
+bird's-eye view before I could understand properly: I am so grateful to
+you for giving it me. It is really a great labour, this daily letter to
+the Cardinal-Protector. I am thinking of resigning if I am allowed."
+
+"My dear father, don't do that. If I may say so to your face, I think
+you have a very shrewd mind; and unless Rome has balanced information
+she can do nothing. I don't suppose your colleagues are as careful as
+yourself."
+
+Percy smiled, lifting his dark eyebrows deprecatingly.
+
+"Come, father," he said.
+
+* * * * *
+
+The two priests parted at the steps of the corridor, and Percy stood for
+a minute or two staring out at the familiar autumn scene, trying to
+understand what it all meant. What he had heard downstairs seemed
+strangely to illuminate that vision of splendid prosperity that lay
+before him.
+
+The air was as bright as day; artificial sunlight had carried all before
+it, and London now knew no difference between dark and light. He stood
+in a kind of glazed cloister, heavily floored with a preparation of
+rubber on which footsteps made no sound. Beneath him, at the foot of the
+stairs, poured an endless double line of persons severed by a partition,
+going to right and left, noiselessly, except for the murmur of Esperanto
+talking that sounded ceaselessly as they went. Through the clear,
+hardened glass of the public passage showed a broad sleek black roadway,
+ribbed from side to side, and puckered in the centre, significantly
+empty, but even as he stood there a note sounded far away from Old
+Westminster, like the hum of a giant hive, rising as it came, and an
+instant later a transparent thing shot past, flashing from every angle,
+and the note died to a hum again and a silence as the great Government
+motor from the south whirled eastwards with the mails. This was a
+privileged roadway; nothing but state-vehicles were allowed to use it,
+and those at a speed not exceeding one hundred miles an hour.
+
+Other noises were subdued in this city of rubber; the passenger-circles
+were a hundred yards away, and the subterranean traffic lay too deep for
+anything but a vibration to make itself felt. It was to remove this
+vibration, and silence the hum of the ordinary vehicles, that the
+Government experts had been working for the last twenty years.
+
+Once again before he moved there came a long cry from overhead,
+startlingly beautiful and piercing, and, as he lifted his eyes from the
+glimpse of the steady river which alone had refused to be transformed,
+he saw high above him against the heavy illuminated clouds, a long
+slender object, glowing with soft light, slide northwards and vanish on
+outstretched wings. That musical cry, he told himself, was the voice of
+one of the European line of volors announcing its arrival in the capital
+of Great Britain.
+
+"Until our Lord comes back," he thought to himself; and for an instant
+the old misery stabbed at his heart. How difficult it was to hold the
+eyes focussed on that far horizon when this world lay in the foreground
+so compelling in its splendour and its strength! Oh, he had argued with
+Father Francis an hour ago that size was not the same as greatness, and
+that an insistent external could not exclude a subtle internal; and he
+had believed what he had then said; but the doubt yet remained till he
+silenced it by a fierce effort, crying in his heart to the Poor Man of
+Nazareth to keep his heart as the heart of a little child.
+
+Then he set his lips, wondering how long Father Francis would bear the
+pressure, and went down the steps.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I-THE ADVENT
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+I
+
+Oliver Brand, the new member for Croydon (4), sat in his study, looking
+out of the window over the top of his typewriter.
+
+His house stood facing northwards at the extreme end of a spur of the
+Surrey Hills, now cut and tunnelled out of all recognition; only to a
+Communist the view was an inspiriting one. Immediately below the wide
+windows the embanked ground fell away rapidly for perhaps a hundred
+feet, ending in a high wall, and beyond that the world and works of men
+were triumphant as far as eye could see. Two vast tracks like streaked
+race-courses, each not less than a quarter of a mile in width, and sunk
+twenty feet below the surface of the ground, swept up to a meeting a
+mile ahead at the huge junction. Of those, that on his left was the
+First Trunk road to Brighton, inscribed in capital letters in the
+Railroad Guide, that to the right the Second Trunk to the Tunbridge and
+Hastings district. Each was divided length-ways by a cement wall, on one
+side of which, on steel rails, ran the electric trams, and on the other
+lay the motor-track itself again divided into three, on which ran, first
+the Government coaches at a speed of one hundred and fifty miles an
+hour, second the private motors at not more than sixty, third the cheap
+Government line at thirty, with stations every five miles. This was
+further bordered by a road confined to pedestrians, cyclists and
+ordinary cars on which no vehicle was allowed to move at more than
+twelve miles an hour.
+
+Beyond these great tracks lay an immense plain of house-roofs, with
+short towers here and there marking public buildings, from the Caterham
+district on the left to Croydon in front, all clear and bright in
+smokeless air; and far away to the west and north showed the low
+suburban hills against the April sky.
+
+There was surprisingly little sound, considering the pressure of the
+population; and, with the exception of the buzz of the steel rails as a
+train fled north or south, and the occasional sweet chord of the great
+motors as they neared or left the junction, there was little to be heard
+in this study except a smooth, soothing murmur that filled the air like
+the murmur of bees in a garden.
+
+Oliver loved every hint of human life--all busy sights and sounds--and
+was listening now, smiling faintly to himself as he stared out into the
+clear air. Then he set his lips, laid his fingers on the keys once more,
+and went on speech-constructing.
+
+* * * * *
+
+He was very fortunate in the situation of his house. It stood in an
+angle of one of those huge spider-webs with which the country was
+covered, and for his purposes was all that he could expect. It was close
+enough to London to be extremely cheap, for all wealthy persons had
+retired at least a hundred miles from the throbbing heart of England;
+and yet it was as quiet as he could wish. He was within ten minutes of
+Westminster on the one side, and twenty minutes of the sea on the other,
+and his constituency lay before him like a raised map. Further, since
+the great London termini were but ten minutes away, there were at his
+disposal the First Trunk lines to every big town in England. For a
+politician of no great means, who was asked to speak at Edinburgh on one
+evening and in Marseilles on the next, he was as well placed as any man
+in Europe.
+
+He was a pleasant-looking man, not much over thirty years old; black
+wire-haired, clean-shaven, thin, virile, magnetic, blue-eyed and
+white-skinned; and he appeared this day extremely content with himself
+and the world. His lips moved slightly as he worked, his eyes enlarged
+and diminished with excitement, and more than once he paused and stared
+out again, smiling and flushed.
+
+Then a door opened; a middle-aged man came nervously in with a bundle of
+papers, laid them down on the table without a word, and turned to go
+out. Oliver lifted his hand for attention, snapped a lever, and spoke.
+
+"Well, Mr. Phillips?" he said.
+
+"There is news from the East, sir," said the secretary.
+
+Oliver shot a glance sideways, and laid his hand on the bundle.
+
+"Any complete message?" he asked.
+
+"No, sir; it is interrupted again. Mr. Felsenburgh's name is mentioned."
+
+Oliver did not seem to hear; he lifted the flimsy printed sheets with a
+sudden movement, and began turning them.
+
+"The fourth from the top, Mr. Brand," said the secretary.
+
+Oliver jerked his head impatiently, and the other went out as if at a
+signal.
+
+The fourth sheet from the top, printed in red on green, seemed to absorb
+Oliver's attention altogether, for he read it through two or three
+times, leaning back motionless in his chair. Then he sighed, and stared
+again through the window.
+
+Then once more the door opened, and a tall girl came in.
+
+"Well, my dear?" she observed.
+
+Oliver shook his head, with compressed lips.
+
+"Nothing definite," he said. "Even less than usual. Listen."
+
+He took up the green sheet and began to read aloud as the girl sat down
+in a window-seat on his left.
+
+She was a very charming-looking creature, tall and slender, with
+serious, ardent grey eyes, firm red lips, and a beautiful carriage of
+head and shoulders. She had walked slowly across the room as Oliver took
+up the paper, and now sat back in her brown dress in a very graceful and
+stately attitude. She seemed to listen with a deliberate kind of
+patience; but her eyes flickered with interest.
+
+"'Irkutsk--April fourteen--Yesterday--as--usual--But--rumoured--
+defection--from--Sufi--party--Troops--continue--gathering--
+Felsenburgh--addressed--Buddhist--crowd--Attempt--on--Llama--last--
+Friday--work--of--Anarchists--Felsenburgh--leaving--for--Moscow--as
+--arranged--he....' There--that is absolutely all," ended Oliver
+dispiritedly. "It's interrupted as usual."
+
+The girl began to swing a foot.
+
+"I don't understand in the least," she said. "Who is Felsenburgh, after
+all?"
+
+"My dear child, that is what all the world is asking. Nothing is known
+except that he was included in the American deputation at the last
+moment. The _Herald_ published his life last week; but it has been
+contradicted. It is certain that he is quite a young man, and that he
+has been quite obscure until now."
+
+"Well, he is not obscure now," observed the girl.
+
+"I know; it seems as if he were running the whole thing. One never hears
+a word of the others. It's lucky he's on the right side."
+
+"And what do you think?"
+
+Oliver turned vacant eyes again out of the window.
+
+"I think it is touch and go," he said. "The only remarkable thing is
+that here hardly anybody seems to realise it. It's too big for the
+imagination, I suppose. There is no doubt that the East has been
+preparing for a descent on Europe for these last five years. They have
+only been checked by America; and this is one last attempt to stop them.
+But why Felsenburgh should come to the front---" he broke off. "He must
+be a good linguist, at any rate. This is at least the fifth crowd he has
+addressed; perhaps he is just the American interpreter. Christ! I wonder
+who he is."
+
+"Has he any other name?"
+
+"Julian, I believe. One message said so."
+
+"How did this come through?"
+
+Oliver shook his head.
+
+"Private enterprise," he said. "The European agencies have stopped work.
+Every telegraph station is guarded night and day. There are lines of
+volors strung out on every frontier. The Empire means to settle this
+business without us."
+
+"And if it goes wrong?"
+
+"My dear Mabel--if hell breaks loose---" he threw out his hands
+deprecatingly.
+
+"And what is the Government doing?"
+
+"Working night and day; so is the rest of Europe. It'll be Armageddon
+with a vengeance if it comes to war."
+
+"What chance do you see?"
+
+"I see two chances," said Oliver slowly: "one, that they may be afraid
+of America, and may hold their hands from sheer fear; the other that
+they may be induced to hold their hands from charity; if only they can
+be made to understand that co-operation is the one hope of the world.
+But those damned religions of theirs---"
+
+The girl sighed, and looked out again on to the wide plain of
+house-roofs below the window.
+
+The situation was indeed as serious as it could be. That huge Empire,
+consisting of a federalism of States under the Son of Heaven (made
+possible by the merging of the Japanese and Chinese dynasties and the
+fall of Russia), had been consolidating its forces and learning its own
+power during the last thirty-five years, ever since, in fact, it had
+laid its lean yellow hands upon Australia and India. While the rest of
+the world had learned the folly of war, ever since the fall of the
+Russian republic under the combined attack of the yellow races, the last
+had grasped its possibilities. It seemed now as if the civilisation of
+the last century was to be swept back once more into chaos. It was not
+that the mob of the East cared very greatly; it was their rulers who had
+begun to stretch themselves after an almost eternal lethargy, and it was
+hard to imagine how they could be checked at this point. There was a
+touch of grimness too in the rumour that religious fanaticism was behind
+the movement, and that the patient East proposed at last to proselytise
+by the modern equivalents of fire and sword those who had laid aside for
+the most part all religious beliefs except that in Humanity. To Oliver
+it was simply maddening. As he looked from his window and saw that vast
+limit of London laid peaceably before him, as his imagination ran out
+over Europe and saw everywhere that steady triumph of common sense and
+fact over the wild fairy-stories of Christianity, it seemed intolerable
+that there should be even a possibility that all this should be swept
+back again into the barbarous turmoil of sects and dogmas; for no less
+than this would be the result if the East laid hands on Europe. Even
+Catholicism would revive, he told himself, that strange faith that had
+blazed so often as persecution had been dashed to quench it; and, of all
+forms of faith, to Oliver's mind Catholicism was the most grotesque and
+enslaving. And the prospect of all this honestly troubled him, far more
+than the thought of the physical catastrophe and bloodshed that would
+fall on Europe with the advent of the East. There was but one hope on
+the religious side, as he had told Mabel a dozen times, and that was
+that the Quietistic Pantheism which for the last century had made such
+giant strides in East and West alike, among Mohammedans, Buddhists,
+Hindus, Confucianists and the rest, should avail to check the
+supernatural frenzy that inspired their exoteric brethren. Pantheism, he
+understood, was what he held himself; for him "God" was the developing
+sum of created life, and impersonal Unity was the essence of His being;
+competition then was the great heresy that set men one against another
+and delayed all progress; for, to his mind, progress lay in the merging
+of the individual in the family, of the family in the commonwealth, of
+the commonwealth in the continent, and of the continent in the world.
+Finally, the world itself at any moment was no more than the mood of
+impersonal life. It was, in fact, the Catholic idea with the
+supernatural left out, a union of earthly fortunes, an abandonment of
+individualism on the one side, and of supernaturalism on the other. It
+was treason to appeal from God Immanent to God Transcendent; there was
+no God transcendent; God, so far as He could be known, was man.
+
+Yet these two, husband and wife after a fashion--for they had entered
+into that terminable contract now recognised explicitly by the
+State--these two were very far from sharing in the usual heavy dulness
+of mere materialists. The world, for them, beat with one ardent life
+blossoming in flower and beast and man, a torrent of beautiful vigour
+flowing from a deep source and irrigating all that moved or felt. Its
+romance was the more appreciable because it was comprehensible to the
+minds that sprang from it; there were mysteries in it, but mysteries
+that enticed rather than baffled, for they unfolded new glories with
+every discovery that man could make; even inanimate objects, the fossil,
+the electric current, the far-off stars, these were dust thrown off by
+the Spirit of the World--fragrant with His Presence and eloquent of His
+Nature. For example, the announcement made by Klein, the astronomer,
+twenty years before, that the inhabitation of certain planets had become
+a certified fact--how vastly this had altered men's views of themselves.
+But the one condition of progress and the building of Jerusalem, on the
+planet that happened to be men's dwelling place, was peace, not the
+sword which Christ brought or that which Mahomet wielded; but peace that
+arose from, not passed, understanding; the peace that sprang from a
+knowledge that man was all and was able to develop himself only by
+sympathy with his fellows. To Oliver and his wife, then, the last
+century seemed like a revelation; little by little the old superstitions
+had died, and the new light broadened; the Spirit of the World had
+roused Himself, the sun had dawned in the west; and now with horror and
+loathing they had seen the clouds gather once more in the quarter whence
+all superstition had had its birth.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Mabel got up presently and came across to her husband.
+
+"My dear," she said, "you must not be downhearted. It all may pass as it
+passed before. It is a great thing that they are listening to America at
+all. And this Mr. Felsenburgh seems to be on the right side."
+
+Oliver took her hand and kissed it.
+
+
+
+II
+
+Oliver seemed altogether depressed at breakfast, half an hour later. His
+mother, an old lady of nearly eighty, who never appeared till noon,
+seemed to see it at once, for after a look or two at him and a word, she
+subsided into silence behind her plate.
+
+It was a pleasant little room in which they sat, immediately behind
+Oliver's own, and was furnished, according to universal custom, in light
+green. Its windows looked out upon a strip of garden at the back, and
+the high creeper-grown wall that separated that domain from the next.
+The furniture, too, was of the usual sort; a sensible round table stood
+in the middle, with three tall arm-chairs, with the proper angles and
+rests, drawn up to it; and the centre of it, resting apparently on a
+broad round column, held the dishes. It was thirty years now since the
+practice of placing the dining-room above the kitchen, and of raising
+and lowering the courses by hydraulic power into the centre of the
+dining-table, had become universal in the houses of the well-to-do. The
+floor consisted entirely of the asbestos cork preparation invented in
+America, noiseless, clean, and pleasant to both foot and eye.
+
+Mabel broke the silence.
+
+"And your speech to-morrow?" she asked, taking up her fork.
+
+Oliver brightened a little, and began to discourse.
+
+It seemed that Birmingham was beginning to fret. They were crying out
+once more for free trade with America: European facilities were not
+enough, and it was Oliver's business to keep them quiet. It was useless,
+he proposed to tell them, to agitate until the Eastern business was
+settled: they must not bother the Government with such details just now.
+He was to tell them, too, that the Government was wholly on their side;
+that it was bound to come soon.
+
+"They are pig-headed," he added fiercely; "pig-headed and selfish; they
+are like children who cry for food ten minutes before dinner-time: it is
+bound to come if they will wait a little."
+
+"And you will tell them so?"
+
+"That they are pig-headed? Certainly."
+
+Mabel looked at her husband with a pleased twinkle in her eyes. She knew
+perfectly well that his popularity rested largely on his outspokenness:
+folks liked to be scolded and abused by a genial bold man who danced and
+gesticulated in a magnetic fury; she liked it herself.
+
+"How shall you go?" she asked.
+
+"Volor. I shall catch the eighteen o'clock at Blackfriars; the meeting
+is at nineteen, and I shall be back at twenty-one."
+
+He addressed himself vigorously to his _entree_, and his mother looked
+up with a patient, old-woman smile.
+
+Mabel began to drum her fingers softly on the damask.
+
+"Please make haste, my dear," she said; "I have to be at Brighton at
+three."
+
+Oliver gulped his last mouthful, pushed his plate over the line, glanced
+to see if all plates were there, and then put his hand beneath the
+table.
+
+Instantly, without a sound, the centre-piece vanished, and the three
+waited unconcernedly while the clink of dishes came from beneath.
+
+Old Mrs. Brand was a hale-looking old lady, rosy and wrinkled, with the
+mantilla head-dress of fifty years ago; but she, too, looked a little
+depressed this morning. The _entree_ was not very successful, she
+thought; the new food-stuff was not up to the old, it was a trifle
+gritty: she would see about it afterwards. There was a clink, a soft
+sound like a push, and the centre-piece snapped into its place, bearing
+an admirable imitation of a roasted fowl.
+
+Oliver and his wife were alone again for a minute or two after breakfast
+before Mabel started down the path to catch the 14-1/2 o'clock 4th grade
+sub-trunk line to the junction.
+
+"What's the matter with mother?" he said.
+
+"Oh! it's the food-stuff again: she's never got accustomed to it; she
+says it doesn't suit her."
+
+"Nothing else?"
+
+"No, my dear, I am sure of it. She hasn't said a word lately."
+
+Oliver watched his wife go down the path, reassured. He had been a
+little troubled once or twice lately by an odd word or two that his
+mother had let fall. She had been brought up a Christian for a few
+years, and it seemed to him sometimes as if it had left a taint. There
+was an old "Garden of the Soul" that she liked to keep by her, though
+she always protested with an appearance of scorn that it was nothing but
+nonsense. Still, Oliver would have preferred that she had burned it:
+superstition was a desperate thing for retaining life, and, as the brain
+weakened, might conceivably reassert itself. Christianity was both wild
+and dull, he told himself, wild because of its obvious grotesqueness and
+impossibility, and dull because it was so utterly apart from the
+exhilarating stream of human life; it crept dustily about still, he
+knew, in little dark churches here and there; it screamed with
+hysterical sentimentality in Westminster Cathedral which he had once
+entered and looked upon with a kind of disgusted fury; it gabbled
+strange, false words to the incompetent and the old and the half-witted.
+But it would be too dreadful if his own mother ever looked upon it again
+with favour.
+
+Oliver himself, ever since he could remember, had been violently opposed
+to the concessions to Rome and Ireland. It was intolerable that these
+two places should be definitely yielded up to this foolish, treacherous
+nonsense: they were hot-beds of sedition; plague-spots on the face of
+humanity. He had never agreed with those who said that it was better
+that all the poison of the West should be gathered rather than
+dispersed. But, at any rate, there it was. Rome had been given up wholly
+to that old man in white in exchange for all the parish churches and
+cathedrals of Italy, and it was understood that mediaeval darkness
+reigned there supreme; and Ireland, after receiving Home Rule thirty
+years before, had declared for Catholicism, and opened her arms to
+Individualism in its most virulent form. England had laughed and
+assented, for she was saved from a quantity of agitation by the
+immediate departure of half her Catholic population for that island, and
+had, consistently with her Communist-colonial policy, granted every
+facility for Individualism to reduce itself there _ad absurdum_. All
+kinds of funny things were happening there: Oliver had read with a
+bitter amusement of new appearances there, of a Woman in Blue and
+shrines raised where her feet had rested; but he was scarcely amused at
+Rome, for the movement to Turin of the Italian Government had deprived
+the Republic of quite a quantity of sentimental prestige, and had haloed
+the old religious nonsense with all the meretriciousness of historical
+association. However, it obviously could not last much longer: the world
+was beginning to understand at last.
+
+He stood a moment or two at the door after his wife had gone, drinking
+in reassurance from that glorious vision of solid sense that spread
+itself before his eyes: the endless house-roofs; the high glass vaults
+of the public baths and gymnasiums; the pinnacled schools where
+Citizenship was taught each morning; the spider-like cranes and
+scaffoldings that rose here and there; and even the few pricking spires
+did not disconcert him. There it stretched away into the grey haze of
+London, really beautiful, this vast hive of men and women who had
+learned at least the primary lesson of the gospel that there was no God
+but man, no priest but the politician, no prophet but the schoolmaster.
+
+Then he went back once more to his speech-constructing.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Mabel, too, was a little thoughtful as she sat with her paper on her
+lap, spinning down the broad line to Brighton. This Eastern news was
+more disconcerting to her than she allowed her husband to see; yet it
+seemed incredible that there could be any real danger of invasion. This
+Western life was so sensible and peaceful; folks had their feet at last
+upon the rock, and it was unthinkable that they could ever be forced
+back on to the mud-flats: it was contrary to the whole law of
+development. Yet she could not but recognise that catastrophe seemed one
+of nature's methods....
+
+She sat very quiet, glancing once or twice at the meagre little scrap
+of news, and read the leading article upon it: that too seemed
+significant of dismay. A couple of men were talking in the
+half-compartment beyond on the same subject; one described the
+Government engineering works that he had visited, the breathless haste
+that dominated them; the other put in interrogations and questions.
+There was not much comfort there. There were no windows through which
+she could look; on the main lines the speed was too great for the eyes;
+the long compartment flooded with soft light bounded her horizon. She
+stared at the moulded white ceiling, the delicious oak-framed paintings,
+the deep spring-seats, the mellow globes overhead that poured out
+radiance, at a mother and child diagonally opposite her. Then the great
+chord sounded; the faint vibration increased ever so slightly; and an
+instant later the automatic doors ran back, and she stepped out on to
+the platform of Brighton station.
+
+As she went down the steps leading to the station square she noticed a
+priest going before her. He seemed a very upright and sturdy old man,
+for though his hair was white he walked steadily and strongly. At the
+foot of the steps he stopped and half turned, and then, to her surprise,
+she saw that his face was that of a young man, fine-featured and strong,
+with black eyebrows and very bright grey eyes. Then she passed on and
+began to cross the square in the direction of her aunt's house.
+
+Then without the slightest warning, except one shrill hoot from
+overhead, a number of things happened.
+
+A great shadow whirled across the sunlight at her feet, a sound of
+rending tore the air, and a noise like a giant's sigh; and, as she
+stopped bewildered, with a noise like ten thousand smashed kettles, a
+huge thing crashed on the rubber pavement before her, where it lay,
+filling half the square, writhing long wings on its upper side that beat
+and whirled like the flappers of some ghastly extinct monster, pouring
+out human screams, and beginning almost instantly to crawl with broken
+life.
+
+Mabel scarcely knew what happened next; but she found herself a moment
+later forced forward by some violent pressure from behind, till she
+stood shaking from head to foot, with some kind of smashed body of a man
+moaning and stretching at her feet. There was a sort of articulate
+language coming from it; she caught distinctly the names of Jesus and
+Mary; then a voice hissed suddenly in her ears:
+
+"Let me through. I am a priest."
+
+She stood there a moment longer, dazed by the suddenness of the whole
+affair, and watched almost unintelligently the grey-haired young priest
+on his knees, with his coat torn open, and a crucifix out; she saw him
+bend close, wave his hand in a swift sign, and heard a murmur of a
+language she did not know. Then he was up again, holding the crucifix
+before him, and she saw him begin to move forward into the midst of the
+red-flooded pavement, looking this way and that as if for a signal. Down
+the steps of the great hospital on her right came figures running now,
+hatless, each carrying what looked like an old-fashioned camera. She
+knew what those men were, and her heart leaped in relief. They were the
+ministers of euthanasia. Then she felt herself taken by the shoulder and
+pulled back, and immediately found herself in the front rank of a crowd
+that was swaying and crying out, and behind a line of police and
+civilians who had formed themselves into a cordon to keep the pressure
+back.
+
+
+III
+
+Oliver was in a panic of terror as his mother, half an hour later, ran
+in with the news that one of the Government volors had fallen in the
+station square at Brighton just after the 14-1/2 train had discharged
+its passengers. He knew quite well what that meant, for he remembered
+one such accident ten years before, just after the law forbidding
+private volors had been passed. It meant that every living creature in
+it was killed and probably many more in the place where it fell--and
+what then? The message was clear enough; she would certainly be in the
+square at that time.
+
+He sent a desperate wire to her aunt asking for news; and sat, shaking
+in his chair, awaiting the answer. His mother sat by him.
+
+"Please God---" she sobbed out once, and stopped confounded as he turned
+on her.
+
+But Fate was merciful, and three minutes before Mr. Phillips toiled up
+the path with the answer, Mabel herself came into the room, rather pale
+and smiling.
+
+"Christ!" cried Oliver, and gave one huge sob as he sprang up.
+
+She had not a great deal to tell him. There was no explanation of the
+disaster published as yet; it seemed that the wings on one side had
+simply ceased to work.
+
+She described the shadow, the hiss of sound, and the crash.
+
+Then she stopped.
+
+"Well, my dear?" said her husband, still rather white beneath the eyes
+as he sat close to her patting her hand.
+
+"There was a priest there," said Mabel. "I saw him before, at the
+station."
+
+Oliver gave a little hysterical snort of laughter.
+
+"He was on his knees at once," she said, "with his crucifix, even before
+the doctors came. My dear, do people really believe all that?"
+
+"Why, they think they do," said her husband.
+
+"It was all so--so sudden; and there he was, just as if he had been
+expecting it all. Oliver, how can they?"
+
+"Why, people will believe anything if they begin early enough."
+
+"And the man seemed to believe it, too--the dying man, I mean. I saw his
+eyes."
+
+She stopped.
+
+"Well, my dear?"
+
+"Oliver, what do you say to people when they are dying?"
+
+"Say! Why, nothing! What can I say? But I don't think I've ever seen any
+one die."
+
+"Nor have I till to-day," said the girl, and shivered a little. "The
+euthanasia people were soon at work."
+
+Oliver took her hand gently.
+
+"My darling, it must have been frightful. Why, you're trembling still."
+
+"No; but listen.... You know, if I had had anything to say I could have
+said it too. They were all just in front of me: I wondered; then I knew
+I hadn't. I couldn't possibly have talked about Humanity."
+
+"My dear, it's all very sad; but you know it doesn't really matter. It's
+all over."
+
+"And--and they've just stopped?"
+
+"Why, yes."
+
+Mabel compressed her lips a little; then she sighed. She had an agitated
+sort of meditation in the train. She knew perfectly that it was sheer
+nerves; but she could not just yet shake them off. As she had said, it
+was the first time she had seen death.
+
+"And that priest--that priest doesn't think so?"
+
+"My dear, I'll tell you what he believes. He believes that that man whom
+he showed the crucifix to, and said those words over, is alive
+somewhere, in spite of his brain being dead: he is not quite sure where;
+but he is either in a kind of smelting works being slowly burned; or, if
+he is very lucky, and that piece of wood took effect, he is somewhere
+beyond the clouds, before Three Persons who are only One although They
+are Three; that there are quantities of other people there, a Woman in
+Blue, a great many others in white with their heads under their arms,
+and still more with their heads on one side; and that they've all got
+harps and go on singing for ever and ever, and walking about on the
+clouds, and liking it very much indeed. He thinks, too, that all these
+nice people are perpetually looking down upon the aforesaid
+smelting-works, and praising the Three Great Persons for making them.
+That's what the priest believes. Now you know it's not likely; that kind
+of thing may be very nice, but it isn't true."
+
+Mabel smiled pleasantly. She had never heard it put so well.
+
+"No, my dear, you're quite right. That sort of thing isn't true. How can
+he believe it? He looked quite intelligent!"
+
+"My dear girl, if I had told you in your cradle that the moon was green
+cheese, and had hammered at you ever since, every day and all day, that
+it was, you'd very nearly believe it by now. Why, you know in your heart
+that the euthanatisers are the real priests. Of course you do."
+
+Mabel sighed with satisfaction and stood up.
+
+"Oliver, you're a most comforting person. I do like you! There! I must
+go to my room: I'm all shaky still."
+
+Half across the room she stopped and put out a shoe.
+
+"Why---" she began faintly.
+
+There was a curious rusty-looking splash upon it; and her husband saw
+her turn white. He rose abruptly.
+
+"My dear," he said, "don't be foolish."
+
+She looked at him, smiled bravely, and went out.
+
+* * * * *
+
+When she was gone, he still sat on a moment where she had left him. Dear
+me! how pleased he was! He did not like to think of what life would have
+been without her. He had known her since she was twelve--that was seven
+years ago-and last year they had gone together to the district official
+to make their contract. She had really become very necessary to him. Of
+course the world could get on without her, and he supposed that he could
+too; but he did not want to have to try. He knew perfectly well, for it
+was his creed of human love, that there was between them a double
+affection, of mind as well as body; and there was absolutely nothing
+else: but he loved her quick intuitions, and to hear his own thought
+echoed so perfectly. It was like two flames added together to make a
+third taller than either: of course one flame could burn without the
+other--in fact, one would have to, one day--but meantime the warmth and
+light were exhilarating. Yes, he was delighted that she happened to be
+clear of the falling volor.
+
+He gave no more thought to his exposition of the Christian creed; it was
+a mere commonplace to him that Catholics believed that kind of thing; it
+was no more blasphemous to his mind so to describe it, than it would be
+to laugh at a Fijian idol with mother-of-pearl eyes, and a horse-hair
+wig; it was simply impossible to treat it seriously. He, too, had
+wondered once or twice in his life how human beings could believe such
+rubbish; but psychology had helped him, and he knew now well enough that
+suggestion will do almost anything. And it was this hateful thing that
+had so long restrained the euthanasia movement with all its splendid
+mercy.
+
+His brows wrinkled a little as he remembered his mother's exclamation,
+"Please God"; then he smiled at the poor old thing and her pathetic
+childishness, and turned once more to his table, thinking in spite of
+himself of his wife's hesitation as she had seen the splash of blood on
+her shoe. Blood! Yes; that was as much a fact as anything else. How was
+it to be dealt with? Why, by the glorious creed of Humanity--that
+splendid God who died and rose again ten thousand times a day, who had
+died daily like the old cracked fanatic Saul of Tarsus, ever since the
+world began, and who rose again, not once like the Carpenter's Son, but
+with every child that came into the world. That was the answer; and was
+it not overwhelmingly sufficient?
+
+Mr. Phillips came in an hour later with another bundle of papers.
+
+"No more news from the East, sir," he said.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+I
+
+Percy Franklin's correspondence with the Cardinal-Protector of England
+occupied him directly for at least two hours every day, and for nearly
+eight hours indirectly.
+
+For the past eight years the methods of the Holy See had once more been
+revised with a view to modern needs, and now every important province
+throughout the world possessed not only an administrative metropolitan
+but a representative in Rome whose business it was to be in touch with
+the Pope on the one side and the people he represented on the other. In
+other words, centralisation had gone forward rapidly, in accordance with
+the laws of life; and, with centralisation, freedom of method and
+expansion of power. England's Cardinal-Protector was one Abbot Martin, a
+Benedictine, and it was Percy's business, as of a dozen more bishops,
+priests and laymen (with whom, by the way, he was forbidden to hold any
+formal consultation), to write a long daily letter to him on affairs
+that came under his notice.
+
+It was a curious life, therefore, that Percy led. He had a couple of
+rooms assigned to him in Archbishop's House at Westminster, and was
+attached loosely to the Cathedral staff, although with considerable
+liberty. He rose early, and went to meditation for an hour, after which
+he said his mass. He took his coffee soon after, said a little office,
+and then settled down to map out his letter. At ten o'clock he was ready
+to receive callers, and till noon he was generally busy with both those
+who came to see him on their own responsibility and his staff of
+half-a-dozen reporters whose business it was to bring him marked
+paragraphs in the newspapers and their own comments. He then breakfasted
+with the other priests in the house, and set out soon after to call on
+people whose opinion was necessary, returning for a cup of tea soon
+after sixteen o'clock. Then he settled down, after the rest of his
+office and a visit to the Blessed Sacrament, to compose his letter,
+which though short, needed a great deal of care and sifting. After
+dinner he made a few notes for next day, received visitors again, and
+went to bed soon after twenty-two o'clock. Twice a week it was his
+business to assist at Vespers in the afternoon, and he usually sang high
+mass on Saturdays.
+
+It was, therefore, a curiously distracting life, with peculiar dangers.
+
+It was one day, a week or two after his visit to Brighton, that he was
+just finishing his letter, when his servant looked in to tell him that
+Father Francis was below.
+
+"In ten minutes," said Percy, without looking up.
+
+He snapped off his last lines, drew out the sheet, and settled down to
+read it over, translating it unconsciously from Latin to English.
+
+"WESTMINSTER, May 14th.
+
+"EMINENCE: Since yesterday I have a little more information. It appears
+certain that the Bill establishing Esperanto for all State purposes will
+be brought in in June. I have had this from Johnson. This, as I have
+pointed out before, is the very last stone in our consolidation with the
+continent, which, at present, is to be regretted.... A great access of
+Jews to Freemasonry is to be expected; hitherto they have held aloof to
+some extent, but the 'abolition of the Idea of God' is tending to draw
+in those Jews, now greatly on the increase once more, who repudiate all
+notion of a personal Messiah. It is 'Humanity' here, too, that is at
+work. To-day I heard the Rabbi Simeon speak to this effect in the City,
+and was impressed by the applause he received.... Yet among others an
+expectation is growing that a man will presently be found to lead the
+Communist movement and unite their forces more closely. I enclose a
+verbose cutting from the _New People_ to that effect; and it is echoed
+everywhere. They say that the cause must give birth to one such soon;
+that they have had prophets and precursors for a hundred years past, and
+lately a cessation of them. It is strange how this coincides
+superficially with Christian ideas. Your Eminence will observe that a
+simile of the 'ninth wave' is used with some eloquence.... I hear to-day
+of the secession of an old Catholic family, the Wargraves of Norfolk,
+with their chaplain Micklem, who it seems has been busy in this
+direction for some while. The _Epoch_ announces it with satisfaction,
+owing to the peculiar circumstances; but unhappily such events are not
+uncommon now.... There is much distrust among the laity. Seven priests
+in Westminster diocese have left us within the last three months; on the
+other hand, I have pleasure in telling your Eminence that his Grace
+received into Catholic Communion this morning the ex-Anglican Bishop of
+Carlisle, with half-a-dozen of his clergy. This has been expected for
+some weeks past. I append also cuttings from the _Tribune_, the _London
+Trumpet_, and the _Observer_, with my comments upon them. Your Eminence
+will see how great the excitement is with regard to the last.
+
+"_Recommendation._ That formal excommunication of the Wargraves and
+these eight priests should be issued in Norfolk and Westminster
+respectively, and no further notice taken."
+
+Percy laid down the sheet, gathered up the half dozen other papers that
+contained his extracts and running commentary, signed the last, and
+slipped the whole into the printed envelope that lay ready.
+
+Then he took up his biretta and went to the lift.
+
+* * * * *
+
+The moment he came into the glass-doored parlour he saw that the crisis
+was come, if not passed already. Father Francis looked miserably ill,
+but there was a curious hardness, too, about his eyes and mouth, as he
+stood waiting. He shook his head abruptly.
+
+"I have come to say good-bye, father. I can bear it no more."
+
+Percy was careful to show no emotion at all. He made a little sign to a
+chair, and himself sat down too. "It is an end of everything," said the
+other again in a perfectly steady voice. "I believe nothing. I have
+believed nothing for a year now."
+
+"You have felt nothing, you mean," said Percy.
+
+"That won't do, father," went on the other. "I tell you there is nothing
+left. I can't even argue now. It is just good-bye."
+
+Percy had nothing to say. He had talked to this man during a period of
+over eight months, ever since Father Francis had first confided in him
+that his faith was going. He understood perfectly what a strain it had
+been; he felt bitterly compassionate towards this poor creature who had
+become caught up somehow into the dizzy triumphant whirl of the New
+Humanity. External facts were horribly strong just now; and faith,
+except to one who had learned that Will and Grace were all and emotion
+nothing, was as a child crawling about in the midst of some huge
+machinery: it might survive or it might not; but it required nerves of
+steel to keep steady. It was hard to know where blame could be assigned;
+yet Percy's faith told him that there was blame due. In the ages of
+faith a very inadequate grasp of religion would pass muster; in these
+searching days none but the humble and the pure could stand the test for
+long, unless indeed they were protected by a miracle of ignorance. The
+alliance of Psychology and Materialism did indeed seem, looked at from
+one angle, to account for everything; it needed a robust supernatural
+perception to understand their practical inadequacy. And as regards
+Father Francis's personal responsibility, he could not help feeling that
+the other had allowed ceremonial to play too great a part in his
+religion, and prayer too little. In him the external had absorbed the
+internal.
+
+So he did not allow his sympathy to show itself in his bright eyes.
+
+"You think it my fault, of course," said the other sharply.
+
+"My dear father," said Percy, motionless in his chair, "I know it is
+your fault. Listen to me. You say Christianity is absurd and impossible.
+Now, you know, it cannot be that! It may be untrue--I am not speaking of
+that now, even though I am perfectly certain that it is absolutely
+true--but it cannot be absurd so long as educated and virtuous people
+continue to hold it. To say that it is absurd is simple pride; it is to
+dismiss all who believe in it as not merely mistaken, but unintelligent
+as well---"
+
+"Very well, then," interrupted the other; "then suppose I withdraw that,
+and simply say that I do not believe it to be true."
+
+"You do not withdraw it," continued Percy serenely; "you still really
+believe it to be absurd: you have told me so a dozen times. Well, I
+repeat, that is pride, and quite sufficient to account for it all. It is
+the moral attitude that matters. There may be other things too---"
+
+Father Francis looked up sharply.
+
+"Oh! the old story!" he said sneeringly.
+
+"If you tell me on your word of honour that there is no woman in the
+case, or no particular programme of sin you propose to work out, I shall
+believe you. But it is an old story, as you say."
+
+"I swear to you there is not," cried the other.
+
+"Thank God then!" said Percy. "There are fewer obstacles to a return of
+faith."
+
+There was silence for a moment after that. Percy had really no more to
+say. He had talked to him of the inner life again and again, in which
+verities are seen to be true, and acts of faith are ratified; he had
+urged prayer and humility till he was almost weary of the names; and had
+been met by the retort that this was to advise sheer self-hypnotism; and
+he had despaired of making clear to one who did not see it for himself
+that while Love and Faith may be called self-hypnotism from one angle,
+yet from another they are as much realities as, for example, artistic
+faculties, and need similar cultivation; that they produce a conviction
+that they are convictions, that they handle and taste things which when
+handled and tasted are overwhelmingly more real and objective than the
+things of sense. Evidences seemed to mean nothing to this man.
+
+So he was silent now, chilled himself by the presence of this crisis,
+looking unseeingly out upon the plain, little old-world parlour, its
+tall window, its strip of matting, conscious chiefly of the dreary
+hopelessness of this human brother of his who had eyes but did not see,
+ears and was deaf. He wished he would say good-bye, and go. There was no
+more to be done.
+
+Father Francis, who had been sitting in a lax kind of huddle, seemed to
+know his thoughts, and sat up suddenly.
+
+"You are tired of me," he said. "I will go."
+
+"I am not tired of you, my dear father," said Percy simply. "I am only
+terribly sorry. You see I know that it is all true."
+
+The other looked at him heavily.
+
+"And I know that it is not," he said. "It is very beautiful; I wish I
+could believe it. I don't think I shall be ever happy again--but--but
+there it is."
+
+Percy sighed. He had told him so often that the heart is as divine a
+gift as the mind, and that to neglect it in the search for God is to
+seek ruin, but this priest had scarcely seen the application to himself.
+He had answered with the old psychological arguments that the
+suggestions of education accounted for everything.
+
+"I suppose you will cast me off," said the other.
+
+"It is you who are leaving me," said Percy. "I cannot follow, if you
+mean that."
+
+"But--but cannot we be friends?"
+
+A sudden heat touched the elder priest's heart.
+
+"Friends?" he said. "Is sentimentality all you mean by friendship? What
+kind of friends can we be?"
+
+The other's face became suddenly heavy.
+
+"I thought so."
+
+"John!" cried Percy. "You see that, do you not? How can we pretend
+anything when you do not believe in God? For I do you the honour of
+thinking that you do not."
+
+Francis sprang up.
+
+"Well---" he snapped. "I could not have believed--I am going."
+
+He wheeled towards the door.
+
+"John!" said Percy again. "Are you going like this? Can you not shake
+hands?"
+
+The other wheeled again, with heavy anger in his face.
+
+"Why, you said you could not be friends with me!"
+
+Percy's mouth opened. Then he understood, and smiled. "Oh! that is all
+you mean by friendship, is it?--I beg your pardon. Oh! we can be polite
+to one another, if you like."
+
+He still stood holding out his hand. Father Francis looked at it a
+moment, his lips shook: then once more he turned, and went out without a
+word.
+
+
+
+II
+
+Percy stood motionless until he heard the automatic bell outside tell
+him that Father Francis was really gone, then he went out himself and
+turned towards the long passage leading to the Cathedral. As he passed
+out through the sacristy he heard far in front the murmur of an organ,
+and on coming through into the chapel used as a parish church he
+perceived that Vespers were not yet over in the great choir. He came
+straight down the aisle, turned to the right, crossed the centre and
+knelt down.
+
+It was drawing on towards sunset, and the huge dark place was lighted
+here and there by patches of ruddy London light that lay on the gorgeous
+marble and gildings finished at last by a wealthy convert. In front of
+him rose up the choir, with a line of white surpliced and furred canons
+on either side, and the vast baldachino in the midst, beneath which
+burned the six lights as they had burned day by day for more than a
+century; behind that again lay the high line of the apse-choir with the
+dim, window-pierced vault above where Christ reigned in majesty. He let
+his eyes wander round for a few moments before beginning his deliberate
+prayer, drinking in the glory of the place, listening to the thunderous
+chorus, the peal of the organ, and the thin mellow voice of the priest.
+There on the left shone the refracted glow of the lamps that burned
+before the Lord in the Sacrament, on the right a dozen candles winked
+here and there at the foot of the gaunt images, high overhead hung the
+gigantic cross with that lean, emaciated Poor Man Who called all who
+looked on Him to the embraces of a God.
+
+Then he hid his face in his hands, drew a couple of long breaths, and
+set to work.
+
+He began, as his custom was in mental prayer, by a deliberate act of
+self-exclusion from the world of sense. Under the image of sinking
+beneath a surface he forced himself downwards and inwards, till the peal
+of the organ, the shuffle of footsteps, the rigidity of the chair-back
+beneath his wrists--all seemed apart and external, and he was left a
+single person with a beating heart, an intellect that suggested image
+after image, and emotions that were too languid to stir themselves. Then
+he made his second descent, renounced all that he possessed and was, and
+became conscious that even the body was left behind, and that his mind
+and heart, awed by the Presence in which they found themselves, clung
+close and obedient to the will which was their lord and protector. He
+drew another long breath, or two, as he felt that Presence surge about
+him; he repeated a few mechanical words, and sank to that peace which
+follows the relinquishment of thought.
+
+There he rested for a while. Far above him sounded the ecstatic music,
+the cry of trumpets and the shrilling of the flutes; but they were as
+insignificant street-noises to one who was falling asleep. He was within
+the veil of things now, beyond the barriers of sense and reflection, in
+that secret place to which he had learned the road by endless effort, in
+that strange region where realities are evident, where perceptions go to
+and fro with the swiftness of light, where the swaying will catches now
+this, now that act, moulds it and speeds it; where all things meet,
+where truth is known and handled and tasted, where God Immanent is one
+with God Transcendent, where the meaning of the external world is
+evident through its inner side, and the Church and its mysteries are
+seen from within a haze of glory.
+
+So he lay a few moments, absorbing and resting.
+
+Then he aroused himself to consciousness and began to speak.
+
+"Lord, I am here, and Thou art here. I know Thee. There is nothing else
+but Thou and I.... I lay this all in Thy hands--Thy apostate priest, Thy
+people, the world, and myself. I spread it before Thee--I spread it
+before Thee."
+
+He paused, poised in the act, till all of which he thought lay like a
+plain before a peak.
+
+... "Myself, Lord--there but for Thy grace should I be going, in
+darkness and misery. It is Thou Who dost preserve me. Maintain and
+finish Thy work within my soul. Let me not falter for one instant. If
+Thou withdraw Thy hand I fall into utter nothingness."
+
+So his soul stood a moment, with outstretched appealing hands, helpless
+and confident. Then the will flickered in self-consciousness, and he
+repeated acts of faith, hope and love to steady it. Then he drew another
+long breath, feeling the Presence tingle and shake about him, and began
+again.
+
+"Lord; look on Thy people. Many are falling from Thee. _Ne in aeternum
+irascaris nobis. Ne in aeternum irascaris nobis_.... I unite myself with
+all saints and angels and Mary Queen of Heaven; look on them and me, and
+hear us. _Emitte lucem tuam et veritatem tuam._ Thy light and Thy truth!
+Lay not on us heavier burdens than we can bear. Lord, why dost Thou not
+speak!"
+
+He writhed himself forward in a passion of expectant desire, hearing his
+muscles crack in the effort. Once more he relaxed himself; and the swift
+play of wordless acts began which he knew to be the very heart of
+prayer. The eyes of his soul flew hither and thither, from Calvary to
+heaven and back again to the tossing troubled earth. He saw Christ dying
+of desolation while the earth rocked and groaned; Christ reigning as a
+priest upon His Throne in robes of light, Christ patient and inexorably
+silent within the Sacramental species; and to each in turn he directed
+the eyes of the Eternal Father....
+
+Then he waited for communications, and they came, so soft and delicate,
+passing like shadows, that his will sweated blood and tears in the
+effort to catch and fix them and correspond....
+
+He saw the Body Mystical in its agony, strained over the world as on a
+cross, silent with pain; he saw this and that nerve wrenched and
+twisted, till pain presented it to himself as under the guise of flashes
+of colour; he saw the life-blood drop by drop run down from His head and
+hands and feet. The world was gathered mocking and good-humoured
+beneath. "_He saved others: Himself He cannot save.... Let Christ come
+down from the Cross and we will believe._" Far away behind bushes and
+in holes of the ground the friends of Jesus peeped and sobbed; Mary
+herself was silent, pierced by seven swords; the disciple whom He loved
+had no words of comfort.
+
+He saw, too, how no word would be spoken from heaven; the angels
+themselves were bidden to put sword into sheath, and wait on the eternal
+patience of God, for the agony was hardly yet begun; there were a
+thousand horrors yet before the end could come, that final sum of
+crucifixion.... He must wait and watch, content to stand there and do
+nothing; and the Resurrection must seem to him no more than a dreamed-of
+hope. There was the Sabbath yet to come, while the Body Mystical must
+lie in its sepulchre cut off from light, and even the dignity of the
+Cross must be withdrawn and the knowledge that Jesus lived. That inner
+world, to which by long effort he had learned the way, was all alight
+with agony; it was bitter as brine, it was of that pale luminosity that
+is the utmost product of pain, it hummed in his ears with a note that
+rose to a scream ... it pressed upon him, penetrated him, stretched him
+as on a rack.... And with that his will grew sick and nerveless.
+
+"Lord! I cannot bear it!" he moaned....
+
+In an instant he was back again, drawing long breaths of misery. He
+passed his tongue over his lips, and opened his eyes on the darkening
+apse before him. The organ was silent now, and the choir was gone, and
+the lights out. The sunset colour, too, had faded from the walls, and
+grim cold faces looked down on him from wall and vault. He was back
+again on the surface of life; the vision had melted; he scarcely knew
+what it was that he had seen.
+
+But he must gather up the threads, and by sheer effort absorb them. He
+must pay his duty, too, to the Lord that gave Himself to the senses as
+well as to the inner spirit. So he rose, stiff and constrained, and
+passed across to the Chapel of the Holy Sacrament.
+
+As he came out from the block of chairs, very upright and tall, with his
+biretta once more on his white hair, he saw an old woman watching him
+very closely. He hesitated an instant, wondering whether she were a
+penitent, and as he hesitated she made a movement towards him.
+
+"I beg your pardon, sir," she began.
+
+She was not a Catholic then. He lifted his biretta.
+
+"Can I do anything for you?" he asked.
+
+"I beg your pardon, sir, but were you at Brighton, at the accident two
+months ago?"
+
+"I was."
+
+"Ah! I thought so: my daughter-in-law saw you then."
+
+Percy had a spasm of impatience: he was a little tired of being
+identified by his white hair and young face.
+
+"Were you there, madam?"
+
+She looked at him doubtfully and curiously, moving her old, eyes up and
+down his figure. Then she recollected herself.
+
+"No, sir; it was my daughter-in-law--I beg your pardon, sir, but---"
+
+"Well?" asked Percy, trying to keep the impatience out of his voice.
+
+"Are you the Archbishop, sir?"
+
+The priest smiled, showing his white teeth.
+
+"No, madam; I am just a poor priest. Dr. Cholmondeley is Archbishop. I
+am Father Percy Franklin."
+
+She said nothing, but still looking at him made a little old-world
+movement of a bow; and Percy passed on to the dim, splendid chapel to
+pay his devotions.
+
+
+
+III
+
+There was great talk that night at dinner among the priests as to the
+extraordinary spread of Freemasonry. It had been going on for many years
+now, and Catholics perfectly recognised its dangers, for the profession
+of Masonry had been for some centuries rendered incompatible with
+religion through the Church's unswerving condemnation of it. A man must
+choose between that and his faith. Things had developed extraordinarily
+during the last century. First there had been the organised assault upon
+the Church in France; and what Catholics had always suspected then
+became a certainty in the revelations of 1918, when P. Gerome, the
+Dominican and ex-Mason, had made his disclosures with regard to the
+Mark-Masons. It had become evident then that Catholics had been right,
+and that Masonry, in its higher grades at least, had been responsible
+throughout the world for the strange movement against religion. But he
+had died in his bed, and the public had been impressed by that fact.
+Then came the splendid donations in France and Italy--to hospitals,
+orphanages, and the like; and once more suspicion began to disappear.
+After all, it seemed--and continued to seem--for seventy years and more
+that Masonry was nothing more than a vast philanthropical society. Now
+once more men had their doubts.
+
+"I hear that Felsenburgh is a Mason," observed Monsignor Macintosh, the
+Cathedral Administrator. "A Grand-Master or something."
+
+"But who is Felsenburgh?" put in a young priest.
+
+Monsignor pursed his lips and shook his head. He was one of those humble
+persons as proud of ignorance as others of knowledge. He boasted that he
+never read the papers nor any book except those that had received the
+_imprimatur_; it was a priest's business, he often remarked, to preserve
+the faith, not to acquire worldly knowledge. Percy had occasionally
+rather envied his point of view.
+
+"He's a mystery," said another priest, Father Blackmore; "but he seems
+to be causing great excitement. They were selling his 'Life' to-day on
+the Embankment."
+
+"I met an American senator," put in Percy, "three days ago, who told me
+that even there they know nothing of him, except his extraordinary
+eloquence. He only appeared last year, and seems to have carried
+everything before him by quite unusual methods. He is a great linguist,
+too. That is why they took him to Irkutsk."
+
+"Well, the Masons---" went on Monsignor. "It is very serious. In the
+last month four of my penitents have left me because of it."
+
+"Their inclusion of women was their master-stroke," growled Father
+Blackmore, helping himself to claret.
+
+"It is extraordinary that they hesitated so long about that," observed
+Percy.
+
+A couple of the others added their evidence. It appeared that they, too,
+had lost penitents lately through the spread of Masonry. It was rumoured
+that a Pastoral was a-preparing upstairs on the subject.
+
+Monsignor shook his head ominously.
+
+"More is wanted than that," he said.
+
+Percy pointed out that the Church had said her last word several
+centuries ago. She had laid her excommunication on all members of secret
+societies, and there was really no more that she could do.
+
+"Except bring it before her children again and again," put in Monsignor.
+"I shall preach on it next Sunday."
+
+* * * * *
+
+Percy dotted down a note when he reached his room, determining to say
+another word or two on the subject to the Cardinal-Protector. He had
+mentioned Freemasonry often before, but it seemed time for another
+remark. Then he opened his letters, first turning to one which he
+recognised as from the Cardinal.
+
+It seemed a curious coincidence, as he read a series of questions that
+Cardinal Martin's letter contained, that one of them should be on this
+very subject. It ran as follows:
+
+"What of Masonry? Felsenburgh is said to be one. Gather all the gossip
+you can about him. Send any English or American biographies of him. Are
+you still losing Catholics through Masonry?"
+
+He ran his eyes down the rest of the questions. They chiefly referred to
+previous remarks of his own, but twice, even in them, Felsenburgh's name
+appeared.
+
+He laid the paper down and considered a little.
+
+It was very curious, he thought, how this man's name was in every one's
+mouth, in spite of the fact that so little was known about him. He had
+bought in the streets, out of curiosity, three photographs that
+professed to represent this strange person, and though one of them might
+be genuine they all three could not be. He drew them out of a
+pigeon-hole, and spread them before him.
+
+One represented a fierce, bearded creature like a Cossack, with round
+staring eyes. No; intrinsic evidence condemned this: it was exactly how
+a coarse imagination would have pictured a man who seemed to be having a
+great influence in the East.
+
+The second showed a fat face with little eyes and a chin-beard. That
+might conceivably be genuine: he turned it over and saw the name of a
+New York firm on the back. Then he turned to the third. This presented a
+long, clean-shaven face with pince-nez, undeniably clever, but scarcely
+strong: and Felsenburgh was obviously a strong man.
+
+Percy inclined to think the second was the most probable; but they were
+all unconvincing; and he shuffled them carelessly together and replaced
+them.
+
+Then he put his elbows on the table, and began to think.
+
+He tried to remember what Mr. Varhaus, the American senator, had told
+him of Felsenburgh; yet it did not seem sufficient to account for the
+facts. Felsenburgh, it seemed, had employed none of those methods common
+in modern politics. He controlled no newspapers, vituperated nobody,
+championed nobody: he had no picked underlings; he used no bribes; there
+were no monstrous crimes alleged against him. It seemed rather as if his
+originality lay in his clean hands and his stainless past--that, and his
+magnetic character. He was the kind of figure that belonged rather to
+the age of chivalry: a pure, clean, compelling personality, like a
+radiant child. He had taken people by surprise, then, rising out of the
+heaving dun-coloured waters of American socialism like a vision--from
+those waters so fiercely restrained from breaking into storm over since
+the extraordinary social revolution under Mr. Hearst's disciples, a
+century ago. That had been the end of plutocracy; the famous old laws of
+1914 had burst some of the stinking bubbles of the time; and the
+enactments of 1916 and 1917 had prevented their forming again in any
+thing like their previous force. It had been the salvation of America,
+undoubtedly, even if that salvation were of a dreary and uninspiring
+description; and now out of the flat socialistic level had arisen this
+romantic figure utterly unlike any that had preceded it.... So the
+senator had hinted.... It was too complicated for Percy just now, and he
+gave it up.
+
+It was a weary world, he told himself, turning his eyes homewards.
+Everything seemed so hopeless and ineffective. He tried not to reflect
+on his fellow-priests, but for the fiftieth time he could not help
+seeing that they were not the men for the present situation. It was not
+that he preferred himself; he knew perfectly well that he, too, was
+fully as incompetent: had he not proved to be so with poor Father
+Francis, and scores of others who had clutched at him in their agony
+during the last ten years? Even the Archbishop, holy man as he was, with
+all his childlike faith--was that the man to lead English Catholics and
+confound their enemies? There seemed no giants on the earth in these
+days. What in the world was to be done? He buried his face in his
+hands....
+
+Yes; what was wanted was a new Order in the Church; the old ones were
+rule-bound through no fault of their own. An Order was wanted without
+habit or tonsure, without traditions or customs, an Order with nothing
+but entire and whole-hearted devotion, without pride even in their most
+sacred privileges, without a past history in which they might take
+complacent refuge. They must be _franc-tireurs_ of Christ's Army; like
+the Jesuits, but without their fatal reputation, which, again, was no
+fault of their own. ... But there must be a Founder--Who, in God's Name?
+--a Founder _nudus sequens Christum nudum_.... Yes--_Franc-tireurs_
+--priests, bishops, laymen and women--with the three vows of course, and
+a special clause forbidding utterly and for ever their ownership of
+corporate wealth.--Every gift received must be handed to the bishop of
+the diocese in which it was given, who must provide them himself with
+necessaries of life and travel. Oh!--what could they not do?... He was
+off in a rhapsody.
+
+Presently he recovered, and called himself a fool. Was not that scheme
+as old as the eternal hills, and as useless for practical purposes? Why,
+it had been the dream of every zealous man since the First Year of
+Salvation that such an Order should be founded!... He was a fool....
+
+Then once more he began to think of it all over again.
+
+Surely it was this which was wanted against the Masons; and women,
+too.--Had not scheme after scheme broken down because men had forgotten
+the power of women? It was that lack that had ruined Napoleon: he had
+trusted Josephine, and she had failed him; so he had trusted no other
+woman. In the Catholic Church, too, woman had been given no active work
+but either menial or connected with education: and was there not room
+for other activities than those? Well, it was useless to think of it. It
+was not his affair. If _Papa Angelicus_ who now reigned in Rome had not
+thought of it, why should a foolish, conceited priest in Westminster set
+himself up to do so?
+
+So he beat himself on the breast once more, and took up his office-book.
+
+He finished in half an hour, and again sat thinking; but this time it
+was of poor Father Francis. He wondered what he was doing now; whether
+he had taken off the Roman collar of Christ's familiar slaves? The poor
+devil! And how far was he, Percy Franklin, responsible?
+
+When a tap came at his door presently, and Father Blackmore looked in
+for a talk before going to bed, Percy told him what had happened.
+
+Father Blackmore removed his pipe and sighed deliberately.
+
+"I knew it was coming," he said. "Well, well."
+
+"He has been honest enough," explained Percy. "He told me eight months
+ago he was in trouble."
+
+Father Blackmore drew upon his pipe thoughtfully.
+
+"Father Franklin," he said, "things are really very serious. There is
+the same story everywhere. What in the world is happening?"
+
+Percy paused before answering.
+
+"I think these things go in waves," he said.
+
+"Waves, do you think?" said the other.
+
+"What else?"
+
+Father Blackmore looked at him intently.
+
+"It is more like a dead calm, it seems to me," he said. "Have you ever
+been in a typhoon?"
+
+Percy shook his head.
+
+"Well," went on the other, "the most ominous thing is the calm. The sea
+is like oil; you feel half-dead: you can do nothing. Then comes the
+storm."
+
+Percy looked at him, interested. He had not seen this mood in the priest
+before.
+
+"Before every great crash there comes this calm. It is always so in
+history. It was so before the Eastern War; it was so before the French
+Revolution. It was so before the Reformation. There is a kind of oily
+heaving; and everything is languid. So everything has been in America,
+too, for over eighty years.... Father Franklin, I think something is
+going to happen."
+
+"Tell me," said Percy, leaning forward.
+
+"Well, I saw Templeton a week before he died, and he put the idea in my
+head.... Look here, father. It may be this Eastern affair that is coming
+on us; but somehow I don't think it is. It is in religion that something
+is going to happen. At least, so I think.... Father, who in God's name
+is Felsenburgh?"
+
+Percy was so startled at the sudden introduction of this name again,
+that he stared a moment without speaking.
+
+Outside, the summer night was very still. There was a faint vibration
+now and again from the underground track that ran twenty yards from the
+house where they sat; but the streets were quiet enough round the
+Cathedral. Once a hoot rang far away, as if some ominous bird of passage
+were crossing between London and the stars, and once the cry of a woman
+sounded thin and shrill from the direction of the river. For the rest
+there was no more than the solemn, subdued hum that never ceased now
+night or day.
+
+"Yes; Felsenburgh," said Father Blackmore once more. "I cannot get that
+man out of my head. And yet, what do I know of him? What does any one
+know of him?"
+
+Percy licked his lips to answer, and drew a breath to still the beating
+of his heart. He could not imagine why he felt excited. After all, who
+was old Blackmore to frighten him? But old Blackmore went on before he
+could speak.
+
+"See how people are leaving the Church! The Wargraves, the Hendersons,
+Sir James Bartlet, Lady Magnier, and then all the priests. Now they're
+not all knaves--I wish they were; it would be so much easier to talk of
+it. But Sir James Bartlet, last month! Now, there's a man who has spent
+half his fortune on the Church, and he doesn't resent it even now. He
+says that any religion is better than none, but that, for himself, he
+just can't believe any longer. Now what does all that mean?... I tell
+you something is going to happen. God knows what! And I can't get
+Felsenburgh out of my head.... Father Franklin---"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Have you noticed how few great men we've got? It's not like fifty years
+ago, or even thirty. Then there were Mason, Selborne, Sherbrook, and
+half-a-dozen others. There was Brightman, too, as Archbishop: and now!
+Then the Communists, too. Braithwaite is dead fifteen years. Certainly
+he was big enough; but he was always speaking of the future, not of the
+present; and tell me what big man they have had since then! And now
+there's this new man, whom no one knows, who came forward in America a
+few months ago, and whose name is in every one's mouth. Very well,
+then!"
+
+Percy knitted his forehead.
+
+"I am not sure that I understand," he said.
+
+Father Blackmore knocked his pipe out before answering.
+
+"Well, this," he said, standing up. "I can't help thinking Felsenburgh
+is going to do something. I don't know what; it may be for us or against
+us. But he is a Mason, remember that.... Well, well; I dare say I'm an
+old fool. Good-night."
+
+"One moment, father," said Percy slowly. "Do you mean--? Good Lord! What
+do you mean?" He stopped, looking at the other.
+
+The old priest stared back under his bushy eyebrows; it seemed to Percy
+as if he, too, were afraid of something in spite of his easy talk; but
+he made no sign.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Percy stood perfectly still a moment when the door was shut. Then he
+moved across to his _prie-dieu_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+I
+
+Old Mrs. Brand and Mabel were seated at a window of the new Admiralty
+Offices in Trafalgar Square to see Oliver deliver his speech on the
+fiftieth anniversary of the passing of the Poor Laws Reform.
+
+It was an inspiriting sight, this bright June morning, to see the crowds
+gathering round Braithwaite's statue. That politician, dead fifteen
+years before, was represented in his famous attitude, with arms
+outstretched and down dropped, his head up and one foot slightly
+advanced, and to-day was decked, as was becoming more and more usual on
+such occasions, in his Masonic insignia. It was he who had given
+immense impetus to that secret movement by his declaration in the House
+that the key of future progress and brotherhood of nations was in the
+hands of the Order. It was through this alone that the false unity of
+the Church with its fantastic spiritual fraternity could be
+counteracted. St. Paul had been right, he declared, in his desire to
+break down the partition-walls between nations, and wrong only in his
+exaltation of Jesus Christ. Thus he had preluded his speech on the Poor
+Law question, pointing to the true charity that existed among Masons
+apart from religious motive, and appealing to the famous benefactions on
+the Continent; and in the enthusiasm of the Bill's success the Order had
+received a great accession of members.
+
+Old Mrs. Brand was in her best to-day, and looked out with considerable
+excitement at the huge throng gathered to hear her son speak. A platform
+was erected round the bronze statue at such a height that the statesman
+appeared to be one of the speakers, though at a slightly higher
+elevation, and this platform was hung with roses, surmounted by a
+sounding-board, and set with a chair and table.
+
+The whole square round about was paved with heads and resonant with
+sound, the murmurs of thousands of voices, overpowered now and again by
+the crash of brass and thunder of drums as the Benefit Societies and
+democratic Guilds, each headed by a banner, deployed from North, South,
+East and West, and converged towards the wide railed space about the
+platform where room was reserved for them. The windows on every side
+were packed with faces; tall stands were erected along the front of the
+National Gallery and St. Martin's Church, garden-beds of colour behind
+the mute, white statues that faced outwards round the square; from
+Braithwaite in front, past the Victorians--John Davidson, John Burns,
+and the rest--round to Hampden and de Montfort towards the north. The
+old column was gone, with its lions. Nelson had not been found
+advantageous to the _Entente Cordiale_, nor the lions to the new art;
+and in their place stretched a wide pavement broken by slopes of steps
+that led up to the National Gallery.
+
+Overhead the roofs showed crowded friezes of heads against the blue
+summer sky. Not less than one hundred thousand persons, it was estimated
+in the evening papers, were collected within sight and sound of the
+platform by noon.
+
+As the clocks began to tell the hour, two figures appeared from behind
+the statue and came forward, and, in an instant, the murmurs of talk
+rose into cheering.
+
+Old Lord Pemberton came first, a grey-haired, upright man, whose father
+had been active in denouncing the House of which he was a member on the
+occasion of its fall over seventy years ago, and his son had succeeded
+him worthily. This man was now a member of the Government, and sat for
+Manchester (3); and it was he who was to be chairman on this auspicious
+occasion. Behind him came Oliver, bareheaded and spruce, and even at
+that distance his mother and wife could see his brisk movement, his
+sudden smile and nod as his name emerged from the storm of sound that
+surged round the platform. Lord Pemberton came forward, lifted his hand
+and made a signal; and in a moment the thin cheering died under the
+sudden roll of drums beneath that preluded the Masonic Hymn.
+
+There was no doubt that these Londoners could sing. It was as if a giant
+voice hummed the sonorous melody, rising to enthusiasm till the music of
+massed bands followed it as a flag follows a flag-stick. The hymn was
+one composed ten years before, and all England was familiar with it.
+Old Mrs. Bland lifted the printed paper mechanically to her eyes, and
+saw the words that she knew so well:
+
+"_The Lord that dwells in earth and sea._" ...
+
+She glanced down the verses, that from the Humanitarian point of view
+had been composed with both skill and ardour. They had a religious ring;
+the unintelligent Christian could sing them without a qualm; yet their
+sense was plain enough--the old human creed that man was all. Even
+Christ's, words themselves were quoted. The kingdom of God, it was said,
+lay within the human heart, and the greatest of all graces was Charity.
+
+She glanced at Mabel, and saw that the girl was singing with all her
+might, with her eyes fixed on her husband's dark figure a hundred yards
+away, and her soul pouring through them. So the mother, too, began to
+move her lips in chorus with that vast volume of sound.
+
+As the hymn died away, and before the cheering could begin again, old
+Lord Pemberton was standing forward on the edge of the platform, and his
+thin, metallic voice piped a sentence or two across the tinkling splash
+of the fountains behind him. Then he stepped back, and Oliver came
+forward.
+
+* * * * *
+
+It was too far for the two to hear what was said, but Mabel slipped a
+paper, smiling tremulously, into the old lady's hand, and herself bent
+forward to listen.
+
+Old Mrs. Brand looked at that, too, knowing that it was an analysis of
+her son's speech, and aware that she would not be able to hear his
+words.
+
+There was an exordium first, congratulating all who were present to do
+honour to the great man who presided from his pedestal on the occasion
+of this great anniversary. Then there came a retrospect, comparing the
+old state of England with the present. Fifty years ago, the speaker
+said, poverty was still a disgrace, now it was so no longer. It was in
+the causes that led to poverty that the disgrace or the merit lay. Who
+would not honour a man worn out in the service of his country, or
+overcome at last by circumstances against which his efforts could not
+prevail?... He enumerated the reforms passed fifty years before on this
+very day, by which the nation once and for all declared the glory of
+poverty and man's sympathy with the unfortunate.
+
+So he had told them he was to sing the praise of patient poverty and its
+reward, and that, he supposed, together with a few periods on the reform
+of the prison laws, would form the first half of his speech.
+
+The second part was to be a panegyric of Braithwaite, treating him as
+the Precursor of a movement that even now had begun.
+
+Old Mrs. Brand leaned back in her seat, and looked about her.
+
+The window where they sat had been reserved for them; two arm-chairs
+filled the space, but immediately behind there were others, standing
+very silent now, craning forward, watching, too, with parted lips: a
+couple of women with an old man directly behind, and other faces visible
+again behind them. Their obvious absorption made the old lady a little
+ashamed of her distraction, and she turned resolutely once more to the
+square.
+
+Ah! he was working up now to his panegyric! The tiny dark figure was
+back, a yard nearer the statue, and as she looked, his hand went up and
+he wheeled, pointing, as a murmur of applause drowned for an instant the
+minute, resonant voice. Then again he was forward, half crouching--for
+he was a born actor--and a storm of laughter rippled round the throng of
+heads. She heard an indrawn hiss behind her chair, and the next instant
+an exclamation from Mabel.... What was that?
+
+There was a sharp crack, and the tiny gesticulating figure staggered
+back a step. The old man at the table was up in a moment, and
+simultaneously a violent commotion bubbled and heaved like water about a
+rock at a point in the crowd immediately outside the railed space where
+the bands were massed, and directly opposite the front of the platform.
+
+Mrs. Brand, bewildered and dazed, found herself standing up, clutching
+the window rail, while the girl gripped her, crying out something she
+could not understand. A great roaring filled the square, the heads
+tossed this way and that, like corn under a squall of wind. Then Oliver
+was forward again, pointing and crying out, for she could see his
+gestures; and she sank back quickly, the blood racing through her old
+veins, and her heart hammering at the base of her throat.
+
+"My dear, my dear, what is it?" she sobbed.
+
+But Mabel was up, too, staring out at her husband; and a quick babble of
+talk and exclamations from behind made itself audible in spite of the
+roaring tumult of the square.
+
+
+
+II
+
+Oliver told them the explanation of the whole affair that evening at
+home, leaning back in his chair, with one arm bandaged and in a sling.
+
+They had not been able to get near him at the time; the excitement in
+the square had been too fierce; but a messenger had come to his wife
+with the news that her husband was only slightly wounded, and was in the
+hands of the doctors.
+
+"He was a Catholic," explained the drawn-faced Oliver. "He must have
+come ready, for his repeater was found loaded. Well, there was no chance
+for a priest this time."
+
+Mabel nodded slowly: she had read of the man's fate on the placards.
+
+"He was killed--trampled and strangled instantly," said Oliver. "I did
+what I could: you saw me. But--well, I dare say it was more merciful."
+
+"But you did what you could, my dear?" said the old lady, anxiously,
+from her corner.
+
+"I called out to them, mother, but they wouldn't hear me."
+
+Mabel leaned forward---
+
+"Oliver, I know this sounds stupid of me; but--but I wish they had not
+killed him."
+
+Oliver smiled at her. He knew this tender trait in her.
+
+"It would have been more perfect if they had not," she said. Then she
+broke off and sat back.
+
+"Why did he shoot just then?" she asked.
+
+Oliver turned his eyes for an instant towards his mother, but she was
+knitting tranquilly.
+
+Then he answered with a curious deliberateness.
+
+"I said that Braithwaite had done more for the world by one speech than
+Jesus and all His saints put together." He was aware that the
+knitting-needles stopped for a second; then they went on again as
+before.
+
+"But he must have meant to do it anyhow," continued Oliver.
+
+"How do they know he was a Catholic?" asked the girl again.
+
+"There was a rosary on him; and then he just had time to call on his
+God."
+
+"And nothing more is known?"
+
+"Nothing more. He was well dressed, though."
+
+Oliver leaned back a little wearily and closed his eyes; his arm still
+throbbed intolerably. But he was very happy at heart. It was true that
+he had been wounded by a fanatic, but he was not sorry to bear pain in
+such a cause, and it was obvious that the sympathy of England was with
+him. Mr. Phillips even now was busy in the next room, answering the
+telegrams that poured in every moment. Caldecott, the Prime Minister,
+Maxwell, Snowford and a dozen others had wired instantly their
+congratulations, and from every part of England streamed in message
+after message. It was an immense stroke for the Communists; their
+spokesman had been assaulted during the discharge of his duty, speaking
+in defence of his principles; it was an incalculable gain for them, and
+loss for the Individualists, that confessors were not all on one side
+after all. The huge electric placards over London had winked out the
+facts in Esperanto as Oliver stepped into the train at twilight.
+
+"_Oliver Brand wounded.... Catholic assailant.... Indignation of the
+country.... Well-deserved fate of assassin_."
+
+He was pleased, too, that he honestly had done his best to save the man.
+Even in that moment of sudden and acute pain he had cried out for a fair
+trial; but he had been too late. He had seen the starting eyes roll up
+in the crimson face, and the horrid grin come and go as the hands had
+clutched and torn at his throat. Then the face had vanished and a heavy
+trampling began where it had disappeared. Oh! there was some passion and
+loyalty left in England!
+
+His mother got up presently and went out, still without a word; and
+Mabel turned to him, laying a hand on his knee.
+
+"Are you too tired to talk, my dear?"
+
+He opened his eyes.
+
+"Of course not, my darling. What is it?"
+
+"What do you think will be the effect?"
+
+He raised himself a little, looking out as usual through the darkening
+windows on to that astonishing view. Everywhere now lights were
+glowing, a sea of mellow moons just above the houses, and above the
+mysterious heavy blue of a summer evening.
+
+"The effect?" he said. "It can be nothing but good. It was time that
+something happened. My dear, I feel very downcast sometimes, as you
+know. Well, I do not think I shall be again. I have been afraid
+sometimes that we were losing all our spirit, and that the old Tories
+were partly right when they prophesied what Communism would do. But
+after this---"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Well; we have shown that we can shed our blood too. It is in the nick
+of time, too, just at the crisis. I don't want to exaggerate; it is only
+a scratch--but it was so deliberate, and--and so dramatic. The poor
+devil could not have chosen a worse moment. People won't forget it."
+
+Mabel's eyes shone with pleasure.
+
+"You poor dear!" she said. "Are you in pain?"
+
+"Not much. Besides, Christ! what do I care? If only this infernal
+Eastern affair would end!"
+
+He knew he was feverish and irritable, and made a great effort to drive
+it down.
+
+"Oh, my dear!" he went on, flushed a little. "If they would not be such
+heavy fools: they don't understand; they don't understand."
+
+"Yes, Oliver?"
+
+"They don't understand what a glorious thing it all is Humanity, Life,
+Truth at last, and the death of Folly! But haven't I told them a hundred
+times?"
+
+She looked at him with kindling eyes. She loved to see him like this,
+his confident, flushed face, the enthusiasm in his blue eyes; and the
+knowledge of his pain pricked her feeling with passion. She bent forward
+and kissed him suddenly.
+
+"My dear, I am so proud of you. Oh, Oliver!"
+
+He said nothing; but she could see what she loved to see, that response
+to her own heart; and so they sat in silence while the sky darkened yet
+more, and the click of the writer in the next room told them that the
+world was alive and that they had a share in its affairs.
+
+Oliver stirred presently.
+
+"Did you notice anything just now, sweetheart--when I said that about
+Jesus Christ?"
+
+"She stopped knitting for a moment," said the girl.
+
+He nodded.
+
+"You saw that too, then.... Mabel, do you think she is falling back?"
+
+"Oh! she is getting old," said the girl lightly. "Of course she looks
+back a little."
+
+"But you don't think--it would be too awful!"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"No, no, my dear; you're excited and tired. It's just a little
+sentiment.... Oliver, I don't think I would say that kind of thing
+before her."
+
+"But she hears it everywhere now."
+
+"No, she doesn't. Remember she hardly ever goes out. Besides, she hates
+it. After all, she was brought up a Catholic."
+
+Oliver nodded, and lay back again, looking dreamily out.
+
+"Isn't it astonishing the way in which suggestion lasts? She can't get
+it out of her head, even after fifty years. Well, watch her, won't
+you?... By the way ..."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"There's a little more news from the East. They say Felsenburgh's
+running the whole thing now. The Empire is sending him everywhere--
+Tobolsk, Benares, Yakutsk--everywhere; and he's been to Australia."
+
+Mabel sat up briskly.
+
+"Isn't that very hopeful?"
+
+"I suppose so. There's no doubt that the Sufis are winning; but for how
+long is another question. Besides, the troops don't disperse."
+
+"And Europe?"
+
+"Europe is arming as fast as possible. I hear we are to meet the Powers
+next week at Paris. I must go."
+
+"Your arm, my dear?"
+
+"My arm must get well. It will have to go with me, anyhow."
+
+"Tell me some more."
+
+"There is no more. But it is just as certain as it can be that this is
+the crisis. If the East can be persuaded to hold its hand now, it will
+never be likely to raise it again. It will mean free trade all over the
+world, I suppose, and all that kind of thing. But if not---"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"If not, there will be a catastrophe such as never has been even
+imagined. The whole human race will be at war, and either East or West
+will be simply wiped out. These new Benninschein explosives will make
+certain of that."
+
+"But is it absolutely certain that the East has got them?"
+
+"Absolutely. Benninschein sold them simultaneously to East and West;
+then he died, luckily for him."
+
+Mabel had heard this kind of talk before, but her imagination simply
+refused to grasp it. A duel of East and West under these new conditions
+was an unthinkable thing. There had been no European war within living
+memory, and the Eastern wars of the last century had been under the old
+conditions. Now, if tales were true, entire towns would be destroyed
+with a single shell. The new conditions were unimaginable. Military
+experts prophesied extravagantly, contradicting one another on vital
+points; the whole procedure of war was a matter of theory; there were no
+precedents with which to compare it. It was as if archers disputed as to
+the results of cordite. Only one thing was certain--that the East had
+every modern engine, and, as regards male population, half as much
+again as the rest of the world put together; and the conclusion to be
+drawn from these premisses was not reassuring to England.
+
+But imagination simply refused to speak. The daily papers had a short,
+careful leading article every day, founded upon the scraps of news that
+stole out from the conferences on the other side of the world;
+Felsenburgh's name appeared more frequently than ever: otherwise there
+seemed to be a kind of hush. Nothing suffered very much; trade went on;
+European stocks were not appreciably lower than usual; men still built
+houses, married wives, begat sons and daughters, did their business and
+went to the theatre, for the mere reason that there was no good in
+anything else. They could neither save nor precipitate the situation; it
+was on too large a scale. Occasionally people went mad--people who had
+succeeded in goading their imagination to a height whence a glimpse of
+reality could be obtained; and there was a diffused atmosphere of
+tenseness. But that was all. Not many speeches were made on the subject;
+it had been found inadvisable. After all, there was nothing to do but to
+wait.
+
+
+
+III
+
+Mabel remembered her husband's advice to watch, and for a few days did
+her best. But there was nothing that alarmed her. The old lady was a
+little quiet, perhaps, but went about her minute affairs as usual. She
+asked the girl to read to her sometimes, and listened unblenching to
+whatever was offered her; she attended in the kitchen daily, organised
+varieties of food, and appeared interested in all that concerned her
+son. She packed his bag with her own hands, set out his furs for the
+swift flight to Paris, and waved to him from the window as he went down
+the little path towards the junction. He would be gone three days, he
+said.
+
+It was on the evening of the second day that she fell ill; and Mabel,
+running upstairs, in alarm at the message of the servant, found her
+rather flushed and agitated in her chair.
+
+"It is nothing, my dear," said the old lady tremulously; and she added
+the description of a symptom or two.
+
+Mabel got her to bed, sent for the doctor, and sat down to wait.
+
+She was sincerely fond of the old lady, and had always found her
+presence in the house a quiet sort of delight. The effect of her upon
+the mind was as that of an easy-chair upon the body. The old lady was so
+tranquil and human, so absorbed in small external matters, so
+reminiscent now and then of the days of her youth, so utterly without
+resentment or peevishness. It seemed curiously pathetic to the girl to
+watch that quiet old spirit approach its extinction, or rather, as Mabel
+believed, its loss of personality in the reabsorption into the Spirit of
+Life which informed the world. She found less difficulty in
+contemplating the end of a vigorous soul, for in that case she imagined
+a kind of energetic rush of force back into the origin of things; but in
+this peaceful old lady there was so little energy; her whole point, so
+to speak, lay in the delicate little fabric of personality, built out of
+fragile things into an entity far more significant than the sum of its
+component parts: the death of a flower, reflected Mabel, is sadder than
+the death of a lion; the breaking of a piece of china more irreparable
+than the ruin of a palace.
+
+"It is syncope," said the doctor when he came in. "She may die at any
+time; she may live ten years."
+
+"There is no need to telegraph for Mr. Brand?"
+
+He made a little deprecating movement with his hands.
+
+"It is not certain that she will die--it is not imminent?" she asked.
+
+"No, no; she may live ten years, I said."
+
+He added a word or two of advice as to the use of the oxygen injector,
+and went away.
+
+* * * * *
+
+The old lady was lying quietly in bed, when the girl went up, and put
+out a wrinkled hand.
+
+"Well, my dear?" she asked.
+
+"It is just a little weakness, mother. You must lie quiet and do
+nothing. Shall I read to you?"
+
+"No, my dear; I will think a little."
+
+It was no part of Mabel's idea to duty to tell her that she was in
+danger, for there was no past to set straight, no Judge to be
+confronted. Death was an ending, not a beginning. It was a peaceful
+Gospel; at least, it became peaceful as soon as the end had come.
+
+So the girl went downstairs once more, with a quiet little ache at her
+heart that refused to be still.
+
+What a strange and beautiful thing death was, she told herself--this
+resolution of a chord that had hung suspended for thirty, fifty or
+seventy years--back again into the stillness of the huge Instrument that
+was all in all to itself. Those same notes would be struck again, were
+being struck again even now all over the world, though with an infinite
+delicacy of difference in the touch; but that particular emotion was
+gone: it was foolish to think that it was sounding eternally elsewhere,
+for there was no elsewhere. She, too, herself would cease one day, let
+her see to it that the tone was pure and lovely.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Mr. Phillips arrived the next morning as usual, just as Mabel had left
+the old lady's room, and asked news of her.
+
+"She is a little better, I think," said Mabel. "She must be very quiet
+all day."
+
+The secretary bowed and turned aside into Oliver's room, where a heap of
+letters lay to be answered.
+
+A couple of hours later, as Mabel went upstairs once more, she met Mr.
+Phillips coming down. He looked a little flushed under his sallow skin.
+
+"Mrs. Brand sent for me," he said. "She wished to know whether Mr.
+Oliver would be back to-night."
+
+"He will, will he not? You have not heard?"
+
+"Mr. Brand said he would be here for a late dinner. He will reach London
+at nineteen."
+
+"And is there any other news?"
+
+He compressed his lips.
+
+"There are rumours," he said. "Mr. Brand wired to me an hour ago."
+
+He seemed moved at something, and Mabel looked at him in astonishment.
+
+"It is not Eastern news?" she asked.
+
+His eyebrows wrinkled a little.
+
+"You must forgive me, Mrs. Brand," he said. "I am not at liberty to say
+anything."
+
+She was not offended, for she trusted her husband too well; but she went
+on into the sick-room with her heart beating.
+
+The old lady, too, seemed excited. She lay in bed with a clear flush in
+her white cheeks, and hardly smiled at all to the girl's greeting.
+
+"Well, you have seen Mr. Phillips, then?" said Mabel.
+
+Old Mrs. Brand looked at her sharply an instant, but said nothing.
+
+"Don't excite yourself, mother. Oliver will be back to-night."
+
+The old lady drew a long breath.
+
+"Don't trouble about me, my dear," she said. "I shall do very well now.
+He will be back to dinner, will he not?"
+
+"If the volor is not late. Now, mother, are you ready for breakfast?"
+
+* * * * *
+
+Mabel passed an afternoon of considerable agitation. It was certain that
+something had happened. The secretary, who breakfasted with her in the
+parlour looking on to the garden, had appeared strangely excited. He had
+told her that he would be away the rest of the day: Mr. Oliver had given
+him his instructions. He had refrained from all discussion of the
+Eastern question, and he had given her no news of the Paris Convention;
+he only repeated that Mr. Oliver would be back that night. Then he had
+gone of in a hurry half-an-hour later.
+
+The old lady seemed asleep when the girl went up afterwards, and Mabel
+did not like to disturb her. Neither did she like to leave the house; so
+she walked by herself in the garden, thinking and hoping and fearing,
+till the long shadow lay across the path, and the tumbled platform of
+roofs was bathed in a dusty green haze from the west.
+
+As she came in she took up the evening paper, but there was no news
+there except to the effect that the Convention would close that
+afternoon.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Twenty o'clock came, but there was no sign of Oliver. The Paris volor
+should have arrived an hour before, but Mabel, staring out into the
+darkening heavens had seen the stars come out like jewels one by one,
+but no slender winged fish pass overhead. Of course she might have
+missed it; there was no depending on its exact course; but she had seen
+it a hundred times before, and wondered unreasonably why she had not
+seen it now. But she would not sit down to dinner, and paced up and
+down in her white dress, turning again and again to the window,
+listening to the soft rush of the trains, the faint hoots from the
+track, and the musical chords from the junction a mile away. The lights
+were up by now, and the vast sweep of the towns looked like fairyland
+between the earthly light and the heavenly darkness. Why did not Oliver
+come, or at least let her know why he did not?
+
+Once she went upstairs, miserably anxious herself, to reassure the old
+lady, and found her again very drowsy.
+
+"He is not come," she said. "I dare say he may be kept in Paris."
+
+The old face on the pillow nodded and murmured, and Mabel went down
+again. It was now an hour after dinner-time.
+
+Oh! there were a hundred things that might have kept him. He had often
+been later than this: he might have missed the volor he meant to catch;
+the Convention might have been prolonged; he might be exhausted, and
+think it better to sleep in Paris after all, and have forgotten to wire.
+He might even have wired to Mr. Phillips, and the secretary have
+forgotten to pass on the message.
+
+She went at last, hopelessly, to the telephone, and looked at it. There
+it was, that round silent month, that little row of labelled buttons.
+She half decided to touch them one by one, and inquire whether anything
+had been heard of her husband: there was his club, his office in
+Whitehall, Mr. Phillips's house, Parliament-house, and the rest. But she
+hesitated, telling herself to be patient. Oliver hated interference, and
+he would surely soon remember and relieve her anxiety.
+
+Then, even as she turned away, the bell rang sharply, and a white label
+flashed into sight.--WHITEHALL.
+
+She pressed the corresponding button, and, her hand shaking so much that
+she could scarcely hold the receiver to her ear, she listened.
+
+"Who is there?"
+
+Her heart leaped at the sound of her husband's voice, tiny and minute
+across the miles of wire.
+
+"I--Mabel," she said. "Alone here."
+
+"Oh! Mabel. Very well. I am back: all is well. Now listen. Can you
+hear?"
+
+"Yes, yes."
+
+"The best has happened. It is all over in the East. Felsenburgh has done
+it. Now listen. I cannot come home to-night. It will be announced in
+Paul's House in two hours from now. We are communicating with the Press.
+Come up here to me at once. You must be present.... Can you hear?"
+
+"Oh, yes."
+
+"Come then at once. It will be the greatest thing in history. Tell no
+one. Come before the rush begins. In half-an-hour the way will be
+stopped."
+
+"Oliver."
+
+"Yes? Quick."
+
+"Mother is ill. Shall I leave her?"
+
+"How ill?"
+
+"Oh, no immediate danger. The doctor has seen her."
+
+There was silence for a moment.
+
+"Yes; come then. We will go back to-night anyhow, then. Tell her we
+shall be late."
+
+"Very well."
+
+"... Yes, you must come. Felsenburgh will be there."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+I
+
+On the same afternoon Percy received a visitor.
+
+There was nothing exceptional about him; and Percy, as he came
+downstairs in his walking-dress and looked at him in the light from the
+tall parlour-window, came to no conclusion at all as to his business and
+person, except that he was not a Catholic.
+
+"You wished to see me," said the priest, indicating a chair.
+
+"I fear I must not stop long."
+
+"I shall not keep you long," said the stranger eagerly. "My business is
+done in five minutes."
+
+Percy waited with his eyes cast down.
+
+"A--a certain person has sent me to you. She was a Catholic once; she
+wishes to return to the Church."
+
+Percy made a little movement with his head. It was a message he did not
+very often receive in these days.
+
+"You will come, sir, will you not? You will promise me?"
+
+The man seemed greatly agitated; his sallow face showed a little shining
+with sweat, and his eyes were piteous.
+
+"Of course I will come," said Percy, smiling.
+
+"Yes, sir; but you do not know who she is. It--it would make a great
+stir, sir, if it was known. It must not be known, sir; you will promise
+me that, too?"
+
+"I must not make any promise of that kind," said the priest gently. "I
+do not know the circumstances yet."
+
+The stranger licked his lips nervously.
+
+"Well, sir," he said hastily, "you will say nothing till you have seen
+her? You can promise me that."
+
+"Oh! certainly," said the priest.
+
+"Well, sir, you had better not know my name. It--it may make it easier
+for you and for me. And--and, if you please, sir, the lady is ill; you
+must come to-day, if you please, but not until the evening. Will
+twenty-two o'clock be convenient, sir?"
+
+"Where is it?" asked Percy abruptly.
+
+"It--it is near Croydon junction. I will write down the address
+presently. And you will not come until twenty-two o'clock, sir?"
+
+"Why not now?"
+
+"Because the--the others may be there. They will be away then; I know
+that."
+
+This was rather suspicious, Percy thought: discreditable plots had been
+known before. But he could not refuse outright.
+
+"Why does she not send for her parish-priest?" he asked.
+
+"She she does not know who he is, sir; she saw you once in the
+Cathedral, sir, and asked you for your name. Do you remember, sir?--an
+old lady?"
+
+Percy did dimly remember something of the kind a month or two before;
+but he could not be certain, and said so.
+
+"Well, sir, you will come, will you not?"
+
+"I must communicate with Father Dolan," said the priest. "If he gives me
+permission---"
+
+"If you please, sir, Father--Father Dolan must not know her name. You
+will not tell him?"
+
+"I do not know it myself yet," said the priest, smiling.
+
+The stranger sat back abruptly at that, and his face worked.
+
+"Well, sir, let me tell you this first. This old lady's son is my
+employer, and a very prominent Communist. She lives with him and his
+wife. The other two will be away to-night. That is why I am asking you
+all this. And now, you till come, sir?"
+
+Percy looked at him steadily for a moment or two. Certainly, if this was
+a conspiracy, the conspirators were feeble folk. Then he answered:
+
+"I will come, sir; I promise. Now the name."
+
+The stranger again licked his lips nervously, and glanced timidly from
+side to side. Then he seemed to gather his resolution; he leaned forward
+and whispered sharply.
+
+"The old lady's name is Brand, sir--the mother of Mr. Oliver Brand."
+
+For a moment Percy was bewildered. It was too extraordinary to be true.
+He knew Mr. Oliver Brand's name only too well; it was he who, by God's
+permission, was doing more in England at this moment against the
+Catholic cause than any other man alive; and it was he whom the
+Trafalgar Square incident had raised into such eminent popularity. And
+now, here was his mother---
+
+He turned fiercely upon the man.
+
+"I do not know what you are, sir--whether you believe in God or not; but
+will you swear to me on your religion and your honour that all this is
+true?"
+
+The timid eyes met his, and wavered; but it was the wavering of
+weakness, not of treachery.
+
+"I--I swear it, sir; by God Almighty."
+
+"Are you a Catholic?"
+
+The man shook his head.
+
+"But I believe in God," he said. "At least, I think so."
+
+Percy leaned back, trying to realise exactly what it all meant. There
+was no triumph in his mind--that kind of emotion was not his weakness;
+there was fear of a kind, excitement, bewilderment, and under all a
+satisfaction that God's grace was so sovereign. If it could reach this
+woman, who could be too far removed for it to take effect? Presently he
+noticed the other looking at him anxiously.
+
+"You are afraid, sir? You are not going back from your promise?"
+
+That dispersed the cloud a little, and Percy smiled.
+
+"Oh! no," he said. "I will be there at twenty-two o'clock. ... Is death
+imminent?"
+
+"No, sir; it is syncope. She is recovered a little this morning."
+
+The priest passed his hand over his eyes and stood up.
+
+"Well, I will be there," he said. "Shall you be there, sir?"
+
+The other shook his head, standing up too.
+
+"I must be with Mr. Brand, sir; there is to be a meeting to-night; but I
+must not speak of that.... No, sir; ask for Mrs. Brand, and say that she
+is expecting you. They will take you upstairs at once."
+
+"I must not say I am a priest, I suppose?"
+
+"No, sir; if you please."
+
+He drew out a pocket-book, scribbled in it a moment, tore out the sheet,
+and handed it to the priest.
+
+"The address, sir. Will you kindly destroy that when you have copied it?
+I--I do not wish to lose my place, sir, if it can be helped."
+
+Percy stood twisting the paper in his fingers a moment.
+
+"Why are you not a Catholic yourself?" he asked.
+
+The man shook his head mutely. Then he took up his hat, and went towards
+the door.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Percy passed a very emotional afternoon.
+
+For the last month or two little had happened to encourage him. He had
+been obliged to report half-a-dozen more significant secessions, and
+hardly a conversion of any kind. There was no doubt at all that the tide
+was setting steadily against the Church. The mad act in Trafalgar
+Square, too, had done incalculable harm last week: men were saying more
+than ever, and the papers storming, that the Church's reliance on the
+supernatural was belied by every one of her public acts. "Scratch a
+Catholic and find an assassin" had been the text of a leading article in
+the _New People_, and Percy himself was dismayed at the folly of the
+attempt. It was true that the Archbishop had formally repudiated both
+the act and the motive from the Cathedral pulpit, but that too had only
+served as an opportunity hastily taken up by the principal papers, to
+recall the continual policy of the Church to avail herself of violence
+while she repudiated the violent. The horrible death of the man had in
+no way appeased popular indignation; there were not even wanting
+suggestions that the man had been seen coming out of Archbishop's House
+an hour before the attempt at assassination had taken place.
+
+And now here, with dramatic swiftness, had come a message that the
+hero's own mother desired reconciliation with the Church that had
+attempted to murder her son.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Again and again that afternoon, as Percy sped northwards on his visit to
+a priest in Worcester, and southwards once more as the lights began to
+shine towards evening, he wondered whether this were not a plot after
+all--some kind of retaliation, an attempt to trap him. Yet he had
+promised to say nothing, and to go.
+
+He finished his daily letter after dinner as usual, with a curious sense
+of fatality; addressed and stamped it. Then he went downstairs, in his
+walking-dress, to Father Blackmore's room.
+
+"Will you hear my confession, father?" he said abruptly.
+
+
+
+II
+
+Victoria Station, still named after the great nineteenth-century Queen,
+was neither more nor less busy than usual as he came into it
+half-an-hour later. The vast platform, sunk now nearly two hundred feet
+below the ground level, showed the double crowd of passengers entering
+and leaving town. Those on the extreme left, towards whom Percy began to
+descend in the open glazed lift, were by far the most numerous, and the
+stream at the lift-entrance made it necessary for him to move slowly.
+
+He arrived at last, walking in the soft light on the noiseless ribbed
+rubber, and stood by the door of the long car that ran straight through
+to the Junction. It was the last of a series of a dozen or more, each of
+which slid off minute by minute. Then, still watching the endless
+movement of the lifts ascending and descending between the entrances of
+the upper end of the station, he stepped in and sat down.
+
+He felt quiet now that he had actually started. He had made his
+confession, just in order to make certain of his own soul, though
+scarcely expecting any definite danger, and sat now, his grey suit and
+straw hat in no way distinguishing him as a priest (for a general leave
+was given by the authorities to dress so for any adequate reason). Since
+the case was not imminent, he had not brought stocks or pyx--Father
+Dolan had wired to him that he might fetch them if he wished from St.
+Joseph's, near the Junction. He had only the violet thread in his
+pocket, such as was customary for sick calls.
+
+He was sliding along peaceably enough, fixing his eyes on the empty seat
+opposite, and trying to preserve complete collectedness when the car
+abruptly stopped. He looked out, astonished, and saw by the white
+enamelled walks twenty feet from the window that they were already in
+the tunnel. The stoppage might arise from many causes, and he was not
+greatly excited, nor did it seem that others in the carriage took it
+very seriously; he could hear, after a moment's silence, the talking
+recommence beyond the partition.
+
+Then there came, echoed by the walls, the sound of shouting from far
+away, mingled with hoots and chords; it grew louder. The talking in the
+carriage stopped. He heard a window thrown up, and the next instant a
+car tore past, going back to the station although on the down line. This
+must be looked into, thought Percy: something certainly was happening;
+so he got up and went across the empty compartment to the further
+window. Again came the crying of voices, again the signals, and once
+more a car whirled past, followed almost immediately by another. There
+was a jerk--a smooth movement. Percy staggered and fell into a seat, as
+the carriage in which he was seated itself began to move backwards.
+
+There was a clamour now in the next compartment, and Percy made his way
+there through the door, only to find half-a-dozen men with their heads
+thrust from the windows, who paid absolutely no attention to his
+inquiries. So he stood there, aware that they knew no more than himself,
+waiting for an explanation from some one. It was disgraceful, he told
+himself, that any misadventure should so disorganise the line.
+
+Twice the car stopped; each time it moved on again after a hoot or two,
+and at last drew up at the platform whence it had started, although a
+hundred yards further out.
+
+Ah! there was no doubt that something had happened! The instant he
+opened the door a great roar met his ears, and as he sprang on to the
+platform and looked up at the end of the station, he began to
+understand.
+
+* * * * *
+
+From right to left of the huge interior, across the platforms, swelling
+every instant, surged an enormous swaying, roaring crowd. The flight of
+steps, twenty yards broad, used only in cases of emergency, resembled a
+gigantic black cataract nearly two hundred feet in height. Each car as
+it drew up discharged more and more men and women, who ran like ants
+towards the assembly of their fellows. The noise was indescribable, the
+shouting of men, the screaming of women, the clang and hoot of the huge
+machines, and three or four times the brazen cry of a trumpet, as an
+emergency door was flung open overhead, and a small swirl of crowd
+poured through it towards the streets beyond. But after one look Percy
+looked no more at the people; for there, high up beneath the clock, on
+the Government signal board, flared out monstrous letters of fire,
+telling in Esperanto and English, the message for which England had
+grown sick. He read it a dozen times before he moved, staring, as at a
+supernatural sight which might denote the triumph of either heaven or
+hell.
+
+"EASTERN CONVENTION DISPERSED.
+
+PEACE, NOT WAR.
+
+UNIVERSAL BROTHERHOOD ESTABLISHED.
+
+FELSENBURGH IN LONDON TO-NIGHT."
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+
+III
+
+It was not until nearly two hours later that Percy was standing at the
+house beyond the Junction.
+
+He had argued, expostulated, threatened, but the officials were like
+men possessed. Half of them had disappeared in the rush to the City, for
+it had leaked out, in spite of the Government's precautions, that Paul's
+House, known once as St. Paul's Cathedral, was to be the scene of
+Felsenburgh's reception. The others seemed demented; one man on the
+platform had dropped dead from nervous exhaustion, but no one appeared
+to care; and the body lay huddled beneath a seat. Again and again Percy
+had been swept away by a rush, as he struggled from platform to platform
+in his search for a car that would take him to Croydon. It seemed that
+there was none to be had, and the useless carriages collected like
+drift-wood between the platforms, as others whirled up from the country
+bringing loads of frantic, delirious men, who vanished like smoke from
+the white rubber-boards. The platforms were continually crowded, and as
+continually emptied, and it was not until half-an-hour before midnight
+that the block began to move outwards again.
+
+Well, he was here at last, dishevelled, hatless and exhausted, looking
+up at the dark windows.
+
+He scarcely knew what he thought of the whole matter. War, of course,
+was terrible. And such a war as this would have been too terrible for
+the imagination to visualise; but to the priest's mind there were other
+things even worse. What of universal peace--peace, that is to say,
+established by others than Christ's method? Or was God behind even this?
+The questions were hopeless.
+
+Felsenburgh--it was he then who had done this thing--this thing
+undoubtedly greater than any secular event hitherto known in
+civilisation. What manner of man was he? What was his character, his
+motive, his method? How would he use his success?... So the points flew
+before him like a stream of sparks, each, it might be, harmless; each,
+equally, capable of setting a world on fire. Meanwhile here was an old
+woman who desired to be reconciled with God before she died....
+
+* * * * *
+
+He touched the button again, three or four times, and waited. Then a
+light sprang out overhead, and he knew that he was heard.
+
+"I was sent for," he exclaimed to the bewildered maid. "I should have
+been here at twenty-two: I was prevented by the rush."
+
+She babbled out a question at him.
+
+"Yes, it is true, I believe," he said. "It is peace, not war. Kindly
+take me upstairs."
+
+He went through the hall with a curious sense of guilt. This was Brand's
+house then--that vivid orator, so bitterly eloquent against God; and
+here was he, a priest, slinking in under cover of night. Well, well, it
+was not of his appointment.
+
+At the door of an upstairs room the maid turned to him.
+
+"A doctor, sir?" she said.
+
+"That is my affair," said Percy briefly, and opened the door.
+
+* * * * *
+
+A little wailing cry broke from the corner, before he had time to close
+the door again.
+
+"Oh! thank God! I thought He had forgotten me. You are a priest,
+father?"
+
+"I am a priest. Do you not remember seeing me in the Cathedral?"
+
+"Yes, yes, sir; I saw you praying, father. Oh! thank God, thank God!"
+
+Percy stood looking down at her a moment, seeing her flushed old face in
+the nightcap, her bright sunken eyes and her tremulous hands. Yes; this
+was genuine enough.
+
+"Now, my child," he said, "tell me."
+
+"My confession, father."
+
+Percy drew out the purple thread, slipped it over his shoulders, and sat
+down by the bed.
+
+     * * * * *
+
+But she would not let him go for a while after that.
+
+"Tell me, father. When will you bring me Holy Communion?"
+
+He hesitated.
+
+"I understand that Mr. Brand and his wife know nothing of all this?"
+
+"No, father."
+
+"Tell me, are you very ill?"
+
+"I don't know, father. They will not tell me. I thought I was gone last
+night."
+
+"When would you wish me to bring you Holy Communion? I will do as you
+say."
+
+"Shall I send to you in a day or two? Father, ought I to tell him?"
+
+"You are not obliged."
+
+"I will if I ought."
+
+"Well, think about it, and let me know.... You have heard what has
+happened?"
+
+She nodded, but almost uninterestedly; and Percy was conscious of a tiny
+prick of compunction at his own heart. After all, the reconciling of a
+soul to God was a greater thing than the reconciling of East to West.
+
+"It may make a difference to Mr. Brand," he said. "He will be a great
+man, now, you know."
+
+She still looked at him in silence, smiling a little. Percy was
+astonished at the youthfulness of that old face. Then her face changed.
+
+"Father, I must not keep you; but tell me this--Who is this man?"
+
+"Felsenburgh?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"No one knows. We shall know more to-morrow. He is in town to-night."
+
+She looked so strange that Percy for an instant thought it was a
+seizure. Her face seemed to fall away in a kind of emotion, half
+cunning, half fear.
+
+"Well, my child?"
+
+"Father, I am a little afraid when I think of that man. He cannot harm
+me, can he? I am safe now? I am a Catholic--?"
+
+"My child, of course you are safe. What is the matter? How can this man
+injure you?"
+
+But the look of terror was still there, and Percy came a step nearer.
+
+"You must not give way to fancies," he said. "Just commit yourself to
+our Blessed Lord. This man can do you no harm."
+
+He was speaking now as to a child; but it was of no use. Her old mouth
+was still sucked in, and her eyes wandered past him into the gloom of
+the room behind.
+
+"My child, tell me what is the matter. What do you know of Felsenburgh?
+You have been dreaming."
+
+She nodded suddenly and energetically, and Percy for the first time felt
+his heart give a little leap of apprehension. Was this old woman out of
+her mind, then? Or why was it that that name seemed to him sinister?
+Then he remembered that Father Blackmore had once talked like this. He
+made an effort, and sat down once more.
+
+"Now tell me plainly," he said. "You have been dreaming. What have you
+dreamt?"
+
+She raised herself a little in bed, again glancing round the room; then
+she put out her old ringed hand for one of his, and he gave it,
+wondering.
+
+"The door is shut, father? There is no one listening?"
+
+"No, no, my child. Why are you trembling? You must not be
+superstitious."
+
+"Father, I will tell you. Dreams are nonsense, are they not? Well, at
+least, this is what I dreamt.
+
+"I was somewhere in a great house; I do not know where it was. It was a
+house I have never seen. It was one of the old houses, and it was very
+dark. I was a child, I thought, and I was ... I was afraid of something.
+The passages were all dark, and I went crying in the dark, looking for a
+light, and there was none. Then I heard a voice talking, a great way
+off. Father---"
+
+Her hand gripped his more tightly, and again her eyes went round the
+room.
+
+With great difficulty Percy repressed a sigh. Yet he dared not leave her
+just now. The house was very still; only from outside now and again
+sounded the clang of the cars, as they sped countrywards again from the
+congested town, and once the sound of great shouting. He wondered what
+time it was.
+
+"Had you better tell me now?" he asked, still talking with a patient
+simplicity. "What time will they be back?"
+
+"Not yet," she whispered. "Mabel said not till two o'clock. What time
+is it now, father?"
+
+He pulled out his watch with his disengaged hand.
+
+"It is not yet one," he said.
+
+"Very well, listen, father.... I was in this house; and I heard that
+talking; and I ran along the passages, till I saw light below a door;
+and then I stopped.... Nearer, father."
+
+Percy was a little awed in spite of himself. Her voice had suddenly
+dropped to a whisper, and her old eyes seemed to hold him strangely.
+
+"I stopped, father; I dared not go in. I could hear the talking, and I
+could see the light; and I dared not go in. Father, it was Felsenburgh
+in that room."
+
+From beneath came the sudden snap of a door; then the sound of
+footsteps. Percy turned his head abruptly, and at the same moment heard
+a swift indrawn breath from the old woman.
+
+"Hush!" he said. "Who is that?"
+
+Two voices were talking in the hall below now, and at the sound the old
+woman relaxed her hold.
+
+"I--I thought it to be him," she murmured.
+
+Percy stood up; he could see that she did not understand the situation.
+
+"Yes, my child," he said quietly, "but who is it?"
+
+"My son and his wife," she said; then her face changed once more.
+"Why--why, father---"
+
+Her voice died in her throat, as a step vibrated outside. For a moment
+there was complete silence; then a whisper, plainly audible, in a girl's
+voice.
+
+"Why, her light is burning. Come in, Oliver, but softly."
+
+Then the handle turned.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+I
+
+There was an exclamation, then silence, as a tall, beautiful girl with
+flushed face and shining grey eyes came forward and stopped, followed by
+a man whom Percy knew at once from his pictures. A little whimpering
+sounded from the bed, and the priest lifted his hand instinctively to
+silence it.
+
+"Why," said Mabel; and then stared at the man with the young face and
+the white hair.
+
+Oliver opened his lips and closed them again. He, too, had a strange
+excitement in his face. Then he spoke.
+
+"Who is this?" he said deliberately.
+
+"Oliver," cried the girl, turning to him abruptly, "this is the priest I
+saw---"
+
+"A priest!" said the other, and came forward a step. "Why, I thought---"
+
+
+Percy drew a breath to steady that maddening vibration in his throat.
+
+"Yes, I am a priest," he said.
+
+Again the whimpering broke out from the bed; and Percy, half turning
+again to silence it, saw the girl mechanically loosen the clasp of the
+thin dust cloak over her white dress.
+
+"You sent for him, mother?" snapped the man, with a tremble in his
+voice, and with a sudden jerk forward of his whole body. But the girl
+put out her hand.
+
+"Quietly, my dear," she said. "Now, sir---"
+
+"Yes, I am a priest," said Percy again, strung up now to a desperate
+resistance of will, hardly knowing what he said.
+
+"And you come to my house!" exclaimed the man. He came a step nearer,
+and half recoiled. "You swear you are a priest?" he said. "You have been
+here all this evening?"
+
+"Since midnight."
+
+"And you are not---" he stopped again.
+
+Mabel stepped straight between them.
+
+"Oliver," she said, still with that air of suppressed excitement, "we
+must not have a scene here. The poor dear is too ill. Will you come
+downstairs, sir?"
+
+Percy took a step towards the door, and Oliver moved slightly aside.
+Then the priest stopped, turned and lifted his hand.
+
+"God bless you!" he said simply, to the muttering figure in the bed.
+Then he went out, and waited outside the door.
+
+He could hear a low talking within; then a compassionate murmur from the
+girl's voice; then Oliver was beside him, trembling all over, as white
+as ashes, and made a silent gesture as he went past him down the stairs.
+
+* * * * *
+
+The whole thing seemed to Percy like some incredible dream; it was all
+so unexpected, so untrue to life. He felt conscious of an enormous shame
+at the sordidness of the affair, and at the same time of a kind of
+hopeless recklessness. The worst had happened and the best--that was his
+sole comfort.
+
+Oliver pushed a door open, touched a button, and went through into the
+suddenly lit room, followed by Percy. Still in silence, he pointed to a
+chair, Percy sat down, and Oliver stood before the fireplace, his hands
+deep in the pockets of his jacket, slightly turned away.
+
+Percy's concentrated senses became aware of every detail of the
+room--the deep springy green carpet, smooth under his feet, the straight
+hanging thin silk curtains, the half-dozen low tables with a wealth of
+flowers upon them, and the books that lined the walls. The whole room
+was heavy with the scent of roses, although the windows were wide, and
+the night-breeze stirred the curtains continually. It was a woman's
+room, he told himself. Then he looked at the man's figure, lithe, tense,
+upright; the dark grey suit not unlike his own, the beautiful curve of
+the jaw, the clear pale complexion, the thin nose, the protruding curve
+of idealism over the eyes, and the dark hair. It was a poet's face, he
+told himself, and the whole personality was a living and vivid one. Then
+he turned a little and rose as the door opened, and Mabel came in,
+closing it behind her.
+
+She came straight across to her husband, and put a hand on his shoulder.
+
+"Sit down, my dear," she said. "We must talk a little. Please sit down,
+sir."
+
+The three sat down, Percy on one side, and the husband and wife on a
+straight-backed settle opposite.
+
+The girl began again.
+
+"This must be arranged at once," she said, "but we must have no tragedy.
+Oliver, do you understand? You must not make a scene. Leave this to me."
+
+She spoke with a curious gaiety; and Percy to his astonishment saw that
+she was quite sincere: there was not the hint of cynicism.
+
+"Oliver, my dear," she said again, "don't mouth like that! It is all
+perfectly right. I am going to manage this."
+
+Percy saw a venomous look directed at him by the man; the girl saw it
+too, moving her strong humorous eyes from one to the other. She put her
+hand on his knee.
+
+"Oliver, attend! Don't look at this gentleman so bitterly. He has done
+no harm."
+
+"No harm!" whispered the other.
+
+"No--no harm in the world. What does it matter what that poor dear
+upstairs thinks? Now, sir, would you mind telling us why you came here?"
+
+Percy drew another breath. He had not expected this line.
+
+"I came here to receive Mrs. Brand back into the Church," he said.
+
+"And you have done so?"
+
+"I have done so."
+
+"Would you mind telling us your name? It makes it so much more
+convenient."
+
+Percy hesitated. Then he determined to meet her on her own ground.
+
+"Certainly. My name is Franklin."
+
+"Father Franklin?" asked the girl, with just the faintest tinge of
+mocking emphasis on the first word.
+
+"Yes. Father Percy Franklin, from Archbishop's House, Westminster," said
+the priest steadily.
+
+"Well, then, Father Percy Franklin; can you tell us why you came here? I
+mean, who sent for you?"
+
+"Mrs. Brand sent for me."
+
+"Yes, but by what means?"
+
+"That I must not say."
+
+"Oh, very good.... May we know what good comes of being 'received into
+the Church?'"
+
+"By being received into the Church, the soul is reconciled to God."
+
+"Oh! (Oliver, be quiet.) And how do you do it, Father Franklin?"
+
+Percy stood up abruptly.
+
+"This is no good, madam," he said. "What is the use of these questions?"
+
+The girl looked at him in open-eyed astonishment, still with her hand on
+her husband's knee.
+
+"The use, Father Franklin! Why, we want to know. There is no church law
+against your telling us, is there?"
+
+Percy hesitated again. He did not understand in the least what she was
+after. Then he saw that he would give them an advantage if he lost his
+head at all: so he sat down again.
+
+"Certainly not. I will tell you if you wish to know. I heard Mrs.
+Brand's confession, and gave her absolution."
+
+"Oh! yes; and that does it, then? And what next?"
+
+"She ought to receive Holy Communion, and anointing, if she is in danger
+of death."
+
+Oliver twitched suddenly.
+
+"Christ!" he said softly.
+
+"Oliver!" cried the girl entreatingly. "Please leave this to me. It is
+much better so.--And then, I suppose, Father Franklin, you want to give
+those other things to my mother, too?"
+
+"They are not absolutely necessary," said the priest, feeling, he did
+not know why, that he was somehow playing a losing game.
+
+"Oh! they are not necessary? But you would like to?"
+
+"I shall do so if possible. But I have done what is necessary."
+
+It required all his will to keep quiet. He was as a man who had armed
+himself in steel, only to find that his enemy was in the form of a
+subtle vapour. He simply had not an idea what to do next. He would have
+given anything for the man to have risen and flown at his throat, for
+this girl was too much for them both.
+
+"Yes," she said softly. "Well, it is hardly to be expected that my
+husband should give you leave to come here again. But I am very glad
+that you have done what you think necessary. No doubt it will be a
+satisfaction to you, Father Franklin, and to the poor old thing
+upstairs, too. While we--- _we_--" she pressed her husband's knee--"we
+do not mind at all. Oh!--but there is one thing more."
+
+"If you please," said Percy, wondering what on earth was coming.
+
+"You Christians--forgive me if I say anything rude--but, you know, you
+Christians have a reputation for counting heads, and making the most of
+converts. We shall be so much obliged, Father Franklin, if you will
+give us your word not to advertise this--this incident. It would
+distress my husband, and give him a great deal of trouble."
+
+"Mrs. Brand---" began the priest.
+
+"One moment.... You see, we have not treated you badly. There has been
+no violence. We will promise not to make scenes with my mother. Will you
+promise us that?"
+
+Percy had had time to consider, and he answered instantly.
+
+"Certainly, I will promise that."
+
+Mabel sighed contentedly.
+
+"Well, that is all right. We are so much obliged.... And I think we may
+say this, that perhaps after consideration my husband may see his way to
+letting you come here again to do Communion and--and the other thing---"
+
+Again that spasm shook the man beside her.
+
+"Well, we will see about that. At any rate, we know your address, and
+can let you know.... By the way, Father Franklin, are you going back to
+Westminster to-night?"
+
+He bowed.
+
+"Ah! I hope you will get through. You will find London very much
+excited. Perhaps you heard---"
+
+"Felsenburgh?" said Percy.
+
+"Yes. Julian Felsenburgh," said the girl softly, again with that strange
+excitement suddenly alight in her eyes. "Julian Felsenburgh," she
+repeated. "He is there, you know. He will stay in England for the
+present."
+
+Again Percy was conscious of that slight touch of fear at the mention of
+that name.
+
+"I understand there is to be peace," he said.
+
+The girl rose and her husband with her.
+
+"Yes," she said, almost compassionately, "there is to be peace. Peace at
+last." (She moved half a step towards him, and her face glowed like a
+rose of fire. Her hand rose a little.) "Go back to London, Father
+Franklin, and use your eyes. You will see him, I dare say, and you will
+see more besides." (Her voice began to vibrate.) "And you will
+understand, perhaps, why we have treated you like this--why we are no
+longer afraid of you--why we are willing that my mother should do its
+she pleases. Oh! you will understand, Father Franklin if not to-night,
+to-morrow; or if not to-morrow, at least in a very short time."
+
+"Mabel!" cried her husband.
+
+The girl wheeled, and threw her arms round him, and kissed him on the
+mouth.
+
+"Oh! I am not ashamed, Oliver, my dear. Let him go and see for himself.
+Good-night, Father Franklin."
+
+As he went towards the door, hearing the ping of the bell that some one
+touched in the room behind him, he turned once more, dazed and
+bewildered; and there were the two, husband and wife, standing in the
+soft, sunny light, as if transfigured. The girl had her arm round the
+man's shoulder, and stood upright and radiant as a pillar of fire; and
+even on the man's face there was no anger now--nothing but an almost
+supernatural pride and confidence. They were both smiling.
+
+Then Percy passed out into the soft, summer night.
+
+
+
+II
+
+Percy understood nothing except that he was afraid, as he sat in the
+crowded car that whirled him up to London. He scarcely even heard the
+talk round him, although it was loud and continuous; and what he heard
+meant little to him. He understood only that there had been strange
+scenes, that London was said to have gone suddenly mad, that Felsenburgh
+had spoken that night in Paul's House.
+
+He was afraid at the way in which he had been treated, and he asked
+himself dully again and again what it was that had inspired that
+treatment; it seemed that he had been in the presence of the
+supernatural; he was conscious of shivering a little, and of the
+symptoms of an intolerable sleepiness. It was scarcely strange to him
+that he should be sitting in a crowded car at two o'clock of a summer
+dawn.
+
+Thrice the car stopped, and he stared out at the signs of confusion that
+were everywhere; at the figures that ran in the twilight between the
+tracks, at a couple of wrecked carriages, a tumble of tarpaulins; he
+listened mechanically to the hoots and cries that sounded everywhere.
+
+As he stepped out at last on to the platform, he found it very much as
+he had left it two hours before. There was the same desperate rush as
+the car discharged its load, the same dead body beneath the seat; and
+above all, as he ran helplessly behind the crowd, scarcely knowing
+whither he ran or why, above him burned the same stupendous message
+beneath the clock. Then he found himself in the lift, and a minute later
+he was out on the steps behind the station.
+
+There, too, was an astonishing sight. The lamps still burned overhead,
+but beyond them lay the first pale streaks of the false dawn. The street
+that ran now straight to the old royal palace, uniting there, as at the
+centre of a web, with those that came from Westminster, the Mall and
+Hyde Park, was one solid pavement of heads. On this side and that rose
+up the hotels and "Houses of Joy," the windows all ablaze with light,
+solemn and triumphant as if to welcome a king; while far ahead against
+the sky stood the monstrous palace outlined in fire, and alight from
+within like all other houses within view. The noise was bewildering. It
+was impossible to distinguish one sound from another. Voices, horns,
+drums, the tramp of a thousand footsteps on the rubber pavements, the
+sombre roll of wheels from the station behind--all united in one
+overwhelmingly solemn booming, overscored by shriller notes.
+
+It was impossible to move.
+
+He found himself standing in a position of extraordinary advantage, at
+the very top of the broad flight of steps that led down into the old
+station yard, now a wide space that united, on the left the broad road
+to the palace, and on the right Victoria Street, that showed like all
+else one vivid perspective of lights and heads. Against the sky on his
+right rose up the illuminated head of the Cathedral Campanile. It
+appeared to him as if he had known that in some previous existence.
+
+He edged himself mechanically a foot or two to his left, till he clasped
+a pillar; then he waited, trying not to analyse his emotions, but to
+absorb them.
+
+Gradually he became aware that this crowd was as no other that he had
+ever seen. To his psychical sense it seemed to him that it possessed a
+unity unlike any other. There was magnetism in the air. There was a
+sensation as if a creative act were in process, whereby thousands of
+individual cells were being welded more and more perfectly every instant
+into one huge sentient being with one will, one emotion, and one head.
+The crying of voices seemed significant only as the stirrings of this
+creative power which so expressed itself. Here rested this giant
+humanity, stretching to his sight in living limbs so far as he could see
+on every side, waiting, waiting for some consummation--stretching, too,
+as his tired brain began to guess, down every thoroughfare of the vast
+city.
+
+He did not even ask himself for what they waited. He knew, yet he did
+not know. He knew it was for a revelation--for something that should
+crown their aspirations, and fix them so for ever.
+
+He had a sense that he had seen all this before; and, like a child, he
+began to ask himself where it could have happened, until he remembered
+that it was so that he had once dreamt of the Judgment Day--of humanity
+gathered to meet Jesus Christ--Jesus Christ! Ah! how tiny that Figure
+seemed to him now--how far away--real indeed, but insignificant to
+himself--how hopelessly apart from this tremendous life! He glanced up
+at the Campanile. Yes; there was a piece of the True Cross there, was
+there not?--a little piece of the wood on which a Poor Man had died
+twenty centuries ago.... Well, well. It was a long way off....
+
+He did not quite understand what was happening to him. "Sweet Jesus, be
+to me not a Judge but a Saviour," he whispered beneath his breath,
+gripping the granite of the pillar; and a moment later knew how futile
+was that prayer. It was gone like a breath in this vast, vivid
+atmosphere of man. He had said mass, had he not? this morning--in white
+vestments.--Yes; he had believed it all then--desperately, but truly;
+and now....
+
+To look into the future was as useless as to look into the past. There
+was no future, and no past: it was all one eternal instant, present and
+final....
+
+Then he let go of effort, and again began to see with his bodily eyes.
+
+* * * * *
+
+The dawn was coming up the sky now, a steady soft brightening that
+appeared in spite of its sovereignty to be as nothing compared with the
+brilliant light of the streets. "We need no sun," he whispered, smiling
+piteously; "no sun or light of a candle. We have our light on earth--the
+light that lighteneth every man...."
+
+The Campanile seemed further away than ever now, in that ghostly glimmer
+of dawn--more and more helpless every moment, compared with the
+beautiful vivid shining of the streets.
+
+Then he listened to the sounds, and it seemed to him as if somewhere,
+far down eastwards, there was a silence beginning. He jerked his head
+impatiently, as a man behind him began to talk rapidly and confusedly.
+Why would he not be silent, and let silence be heard?... The man stopped
+presently, and out of the distance there swelled up a roar, as soft as
+the roll of a summer tide; it passed up towards him from the right; it
+was about him, dinning in his ears. There was no longer any individual
+voice: it was the breathing of the giant that had been born; he was
+crying out too; he did not know what he said, but he could not be
+silent. His veins and nerves seemed alight with wine; and as he stared
+down the long street, hearing the huge cry ebb from him and move toward
+the palace, he knew why he had cried, and why he was now silent.
+
+A slender, fish-shaped thing, as white as milk, as ghostly as a shadow,
+and as beautiful as the dawn, slid into sight half-a-mile away, turned
+and came towards him, floating, as it seemed, on the very wave of
+silence that it created, up, up the long curving street on outstretched
+wings, not twenty feet above the heads of the crowd. There was one great
+sigh, and then silence once more.
+
+* * * * *
+
+When Percy could think consciously again--for his will was only capable
+of efforts as a clock of ticks--the strange white thing was nearer. He
+told himself that he had seen a hundred such before; and at the same
+instant that this was different from all others.
+
+Then it was nearer still, floating slowly, slowly, like a gull over the
+sea; he could make out its smooth nose, its low parapet beyond, the
+steersman's head motionless; he could even hear now the soft winnowing
+of the screw--and then he saw that for which he had waited.
+
+High on the central deck there stood a chair, draped, too, in white,
+with some insignia visible above its back; and in the chair sat the
+figure of a man, motionless and lonely. He made no sign as he came; his
+dark dress showed vividedly against the whiteness; his head was raised,
+and he turned it gently now and again from side to side.
+
+It came nearer still, in the profound stillness; the head turned, and
+for an instant the face was plainly visible in the soft, radiant light.
+
+It was a pale face, strongly marked, as of a young man, with arched,
+black eyebrows, thin lips, and white hair.
+
+Then the face turned once more, the steersman shifted his head, and the
+beautiful shape, wheeling a little, passed the corner, and moved up
+towards the palace.
+
+There was an hysterical yelp somewhere, a cry, and again the tempestuous
+groan broke out.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II-THE ENCOUNTER
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+I
+
+Oliver Brand was seated at his desk, on the evening of the next day,
+reading the leading article of the _New People_, evening edition.
+
+* * * * *
+
+"We have had time," he read, "to recover ourselves a little from the
+intoxication of last night. Before embarking on prophecy, it will be as
+well to recall the facts. Up to yesterday evening our anxiety with
+regard to the Eastern crisis continued; and when twenty-one o'clock
+struck there were not more than forty persons in London--the English
+delegates, that is to say--who knew positively that the danger was over.
+Between that moment and half-an-hour later the Government took a few
+discreet steps: a select number of persons were informed; the police
+were called out, with half-a-dozen regiments, to preserve order; Paul's
+House was cleared; the railroad companies were warned; and at the half
+hour precisely the announcement was made by means of the electric
+placards in every quarter of London, as well as in all large provincial
+towns. We have not space now to adequately describe the admirable manner
+in which the public authorities did their duty; it is enough to say that
+not more than seventy fatalities took place in the whole of London; nor
+is it our business to criticise the action of the Government, in
+choosing this mode of making the announcement.
+
+"By twenty-two o'clock Paul's House was filled in every corner, the Old
+Choir was reserved for members of Parliament and public officials, the
+quarter-dome galleries were filled with ladies, and to the rest of the
+floor the public was freely admitted. The volor-police also inform us
+now that for about the distance of one mile in every direction round
+this centre every thoroughfare was blocked with pedestrians, and, two
+hours later, as we all know, practically all the main streets of the
+whole of London were in the same condition.
+
+"It was an excellent choice by which Mr. OLIVER BRAND was selected as
+the first speaker. His arm was still in bandages; and the appeal of his
+figure as well as his passionate words struck the first explicit note of
+the evening. A report of his words will be found in another column. In
+their turns, the PRIME MINISTER, Mr. SNOWFORD, the FIRST MINISTER OF THE
+ADMIRALTY, THE SECRETARY FOR EASTERN AFFAIRS, and LORD PEMBERTON, all
+spoke a few words, corroborating the extraordinary news. At a quarter
+before twenty-three, the noise of cheering outside announced the arrival
+of the American delegates from Paris, and one by one these ascended the
+platform by the south gates of the Old Choir. Each spoke in turn. It is
+impossible to appreciate words spoken at such a moment as this; but
+perhaps it is not invidious to name Mr. MARKHAM as the orator who above
+all others appealed to those who were privileged to hear him. It was he,
+too, who told us explicitly what others had merely mentioned, to the
+effect that the success of the American efforts was entirely due to Mr.
+JULIAN FELSENBURGH. As yet Mr. FELSENBURGH had not arrived; but in
+answer to a roar of inquiry, Mr. MARKHAM announced that this gentleman
+would be amongst them in a few minutes. He then proceeded to describe to
+us, so far as was possible in a few sentences, the methods by which Mr.
+FELSENBURGH had accomplished what is probably the most astonishing task
+known to history. It seems from his words that Mr. FELSENBURGH (whose
+biography, so far as it is known, we give in another column) is probably
+the greatest orator that the world has ever known--we use these words
+deliberately. All languages seem the same to him; he delivered speeches
+during the eight months through which the Eastern Convention lasted, in
+no less than fifteen tongues. Of his manner in speaking we shall have a
+few remarks to make presently. He showed also, Mr. MARKHAM told us, the
+most astonishing knowledge, not only of human nature, but of every trait
+under which that divine thing manifests itself. He appeared acquainted
+with the history, the prejudices, the fears, the hopes, the expectations
+of all the innumerable sects and castes of the East to whom it was his
+business to speak. In fact, as Mr. MARKHAM said, he is probably the
+first perfect product of that new cosmopolitan creation to which the
+world has laboured throughout its history. In no less than nine
+places--Damascus, Irkutsk, Constantinople, Calcutta, Benares, Nanking,
+among them--he was hailed as Messiah by a Mohammedan mob. Finally, in
+America, where this extraordinary figure has arisen, all speak well of
+him. He has been guilty of none of those crimes--there is not one that
+convicts him of sin--those crimes of the Yellow Press, of corruption, of
+commercial or political bullying which have so stained the past of all
+those old politicians who made the sister continent what she has become.
+Mr. FELSENBURGH has not even formed a party. He, and not his underlings,
+have conquered. Those who were present in Paul's House on this occasion
+will understand us when we say that the effect of those words was
+indescribable.
+
+"When Mr. MARKHAM sat down, there was a silence; then, in order to quiet
+the rising excitement, the organist struck the first chords of the
+Masonic Hymn; the words were taken up, and presently not only the whole
+interior of the building rang with it, but outside, too, the people
+responded, and the city of London for a few moments became indeed a
+temple of the Lord.
+
+"Now indeed we come to the most difficult part of our task, and it is
+better to confess at once that anything resembling journalistic
+descriptiveness must be resolutely laid aside. The greatest things are
+best told in the simplest words.
+
+"Towards the close of the fourth verse, a figure in a plain dark suit
+was observed ascending the steps of the platform. For a moment this
+attracted no attention, but when it was seen that a sudden movement had
+broken out among the delegates, the singing began to falter; and it
+ceased altogether as the figure, after a slight inclination to right and
+left, passed up the further steps that led to the rostrum. Then occurred
+a curious incident. The organist aloft at first did not seem to
+understand, and continued playing, but a sound broke out from the crowd
+resembling a kind of groan, and instantly he ceased. But no cheering
+followed. Instead a profound silence dominated in an instant the huge
+throng; this, by some strange magnetism, communicated itself to those
+without the building, and when Mr. FELSENBURGH uttered his first words,
+it was in a stillness that was like a living thing. We leave the
+explanation of this phenomenon to the expert in psychology.
+
+"Of his actual words we have nothing to say. So far as we are aware no
+reporter made notes at the moment; but the speech, delivered in
+Esperanto, was a very simple one, and very short. It consisted of a
+brief announcement of the great fact of Universal Brotherhood, a
+congratulation to all who were yet alive to witness this consummation of
+history; and, at the end, an ascription of praise to that Spirit of the
+World whose incarnation was now accomplished.
+
+"So much we can say; but we can say nothing as to the impression of the
+personality who stood there. In appearance the man seemed to be about
+thirty-three years of age, clean-shaven, upright, with white hair and
+dark eyes and brows; he stood motionless with his hands on the rail, he
+made but one gesture that drew a kind of sob from the crowd, he spoke
+these words slowly, distinctly, and in a clear voice; then he stood
+waiting.
+
+"There was no response but a sigh which sounded in the ears of at least
+one who heard it as if the whole world drew breath for the first time;
+and then that strange heart-shaking silence fell again. Many were
+weeping silently, the lips of thousands moved without a sound, and all
+faces were turned to that simple figure, as if the hope of every soul
+were centred there. So, if we may believe it, the eyes of many,
+centuries ago, were turned on one known now to history as JESUS OF
+NAZARETH.
+
+"Mr. FELSENBURGH stood so a moment longer, then he turned down the
+steps, passed across the platform and disappeared.
+
+"Of what took place outside we have received the following account from
+an eye-witness. The white volor, so well known now to all who were in
+London that night, had remained stationary outside the little south door
+of the Old Choir aisle, poised about twenty feet above the ground.
+Gradually it became known to the crowd, in those few minutes, who it was
+who had arrived in it, and upon Mr. FELSENBURGH'S reappearance that same
+strange groan sounded through the whole length of Paul's Churchyard,
+followed by the same silence. The volor descended; the master stepped on
+board, and once more the vessel rose to a height of twenty feet. It was
+thought at first that some speech would be made, but none was necessary;
+and after a moment's pause, the volor began that wonderful parade which
+London will never forget. Four times during the night Mr. FELSENBURGH
+went round the enormous metropolis, speaking no word; and everywhere the
+groan preceded and followed him, while silence accompanied his actual
+passage. Two hours after sunrise the white ship rose over Hampstead and
+disappeared towards the North; and since then he, whom we call, in
+truth, the Saviour of the world, has not been seen.
+
+"And now what remains to be said?
+
+"Comment is useless. It is enough to say in one short sentence that the
+new era has begun, to which prophets and kings, and the suffering, the
+dying, all who labour and are heavy-laden, have aspired in vain. Not
+only has intercontinental rivalry ceased to exist, but the strife of
+home dissensions has ceased also. Of him who has been the herald of its
+inauguration we have nothing more to say. Time alone can show what is
+yet left for him to do.
+
+"But what has been done is as follows. The Eastern peril has been for
+ever dissipated. It is understood now, by fanatic barbarians as well as
+by civilised nations, that the reign of War is ended. 'Not peace but a
+sword,' said CHRIST; and bitterly true have those words proved to be.
+'Not a sword but peace' is the retort, articulate at last, from those
+who have renounced CHRIST'S claims or have never accepted them. The
+principle of love and union learned however falteringly in the West
+during the last century, has been taken up in the East as well. There
+shall be no more an appeal to arms, but to justice; no longer a crying
+after a God Who hides Himself, but to Man who has learned his own
+Divinity. The Supernatural is dead; rather, we know now that it never
+yet has been alive. What remains is to work out this new lesson, to
+bring every action, word and thought to the bar of Love and Justice; and
+this will be, no doubt, the task of years. Every code must be reversed;
+every barrier thrown down; party must unite with party, country with
+country, and continent with continent. There is no longer the fear of
+fear, the dread of the hereafter, or the paralysis of strife. Man has
+groaned long enough in the travails of birth; his blood has been poured
+out like water through his own foolishness; but at length he understands
+himself and is at peace.
+
+"Let it be seen at least that England is not behind the nations in this
+work of reformation; let no national isolation, pride of race, or
+drunkenness of wealth hold her hands back from this enormous work. The
+responsibility is incalculable, but the victory certain. Let us go
+softly, humbled by the knowledge of our crimes in the past, confident in
+the hope of our achievements in the future, towards that reward which is
+in sight at last--the reward hidden so long by the selfishness of men,
+the darkness of religion, and the strife of tongues--the reward promised
+by one who knew not what he said and denied what he asserted--Blessed
+are the meek, the peacemakers, the merciful, for they shall inherit the
+earth, be named the children of God, and find mercy."
+
+* * * * *
+
+Oliver, white to the lips, with his wife kneeling now beside him, turned
+the page and read one more short paragraph, marked as being the latest
+news.
+
+"It is understood that the Government is in communication with Mr.
+Felsenburgh."
+
+
+
+II
+
+"Ah! it is journalese," said Oliver, at last, leaning back. "Tawdry
+stuff! But--but the thing!"
+
+Mabel got up, passed across to the window-seat, and sat down. Her lips
+opened once or twice, but she said nothing.
+
+"My darling," cried the man, "have you nothing to say?"
+
+She looked at him tremulously a moment.
+
+"Say!" she said. "As you said, What is the use of words?"
+
+"Tell me again," said Oliver. "How do I know it is not a dream?"
+
+"A dream," she said. "Was there ever a dream like this?"
+
+Again she got up restlessly, came across the floor, and knelt down by
+her husband once more, taking his hands in hers.
+
+"My dear," she said, "I tell you it is not a dream. It is reality at
+last. I was there too--do you not remember? You waited for me when all
+was over--when He was gone out--we saw Him together, you and I. We heard
+Him--you on the platform and I in the gallery. We saw Him again pass up
+the Embankment as we stood in the crowd. Then we came home and we found
+the priest."
+
+Her face was transfigured as she spoke. It was as of one who saw a
+Divine Vision. She spoke very quietly, without excitement or hysteria.
+Oliver stared at her a moment; then he bent forward and kissed her
+gently.
+
+"Yes, my darling; it is true. But I want to hear it again and again.
+Tell me again what you saw."
+
+"I saw the Son of Man," she said. "Oh! there is no other phrase. The
+Saviour of the world, as that paper says. I knew Him in my heart as soon
+as I saw Him--as we all did--as soon as He stood there holding the rail.
+It was like a glory round his head. I understand it all now. It was He
+for whom we have waited so long; and He has come, bringing Peace and
+Goodwill in His hands. When He spoke, I knew it again. His voice was
+as--as the sound of the sea--as simple as that--as--as lamentable--as
+strong as that.--Did you not hear it?"
+
+Oliver bowed his head.
+
+"I can trust Him for all the rest," went on the girl softly. "I do not
+know where He is, nor when He will come back, nor what He will do. I
+suppose there is a great deal for Him to do, before He is fully
+known--laws, reforms--that will be your business, my dear. And the rest
+of us must wait, and love, and be content."
+
+Oliver again lifted his face and looked at her.
+
+"Mabel, my dear---"
+
+"Oh! I knew it even last night," she said, "but I did not know that I
+knew it till I awoke to-day and remembered. I dreamed of Him all
+night.... Oliver, where is He?"
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"Yes, I know where He is, but I am under oath---"
+
+She nodded quickly, and stood up.
+
+"Yes. I should not have asked that. Well, we are content to wait."
+
+There was silence for a moment or two. Oliver broke it.
+
+"My dear, what do you mean when you say that He is not yet known?"
+
+"I mean just that," she said. "The rest only know what He has done--not
+what He is; but that, too, will come in time."
+
+"And meanwhile---"
+
+"Meanwhile, you must work; the rest will come by and bye. Oh! Oliver, be
+strong and faithful."
+
+She kissed him quickly, and went out.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Oliver sat on without moving, staring, as his habit was, out at the wide
+view beyond his windows. This time yesterday he was leaving Paris,
+knowing the fact indeed--for the delegates had arrived an hour
+before--but ignorant of the Man. Now he knew the Man as well--at least
+he had seen Him, heard Him, and stood enchanted under the glow of His
+personality. He could explain it to himself no more than could any one
+else--unless, perhaps, it were Mabel. The others had been as he had
+been: awed and overcome, yet at the same time kindled in the very depths
+of their souls. They had come out--Snowford, Cartwright, Pemberton, and
+the rest--on to the steps of Paul's House, following that strange
+figure. They had intended to say something, but they were dumb as they
+saw the sea of white faces, heard the groan and the silence, and
+experienced that compelling wave of magnetism that surged up like
+something physical, as the volor rose and started on that indescribable
+progress.
+
+Once more he had seen Him, as he and Mabel stood together on the deck of
+the electric boat that carried them south. The white ship had passed
+along overhead, smooth and steady, above the heads of that vast
+multitude, bearing Him who, if any had the right to that title, was
+indeed the Saviour of the world. Then they had come home, and found the
+priest.
+
+That, too, had been a shock to him; for, at first sight, it seemed that
+this priest was the very man he had seen ascend the rostrum two hours
+before. It was an extraordinary likeness--the same young face and white
+hair. Mabel, of course, had not noticed it; for she had only seen
+Felsenburgh at a great distance; and he himself had soon been reassured.
+And as for his mother--it was terrible enough; if it had not been for
+Mabel there would have been violence done last night. How collected and
+reasonable she had been! And, as for his mother--he must leave her alone
+for the present. By and bye, perhaps, something might be done. The
+future! It was that which engrossed him--the future, and the absorbing
+power of the personality under whose dominion he had fallen last night.
+All else seemed insignificant now--even his mother's defection, her
+illness--all paled before this new dawn of an unknown sun. And in an
+hour he would know more; he was summoned to Westminster to a meeting of
+the whole House; their proposals to Felsenburgh were to be formulated;
+it was intended to offer him a great position.
+
+Yes, as Mabel had said; this was now their work--to carry into effect
+the new principle that had suddenly become incarnate in this grey-haired
+young American--the principle of Universal Brotherhood. It would mean
+enormous labour; all foreign relations would have to be
+readjusted--trade, policy, methods of government--all demanded
+re-statement. Europe was already organised internally on a basis of
+mutual protection: that basis was now gone. There was no more any
+protection, because there was no more any menace. Enormous labour, too,
+awaited the Government in other directions. A Blue-book must be
+prepared, containing a complete report of the proceedings in the East,
+together with the text of the Treaty which had been laid before them in
+Paris, signed by the Eastern Emperor, the feudal kings, the Turkish
+Republic, and countersigned by the American plenipotentiaries....
+Finally, even home politics required reform: the friction of old strife
+between centre and extremes must cease forthwith--there must be but one
+party now, and that at the Prophet's disposal.... He grew bewildered as
+he regarded the prospect, and saw how the whole plane of the world was
+shifted, how the entire foundation of western life required
+readjustment. It was a Revolution indeed, a cataclysm more stupendous
+than even invasion itself; but it was the conversion of darkness into
+light, and chaos into order.
+
+He drew a deep breath, and so sat pondering.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Mabel came down to him half-an-hour later, as he dined early before
+starting for Whitehall.
+
+"Mother is quieter," she said. "We must be very patient, Oliver. Have
+you decided yet as to whether the priest is to come again?"
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"I can think of nothing," he said, "but of what I have to do. You
+decide, my dear; I leave it in your hands."
+
+She nodded.
+
+"I will talk to her again presently. Just now she can understand very
+little of what has happened.... What time shall you be home?"
+
+"Probably not to-night. We shall sit all night."
+
+"Yes, dear. And what shall I tell Mr. Phillips?"
+
+"I will telephone in the morning.... Mabel, do you remember what I told
+you about the priest?"
+
+"His likeness to the other?"
+
+"Yes. What do you make of that?"
+
+She smiled.
+
+"I make nothing at all of it. Why should they not be alike?"
+
+He took a fig from the dish, and swallowed it, and stood up.
+
+"It is only very curious," he said. "Now, good-night, my dear."
+
+
+
+III
+
+"Oh, mother," said Mabel, kneeling by the bed; "cannot you understand
+what has happened?"
+
+She had tried desperately to tell the old lady of the extraordinary
+change that had taken place in the world--and without success. It seemed
+to her that some great issue depended on it; that it would be piteous if
+the old woman went out into the dark unconscious of what had come. It
+was as if a Christian knelt by the death-bed of a Jew on the first
+Easter Monday. But the old lady lay in her bed, terrified but obdurate.
+
+"Mother," said the girl, "let me tell you again. Do you not understand
+that all which Jesus Christ promised has come true, though in another
+way? The reign of God has really begun; but we know now who God is. You
+said just now you wanted the Forgiveness of Sins; well, you have that;
+we all have it, because there is no such thing as sin. There is only
+Crime. And then Communion. You used to believe that that made you a
+partaker of God; well, we are all partakers of God, because we are human
+beings. Don't you see that Christianity is only one way of saying all
+that? I dare say it was the only way, for a time; but that is all over
+now. Oh! and how much better this is! It is true--true. You can see it
+to be true!"
+
+She paused a moment, forcing herself to look at that piteous old face,
+the flushed wrinkled cheeks, the writhing knotted hands on the coverlet.
+
+"Look how Christianity has failed--how it has divided people; think of
+all the cruelties--the Inquisition, the Religious Wars; the separations
+between husband and wife and parents and children--the disobedience to
+the State, the treasons. Oh! you cannot believe that these were right.
+What kind of a God would that be! And then Hell; how could you ever have
+believed in that?... Oh! mother, don't believe anything so frightful....
+Don't you understand that that God has gone--that He never existed at
+all--that it was all a hideous nightmare; and that now we all know at
+last what the truth is.... Mother! think of what happened last
+night--how He came--the Man of whom you were so frightened. I told you
+what He was like--so quiet and strong--how every one was silent--of
+the--the extraordinary atmosphere, and how six millions of people saw
+Him. And think what He has done--how He has healed all the old
+wounds--how the whole world is at peace at last--and of what is going to
+happen. Oh! mother, give up those horrible old lies; give them up; be
+brave."
+
+"The priest, the priest!" moaned the old woman at last.
+
+"Oh! no, no, no--not the priest; he can do nothing. He knows it's all
+lies, too!"
+
+"The priest! the priest!" moaned the other again. "He can tell you; he
+knows the answer."
+
+Her face was convulsed with effort, and her old fingers fumbled and
+twisted with the rosary. Mabel grew suddenly frightened, and stood up.
+
+"Oh! mother!" She stooped and kissed her. "There! I won't say any more
+now. But just think about it quietly. Don't be in the least afraid; it
+is all perfectly right."
+
+She stood a moment, still looking compassionately down; torn by sympathy
+and desire. No! it was no use now; she must wait till the next day.
+
+"I'll look in again presently," she said, "when you have had dinner.
+Mother! don't look like that! Kiss me!"
+
+It was astonishing, she told herself that evening, how any one could be
+so blind. And what a confession of weakness, too, to call only for the
+priest! It was ludicrous, absurd! She herself was filled with an
+extraordinary peace. Even death itself seemed now no longer terrible,
+for was not death swallowed up in victory? She contrasted the selfish
+individualism of the Christian, who sobbed and shrank from death, or, at
+the best, thought of it only as the gate to his own eternal life, with
+the free altruism of the New Believer who asked no more than that Man
+should live and grow, that the Spirit of the World should triumph and
+reveal Himself, while he, the unit, was content to sink back into that
+reservoir of energy from which he drew his life. At this moment she
+would have suffered anything, faced death cheerfully--she contemplated
+even the old woman upstairs with pity--for was it not piteous that death
+should not bring her to herself and reality?
+
+She was in a quiet whirl of intoxication; it was as if the heavy veil of
+sense had rolled back at last and shown a sweet, eternal landscape
+behind--a shadowless land of peace where the lion lay down with the
+lamb, and the leopard with the kid. There should be war no more: that
+bloody spectre was dead, and with him the brood of evil that lived in
+his shadow--superstition, conflict, terror, and unreality. The idols
+were smashed, and rats had run out; Jehovah was fallen; the wild-eyed
+dreamer of Galilee was in his grave; the reign of priests was ended. And
+in their place stood a strange, quiet figure of indomitable power and
+unruffled tenderness.... He whom she had seen--the Son of Man, the
+Saviour of the world, as she had called Him just now--He who bore these
+titles was no longer a monstrous figure, half God and half man, claiming
+both natures and possessing neither; one who was tempted without
+temptation, and who conquered without merit, as his followers said. Here
+was one instead whom she could follow, a god indeed and a man as well--a
+god because human, and a man because so divine.
+
+She said no more that night. She looked into the bedroom for a few
+minutes, and saw the old woman asleep. Her old hand lay out on the
+coverlet, and still between the fingers was twisted the silly string of
+beads. Mabel went softly across in the shaded light, and tried to detach
+it; but the wrinkled fingers writhed and closed, and a murmur came from
+the half-open lips. Ah! how piteous it was, thought the girl, how
+hopeless that a soul should flow out into such darkness, unwilling to
+make the supreme, generous surrender, and lay down its life because life
+itself demanded it!
+
+Then she went to her own room.
+
+* * * * *
+
+The clocks were chiming three, and the grey dawn lay on the walls, when
+she awoke to find by her bed the woman who had sat with the old lady.
+
+"Come at once, madam; Mrs. Brand is dying."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+Oliver was with them by six o'clock; he came straight up into his
+mother's room to find that all was over.
+
+The room was full of the morning light and the clean air, and a bubble
+of bird-music poured in from the lawn. But his wife knelt by the bed,
+still holding the wrinkled hands of the old woman, her face buried in
+her arms. The face of his mother was quieter than he had ever seen it,
+the lines showed only like the faintest shadows on an alabaster mask;
+her lips were set in a smile. He looked for a moment, waiting until the
+spasm that caught his throat had died again. Then he put his hand on his
+wife's shoulder.
+
+"When?" he said.
+
+Mabel lifted her face.
+
+"Oh! Oliver," she murmured. "It was an hour ago. ... Look at this."
+
+She released the dead hands and showed the rosary still twisted there;
+it had snapped in the last struggle, and a brown bead lay beneath the
+fingers.
+
+"I did what I could," sobbed Mabel. "I was not hard with her. But she
+would not listen. She kept on crying out for the priest as long as she
+could speak."
+
+"My dear ... " began the man. Then he, too, went down on his knees by
+his wife, leaned forward and kissed the rosary, while tears blinded him.
+
+"Yes, yes," he said. "Leave her in peace. I would not move it for the
+world: it was her toy, was it not?"
+
+The girl stared at him, astonished.
+
+"We can be generous, too," he said. "We have all the world at last. And
+she--she has lost nothing: it was too late."
+
+"I did what I could."
+
+"Yes, my darling, and you were right. But she was too old; she could not
+understand."
+
+He paused.
+
+"Euthanasia?" he whispered with something very like tenderness.
+
+She nodded.
+
+"Yes," she said; "just as the last agony began. She resisted, but I knew
+you would wish it."
+
+They talked together for an hour in the garden before Oliver went to his
+room; and he began to tell her presently of all that had passed.
+
+"He has refused," he said. "We offered to create an office for Him; He
+was to have been called Consultor, and he refused it two hours ago. But
+He has promised to be at our service.... No, I must not tell you where
+He is.... He will return to America soon, we think; but He will not
+leave us. We have drawn up a programme, and it is to be sent to Him
+presently.... Yes, we were unanimous."
+
+"And the programme?"
+
+"It concerns the Franchise, the Poor Laws and Trade. I can tell you no
+more than that. It was He who suggested the points. But we are not sure
+if we understand Him yet."
+
+"But, my dear---"
+
+"Yes; it is quite extraordinary. I have never seen such things. There
+was practically no argument."
+
+"Do the people understand?"
+
+"I think so. We shall have to guard against a reaction. They say that
+the Catholics will be in danger. There is an article this morning in the
+_Era_. The proofs were sent to us for sanction. It suggests that means
+must be taken to protect the Catholics."
+
+Mabel smiled.
+
+"It is a strange irony," he said. "But they have a right to exist. How
+far they have a right to share in the government is another matter. That
+will come before us, I think, in a week or two."
+
+"Tell me more about Him."
+
+"There is really nothing to tell; we know nothing, except that He is the
+supreme force in the world. France is in a ferment, and has offered him
+Dictatorship. That, too, He has refused. Germany has made the same
+proposal as ourselves; Italy, the same as France, with the title of
+Perpetual Tribune. America has done nothing yet, and Spain is divided."
+
+"And the East?"
+
+"The Emperor thanked Him; no more than that."
+
+Mabel drew a long breath, and stood looking out across the heat haze
+that was beginning to rise from the town beneath. These were matters so
+vast that she could not take them in. But to her imagination Europe lay
+like a busy hive, moving to and fro in the sunshine. She saw the blue
+distance of France, the towns of Germany, the Alps, and beyond them the
+Pyrenees and sun-baked Spain; and all were intent on the same business,
+to capture if they could this astonishing figure that had risen over the
+world. Sober England, too, was alight with zeal. Each country desired
+nothing better than that this man should rule over them; and He had
+refused them all.
+
+"He has refused them all!" she repeated breathlessly.
+
+"Yes, all. We think He may be waiting to hear from America. He still
+holds office there, you know."
+
+"How old is He?"
+
+"Not more than thirty-two or three. He has only been in office a few
+months. Before that He lived alone in Vermont. Then He stood for the
+Senate; then He made a speech or two; then He was appointed delegate,
+though no one seems to have realised His power. And the rest we know."
+
+Mabel shook her head meditatively.
+
+"We know nothing," she said. "Nothing; nothing! Where did He learn His
+languages?"
+
+"It is supposed that He travelled for many years. But no one knows. He
+has said nothing."
+
+She turned swiftly to her husband.
+
+"But what does it all mean? What is His power? Tell me, Oliver?"
+
+He smiled back, shaking his head.
+
+"Well, Markham said that it was his incorruption--that and his oratory;
+but that explains nothing."
+
+"No, it explains nothing," said the girl.
+
+"It is just personality," went on Oliver, "at least, that's the label to
+use. But that, too, is only a label."
+
+"Yes, just a label. But it is that. They all felt it in Paul's House,
+and in the streets afterwards. Did you not feel it?"
+
+"Feel it!" cried the man, with shining eyes. "Why, I would die for Him!"
+
+* * * * *
+
+They went back to the house presently, and it was not till they reached
+the door that either said a word about the dead old woman who lay
+upstairs.
+
+"They are with her now," said Mabel softly. "I will communicate with the
+people."
+
+He nodded gravely.
+
+"It had better be this afternoon," he said. "I have a spare hour at
+fourteen o'clock. Oh! by the way, Mabel, do you know who took the
+message to the priest?"
+
+"I think so."
+
+"Yes, it was Phillips. I saw him last night. He will not come here
+again."
+
+"Did he confess it?"
+
+"He did. He was most offensive."
+
+But Oliver's face softened again as he nodded to his wife at the foot of
+the stairs, and turned to go up once more to his mother's room.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+I
+
+It seemed to Percy Franklin as he drew near Rome, sliding five hundred
+feet high through the summer dawn, that he was approaching the very
+gates of heaven, or, still better, he was as a child coming home. For
+what he had left behind him ten hours before in London was not a bad
+specimen, he thought, of the superior mansions of hell. It was a world
+whence God seemed to have withdrawn Himself, leaving it indeed in a
+state of profound complacency--a state without hope or faith, but a
+condition in which, although life continued, there was absent the one
+essential to well-being. It was not that there was not expectation--for
+London was on tip-toe with excitement. There were rumours of all kinds:
+Felsenburgh was coming back; he was back; he had never gone. He was to
+be President of the Council, Prime Minister, Tribune, with full
+capacities of democratic government and personal sacro-sanctity, even
+King--if not Emperor of the West. The entire constitution was to be
+remodelled, there was to be a complete rearrangement of the pieces;
+crime was to be abolished by the mysterious power that had killed war;
+there was to be free food--the secret of life was discovered, there was
+to be no more death--so the rumours ran.... Yet that was lacking, to the
+priest's mind, which made life worth living....
+
+In Paris, while the volor waited at the great station at Montmartre,
+once known as the Church of the Sacred Heart, he had heard the roaring
+of the mob in love with life at last, and seen the banners go past. As
+it rose again over the suburbs he had seen the long lines of trains
+streaming in, visible as bright serpents in the brilliant glory of the
+electric globes, bringing the country folk up to the Council of the
+Nation which the legislators, mad with drama, had summoned to decide the
+great question. At Lyons it had been the same. The night was as clear as
+the day, and as full of sound. Mid France was arriving to register its
+votes.
+
+He had fallen asleep as the cold air of the Alps began to envelop the
+car, and had caught but glimpses of the solemn moonlit peaks below him,
+the black profundities of the gulfs, the silver glint of the shield-like
+lakes, and the soft glow of Interlaken and the towns in the Rhone
+valley. Once he had been moved in spite of himself, as one of the huge
+German volors had passed in the night, a blaze of ghostly lights and
+gilding, resembling a huge moth with antennae of electric light, and the
+two ships had saluted one another through half a league of silent air,
+with a pathetic cry as of two strange night-birds who have no leisure to
+pause. Milan and Turin had been quiet, for Italy was organised on other
+principles than France, and Florence was not yet half awake. And now the
+Campagna was slipping past like a grey-green rug, wrinkled and tumbled,
+five hundred feet beneath, and Rome was all but in sight. The indicator
+above his seat moved its finger from one hundred to ninety miles.
+
+He shook off the doze at last, and drew out his office book; but as he
+pronounced the words his attention was elsewhere, and, when Prime was
+said, he closed the book once more, propped himself more comfortably,
+drawing the furs round him, and stretching his feet on the empty seat
+opposite. He was alone in his compartment; the three men who had come in
+at Paris had descended at Turin.
+
+* * * * *
+
+He had been remarkably relieved when the message had come three days
+before from the Cardinal-Protector, bidding him make arrangements for a
+long absence from England, and, as soon as that was done, to come to
+Rome. He understood that the ecclesiastical authorities were really
+disturbed at last.
+
+He reviewed the last day or two, considering the report he would have to
+present. Since his last letter, three days before, seven notable
+apostasies had taken place in Westminster diocese alone, two priests and
+five important laymen. There was talk of revolt on all sides; he had
+seen a threatening document, called a "petition," demanding the right to
+dispense with all ecclesiastical vestments, signed by one hundred and
+twenty priests from England and Wales. The "petitioners" pointed out
+that persecution was coming swiftly at the hands of the mob; that the
+Government was not sincere in the promises of protection; they hinted
+that religious loyalty was already strained to breaking-point even in
+the case of the most faithful, and that with all but those it had
+already broken.
+
+And as to his comments Percy was clear. He would tell the authorities,
+as he had already told them fifty times, that it was not persecution
+that mattered; it was this new outburst of enthusiasm for Humanity--an
+enthusiasm which had waxed a hundredfold more hot since the coming of
+Felsenburgh and the publication of the Eastern news--which was melting
+the hearts of all but the very few. Man had suddenly fallen in love with
+man. The conventional were rubbing their eyes and wondering why they had
+ever believed, or even dreamed, that there was a God to love, asking one
+another what was the secret of the spell that had held them so long.
+Christianity and Theism were passing together from the world's mind as a
+morning mist passes when the sun comes up. His recommendations--? Yes,
+he had those clear, and ran them over in his mind with a sense of
+despair.
+
+For himself, he scarcely knew if he believed what he professed. His
+emotions seemed to have been finally extinguished in the vision of the
+white car and the silence of the crowd that evening three weeks before.
+It had been so horribly real and positive; the delicate aspirations and
+hopes of the soul appeared so shadowy when compared with that burning,
+heart-shaking passion of the people. He had never seen anything like it;
+no congregation under the spell of the most kindling preacher alive had
+ever responded with one-tenth of the fervour with which that irreligious
+crowd, standing in the cold dawn of the London streets, had greeted the
+coming of their saviour. And as for the man himself--Percy could not
+analyse what it was that possessed him as he had stared, muttering the
+name of Jesus, on that quiet figure in black with features and hair so
+like his own. He only knew that a hand had gripped his heart--a hand
+warm, not cold--and had quenched, it seemed, all sense of religious
+conviction. It had only been with an effort that sickened him to
+remember, that he had refrained from that interior act of capitulation
+that is so familiar to all who have cultivated an inner life and
+understand what failure means. There had been one citadel that had not
+flung wide its gates--all else had yielded. His emotions had been
+stormed, his intellect silenced, his memory of grace obscured, a
+spiritual nausea had sickened his soul, yet the secret fortress of the
+will had, in an agony, held fast the doors and refused to cry out and
+call Felsenburgh king.
+
+Ah! how he had prayed during those three weeks! It appeared to him that
+he had done little else; there had been no peace. Lances of doubt thrust
+again and again through door and window; masses of argument had crashed
+from above; he had been on the alert day and night, repelling this,
+blindly, and denying that, endeavouring to keep his foothold on the
+slippery plane of the supernatural, sending up cry after cry to the Lord
+Who hid Himself. He had slept with his crucifix in his hand, he had
+awakened himself by kissing it; while he wrote, talked, ate, walked, and
+sat in cars, the inner life had been busy-making frantic speechless acts
+of faith in a religion which his intellect denied and from which his
+emotions shrank. There had been moments of ecstasy--now in a crowded
+street, when he recognised that God was all, that the Creator was the
+key to the creature's life, that a humble act of adoration was
+transcendently greater than the most noble natural act, that the
+Supernatural was the origin and end of existence there had come to him
+such moments in the night, in the silence of the Cathedral, when the
+lamp flickered, and a soundless air had breathed from the iron door of
+the tabernacle. Then again passion ebbed, and left him stranded on
+misery, but set with a determination (which might equally be that of
+pride or faith) that no power in earth or hell should hinder him from
+professing Christianity even if he could not realise it. It was
+Christianity alone that made life tolerable.
+
+Percy drew a long vibrating breath, and changed his position; for far
+away his unseeing eyes had descried a dome, like a blue bubble set on a
+carpet of green; and his brain had interrupted itself to tell him that
+this was Rome. He got up presently, passed out of his compartment, and
+moved forward up the central gangway, seeing, as he went, through the
+glass doors to right and left his fellow-passengers, some still asleep,
+some staring out at the view, some reading. He put his eye to the glass
+square in the door, and for a minute or two watched, fascinated, the
+steady figure of the steerer at his post. There he stood motionless, his
+hands on the steel circle that directed the vast wings, his eyes on the
+wind-gauge that revealed to him as on the face of a clock both the force
+and the direction of the high gusts; now and again his hands moved
+slightly, and the huge fans responded, now lifting, now lowering.
+Beneath him and in front, fixed on a circular table, were the glass
+domes of various indicators--Percy did not know the meaning of half--one
+seemed a kind of barometer, intended, he guessed, to declare the height
+at which they were travelling, another a compass. And beyond, through
+the curved windows, lay the enormous sky. Well, it was all very
+wonderful, thought the priest, and it was with the force of which all
+this was but one symptom that the supernatural had to compete.
+
+He sighed, turned, and went back to his compartment.
+
+It was an astonishing vision that began presently to open before
+him--scarcely beautiful except for its strangeness, and as unreal as a
+raised map. Far to his right, as he could see through the glass doors,
+lay the grey line of the sea against the luminous sky, rising and
+falling ever so slightly as the car, apparently motionless, tilted
+imperceptibly against the western breeze; the only other movement was
+the faint pulsation of the huge throbbing screw in the rear. To the left
+stretched the limitless country, flitting beneath, in glimpses seen
+between the motionless wings, with here and there the streak of a
+village, flattened out of recognition, or the flash of water, and
+bounded far away by the low masses of the Umbrian hills; while in front,
+seen and gone again as the car veered, lay the confused line of Rome and
+the huge new suburbs, all crowned by the great dome growing every
+instant. Around, above and beneath, his eyes were conscious of wide
+air-spaces, overhead deepening into lapis-lazuli down to horizons of
+pale turquoise. The only sound, of which he had long ceased to be
+directly conscious, was that of the steady rush of air, less shrill now
+as the speed began to drop down--down--to forty miles an hour. There was
+a clang of a bell, and immediately he was aware of a sense of faint
+sickness as the car dropped in a glorious swoop, and he staggered a
+little as he grasped his rugs together. When he looked again the motion
+seemed to have ceased; he could see towers ahead, a line of house-roofs,
+and beneath he caught a glimpse of a road and more roofs with patches of
+green between. A bell clanged again, and a long sweet cry followed. On
+all sides he could hear the movement of feet; a guard in uniform passed
+swiftly along the glazed corridor; again came the faint nausea; and as
+he looked up once more from his luggage for an instant he saw the dome,
+grey now and lined, almost on a level with his own eyes, huge against
+the vivid sky. The world span round for a moment; he shut his eyes, and
+when he looked again walls seemed to heave up past him and stop,
+swaying. There was the last bell, a faint vibration as the car grounded
+in the steel-netted dock; a line of faces rocked and grew still outside
+the windows, and Percy passed out towards the doors, carrying his bags.
+
+
+
+II
+
+He still felt a sense of insecure motion as he sat alone over coffee an
+hour later in one of the remote rooms of the Vatican; but there was a
+sense of exhilaration as well, as his tired brain realised where he was.
+It had been strange to drive over the rattling stones in the weedy
+little cab, such as he remembered ten years ago when he had left Rome,
+newly ordained. While the world had moved on, Rome had stood still; she
+had other affairs to think of than physical improvements, now that the
+spiritual weight of the earth rested entirely upon her shoulders. All
+had seemed unchanged--or rather it had reverted to the condition of
+nearly one hundred and fifty years ago. Histories related how the
+improvements of the Italian government had gradually dropped out of use
+as soon as the city, eighty years before, had been given her
+independence; the trains ceased to run; volors were not allowed to enter
+the walls; the new buildings, permitted to remain, had been converted to
+ecclesiastical use; the Quirinal became the offices of the "Red Pope";
+the embassies, huge seminaries; even the Vatican itself, with the
+exception of the upper floor, had become the abode of the Sacred
+College, who surrounded the Supreme Pontiff as stars their sun.
+
+It was an extraordinary city, said antiquarians--the one living example
+of the old days. Here were to be seen the ancient inconveniences, the
+insanitary horrors, the incarnation of a world given over to dreaming.
+The old Church pomp was back, too; the cardinals drove again in gilt
+coaches; the Pope rode on his white mule; the Blessed Sacrament went
+through the ill-smelling streets with the sound of bells and the light
+of lanterns. A brilliant description of it had interested the civilised
+world immensely for about forty-eight hours; the appalling retrogression
+was still used occasionally as the text for violent denunciations by the
+poorly educated; the well-educated had ceased to do anything but take
+for granted that superstition and progress were irreconcilable enemies.
+
+Yet Percy, even in the glimpses he had had in the streets, as he drove
+from the volor station outside the People's Gate, of the old peasant
+dresses, the blue and red-fringed wine carts, the cabbage-strewn
+gutters, the wet clothes flapping on strings, the mules and
+horses--strange though these were, he had found them a refreshment. It
+had seemed to remind him that man was human, and not divine as the rest
+of the world proclaimed--human, and therefore careless and
+individualistic; human, and therefore occupied with interests other than
+those of speed, cleanliness, and precision.
+
+The room in which he sat now by the window with shading blinds, for the
+sun was already hot, seemed to revert back even further than to a
+century-and-a-half. The old damask and gilding that he had expected was
+gone, and its absence gave the impression of great severity. There was a
+wide deal table running the length of the room, with upright wooden arm
+chairs set against it; the floor was red-tiled, with strips of matting
+for the feet, the white, distempered walls had only a couple of old
+pictures hung upon them, and a large crucifix flanked by candles stood
+on a little altar by the further door. There was no more furniture than
+that, with the exception of a writing-desk between the windows, on which
+stood a typewriter. That jarred somehow on his sense of fitness, and he
+wondered at it.
+
+He finished the last drop of coffee in the thick-rimmed white cup, and
+sat back in his chair.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Already the burden was lighter, and he was astonished at the swiftness
+with which it had become so. Life looked simpler here; the interior
+world was taken more for granted; it was not even a matter of debate.
+There it was, imperious and objective, and through it glimmered to the
+eyes of the soul the old Figures that had become shrouded behind the
+rush of worldly circumstance. The very shadow of God appeared to rest
+here; it was no longer impossible to realise that the saints watched and
+interceded, that Mary sat on her throne, that the white disc on the
+altar was Jesus Christ. Percy was not yet at peace after all, he had
+been but an hour in Rome; and air, charged with never so much grace,
+could scarcely do more than it had done. But he felt more at ease, less
+desperately anxious, more childlike, more content to rest on the
+authority that claimed without explanation, and asserted that the world,
+as a matter of fact, proved by evidences without and within, was made
+this way and not that, for this purpose and not the other. Yet he had
+used the conveniences which he hated; he had left London a bare twelve
+hours before, and now here he sat in a place which was either a stagnant
+backwater of life, or else the very mid-current of it; he was not yet
+sure which.
+
+* * * * *
+
+There was a step outside, a handle was turned; and the
+Cardinal-Protector came through.
+
+Percy had not seen him for four years, and for a moment scarcely
+recognised him.
+
+It was a very old man that he saw now, bent and feeble, his face covered
+with wrinkles, crowned by very thin, white hair, and the little scarlet
+cap on top; he was in his black Benedictine habit with a plain abbatial
+cross on his breast, and walked hesitatingly, with a black stick. The
+only sign of vigour was in the narrow bright slit of his eyes showing
+beneath drooping lids. He held out his hand, smiling, and Percy,
+remembering in time that he was in the Vatican, bowed low only as he
+kissed the amethyst.
+
+"Welcome to Rome, father," said the old man, speaking with an unexpected
+briskness. "They told me you were here half-an-hour ago; I thought I
+would leave you to wash and have your coffee."
+
+Percy murmured something.
+
+"Yes; you are tired, no doubt," said the Cardinal, pulling out a chair.
+
+"Indeed not, your Eminence. I slept excellently."
+
+The Cardinal made a little gesture to a chair.
+
+"But I must have a word with you. The Holy Father wishes to see you at
+eleven o'clock."
+
+Percy started a little.
+
+"We move quickly in these days, father.... There is no time to dawdle.
+You understand that you are to remain in Rome for the present?"
+
+"I have made all arrangements for that, your Eminence."
+
+"That is very well.... We are pleased with you here, Father Franklin.
+The Holy Father has been greatly impressed by your comments. You have
+foreseen things in a very remarkable manner."
+
+Percy flushed with pleasure. It was almost the first hint of
+encouragement he had had. Cardinal Martin went on.
+
+"I may say that you are considered our most valuable
+correspondent--certainly in England. That is why you are summoned. You
+are to help us here in future--a kind of consultor: any one can relate
+facts; not every one can understand them.... You look very young,
+father. How old are you?"
+
+"I am thirty-three, your Eminence."
+
+"Ah! your white hair helps you.... Now, father, will you come with me
+into my room? It is now eight o'clock. I will keep you till nine--no
+longer. Then you shall have some rest, and at eleven I shall take you up
+to his Holiness."
+
+Percy rose with a strange sense of elation, and ran to open the door for
+the Cardinal to go through.
+
+
+
+III
+
+At a few minutes before eleven Percy came out of his little white-washed
+room in his new ferraiuola, soutane and buckle shoes, and tapped at the
+door of the Cardinal's room.
+
+He felt a great deal more self-possessed now. He had talked to the
+Cardinal freely and strongly, had described the effect that Felsenburgh
+had had upon London, and even the paralysis that had seized upon
+himself. He had stated his belief that they were on the edge of a
+movement unparalleled in history: he related little scenes that he had
+witnessed--a group kneeling before a picture of Felsenburgh, a dying man
+calling him by name, the aspect of the crowd that had waited in
+Westminster to hear the result of the offer made to the stranger. He
+showed him half-a-dozen cuttings from newspapers, pointing out their
+hysterical enthusiasm; he even went so far as to venture upon prophecy,
+and to declare his belief that persecution was within reasonable
+distance.
+
+"The world seems very oddly alive," he said; "it is as if the whole
+thing was flushed and nervous."
+
+The Cardinal nodded.
+
+"We, too," he said, "even we feel it."
+
+For the rest the Cardinal had sat watching him out of his narrow eyes,
+nodding from time to time, putting an occasional question, but listening
+throughout with great attention.
+
+"And your recommendations, father---" he had said, and then interrupted
+himself. "No, that is too much to ask. The Holy Father will speak of
+that."
+
+He had congratulated him upon his Latin then--for they had spoken in
+that language throughout this second interview; and Percy had explained
+how loyal Catholic England had been in obeying the order, given ten
+years before, that Latin should become to the Church what Esperanto was
+becoming to the world.
+
+"That is very well," said the old man. "His Holiness will be pleased at
+that."
+
+At his second tap the door opened and the Cardinal came out, taking him
+by the arm without a word; and together they turned to the lift
+entrance.
+
+Percy ventured to make a remark as they slid noiselessly up towards the
+papal apartment.
+
+"I am surprised at the lift, your Eminence, and the typewriter in the
+audience-room."
+
+"Why, father?"
+
+"Why, all the rest of Rome is back in the old days."
+
+The Cardinal looked at him, puzzled.
+
+"Is it? I suppose it is. I never thought of that."
+
+A Swiss guard flung back the door of the lift, saluted and went before
+them along the plain flagged passage to where his comrade stood. Then he
+saluted again and went back. A Pontifical chamberlain, in all the sombre
+glory of purple, black, and a Spanish ruff, peeped from the door, and
+made haste to open it. It really seemed almost incredible that such
+things still existed.
+
+"In a moment, your Eminence," he said in Latin. "Will your Eminence wait
+here?"
+
+It was a little square room, with half-a-dozen doors, plainly contrived
+out of one of the huge old halls, for it was immensely high, and the
+tarnished gilt cornice vanished directly in two places into the white
+walls. The partitions, too, seemed thin; for as the two men sat down
+there was a murmur of voices faintly audible, the shuffling of
+footsteps, and the old eternal click of the typewriter from which Percy
+hoped he had escaped. They were alone in the room, which was furnished
+with the same simplicity as the Cardinal's--giving the impression of a
+curious mingling of ascetic poverty and dignity by its red-tiled floor,
+its white walls, its altar and two vast bronze candlesticks of
+incalculable value that stood on the dais. The shutters here, too, were
+drawn; and there was nothing to distract Percy from the excitement that
+surged up now tenfold in heart and brain.
+
+It was _Papa Angelicus_ whom he was about to see; that amazing old man
+who had been appointed Secretary of State just fifty years ago, at the
+age of thirty, and Pope nine years previously. It was he who had carried
+out the extraordinary policy of yielding the churches throughout the
+whole of Italy to the Government, in exchange for the temporal lordship
+of Rome, and who had since set himself to make it a city of saints. He
+had cared, it appeared, nothing whatever for the world's opinion; his
+policy, so far as it could be called one, consisted in a very simple
+thing: he had declared in Epistle after Epistle that the object of the
+Church was to do glory to God by producing supernatural virtues in man,
+and that nothing at all was of any significance or importance except so
+far as it effected this object. He had further maintained that since
+Peter was the Rock, the City of Peter was the Capital of the world, and
+should set an example to its dependency: this could not be done unless
+Peter ruled his City, and therefore he had sacrificed every church and
+ecclesiastical building in the country for that one end. Then he had set
+about ruling his city: he had said that on the whole the latter-day
+discoveries of man tended to distract immortal souls from a
+contemplation of eternal verities--not that these discoveries could be
+anything but good in themselves, since after all they gave insight into
+the wonderful laws of God--but that at present they were too exciting to
+the imagination. So he had removed the trams, the volors, the
+laboratories, the manufactories--saying that there was plenty of room
+for them outside Rome--and had allowed them to be planted in the
+suburbs: in their place he had raised shrines, religious houses and
+Calvaries. Then he had attended further to the souls of his subjects.
+Since Rome was of limited area, and, still more because the world
+corrupted without its proper salt, he allowed no man under the age of
+fifty to live within its walls for more than one month in each year,
+except those who received his permit. They might live, of course,
+immediately outside the city (and they did, by tens of thousands), but
+they were to understand that by doing so they sinned against the spirit,
+though not the letter, of their Father's wishes. Then he had divided the
+city into national quarters, saying that as each nation had its peculiar
+virtues, each was to let its light shine steadily in its proper place.
+Rents had instantly begun to rise, so he had legislated against that by
+reserving in each quarter a number of streets at fixed prices, and had
+issued an ipso facto excommunication against all who erred in this
+respect. The rest were abandoned to the millionaires. He had retained
+the Leonine City entirely at his own disposal. Then he had restored
+Capital Punishment, with as much serene gravity as that with which he
+had made himself the derision of the civilised world in other matters,
+saying that though human life was holy, human virtue was more holy
+still; and he had added to the crime of murder, the crimes of adultery,
+idolatry and apostasy, for which this punishment was theoretically
+sanctioned. There had not been, however, more than two such executions
+in the eight years of his reign, since criminals, of course, with the
+exception of devoted believers, instantly made their way to the suburbs,
+where they were no longer under his jurisdiction.
+
+But he had not stayed here. He had sent once more ambassadors to every
+country in the world, informing the Government of each of their arrival.
+No attention was paid to this, beyond that of laughter; but he had
+continued, undisturbed, to claim his rights, and, meanwhile, used his
+legates for the important work of disseminating his views. Epistles
+appeared from time to time in every town, laying down the principles of
+the papal claims with as much tranquillity as if they were everywhere
+acknowledged. Freemasonry was steadily denounced, as well as democratic
+ideas of every kind; men were urged to remember their immortal souls and
+the Majesty of God, and to reflect upon the fact that in a few years all
+would be called to give their account to Him Who was Creator and Ruler
+of the world, Whose Vicar was John XXIV, P.P., whose name and seal were
+appended.
+
+That was a line of action that took the world completely by surprise.
+People had expected hysteria, argument, and passionate exhortation;
+disguised emissaries, plots, and protests. There were none of these. It
+was as if progress had not yet begun, and volors were uninvented, as if
+the entire universe had not come to disbelieve in God, and to discover
+that itself was God. Here was this silly old man, talking in his sleep,
+babbling of the Cross, and the inner life and the forgiveness of sins,
+exactly as his predecessors had talked two thousand years before. Well,
+it was only one sign more that Rome had lost not only its power, but its
+common sense as well. It was really time that something should be done.
+
+* * * * *
+
+And this was the man, thought Percy, _Papa Angelicus_, whom he was to
+see in a minute or two.
+
+The Cardinal put his hand on the priest's knee as the door opened, and a
+purple prelate appeared, bowing.
+
+"Only this," he said. "Be absolutely frank."
+
+Percy stood up, trembling. Then he followed his patron towards the inner
+door.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+A white figure sat in the green gloom, beside a great writing-table,
+three or four yards away, but with the chair wheeled round to face the
+door by which the two entered. So much Percy saw as he performed the
+first genuflection. Then he dropped his eyes, advanced, genuflected
+again with the other, advanced once more, and for the third time
+genuflected, lifting the thin white hand, stretched out, to his lips. He
+heard the door close as he stood up.
+
+"Father Franklin, Holiness," said the Cardinal's voice at his ear.
+
+A white-sleeved arm waved to a couple of chairs set a yard away, and the
+two sat down.
+
+* * * * *
+
+While the Cardinal, talking in slow Latin, said a few sentences,
+explaining that this was the English priest whose correspondence had
+been found so useful, Percy began to look with all his eyes.
+
+He knew the Pope's face well, from a hundred photographs and moving
+pictures; even his gestures were familiar to him, the slight bowing of
+the head in assent, the tiny eloquent movement of the hands; but Percy,
+with a sense of being platitudinal, told himself that the living
+presence was very different.
+
+It was a very upright old man that he saw in the chair before him, of
+medium height and girth, with hands clasping the bosses of his
+chair-arms, and an appearance of great and deliberate dignity. But it
+was at the face chiefly that he looked, dropping his gaze three or four
+times, as the Pope's blue eyes turned on him. They were extraordinary
+eyes, reminding him of what historians said of Pius X.; the lids drew
+straight lines across them, giving him the look of a hawk, but the rest
+of the face contradicted them. There was no sharpness in that. It was
+neither thin nor fat, but beautifully modelled in an oval outline: the
+lips were clean-cut, with a look of passion in their curves; the nose
+came down in an aquiline sweep, ending in chiselled nostrils; the chin
+was firm and cloven, and the poise of the whole head was strangely
+youthful. It was a face of great generosity and sweetness, set at an
+angle between defiance and humility, but ecclesiastical from ear to ear
+and brow to chin; the forehead was slightly compressed at the temples,
+and beneath the white cap lay white hair. It had been the subject of
+laughter at the music-halls nine years before, when the composite face
+of well-known priests had been thrown on a screen, side by side with the
+new Pope's, for the two were almost indistinguishable.
+
+Percy found himself trying to sum it up, but nothing came to him except
+the word "priest." It was that, and that was all. _Ecce sacerdos
+magnus!_ He was astonished at the look of youth, for the Pope was
+eighty-eight this year; yet his figure was as upright as that of a man
+of fifty, his shoulders unbowed, his head set on them like an athlete's,
+and his wrinkles scarcely perceptible in the half light. _Papa
+Angelicus!_ reflected Percy.
+
+The Cardinal ceased his explanations, and made a little gesture. Percy
+drew up all his faculties tense and tight to answer the questions that
+he knew were coming.
+
+"I welcome you, my son," said a very soft, resonant voice.
+
+Percy bowed, desperately, from the waist.
+
+The Pope dropped his eyes again, lifted a paper-weight with his left
+hand, and began to play with it gently as he talked.
+
+"Now, my son, deliver a little discourse. I suggest to you three
+heads--what has happened, what is happening, what will happen, with a
+peroration as to what should happen."
+
+Percy drew a long breath, settled himself back, clasped the fingers of
+his left hand in the fingers of his right, fixed his eyes firmly upon
+the cross-embroidered red shoe opposite, and began. (Had he not
+rehearsed this a hundred times!)
+
+* * * * *
+
+He first stated his theme; to the effect that all the forces of the
+civilised world were concentrating into two camps--the world and God. Up
+to the present time the forces of the world had been incoherent and
+spasmodic, breaking out in various ways--revolutions and wars had been
+like the movements of a mob, undisciplined, unskilled, and unrestrained.
+To meet this, the Church, too, had acted through her Catholicity--
+dispersion rather than concentration: _franc-tireurs_ had been opposed
+to _franc-tireurs_. But during the last hundred years there had been
+indications that the method of warfare was to change. Europe, at any
+rate, had grown weary of internal strife; the unions first of Labour,
+then of Capital, then of Labour and Capital combined, illustrated this
+in the economic sphere; the peaceful partition of Africa in the
+political sphere; the spread of Humanitarian religion in the spiritual
+sphere. Over against this must be placed the increased centralisation of
+the Church. By the wisdom of her pontiffs, over-ruled by God Almighty,
+the lines had been drawing tighter every year. He instanced the
+abolition of all local usages, including those so long cherished by the
+East, the establishment of the Cardinal-Protectorates in Rome, the
+enforced merging of all friars into one Order, though retaining their
+familiar names, under the authority of the supreme General; all monks,
+with the exception of the Carthusians, the Carmelites and the Trappists,
+into another; of the three excepted into a third; and the classification
+of nuns after the same plan. Further, he remarked on the more recent
+decrees, establishing the sense of the Vatican decision on
+infallibility, the new version of Canon Law, the immense simplification
+that had taken place in ecclesiastical government, the hierarchy,
+rubrics and the affairs of missionary countries, with the new and
+extraordinary privileges granted to mission priests. At this point he
+became aware that his self-consciousness had left him, and he began,
+even with little gestures, and a slightly raised voice, to enlarge on
+the significance of the last month's events.
+
+All that had gone before, he said, pointed to what had now actually
+taken place--namely, the reconciliation of the world on a basis other
+than that of Divine Truth. It was the intention of God and of His Vicars
+to reconcile all men in Christ Jesus; but the corner-stone had once more
+been rejected, and instead of the chaos that the pious had prophesied,
+there was coming into existence a unity unlike anything known in
+history. This was the more deadly from the fact that it contained so
+many elements of indubitable good. War, apparently, was now extinct, and
+it was not Christianity that had done it; union was now seen to be
+better than disunion, and the lesson had been learned apart from the
+Church. In fact, natural virtues had suddenly waxed luxuriant, and
+supernatural virtues were despised. Friendliness took the place of
+charity, contentment the place of hope, and knowledge the place of
+faith.
+
+Percy stopped, he had become conscious that he was preaching a kind of
+sermon.
+
+"Yes, my son," said the kind voice. "What else?"
+
+What else?... Very well, continued Percy, movements such as these
+brought forth men, and the Man of this movement was Julian Felsenburgh.
+He had accomplished a work that--apart from God--seemed miraculous. He
+had broken down the eternal division between East and West, coming
+himself from the continent that alone could produce such powers; he had
+prevailed by sheer force of personality over the two supreme tyrants of
+life religious fanaticism and party government. His influence over the
+impassive English was another miracle, yet he had also set on fire
+France, Germany, and Spain. Percy here described one or two of his
+little scenes, saying that it was like the vision of a god: and he
+quoted freely some of the titles given to the Man by sober, unhysterical
+newspapers. Felsenburgh was called the Son of Man, because he was so
+pure-bred a cosmopolitan; the Saviour of the World, because he had slain
+war and himself survived--even--even--here Percy's voice faltered--even
+Incarnate God, because he was the perfect representative of divine man.
+
+The quiet, priestly face watching opposite never winced or moved; and he
+went on.
+
+Persecution, he said, was coming. There had been a riot or two already.
+But persecution was not to be feared. It would no doubt cause
+apostasies, as it had always done, but these were deplorable only on
+account of the individual apostates. On the other hand, it would
+reassure the faithful; and purge out the half-hearted. Once, in the
+early ages, Satan's attack had been made on the bodily side, with whips
+and fire and beasts; in the sixteenth century it had been on the
+intellectual side; in the twentieth century on the springs of moral and
+spiritual life. Now it seemed as if the assault was on all three planes
+at once. But what was chiefly to be feared was the positive influence of
+Humanitarianism: it was coming, like the kingdom of God, with power; it
+was crushing the imaginative and the romantic, it was assuming rather
+than asserting its own truth; it was smothering with bolsters instead of
+wounding and stimulating with steel or controversy. It seemed to be
+forcing its way, almost objectively, into the inner world. Persons who
+had scarcely heard its name were professing its tenets; priests absorbed
+it, as they absorbed God in Communion--he mentioned the names of the
+recent apostates--children drank it in like Christianity itself. The
+soul "naturally Christian" seemed to be becoming "the soul naturally
+infidel." Persecution, cried the priest, was to be welcomed like
+salvation, prayed for, and grasped; but he feared that the authorities
+were too shrewd, and knew the antidote and the poison apart. There might
+be individual martyrdoms--in fact there would be, and very many--but
+they would be in spite of secular government, not because of it.
+Finally, he expected, Humanitarianism would presently put on the dress
+of liturgy and sacrifice, and when that was done, the Church's cause,
+unless God intervened, would be over.
+
+Percy sat back, trembling.
+
+"Yes, my son. And what do you think should be done?"
+
+Percy flung out his hands.
+
+"Holy Father--the mass, prayer, the rosary. These first and last. The
+world denies their power: it is on their power that Christians must
+throw all their weight. All things in Jesus Christ--in Jesus Christ,
+first and last. Nothing else can avail. He must do all, for we can do
+nothing."
+
+The white head bowed. Then it rose erect.
+
+"Yes, my son.... But so long as Jesus Christ deigns to use us, we must
+be used. He is Prophet and King as well as Priest. We then, too, must be
+prophet and king as well as priest. What of Prophecy and Royalty?"
+
+The voice thrilled Percy like a trumpet.
+
+"Yes, Holiness.... For prophecy, then, let us preach charity; for
+Royalty, let us reign on crosses. We must love and suffer...." (He drew
+one sobbing breath.) "Your Holiness has preached charity always. Let
+charity then issue in good deeds. Let us be foremost in them; let us
+engage in trade honestly, in family life chastely, in government
+uprightly. And as for suffering--ah! Holiness!"
+
+His old scheme leaped back to his mind, and stood poised there
+convincing and imperious.
+
+"Yes, my son, speak plainly."
+
+"Your Holiness--it is old--old as Rome--every fool has desired it: a new
+Order, Holiness--a new Order," he stammered.
+
+The white hand dropped the paper-weight; the Pope leaned forward,
+looking intently at the priest.
+
+"Yes, my son?"
+
+Percy threw himself on his knees.
+
+"A new Order, Holiness--no habit or badge--subject to your Holiness
+only--freer than Jesuits, poorer than Franciscans, more mortified than
+Carthusians: men and women alike--the three vows with the intention of
+martyrdom; the Pantheon for their Church; each bishop responsible for
+their sustenance; a lieutenant in each country.... (Holiness, it is the
+thought of a fool.) ... And Christ Crucified for their patron."
+
+The Pope stood up abruptly--so abruptly that Cardinal Martin sprang up
+too, apprehensive and terrified. It seemed that this young man had gone
+too far.
+
+Then the Pope sat down again, extending his hand.
+
+"God bless you, my son. You have leave to go.... Will your Eminence stay
+for a few minutes?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+I
+
+The Cardinal said very little to Percy when they met again that evening,
+beyond congratulating him on the way he had borne himself with the Pope.
+It seemed that the priest had done right by his extreme frankness. Then
+he told him of his duties.
+
+Percy was to retain the couple of rooms that had been put at his
+disposal; he was to say mass, as a rule, in the Cardinal's oratory; and
+after that, at nine, he was to present himself for instructions: he was
+to dine at noon with the Cardinal, after which he was to consider
+himself at liberty till _Ave Maria_: then, once more he was to be at his
+master's disposal until supper. The work he would principally have to do
+would be the reading of all English correspondence, and the drawing up
+of a report upon it.
+
+Percy found it a very pleasant and serene life, and the sense of home
+deepened every day. He had an abundance of time to himself, which he
+occupied resolutely in relaxation. From eight to nine he usually walked
+abroad, going sedately through the streets with his senses passive,
+looking into churches, watching the people, and gradually absorbing the
+strange naturalness of life under ancient conditions. At times it
+appeared to him like an historical dream; at times it seemed that there
+was no other reality; that the silent, tense world of modern
+civilisation was itself a phantom, and that here was the simple
+naturalness of the soul's childhood back again. Even the reading of the
+English correspondence did not greatly affect him, for the stream of his
+mind was beginning to run clear again in this sweet old channel; and he
+read, dissected, analysed and diagnosed with a deepening tranquillity.
+
+There was not, after all, a great deal of news. It was a kind of lull
+after storm. Felsenburgh was still in retirement; he had refused the
+offers made to him by France and Italy, as that of England; and,
+although nothing definite was announced, it seemed that he was confining
+himself at present to an unofficial attitude. Meanwhile the Parliaments
+of Europe were busy in the preliminary stages of code-revision. Nothing
+would be done, it was understood, until the autumn sessions.
+
+Life in Rome was very strange. The city had now become not only the
+centre of faith but, in a sense, a microcosm of it. It was divided into
+four huge quarters--Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Teutonic and Eastern--besides
+Trastevere, which was occupied almost entirely by Papal offices,
+seminaries, and schools. Anglo-Saxondom occupied the southwestern
+quarter, now entirely covered with houses, including the Aventine, the
+Celian and Testaccio. The Latins inhabited old Rome, between the Course
+and the river; the Teutons the northeastern quarter, bounded on the
+south by St. Laurence's Street; and the Easterns the remaining quarter,
+of which the centre was the Lateran. In this manner the true Romans were
+scarcely conscious of intrusion; they possessed a multitude of their own
+churches, they were allowed to revel in narrow, dark streets and hold
+their markets; and it was here that Percy usually walked, in a passion
+of historical retrospect. But the other quarters were strange enough,
+too. It was curious to see how a progeny of Gothic churches, served by
+northern priests, had grown up naturally in the Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic
+districts, and how the wide, grey streets, the neat pavements, the
+severe houses, showed how the northerns had not yet realised the
+requirements of southern life. The Easterns, on the other hand,
+resembled the Latins; their streets were as narrow and dark, their
+smells as overwhelming, their churches as dirty and as homely, and their
+colours even more brilliant.
+
+Outside the walls the confusion was indescribable. If the city
+represented a carved miniature of the world, the suburbs represented the
+same model broken into a thousand pieces, tumbled in a bag and shot out
+at random. So far as the eye could see, on all sides from the roof of
+the Vatican, there stretched an endless plain of house-roofs, broken by
+spires, towers, domes and chimneys, under which lived human beings of
+every race beneath the sun. Here were the great manufactories, the
+monster buildings of the new world, the stations, the schools, the
+offices, all under secular dominion, yet surrounded by six millions of
+souls who lived here for love of religion. It was these who had
+despaired of modern life, tired out with change and effort, who had fled
+from the new system for refuge to the Church, but who could not obtain
+leave to live in the city itself. New houses were continually springing
+up in all directions. A gigantic compass, fixed by one leg in Rome, and
+with a span of five miles, would, if twirled, revolve through packed
+streets through its entire circle. Beyond that too houses stretched into
+the indefinite distance.
+
+But Percy did not realise the significance of all that he saw, until the
+occasion of the Pope's name-day towards the end of August.
+
+It was yet cool and early, when he followed his patron, whom he was to
+serve as chaplain, along the broad passages of the Vatican towards the
+room where the Pope and Cardinals were to assemble. Through a window, as
+he looked out into the Piazza, the crowd was yet more dense, if that
+were possible, than it had been an hour before. The huge oval square was
+cobbled with heads, through which ran a broad road, kept by papal troops
+for the passage of the carriages; and up the broad ribbon, white in the
+eastern light, came monstrous vehicles, a blaze of gilding and colour
+and cream tint; slow cheers swelled up and died, and through all came
+the rush and patter of wheels over the stones, like the sound of a
+tide-swept pebbly beach.
+
+As they waited in an ante-chamber, halted by the pressure in front and
+behind--a pack of scarlet and white and purple--he looked out again, and
+realised what he had known only intellectually before, that here before
+his eyes was the royalty of the old world assembled--and he began to
+perceive its significance.
+
+Round the steps of the basilica spread a great fan of coaches, each
+yoked to eight horses--the white of France and Spain, the black of
+Germany, Italy and Russia, and the cream-coloured of England. Those
+stood out in the near half-circle, and beyond was the sweep of the
+lesser powers: Greece, Norway, Sweden, Roumania and the Balkan States.
+One, the Turk, was alone wanting, he reminded himself. The emblems of
+some were visible--eagles, lions, leopards--guarding the royal crown
+above the roof of each. From the foot of the steps to the head ran a
+broad scarlet carpet, lined with soldiers.
+
+Percy leaned against the shutter, and began to meditate. Here was all
+that was left of Royalty. He had seen their palaces before, here and
+there in the various quarters, with standards flying, and
+scarlet-liveried men lounging on the steps. He had raised his hat a
+dozen times as a landau thundered past him up the Course; he had even
+seen the lilies of France and the leopards of England pass together in
+the solemn parade of the Pincian Hill. He had read in the papers every
+now and again during the last five years that family after family had
+made its way to Rome, after papal recognition had been granted; he had
+been told by the Cardinal on the previous evening that William of
+England, with his Consort, had landed at Ostia in the morning and that
+the tale of the Powers was complete. But he had never before realised
+the stupendous, overwhelming fact of the assembly of the world's royalty
+under the shadow of Peter's Throne, nor the appalling danger that its
+presence constituted in the midst of a democratic world. That world, he
+knew, affected to laugh at the folly and the childishness of it all--at
+the desperate play-acting of Divine Right on the part of fallen and
+despised families; but the same world, he knew very well, had not yet
+lost quite all its sentiment; and if that sentiment should happen to
+become resentful---
+
+The pressure relaxed; Percy slipped out of the recess, and followed in
+the slow-moving stream.
+
+Half-an-hour later he was in his place among the ecclesiastics, as the
+papal procession came out through the glimmering dusk of the chapel of
+the Blessed Sacrament into the nave of the enormous church; but even
+before he had entered the chapel he heard the quiet roar of recognition
+and the cry of the trumpets that greeted the Supreme Pontiff as he came
+out, a hundred yards ahead, borne on the _sedia gestatoria_, with the
+fans going behind him. When Percy himself came out, five minutes later,
+walking in his quaternion, and saw the sight that was waiting, he
+remembered with a sudden throb at his heart that other sight he had seen
+in London in a summer dawn three months before....
+
+Far ahead, seeming to cleave its way through the surging heads, like the
+poop of an ancient ship, moved the canopy beneath which sat the Lord of
+the world, and between him and the priest, as if it were the wake of
+that same ship, swayed the gorgeous procession--Protonotaries Apostolic,
+Generals of Religious Orders and the rest--making its way along with
+white, gold, scarlet and silver foam between the living banks on either
+side. Overhead hung the splendid barrel of the roof, and far in front
+the haven of God's altar reared its monstrous pillars, beneath which
+burned the seven yellow stars that were the harbour lights of sanctity.
+It was an astonishing sight, but too vast and bewildering to do anything
+but oppress the observers with a consciousness of their own futility.
+The enormous enclosed air, the giant statues, the dim and distant roofs,
+the indescribable concert of sound--of the movement of feet, the murmur
+of ten thousand voices, the peal of organs like the crying of gnats, the
+thin celestial music--the faint suggestive smell of incense and men and
+bruised bay and myrtle--and, supreme above all, the vibrant atmosphere
+of human emotion, shot with supernatural aspiration, as the Hope of the
+World, the holder of Divine Vice-Royalty, passed on his way to stand
+between God and man--this affected the priest as the action of a drug
+that at once lulls and stimulates, that blinds while it gives new
+vision, that deafens while it opens stopped ears, that exalts while it
+plunges into new gulfs of consciousness. Here, then, was the other
+formulated answer to the problem of life. The two Cities of Augustine
+lay for him to choose. The one was that of a world self-originated,
+self-organised and self-sufficient, interpreted by such men as Marx and
+Herve, socialists, materialists, and, in the end, hedonists, summed up
+at last in Felsenburgh. The other lay displayed in the sight he saw
+before him, telling of a Creator and of a creation, of a Divine purpose,
+a redemption, and a world transcendent and eternal from which all sprang
+and to which all moved. One of the two, John and Julian, was the Vicar,
+and the other the Ape, of God.... And Percy's heart in one more spasm of
+conviction made its choice....
+
+But the summit was not yet reached.
+
+As Percy came at last out from the nave beneath the dome, on his way to
+the tribune beyond the papal throne, he became aware of a new element.
+
+A great space was cleared about the altar and confession, extending, as
+he could see at least on his side, to the point that marked the entrance
+to the transepts; at this point ran rails straight across from side to
+side, continuing the lines of the nave. Beyond this red-hung barrier lay
+a gradual slope of faces, white and motionless; a glimmer of steel
+bounded it, and above, a third of the distance down the transept, rose
+in solemn serried array a line of canopies. These were of scarlet, like
+cardinalitial baldachini, but upon the upright surface of each burned
+gigantic coats supported by beasts and topped by crowns. Under each was
+a figure or two--no more--in splendid isolation, and through the
+interspaces between the thrones showed again a misty slope of faces.
+
+His heart quickened as he saw it--as he swept his eyes round and across
+to the right and saw as in a mirror the replica of the left in the right
+transept. It was there then that they sat--those lonely survivors of
+that strange company of persons who, till half-a-century ago, had
+reigned as God's temporal Vicegerents with the consent of their
+subjects. They were unrecognised, now, save by Him from whom they drew
+their sovereignty--pinnacles clustering and hanging from a dome, from
+which the walls had been withdrawn. These were men and women who had
+learned at last that power comes from above, and their title to rule
+came not from their subjects but from the Supreme Ruler of
+all--shepherds without sheep, captains without soldiers to command. It
+was piteous--horribly piteous, yet inspiring. The act of faith was so
+sublime; and Percy's heart quickened as he understood it. These, then,
+men and women like himself, were not ashamed to appeal from man to God,
+to assume insignia which the world regarded as playthings, but which to
+them were emblems of supernatural commission. Was there not mirrored
+here, he asked himself, some far-off shadow of One Who rode on the colt
+of an ass amid the sneers of the great and the enthusiasm of
+children?...
+
+* * * * *
+
+It was yet more kindling as the mass went on, and he saw the male
+sovereigns come down to do their services at the altar, and to go to and
+fro between it and the Throne. There they went bareheaded, the stately
+silent figures. The English king, once again _Fidei Defensor_, bore the
+train in place of the old king of Spain, who, with the Austrian Emperor,
+alone of all European sovereigns, had preserved the unbroken continuity
+of faith. The old man leaned over his fald-stool, mumbling and weeping,
+even crying out now and again in love and devotion, as, like Simeon, he
+saw his Salvation. The Austrian Emperor twice administered the Lavabo;
+the German sovereign, who had lost his throne and all but his life upon
+his conversion four years before, by a new privilege placed and withdrew
+the cushion, as his Lord kneeled before the Lord of them both. So
+movement by movement the gorgeous drama was enacted; the murmuring of
+the crowds died to a stillness that was but one wordless prayer as the
+tiny White Disc rose between the white hands, and the thin angelic music
+pealed in the dome. For here was the one hope of these thousands, as
+mighty and as little as once within the Manger. There was none other
+that fought for them but only God. Surely then, if the blood of men and
+the tears of women could not avail to move the Judge and Observer of all
+from His silence, surely at least here the bloodless Death of His only
+Son, that once on Calvary had darkened heaven and rent the earth,
+pleaded now with such sorrowful splendour upon this island of faith amid
+a sea of laughter and hatred--this at least must avail! How could it
+not?
+
+* * * * *
+
+Percy had just sat down, tired out with the long ceremonies, when the
+door opened abruptly, and the Cardinal, still in his robes, came in
+swiftly, shutting the door behind him.
+
+"Father Franklin," he said, in a strange breathless voice, "there is the
+worst of news. Felsenburgh is appointed President of Europe."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+It was late that night before Percy returned, completely exhausted by
+his labours. For hour after hour he had sat with the Cardinal, opening
+despatches that poured into the electric receivers from all over Europe,
+and were brought in one by one into the quiet sitting-room. Three times
+in the afternoon the Cardinal had been sent for, once by the Pope and
+twice to the Quirinal.
+
+There was no doubt at all that the news was true; and it seemed that
+Felsenburgh must have waited deliberately for the offer. All others he
+had refused. There had been a Convention of the Powers, each of whom had
+been anxious to secure him, and each of whom had severally failed; these
+private claims had been withdrawn, and an united message sent. The new
+proposal was to the effect that Felsenburgh should assume a position
+hitherto undreamed of in democracy; that he should receive a House of
+Government in every capital of Europe; that his veto of any measure
+should be final for three years; that any measure he chose to introduce
+three times in three consecutive years should become law; that his title
+should be that of President of Europe. From his side practically nothing
+was asked, except that he should refuse any other official position
+offered him that did not receive the sanction of all the Powers. And all
+this, Percy saw very well, involved the danger of an united Europe
+increased tenfold. It involved all the stupendous force of Socialism
+directed by a brilliant individual. It was the combination of the
+strongest characteristics of the two methods of government. The offer
+had been accepted by Felsenburgh after eight hours' silence.
+
+It was remarkable, too, to observe how the news had been accepted by the
+two other divisions of the world. The East was enthusiastic; America was
+divided. But in any case America was powerless: the balance of the world
+was overwhelmingly against her.
+
+Percy threw himself, as he was, on to his bed, and lay there with
+drumming pulses, closed eyes and a huge despair at his heart. The world
+indeed had risen like a giant over the horizons of Rome, and the holy
+city was no better now than a sand castle before a tide. So much he
+grasped. As to how ruin would come, in what form and from what
+direction, he neither knew nor cared. Only he knew now that it would
+come.
+
+He had learned by now something of his own temperament; and he turned
+his eyes inwards to observe himself bitterly, as a doctor in mortal
+disease might with a dreadful complacency diagnose his own symptoms. It
+was even a relief to turn from the monstrous mechanism of the world to
+see in miniature one hopeless human heart. For his own religion he no
+longer feared; he knew, as absolutely as a man may know the colour of
+his eyes, that it was secure again and beyond shaking. During those
+weeks in Rome the cloudy deposit had run clear and the channel was once
+more visible. Or, better still, that vast erection of dogma, ceremony,
+custom and morals in which he had been educated, and on which he had
+looked all his life (as a man may stare upon some great set-piece that
+bewilders him), seeing now one spark of light, now another, flare and
+wane in the darkness, had little by little kindled and revealed itself
+in one stupendous blaze of divine fire that explains itself. Huge
+principles, once bewildering and even repellent, were again luminously
+self-evident; he saw, for example, that while Humanity-Religion
+endeavoured to abolish suffering the Divine Religion embraced it, so
+that the blind pangs even of beasts were within the Father's Will and
+Scheme; or that while from one angle one colour only of the web of life
+was visible--material, or intellectual, or artistic--from another the
+Supernatural was as eminently obvious. Humanity-Religion could only be
+true if at least half of man's nature, aspirations and sorrows were
+ignored. Christianity, on the other hand, at least included and
+accounted for these, even if it did not explain them. This ... and this
+... and this ... all made the one and perfect whole. There was the
+Catholic Faith, more certain to him than the existence of himself: it
+was true and alive. He might be damned, but God reigned. He might go
+mad, but Jesus Christ was Incarnate Deity, proving Himself so by death
+and Resurrection, and John his Vicar. These things were as the bones of
+the Universe--facts beyond doubting--if they were not true, nothing
+anywhere was anything but a dream.
+
+Difficulties?--Why, there were ten thousand. He did not in the least
+understand why God had made the world as it was, nor how Hell could be
+the creation of Love, nor how bread was transubstantiated into the Body
+of God but--well, these things were so. He had travelled far, he began
+to see, from his old status of faith, when he had believed that divine
+truth could be demonstrated on intellectual grounds. He had learned now
+(he knew not how) that the supernatural cried to the supernatural; the
+Christ without to the Christ within; that pure human reason indeed could
+not contradict, yet neither could it adequately prove the mysteries of
+faith, except on premisses visible only to him who receives Revelation
+as a fact; that it is the moral state, rather than the intellectual, to
+which the Spirit of God speaks with the greater certitude. That which he
+had both learned and taught he now knew, that Faith, having, like man
+himself, a body and a spirit--an historical expression and an inner
+verity--speaks now by one, now by another. This man believes because he
+sees--accepts the Incarnation or the Church from its credentials; that
+man, perceiving that these things are spiritual facts, yields himself
+wholly to the message and authority of her who alone professes them, as
+well as to the manifestation of them upon the historical plane; and in
+the darkness leans upon her arm. Or, best of all, because he has
+believed, now he sees.
+
+So he looked with a kind of interested indolence at other tracts of his
+nature.
+
+First, there was his intellect, puzzled beyond description, demanding,
+Why, why, why? Why was it allowed? How was it conceivable that God did
+not intervene, and that the Father of men could permit His dear world to
+be so ranged against Him? What did He mean to do? Was this eternal
+silence never to be broken? It was very well for those that had the
+Faith, but what of the countless millions who were settling down in
+contented blasphemy? Were these not, too, His children and the sheep of
+His pasture? What was the Catholic Church made for if not to convert the
+world, and why then had Almighty God allowed it, on the one side, to
+dwindle to a handful, and, on the other, the world to find its peace
+apart from Him?
+
+He considered his emotions, but there was no comfort there, no stimulus.
+Oh! yes; he could pray still, by mere cold acts of the will, and his
+theology told him that God accepted such. He could say "_Adveniat regnum
+tuum. ... Fiat voluntas tua_," five thousand times a day, if God wanted
+that; but there was no sting or touch, no sense of vibration through the
+cords that his will threw up to the Heavenly Throne. What in the world
+then did God want him to do? Was it just then to repeat formulas, to lie
+still, to open despatches, to listen through the telephone, and to
+suffer?
+
+And then the rest of the world--the madness that had seized upon the
+nations; the amazing stories that had poured in that day of the men in
+Paris, who, raving like Bacchantes, had stripped themselves naked in the
+Place de Concorde, and stabbed themselves to the heart, crying out to
+thunders of applause that life was too enthralling to be endured; of the
+woman who sang herself mad last night in Spain, and fell laughing and
+foaming in the concert hall at Seville; of the crucifixion of the
+Catholics that morning in the Pyrenees, and the apostasy of three
+bishops in Germany.... And this ... and this ... and a thousand more
+horrors were permitted, and God made no sign and spoke no word....
+
+There was a tap, and Percy sprang up as the Cardinal came in.
+
+He looked horribly worn; and his eyes had a kind of sunken brilliance
+that revealed fever. He made a little motion to Percy to sit down, and
+himself sat in the deep chair, trembling a little, and gathering his
+buckled feet beneath his red-buttoned cassock.
+
+"You must forgive me, father," he said. "I am anxious for the Bishop's
+safety. He should be here by now."
+
+This was the Bishop of Southwark, Percy remembered, who had left England
+early that morning.
+
+"He is coming straight through, your Eminence?"
+
+"Yes; he should have been here by twenty-three. It is after midnight, is
+it not?"
+
+As he spoke, the bells chimed out the half-hour.
+
+It was nearly quiet now. All day the air had been full of sound; mobs
+had paraded the suburbs; the gates of the City had been barred, yet that
+was only an earnest of what was to be expected when the world understood
+itself.
+
+The Cardinal seemed to recover himself after a few minutes' silence.
+
+"You look tired out, father," he said kindly.
+
+Percy smiled.
+
+"And your Eminence?" he said.
+
+The old man smiled too.
+
+"Why, yes," he said. "I shall not last much longer, father. And then it
+will be you to suffer."
+
+Percy sat up, suddenly, sick at heart.
+
+"Why, yes," said the Cardinal. "The Holy Father has arranged it. You are
+to succeed me, you know. It need be no secret."
+
+Percy drew a long trembling breath.
+
+"Eminence," he began piteously.
+
+The other lifted a thin old hand.
+
+"I understand all that," he said softly. "You wish to die, is it not
+so?--and be at peace. There are many who wish that. But we must suffer
+first. _Et pati et mori_. Father Franklin, there must be no faltering."
+
+There was a long silence.
+
+The news was too stunning to convey anything to the priest but a sense
+of horrible shock. The thought had simply never entered his mind that
+he, a man under forty, should be considered eligible to succeed this
+wise, patient old prelate. As for the honour--Percy was past that now,
+even had he thought of it. There was but one view before him--of a long
+and intolerable journey, on a road that went uphill, to be traversed
+with a burden on his shoulders that he could not support.
+
+Yet he recognised its inevitability. The fact was announced to him as
+indisputable; it was to be; there was nothing to be said. But it was as
+if one more gulf had opened, and he stared into it with a dull, sick
+horror, incapable of expression.
+
+The Cardinal first broke the silence.
+
+"Father Franklin," he said, "I have seen to-day a picture of
+Felsenburgh. Do you know whom I at first took it for?"
+
+Percy smiled listlessly.
+
+"Yes, father, I took it for you. Now, what do you make of that?"
+
+"I don't understand, Eminence."
+
+"Why---" He broke off, suddenly changing the subject.
+
+"There was a murder in the City to-day," he said. "A Catholic stabbed a
+blasphemer."
+
+Percy glanced at him again.
+
+"Oh! yes; he has not attempted to escape," went on the old man. "He is
+in gaol."
+
+"And---"
+
+"He will be executed. The trial will begin to-morrow.... It is sad
+enough. It is the first murder for eight months."
+
+The irony of the position was evident enough to Percy as he sat
+listening to the deepening silence outside in the starlit night. Here
+was this poor city pretending that nothing was the matter, quietly
+administering its derided justice; and there, outside, were the forces
+gathering that would put an end to all. His enthusiasm seemed dead.
+There was no thrill from the thought of the splendid disregard of
+material facts of which this was one tiny instance, none of despairing
+courage or drunken recklessness. He felt like one who watches a fly
+washing his face on the cylinder of an engine--the huge steel slides
+along bearing the tiny life towards enormous death--another moment and
+it will be over; and yet the watcher cannot interfere. The supernatural
+thus lay, perfect and alive, but immeasurably tiny; the huge forces were
+in motion, the world was heaving up, and Percy could do nothing but
+stare and frown. Yet, as has been said, there was no shadow on his
+faith; the fly he knew was greater than the engine from the superiority
+of its order of life; if it were crushed, life would not be the final
+sufferer; so much he knew, but how it was so, he did not know.
+
+As the two sat there, again came a step and a tap; and a servant's face
+looked in.
+
+"His Lordship is come, Eminence," he said.
+
+The Cardinal rose painfully, supporting himself by the table. Then he
+paused, seeming to remember something, and fumbled in his pocket.
+
+"See that, father," he said, and pushed a small silver disc towards the
+priest. "No; when I am gone."
+
+Percy closed the door and came back, taking up the little round object.
+
+It was a coin, fresh from the mint. On one side was the familiar wreath
+with the word "fivepence" in the midst, with its Esperanto equivalent
+beneath, and on the other the profile of a man, with an inscription.
+Percy turned it to read:
+
+"JULIAN FELSENBURGH, LA PREZIDANTE DE UROPO."
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+It was at ten o'clock on the following morning that the Cardinals were
+summoned to the Pope's presence to hear the allocution.
+
+Percy, from his seat among the Consultors, watched them come in, men of
+every nation and temperament and age--the Italians all together,
+gesticulating, and flashing teeth; the Anglo-Saxons steady-faced and
+serious; an old French Cardinal leaning on his stick, walking with the
+English Benedictine. It was one of the great plain stately rooms of
+which the Vatican now chiefly consisted, seated length wise like a
+chapel. At the lower end, traversed by the gangway, were the seats of
+the Consultors; at the upper end, the dais with the papal throne. Three
+or four benches with desks before them, standing out beyond the
+Consultors' seats, were reserved for the arrivals of the day before
+--prelates and priests who had poured into Rome from every European
+country on the announcement of the amazing news.
+
+Percy had not an idea as to what would be said. It was scarcely possible
+that nothing but platitudes would be uttered, yet what else could be
+said in view of the complete doubtfulness of the situation? All that was
+known even this morning was that the Presidentship of Europe was a fact;
+the little silver coin he had seen witnessed to that; that there had
+been an outburst of persecution, repressed sternly by local authorities;
+and that Felsenburgh was to-day to begin his tour from capital to
+capital. He was expected in Turin by the end of the week. From every
+Catholic centre throughout the world had come in messages imploring
+guidance; it was said that apostasy was rising like a tidal wave, that
+persecution threatened everywhere, and that even bishops were beginning
+to yield.
+
+As for the Holy Father, all was doubtful. Those who knew, said nothing;
+and the only rumour that escaped was to the effect that he had spent all
+night in prayer at the tomb of the Apostle....
+
+The murmur died suddenly to a rustle and a silence; there was a ripple
+of sinking heads along the seats as the door beside the canopy opened,
+and a moment later John, _Pater Patrum_, was on his throne.
+
+* * * * *
+
+At first Percy understood nothing. He stared only, as at a picture,
+through the dusty sunlight that poured in through the shrouded windows,
+at the scarlet lines to right and left, up to the huge scarlet canopy,
+and the white figure that sat there. Certainly, these southerners
+understood the power of effect. It was as vivid and impressive as a
+vision of the Host in a jewelled monstrance. Every accessory was
+gorgeous, the high room, the colour of the robes, the chains and
+crosses, and as the eye moved along to its climax it was met by a piece
+of dead white--as if glory was exhausted and declared itself impotent to
+tell the supreme secret. Scarlet and purple and gold were well enough
+for those who stood on the steps of the throne--they needed it; but for
+Him who sat there nothing was needed. Let colours die and sounds faint
+in the presence of God's Viceroy. Yet what expression was required found
+itself adequately provided in that beautiful oval face, the poised
+imperious head, the sweet brilliant eyes and the clean-curved lips that
+spoke so strongly. There was not a sound in the room, not a rustle, nor
+a breathing--even without it seemed as if the world were allowing the
+supernatural to state its defence uninterruptedly, before summing up and
+clamouring condemnation.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Percy made a violent effort at self-repression, clenched his hands and
+listened.
+
+"... Since this then is so, sons in Jesus Christ, it is for us to
+answer. We wrestle not, as the Doctor of the Gentiles teaches us,
+_against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against
+the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of
+wickedness in the high places. Wherefore_, he continues, _take unto you
+the armour of God_; and he further declares to us its nature--_the
+girdle of truth, the breastplate of justice, the shoes of peace, the
+shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit._
+
+"By this, therefore, the Word of God bids us to war, but not with the
+weapons of this world, for neither is His kingdom of this world; and it
+is to remind you of the principles of this warfare that we have summoned
+you to Our Presence."
+
+The voice paused, and there was a rustling sigh along the seats. Then
+the voice continued on a slightly higher note.
+
+"It has ever been the wisdom of Our predecessors, as is also their duty,
+while keeping silence at certain seasons, at others to speak freely the
+whole counsel of God. From this duty We Ourself must not be deterred by
+the knowledge of Our own weakness and ignorance, but to trust rather
+that He Who has placed Us on this throne will deign to speak through Our
+mouth and use Our words to His glory.
+
+"First, then, it is necessary to utter Our sentence as to the new
+movement, as men call it, which has latterly been inaugurated by the
+rulers of this world.
+
+"We are not unmindful of the blessings of peace and unity, nor do We
+forget that the appearance of these things has been the fruit of much
+that we have condemned. It is this appearance of peace that has deceived
+many, causing them to doubt the promise of the Prince of Peace that it
+is through Him alone that we have access to the Father. That true peace,
+passing understanding, concerns not only the relations of men between
+themselves, but, supremely, the relations of men with their Maker; and
+it is in this necessary point that the efforts of the world are found
+wanting. It is not indeed to be wondered at that in a world which has
+rejected God this necessary matter should be forgotten. Men have
+thought--led astray by seducers--that the unity of nations was the
+greatest prize of this life, forgetting the words of our Saviour, Who
+said that He came to bring not peace but a sword, and that it is through
+many tribulations that we enter God's Kingdom. First, then, there should
+be established the peace of man with God, and after that the unity of
+man with man will follow. _Seek ye first_, said Jesus Christ, _the
+kingdom of God--and then all these things shall be added unto you._
+
+"First, then, We once more condemn and anathematise the opinions of
+those who teach and believe the contrary of this; and we renew once more
+all the condemnations uttered by Ourself or Our predecessors against all
+those societies, organisations and communities that have been formed for
+the furtherance of an unity on another than a divine foundation; and We
+remind Our children throughout the world that it is forbidden to them to
+enter or to aid or to approve in any manner whatsoever any of those
+bodies named in such condemnations."
+
+Percy moved in his seat, conscious of a touch of impatience.... The
+manner was superb, tranquil and stately as a river; but the matter a
+trifle banal. Here was this old reprobation of Freemasonry, repeated in
+unoriginal language.
+
+"Secondly," went on the steady voice, "We wish to make known to you Our
+desires for the future; and here We tread on what many have considered
+dangerous ground."
+
+Again came that rustle. Percy saw more than one cardinal lean forward
+with hand crooked at ear to hear the better. It was evident that
+something important was coming.
+
+"There are many points," went on the high voice, "of which it is not Our
+intention to speak at this time, for of their own nature they are
+secret, and must be treated of on another occasion. But what We say
+here, We say to the world. Since the assaults of Our enemies are both
+open and secret, so too must be Our defences. This then is Our
+intention."
+
+The Pope paused again, lifted one hand as if mechanically to his breast,
+and grasped the cross that hung there.
+
+"While the army of Christ is one, it consists of many divisions, each of
+which has its proper function and object. In times past God has raised
+up companies of His servants to do this or that particular work--the
+sons of St. Francis to preach poverty, those of St. Bernard to labour in
+prayer with all holy women dedicating themselves to this purpose, the
+Society of Jesus for the education of youth and the conversion of the
+heathen--together with all the other Religious Orders whose names are
+known throughout the world. Each such company was raised up at a
+particular season of need, and each has corresponded nobly with the
+divine vocation. It has also been the especial glory of each, for the
+furtherance of its intention, while pursuing its end, to cut off from
+itself all such activities (good in themselves) which would hinder that
+work for which God had called it into being--following in this matter
+the words of our Redeemer, _Every branch that beareth fruit, He purgeth
+it that it may bring forth more fruit._ At this present season, then, it
+appears to Our Humility that all such Orders (which once more We commend
+and bless) are not perfectly suited by the very conditions of their
+respective Rules to perform the great work which the time requires. Our
+warfare lies not with ignorance in particular, whether of the heathens
+to whom the Gospel has not yet come, or of those whose fathers have
+rejected it, nor with _the deceitful riches of this world_, nor with
+_science falsely so-called_, nor indeed with any one of those
+strongholds of infidelity against whom We have laboured in the past.
+Rather it appears as if at last the time was come of which the apostle
+spoke when he said that _that day shall not come, except there come a
+falling away first, and that Man of Sin be revealed, the Son of
+Perdition, who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called
+God._
+
+"It is not with this or that force that we are concerned, but rather
+with the unveiled immensity of that power whose time was foretold, and
+whose destruction is prepared."
+
+The voice paused again, and Percy gripped the rail before him to stay
+the trembling of his hands. There was no rustle now, nothing but a
+silence that tingled and shook. The Pope drew a long breath, turned his
+head slowly to right and left, and went on more deliberately than ever.
+
+"It seems good, then, to Our Humility, that the Vicar of Christ should
+himself invite God's children to this new warfare; and it is Our
+intention to enroll under the title of the Order of Christ Crucified the
+names of all who offer themselves to this supreme service. In doing this
+We are aware of the novelty of Our action, and the disregard of all such
+precautions as have been necessary in the past. We take counsel in this
+matter with none save Him Who we believe has inspired it.
+
+"First, then, let Us say, that although obedient service will be
+required from all who shall be admitted to this Order, Our primary
+intention in instituting it lies in God's regard rather than in man's,
+in appealing to Him Who asks our generosity rather than to those who
+deny it, and dedicating once more by a formal and deliberate act our
+souls and bodies to the heavenly Will and service of Him Who alone can
+rightly claim such offering, and will accept our poverty.
+
+"Briefly, we dictate only the following conditions.
+
+"None shall be capable of entering the Order except such as shall be
+above the age of seventeen years.
+
+"No badge, habit, nor insignia shall be attached to it.
+
+"The Three Evangelical Counsels shall be the foundation of the Rule, to
+which we add a fourth intention, namely, that of a desire to receive the
+crown of martyrdom and a purpose of embracing it.
+
+"The bishop of every diocese, if he himself shall enter the Order, shall
+be the superior within the limits of his own jurisdiction, and alone
+shall be exempt from the literal observance of the Vow of Poverty so
+long as he retains his see. Such bishops as do not feel the vocation to
+the Order shall retain their sees under the usual conditions, but shall
+have no Religious claim on the members of the Order.
+
+"Further, We announce Our intention of Ourself entering the Order as its
+supreme prelate, and of making Our profession within the course of a few
+days.
+
+"Further, We declare that in Our Own pontificate none shall be elevated
+to the Sacred College save those who have made their profession in the
+Order; and We shall dedicate shortly the Basilica of St. Peter and St.
+Paul as the central church of the Order, in which church We shall raise
+to the altars without any delay those happy souls who shall lay down
+their lives in the pursuance of their vocation.
+
+"Of that vocation it is unnecessary to speak beyond indicating that it
+may be pursued under any conditions laid down by the Superiors. As
+regards the novitiate, its conditions and requirements, we shall shortly
+issue the necessary directions. Each diocesan superior (for it is Our
+hope that none will hold back) shall have all such rights as usually
+appertain to Religious Superiors, and shall be empowered to employ his
+subjects in any work that, in his opinion, shall subserve the glory of
+God and the salvation of souls. It is Our Own intention to employ in Our
+service none except those who shall make their profession."
+
+He raised his eyes once more, seemingly without emotion, then he
+continued:
+
+"So far, then, We have determined. On other matters We shall take
+counsel immediately; but it is Our wish that these words shall be
+communicated to all the world, that there may be no delay in making
+known what it is that Christ through His Vicar asks of all who profess
+the Divine Name. We offer no rewards except those which God Himself has
+promised to those that love Him, and lay down their life for Him; no
+promise of peace, save of that which passeth understanding; no home save
+that which befits pilgrims and sojourners who seek a City to come; no
+honour save the world's contempt; no life, save that which is hid with
+Christ in God."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+I
+
+Oliver Brand, seated in his little private room at Whitehall, was
+expecting a visitor. It was already close upon ten o'clock, and at
+half-past he must be in the House. He had hoped that Mr. Francis,
+whoever he might be, would not detain him long. Even now, every moment
+was a respite, for the work had become simply prodigious during the last
+weeks.
+
+But he was not reprieved for more than a minute, for the last boom from
+the Victoria Tower had scarcely ceased to throb when the door opened and
+a clerkly voice uttered the name he was expecting.
+
+Oliver shot one quick look at the stranger, at his drooping lids and
+down-turned mouth, summed him up fairly and accurately in the moments
+during which they seated themselves, and went briskly to business.
+
+"At twenty-five minutes past, sir, I must leave this room," he said.
+"Until then---" he made a little gesture.
+
+Mr. Francis reassured him.
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Brand--that is ample time. Then, if you will excuse
+me---" He groped in his breast-pocket, and drew out a long envelope.
+
+"I will leave this with you," he said, "when I go. It sets out our
+desires at length and our names. And this is what I have to say, sir."
+
+He sat back, crossed his legs, and went on, with a touch of eagerness in
+his voice.
+
+"I am a kind of deputation, as you know," he said. "We have something
+both to ask and to offer. I am chosen because it was my own idea. First,
+may I ask a question?"
+
+Oliver bowed.
+
+"I wish to ask nothing that I ought not. But I believe it is practically
+certain, is it not?--that Divine Worship is to be restored throughout
+the kingdom?"
+
+Oliver smiled.
+
+"I suppose so," he said. "The bill has been read for the third time,
+and, as you know, the President is to speak upon it this evening."
+
+"He will not veto it?"
+
+"We suppose not. He has assented to it in Germany."
+
+"Just so," said Mr. Francis. "And if he assents here, I suppose it will
+become law immediately."
+
+Oliver leaned over this table, and drew out the green paper that
+contained the Bill.
+
+"You have this, of course---" he said. "Well, it becomes law at once;
+and the first feast will be observed on the first of October.
+'Paternity,' is it not? Yes, Paternity."
+
+"There will be something of a rush then," said the other eagerly. "Why,
+that is only a week hence."
+
+"I have not charge of this department," said Oliver, laying back the
+Bill. "But I understand that the ritual will be that already in use in
+Germany. There is no reason why we should be peculiar."
+
+"And the Abbey will be used?"
+
+"Why, yes."
+
+"Well, sir," said Mr. Francis, "of course I know the Government
+Commission has studied it all very closely, and no doubt has its own
+plans. But it appears to me that they will want all the experience they
+can get."
+
+"No doubt."
+
+"Well, Mr. Brand, the society which I represent consists entirely of men
+who were once Catholic priests. We number about two hundred in London. I
+will leave a pamphlet with you, if I may, stating our objects, our
+constitution, and so on. It seemed to us that here was a matter in which
+our past experience might be of service to the Government. Catholic
+ceremonies, as you know, are very intricate, and some of us studied them
+very deeply in old days. We used to say that Masters of Ceremonies were
+born, not made, and we have a fair number of those amongst us. But
+indeed every priest is something of a ceremonialist."
+
+He paused.
+
+"Yes, Mr. Francis?"
+
+"I am sure the Government realises the immense importance of all going
+smoothly. If Divine Service was at all grotesque or disorderly, it would
+largely defeat its own object. So I have been deputed to see you, Mr.
+Brand, and to suggest to you that here is a body of men--reckon it as at
+least twenty-five--who have had special experience in this kind of
+thing, and are perfectly ready to put themselves at the disposal of the
+Government."
+
+Oliver could not resist a faint flicker of a smile at the corner of his
+mouth. It was a very grim bit of irony, he thought, but it seemed
+sensible enough.
+
+"I quite understand, Mr. Francis. It seems a very reasonable suggestion.
+But I do not think I am the proper person. Mr. Snowford---"
+
+"Yes, yes, sir, I know. But your speech the other day inspired us all.
+You said exactly what was in all our hearts--that the world could not
+live without worship; and that now that God was found at last---"
+
+Oliver waved his hand. He hated even a touch of flattery.
+
+"It is very good of you, Mr. Francis. I will certainly speak to Mr.
+Snowford. I understand that you offer yourselves as--as Masters of
+Ceremonies--?"
+
+"Yes, sir; and sacristans. I have studied the German ritual very
+carefully; it is more elaborate than I had thought it. It will need a
+good deal of adroitness. I imagine that you will want at least a dozen
+_Ceremoniarii_ in the Abbey; and a dozen more in the vestries will
+scarcely be too much."
+
+Oliver nodded abruptly, looking curiously at the eager pathetic face of
+the man opposite him; yet it had something, too, of that mask-like
+priestly look that he had seen before in others like him. This was
+evidently a devotee.
+
+"You are all Masons, of course?" he said.
+
+"Why, of course, Mr. Brand."
+
+"Very good. I will speak to Mr. Snowford to-day if I can catch him."
+
+He glanced at the clock. There were yet three or four minutes.
+
+"You have seen the new appointment in Rome, sir," went on Mr. Francis.
+
+Oliver shook his head. He was not particularly interested in Rome just
+now.
+
+"Cardinal Martin is dead--he died on Tuesday--and his place is already
+filled."
+
+"Indeed, sir?"
+
+"Yes--the new man was once a friend of mine--Franklin, his name
+is--Percy Franklin."
+
+"Eh?"
+
+"What is the matter, Mr. Brand? Did you know him?"
+
+Oliver was eyeing him darkly, a little pale.
+
+"Yes; I knew him," he said quietly. "At least, I think so."
+
+"He was at Westminster until a month or two ago."
+
+"Yes, yes," said Oliver, still looking at him. "And you knew him, Mr.
+Francis?"
+
+"I knew him--yes."
+
+"Ah!--well, I should like to have a talk some day about him."
+
+He broke off. It yet wanted a minute to his time.
+
+"And that is all?" he asked.
+
+"That is all my actual business, sir," answered the other. "But I hope
+you will allow me to say how much we all appreciate what you have done,
+Mr. Brand. I do not think it is possible for any, except ourselves, to
+understand what the loss of worship means to us. It was very strange at
+first---"
+
+His voice trembled a little, and he stopped. Oliver felt interested, and
+checked himself in his movement to rise.
+
+"Yes, Mr. Francis?"
+
+The melancholy brown eyes turned on him full.
+
+"It was an illusion, of course, sir--we know that. But I, at any rate,
+dare to hope that it was not all wasted--all our aspirations and
+penitence and praise. We mistook our God, but none the less it reached
+Him--it found its way to the Spirit of the World. It taught us that the
+individual was nothing, and that He was all. And now---"
+
+"Yes, sir," said the other softly. He was really touched.
+
+The sad brown eyes opened full.
+
+"And now Mr. Felsenburgh is come." He swallowed in his throat. "Julian
+Felsenburgh!" There was a world of sudden passion in his gentle voice,
+and Oliver's own heart responded.
+
+"I know, sir," he said; "I know all that you mean."
+
+"Oh! to have a Saviour at last!" cried Francis. "One that can be seen
+and handled and praised to His Face! It is like a dream--too good to be
+true!"
+
+Oliver glanced at the clock, and rose abruptly, holding out his hand.
+
+"Forgive me, sir. I must not stay. You have touched me very deeply.... I
+will speak to Snowford. Your address is here, I understand?"
+
+He pointed to the papers.
+
+"Yes, Mr. Brand. There is one more question."
+
+"I must not stay, sir," said Oliver, shaking his head.
+
+"One instant--is it true that this worship will be compulsory?"
+
+Oliver bowed as he gathered up his papers.
+
+
+
+II
+
+Mabel, seated in the gallery that evening behind the President's chair,
+had already glanced at her watch half-a-dozen times in the last hour,
+hoping each time that twenty-one o'clock was nearer than she feared. She
+knew well enough by now that the President of Europe would not be
+half-a-minute either before or after his time. His supreme punctuality
+was famous all over the continent. He had said Twenty-One, so it was to
+be twenty-one.
+
+A sharp bell-note impinged from beneath, and in a moment the drawling
+voice of the speaker stopped. Once more she lifted her wrist, saw that
+it wanted five minutes of the hour; then she leaned forward from her
+corner and stared down into the House.
+
+A great change had passed over it at the metallic noise. All down the
+long brown seats members were shifting and arranging themselves more
+decorously, uncrossing their legs, slipping their hats beneath the
+leather fringes. As she looked, too, she saw the President of the House
+coming down the three steps from his chair, for Another would need it in
+a few moments.
+
+The house was full from end to end; a late comer ran in from the
+twilight of the south door and looked distractedly about him in the full
+light before he saw his vacant place. The galleries at the lower end
+were occupied too, down there, where she had failed to obtain a seat.
+Yet from all the crowded interior there was no sound but a sibilant
+whispering; from the passages behind she could hear again the quick
+bell-note repeat itself as the lobbies were cleared; and from Parliament
+Square outside once more came the heavy murmur of the crowd that had
+been inaudible for the last twenty minutes. When that ceased she would
+know that he was come.
+
+How strange and wonderful it was to be here--on this night of all, when
+the President was to speak! A month ago he had assented to a similar
+Bill in Germany, and had delivered a speech on the same subject at
+Turin. To-morrow he was to be in Spain. No one knew where he had been
+during the past week. A rumour had spread that his volor had been seen
+passing over Lake Como, and had been instantly contradicted. No one knew
+either what he would say to-night. It might be three words or twenty
+thousand. There were a few clauses in the Bill--notably those bearing on
+the point as to when the new worship was to be made compulsory on all
+subjects over the age of seven--it might be he would object and veto
+these. In that case all must be done again, and the Bill re-passed,
+unless the House accepted his amendment instantly by acclamation.
+
+Mabel herself was inclined to these clauses. They provided that,
+although worship was to be offered in every parish church of England on
+the ensuing first day of October, this was not to be compulsory on all
+subjects till the New Year; whereas, Germany, who had passed the Bill
+only a month before, had caused it to come into full force immediately,
+thus compelling all her Catholic subjects either to leave the country
+without delay or suffer the penalties. These penalties were not
+vindictive: on a first offence a week's detention only was to be given;
+on the second, one month's imprisonment; on the third, one year's; and
+on the fourth, perpetual imprisonment until the criminal yielded. These
+were merciful terms, it seemed; for even imprisonment itself meant no
+more than reasonable confinement and employment on Government works.
+There were no mediaeval horrors here; and the act of worship demanded
+was so little, too; it consisted of no more than bodily presence in the
+church or cathedral on the four new festivals of Maternity, Life,
+Sustenance and Paternity, celebrated on the first day of each quarter.
+Sunday worship was to be purely voluntary.
+
+She could not understand how any man could refuse this homage. These
+four things were facts--they were the manifestations of what she called
+the Spirit of the World--and if others called that Power God, yet surely
+these ought to be considered as His functions. Where then was the
+difficulty? It was not as if Christian worship were not permitted, under
+the usual regulations. Catholics could still go to mass. And yet
+appalling things were threatened in Germany: not less than twelve
+thousand persons had already left for Rome; and it was rumoured that
+forty thousand would refuse this simple act of homage a few days hence.
+It bewildered and angered her to think of it.
+
+For herself the new worship was a crowning sign of the triumph of
+Humanity. Her heart had yearned for some such thing as this--some
+public corporate profession of what all now believed. She had so
+resented the dulness of folk who were content with action and never
+considered its springs. Surely this instinct within her was a true one;
+she desired to stand with her fellows in some solemn place, consecrated
+not by priests but by the will of man; to have as her inspirers sweet
+singing and the peal of organs; to utter her sorrow with thousands
+beside her at her own feebleness of immolation before the Spirit of all;
+to sing aloud her praise of the glory of life, and to offer by sacrifice
+and incense an emblematic homage to That from which she drew her being,
+and to whom one day she must render it again. Ah! these Christians had
+understood human nature, she had told herself a hundred times: it was
+true that they had degraded it, darkened light, poisoned thought,
+misinterpreted instinct; but they had understood that man must worship
+--must worship or sink.
+
+For herself she intended to go at least once a week to the little old
+church half-a-mile away from her home, to kneel there before the sunlit
+sanctuary, to meditate on sweet mysteries, to present herself to That
+which she was yearning to love, and to drink, it might be, new draughts
+of life and power.
+
+Ah! but the Bill must pass first.... She clenched her hands on the rail,
+and stared steadily before her on the ranks of heads, the open gangways,
+the great mace on the table, and heard, above the murmur of the crowd
+outside and the dying whispers within, her own heart beat.
+
+She could not see Him, she knew. He would come in from beneath through
+the door that none but He might use, straight into the seat beneath the
+canopy. But she would hear His voice--that must be joy enough for
+her....
+
+Ah! there was silence now outside; the soft roar had died. He had come
+then. And through swimming eyes she saw the long ridges of heads rise
+beneath her, and through drumming ears heard the murmur of many feet.
+All faces looked this way; and she watched them as a mirror to see the
+reflected light of His presence. There was a gentle sobbing somewhere in
+the air--was it her own or another's? ... the click of a door; a great
+mellow booming over-head, shock after shock, as the huge tenor bells
+tolled their three strokes; and, in an instant, over the white faces
+passed a ripple, as if some breeze of passion shook the souls within;
+there was a swaying here and there; and a passionless voice spoke half a
+dozen words in Esperanto, out of sight:
+
+"Englishmen, I assent to the Bill of Worship."
+
+
+
+III
+
+It was not until mid-day breakfast on the following morning that husband
+and wife met again. Oliver had slept in town and telephoned about eleven
+o'clock that he would be home immediately, bringing a guest with him:
+and shortly before noon she heard their voices in the hall.
+
+Mr. Francis, who was presently introduced to her, seemed a harmless kind
+of man, she thought, not interesting, though he seemed in earnest about
+this Bill. It was not until breakfast was nearly over that she
+understood who he was.
+
+"Don't go, Mabel," said her husband, as she made a movement to rise.
+"You will like to hear about this, I expect. My wife knows all that I
+know," he added.
+
+Mr. Francis smiled and bowed.
+
+"I may tell her about you, sir?" said Oliver again.
+
+"Why, certainly."
+
+Then she heard that he had been a Catholic priest a few months before,
+and that Mr. Snowford was in consultation with him as to the ceremonies
+in the Abbey. She was conscious of a sudden interest as she heard this.
+
+"Oh! do talk," she said. "I want to hear everything."
+
+It seemed that Mr. Francis had seen the new Minister of Public Worship
+that morning, and had received a definite commission from him to take
+charge of the ceremonies on the first of October. Two dozen of his
+colleagues, too, were to be enrolled among the _ceremoniarii_, at least
+temporarily--and after the event they were to be sent on a lecturing
+tour to organise the national worship throughout the country.
+
+Of course things would be somewhat sloppy at first, said Mr. Francis;
+but by the New Year it was hoped that all would be in order, at least in
+the cathedrals and principal towns.
+
+"It is important," he said, "that this should be done as soon as
+possible. It is very necessary to make a good impression. There are
+thousands who have the instinct of worship, without knowing how to
+satisfy it."
+
+"That is perfectly true," said Oliver. "I have felt that for a long
+time. I suppose it is the deepest instinct in man."
+
+"As to the ceremonies---" went on the other, with a slightly important
+air. His eyes roved round a moment; then he dived into his
+breast-pocket, and drew out a thin red-covered book.
+
+"Here is the Order of Worship for the Feast of Paternity," he said. "I
+have had it interleaved, and have made a few notes."
+
+He began to turn the pages, and Mabel, with considerable excitement,
+drew her chair a little closer to listen.
+
+"That is right, sir," said the other. "Now give us a little lecture."
+
+Mr. Francis closed the book on his finger, pushed his plate aside, and
+began to discourse.
+
+"First," he said, "we must remember that this ritual is based almost
+entirely upon that of the Masons. Three-quarters at least of the entire
+function will be occupied by that. With that the _ceremoniarii_ will not
+interfere, beyond seeing that the insignia are ready in the vestries and
+properly put on. The proper officials will conduct the rest.... I need
+not speak of that then. The difficulties begin with the last quarter."
+
+He paused, and with a glance of apology began arranging forks and
+glasses before him on the cloth.
+
+"Now here," he said, "we have the old sanctuary of the abbey. In the
+place of the reredos and Communion table there will be erected the large
+altar of which the ritual speaks, with the steps leading up to it from
+the floor. Behind the altar--extending almost to the old shrine of the
+Confessor--will stand the pedestal with the emblematic figure upon it;
+and--so far as I understand from the absence of directions--each such
+figure will remain in place until the eve of the next quarterly feast."
+
+"What kind of figure?" put in the girl.
+
+Francis glanced at her husband.
+
+"I understand that Mr. Markenheim has been consulted," he said. "He will
+design and execute them. Each is to represent its own feast. This for
+Paternity---"
+
+He paused again.
+
+"Yes, Mr. Francis?"
+
+"This one, I understand, is to be the naked figure of a man."
+
+"A kind of Apollo--or Jupiter, my dear," put in Oliver.
+
+Yes--that seemed all right, thought Mabel. Mr. Francis's voice moved on
+hastily.
+
+"A new procession enters at this point, after the discourse," he said.
+"It is this that will need special marshalling. I suppose no rehearsal
+will be possible?"
+
+"Scarcely," said Oliver, smiling.
+
+The Master of Ceremonies sighed.
+
+"I feared not. Then we must issue very precise printed instructions.
+Those who take part will withdraw, I imagine, during the hymn, to the
+old chapel of St. Faith. That is what seems to me the best."
+
+He indicated the chapel.
+
+"After the entrance of the procession all will take their places on
+these two sides--here--and here--while the celebrant with the sacred
+ministers---"
+
+"Eh?"
+
+Mr. Francis permitted a slight grimace to appear on his face; he flushed
+a little.
+
+"The President of Europe---" He broke off. "Ah! that is the point. Will
+the President take part? That is not made clear in the ritual."
+
+"We think so," said Oliver. "He is to be approached."
+
+"Well, if not, I suppose the Minister of Public Worship will officiate.
+He with his supporters pass straight up to the foot of the altar.
+Remember that the figure is still veiled, and that the candles have been
+lighted during the approach of the procession. There follow the
+Aspirations printed in the ritual with the responds. These are sung by
+the choir, and will be most impressive, I think. Then the officiant
+ascends the altar alone, and, standing, declaims the Address, as it is
+called. At the close of it--at the point, that is to say, marked here
+with a star, the thurifers will leave the chapel, four in number. One
+ascends the altar, leaving the others swinging their thurifers at its
+foot--hands his to the officiant and retires. Upon the sounding of a
+bell the curtains are drawn back, the officiant tenses the image in
+silence with four double swings, and, as he ceases the choir sings the
+appointed antiphon."
+
+He waved his hands.
+
+"The rest is easy," he said. "We need not discuss that."
+
+To Mabel's mind even the previous ceremonies seemed easy enough. But she
+was undeceived.
+
+"You have no idea, Mrs. Brand," went on the _ceremoniarius_, "of the
+difficulties involved even in such a simple matter as this. The
+stupidity of people is prodigious. I foresee a great deal of hard work
+for us all.... Who is to deliver the discourse, Mr. Brand?"
+
+Oliver shook his head.
+
+"I have no idea," he said. "I suppose Mr. Snowford will select."
+
+Mr. Francis looked at him doubtfully.
+
+"What is your opinion of the whole affair, sir?" he said.
+
+Oliver paused a moment.
+
+"I think it is necessary," he began. "There would not be such a cry for
+worship if it was not a real need. I think too--yes, I think that on the
+whole the ritual is impressive. I do not see how it could be
+bettered...."
+
+"Yes, Oliver?" put in his wife, questioningly.
+
+"No--there is nothing--except ... except I hope the people will
+understand it."
+
+Mr. Francis broke in.
+
+"My dear sir, worship involves a touch of mystery. You must remember
+that. It was the lack of that that made Empire Day fail in the last
+century. For myself, I think it is admirable. Of course much must depend
+on the manner in which it is presented. I see many details at present
+undecided--the colour of the curtains, and so forth. But the main plan
+is magnificent. It is simple, impressive, and, above all, it is
+unmistakable in its main lesson---"
+
+"And that you take to be--?"
+
+"I take it that it is homage offered to Life," said the other slowly.
+"Life under four aspects--Maternity corresponds to Christmas and the
+Christian fable; it is the feast of home, love, faithfulness. Life
+itself is approached in spring, teeming, young, passionate. Sustenance
+in midsummer, abundance, comfort, plenty, and the rest, corresponding
+somewhat to the Catholic Corpus Christi; and Paternity, the protective,
+generative, masterful idea, as winter draws on.... I understand it was a
+German thought."
+
+Oliver nodded.
+
+"Yes," he said. "And I suppose it will be the business of the speaker to
+explain all this."
+
+"I take it so. It appears to me far more suggestive than the alternative
+plan--Citizenship, Labour, and so forth. These, after all, are
+subordinate to Life."
+
+Mr. Francis spoke with an extraordinary suppressed enthusiasm, and the
+priestly look was more evident than ever. It was plain that his heart at
+least demanded worship.
+
+Mabel clasped her hands suddenly.
+
+"I think it is beautiful," she said softly, "and--and it is so real."
+
+Mr. Francis turned on her with a glow in his brown eyes.
+
+"Ah! yes, madam. That is it. There is no Faith, as we used to call it:
+it is the vision of Facts that no one can doubt; and the incense
+declares the sole divinity of Life as well as its mystery."
+
+"What of the figures?" put in Oliver.
+
+"A stone image is impossible, of course. It must be clay for the
+present. Mr. Markenheim is to set to work immediately. If the figures
+are approved they can then be executed in marble."
+
+Again Mabel spoke with a soft gravity.
+
+"It seems to me," she said, "that this is the last thing that we needed.
+It is so hard to keep our principles clear--we must have a body for
+them--some kind of expression---"
+
+She paused.
+
+"Yes, Mabel?"
+
+"I do not mean," she went on, "that some cannot live without it, but
+many cannot. The unimaginative need concrete images. There must be some
+channel for their aspirations to flow through--- Ah! I cannot express
+myself!"
+
+Oliver nodded slowly. He, too, seemed to be in a meditative mood.
+
+"Yes," he said. "And this, I suppose, will mould men's thoughts too: it
+will keep out all danger of superstition."
+
+Mr. Francis turned on him abruptly.
+
+"What do you think of the Pope's new Religious Order, sir?"
+
+Oliver's face took on it a tinge of grimness.
+
+"I think it is the worst step he ever took--for himself, I mean. Either
+it is a real effort, in which case it will provoke immense
+indignation--or it is a sham, and will discredit him. Why do you ask?"
+
+"I was wondering whether any disturbance will be made in the abbey."
+
+"I should be sorry for the brawler."
+
+A bell rang sharply from the row of telephone labels. Oliver rose and
+went to it. Mabel watched him as he touched a button--mentioned his
+name, and put his ear to the opening.
+
+"It is Snowford's secretary," he said abruptly to the two expectant
+faces. "Snowford wants to--ah!"
+
+Again he mentioned his name and listened. They heard a sentence or two
+from him that seemed significant.
+
+"Ah! that is certain, is it? I am sorry.... Yes.... Oh! but that is
+better than nothing.... Yes; he is here.... Indeed. Very well; we will
+be with you directly."
+
+He looked on the tube, touched the button again, and came back to them.
+
+"I am sorry," he said. "The President will take no part at the Feast.
+But it is uncertain whether he will not be present. Mr. Snowford wants
+to see us both at once, Mr. Francis. Markenheim is with him."
+
+But though Mabel was herself disappointed, she thought he looked graver
+than the disappointment warranted.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+I
+
+Percy Franklin, the new Cardinal-Protector of England, came slowly along
+the passage leading from the Pope's apartments, with Hans Steinmann,
+Cardinal-Protector of Germany, blowing at his side. They entered the
+lift, still in silence, and passed out, two splendid vivid figures, one
+erect and virile, the other bent, fat, and very German from spectacles
+to flat buckled feet.
+
+At the door of Percy's suite, the Englishman paused, made a little
+gesture of reverence, and went in without a word.
+
+A secretary, young Mr. Brent, lately from England, stood up as his
+patron came in.
+
+"Eminence," he said, "the English papers are come."
+
+Percy put out a hand, took a paper, passed on into his inner room, and
+sat down.
+
+There it all was--gigantic headlines, and four columns of print broken
+by startling title phrases in capital letters, after the fashion set by
+America a hundred years ago. No better way even yet had been found of
+misinforming the unintelligent.
+
+He looked at the top. It was the English edition of the _Era_. Then he
+read the headlines. They ran as follows:
+
+"THE NATIONAL WORSHIP. BEWILDERING SPLENDOUR. RELIGIOUS ENTHUSIASM. THE
+ABBEY AND GOD. CATHOLIC FANATIC. EX-PRIESTS AS FUNCTIONARIES."
+
+He ran his eyes down the page, reading the vivid little phrases, and
+drawing from the whole a kind of impressionist view of the scenes in the
+Abbey on the previous day, of which he had already been informed by the
+telegraph, and the discussion of which had been the purpose of his
+interview just now with the Holy Father.
+
+There plainly was no additional news; and he was laying the paper down
+when his eye caught a name.
+
+"It is understood that Mr. Francis, the _ceremoniarius_ (to whom the
+thanks of all are due for his reverent zeal and skill), will proceed
+shortly to the northern towns to lecture on the Ritual. It is
+interesting to reflect that this gentleman only a few months ago was
+officiating at a Catholic altar. He was assisted in his labours by
+twenty-four confreres with the same experience behind them."
+
+"Good God!" said Percy aloud. Then he laid the paper down.
+
+But his thoughts had soon left this renegade behind, and once more he
+was running over in his mind the significance of the whole affair, and
+the advice that he had thought it his duty to give just now upstairs.
+
+Briefly, there was no use in disputing the fact that the inauguration of
+Pantheistic worship had been as stupendous a success in England as in
+Germany. France, by the way, was still too busy with the cult of human
+individuals, to develop larger ideas.
+
+But England was deeper; and, somehow, in spite of prophecy, the affair
+had taken place without even a touch of bathos or grotesqueness. It had
+been said that England was too solid and too humorous. Yet there had
+been extraordinary scenes the day before. A great murmur of enthusiasm
+had rolled round the Abbey from end to end as the gorgeous curtains ran
+back, and the huge masculine figure, majestic and overwhelming, coloured
+with exquisite art, had stood out above the blaze of candles against the
+tall screen that shrouded the shrine. Markenheim had done his work well;
+and Mr. Brand's passionate discourse had well prepared the popular mind
+for the revelation. He had quoted in his peroration passage after
+passage from the Jewish prophets, telling of the City of Peace whose
+walls rose now before their eyes.
+
+"_Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is
+risen upon thee.... For behold I create new heavens and a new earth; and
+the former shall not be remembered nor come into mind.... Violence shall
+no more be heard in thy land, wasting nor destruction within thy
+borders. O thou so long afflicted, tossed with tempest and not
+comforted; behold I will lay thy stones with fair colours, and thy
+foundations with sapphires.... I will make thy windows of agates and thy
+gates of carbuncles, and all thy borders of pleasant stones. Arise,
+shine, for thy light is come._"
+
+As the chink of the censer-chains had sounded in the stillness, with one
+consent the enormous crowd had fallen on its knees, and so remained, as
+the smoke curled up from the hands of the rebel figure who held the
+thurible. Then the organ had begun to blow, and from the huge massed
+chorus in the transepts had rolled out the anthem, broken by one
+passionate cry, from some mad Catholic. But it had been silenced in an
+instant....
+
+It was incredible--utterly incredible, Percy had told himself. Yet the
+incredible had happened; and England had found its worship once
+more--the necessary culmination of unimpeded subjectivity. From the
+provinces had come the like news. In cathedral after cathedral had been
+the same scenes. Markenheim's masterpiece, executed in four days after
+the passing of the bill, had been reproduced by the ordinary machinery,
+and four thousand replicas had been despatched to every important
+centre. Telegraphic reports had streamed into the London papers that
+everywhere the new movement had been received with acclamation, and that
+human instincts had found adequate expression at last. If there had not
+been a God, mused Percy reminiscently, it would have been necessary to
+invent one. He was astonished, too, at the skill with which the new cult
+had been framed. It moved round no disputable points; there was no
+possibility of divergent political tendencies to mar its success, no
+over-insistence on citizenship, labour and the rest, for those who were
+secretly individualistic and idle. Life was the one fount and centre of
+it all, clad in the gorgeous robes of ancient worship. Of course the
+thought had been Felsenburgh's, though a German name had been mentioned.
+It was Positivism of a kind, Catholicism without Christianity, Humanity
+worship without its inadequacy. It was not man that was worshipped but
+the Idea of man, deprived of his supernatural principle. Sacrifice,
+too, was recognised--the instinct of oblation without the demand made by
+transcendent Holiness upon the blood-guiltiness of man.... In fact,--in
+fact, said Percy, it was exactly as clever as the devil, and as old as
+Cain.
+
+The advice he had given to the Holy Father just now was a counsel of
+despair, or of hope; he really did not know which. He had urged that a
+stringent decree should be issued, forbidding any acts of violence on
+the part of Catholics. The faithful were to be encouraged to be patient,
+to hold utterly aloof from the worship, to say nothing unless they were
+questioned, to suffer bonds gladly. He had suggested, in company with
+the German Cardinal, that they two should return to their respective
+countries at the close of the year, to encourage the waverers; but the
+answer had been that their vocation was to remain in Rome, unless
+something unforeseen happened.
+
+As for Felsenburgh, there was little news. It was said that he was in
+the East; but further details were secret. Percy understood quite well
+why he had not been present at the worship as had been expected. First,
+it would have been difficult to decide between the two countries that
+had established it; and, secondly, he was too brilliant a politician to
+risk the possible association of failure with his own person; thirdly,
+there was something the matter with the East.
+
+This last point was difficult to understand; it had not yet become
+explicit, but it seemed as if the movement of last year had not yet run
+its course. It was undoubtedly difficult to explain the new President's
+constant absences from his adopted continent, unless there was something
+that demanded his presence elsewhere; but the extreme discretion of the
+East and the stringent precautions taken by the Empire made it
+impossible to know any details. It was apparently connected with
+religion; there were rumours, portents, prophets, ecstatics there.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Upon Percy himself had fallen a subtle change which he himself was
+recognising. He no longer soared to confidence or sank to despair. He
+said his mass, read his enormous correspondence, meditated strictly;
+and, though he felt nothing he knew everything. There was not a tinge of
+doubt upon his faith, but neither was there emotion in it. He was as one
+who laboured in the depths of the earth, crushed even in imagination,
+yet conscious that somewhere birds sang, and the sun shone, and water
+ran. He understood his own state well enough, and perceived that he had
+come to a reality of faith that was new to him, for it was sheer
+faith--sheer apprehension of the Spiritual--without either the dangers
+or the joys of imaginative vision. He expressed it to himself by saying
+that there were three processes through which God led the soul: the
+first was that of external faith, which assents to all things presented
+by the accustomed authority, practises religion, and is neither
+interested nor doubtful; the second follows the quickening of the
+emotional and perceptive powers of the soul, and is set about with
+consolations, desires, mystical visions and perils; it is in this plane
+that resolutions are taken and vocations found and shipwrecks
+experienced; and the third, mysterious and inexpressible, consists in
+the re-enactment in the purely spiritual sphere of all that has preceded
+(as a play follows a rehearsal), in which God is grasped but not
+experienced, grace is absorbed unconsciously and even distastefully, and
+little by little the inner spirit is conformed in the depths of its
+being, far within the spheres of emotion and intellectual perception, to
+the image and mind of Christ.
+
+So he lay back now, thinking, a long, stately, scarlet figure, in his
+deep chair, staring out over Holy Rome seen through the misty September
+haze. How long, he wondered, would there be peace? To his eyes even
+already the air was black with doom.
+
+He struck his hand-bell at last.
+
+"Bring me Father Blackmore's Last report," he said, as his secretary
+appeared.
+
+
+
+II
+
+Percy's intuitive faculties were keen by nature and had been vastly
+increased by cultivation. He had never forgotten Father Blackmore's
+shrewd remarks of a year ago; and one of his first acts as
+Cardinal-Protector had been to appoint that priest on the list of
+English correspondents. Hitherto he had received some dozen letters, and
+not one of them had been without its grain of gold. Especially he had
+noticed that one warning ran through them all, namely, that sooner or
+later there would be some overt act of provocation on the part of
+English Catholics; and it was the memory of this that had inspired his
+vehement entreaties to the Pope this morning. As in the Roman and
+African persecutions of the first three centuries, so now, the greatest
+danger to the Catholic community lay not in the unjust measures of the
+Government but in the indiscreet zeal of the faithful themselves. The
+world desired nothing better than a handle to its blade. The scabbard
+was already cast away.
+
+When the young man had brought the four closely written sheets, dated
+from Westminster, the previous evening, Percy turned at once to the last
+paragraph before the usual Recommendations.
+
+"Mr. Brand's late secretary, Mr. Phillips, whom your Eminence commended
+to me, has been to see me two or three times. He is in a curious state.
+He has no faith; yet, intellectually, he sees no hope anywhere but in
+the Catholic Church. He has even begged for admission to the Order of
+Christ Crucified, which of course is impossible. But there is no doubt
+he is sincere; otherwise he would have professed Catholicism. I have
+introduced him to many Catholics in the hope that they may help him. I
+should much wish your Eminence to see him."
+
+Before leaving England, Percy had followed up the acquaintance he had
+made so strangely over Mrs. Brand's reconciliation to God, and, scarcely
+knowing why, had commended him to the priest. He had not been
+particularly impressed by Mr. Phillips; he had thought him a timid,
+undecided creature, yet he had been struck by the extremely unselfish
+action by which the man had forfeited his position. There must surely be
+a good deal behind.
+
+And now the impulse had come to send for him. Perhaps the spiritual
+atmosphere of Rome would precipitate faith. In any case, the
+conversation of Mr. Brand's late secretary might be instructive.
+
+He struck the bell again.
+
+"Mr. Brent," he said, "in your next letter to Father Blackmore, tell him
+that I wish to see the man whom he proposed to send--Mr. Phillips."
+
+"Yes, Eminence."
+
+"There is no hurry. He can send him at his leisure."
+
+"Yes, Eminence."
+
+"But he must not come till January. That will be time enough, unless
+there is urgent reason."
+
+"Yes, Eminence."
+
+* * * * *
+
+The development of the Order of Christ Crucified had gone forward with
+almost miraculous success. The appeal issued by the Holy Father
+throughout Christendom had been as fire among stubble. It seemed as if
+the Christian world had reached exactly that point of tension at which a
+new organisation of this nature was needed, and the response had
+startled even the most sanguine. Practically the whole of Rome with its
+suburbs--three millions in all--had run to the enrolling stations in
+St. Peter's as starving men run to food, and desperate to the storming
+of a breach. For day after day the Pope himself had sat enthroned below
+the altar of the Chair, a glorious, radiant figure, growing ever white
+and weary towards evening, imparting his Blessing with a silent sign to
+each individual of the vast crowd that swarmed up between the barriers,
+fresh from fast and Communion, to kneel before his new Superior and kiss
+the Pontifical ring. The requirements had been as stringent as
+circumstances allowed. Each postulant was obliged to go to confession to
+a specially authorised priest, who examined sharply into motives and
+sincerity, and only one-third of the applicants had been accepted. This,
+the authorities pointed out to the scornful, was not an excessive
+proportion; for it was to be remembered that most of those who had
+presented themselves had already undergone a sifting fierce as fire. Of
+the three millions in Rome, two millions at least were exiles for their
+faith, preferring to live obscure and despised in the shadow of God
+rather than in the desolate glare of their own infidel countries.
+
+On the fifth evening of the enrolment of novices an astonishing incident
+had taken place. The old King of Spain (Queen Victoria's second son),
+already on the edge of the grave, had just risen and tottered before his
+Ruler; it seemed for an instant as if he would fall, when the Pope
+himself, by a sudden movement, had risen, caught him in his arms and
+kissed him; and then, still standing, had spread his arms abroad and
+delivered a _fervorino_ such as never had been heard before in the
+history of the basilica.
+
+"_Benedictus Dominus!_" he cried, with upraised face and shining eyes.
+"Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for He hath visited and redeemed His
+people. I, John, Vicar of Christ, Servant of Servants, and sinner among
+sinners, bid you be of good courage in the Name of God. By Him Who hung
+on the Cross, I promise eternal life to all who persevere in His Order.
+He Himself has said it. _To him that overcometh I will give a crown of
+life._
+
+"Little children; fear not him that killeth the body. There is no more
+that he can do. God and His Mother are amongst us...."
+
+So his voice had poured on, telling the enormous awe-stricken crowd of
+the blood that already had been shed on the place where they stood, of
+the body of the Apostle that lay scarcely fifty yards away, urging,
+encouraging, inspiring. They had vowed themselves to death, if that were
+God's Will; and if not, the intention would be taken for the deed. They
+were under obedience now; their wills were no longer theirs but God's;
+under chastity--for their bodies were bought with a price; under
+poverty, and theirs was the kingdom of heaven.
+
+He had ended by a great silent Benediction of the City and the World:
+and there were not wanting a half-dozen of the faithful who had seen,
+they thought, a white shape in the form of a bird that hung in the air
+while he spoke white as a mist, translucent as water....
+
+The consequent scenes in the city and suburbs had been unparalleled, for
+thousands of families had with one consent dissolved human ties.
+Husbands had found their way to the huge houses on the Quirinal set
+apart for them; wives to the Aventine; while the children, as confident
+as their parents, had swarmed over to the Sisters of St. Vincent who had
+received at the Pope's orders the gift of three streets to shelter them
+in. Everywhere the smoke of burning went up in the squares where
+household property, rendered useless by the vows of poverty, were
+consumed by their late owners; and daily long trains moved out from the
+station outside the walls carrying jubilant loads of those who were
+despatched by the Pope's delegates to be the salt of men, consumed in
+their function, and leaven plunged in the vast measures of the infidel
+world. And that infidel world welcomed their coming with bitter
+laughter.
+
+From the rest of Christendom had poured in news of success. The same
+precautions had been observed as in Rome, for the directions issued were
+precise and searching; and day after day came in the long rolls of the
+new Religious drawn up by the diocesan superiors.
+
+Within the last few days, too, other lists had arrived, more glorious
+than all. Not only did reports stream in that already the Order was
+beginning its work and that already broken communications were being
+re-established, that devoted missioners were in process of organising
+themselves, and that hope was once more rising in the most desperate
+hearts; but better than all this was the tidings of victory in another
+sphere. In Paris forty of the new-born Order had been burned alive in
+one day in the Latin quarter, before the Government intervened. From
+Spain, Holland, Russia had come in other names. In Dusseldorf eighteen
+men and boys, surprised at their singing of Prime in the church of Saint
+Laurence, had been cast down one by one into the city-sewer, each
+chanting as he vanished:
+
+"_Christi Fili Dei vivi miserere nobis,_"
+
+and from the darkness had come up the same broken song till it was
+silenced with stones. Meanwhile, the German prisons were thronged with
+the first batches of recusants. The world shrugged its shoulders, and
+declared that they had brought it on themselves, while yet it deprecated
+mob-violence, and requested the attention of the authorities and the
+decisive repression of this new conspiracy of superstition. And within
+St. Peter's Church the workmen were busy at the long rows of new altars,
+affixing to the stone diptychs the brass-forged names of those who had
+already fulfilled their vows and gained their crowns.
+
+It was the first word of God's reply to the world's challenge.
+
+* * * * *
+
+As Christmas drew on it was announced that the Sovereign pontiff would
+sing mass on the last day of the year, at the papal altar of Saint
+Peter's, on behalf of the Order; and preparations began to be made.
+
+It was to be a kind of public inauguration of the new enterprise; and,
+to the astonishment of all, a special summons was issued to all members
+of the Sacred College throughout the world to be present, unless hindered
+by sickness. It seemed as if the Pope were determined that the world
+should understand that war was declared; for, although the command would
+not involve the absence of any Cardinal from his province for more than
+five days, yet many inconveniences must surely result. However, it had
+been said, and it was to be done.
+
+* * * * *
+
+It was a strange Christmas.
+
+Percy was ordered to attend the Pope at his second mass, and himself
+said his three at midnight in his own private oratory. For the first
+time in his life he saw that of which he had heard so often, the
+wonderful old-world Pontifical procession, lit by torches, going through
+the streets from the Lateran to St. Anastasia, where the Pope for the
+last few years had restored the ancient custom discontinued for nearly a
+century-and-a-half. The little basilica was reserved, of course, in
+every corner for the peculiarly privileged; but the streets outside
+along the whole route from the Cathedral to the church--and, indeed, the
+other two sides of the triangle as well, were one dense mass of silent
+heads and flaming torches. The Holy Father was attended at the altar by
+the usual sovereigns; and Percy from his place watched the heavenly
+drama of Christ's Passion enacted through the veil of His nativity at
+the hands of His old Angelic Vicar. It was hard to perceive Calvary
+here; it was surely the air of Bethlehem, the celestial light, not the
+supernatural darkness, that beamed round the simple altar. It was the
+Child called Wonderful that lay there beneath the old hands, rather than
+the stricken Man of Sorrows.
+
+_Adeste fideles_ sang the choir from the tribune.--Come, let us adore,
+rather than weep; let us exult, be content, be ourselves like little
+children. As He for us became a child, let us become childlike for Him.
+Let us put on the garments of infancy and the shoes of peace. _For the
+Lord hath reigned; He is clothed with beauty: the Lord is clothed with
+strength and hath girded Himself. He hath established the world which
+shall not be moved: His throne is prepared from of old. He is from
+everlasting. Rejoice greatly then, O daughter of Zion, shout for joy, O
+daughter of Jerusalem; behold thy King cometh, to thee, the Holy One,
+the Saviour of the world._ It will be time, then, to suffer by and bye,
+when the Prince of this world cometh upon the Prince of Heaven.
+
+So Percy mused, standing apart in his gorgeousness, striving to make
+himself little and simple. Surely nothing was too hard for God! Might
+not this mystic Birth once more do what it had done before--bring into
+subjection through the might of its weakness every proud thing that
+exalts itself above all that is called God? It had drawn wise Kings once
+across the desert, as well as shepherds from their flocks. It had kings
+about it now, kneeling with the poor and foolish, kings who had laid
+down their crowns, who brought the gold of loyal hearts, the myrrh of
+desired martyrdom, and the incense of a pure faith. Could not republics,
+too, lay aside their splendour, mobs be tamed, selfishness deny itself,
+and wisdom confess its ignorance?...
+
+Then he remembered Felsenburgh; and his heart sickened within him.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+Six days later, Percy rose as usual, said his mass, breakfasted, and
+sat down to say office until his servant should summon him to vest for
+the Pontifical mass.
+
+He had learned to expect bad news now so constantly--of apostasies,
+deaths, losses--that the lull of the previous week had come to him with
+extraordinary refreshment. It appeared to him as if his musings in St.
+Anastasia had been truer than he thought, and that the sweetness of the
+old feast had not yet wholly lost its power even over a world that
+denied its substance. For nothing at all had happened of importance. A
+few more martyrdoms had been chronicled, but they had been isolated
+cases; and of Felsenburgh there had been no tidings at all. Europe
+confessed its ignorance of his business.
+
+On the other hand, to-morrow, Percy knew very well, would be a day of
+extraordinary moment in England and Germany at any rate; for in England
+it was appointed as the first occasion of compulsory worship throughout
+the country, while it was the second in Germany. Men and women would
+have to declare themselves now.
+
+He had seen on the previous evening a photograph of the image that was
+to be worshipped next day in the Abbey; and, in a fit of loathing, had
+torn it to shreds. It represented a nude woman, huge and majestic,
+entrancingly lovely, with head and shoulders thrown back, as one who
+sees a strange and heavenly vision, arms downstretched and hands a
+little raised, with wide fingers, as in astonishment--the whole
+attitude, with feet and knees pressed together, suggestive of
+expectation, hope and wonder; in devilish mockery her long hair was
+crowned with twelve stars. This, then, was the spouse of the other, the
+embodiment of man's ideal maternity, still waiting for her child....
+
+When the white scraps lay like poisonous snow at his feet, he had sprung
+across the room to his _prie-dieu_, and fallen there in an agony of
+reparation.
+
+"Oh! Mother, Mother!" he cried to the stately Queen of Heaven who, with
+Her true Son long ago in Her arms, looked down on him from Her
+bracket--no more than that.
+
+* * * * *
+
+But he was still again this morning, and celebrated Saint Silvester,
+Pope and Martyr, the last saint in the procession of the Christian year,
+with tolerable equanimity. The sights of last night, the throng of
+officials, the stately, scarlet, unfamiliar figures of the Cardinals who
+had come in from north, south, east and west--these helped to reassure
+him again--unreasonably, as he knew, yet effectually. The very air was
+electric with expectation. All night the piazza had been crowded by a
+huge, silent mob waiting till the opening of the doors at seven o'clock.
+Now the church itself was full, and the piazza full again. Far down the
+street to the river, so far as he could see as he had leaned from his
+window just now, lay that solemn motionless pavement of heads. The roof
+of the colonnade showed a fringe of them, the house-tops were black--and
+this in the bitter cold of a clear, frosty morning, for it was announced
+that after mass and the proceeding of the members of the Order past the
+Pontifical Throne, the Pope would give Apostolic Benediction to the City
+and the World.
+
+Percy finished Terce, closed his book and lay back; his servant would be
+here in a minute now.
+
+His mind began to run over the function, and he reflected that the
+entire Sacred College (with the exception of the Cardinal-Protector of
+Jerusalem, detained by sickness), numbering sixty-four members, would
+take part. This would mean an unique sight by and bye. Eight years
+before, he remembered, after the freedom of Rome, there had been a
+similar assembly; but the Cardinals at that time amounted to no more
+than fifty-three all told, and four had been absent.
+
+Then he heard voices in his ante-room, a quick step, and a loud English
+expostulation. That was curious, and he sat up.
+
+Then he heard a sentence.
+
+"His Eminence must go to vest; it is useless."
+
+There was a sharp answer, a faint scuffle, and a snatch at the handle.
+This was indecent; so Percy stood up, made three strides of it to the
+door, and tore it open.
+
+A man stood there, whom at first he did not recognise, pale and
+disordered.
+
+"Why---" began Percy, and recoiled.
+
+"Mr. Phillips!" he said.
+
+The other threw out his hands.
+
+"It is I, sir--your Eminence--this moment arrived. It is life and death.
+Your servant tells me---"
+
+"Who sent you?"
+
+"Father Blackmore."
+
+"Good news or bad?"
+
+The man rolled his eyes towards the servant, who still stood erect and
+offended a yard away; and Percy understood.
+
+He put his hand on the other's arm, drawing him through the doorway.
+
+"Tap upon this door in two minutes, James," he said.
+
+They passed across the polished floor together; Percy went to his usual
+place in the window, leaned against the shutter, and spoke.
+
+"Tell me in one sentence, sir," he said to the breathless man.
+
+"There is a plot among the Catholics. They intend destroying the Abbey
+to-morrow with explosives. I knew that the Pope---"
+
+Percy cut him short with a gesture.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+I
+
+The volor-stage was comparatively empty this afternoon, as the little
+party of six stepped out on to it from the lift. There was nothing to
+distinguish these from ordinary travellers. The two Cardinals of Germany
+and England were wrapped in plain furs, without insignia of any kind;
+their chaplains stood near them, while the two men-servants hurried
+forward with the bags to secure a private compartment.
+
+The four kept complete silence, watching the busy movements of the
+officials on board, staring unseeingly at the sleek, polished monster
+that lay netted in steel at their feet, and the great folded fins that
+would presently be cutting the thin air at a hundred and fifty miles an
+hour.
+
+Then Percy, by a sudden movement, turned from the others, went to the
+open window that looked over Rome, and leaned there with his elbows on
+the sill, looking.
+
+* * * * *
+
+It was a strange view before him.
+
+It was darkening now towards sunset, and the sky, primrose-green
+overhead, deepened to a clear tawny orange above the horizon, with a
+sanguine line or two at the edge, and beneath that lay the deep evening
+violet of the city, blotted here and there by the black of cypresses and
+cut by the thin leafless pinnacles of a poplar grove that aspired
+without the walls. But right across the picture rose the enormous dome,
+of an indescribable tint; it was grey, it was violet--it was what the
+eye chose to make it--and through it, giving its solidity the air of a
+bubble, shone the southern sky, flushed too with faint orange. It was
+this that was supreme and dominant; the serrated line of domes, spires
+and pinnacles, the crowded roofs beneath, in the valley dell' Inferno,
+the fairy hills far away--all were but the annexe to this mighty
+tabernacle of God. Already lights were beginning to shine, as for thirty
+centuries they had shone; thin straight skeins of smoke were ascending
+against the darkening sky. The hum of this Mother of cities was
+beginning to be still, for the keen air kept folks indoors; and the
+evening peace was descending that closed another day and another year.
+Beneath in the narrow streets Percy could see tiny figures, hurrying
+like belated ants; the crack of a whip, the cry of a woman, the wail of
+a child came up to this immense elevation like details of a murmur from
+another world. They, too, would soon be quiet, and there would be peace.
+
+A heavy bell beat faintly from far away, and the drowsy city turned to
+murmur its good-night to the Mother of God. From a thousand towers came
+the tiny melody, floating across the great air spaces, in a thousand
+accents, the solemn bass of St. Peter's, the mellow tenor of the
+Lateran, the rough cry from some old slum church, the peevish tinkle of
+convents and chapels--all softened and made mystical in this grave
+evening air--it was the wedding of delicate sound and clear light.
+Above, the liquid orange sky; beneath, this sweet, subdued ecstasy of
+bells.
+
+"_Alma Redemptoris Mater_," whispered Percy, his eyes wet with tears.
+"_Gentle Mother of the Redeemer--the open door of the sky, star of the
+sea--have mercy on sinners._ _The Angel of the Lord announced it to Mary,
+and she conceived of the Holy Ghost_.... _Pour, therefore, Lord, Thy
+grace into our hearts. Let us, who know Christ's incarnation, rise
+through passion and cross to the glory of Resurrection--through the same
+Christ our Lord._"
+
+Another bell clanged sharply close at hand, calling him down to earth,
+and wrong, and labour and grief; and he turned to see the motionless
+volor itself one blaze of brilliant internal light, and the two priests
+following the German Cardinal across the gangway.
+
+It was the rear compartment that the men had taken; and when he had seen
+that the old man was comfortable, still without a word he passed out
+again into the central passage to see the last of Rome.
+
+The exit-door had now been snapped, and as Percy stood at the opposite
+window looking out at the high wall that would presently sink beneath
+him, throughout the whole of the delicate frame began to run the
+vibration of the electric engine. There was the murmur of talking
+somewhere, a heavy step shook the floor, a bell clanged again, twice,
+and a sweet wind-chord sounded. Again it sounded; the vibration ceased,
+and the edge of the high wall against the tawny sky on which he had
+fixed his eyes sank suddenly like a dropped bar, and he staggered a
+little in his place. A moment later the dome rose again, and itself
+sank, the city, a fringe of towers and a mass of dark roofs, pricked
+with light, span like a whirlpool; the jewelled stars themselves sprang
+this way and that; and with one more long cry the marvellous machine
+righted itself, beat with its wings, and settled down, with the note of
+the flying air passing through rising shrillness into vibrant silence,
+to its long voyage to the north.
+
+Further and further sank the city behind; it was a patch now: greyness
+on black. The sky seemed to grow more huge and all-containing as the
+earth relapsed into darkness; it glowed like a vast dome of wonderful
+glass, darkening even as it glowed; and as Percy dropped his eyes once
+more round the extreme edge of the car the city was but a line and a
+bubble--a line and a swelling--a line, and nothingness.
+
+He drew a long breath, and went back to his friends.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+"Tell me again," said the old Cardinal, when the two were settled down
+opposite to one another, and the chaplains were gone to another
+compartment. "Who is this man?"
+
+"This man? He was secretary to Oliver Brand, one of our politicians. He
+fetched me to old Mrs. Brand's death bed, and lost his place in
+consequence. He is in journalism now. He is perfectly honest. No, he is
+not a Catholic, though he longs to be one. That is why they confided in
+him."
+
+"And they?"
+
+"I know nothing of them, except that they are a desperate set. They have
+enough faith to act, but not enough to be patient.... I suppose they
+thought this man would sympathise. But unfortunately he has a
+conscience, and he also sees that any attempt of this kind would be the
+last straw on the back of toleration. Eminence, do you realise how
+violent the feeling is against us?"
+
+The old man shook his head lamentably.
+
+"Do I not?" he murmured. "And my Germans are in it? Are you sure?"
+
+"Eminence, it is a vast plot. It has been simmering for months. There
+have been meetings every week. They have kept the secret marvellously.
+Your Germans only delayed that the blow might be more complete. And now,
+to-morrow---" Percy drew back with a despairing gesture.
+
+"And the Holy Father?"
+
+"I went to him as soon as mass was over. He withdrew all opposition, and
+sent for you. It is our one chance, Eminence."
+
+"And you think our plan will hinder it?"
+
+"I have no idea, but I can think of nothing else. I shall go straight to
+the Archbishop and tell him all. We arrive, I believe, at three o'clock,
+and you in Berlin about seven, I suppose, by German time. The function
+is fixed for eleven. By eleven, then, we shall have done all that is
+possible. The Government will know, and they will know, too, that we are
+innocent in Rome. I imagine they will cause it to be announced that the
+Cardinal-Protector and the Archbishop, with his coadjutors, will be
+present in the sacristies. They will double every guard; they will
+parade volors overhead--and then--well! in God's hands be the rest."
+
+"Do you think the conspirators will attempt it?"
+
+"I have no idea," said Percy shortly.
+
+"I understand they have alternative plans."
+
+"Just so. If all is clear, they intend dropping the explosive from
+above; if not, at least three men have offered to sacrifice themselves
+by taking it into the Abbey themselves.... And you, Eminence?"
+
+The old man eyed him steadily.
+
+"My programme is yours," he said. "Eminence, have you considered the
+effect in either case? If nothing happens---"
+
+"If nothing happens we shall be accused of a fraud, of seeking to
+advertise ourselves. If anything happens--well, we shall all go before
+God together. Pray God it may be the second," he added passionately.
+
+"It will be at least easier to bear," observed the old man.
+
+"I beg your pardon, Eminence. I should not have said that."
+
+There fell a silence between the two, in which no sound was heard but
+the faint untiring vibration of the screw, and the sudden cough of a man
+in the next compartment. Percy leaned his head wearily on his hand, and
+stared from the window.
+
+The earth was now dark beneath them--an immense emptiness; above, the
+huge engulfing sky was still faintly luminous, and through the high
+frosty mist through which they moved stars glimmered now and again, as
+the car swayed and tacked across the wind.
+
+"It will be cold among the Alps," murmured Percy. Then he broke off.
+"And I have not one shred of evidence," he said; "nothing but the word
+of a man."
+
+"And you are sure?"
+
+"I am sure."
+
+"Eminence," said the German suddenly, staring straight into his face,
+"the likeness is extraordinary."
+
+Percy smiled listlessly. He was tired of bearing that.
+
+"What do you make of it?" persisted the other.
+
+"I have been asked that before," said Percy. "I have no views."
+
+"It seems to me that God means something," murmured the German heavily,
+still staring at him.
+
+"Well, Eminence?"
+
+"A kind of antithesis--a reverse of the medal. I do not know."
+
+Again there was silence. A chaplain looked in through the glazed door, a
+homely, blue-eyed German, and was waved away once more.
+
+"Eminence," said the old man abruptly, "there is surely more to speak
+of. Plans to be made."
+
+Percy shook his head.
+
+"There are no plans to be made," he said. "We know nothing but the
+fact--no names--nothing. We--we are like children in a tiger's cage. And
+one of us has just made a gesture in the tiger's face."
+
+"I suppose we shall communicate with one another?"
+
+"If we are in existence."
+
+It was curious how Percy took the lead. He had worn his scarlet for
+about three months, and his companion for twelve years; yet it was the
+younger who dictated plans and arranged. He was scarcely conscious of
+its strangeness, however. Ever since the shocking news of the morning,
+when a new mine had been sprung under the shaking Church, and he had
+watched the stately ceremonial, the gorgeous splendour, the dignified,
+tranquil movements of the Pope and his court, with a secret that burned
+his heart and brain--above all, since that quick interview in which old
+plans had been reversed and a startling decision formed, and a blessing
+given and received, and a farewell looked not uttered--all done in
+half-an-hour--his whole nature had concentrated itself into one keen
+tense force, like a coiled spring. He felt power tingling to his
+finger-tips--power and the dulness of an immense despair. Every prop had
+been cut, every brace severed; he, the City of Rome, the Catholic
+Church, the very supernatural itself, seemed to hang now on one single
+thing--the Finger of God. And if that failed--well, nothing would ever
+matter any more....
+
+He was going now to one of two things--ignominy or death. There was no
+third thing--unless, indeed, the conspirators were actually taken with
+their instruments upon them. But that was impossible. Either they would
+refrain, knowing that God's ministers would fall with them, and in that
+case there would be the ignominy of a detected fraud, of a miserable
+attempt to win credit. Or they would not refrain; they would count the
+death of a Cardinal and a few bishops a cheap price to pay for
+revenge--and in that case well, there was Death and Judgment. But Percy
+had ceased to fear. No ignominy could be greater than that which he
+already bore--the ignominy of loneliness and discredit. And death could
+be nothing but sweet--it would at least be knowledge and rest. He was
+willing to risk all on God.
+
+The other, with a little gesture of apology, took out his office book
+presently, and began to read.
+
+Percy looked at him with an immense envy. Ah! if only he were as old as
+that! He could bear a year or two more of this misery, but not fifty
+years, he thought. It was an almost endless vista that (even if things
+went well) opened before him, of continual strife, self-repression,
+energy, misrepresentation from his enemies. The Church was sinking
+further every day. What if this new spasm of fervour were no more than
+the dying flare of faith? How could he bear that? He would have to see
+the tide of atheism rise higher and more triumphant every day;
+Felsenburgh had given it an impetus of whose end there was no
+prophesying. Never before had a single man wielded the full power of
+democracy. Then once more he looked forward to the morrow. Oh! if it
+could but end in death!... _Beati mortui qui in Domino moriuntur!_ ...
+
+It was no good; it was cowardly to think in this fashion. After all, God
+was God--He takes up the isles as a very little thing.
+
+Percy took out his office book, found Prime and St. Sylvester, signed
+himself with the cross, and began to pray. A minute later the two
+chaplains slipped in once more, and sat down; and all was silent, save
+for that throb of the screw, and the strange whispering rush of air
+outside.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+It was about nineteen o'clock that the ruddy English conductor looked in
+at the doorway, waking Percy from his doze.
+
+"Dinner will be served in half-an-hour, gentlemen," he said (speaking
+Esperanto, as the rule was on international cars). "We do not stop at
+Turin to-night."
+
+He shut the door and went out, and the sound of closing doors came down
+the corridor as he made the same announcement to each compartment.
+
+There were no passengers to descend at Turin, then, reflected Percy; and
+no doubt a wireless message had been received that there were none to
+come on board either. That was good news: it would give him more time in
+London. It might even enable Cardinal Steinmann to catch an earlier
+volor from Paris to Berlin; but he was not sure bow they ran. It was a
+pity that the German had not been able to catch the thirteen o'clock
+from Rome to Berlin direct. So he calculated, in a kind of superficial
+insensibility.
+
+He stood up presently to stretch himself. Then he passed out and along
+the corridor to the lavatory to wash his hands.
+
+He became fascinated by the view as he stood before the basin at the
+rear of the car, for even now they were passing over Turin. It was a
+blur of light, vivid and beautiful, that shone beneath him in the midst
+of this gulf of darkness, sweeping away southwards into the gloom as the
+car sped on towards the Alps. How little, he thought, seemed this great
+city seen from above; and yet, how mighty it was! It was from that
+glimmer, already five miles behind, that Italy was controlled; in one of
+these dolls' houses of which he had caught but a glimpse, men sat in
+council over souls and bodies, and abolished God, and smiled at His
+Church. And God allowed it all, and made no sign. It was there that
+Felsenburgh had been, a month or two ago--Felsenburgh, his double! And
+again the mental sword tore and stabbed at his heart.
+
+* * * * *
+
+A few minutes later, the four ecclesiastics were sitting at their round
+table in a little screened compartment of the dining-room in the bows of
+the air-ship. It was an excellent dinner, served, as usual, from the
+kitchen in the bowels of the volor, and rose, course by course, with a
+smooth click, into the centre of the table. There was a bottle of red
+wine to each diner, and both table and chairs swung easily to the very
+slight motion of the ship. But they did not talk much, for there was
+only one subject possible to the two cardinals, and the chaplains had
+not yet been admitted into the full secret.
+
+It was growing cold now, and even the hot-air foot-rests did not quite
+compensate for the deathly iciness of the breath that began to stream
+down from the Alps, which the ship was now approaching at a slight
+incline. It was necessary to rise at least nine thousand feet from the
+usual level, in order to pass the frontier of the Mont Cenis at a safe
+angle; and at the same time it was necessary to go a little slower over
+the Alps themselves, owing to the extreme rarity of the air, and the
+difficulty in causing the screw to revolve sufficiently quickly to
+counteract it.
+
+"There will be clouds to-night," said a voice clear and distinct from
+the passage, as the door swung slightly to a movement of the car.
+
+Percy got up and closed it.
+
+The German Cardinal began to grow a little fidgety towards the end of
+dinner.
+
+"I shall go back," he said at last. "I shall be better in my fur rug."
+
+His chaplain dutifully went after him, leaving his own dinner
+unfinished, and Percy was left alone with Father Corkran, his English
+chaplain lately from Scotland.
+
+He finished his wine, ate a couple of figs, and then sat staring out
+through the plate-glass window in front.
+
+"Ah!" he said. "Excuse me, father. There are the Alps at last."
+
+The front of the car consisted of three divisions, in the centre of one
+of which stood the steersman, his eyes looking straight ahead, and his
+hands upon the wheel. On either side of him, separated from him by
+aluminium walls, was contrived a narrow slip of a compartment, with a
+long curved window at the height of a man's eyes, through which a
+magnificent view could be obtained. It was to one of these that Percy
+went, passing along the corridor, and seeing through half-opened doors
+other parties still over their wine. He pushed the spring door on the
+left and went through.
+
+He had crossed the Alps three times before in his life, and well
+remembered the extraordinary effect they had had on him, especially as
+he had once seen them from a great altitude upon a clear day--an
+eternal, immeasurable sea of white ice, broken by hummocks and wrinkles
+that from below were soaring peaks named and reverenced; and, beyond,
+the spherical curve of the earth's edge that dropped in a haze of air
+into unutterable space. But this time they seemed more amazing than
+ever, and he looked out on them with the interest of a sick child.
+
+The car was now ascending; rapidly towards the pass up across the huge
+tumbled slopes, ravines, and cliffs that lie like outworks of the
+enormous wall. Seen from this great height they were in themselves
+comparatively insignificant, but they at least suggested the vastness of
+the bastions of which they were no more than buttresses. As Percy
+turned, he could see the moonless sky alight with frosty stars, and the
+dimness of the illumination made the scene even more impressive; but as
+he turned again, there was a change. The vast air about him seemed now
+to be perceived through frosted glass. The velvet blackness of the pine
+forests had faded to heavy grey, the pale glint of water and ice seen
+and gone again in a moment, the monstrous nakedness of rock spires and
+slopes, rising towards him and sliding away again beneath with a
+crawling motion--all these had lost their distinctness of outline, and
+were veiled in invisible white. As he looked yet higher to right and
+left the sight became terrifying, for the giant walls of rock rushing
+towards him, the huge grotesque shapes towering on all sides, ran upward
+into a curtain of cloud visible only from the dancing radiance thrown
+upon it by the brilliantly lighted car. Even as he looked, two straight
+fingers of splendour, resembling horns, shot out, as the bow
+searchlights were turned on; and the car itself, already travelling at
+half-speed, dropped to quarter-speed, and began to sway softly from side
+to side as the huge air-planes beat the mist through which they moved,
+and the antennae of light pierced it. Still up they went, and on--yet
+swift enough to let Percy see one great pinnacle rear itself, elongate,
+sink down into a cruel needle, and vanish into nothingness a thousand
+feet below. The motion grew yet more nauseous, as the car moved up at a
+sharp angle preserving its level, simultaneously rising, advancing and
+swaying. Once, hoarse and sonorous, an unfrozen torrent roared like a
+beast, it seemed within twenty yards, and was dumb again on the instant.
+Now, too, the horns began to cry, long, lamentable hootings, ringing
+sadly in that echoing desolation like the wail of wandering souls; and
+as Percy, awed beyond feeling, wiped the gathering moisture from the
+glass, and stared again, it appeared as if he floated now, motionless
+except for the slight rocking beneath his feet, in a world of whiteness,
+as remote from earth as from heaven, poised in hopeless infinite space,
+blind, alone, frozen, lost in a white hell of desolation.
+
+
+Once, as he stared, a huge whiteness moved towards him through the veil,
+slid slowly sideways and down, disclosing, as the car veered, a gigantic
+slope smooth as oil, with one cluster of black rock cutting it like the
+fingers of a man's hand groping from a mountainous wave.
+
+Then, as once more the car cried aloud like a lost sheep, there answered
+it, it seemed scarcely ten yards away, first one windy scream of dismay,
+another and another; a clang of bells, a chorus broke out; and the air
+was full of the beating of wings.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+There was one horrible instant before a clang of a bell, the answering
+scream, and a whirling motion showed that the steersman was alert. Then
+like a stone the car dropped, and Percy clutched at the rail before him
+to steady the terrible sensation of falling into emptiness. He could
+hear behind him the crash of crockery, the bumping of heavy bodies, and
+as the car again checked on its wide wings, a rush of footsteps broke
+out and a cry or two of dismay. Outside, but high and far away, the
+hooting went on; the air was full of it, and in a flash he recognised
+that it could not be one or ten or twenty cars, but at least a hundred
+that had answered the call, and that somewhere overhead were hooting and
+flapping. The invisible ravines and cliffs on all sides took up the
+crying; long wails whooped and moaned and died amid a clash of bells,
+further and further every instant, but now in every direction, behind,
+above, in front, and far to right and left. Once more the car began to
+move, sinking in a long still curve towards the face of the mountain;
+and as it checked, and began to sway again on its huge wings, he turned
+to the door, seeing as he did so, through the cloudy windows in the
+glow of light, a spire of rock not thirty feet below rising from the
+mist, and one smooth shoulder of snow curving away into invisibility.
+
+Within, the car shewed brutal signs of the sudden check: the doors of
+the dining compartments, as he passed along, were flung wide; glasses,
+plates, pools of wine and tumbled fruit rolled to and fro on the heaving
+floors; one man, sitting helplessly on the ground, rolled vacant,
+terrified eyes upon the priest. He glanced in at the door through which
+he had come just now, and Father Corkran staggered up from his seat and
+came towards him, reeling at the motion underfoot; simultaneously there
+was a rush from the opposite door, where a party of Americans had been
+dining; and as Percy, beckoning with his head, turned again to go down
+to the stern-end of the ship, he found the narrow passage blocked with
+the crowd that had run out. A babble of talking and cries made questions
+impossible; and Percy, with his chaplain behind him, gripped the
+aluminium panelling, and step by step began to make his way in search of
+his friends.
+
+Half-way down the passage, as he pushed and struggled, a voice made
+itself heard above the din; and in the momentary silence that followed,
+again sounded the far-away crying of the volors overhead.
+
+"Seats, gentlemen, seats," roared the voice. "We are moving
+immediately."
+
+Then the crowd melted as the conductor came through, red-faced and
+determined, and Percy, springing into his wake, found his way clear to
+the stern.
+
+The Cardinal seemed none the worse. He had been asleep, he explained,
+and saved himself in time from rolling on to the floor; but his old face
+twitched as he talked.
+
+"But what is it?" he said. "What is the meaning?"
+
+Father Bechlin related how he had actually seen one of the troop of
+volors within five yards of the window; it was crowded with faces, he
+said, from stem to stern. Then it had soared suddenly, and vanished in
+whorls of mist.
+
+Percy shook his head, saying nothing. He had no explanation.
+
+"They are inquiring, I understand," said Father Bechlin again. "The
+conductor was at his instrument just now."
+
+There was nothing to be seen from the windows now. Only, as Percy stared
+out, still dazed with the shock, he saw the cruel needle of rock
+wavering beneath as if seen through water, and the huge shoulder of snow
+swaying softly up and down. It was quieter outside. It appeared that the
+flock had passed, only somewhere from an infinite height still sounded a
+fitful wailing, as if a lonely bird were wandering, lost in space.
+
+"That is the signalling volor," murmured Percy to himself.
+
+He had no theory--no suggestion. Yet the matter seemed an ominous one.
+It was unheard of that an encounter with a hundred volors should take
+place, and he wondered why they were going southwards. Again the name of
+Felsenburgh came to his mind. What if that sinister man were still
+somewhere overhead?
+
+"Eminence," began the old man again. But at that instant the car began
+to move.
+
+A bell clanged, a vibration tingled underfoot, and then, soft as a
+flake of snow, the great ship began to rise, its movement perceptible
+only by the sudden drop and vanishing of the spire of rock at which
+Percy still stared. Slowly the snowfield too began to flit downwards, a
+black cleft, whisked smoothly into sight from above, and disappeared
+again below, and a moment later once more the car seemed poised in white
+space as it climbed the slope of air down which it had dropped just now.
+Again the wind-chord rent the atmosphere; and this time the answer was
+as faint and distant as a cry from another world. The speed quickened,
+and the steady throb of the screw began to replace the swaying motion of
+the wings. Again came the hoot, wild and echoing through the barren
+wilderness of rock walls beneath, and again with a sudden impulse the
+car soared. It was going in great circles now, cautious as a cat,
+climbing, climbing, punctuating the ascent with cry after cry, searching
+the blind air for dangers. Once again a vast white slope came into
+sight, illuminated by the glare from the windows, sinking ever more and
+more swiftly, receding and approaching--until for one instant a jagged
+line of rocks grinned like teeth through the mist, dropped away and
+vanished, and with a clash of bells, and a last scream of warning, the
+throb of the screw passed from a whirr to a rising note, and the note to
+stillness, as the huge ship, clear at last of the frontier peaks, shook
+out her wings steady once more, and set out for her humming flight
+through space.... Whatever it was, was behind them now, vanished into
+the thick night.
+
+There was a sound of talking from the interior of the car, hasty,
+breathless voices, questioning, exclaiming, and the authoritative terse
+answer of the guard. A step came along outside, and Percy sprang to meet
+it, but, as he laid his hand on the door, it was pushed from without,
+and to his astonishment the English guard came straight through, closing
+it behind him.
+
+He stood there, looking strangely at the four priests, with compressed
+lips and anxious eyes.
+
+"Well?" cried Percy.
+
+"All right, gentlemen. But I'm thinking you'd better descend at Paris. I
+know who you are, gentlemen--and though I'm not a Catholic---"
+
+He stopped again.
+
+"For God's sake, man---" began Percy.
+
+"Oh! the news, gentlemen. Well, it was two hundred cars going to Rome.
+There is a Catholic plot, sir, discovered in London---"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"To wipe out the Abbey. So they're going---"
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"Yes, sir--to wipe out Rome."
+
+Then he was gone again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+I
+
+It was nearly sixteen o'clock on the same day, the last day of the year,
+that Mabel went into the little church that stood in the street beneath
+her house.
+
+The dark was falling softly layer on layer; across the roofs to westward
+burned the smouldering fire of the winter sunset, and the interior was
+full of the dying light. She had slept a little in her chair that
+afternoon, and had awakened with that strange cleansed sense of spirit
+and mind that sometimes follows such sleep. She wondered later how she
+could have slept at such a time, and above all, how it was that she had
+perceived nothing of that cloud of fear and fury that even now was
+falling over town and country alike. She remembered afterwards an
+unusual busy-ness on the broad tracks beneath her as she had looked out
+on them from her windows, and an unusual calling of horns and whistles;
+but she thought nothing of it, and passed down an hour later for a
+meditation in the church.
+
+She had grown to love the quiet place, and came in often like this to
+steady her thoughts and concentrate them on the significance that lay
+beneath the surface of life--the huge principles upon which all lived,
+and which so plainly were the true realities. Indeed, such devotion was
+becoming almost recognised among certain classes of people. Addresses
+were delivered now and then; little books were being published as guides
+to the interior life, curiously resembling the old Catholic books on
+mental prayer.
+
+She went to-day to her usual seat, sat down, folded her hands, looked
+for a minute or two upon the old stone sanctuary, the white image and
+the darkening window. Then she closed her eyes and began to think,
+according to the method she followed.
+
+First she concentrated her attention on herself, detaching it from all
+that was merely external and transitory, withdrawing it inwards ...
+inwards, until she found that secret spark which, beneath all frailties
+and activities, made her a substantial member of the divine race of
+humankind.
+
+This then was the first step.
+
+The second consisted in an act of the intellect, followed by one of the
+imagination. All men possessed that spark, she considered.... Then she
+sent out her powers, sweeping with the eyes of her mind the seething
+world, seeing beneath the light and dark of the two hemispheres, the
+countless millions of mankind--children coming into the world, old men
+leaving it, the mature rejoicing in it and their own strength. Back
+through the ages she looked, through those centuries of crime and
+blindness, as the race rose through savagery and superstition to a
+knowledge of themselves; on through the ages yet to come, as generation
+followed generation to some climax whose perfection, she told herself,
+she could not fully comprehend because she was not of it. Yet, she told
+herself again, that climax had already been born; the birthpangs were
+over; for had not He come who was the heir of time?...
+
+Then by a third and vivid act she realised the unity of all, the central
+fire of which each spark was but a radiation--that vast passionless
+divine being, realising Himself up through these centuries, one yet
+many, Him whom men had called God, now no longer unknown, but recognised
+as the transcendent total of themselves--Him who now, with the coming of
+the new Saviour, had stirred and awakened and shown Himself as One.
+
+And there she stayed, contemplating the vision of her mind, detaching
+now this virtue, now that for particular assimilation, dwelling on her
+deficiencies, seeing in the whole the fulfilment of all aspirations, the
+sum of all for which men had hoped--that Spirit of Peace, so long
+hindered yet generated too perpetually by the passions of the world,
+forced into outline and being by the energy of individual lives,
+realising itself in pulse after pulse, dominant at last, serene,
+manifest, and triumphant. There she stayed, losing the sense of
+individuality, merging it by a long sustained effort of the will,
+drinking, as she thought, long breaths of the spirit of life and
+love....
+
+Some sound, she supposed afterwards, disturbed her, and she opened her
+eyes; and there before her lay the quiet pavement, glimmering through
+the dusk, the step of the sanctuary, the rostrum on the right, and the
+peaceful space of darkening air above the white Mother-figure and
+against the tracery of the old window. It was here that men had
+worshipped Jesus, that blood-stained Man of Sorrow, who had borne, even
+on His own confession, not peace but a sword. Yet they had knelt, those
+blind and hopeless Christians.... Ah! the pathos of it all, the
+despairing acceptance of any creed that would account for sorrow, the
+wild worship of any God who had claimed to bear it!
+
+And again came the sound, striking across her peace, though as yet she
+did not understand why.
+
+It was nearer now; and she turned in astonishment to look down the dusky
+nave.
+
+It was from without that the sound had come, that strange murmur, that
+rose and fell again as she listened.
+
+She stood up, her heart quickening a little--only once before had she
+heard such a sound, once before, in a square, where men raged about a
+point beneath a platform....
+
+She stepped swiftly out of her seat, passed down the aisle, drew back
+the curtains beneath the west window, lifted the latch and stepped out.
+
+* * * * *
+
+The street, from where she looked over the railings that barred the
+entrance to the church, seemed unusually empty and dark. To right and
+left stretched the houses, overhead the darkening sky was flushed with
+rose; but it seemed as if the public lights had been forgotten. There
+was not a living being to be seen.
+
+She had put her hand on the latch of the gate, to open it and go out,
+when a sudden patter of footsteps made her hesitate; and the next
+instant a child appeared panting, breathless and terrified, running with
+her hands before her.
+
+"They're coming, they're coming," sobbed the child, seeing the face
+looking at her. Then she clung to the bars, staring over her shoulder.
+
+Mabel lifted the latch in an instant; the child sprang in, ran to the
+door and beat against it, then turning, seized her dress and cowered
+against her. Mabel shut the gate.
+
+"There, there," she said. "Who is it? Who are coming?"
+
+But the child hid her face, drawing at the kindly skirts; and the next
+moment came the roar of voices and the trampling of footsteps.
+
+* * * * *
+
+It was not more than a few seconds before the heralds of that grim
+procession came past. First came a flying squadron of children,
+laughing, terrified, fascinated, screaming, turning their heads as they
+ran, with a dog or two yelping among them, and a few women drifting
+sideways along the pavements. A face of a man, Mabel saw as she glanced
+in terror upwards, had appeared at the windows opposite, pale and
+eager--some invalid no doubt dragging himself to see. One group--a
+well-dressed man in grey, a couple of women carrying babies, a
+solemn-faced boy--halted immediately before her on the other side of the
+railings, all talking, none listening, and these too turned their faces
+to the road on the left, up which every instant the clamour and
+trampling grew. Yet she could not ask. Her lips moved; but no sound came
+from them. She was one incarnate apprehension. Across her intense fixity
+moved pictures of no importance of Oliver as he had been at breakfast,
+of her own bedroom with its softened paper, of the dark sanctuary and
+the white figure on which she had looked just now.
+
+They were coming thicker now; a troop of young men with their arms
+linked swayed into sight, all talking or crying aloud, none
+listening--all across the roadway, and behind them surged the crowd,
+like a wave in a stone-fenced channel, male scarcely distinguishable
+from female in that pack of faces, and under that sky that grew darker
+every instant. Except for the noise, which Mabel now hardly noticed, so
+thick and incessant it was, so complete her concentration in the sense
+of sight--except for that, it might have been, from its suddenness and
+overwhelming force, some mob of phantoms trooping on a sudden out of
+some vista of the spiritual world visible across an open space, and
+about to vanish again in obscurity. That empty street was full now on
+this side and that so far as she could see; the young men were
+gone--running or walking she hardly knew--round the corner to the right,
+and the entire space was one stream of heads and faces, pressing so
+fiercely that the group at the railings were detached like weeds and
+drifted too, sideways, clutching at the bars, and swept away too and
+vanished. And all the while the child tugged and tore at her skirts.
+
+Certain things began to appear now above the heads of the crowd--objects
+she could not distinguish in the failing light--poles, and fantastic
+shapes, fragments of stuff resembling banners, moving as if alive,
+turning from side to side, borne from beneath.
+
+Faces, distorted with passion, looked at her from time to time as the
+moving show went past, open mouths cried at her; but she hardly saw
+them. She was watching those strange emblems, straining her eyes through
+the dusk, striving to distinguish the battered broken shapes,
+half-guessing, yet afraid to guess.
+
+Then, on a sudden, from the hidden lamps beneath the eaves, light leaped
+into being--that strong, sweet, familiar light, generated by the great
+engines underground that, in the passion of that catastrophic day, all
+men had forgotten; and in a moment all changed from a mob of phantoms
+and shapes into a pitiless reality of life and death.
+
+Before her moved a great rood, with a figure upon it, of which one arm
+hung from the nailed hand, swinging as it went; an embroidery streamed
+behind with the swiftness of the motion.
+
+And next after it came the naked body of a child, impaled, white and
+ruddy, the head fallen upon the breast, and the arms, too, dangling and
+turning.
+
+And next the figure of a man, hanging by the neck, dressed, it seemed,
+in a kind of black gown and cape, with its black-capped head twisting
+from the twisting rope.
+
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+The same night Oliver Brand came home about an hour before midnight.
+
+For himself, what he had heard and seen that day was still too vivid and
+too imminent for him to judge of it coolly. He had seen, from his
+windows in Whitehall, Parliament Square filled with a mob the like of
+which had not been known in England since the days of Christianity--a
+mob full of a fury that could scarcely draw its origin except from
+sources beyond the reach of sense. Thrice during the hours that followed
+the publication of the Catholic plot and the outbreak of mob-law he had
+communicated with the Prime Minister asking whether nothing could be
+done to allay the tumult; and on both occasions he had received the
+doubtful answer that what could be done would be done, that force was
+inadmissible at present; but that the police were doing all that was
+possible.
+
+As regarded the despatch of the volors to Rome, he had assented by
+silence, as had the rest of the Council. That was, Snowford had said, a
+judicial punitive act, regrettable but necessary. Peace, in this
+instance, could not be secured except on terms of war--or rather, since
+war was obsolete--by the sternness of justice. These Catholics had shown
+themselves the avowed enemies of society; very well, then society must
+defend itself, at least this once. Man was still human. And Oliver had
+listened and said nothing.
+
+As he passed in one of the Government volors over London on his way
+home, he had caught more than one glimpse of what was proceeding beneath
+him. The streets were as bright as day, shadowless and clear in the
+white light, and every roadway was a crawling serpent. From beneath rose
+up a steady roar of voices, soft and woolly, punctuated by cries. From
+here and there ascended the smoke of burning; and once, as he flitted
+over one of the great squares to the south of Battersea, he had seen as
+it were a scattered squadron of ants running as if in fear or
+pursuit.... He knew what was happening.... Well, after all, man was not
+yet perfectly civilised.
+
+He did not like to think of what awaited him at home. Once, about five
+hours earlier, he had listened to his wife's voice through the
+telephone, and what he had heard had nearly caused him to leave all and
+go to her. Yet he was scarcely prepared for what he found.
+
+As he came into the sitting-room, there was no sound, except that
+far-away hum from the seething streets below. The room seemed strangely
+dark and cold; the only light that entered was through one of the
+windows from which the curtains were withdrawn, and, silhouetted against
+the luminous sky beyond, was the upright figure of a woman, looking and
+listening....
+
+He pressed the knob of the electric light; and Mabel turned slowly
+towards him. She was in her day-dress, with a cloak thrown over her
+shoulders, and her face was almost as that of a stranger. It was
+perfectly colourless, her lips were compressed and her eyes full of an
+emotion which he could not interpret. It might equally have been anger,
+terror or misery.
+
+She stood there in the steady light, motionless, looking at him.
+
+For a moment he did not trust himself to speak. He passed across to the
+window, closed it and drew the curtains. Then he took that rigid figure
+gently by the arm.
+
+"Mabel," he said, "Mabel."
+
+She submitted to be drawn towards the sofa, but there was no response to
+his touch. He sat down and looked up at her with a kind of despairing
+apprehension.
+
+"My dear, I am tired out," he said.
+
+Still she looked at him. There was in her pose that rigidity that actors
+simulate; yet he knew it for the real thing. He had seen that silence
+once or twice before in the presence of a horror--once at any rate, at
+the sight of a splash of blood on her shoe.
+
+"Well, my darling, sit down, at least," he said.
+
+She obeyed him mechanically--sat, and still stared at him. In the
+silence once more that soft roar rose and died from the invisible world
+of tumult outside the windows. Within here all was quiet. He knew
+perfectly that two things strove within her, her loyalty to her faith
+and her hatred of those crimes in the name of justice. As he looked on
+her he saw that these two were at death grips, that hatred was
+prevailing, and that she herself was little more than a passive
+battlefield. Then, as with a long-drawn howl of a wolf, there surged and
+sank the voices of the mob a mile away, the tension broke.... She threw
+herself forward towards him, he caught her by the wrists, and so she
+rested, clasped in his arms, her face and bosom on his knees, and her
+whole body torn by emotion.
+
+For a full minute neither spoke. Oliver understood well enough, yet at
+present he had no words. He only drew her a little closer to himself,
+kissed her hair two or three times, and settled himself to hold her. He
+began to rehearse what he must say presently.
+
+Then she raised her flushed face for an instant, looked at him
+passionately, dropped her head again and began to sob out broken words.
+
+He could only catch a sentence here and there, yet he knew what she was
+saying....
+
+It was the ruin of all her hopes, she sobbed, the end of her religion.
+Let her die, die and have done with it! It was all gone, gone, swept
+away in this murderous passion of the people of her faith ... they were
+no better than Christians, after all, as fierce as the men on whom they
+avenged themselves, as dark as though the Saviour, Julian, had never
+come; it was all lost ... War and Passion and Murder had returned to the
+body from which she had thought them gone forever.... The burning
+churches, the hunted Catholics, the raging of the streets on which she
+had looked that day, the bodies of the child and the priest carried on
+poles, the burning churches and convents. ... All streamed out,
+incoherent, broken by sobs, details of horror, lamentations, reproaches,
+interpreted by the writhing of her head and hands upon his knees. The
+collapse was complete.
+
+He put his hands again beneath her arms and raised her. He was worn out
+by his work, yet he knew he must quiet her. This was more serious than
+any previous crisis. Yet he knew her power of recovery.
+
+"Sit down, my darling," he said. "There ... give me your hands. Now
+listen to me."
+
+* * * * *
+
+He made really an admirable defence, for it was what he had been
+repeating to himself all day. Men were not yet perfect, he said; there
+ran in their veins the blood of men who for twenty centuries had been
+Christians.... There must be no despair; faith in man was of the very
+essence of religion, faith in man's best self, in what he would become,
+not in what at present he actually was. They were at the beginning of
+the new religion, not in its maturity; there must be sourness in the
+young fruit. ... Consider, too, the provocation! Remember the appalling
+crime that these Catholics had contemplated; they had set themselves to
+strike the new Faith in its very heart....
+
+"My darling," he said, "men are not changed in an instant. What if those
+Christians had succeeded!... I condemn it all as strongly as you. I saw
+a couple of newspapers this afternoon that are as wicked as anything
+that the Christians have ever done. They exulted in all these crimes. It
+will throw the movement back ten years.... Do you think that there are
+not thousands like yourself who hate and detest this violence?... But
+what does faith mean, except that we know that mercy will prevail?
+Faith, patience and hope--these are our weapons."
+
+He spoke with passionate conviction, his eyes fixed on hers, in a fierce
+endeavour to give her his own confidence, and to reassure the remnants
+of his own doubtfulness. It was true that he too hated what she hated,
+yet he saw things that she did not.... Well, well, he told himself, he
+must remember that she was a woman.
+
+The look of frantic horror passed slowly out of her eyes, giving way to
+acute misery as he talked, and as his personality once more began to
+dominate her own. But it was not yet over.
+
+"But the volors," she cried, "the volors! That is deliberate; that is
+not the work of the mob."
+
+"My darling, it is no more deliberate than the other. We are all human,
+we are all immature. Yes, the Council permitted it, ... permitted it,
+remember. The German Government, too, had to yield. We must tame nature
+slowly, we must not break it."
+
+He talked again for a few minutes, repeating his arguments, soothing,
+reassuring, encouraging; and he saw that he was beginning to prevail.
+But she returned to one of his words.
+
+"Permitted it! And you permitted it."
+
+"Dear; I said nothing, either for it or against. I tell you that if we
+had forbidden it there would have been yet more murder, and the people
+would have lost their rulers. We were passive, since we could do
+nothing."
+
+"Ah! but it would have been better to die.... Oh, Oliver, let me die at
+least! I cannot bear it."
+
+By her hands which he still held he drew her nearer yet to himself.
+
+"Sweetheart," he said gravely, "cannot you trust me a little? If I could
+tell you all that passed to-day, you would understand. But trust me that
+I am not heartless. And what of Julian Felsenburgh?"
+
+For a moment he saw hesitation in her eyes; her loyalty to him and her
+loathing of all that had happened strove within her. Then once again
+loyalty prevailed, the name of Felsenburgh weighed down the balance, and
+trust came back with a flood of tears.
+
+"Oh, Oliver," she said, "I know I trust you. But I am so weak, and all
+is so terrible. And He so strong and merciful. And will He be with us
+to-morrow?"
+
+* * * * *
+
+It struck midnight from the clock-tower a mile away as they yet sat and
+talked. She was still tremulous from the struggle; but she looked at him
+smiling, still holding his hands. He saw that the reaction was upon her
+in full force at last.
+
+"The New Year, my husband," she said, and rose as she said it, drawing
+him after her.
+
+"I wish you a happy New Year," she said. "Oh help me, Oliver."
+
+She kissed him, and drew back, still holding his hands, looking at him
+with bright tearful eyes.
+
+"Oliver," she cried again, "I must tell you this.... Do you know what I
+thought before you came?"
+
+He shook his head, staring at her greedily. How sweet she was! He felt
+her grip tighten on his hands.
+
+"I thought I could not bear it," she whispered--"that I must end it
+all--ah! you know what I mean."
+
+His heart flinched as he heard her; and he drew her closer again to
+himself.
+
+"It is all over! it is all over," she cried. "Ah! do not look like that!
+I could not tell you if it was not."'
+
+As their lips met again there came the vibration of an electric bell
+from the next room, and Oliver, knowing what it meant, felt even in that
+instant a tremor shake his heart. He loosed her hands, and still smiled
+at her.
+
+"The bell!" she said, with a flash of apprehension.
+
+"But it is all well between us again?"
+
+Her face steadied itself into loyalty and confidence.
+
+"It is all well," she said; and again the impatient bell tingled. "Go,
+Oliver; I will wait here."
+
+A minute later he was back again, with a strange look on his white face,
+and his lips compressed. He came straight up to her, taking her once
+more by the hands, and looking steadily into her steady eyes. In the
+hearts of both of them resolve and faith were holding down the emotion
+that was not yet dead. He drew a long breath.
+
+"Yes," he said in an even voice, "it is over."
+
+Her lips moved; and that deadly paleness lay on her cheeks. He gripped
+her firmly.
+
+"Listen," he said. "You must face it. It is over. Rome is gone. Now we
+must build something better."
+
+She threw herself sobbing into his arms.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+I
+
+Long before dawn on the first morning of the New Year the approaches to
+the Abbey were already blocked. Victoria Street, Great George Street,
+Whitehall--even Millbank Street itself--were full and motionless. Broad
+Sanctuary, divided by the low-walled motor-track, was itself cut into
+great blocks and wedges of people by the ways which the police kept open
+for the passage of important personages, and Palace Yard was kept
+rigidly clear except for one island, occupied by a stand which was
+itself full from top to bottom and end to end. All roofs and parapets
+which commanded a view of the Abbey were also one mass of heads.
+Overhead, like solemn moons, burned the white lights of the electric
+globes.
+
+It was not known at exactly what hour the tumult had steadied itself to
+definite purpose, except to a few weary controllers of the temporary
+turnstiles which had been erected the evening before. It had been
+announced a week previously that, in consideration of the enormous
+demand for seats, all persons who presented their worship-ticket at an
+authorised office, and followed the directions issued by the police,
+would be accounted as having fulfilled the duties of citizenship in that
+respect, and it was generally made known that it was the Government's
+intention to toll the great bell of the Abbey at the beginning of the
+ceremony and at the incensing of the image, during which period silence
+must be as far as possible preserved by all those within hearing.
+
+London had gone completely mad on the announcement of the Catholic plot
+on the afternoon before. The secret had leaked out about fourteen
+o'clock, an hour after the betrayal of the scheme to Mr. Snowford; and
+practically all commercial activities had ceased on the instant. By
+fifteen-and-a-half all stores were closed, the Stock Exchange, the City
+offices, the West End establishments--all had as by irresistible impulse
+suspended business, and from within two hours after noon until nearly
+midnight, when the police had been adequately reinforced and enabled to
+deal with the situation, whole mobs and armies of men, screaming
+squadrons of women, troops of frantic youths, had paraded the streets,
+howling, denouncing, and murdering. It was not known how many deaths had
+taken place, but there was scarcely a street without the signs of
+outrage. Westminster Cathedral had been sacked, every altar overthrown,
+indescribable indignities performed there. An unknown priest had
+scarcely been able to consume the Blessed Sacrament before he was seized
+and throttled; the Archbishop with eleven priests and two bishops had
+been hanged at the north end of the church, thirty-five convents had
+been destroyed, St. George's Cathedral burned to the ground; and it was
+reported even, by the evening papers, that it was believed that, for the
+first time since the introduction of Christianity into England, there
+was not one Tabernacle left within twenty miles of the Abbey. "London,"
+explained the _New People_, in huge headlines, "was cleansed at last of
+dingy and fantastic nonsense."
+
+It was known at about fifteen-and-a-half o'clock that at least seventy
+volors had left for Rome, and half-an-hour later that Berlin had
+reinforced them by sixty more. At midnight, fortunately at a time when
+the police had succeeded in shepherding the crowds into some kind of
+order, the news was flashed on to cloud and placard alike that the grim
+work was done, and that Rome had ceased to exist. The early morning
+papers added a few details, pointing out, of course, the coincidence of
+the fall with the close of the year, relating how, by an astonishing
+chance, practically all the heads of the hierarchy throughout the world
+had been assembled in the Vatican which had been the first object of
+attack, and how these, in desperation, it was supposed, had refused to
+leave the City when the news came by wireless telegraphy that the
+punitive force was on its way. There was not a building left in Rome;
+the entire place, Leonine City, Trastevere, suburbs--everything was
+gone; for the volors, poised at an immense height, had parcelled out the
+City beneath them with extreme care, before beginning to drop the
+explosives; and five minutes after the first roar from beneath and the
+first burst of smoke and flying fragments, the thing was finished. The
+volors had then dispersed in every direction, pursuing the motor and
+rail-tracks along which the population had attempted to escape so soon
+as the news was known; and it was supposed that not less than thirty
+thousand belated fugitives had been annihilated by this foresight. It
+was true, remarked the _Studio_, that many treasures of incalculable
+value had been destroyed, but this was a cheap price to pay for the
+final and complete extermination of the Catholic pest. "There comes a
+point," it remarked, "when destruction is the only cure for a
+vermin-infested house," and it proceeded to observe that now that the
+Pope with the entire College of Cardinals, all the ex-Royalties of
+Europe, all the most frantic religionists from the inhabited world who
+had taken up their abode in the "Holy City" were gone at a stroke, a
+recrudescence of the superstition was scarcely to be feared elsewhere.
+Yet care must even now be taken against any relenting. Catholics (if any
+were left bold enough to attempt it) must no longer be allowed to take
+any kind of part in the life of any civilised country. So far as
+messages had come in from other countries, there was but one chorus of
+approval at what had been done.
+
+A few papers regretted the incident, or rather the spirit which had lain
+behind it. It was not seemly, they said, that Humanitarians should have
+recourse to violence; yet not one pretended that anything could be felt
+but thanksgiving for the general result. Ireland, too, must be brought
+into line; they must not dally any longer.
+
+* * * * *
+
+It was now brightening slowly towards dawn, and beyond the river through
+the faint wintry haze a crimson streak or two began to burn. But all was
+surprisingly quiet, for this crowd, tired out with an all-night watch,
+chilled by the bitter cold, and intent on what lay before them, had no
+energy left for useless effort. Only from packed square and street and
+lane went up a deep, steady murmur like the sound of the sea a mile
+away, broken now and again by the hoot and clang of a motor and the rush
+of its passage as it tore eastwards round the circle through Broad
+Sanctuary and vanished citywards. And the light broadened and the
+electric globes sickened and paled, and the haze began to clear a
+little, showing, not the fresh blue that had been hoped for from the
+cold of the night, but a high, colourless vault of cloud, washed with
+grey and faint rose-colour, as the sun came up, a ruddy copper disc,
+beyond the river.
+
+* * * * *
+
+At nine o'clock the excitement rose a degree higher. The police between
+Whitehall and the Abbey, looking from their high platforms strung along
+the route, whence they kept watch and controlled the wire palisadings,
+showed a certain activity, and a minute later a police-car whirled
+through the square between the palings, and vanished round the Abbey
+towers. The crowd murmured and shuffled and began to expect, and a cheer
+was raised when a moment later four more cars appeared, bearing the
+Government insignia, and disappeared in the same direction. These were
+the officials, they said, going to Dean's Yard, where the procession
+would assemble.
+
+At about a quarter to ten the crowd at the west end of Victoria Street
+began to raise its voice in a song, and by the time that was over, and
+the bells had burst out from the Abbey towers, a rumour had somehow made
+its entrance that Felsenburgh was to be present at the ceremony. There
+was no assignable reason for this, neither then nor afterwards; in fact,
+the _Evening Star_ declared that it was one more instance of the
+astonishing instinct of human beings _en masse_; for it was not until an
+hour later that even the Government were made aware of the facts. Yet
+the truth remained that at half-past ten one continuous roar went up,
+drowning even the brazen clamour of the bells, reaching round to
+Whitehall and the crowded pavements of Westminster Bridge, demanding
+Julian Felsenburgh. Yet there had been absolutely no news of the
+President of Europe for the last fortnight, beyond an entirely
+unsupported report that he was somewhere in the East.
+
+And all the while the motors poured from all directions towards the
+Abbey and disappeared under the arch into Dean's Yard, bearing those
+fortunate persons whose tickets actually admitted them to the church
+itself. Cheers ran and rippled along the lines as the great men were
+recognised--Lord Pemberton, Oliver Brand and his wife, Mr. Caldecott,
+Maxwell, Snowford, with the European delegates--even melancholy-faced
+Mr. Francis himself, the Government _ceremoniarius_, received a
+greeting. But by a quarter to eleven, when the pealing bells paused, the
+stream had stopped, the barriers issued out to stop the roads, the wire
+palisadings vanished, and the crowd for an instant, ceasing its roaring,
+sighed with relief at the relaxed pressure, and surged out into the
+roadways. Then once more the roaring began for Julian Felsenburgh.
+
+The sun was now high, still a copper disc, above the Victoria Tower, but
+paler than an hour ago; the whiteness of the Abbey, the heavy greys of
+Parliament House, the ten thousand tints of house-roofs, heads,
+streamers, placards began to disclose themselves.
+
+A single bell tolled five minutes to the hour, and the moments slipped
+by, until once more the bell stopped, and to the ears of those within
+hearing of the great west doors came the first blare of the huge organ,
+reinforced by trumpets. And then, as sudden and profound as the hush of
+death, there fell an enormous silence.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+As the five-minutes bell began, sounding like a continuous wind-note in
+the great vaults overhead, solemn and persistent, Mabel drew a long
+breath and leaned back in her seat from the rigid position in which for
+the last half-hour she had been staring out at the wonderful sight. She
+seemed to herself to have assimilated it at last, to be herself once
+more, to have drunk her fill of the triumph and the beauty. She was as
+one who looks upon a summer sea on the morning after a storm. And now
+the climax was at hand.
+
+From end to end and side to side the interior of the Abbey presented a
+great broken mosaic of human faces; living slopes, walls, sections and
+curves. The south transept directly opposite to her, from pavement to
+rose window, was one sheet of heads; the floor was paved with them, cut
+in two by the scarlet of the gangway leading from the chapel of St.
+Faith--on the right, the choir beyond the open space before the
+sanctuary was a mass of white figures, scarved and surpliced; the high
+organ gallery, beneath which the screen had been removed, was crowded
+with them, and, far down beneath, the dim nave stretched the same
+endless pale living pavement to the shadow beneath the west window.
+Between every group of columns behind the choir-stalls, before her, to
+right, left, and behind, were platforms contrived in the masonry; and
+the exquisite roof, fan-tracery and soaring capital, alone gave the eye
+an escape from humanity. The whole vast space was full, it seemed, of
+delicate sunlight that streamed in from the artificial light set outside
+each window, and poured the ruby and the purple and the blue from the
+old glass in long shafts of colour across the dusty air, and in broken
+patches on the faces and dresses behind. The murmur of ten thousand
+voices filled the place, supplying, it seemed, a solemn accompaniment to
+that melodious note that now pulsed above it. And finally, more
+significant than all, was the empty carpeted sanctuary at her feet, the
+enormous altar with its flight of steps, the gorgeous curtain and the
+great untenanted sedilia.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Mabel needed some such reassurance, for last night, until the coming of
+Oliver, had passed for her as a kind of appalling waking dream. From the
+first shock of what she had seen outside the church, through those hours
+of waiting, with the knowledge that this was the way in which the Spirit
+of Peace asserted its superiority, up to that last moment when, in her
+husband's arms, she had learned of the Fall of Rome, it had appeared to
+her as if her new world had suddenly corrupted about her. It was
+incredible, she told herself, that this ravening monster, dripping blood
+from claws and teeth, that had arisen roaring in the night, could be the
+Humanity that had become her God. She had thought revenge and cruelty
+and slaughter to be the brood of Christian superstition, dead and buried
+under the new-born angel of light, and now it seemed that the monsters
+yet stirred and lived. All the evening she had sat, walked, lain about
+her quiet house with the horror heavy about her, flinging open a window
+now and again in the icy air to listen with clenched hands to the cries
+and the roarings of the mob that raged in the streets beneath, the
+clanks, the yells and the hoots of the motor-trains that tore up from
+the country to swell the frenzy of the city--to watch the red glow of
+fire, the volumes of smoke that heaved up from the burning chapels and
+convents.
+
+She had questioned, doubted, resisted her doubts, flung out frantic acts
+of faith, attempted to renew the confidence that she attained in her
+meditation, told herself that traditions died slowly; she had knelt,
+crying out to the spirit of peace that lay, as she knew so well, at the
+heart of man, though overwhelmed for the moment by evil passion. A line
+or two ran in her head from one of the old Victorian poets:
+
+You doubt If any one Could think or bid it? How could it come about?...
+Who did it? Not men! Not here! Oh! not beneath the sun.... The torch
+that smouldered till the cup o'er-ran The wrath of God which is the
+wrath of Man!
+
+She had even contemplated death, as she had told her husband--the taking
+of her own life, in a great despair with the world. Seriously she had
+thought of it; it was an escape perfectly in accord with her morality.
+The useless and agonising were put out of the world by common consent;
+the Euthanasia houses witnessed to it. Then why not she?... For she
+could not bear it!... Then Oliver had come, she had fought her way back
+to sanity and confidence; and the phantom had gone again.
+
+How sensible and quiet he had been, she was beginning to tell herself
+now, as the quiet influence of this huge throng in this glorious place
+of worship possessed her once more--how reasonable in his explanation
+that man was even now only convalescent and therefore liable to relapse.
+She had told herself that again and again during the night, but it had
+been different when he had said so. His personality had once more
+prevailed; and the name of Felsenburgh had finished the work.
+
+"If He were but here!" she sighed. But she knew He was far away.
+
+* * * * *
+
+It was not until a quarter to eleven that she understood that the crowds
+outside were clamouring for Him too, and that knowledge reassured her
+yet further. They knew, then, these wild tigers, where their redemption
+lay; they understood what was their ideal, even if they had not attained
+to it. Ah! if He were but here, there would be no more question: the
+sullen waves would sink beneath His call of peace, the hazy clouds lift,
+the rumble die to silence. But He was away--away on some strange
+business. Well; He knew His work. He would surely come soon again to His
+children who needed Him so terribly.
+
+* * * * *
+
+She had the good fortune to be alone in a crowd. Her neighbour, a
+grizzled old man with his daughters beyond, was her only neighbour, and
+a stranger. At her left rose up the red-covered barricade over which she
+could see the sanctuary and the curtain; and her seat in the tribune,
+raised some eight feet above the floor, removed her from any possibility
+of conversation. She was thankful for that: she did not want to talk;
+she wanted only to control her faculties in silence, to reassert her
+faith, to look out over this enormous throng gathered to pay homage to
+the great Spirit whom they had betrayed, to renew her own courage and
+faithfulness. She wondered what the preacher would say, whether there
+would be any note of penitence. Maternity was his subject--that benign
+aspect of universal life--tenderness, love, quiet, receptive, protective
+passion, the spirit that soothes rather than inspires, that busies
+itself with peaceful tasks, that kindles the lights and fires of home,
+that gives sleep, food and welcome....
+
+The bell stopped, and in the instant before the music began she heard,
+clear above the murmur within, the roar of the crowds outside, who still
+demanded their God. Then, with a crash, the huge organ awoke, pierced by
+the cry of the trumpets and the maddening throb of drums. There was no
+delicate prelude here, no slow stirring of life rising through
+labyrinths of mystery to the climax of sight--here rather was full-orbed
+day, the high noon of knowledge and power, the dayspring from on high,
+dawning in mid-heaven. Her heart quickened to meet it, and her reviving
+confidence, still convalescent, stirred and smiled, as the tremendous
+chords blared overhead, telling of triumph full-armed. God was man,
+then, after all--a God who last night had faltered for an hour, but who
+rose again on this morning of a new year, scattering mists, dominant
+over his own passion, all-compelling and all-beloved. God was man, and
+Felsenburgh his Incarnation! Yes, she must believe that! She did
+believe that!
+
+Then she saw how already the long procession was winding up beneath the
+screen, and by imperceptible art the light grew yet more acutely
+beautiful. They were coming, then, those ministers of a pure worship;
+grave men who knew in what they believed, and who, even if they did not
+at this moment thrill with feeling (for she knew that in this respect
+her husband for one did not), yet believed the principles of this
+worship and recognised their need of expression for the majority of
+mankind--coming slowly up in fours and pairs and units, led by robed
+vergers, rippling over the steps, and emerging again into the coloured
+sunlight in all their bravery of Masonic apron, badge and jewel. Surely
+here was reassurance enough.
+
+* * * * *
+
+The sanctuary now held a figure or two. Anxious-faced Mr. Francis, in
+his robes of office, came gravely down the steps and stood awaiting the
+procession, directing with almost imperceptible motions his satellites
+who hovered about the aisles ready to point this way and that to the
+advancing stream; and the western-most seats were already beginning to
+fill, when on a sudden she recognised that something had happened.
+
+Just now the roaring of the mob outside had provided a kind of underbass
+to the music within, imperceptible except to sub-consciousness, but
+clearly discernible in its absence; and this absence was now a fact.
+
+At first she thought that the signal of beginning worship had hushed
+them; and then, with an indescribable thrill, she remembered that in all
+her knowledge only one thing had ever availed to quiet a turbulent
+crowd. Yet she was not sure; it might be an illusion. Even now the mob
+might be roaring still, and she only deaf to it; but again with an
+ecstasy that was very near to agony she perceived that the murmur of
+voices even within the building had ceased, and that some great wave of
+emotion was stirring the sheets and slopes of faces before her as a wind
+stirs wheat. A moment later, and she was on her feet, gripping the rail,
+with her heart like an over-driven engine beating pulses of blood,
+furious and insistent, through every vein; for with great rushing surge
+that sounded like a sigh, heard even above the triumphant tumult
+overhead, the whole enormous assemblage had risen to its feet.
+
+Confusion seemed to break out in the orderly procession. She saw Mr.
+Francis run forward quickly, gesticulating like a conductor, and at his
+signal the long line swayed forward, split, recoiled, and again slid
+swiftly forward, breaking as it did so into twenty streams that poured
+along the seats and filled them in a moment. Men ran and pushed, aprons
+flapped, hands beckoned, all without coherent words. There was a
+knocking of feet, the crash of an overturned chair, and then, as if a
+god had lifted his hand for quiet, the music ceased abruptly, sending a
+wild echo that swooned and died in a moment; a great sigh filled its
+place, and, in the coloured sunshine that lay along the immense length
+of the gangway that ran open now from west to east, far down in the
+distant nave, a single figure was seen advancing.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+What Mabel saw and heard and felt from eleven o'clock to half-an-hour
+after noon on that first morning of the New Year she could never
+adequately remember. For the time she lost the continuous consciousness
+of self, the power of reflection, for she was still weak from her
+struggle; there was no longer in her the process by which events are
+stored, labelled and recorded; she was no more than a being who observed
+as it were in one long act, across which considerations played at
+uncertain intervals. Eyes and ear seemed her sole functions,
+communicating direct with a burning heart.
+
+* * * * *
+
+She did not even know at what point her senses told her that this was
+Felsenburgh. She seemed to have known it even before he entered, and she
+watched Him as in complete silence He came deliberately up the red
+carpet, superbly alone, rising a step or two at the entrance of the
+choir, passing on and up before her. He was in his English judicial
+dress of scarlet and black, but she scarcely noticed it. For her, too,
+no one else existed but, He; this vast assemblage was gone, poised and
+transfigured in one vibrating atmosphere of an immense human emotion.
+There was no one, anywhere, but Julian Felsenburgh. Peace and light
+burned like a glory about Him.
+
+For an instant after passing he disappeared beyond the speaker's
+tribune, and the instant after reappeared once more, coming up the
+steps. He reached his place--she could see His profile beneath her and
+slightly to the left, pure and keen as the blade of a knife, beneath His
+white hair. He lifted one white-furred sleeve, made a single motion, and
+with a surge and a rumble, the ten thousand were seated. He motioned
+again and with a roar they were on their feet.
+
+Again there was a silence. He stood now, perfectly still, His hands laid
+together on the rail, and His face looking steadily before Him; it
+seemed as if He who had drawn all eyes and stilled all sounds were
+waiting until His domination were complete, and there was but one will,
+one desire, and that beneath His hand. Then He began to speak....
+
+* * * * *
+
+In this again, as Mabel perceived afterwards, there was no precise or
+verbal record within her of what he said; there was no conscious process
+by which she received, tested, or approved what she heard. The nearest
+image under which she could afterwards describe her emotions to herself,
+was that when He spoke it was she who was speaking. Her own thoughts,
+her predispositions, her griefs, her disappointment, her passion, her
+hopes--all these interior acts of the soul known scarcely even to
+herself, down even, it seemed, to the minutest whorls and eddies of
+thought, were, by this man, lifted up, cleansed, kindled, satisfied and
+proclaimed. For the first time in her life she became perfectly aware of
+what human nature meant; for it was her own heart that passed out upon
+the air, borne on that immense voice. Again, as once before for a few
+moments in Paul's House, it seemed that creation, groaning so long, had
+spoken articulate words at last--had come to growth and coherent thought
+and perfect speech. Yet then He had spoken to men; now it was Man
+Himself speaking. It was not one man who spoke there, it was Man--Man
+conscious of his origin, his destiny, and his pilgrimage between, Man
+sane again after a night of madness--knowing his strength, declaring his
+law, lamenting in a voice as eloquent as stringed instruments his own
+failure to correspond. It was a soliloquy rather than an oration. Rome
+had fallen, English and Italian streets had run with blood, smoke and
+flame had gone up to heaven, because man had for an instant sunk back to
+the tiger. Yet it was done, cried the great voice, and there was no
+repentance; it was done, and ages hence man must still do penance and
+flush scarlet with shame to remember that once he turned his back on
+the risen light.
+
+There was no appeal to the lurid, no picture of the tumbling palaces,
+the running figures, the coughing explosions, the shaking of the earth
+and the dying of the doomed. It was rather with those hot hearts
+shouting in the English and German streets, or aloft in the winter air
+of Italy, the ugly passions that warred there, as the volors rocked at
+their stations, generating and fulfilling revenge, paying back plot with
+plot, and violence with violence. For there, cried the voice, was man as
+he had been, fallen in an instant to the cruel old ages before he had
+learned what he was and why.
+
+There was no repentance, said the voice again, but there was something
+better; and as the hard, stinging tones melted, the girl's dry eyes of
+shame filled in an instant with tears. There was something better--the
+knowledge of what crimes man was yet capable of, and the will to use
+that knowledge. Rome was gone, and it was a lamentable shame; Rome was
+gone, and the air was the sweeter for it; and then in an instant, like
+the soar of a bird, He was up and away--away from the horrid gulf where
+He had looked just now, from the fragments of charred bodies, and
+tumbled houses and all the signs of man's disgrace, to the pure air and
+sunlight to which man must once more set his face. Yet He bore with Him
+in that wonderful flight the dew of tears and the aroma of earth. He had
+not spared words with which to lash and whip the naked human heart, and
+He did not spare words to lift up the bleeding, shrinking thing, and
+comfort it with the divine vision of love....
+
+Historically speaking, it was about forty minutes before He turned to
+the shrouded image behind the altar.
+
+"Oh! Maternity!" he cried. "Mother of us all---"
+
+And then, to those who heard Him, the supreme miracle took place.... For
+it seemed now in an instant that it was no longer man who spoke, but One
+who stood upon the stage of the superhuman. The curtain ripped back, as
+one who stood by it tore, panting, at the strings; and there, it seemed,
+face to face stood the Mother above the altar, huge, white and
+protective, and the Child, one passionate incarnation of love, crying to
+her from the tribune.
+
+"Oh! Mother of us all, and Mother of Me!"
+
+So He praised her to her face, that sublime principle of life, declared
+her glories and her strength, her Immaculate Motherhood, her seven
+swords of anguish driven through her heart by the passion and the
+follies of her Son--He promised her great things, the recognition of her
+countless children, the love and service of the unborn, the welcome of
+those yet quickening within the womb. He named her the Wisdom of the
+Most High, that sweetly orders all things, the Gate of Heaven, House of
+Ivory, Comforter of the afflicted, Queen of the World; and, to the
+delirious eyes of those who looked on her it seemed that the grave face
+smiled to hear Him....
+
+A great panting as of some monstrous life began to fill the air as the
+mob swayed behind Him, and the torrential voice poured on. Waves of
+emotion swept up and down; there were cries and sobs, the yelping of a
+man beside himself at last, from somewhere among the crowded seats, the
+crash of a bench, and another and another, and the gangways were full,
+for He no longer held them passive to listen; He was rousing them to
+some supreme act. The tide crawled nearer, and the faces stared no
+longer at the Son but the Mother; the girl in the gallery tore at the
+heavy railing, and sank down sobbing upon her knees. And above all the
+voice pealed on--and the thin hands blanched to whiteness strained from
+the wide and sumptuous sleeves as if to reach across the sanctuary
+itself.
+
+It was a new tale He was telling now, and all to her glory. He was from
+the East, now they knew, come from some triumph. He had been hailed as
+King, adored as Divine, as was meet and right--He, the humble superhuman
+son of a Human Mother--who bore not a sword but peace, not a cross but a
+crown. So it seemed He was saying; yet no man there knew whether He said
+it or not--whether the voice proclaimed it, or their hearts asserted it.
+He was on the steps of the sanctuary now, still with outstretched hands
+and pouring words, and the mob rolled after him to the rumble of ten
+thousand feet and the sighing of ten thousand hearts.... He was at the
+altar; He was upon it. Again in one last cry, as the crowd broke against
+the steps beneath, He hailed her Queen and Mother.
+
+The end came in a moment, swift and inevitable. And for an instant,
+before the girl in the gallery sank down, blind with tears, she saw the
+tiny figure poised there at the knees of the huge image, beneath the
+expectant hands, silent and transfigured in the blaze of light. The
+Mother, it seemed, had found her Son at last.
+
+For an instant she saw it, the soaring columns, the gilding and the
+colours, the swaying heads, the tossing hands. It was a sea that heaved
+before her, lights went up and down, the rose window whirled overhead,
+presences filled the air, heaven flashed away, and the earth shook it
+ecstasy. Then in the heavenly light, to the crash of drums, above the
+screaming of the women and the battering of feet, in one thunder-peal of
+worship ten thousand voices hailed Him Lord and God.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III-THE VICTORY
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+I
+
+The little room where the new Pope sat reading was a model of
+simplicity. Its walls were whitewashed, its roof unpolished rafters, and
+its floor beaten mud. A square table stood in the centre, with a chair
+beside it; a cold brazier laid for lighting, stood in the wide hearth; a
+bookshelf against the wall held a dozen volumes. There were three doors,
+one leading to the private oratory, one to the ante-room, and the third
+to the little paved court. The south windows were shuttered, but through
+the ill-fitting hinges streamed knife-blades of fiery light from the hot
+Eastern day outside.
+
+It was the time of the mid-day siesta, and except for the brisk scything
+of the _cicade_ from the hill-slope behind the house, all was in deep
+silence.
+
+* * * * *
+
+The Pope, who had dined an hour before, had hardly shifted His attitude
+in all that time, so intent was He upon His reading. For the while, all
+was put away, His own memory of those last three months, the bitter
+anxiety, the intolerable load of responsibility. The book He held was a
+cheap reprint of the famous biography of Julian Felsenburgh, issued a
+month before, and He was now drawing to an end.
+
+It was a terse, well-written book, composed by an unknown hand, and some
+even suspected it to be the disguised work of Felsenburgh himself. More,
+however, considered that it was written at least with Felsenburgh's
+consent by one of that small body of intimates whom he had admitted to
+his society--that body which under him now conducted the affairs of West
+and East. From certain indications in the book it had been argued that
+its actual writer was a Westerner.
+
+The main body of the work dealt with his life, or rather with those two
+or three years known to the world, from his rapid rise in American
+politics and his mediation in the East down to the event of five months
+ago, when in swift succession he had been hailed Messiah in Damascus,
+had been formally adored in London, and finally elected by an
+extraordinary majority to the Tribuniciate of the two Americas.
+
+The Pope had read rapidly through these objective facts, for He knew
+them well enough already, and was now studying with close attention the
+summary of his character, or rather, as the author rather sententiously
+explained, the summary of his self-manifestation to the world. He read
+the description of his two main characteristics, his grasp upon words
+and facts; "words, the daughters of earth, were wedded in this man to
+facts, the sons of heaven, and Superman was their offspring." His minor
+characteristics, too, were noticed, his appetite for literature, his
+astonishing memory, his linguistic powers. He possessed, it appeared,
+both the telescopic and the microscopic eye--he discerned world-wide
+tendencies and movements on the one hand; he had a passionate capacity
+for detail on the other. Various anecdotes illustrated these remarks,
+and a number of terse aphorisms of his were recorded. "No man forgives,"
+he said; "he only understands." "It needs supreme faith to renounce a
+transcendent God." "A man who believes in himself is almost capable of
+believing in his neighbour." Here was a sentence that to the Pope's mind
+was significant of that sublime egotism that is alone capable of
+confronting the Christian spirit: and again, "To forgive a wrong is to
+condone a crime," and "The strong man is accessible to no one, but all
+are accessible to him."
+
+There was a certain pompousness in this array of remarks, but it lay, as
+the Pope saw very well, not in the speaker but in the scribe. To him who
+had seen the speaker it was plain how they had been uttered--with no
+pontifical solemnity, but whirled out in a fiery stream of eloquence, or
+spoken with that strangely moving simplicity that had constituted his
+first assault on London. It was possible to hate Felsenburgh, and to
+fear him; but never to be amused at him.
+
+But plainly the supreme pleasure of the writer was to trace the analogy
+between his hero and nature. In both there was the same apparent
+contradictoriness--the combination of utter tenderness and utter
+ruthlessness. "The power that heals wounds also inflicts them: that
+clothes the dungheap with sweet growths and grasses, breaks, too, into
+fire and earthquake; that causes the partridge to die for her young,
+also makes the shrike with his living larder." So, too, with
+Felsenburgh; He who had wept over the Fall of Rome, a month later had
+spoken of extermination as an instrument that even now might be
+judicially used in the service of humanity. Only it must be used with
+deliberation, not with passion.
+
+The utterance had aroused extraordinary interest, since it seemed so
+paradoxical from one who preached peace and toleration; and argument
+had broken out all over the world. But beyond enforcing the dispersal of
+the Irish Catholics, and the execution of a few individuals, so far that
+utterance had not been acted upon. Yet the world seemed as a whole to
+have accepted it, and even now to be waiting for its fulfilment.
+
+As the biographer pointed out, the world enclosed in physical nature
+should welcome one who followed its precepts, one who was indeed the
+first to introduce deliberately and confessedly into human affairs such
+laws as those of the Survival of the Fittest and the immorality of
+forgiveness. If there was mystery in the one, there was mystery in the
+other, and both must be accepted if man was to develop.
+
+And the secret of this, it seemed, lay in His personality. To see Him
+was to believe in Him, or rather to accept Him as inevitably true. "We
+do not explain nature or escape from it by sentimental regrets: the bare
+cries like a child, the wounded stag weeps great tears, the robin kills
+his parents; life exists only on condition of death; and these things
+happen however we may weave theories that explain nothing. Life must be
+accepted on those terms; we cannot be wrong if we follow nature; rather
+to accept them is to find peace--our great mother only reveals her
+secrets to those who take her as she is." So, too, with Felsenburgh. "It
+is not for us to discriminate: His personality is of a kind that does
+not admit it. He is complete and sufficing for those who trust Him and
+are willing to suffer; an hostile and hateful enigma to those who are
+not. We must prepare ourselves for the logical outcome of this doctrine.
+Sentimentality must not be permitted to dominate reason."
+
+Finally, then, the writer showed how to this Man belonged properly all
+those titles hitherto lavished upon imagined Supreme Beings. It was in
+preparation for Him that these types came into the realms of thought and
+influenced men's lives.
+
+He was the _Creator_, for it was reserved for Him to bring into being
+the perfect life of union to which all the world had hitherto groaned in
+vain; it was in His own image and likeness that He had made man.
+
+Yet He was the _Redeemer_ too, for that likeness had in one sense always
+underlain the tumult of mistake and conflict. He had brought man out of
+darkness and the shadow of death, guiding their feet into the way of
+peace. He was the _Saviour_ for the same reason--the _Son of Man_, for
+He alone was perfectly human; He was the _Absolute_, for He was the
+content of Ideals; the _Eternal_, for He had lain always in nature's
+potentiality and secured by His being the continuity of that order; the
+_Infinite_, for all finite things fell short of Him who was more than
+their sum.
+
+He was _Alpha_, then, and _Omega_, the beginning and the end, the first
+and the last. He was _Dominus et Deus noster_ (as Domitian had been, the
+Pope reflected). He was as simple and as complex as life itself--simple
+in its essence, complex in its activities.
+
+And last of all, the supreme proof of His mission lay in the immortal
+nature of His message. There was no more to be added to what He had
+brought to light--for in Him all diverging lines at last found their
+origin and their end. As to whether or no He would prove to be
+personally immortal was an wholly irrelevant thought; it would be indeed
+fitting if through His means the vital principle should disclose its
+last secret; but no more than fitting. Already His spirit was in the
+world; the individual was no more separate from his fellows; death no
+more than a wrinkle that came and went across the inviolable sea. For
+man had learned at last that the race was all and self was nothing; the
+cell had discovered the unity of the body; even, the greatest thinkers
+declared, the consciousness of the individual had yielded the title of
+Personality to the corporate mass of man--and the restlessness of the
+unit had sunk into the peace of a common Humanity, for nothing but this
+could explain the cessation of party strife and national
+competition--and this, above all, had been the work of Felsenburgh.
+
+"_Behold I am with you always_," quoted the writer in a passionate
+peroration, "_even now in the consummation of the world; and, the
+Comforter is come unto you. I am the Door--the Way, the Truth and the
+Life--the Bread of Life and the Water of Life. My name is Wonderful, the
+Prince of Peace, the Father Everlasting. It is I who am the Desire of
+all nations, the fairest among the children of men--and of my Kingdom
+there shall be no end_."
+
+The Pope laid down the book, and leaned back, closing his eyes.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+And as for Himself, what had He to say to all this? A Transcendent God
+Who hid Himself, a Divine Saviour Who delayed to come, a Comforter heard
+no longer in wind nor seen in fire!
+
+There, in the next room, was a little wooden altar, and above it an iron
+box, and within that box a silver cup, and within that cup--Something.
+Outside the house, a hundred yards away, lay the domes and plaster roofs
+of a little village called Nazareth; Carmel was on the right, a mile or
+two away, Thabor on the left, the plain of Esdraelon in front; and
+behind, Cana and Galilee, and the quiet lake, and Hermon. And far away
+to the south lay Jerusalem....
+
+It was to this tiny strip of holy land that the Pope had come--the land
+where a Faith had sprouted two thousand years ago, and where, unless God
+spoke in fire from heaven, it would presently be cut down as a cumberer
+of the ground. It was here on this material earth that One had walked
+Whom all men had thought to have been He Who would redeem Israel--in
+this village that He had fetched water and made boxes and chairs, on
+that long lake that His Feet had walked, on that high hill that He had
+flamed in glory, on that smooth, low mountain to the north that He had
+declared that the meek were blessed and should inherit the earth, that
+peacemakers were the children of God, that they who hungered and
+thirsted should be satisfied.
+
+And now it was come to this. Christianity had smouldered away from
+Europe like a sunset on darkening peaks; Eternal Rome was a heap of
+ruins; in East and West alike a man had been set upon the throne of God,
+had been acclaimed as divine. The world had leaped forward; social
+science was supreme; men had learned consistency; they had learned, too,
+the social lessons of Christianity apart from a Divine Teacher, or,
+rather, they said, in spite of Him. There were left, perhaps, three
+millions, perhaps five, at the utmost ten millions--it was impossible to
+know--throughout the entire inhabited globe who still worshipped Jesus
+Christ as God. And the Vicar of Christ sat in a whitewashed room in
+Nazareth, dressed as simply as His master, waiting for the end.
+
+* * * * *
+
+He had done what He could. There had been a week five months ago when
+it had been doubtful whether anything at all could be done. There were
+left three Cardinals alive, Himself, Steinmann, and the Patriarch of
+Jerusalem; the rest lay mangled somewhere in the ruins of Rome. There
+was no precedent to follow; so the two Europeans had made their way out
+to the East, and to the one town in it where quiet still reigned. With
+the disappearance of Greek Christianity there had also vanished the last
+remnants of internecine war in Christendom; and by a kind of tacit
+consent of the world, Christians were allowed a moderate liberty in
+Palestine. Russia, which now held the country as a dependency, had
+sufficient sentiment left to leave it alone; it was true that the holy
+places had been desecrated, and remained now only as spots of
+antiquarian interest; the altars were gone but the sites were yet
+marked, and, although mass could no longer be said there, it was
+understood that private oratories were not forbidden.
+
+It was in this state that the two European Cardinals had found the Holy
+City; it was not thought wise to wear insignia of any description in
+public; and it was practically certain even now that the civilised world
+was unaware of their existence; for within three days of their arrival
+the old Patriarch had died, yet not before Percy Franklin, surely under
+the strangest circumstances since those of the first century, had been
+elected to the Supreme Pontificate. It had all been done in a few
+minutes by the dying man's bedside. The two old men had insisted. The
+German had even recurred once more to the strange resemblance between
+Percy and Julian Felsenburgh, and had murmured his old half-heard
+remarks about the antithesis, and the Finger of God; and Percy,
+marvelling at his superstition, had accepted, and the election was
+recorded. He had taken the name of Silvester, the last saint in the
+year, and was the third of that title. He had then retired to Nazareth
+with his chaplain; Steinmann had gone back to Germany, and been hanged
+in a riot within a fortnight of his arrival.
+
+The next matter was the creation of new cardinals, and to twenty
+persons, with infinite precautions, briefs had been conveyed. Of these,
+nine had declined; three more had been approached, of whom only one had
+accepted. There were therefore at this moment twelve persons in the
+world who constituted the Sacred College--two Englishmen, of whom
+Corkran was one; two Americans, a Frenchman, a German, an Italian, a
+Spaniard, a Pole, a Chinaman, a Greek, and a Russian. To these were
+entrusted vast districts over which their control was supreme, subject
+only to the Holy Father Himself.
+
+As regarded the Pope's own life very little need be said. It resembled,
+He thought, in its outward circumstances that of such a man as Leo the
+Great, without His worldly importance or pomp. Theoretically, the
+Christian world was under His dominion; practically, Christian affairs
+were administered by local authorities. It was impossible for a hundred
+reasons for Him to do what He wished with regard to the exchange of
+communications. An elaborate cypher had been designed, and a private
+telegraphic station organised on His roof communicating with another in
+Damascus where Cardinal Corkran had fixed his residence; and from that
+centre messages occasionally were despatched to ecclesiastical
+authorities elsewhere; but, for the most part, there was little to be
+done. The Pope, however, had the satisfaction of knowing that, with
+incredible difficulty, a little progress had been made towards the
+reorganisation of the hierarchy in all countries. Bishops were being
+consecrated freely; there were not less than two thousand of them all
+told, and of priests an unknown number. The Order of Christ Crucified
+was doing excellent work, and the tales of not less than four hundred
+martyrdoms had reached Nazareth during the last two months, accomplished
+mostly at the hands of the mobs.
+
+In other respects, also, as well as in the primary object of the Order's
+existence (namely, the affording of an opportunity to all who loved God
+to dedicate themselves to Him more perfectly), the new Religious were
+doing good work. The more perilous tasks--the work of communication
+between prelates, missions to persons of suspected integrity--all the
+business, in fact, which was carried on now at the vital risk of the
+agent were entrusted solely to members of the Order. Stringent
+instructions had been issued from Nazareth that no bishop was to expose
+himself unnecessarily; each was to regard himself as the heart of his
+diocese to be protected at all costs save that of Christian honour, and
+in consequence each had surrounded himself with a group of the new
+Religious--men and women--who with extraordinary and generous obedience
+undertook such dangerous tasks as they were capable of performing. It
+was plain enough by now that had it not been for the Order, the Church
+would have been little better than paralysed under these new conditions.
+
+Extraordinary facilities were being issued in all directions. Every
+priest who belonged to the Order received universal jurisdiction subject
+to the bishop, if any, of the diocese in which he might be; mass might
+be said on any day of the year of the Five Wounds, or the Resurrection,
+or Our Lady; and all had the privilege of the portable altar, now
+permitted to be wood. Further ritual requirements were relaxed; mass
+might be said with any decent vessels of any material capable of
+destruction, such as glass or china; bread of any description might be
+used; and no vestments were obligatory except the thin thread that now
+represented the stole; lights were non-essential; none need wear the
+clerical habit; and rosary, even without beads, was always permissible
+instead of the Office.
+
+In this manner priests were rendered capable of giving the sacraments
+and offering the holy sacrifice at the least possible risk to
+themselves; and these relaxations had already proved of enormous benefit
+in the European prisons, where by this time many thousands of Catholics
+were undergoing the penalty of refusing public worship.
+
+* * * * *
+
+The Pope's private life was as simple as His room. He had one Syrian
+priest for His chaplain, and two Syrian servants. He said His mass each
+morning, Himself wearing vestments and His white habit beneath, and
+heard a mass after. He then took His coffee, after changing into the
+tunic and burnous of the country, and spent the morning over business.
+He dined at noon, slept, and rode out, for the country by reason of its
+indeterminate position was still in the simplicity of a hundred years
+ago. He returned at dusk, supped, and worked again till late into the
+night.
+
+That was all. His chaplain sent what messages were necessary to
+Damascus; His servants, themselves ignorant of His dignity, dealt with
+the secular world so far as was required, and the utmost that seemed to
+be known to His few neighbours was that there lived in the late Sheikh's
+little house on the hill an eccentric European with a telegraph office.
+His servants, themselves devout Catholics, knew Him for a bishop, but no
+more than that. They were told only that there was yet a Pope alive, and
+with that and the sacraments were content.
+
+To sum up, therefore--the Catholic world knew that their Pope lived
+under the name of Silvester; and thirteen persons of the entire human
+race knew that Franklin had been His name, and that the throne of Peter
+rested for the time in Nazareth.
+
+It was, as a Frenchman had said, just a hundred years ago. Catholicism
+survived; but no more.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+And as for His inner life, what can be said of that? He lay now back in
+his wooden chair, thinking with closed eyes.
+
+He could not have described it consistently even to Himself, for indeed
+He scarcely knew it: He acted rather than indulged in reflex thought.
+But the centre of His position was simple faith. The Catholic Religion,
+He knew well enough, gave the only adequate explanation of the universe;
+it did not unlock all mysteries, but it unlocked more than any other key
+known to man; He knew, too, perfectly well, that it was the only system
+of thought that satisfied man as a whole, and accounted for him in his
+essential nature. Further, He saw well enough that the failure of
+Christianity to unite all men one to another rested not upon its
+feebleness but its strength; its lines met in eternity, not in time.
+Besides, He happened to believe it.
+
+But to this foreground there were other moods whose shifting was out of
+his control. In his _exalt_ moods, which came upon Him like a breeze
+from Paradise, the background was bright with hope and drama--He saw
+Himself and His companions as Peter and the Apostles must have regarded
+themselves, as they proclaimed through the world, in temples, slums,
+market-places and private houses, the faith that was to shake and
+transform the world. They had handled the Lord of Life, seen the empty
+sepulchre, grasped the pierced hands of Him Who was their brother and
+their God. It was radiantly true, though not a man believed it; the huge
+superincumbent weight of incredulity could not disturb a fact that was
+as the sun in heaven. Moreover, the very desperateness of the cause was
+their inspiration. There was no temptation to lean upon the arm of
+flesh, for there was none that fought for them but God. Their nakedness
+was their armour, their slow tongues their persuasiveness, their
+weakness demanded God's strength, and found it. Yet there was this
+difference, and it was a significant one. For Peter the spiritual world
+had an interpretation and a guarantee in the outward events he had
+witnessed. He had handled the Risen Christ, the external corroborated
+the internal. But for Silvester it was not so. For Him it was necessary
+so to grasp spiritual truths in the supernatural sphere that the
+external events of the Incarnation were proved by rather than proved the
+certitude of His spiritual apprehension. Certainly, historically
+speaking, Christianity was true--proved by its records--yet to see that
+needed illumination. He apprehended the power of the Resurrection,
+therefore Christ was risen.
+
+Therefore in heavier moods it was different with him. There were
+periods, lasting sometimes for days together, clouding Him when He
+awoke, stifling Him as He tried to sleep, dulling the very savour of the
+Sacrament and the thrill of the Precious Blood; times in which the
+darkness was so intolerable that even the solid objects of faith
+attenuated themselves to shadow, when half His nature was blind not only
+to Christ, but to God Himself, and the reality of His own
+existence--when His own awful dignity seemed as the insignia of a fool.
+And was it conceivable, His earthly mind demanded, that He and His
+college of twelve and His few thousands should be right, and the entire
+consensus of the civilised world wrong? It was not that the world had
+not heard the message of the Gospel; it had heard little else for two
+thousand years, and now pronounced it false--false in its external
+credentials, and false therefore in its spiritual claims. It was a lost
+cause for which He suffered; He was not the last of an august line, He
+was the smoking wick of a candle of folly; He was the _reductio ad
+absurdam_ of a ludicrous syllogism based on impossible premises. He was
+not worth killing, He and His company of the insane--they were no more
+than the crowned dunces of the world's school. Sanity sat on the solid
+benches of materialism. And this heaviness waxed so dark sometimes that
+He almost persuaded Himself that His faith was gone; the clamours of
+mind so loud that the whisper of the heart was unheard, the desires for
+earthly peace so fierce that supernatural ambitions were silenced--so
+dense was the gloom, that, hoping against hope, believing against
+knowledge, and loving against truth, He cried as One other had cried on
+another day like this--_Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!_ ... But that, at
+least, He never failed to cry.
+
+One thing alone gave Him power to go on, so far at least as His
+consciousness was concerned, and that was His meditation. He had
+travelled far in the mystical life since His agonies of effort. Now He
+used no deliberate descents into the spiritual world: He threw, as it
+were, His hands over His head, and dropped into spacelessness.
+Consciousness would draw Him up, as a cork, to the surface, but He would
+do no more than repeat His action, until by that cessation of activity,
+which is the supreme energy, He floated in the twilight realm of
+transcendence; and there God would deal with Him--now by an articulate
+sentence, now by a sword of pain, now by an air like the vivifying
+breath of the sea. Sometimes after Communion He would treat Him so,
+sometimes as He fell asleep, sometimes in the whirl of work. Yet His
+consciousness did not seem to retain for long such experiences; five
+minutes later, it might be, He would be wrestling once more with the all
+but sensible phantoms of the mind and the heart.
+
+There He lay, then, in the chair, revolving the intolerable blasphemies
+that He had read. His white hair was thin upon His browned temples, His
+hands were as the hands of a spirit, and His young face lined and
+patched with sorrow. His bare feet protruded from beneath His stained
+tunic, and His old brown burnous lay on the floor beside Him....
+
+It was an hour before He moved, and the sun had already lost half its
+fierceness, when the steps of the horses sounded in the paved court
+outside. Then He sat up, slipped His feet into their shoes, and lifted
+the burnous from the floor, as the door opened and the lean sun-burned
+priest came through.
+
+"The horses, Holiness," said the man.
+
+* * * * *
+
+The Pope spoke not one word that afternoon, until the two came towards
+sunset up the bridle-path that leads between Thabor and Nazareth. They
+had taken their usual round through Cana, mounting a hillock from which
+the long mirror of Gennesareth could be seen, and passing on, always
+bearing to the right, under the shadow of Thabor until once more
+Esdraelon spread itself beneath like a grey-green carpet, a vast circle,
+twenty miles across, sprinkled sparsely with groups of huts, white walls
+and roofs, with Nain visible on the other side, Carmel heaving its long
+form far off on the right, and Nazareth nestling a mile or two away on
+the plateau on which they had halted.
+
+It was a sight of extraordinary peace, and seemed an extract from some
+old picture-book designed centuries ago. Here was no crowd of roofs, no
+pressure of hot humanity, no terrible evidences of civilisation and
+manufactory and strenuous, fruitless effort. A few tired Jews had come
+back to this quiet little land, as old people may return to their native
+place, with no hope of renewing their youth, or refinding their ideals,
+but with a kind of sentimentality that prevails so often over more
+logical motives, and a few more barrack-like houses had been added here
+and there to the obscure villages in sight. But it was very much as it
+had been a hundred years ago.
+
+The plain was half shadowed by Carmel, and half in dusty golden light.
+Overhead the clear Eastern sky was flushed with rose, as it had flushed
+for Abraham, Jacob, and the Son of David. There was no little cloud
+here, as a man's hand, over the sea, charged with both promise and
+terror; no sound of chariot-wheels from earth or heaven, no vision of
+heavenly horses such as a young man had seen thirty centuries ago in
+this very sky. Here was the old earth and the old heaven, unchanged and
+unchangeable; the patient, returning spring had starred the thin soil
+with flowers of Bethlehem, and those glorious lilies to which Solomon's
+scarlet garments might not be compared. There was no whisper from the
+Throne as when Gabriel had once stooped through this very air to hail
+Her who was blessed among women, no breath of promise or hope beyond
+that which God sends through every movement of His created robe of life.
+
+As the two halted, and the horses looked out with steady, inquisitive
+eyes at the immensity of light and air beneath them, a soft hooting cry
+broke out, and a shepherd passed below along the hillside a hundred
+yards away, trailing his long shadow behind him, and to the mellow
+tinkle of bells his flock came after, a troop of obedient sheep and
+wilful goats, cropping and following and cropping again as they went on
+to the fold, called by name in that sad minor voice of him who knew
+each, and led instead of driving. The soft clanking grew fainter, the
+shadow of the shepherd shot once to their very feet, as he topped the
+rise, and vanished again as he stepped down once more; and the call grew
+fainter yet, and ceased.
+
+* * * * *
+
+The Pope lifted His hand to His eyes for an instant, then smoothed it
+down His face.
+
+He nodded across to a dim patch of white walls glimmering through the
+violet haze of the falling twilight.
+
+"That place, father," He said, "what is its name?"
+
+The Syrian priest looked across, back once more at the Pope, and across
+again.
+
+"That among the palms, Holiness?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"That is Megiddo," he said. "Some call it Armageddon."
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+I
+
+At twenty-three o'clock that night the Syrian priest went out to watch
+for the coming of the messenger from Tiberias. Nearly two hours
+previously he had heard the cry of the Russian volor that plied from
+Damascus to Tiberias, and Tiberias to Jerusalem, and even as it was the
+messenger was a little late.
+
+These were very primitive arrangements, but Palestine was out of the
+world--a slip of useless country--and it was necessary for a man to ride
+from Tiberias to Nazareth each night with papers from Cardinal Corkran
+to the Pope, and to return with correspondence. It was a dangerous task,
+and the members of the New Order who surrounded the Cardinal undertook
+it by turns. In this manner all matters for which the Pope's personal
+attention was required, and which were too long and not too urgent,
+could be dealt with at leisure by him, and an answer returned within the
+twenty-four hours.
+
+It was a brilliant moonlit night. The great golden shield was riding
+high above Thabor, shedding its strange metallic light down the long
+slopes and over the moor-like country that rose up from before the
+house-door--casting too heavy black shadows that seemed far more
+concrete and solid than the brilliant pale surfaces of the rock slabs or
+even than the diamond flashes from the quartz and crystal that here and
+there sparkled up the stony pathway. Compared with this clear splendour,
+the yellow light from the shuttered house seemed a hot and tawdry thing;
+and the priest, leaning against the door-post, his eyes alone alight in
+his dark face, sank down at last with a kind of Eastern sensuousness to
+bathe himself in the glory, and to spread his lean, brown hands out to
+it.
+
+This was a very simple man, in faith as well as in life. For him there
+were neither the ecstasies nor the desolations of his master. It was an
+immense and solemn joy to him to live here at the spot of God's
+Incarnation and in attendance upon His Vicar. As regarded the movements
+of the world, he observed them as a man in a ship watches the heaving of
+the waves far beneath. Of course the world was restless, he half
+perceived, for, as the Latin Doctor had said, all hearts were restless
+until they found their rest in God. _Quare fremuerunt gentes?...
+Adversus Dominum, et adversus Christum ejus!_ As to the end--he was not
+greatly concerned. It might well be that the ship would be overwhelmed,
+but the moment of the catastrophe would be the end of all things
+earthly. The gates of hell shall not prevail: when Rome falls, the world
+falls; and when the world falls, Christ is manifest in power. For
+himself, he imagined that the end was not far away. When he had named
+Megiddo this afternoon it had been in his mind; to him it seemed natural
+that at the consummation of all things Christ's Vicar should dwell at
+Nazareth where His King had come on earth--and that the Armageddon of
+the Divine John should be within sight of the scene where Christ had
+first taken His earthly sceptre and should take it again. After all, it
+would not be the first battle that Megiddo had seen. Israel and Amalek
+had met here; Israel and Assyria; Sesostris had ridden here and
+Sennacherib. Christian and Turk had contended here, like Michael and
+Satan, over the place where God's Body had lain. As to the exact method
+of that end, he had no clear views; it would be a battle of some kind,
+and what field could be found more evidently designed for that than this
+huge flat circular plain of Esdraelon, twenty miles across, sufficient
+to hold all the armies of the earth in its embrace? To his view once
+more, ignorant as he was of present statistics, the world was divided
+into two large sections, Christians and heathens, and he supposed them
+very much of a size. Something would happen, troops would land at
+Khaifa, they would stream southwards from Tiberias, Damascus and remote
+Asia, northwards from Jerusalem, Egypt and Africa; eastwards from
+Europe; westwards from Asia again and the far-off Americas. And, surely,
+the time could not be far away, for here was Christ's Vicar; and, as He
+Himself had said in His gospel of the Advent, _Ubicumque fuerit corpus,
+illie congregabuntur et aquilae._ Of more subtle interpretations of
+prophecy he had no knowledge. For him words were things, not merely
+labels upon ideas. What Christ and St. Paul and St. John had said--these
+things were so. He had escaped, owing chiefly to his isolation from the
+world, that vast expansion of Ritschlian ideas that during the last
+century had been responsible for the desertion by so many of any
+intelligible creed. For others this had been the supreme struggle--the
+difficulty of decision between the facts that words were not things, and
+yet that the things they represented were in themselves objective. But
+to this man, sitting now in the moonlight, listening to the far-off tap
+of hoofs over the hill as the messenger came up from Cana, faith was as
+simple as an exact science. Here Gabriel had descended on wide feathered
+wings from the Throne of God set beyond the stars, the Holy Ghost had
+breathed in a beam of ineffable light, the Word had become Flesh as Mary
+folded her arms and bowed her head to the decree of the Eternal. And
+here once more, he thought, though it was no more than a guess--yet he
+thought that already the running of chariot-wheels was audible--the
+tumult of the hosts of God gathering about the camp of the saints--he
+thought that already beyond the bars of the dark Gabriel set to his lips
+the trumpet of doom and heaven was astir. He might be wrong at this
+time, as others had been wrong at other times, but neither he nor they
+could be wrong for ever; there must some day be an end to the patience
+of God, even though that patience sprang from the eternity of His
+nature. He stood up, as down the pale moonlit path a hundred yards away
+came a pale figure of one who rode, with a leather bag strapped to his
+girdle.
+
+
+
+II
+
+It would be about three o'clock in the morning that the priest awoke in
+his little mud-walled room next to that of the Holy Father's, and heard
+a footstep coming up the stairs. Last evening he had left his master as
+usual beginning to open the pile of letters arrived from Cardinal
+Corkran, and himself had gone straight to his bed and slept. He lay now
+a moment or two, still drowsy, listening to the pad of feet, and an
+instant later sat up abruptly, for a deliberate tap had sounded on the
+door. Again it came; he sprang out of bed in his long night-tunic, drew
+it up hastily in his girdle, went to the door and opened it.
+
+The Pope was standing there, with a little lamp in one hand, for the
+dawn had scarcely yet begun, and a paper in the other.
+
+"I beg your pardon, Father; but there is a message I must have sent at
+once to his Eminence."
+
+Together they went out through the Pope's room, the priest, still
+half-blind with sleep, passed up the stairs, and emerged into the clear
+cold air of the upper roof. The Pope blew out His lamp, and set it on
+the parapet.
+
+"You will be cold, Father; fetch your cloak."
+
+"And you, Holiness?"
+
+The other made a little gesture of denial, and went across to the tiny
+temporary shed where the wireless telegraphic instrument stood.
+
+"Fetch your cloak, Father," He said again over His shoulder. "I will
+ring up meanwhile."
+
+When the priest came back three minutes later, in his slippers and
+cloak, carrying another cloak also for his master, the Pope was still
+seated at the table. He did not even move His head as the other came up,
+but once more pressed on the lever that, communicating with the
+twelve-foot pole that rose through the pent-house overhead, shot out the
+quivering energy through the eighty miles of glimmering air that lay
+between Nazareth and Damascus.
+
+This simple priest had scarcely even by now become accustomed to this
+extraordinary device invented a century ago and perfected through all
+those years to this precise exactness--that device by which with the
+help of a stick, a bundle of wires, and a box of wheels, something, at
+last established to be at the root of all matter, if not at the very
+root of physical life, spoke across the spaces of the world to a tiny
+receiver tuned by a hair's breadth to the vibration with which it was
+set in relations.
+
+The air was surprisingly cold, considering the heat that had preceded
+and would follow it, and the priest shivered a little as he stood clear
+of the roof, and stared, now at the motionless figure in the chair
+before him, now at the vast vault of the sky passing, even as he looked,
+from a cold colourless luminosity to a tender tint of yellow, as far
+away beyond Thabor and Moab the dawn began to deepen. From the village
+half-a-mile away arose the crowing of a cock, thin and brazen as a
+trumpet; a dog barked once and was silent again; and then, on a sudden,
+a single stroke upon a bell hung in the roof recalled him in an instant,
+and told him that his work was to begin.
+
+The Pope pressed the lever again at the sound, twice, and then, after a
+pause, once more--waited a moment for an answer, and then when it came,
+rose and signed to the priest to take his place.
+
+The Syrian sat down, handing the extra cloak to his master, and waited
+until the other had settled Himself in a chair set in such a position at
+the side of the table that the face of each was visible to the other.
+Then he waited, with his brown fingers poised above the row of keys,
+looking at the other's face as He arranged himself to speak. That face,
+he thought, looking out from the hood, seemed paler than ever in this
+cold light of dawn; the black arched eyebrows accentuated this, and even
+the steady lips, preparing to speak, seemed white and bloodless. He had
+His paper in His hand, and His eyes were fixed upon this.
+
+"Make sure it is the Cardinal," he said abruptly.
+
+The priest tapped off an enquiry, and, with moving lips, raid off the
+printed message, as like magic it precipitated itself on to the tall
+white sheet of paper that faced him.
+
+"It is his Eminence, Holiness," he said softly. "He is alone at the
+instrument."
+
+"Very well. Now then; begin."
+
+"We have received your Eminence's letter, and have noted the news.... It
+should have been forwarded by telegraphy--why was that not done?"
+
+The voice paused, and the priest who had snapped off the message, more
+quickly than a man could write it, read aloud the answer.
+
+"'I did not understand that it was urgent. I thought it was but one
+more assault. I had intended to communicate more so soon as I heard
+more."'
+
+"Of course it was urgent," came the voice again in the deliberate
+intonation that was used between these two in the case of messages for
+transmission. "Remember that all news of this kind is always urgent."
+
+"'I will remember,' read the priest. 'I regret my mistake.'"
+
+"You tell us," went on the Pope, His eyes still downcast on the paper,
+"that this measure is decided upon; you name only three authorities.
+Give me, now, all the authorities you have, if you have more."
+
+There was a moment's pause. Then the priest began to read off the names.
+
+"Besides the three Cardinals whose names I sent, the Archbishops of
+Thibet, Cairo, Calcutta and Sydney have all asked if the news was true,
+and for directions if it is true; besides others whose names I can
+communicate if I may leave the table for a moment.'"
+
+"Do so," said the Pope.
+
+Again there was a pause. Then once more the names began.
+
+"'The Bishops of Bukarest, the Marquesas Islands and Newfoundland. The
+Franciscans in Japan, the Crutched Friars in Morocco, the Archbishops of
+Manitoba and Portland, and the Cardinal-Archbisbop of Pekin. I have
+despatched two members of Christ Crucified to England.'"
+
+"Tell us when the news first arrived, and how."
+
+"'I was called up to the instrument yesterday evening at about twenty
+o'clock. The Archbishop of Sydney was asking, through our station at
+Bombay, whether the news was true. I replied I had heard nothing of it.
+Within ten minutes four more inquiries had come to the same effect; and
+three minutes later Cardinal Ruspoli sent the positive news from Turin.
+This was accompanied by a similar message from Father Petrovski in
+Moscow. Then--- '"
+
+"Stop. Why did not Cardinal Dolgorovski communicate it?"
+
+"'He did communicate it three hours later.'"
+
+"Why not at once?"
+
+"'His Eminence had not heard it.'"
+
+"Find out at what hour the news reached Moscow--not now, but within the
+day."
+
+"'I will.'"
+
+"Go on, then."
+
+"'Cardinal Malpas communicated it within five minutes of Cardinal
+Ruspoli, and the rest of the inquiries arrived before midnight. China
+reported it at twenty-three.'"
+
+"Then when do you suppose the news was made public?"
+
+"'It was decided first at the secret London conference, yesterday, at
+about sixteen o'clock by our time. The Plenipotentiaries appear to have
+signed it at that hour. After that it was communicated to the world. It
+was published here half an hour past midnight.'"
+
+"Then Felsenburgh was in London?"
+
+"'I am not yet sure. Cardinal Malpas tells me that Felsenburgh gave his
+provisional consent on the previous day.'"
+
+"Very good. That is all you know, then?"
+
+"'I was called up an hour ago by Cardinal Ruspoli again. He tells me
+that he fears a riot in Florence; it will be the first of many
+revolutions, he says.'"
+
+"Does he ask for anything?"
+
+"'Only for directions.'"
+
+"Tell him that we send him the Apostolic Benediction, and will forward
+directions within the course of two hours. Select twelve members of the
+Order for immediate service."
+
+"'I will.'"
+
+"Communicate that message also, as soon as we have finished, to all the
+Sacred College, and bid them communicate it with all discretion to all
+metropolitans and bishops, that priests and people may know that We bear
+them in our heart."
+
+"'I will, Holiness.'"
+
+"Tell them, finally, that We had foreseen this long ago; that We commend
+them to the Eternal Father without Whose Providence no sparrow falls to
+the ground. Bid them be quiet and confident; to do nothing, save confess
+their faith when they are questioned. All other directions shall be
+issued to their pastors immediately!"
+
+"'I will, Holiness.'"
+
+* * * * *
+
+There was again a pause.
+
+The Pope had been speaking with the utmost tranquillity as one in a
+dream. His eyes were downcast upon the paper, His whole body as
+motionless as an image. Yet to the priest who listened, despatching the
+Latin messages, and reading aloud the replies, it seemed, although so
+little intelligible news had reached him, as if something very strange
+and great was impending. There was the sense of a peculiar strain in the
+air, and although he drew no deductions from the fact that apparently
+the whole Catholic world was in frantic communication with Damascus, yet
+he remembered his meditations of the evening before as he had waited for
+the messenger. It seemed as if the powers of this world were
+contemplating one more step--with its nature he was not greatly
+concerned.
+
+The Pope spoke again in His natural voice.
+
+"Father," he said, "what I am about to say now is as if I told it in
+confession. You understand?--Very well. Now begin."
+
+Then again the intonation began.
+
+"Eminence. We shall say mass of the Holy Ghost in one hour from now. At
+the end of that time, you will cause that all the Sacred College shall
+be in touch with yourself, and waiting for our commands. This new
+decision is unlike any that have preceded it. Surely you understand
+that now. Two or three plans are in our mind, yet We are not sure yet
+which it is that our Lord intends. After mass We shall communicate to
+you that which He shall show Us to be according to His Will. We beg of
+you to say mass also, immediately, for Our intention. Whatever must be
+done must be done quickly. The matter of Cardinal Dolgorovski you may
+leave until later. But we wish to hear the result of your inquiries,
+especially in London, before mid-day. _Benedicat te Omnipotens Deus,
+Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus._"
+
+"'Amen!'" murmured the priest, reading it from the sheet.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+The little chapel in the house below was scarcely more dignified than
+the other rooms. Of ornaments, except those absolutely essential to
+liturgy and devotion, there were none. In the plaster of the walls were
+indented in slight relief the fourteen stations of the Cross; a small
+stone image of the Mother of God stood in a corner, with an iron-work
+candlestick before it, and on the solid uncarved stone altar, raised on
+a stone step, stood six more iron candlesticks and an iron crucifix. A
+tabernacle, also of iron, shrouded by linen curtains, stood beneath the
+cross; a small stone slab projecting from the wall served as a credence.
+There was but one window, and this looked into the court, so that the
+eyes of strangers might not penetrate.
+
+It seemed to the Syrian priest as he went about his business--laying out
+the vestments in the little sacristy that opened out at one side of the
+altar, preparing the cruets and stripping the covering from the
+altar-cloth--that even that slight work was wearying. There seemed a
+certain oppression in the air. As to how far that was the result of his
+broken rest he did not know, but he feared that it was one more of those
+scirocco days that threatened. That yellowish tinge of dawn had not
+passed with the sun-rising; even now, as he went noiselessly on his bare
+feet between the predella and the _prie-dieu_ where the silent white
+figure was still motionless, he caught now and again, above the roof
+across the tiny court, a glimpse of that faint sand-tinged sky that was
+the promise of beat and heaviness.
+
+He finished at last, lighted the candles, genuflected, and stood with
+bowed head waiting for the Holy Father to rise from His knees. A
+servant's footstep sounded in the court, coming across to hear mass, and
+simultaneously the Pope rose and went towards the sacristy, where the
+red vestments of God who came by fire were laid ready for the Sacrifice.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Silvester's bearing at mass was singularly unostentatious. He moved as
+swiftly as any young priest, His voice was quite even and quite low, and
+his pace neither rapid nor pompous. According to tradition, He occupied
+half-an-hour _ab amictu ad amictum_; and even in the tiny empty chapel
+He observed to keep His eyes always downcast. And yet this Syrian never
+served His mass without a thrill of something resembling fear; it was
+not only his knowledge of the awful dignity of this simple celebrant;
+but, although he could not have expressed it so, there was an aroma of
+an emotion about the vestmented figure that affected him almost
+physically--an entire absence of self-consciousness, and in its place
+the consciousness of some other Presence, a perfection of manner even in
+the smallest details that could only arise from absolute recollection.
+Even in Rome in the old days it had been one of the sights of Rome to
+see Father Franklin say mass; seminary students on the eve of ordination
+were sent to that sight to learn the perfect manner and method.
+
+To-day all was as usual, but at the Communion the priest looked up
+suddenly at the moment when the Host had been consumed, with a half
+impression that either a sound or a gesture had invited it; and, as he
+looked, his heart began to beat thick and convulsive at the base of his
+throat. Yet to the outward eyes there was nothing unusual. The figure
+stood there with bowed head, the chin resting on the tips of the long
+fingers, the body absolutely upright, and standing with that curious
+light poise as if no weight rested upon the feet. But to the inner sense
+something was apparent the Syrian could not in the least formulate it to
+himself; but afterwards he reflected that he had stared expecting some
+visible or audible manifestation to take place. It was an impression
+that might be described under the terms of either light or sound; at any
+instant that delicate vivid force, that to the eyes of the soul burned
+beneath the red chasuble and the white alb, might have suddenly welled
+outwards under the appearance of a gush of radiant light rendering
+luminous not only the clear brown flesh seen beneath the white hair, but
+the very texture of the coarse, dead, stained stuffs that swathed the
+rest of the body. Or it might have shown itself in the strain of a long
+chord on strings or wind, as if the mystical union of the dedicated soul
+with the ineffable Godhead and Humanity of Jesus Christ generated such a
+sound as ceaselessly flows out with the river of life from beneath the
+Throne of the Lamb. Or yet once more it might have declared itself under
+the guise of a perfume--the very essence of distilled sweetness--such a
+scent as that which, streaming out through the gross tabernacle of a
+saint's body, is to those who observe it as the breath of heavenly
+roses....
+
+The moments passed in that hush of purity and peace; sounds came and
+went outside, the rattle of a cart far away, the sawing of the first
+cicada in the coarse grass twenty yards away beyond the wall; some one
+behind the priest was breathing short and thick as under the pressure of
+an intolerable emotion, and yet the figure stood there still, without a
+movement or sway to break the carved motionlessness of the alb-folds or
+the perfect poise of the white-shod feet. When He moved at last to
+uncover the Precious Blood, to lay His hands on the altar and adore, it
+was as if a statue had stirred into life; to the server it was very
+nearly as a shock.
+
+Again, when the chalice was empty, that first impression reasserted
+itself; the human and the external died in the embrace of the Divine and
+Invisible, and once more silence lived and glowed.... And again as the
+spiritual energy sank back again into its origin, Silvester stretched
+out the chalice.
+
+With knees that shook and eyes wide in expectation, the priest rose,
+adored, and went to the credence.
+
+* * * * *
+
+It was customary after the Pope's mass that the priest himself should
+offer the Sacrifice in his presence, but to-day so soon as the vestments
+had been laid one by one on the rough chest, Silvester turned to the
+priest.
+
+"Presently," he said softly. "Go up, father, at once to the roof, and
+tell the Cardinal to be ready. I shall come in five minutes."
+
+It was surely a scirocco-day, thought the priest, as he came up on to
+the flat roof. Overhead, instead of the clear blue proper to that hour
+of the morning, lay a pale yellow sky darkening even to brown at the
+horizon. Thabor, before him, hung distant and sombre seen through the
+impalpable atmosphere of sand, and across the plain, as he glanced
+behind him, beyond the white streak of Nain nothing was visible except
+the pale outline of the tops of the hills against the sky. Even at this
+morning hour, too, the air was hot and breathless, broken only by the
+slow-stifling lift of the south-western breeze that, blowing across
+countless miles of sand beyond far-away Egypt, gathered up the heat of
+the huge waterless continent and was pouring it, with scarcely a streak
+of sea to soften its malignity, on this poor strip of land. Carmel, too,
+as he turned again, was swathed about its base with mist, half dry and
+half damp, and above showed its long bull-head running out defiantly
+against the western sky. The very table as he touched it was dry and hot
+to the hand, by mid-day the steel would be intolerable.
+
+He pressed the lever, and waited; pressed it again, and waited again.
+There came the answering ring, and he tapped across the eighty miles of
+air that his Eminence's presence was required at once. A minute or two
+passed, and then, after another rap of the bell, a line flicked out on
+the new white sheet.
+
+"'I am here. Is it his Holiness?'"
+
+He felt a hand upon his shoulder, and turned to see Silvester, hooded
+and in white, behind his chair.
+
+"Tell him yes. Ask him if there is further news."
+
+The Pope went to the chair once more and sat down, and a minute later
+the priest, with growing excitement, read out the answer.
+
+"'Inquiries are pouring in. Many expect your Holiness to issue a
+challenge. My secretaries have been occupied since four o'clock. The
+anxiety is indescribable. Some are denying that they have a Pope.
+Something must be done at once.'"
+
+"Is that all?" asked the Pope.
+
+Again the priest read out the answer. "'Yes and no. The news is true. It
+will be inforced immediately. Unless a step is taken immediately there
+will be widespread and final apostasy.'"
+
+"Very good," murmured the Pope, in his official voice. "Now listen
+carefully, Eminence." He was silent for a moment, his fingers joined
+beneath his chin as just now at mass. Then he spoke.
+
+"We are about to place ourselves unreservedly in the hands of God. Human
+prudence must no longer restrain us. We command you then, using all
+discretion that is possible, to communicate these wishes of ours to the
+following persons under the strictest secrecy, and to no others
+whatsoever. And for this service you are to employ messengers, taken
+from the Order of Christ Crucified, two for each message, which is not
+to be committed to writing in any form. The members of the Sacred
+College, numbering twelve; the metropolitans and Patriarchs through the
+entire world, numbering twenty-two; the Generals of the Religious
+Orders: the Society of Jesus, the Friars, the Monks Ordinary, and the
+Monks Contemplative four. These persons, thirty-eight in number, with
+the chaplain of your Eminence, who shall act as notary, and my own who
+shall assist him, and Ourself--forty-one all told--these persons are to
+present themselves here at our palace of Nazareth not later than the Eve
+of Pentecost. We feel Ourselves unwilling to decide the steps necessary
+to be taken with reference to the new decree, except we first hear the
+counsel of our advisers, and give them an opportunity of communicating
+freely one with another. These words, as we have spoken them, are to be
+forwarded to all those persons whom we have named; and your Eminence
+will further inform them that our deliberations will not occupy more
+than four days.
+
+"As regards the questions of provisioning the council and all matters of
+that kind, your Eminence will despatch to-day the chaplain of whom we
+have spoken, who with my own chaplain will at once set about
+preparations, and your Eminence will yourself follow, appointing Father
+Marabout to act in your absence, not later than four days hence.
+
+"Finally, to all who have asked explicit directions in the face of this
+new decree, communicate this one sentence, and no more.
+
+"_Lose not your confidence which hath a great reward. For yet a little
+while, and, He that is to come will come and will not delay_.--Silvester
+the Bishop, Servant of the Servants of God."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+I
+
+Oliver Brand stepped out from the Conference Hall in Westminster on the
+Friday evening, so soon as the business was over and the
+Plenipotentiaries had risen from the table, more concerned as to the
+effect of the news upon his wife than upon the world.
+
+He traced the beginning of the change to the day five months ago when
+the President of the World had first declared the development of his
+policy, and while Oliver himself had yielded to that development, and
+from defending it in public had gradually convinced himself of its
+necessity, Mabel, for the first time in her life, had shown herself
+absolutely obstinate.
+
+The woman to his mind seemed to him to have fallen into some kind of
+insanity. Felsenburgh's declaration had been made a week or two after
+his Acclamation at Westminster, and Mabel had received the news of it at
+first with absolute incredulity.
+
+Then, when there was no longer any doubt that he had declared the
+extermination of the Supernaturalists to be a possible necessity, there
+had been a terrible scene between husband and wife. She had said that
+she had been deceived; that the world's hope was a monstrous mockery;
+that the reign of universal peace was as far away as ever; that
+Felsenburgh had betrayed his trust and broken his word. There had been
+an appalling scene. He did not even now like to recall it to his
+imagination. She had quieted after a while, but his arguments, delivered
+with infinite patience, seemed to produce very little effect. She
+settled down into silence, hardly answering him. One thing only seemed
+to touch her, and that was when he spoke of the President himself. It
+was becoming plain to him that she was but a woman after all at the
+mercy of a strong personality, but utterly beyond the reach of logic. He
+was very much disappointed. Yet he trusted to time to cure her.
+
+The Government of England had taken swift and skilful steps to reassure
+those who, like Mabel, recoiled from the inevitable logic of the new
+policy. An army of speakers traversed the country, defending and
+explaining; the press was engineered with extraordinary adroitness, and
+it was possible to say that there was not a person among the millions of
+England who had not easy access to the Government's defence.
+
+Briefly, shorn of rhetoric, their arguments were as follows, and there
+was no doubt that, on the whole, they had the effect of quieting the
+amazed revolt of the more sentimental minds.
+
+Peace, it was pointed out, had for the first time in the world's history
+become an universal fact. There was no longer one State, however small,
+whose interests were not identical with those of one of the three
+divisions of the world of which it was a dependency, and that first
+stage had been accomplished nearly half-a-century ago. But the second
+stage--the reunion of these three divisions under a common head--an
+infinitely greater achievement than the former, since the conflicting
+interests were incalculably more vast--this had been consummated by a
+single Person, Who, it appeared, had emerged from humanity at the very
+instant when such a Character was demanded. It was surely not much to
+ask that those on whom these benefits had come should assent to the will
+and judgment of Him through whom they had come. This, then, was an
+appeal to faith.
+
+The second main argument was addressed to reason. Persecution, as all
+enlightened persons confessed, was the method of a majority of savages
+who desired to force a set of opinions upon a minority who did not
+spontaneously share them. Now the peculiar malevolence of persecution in
+the past lay, not in the employment of force, but in the abuse of it.
+That any one kingdom should dictate religious opinions to a minority of
+its members was an intolerable tyranny, for no one State possessed the
+right to lay down universal laws, the contrary to which might be held by
+its neighbour. This, however, disguised, was nothing else than the
+Individualism of Nations, a heresy even more disastrous to the
+commonwealth of the world than the Individualism of the Individual. But
+with the arrival of the universal community of interests the whole
+situation was changed. The single personality of the human race had
+succeeded to the incoherence of divided units, and with that
+consummation--which might be compared to a coming of age, an entirely
+new set of rights had come into being. The human race was now a single
+entity with a supreme responsibility towards itself; there were no
+longer any private rights at all, such as had certainly existed, in the
+period previous to this. Man now possessed dominion over every cell
+which composed His Mystical Body, and where any such cell asserted
+itself to the detriment of the Body, the rights of the whole were
+unqualified.
+
+And there was no religion but one that claimed the equal rights of
+universal jurisdiction--and that the Catholic. The sects of the East,
+while each retained characteristics of its own, had yet found in the New
+Man the incarnation of their ideals, and had therefore given in their
+allegiance to the authority of the whole Body of whom He was Head. But
+the very essence of the Catholic Religion was treason to the very idea
+of man. Christians directed their homage to a supposed supernatural
+Being who was not only--so they claimed--outside of the world but
+positively transcended it. Christians, then--leaving aside the mad fable
+of the Incarnation, which might very well be suffered to die of its own
+folly--deliberately severed themselves from that Body of which by human
+generation they had been made members. They were as mortified limbs
+yielding themselves to the domination of an outside force other than
+that which was their only life, and by that very act imperilled the
+entire Body. This madness, then, was the one crime which still deserved
+the name. Murder, theft, rape, even anarchy itself, were as trifling
+faults compared to this monstrous sin, for while these injured indeed
+the Body they did not strike at its heart--individuals suffered, and
+therefore those minor criminals deserved restraint; but the very Life
+was not struck at. But in Christianity there was a poison actually
+deadly. Every cell that became infected with it was infected in that
+very fibre that bound it to the spring of life. This, and this alone,
+was the supreme crime of High Treason against man--and nothing but
+complete removal from the world could be an adequate remedy.
+
+These, then, were the main arguments addressed to that section of the
+world which still recoiled from the deliberate utterance of Felsenburgh,
+and their success had been remarkable. Of course, the logic, in itself
+indisputable, had been dressed in a variety of costumes gilded with
+rhetoric, flushed with passion, and it had done its work in such a
+manner that as summer drew on Felsenburgh had announced privately that
+he proposed to introduce a bill which should carry out to its logical
+conclusion the policy of which he had spoken.
+
+Now, this too, had been accomplished.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+Oliver let himself into his house, and went straight upstairs to Mabel's
+room. It would not do to let her hear the news from any but his own
+lips. She was not there, and on inquiry he heard that she had gone out
+an hour before.
+
+He was disconcerted at this. The decree had been signed half-an-hour
+earlier, and in answer to an inquiry from Lord Pemberton it had been
+stated that there was no longer any reason for secrecy, and that the
+decision might be communicated to the press. Oliver had hurried away
+immediately in order to make sure that Mabel should hear the news from
+him, and now she was out, and at any moment the placards might tell her
+of what had been done.
+
+He felt extremely uneasy, but for another hour or so was ashamed to act.
+Then he went to the tube and asked another question or two, but the
+servant had no idea of Mabel's movements; it might be she had gone to
+the church; sometimes she did at this hour. He sent the woman off to
+see, and himself sat down again in the window-seat of his wife's room,
+staring out disconsolately at the wide array of roofs in the golden
+sunset light, that seemed to his eyes to be strangely beautiful this
+evening. The sky was not that pure gold which it had been every night
+during this last week; there was a touch of rose in it, and this
+extended across the entire vault so far as he could see from west to
+east. He reflected on what he had lately read in an old book to the
+effect that the abolition of smoke had certainly changed evening colours
+for the worse.... There had been a couple of severe earthquakes, too, in
+America--he wondered whether there was any connection.... Then his
+thoughts flew back to Mabel....
+
+It was about ten minutes before he heard her footstep on the stairs, and
+as he stood up she came in.
+
+There was something in her face that told him that she knew everything,
+and his heart sickened at her pale rigidity. There was no fury
+there--nothing but white, hopeless despair, and an immense
+determination. Her lips showed a straight line, and her eyes, beneath
+her white summer hat, seemed contracted to pinpricks. She stood there,
+closing the door mechanically behind her, and made no further movement
+towards him.
+
+"Is it true?" she said.
+
+Oliver drew one steady breath, and sat down again.
+
+"Is what true, my dear?"
+
+"Is it true," she said again, "that all are to be questioned as to
+whether they believe in God, and to be killed if they confess it?"
+
+Oliver licked his dry lips.
+
+"You put it very harshly," he said. "The question is, whether the world
+has a right---"
+
+She made a sharp movement with her head.
+
+"It is true then. And you signed it?"
+
+"My dear, I beg you not to make a scene. I am tired out. And I will not
+answer that until you have heard what I have to say."
+
+"Say it, then."
+
+"Sit down, then."
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Very well, then.... Well, this is the point. The world is one now, not
+many. Individualism is dead. It died when Felsenburgh became President
+of the World. You surely see that absolutely new conditions prevail
+now--there has never been anything like it before. You know all this as
+well as I do."
+
+Again came that jerk of impatience.
+
+"You will please to hear me out," he said wearily. "Well, now that this
+has happened, there is a new morality; it is exactly like a child coming
+to the age of reason. We are obliged, therefore, to see that this
+continues--that there is no going back--no mortification--that all the
+limbs are in good health. 'If thy hand offend thee, cut it off,' said
+Jesus Christ. Well, that is what we say.... Now, for any one to say that
+they believe in God--I doubt very much whether there is any one who
+really does believe, or understand what it means--but for any one even
+to say so is the very worst crime conceivable: it is high treason. But
+there is going to be no violence; it will all be quite quiet and
+merciful. Why, you have always approved of Euthanasia, as we all do.
+Well, it is that that will be used; and---"
+
+Once more she made a little movement with her hand. The rest of her was
+like an image.
+
+"Is this any use?" she asked.
+
+Oliver stood up. He could not bear the hardness of her voice.
+
+"Mabel, my darling---"
+
+For an instant her lips shook; then again she looked at him with eyes of
+ice.
+
+"I don't want that," she said. "It is of no use.. Then you did sign it?"
+
+Oliver had a sense of miserable desperation as he looked back at her.
+He would infinitely have preferred that she had stormed and wept.
+
+"Mabel---" he cried again.
+
+"Then you did sign it?"
+
+"I did sign it," he said at last.
+
+She turned and went towards the door. He sprang after her.
+
+"Mabel, where are you going?"
+
+Then, for the first time in her life, she lied to her husband frankly
+and fully.
+
+"I am going to rest a little," she said. "I shall see you presently at
+supper."
+
+He still hesitated, but she met his eyes, pale indeed, but so honest
+that he fell back.
+
+"Very well, my dear.... Mabel, try to understand."
+
+* * * * *
+
+He came down to supper half-an-hour later, primed with logic, and even
+kindled with emotion. The argument seemed to him now so utterly
+convincing; granted the premises that they both accepted and lived by,
+the conclusion was simply inevitable.
+
+He waited a minute or two, and at last went to the tube that
+communicated with the servants' quarters.
+
+"Where is Mrs. Brand?" he asked.
+
+There was an instant's silence, and then the answer came:
+
+"She left the house half-an-hour ago, sir. I thought you knew."
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+That same evening Mr. Francis was very busy in his office over the
+details connected with the festival of Sustenance that was to be
+celebrated on the first of July. It was the first time that the
+particular ceremony had taken place, and he was anxious that it should
+be as successful as its predecessors. There were a few differences
+between this and the others, and it was necessary that the
+_ceremoniarii_ should be fully instructed.
+
+So, with his model before him--a miniature replica of the interior of
+the Abbey, with tiny dummy figures on blocks that could be shifted this
+way and that, he was engaged in adding in a minute ecclesiastical hand
+rubrical notes to his copy of the Order of Proceedings.
+
+When the porter therefore rang up a little after twenty-one o'clock,
+that a lady wished to see him, he answered rather brusquely down the
+tube that it was impossible. But the bell rang again, and to his
+impatient question, the reply came up that it was Mrs. Brand below, and
+that she did not ask for more than ten minutes' conversation. This was
+quite another matter. Oliver Brand was an important personage, and his
+wife therefore had significance, and Mr. Francis apologised, gave
+directions that she was to come to his ante-room, and rose, sighing,
+from his dummy Abbey and officials.
+
+She seemed very quiet this evening, he thought, as he shook hands with
+her a minute later; she wore her veil down, so that he could not see her
+face very well, but her voice seemed to lack its usual vivacity.
+
+"I am so sorry to interrupt you, Mr. Francis," she said. "I only want to
+ask you one or two questions."
+
+He smiled at her encouragingly.
+
+"Mr. Brand, no doubt---"
+
+"No," she said, "Mr. Brand has not sent me. It is entirely my own
+affair. You will see my reasons presently. I will begin at once. I know
+I must not keep you."
+
+It all seemed rather odd, he thought, but no doubt he would understand
+soon.
+
+"First," she said, "I think you used to know Father Franklin. He became
+a Cardinal, didn't he?"
+
+Mr. Francis assented, smiling.
+
+"Do you know if he is alive?"
+
+"No," he said. "He is dead. He was in Rome, you know, at the time of its
+destruction."
+
+"Ah! You are sure?"
+
+"Quite sure. Only one Cardinal escaped--Steinmann. He was hanged in
+Berlin; and the Patriarch of Jerusalem died a week or two later."
+
+"Ah! very well. Well, now, here is a very odd question. I ask for a
+particular reason, which I cannot explain, but you will soon
+understand.... It is this--Why do Catholics believe in God?"
+
+He was so much taken aback that for a moment he sat staring.
+
+"Yes," she said tranquilly, "it is a very odd question. But---" she
+hesitated. "Well, I will tell you," she said. "The fact is, that I have
+a friend who is--is in danger from this new law. I want to be able to
+argue with her; and I must know her side. You are the only priest--I
+mean who has been a priest--whom I ever knew, except Father Franklin. So
+I thought you would not mind telling me."
+
+Her voice was entirely natural; there was not a tremor or a falter in
+it. Mr. Francis smiled genially, rubbing his hands softly together.
+
+"Ah!" he said. "Yes, I see.... Well, that is a very large question.
+Would not to-morrow, perhaps---?"
+
+"I only want just the shortest answer," she said. "It is really
+important for me to know at once. You see, this new law comes into
+force---"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"Well--very briefly, I should say this: Catholics say that God can be
+perceived by reason; that from the arrangements of the world they can
+deduce that there must have been an Arranger--a Mind, you understand.
+Then they say that they deduce other things about God--that He is Love,
+for example, because of happiness---"
+
+"And the pain?" she interrupted.
+
+He smiled again.
+
+"Yes. That is the point--that is the weak point."
+
+"But what do they say about that?"
+
+"Well, briefly, they say that pain is the result of sin---"
+
+"And sin? You see, I know nothing at all, Mr. Francis."
+
+"Well, sin is the rebellion of man's will against God's."
+
+"What do they mean by that?"
+
+"Well, you see, they say that God wanted to be loved by His creatures,
+so He made them free; otherwise they could not really love. But if they
+were free, it means that they could if they liked refuse to love and
+obey God; and that is what is called Sin. You see what nonsense---"
+
+She jerked her head a little.
+
+"Yes, yes," she said. "But I really want to get at what they think....
+Well, then, that is all?"
+
+Mr. Francis pursed his lips.
+
+"Scarcely," he said; "that is hardly more than what they call Natural
+Religion. Catholics believe much more than that."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"My dear Mrs. Brand, it is impossible to put it in a few words. But, in
+brief, they believe that God became man--that Jesus was God, and that He
+did this in order to save them from sin by dying---"
+
+"By bearing pain, you mean?"
+
+"Yes; by dying. Well, what they call the Incarnation is really the
+point. Everything else flows from that. And, once a man believes that, I
+must confess that all the rest follows--even down to scapulars and holy
+water."
+
+"Mr. Francis, I don't understand a word you're saying."
+
+He smiled indulgently.
+
+"Of course not," he said; "it is all incredible nonsense. But, you know,
+I did really believe it all once."
+
+"But it's unreasonable," she said.
+
+He made a little demurring sound.
+
+"Yes," he said, "in one sense, of course it is--utterly unreasonable.
+But in another sense---"
+
+She leaned forward suddenly, and he could catch the glint of her eyes
+beneath her white veil.
+
+"Ah!" she said, almost breathlessly. "That is what I want to hear. Now,
+tell me how they justify it."
+
+He paused an instant, considering.
+
+"Well," he said slowly, "as far as I remember, they say that there are
+other faculties besides those of reason. They say, for example, that
+the heart sometimes finds out things that the reason cannot--intuitions,
+you see. For instance, they say that all things such as self-sacrifice
+and chivalry and even art--all come from the heart, that Reason comes
+with them--in rules of technique, for instance--but that it cannot prove
+them; they are quite apart from that."
+
+"I think I see."
+
+"Well, they say that Religion is like that--in other words, they
+practically confess that it is merely a matter of emotion." He paused
+again, trying to be fair. "Well, perhaps they would not say
+that--although it is true. But briefly---"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Well, they say there is a thing called Faith--a kind of deep conviction
+unlike anything else--supernatural--which God is supposed to give to
+people who desire it--to people who pray for it, and lead good lives,
+and so on---"
+
+"And this Faith?"
+
+"Well, this Faith, acting upon what they call Evidences--this Faith
+makes them absolutely certain that there is a God, that He was made man
+and so on, with the Church and all the rest of it. They say too that
+this is further proved by the effect that their religion has had in the
+world, and by the way it explains man's nature to himself. You see, it
+is just a case of self-suggestion."
+
+He heard her sigh, and stopped.
+
+"Is that any clearer, Mrs. Brand?"
+
+"Thank you very much," she said, "it certainly is clearer. ... And it is
+true that Christians have died for this Faith, whatever it is?"
+
+"Oh! yes. Thousands and thousands. Just as Mohammedans have for theirs."
+
+"The Mohammedans believe in God, too, don't they?"
+
+"Well, they did, and I suppose that a few do now. But very few: the rest
+have become esoteric, as they say."
+
+"And--and which would you say were the most highly evolved people--East
+or West?"
+
+"Oh! West undoubtedly. The East thinks a good deal, but it doesn't act
+much. And that always leads to confusion--even to stagnation of
+thought."
+
+"And Christianity certainly has been the Religion of the West up to a
+hundred years ago?"
+
+"Oh! yes."
+
+She was silent then, and Mr. Francis had time again to reflect how very
+odd all this was. She certainly must be very much attached to this
+Christian friend of hers.
+
+Then she stood up, and he rose with her.
+
+"Thank you so much, Mr. Francis.... Then that is the kind of outline?"
+
+"Well, yes; so far as one can put it in a few words."
+
+"Thank you.... I mustn't keep you."
+
+He went with her towards the door. But within a yard of it she stopped.
+
+"And you, Mr. Francis. You were brought up in all this. Does it ever
+come back to you?"
+
+He smiled.
+
+"Never," he said, "except as a dream."
+
+"How do you account for that, then? If it is all self-suggestion, you
+have had thirty years of it."
+
+She paused; and for a moment he hesitated what to answer.
+
+"How would your old fellow-Catholics account for it?"
+
+"They would say that I had forfeited light--that Faith was withdrawn."
+
+"And you?"
+
+Again he paused.
+
+"I should say that I had made a stronger self-suggestion the other way."
+
+"I see.... Good-night, Mr. Francis."
+
+* * * * *
+
+She would not let him come down the lift with her, so when he had seen
+the smooth box drop noiselessly below the level, he went back again to
+his model of the Abbey and the little dummy figures. But, before he
+began to move these about again, he sat for a moment or two with pursed
+lips, staring.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+I
+
+A week later Mabel awoke about dawn; and for a moment or two forgot
+where she was. She even spoke Oliver's name aloud, staring round the
+unfamiliar room, wondering what she did here. Then she remembered, and
+was silent....
+
+It was the eighth day she had spent in this Home; her probation was
+finished: to-day she wits at liberty to do that for which she had come.
+On the Saturday of the previous week she had gone through her private
+examination before the magistrate, stating under the usual conditions of
+secrecy her name, age and home, as well as her reasons for making the
+application for Euthanasia; and all had passed off well. She had
+selected Manchester as being sufficiently remote and sufficiently large
+to secure her freedom from Oliver's molestation; and her secret had been
+admirably kept. There was not a hint that her husband knew anything of
+her intentions; for, after all, in these cases the police were bound to
+assist the fugitive. Individualism was at least so far recognised as to
+secure to those weary of life the right of relinquishing it. She
+scarcely knew why she had selected this method, except that any other
+seemed impossible. The knife required skill and resolution; firearms
+were unthinkable, and poison, under the new stringent regulations, was
+hard to obtain. Besides, she seriously wished to test her own
+intentions, and to be quite sure that there was no other way than
+this....
+
+Well, she was as certain as ever. The thought had first come to her in
+the mad misery of the outbreak of violence on the last day of the old
+year. Then it had gone again, soothed away by the arguments that man was
+still liable to relapse. Then once more it had recurred, a cold and
+convincing phantom, in the plain daylight revealed by Felsenburgh's
+Declaration. It had taken up its abode with her then, yet she controlled
+it, hoping against hope that the Declaration would not be carried into
+action, occasionally revolting against its horror. Yet it had never been
+far away; and finally when the policy sprouted into deliberate law, she
+had yielded herself resolutely to its suggestion. That was eight days
+ago; and she had not had one moment of faltering since that.
+
+Yet she had ceased to condemn. The logic had silenced her. All that she
+knew was that she could not bear it; that she had misconceived the New
+Faith; that for her, whatever it was for others, there was no hope....
+She had not even a child of her own.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Those eight days, required by law, had passed very peacefully. She had
+taken with her enough money to enter one of the private homes furnished
+with sufficient comfort to save from distractions those who had been
+accustomed to gentle living: the nurses had been pleasant and
+sympathetic; she had nothing to complain of.
+
+She had suffered, of course, to some degree from reactions. The second
+night after her arrival had been terrible, when, as she lay in bed in
+the hot darkness, her whole sentient life had protested and struggled
+against the fate her will ordained. It had demanded the familiar
+things--the promise of food and breath and human intercourse; it had
+writhed in horror against the blind dark towards which it moved so
+inevitably; and, in the agony had been pacified only by the half-hinted
+promise of some deeper voice suggesting that death was not the end. With
+morning light sanity had come back; the will had reassumed the mastery,
+and, with it, had withdrawn explicitly the implied hope of continued
+existence. She had suffered again for an hour or two from a more
+concrete fear; the memory came back to her of those shocking revelations
+that ten years ago had convulsed England and brought about the
+establishment of these Homes under Government supervision--those
+evidences that for years in the great vivisection laboratories human
+subjects had been practised upon--persons who with the same intentions
+as herself had cut themselves off from the world in private
+euthanasia-houses, to whom had been supplied a gas that suspended
+instead of destroying animation.... But this, too, had passed with the
+return of light. Such things were impossible now under the new
+system--at least, in England. She had refrained from making an end upon
+the Continent for this very reason. There, where sentiment was weaker,
+and logic more imperious, materialism was more consistent. Since men
+were but animals--the conclusion was inevitable.
+
+There had been but one physical drawback, the intolerable heat of the
+days and nights. It seemed, scientists said, that an entirely unexpected
+heat-wave had been generated; there were a dozen theories, most of which
+were mutually exclusive one of another. It was humiliating, she thought,
+that men who professed to have taken the earth under their charge should
+be so completely baffled. The conditions of the weather had of course
+been accompanied by disasters; there had been earthquakes of astonishing
+violence, a ripple had wrecked not less than twenty-five towns in
+America; an island or two had disappeared, and that bewildering Vesuvius
+seemed to be working up for a denouement. But no one knew really the
+explanation. One man had been wild enough to say that some cataclysm had
+taken place in the centre of the earth.... So she had heard from her
+nurse; but she was not greatly interested. It was only tiresome that she
+could not walk much in the garden, and had to be content with sitting in
+her own cool shaded room on the second floor.
+
+There was only one other matter of which she had asked, namely, the
+effect of the new decree; but the nurse did not seem to know much about
+that. It appeared that there had been an outrage or two, but the law had
+not yet been enforced to any great extent; a week, after all, was a
+short time, even though the decree had taken effect at once, and
+magistrates were beginning the prescribed census.
+
+* * * * *
+
+It seemed to her as she lay awake this morning, staring at the tinted
+ceiling, and out now and again at the quiet little room, that the heat
+was worse than ever. For a minute she thought she must have overslept;
+but, as she touched her repeater, it told her that it was scarcely after
+four o'clock. Well, well; she would not have to bear it much longer; she
+thought that about eight it would be time to make an end. There was her
+letter to Oliver yet to be written; and one or two final arrangements to
+be made.
+
+As regarded the morality of what she was doing-the relation, that is to
+say, which her act bore to the common life of man--she had no shadow of
+doubt. It was her belief, as of the whole Humanitarian world, that just
+as bodily pain occasionally justified this termination of life, so also
+did mental pain. There was a certain pitch of distress at which the
+individual was no longer necessary to himself or the world; it was the
+most charitable act that could be performed. But she had never thought
+in old days that that state could ever be hers; Life had been much too
+interesting. But it had come to this: there was no question of it.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Perhaps a dozen times in that week she had thought over her conversation
+with Mr. Francis. Her going to him had been little more than
+instinctive; she did just wish to hear what the other side was--whether
+Christianity was as ludicrous as she had always thought. It seemed that
+it was not ludicrous; it was only terribly pathetic. It was just a
+lovely dream--an exquisite piece of poetry. It would be heavenly to
+believe it, but she did not. No--a transcendent God was unthinkable,
+although not quite so unthinkable as a merely immeasurable Man. And as
+for the Incarnation--well, well!
+
+There seemed no way out of it. The Humanity-Religion was the only one.
+Man was God, or at least His highest manifestation; and He was a God
+with which she did not wish to have anything more to do. These faint new
+instincts after something other than intellect and emotion were, she
+knew perfectly well, nothing but refined emotion itself.
+
+She had thought a great deal of Felsenburgh, however, and was astonished
+at her own feelings. He was certainly the most impressive man she had
+ever seen; it did seem very probable indeed that He was what He claimed
+to be--the Incarnation of the ideal Man the first perfect product of
+humanity. But the logic of his position was too much for her. She saw
+now that He was perfectly logical--that He had not been inconsistent in
+denouncing the destruction of Rome and a week later making His
+declaration. It was the passion of one man against another that He
+denounced--of kingdom against kingdom, and sect against sect--for this
+was suicidal for the race. He denounced passion, too, not judicial
+action. Therefore, this new decree was as logical as Himself--it was a
+judicial act on the part of an united world against a tiny majority that
+threatened the principle of life and faith: and it was to be carried out
+with supreme mercy; there was no revenge or passion or partisan spirit
+in it from beginning to end; no more than a man is revengeful or
+passionate when he amputates a diseased limb--Oliver had convinced her
+of that.
+
+Yes, it was logical and sound. And it was because it was so that she
+could not bear it.... But ah! what a sublime man Felsenburgh was; it was
+a joy to her even to recall his speeches and his personality. She would
+have liked to see him again. But it was no good. She had better be done
+with it as tranquilly as possible. And the world must go forward without
+her. She was just tired out with Facts.
+
+* * * * *
+
+She dozed off again presently, and it seemed scarcely five minutes
+before she looked up to see a gentle smiling face of a white-capped
+nurse bending over her.
+
+"It is nearly six o'clock, my dear--the time you told me. I came to see
+about breakfast."
+
+Mabel drew a long breath. Then she sat up suddenly, throwing back the
+sheet.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+It struck a quarter-past six from the little clock on the mantel-shelf
+as she laid down her pen. Then she took up the closely written sheets,
+leaned back in her deep chair, and began to read.
+
+"HOME OF REST,
+
+"NO 3A MANCHESTER WEST.
+
+"MY DEAR: I am very sorry, but it has come back to me. I really cannot
+go on any longer, so I am going to escape in the only way left, as I
+once told you. I have had a very quiet and happy time here; they have
+been most kind and considerate. You see, of course, from the heading on
+this paper, what I mean....
+
+"Well, you have always been very dear to me; you are still, even at this
+moment. So you have a right to know my reasons so far as I know them
+myself. It is very difficult to understand myself; but it seems to me
+that I am not strong enough to live. So long as I was pleased and
+excited it was all very well--especially when He came. But I think I had
+expected it to be different; I did not understand as I do now how it
+must come to this--how it is all quite logical and right. I could bear
+it, when I thought that they had acted through passion, but this is
+deliberate. I did not realise that Peace must have its laws, and must
+protect itself. And, somehow, that Peace is not what I want. It is being
+alive at all that is wrong.
+
+"Then there is this difficulty. I know how absolutely in agreement you
+are with this new state of affairs; of course you are, because you are
+so much stronger and more logical than I am. But if you have a wife she
+must be of one mind with you. And I am not, any more, at least not with
+my heart, though I see you are right.... Do you understand, my dear?
+
+"If we had had a child, it might have been different. I might have liked
+to go on living for his sake. But Humanity, somehow--Oh! Oliver! I
+can't--I can't.
+
+"I know I am wrong, and that you are right--but there it is; I cannot
+change myself. So I am quite sure that I must go.
+
+"Then I want to tell you this--that I am not at all frightened. I never
+can understand why people are--unless, of course, they are Christians. I
+should be horribly frightened if I was one of them. But, you see, we
+both know that there is nothing beyond. It is life that I am frightened
+of--not death. Of course, I should be frightened if there was any pain;
+but the doctors tell me there is absolutely none. It is simply going to
+sleep. The nerves are dead before the brain. I am going to do it myself.
+I don't want any one else in the room. In a few minutes the nurse
+here--Sister Anne, with whom I have made great friends--will bring in
+the thing, and then she will leave me.
+
+"As regards what happens afterwards, I do not mind at all. Please do
+exactly what you wish. The cremation will take place to-morrow morning
+at noon, so that you can be here if you like. Or you can send
+directions, and they will send on the urn to you. I know you liked to
+have your mother's urn in the garden; so perhaps you will like mine.
+Please do exactly what you like. And with all my things too. Of course I
+leave them to you.
+
+"Now, my dear, I want to say this--that I am very sorry indeed now that
+I was so tiresome and stupid. I think I did really believe your
+arguments all along. But I did not want to believe them. Do you see now
+why I was so tiresome?
+
+"Oliver, my darling, you have been extraordinarily good to me.... Yes, I
+know I am crying, but I am really very happy. This is such a lovely
+ending. I wish I hadn't been obliged to make you so anxious during this
+last week: but I had to--I knew you would persuade me against it, if you
+found me, and that would have been worse than ever. I am sorry I told
+you that lie, too. Indeed, it is the first I ever did tell you.
+
+"Well, I don't think there is much more to say. Oliver, my dear,
+good-bye. I send you my love with all my heart.
+
+"MABEL."
+
+* * * * *
+
+She sat still when she had read it through, and her eyes were still wet
+with tears. Yet it was all perfectly true. She was far happier than she
+could be if she had still the prospect of going back. Life seemed
+entirely blank: death was so obvious an escape; her soul ached for it,
+as a body for sleep.
+
+She directed the envelope, still with a perfectly steady hand, laid it
+on the table, and leaned back once more, glancing again at her untasted
+breakfast.
+
+Then she suddenly began to think of her conversation with Mr. Francis;
+and, by a strange association of ideas, remembered the fall of the volor
+in Brighton, the busy-ness of the priest, and the Euthanasia boxes....
+
+When Sister Anne came in a few minutes later, she was astonished at what
+she saw. The girl crouched at the window, her hands on the sill, staring
+out at the sky in an attitude of unmistakable horror.
+
+Sister Anne came across the room quickly, setting down something on the
+table as she passed. She touched the girl on the shoulder.
+
+"My dear, what is it?"
+
+There was a long sobbing breath, and Mabel turned, rising as she turned,
+and clutched the nurse with one shaking hand, pointing out with the
+other.
+
+"There!" she said. "There--look!"
+
+"Well, my dear, what is it? I see nothing. It is a little dark!"
+
+"Dark!" said the other. "You call that dark! Why, why, it is
+black--black!"
+
+The nurse drew her softly backwards to the chair, turning her from the
+window. She recognised nervous fear; but no more than that. But Mabel
+tore herself free, and wheeled again.
+
+"You call that a little dark," she said. "Why, look, sister, look!"
+
+Yet there was nothing remarkable to be seen. In front rose up the
+feathery hand of an elm, then the shuttered windows across the court,
+the roof, and above that the morning sky, a little heavy and dusky as
+before a storm; but no more than that.
+
+"Well, what is it, my dear? What do you see?"
+
+"Why, why ... look! look!--There, listen to that."
+
+A faint far-away rumble sounded as the rolling of a waggon--so faint
+that it might almost be an aural delusion. But the girl's hands were at
+her ears, and her face was one white wide-eyed mask of terror. The nurse
+threw her arms round her.
+
+"My dear," she said, "you are not yourself. That is nothing but a little
+heat-thunder. Sit down quietly."
+
+She could feel the girl's body shaking beneath her hands, but there was
+no resistance as she drew her to the chair.
+
+"The lights! the lights!" sobbed Mabel.
+
+"Will you promise me to sit quietly, then?"
+
+She nodded; and the nurse went across to the door, smiling tenderly; she
+had seen such things before. A moment later the room was full of
+exquisite sunlight, as she switched the handle. As she turned, she saw
+that Mabel had wheeled herself round in the chair, and with clasped
+hands was still staring out at the sky above the roofs; but she was
+plainly quieter again now. The nurse came back, and put her hand on her
+shoulder.
+
+"You are overwrought, my dear.... Now you must believe me. There is
+nothing to be frightened of. It is just nervous excitement.... Shall I
+pull down the blind?"
+
+Mabel turned her face.... Yes, certainly the light had reassured her.
+Her face was still white and bewildered, but the steady look was coming
+back to her eyes, though, even as she spoke, they wandered back more
+than once to the window.
+
+"Nurse," she said more quietly, "please look again and tell me if you
+see nothing. If you say there is nothing I will believe that I am going
+mad. No; you must not touch the blind."
+
+No; there was nothing. The sky was a little dark, as if a blight were
+coming on; but there was hardly more than a veil of cloud, and the light
+was scarcely more than tinged with gloom. It was just such a sky as
+precedes a spring thunderstorm. She said so, clearly and firmly.
+
+Mabel's face steadied still more.
+
+"Very well, nurse.... Then---"
+
+She turned to the little table by the side on which Sister Anne had set
+down what she had brought into the room.
+
+"Show me, please."
+
+The nurse still hesitated.
+
+"Are you sure you are not too frightened, my dear? Shall I get you
+anything?"
+
+"I have no more to say," said Mabel firmly. "Show me, please."
+
+Sister Anne turned resolutely to the table.
+
+There rested upon it a white-enamelled box, delicately painted with
+flowers. From this box emerged a white flexible tube with a broad
+mouthpiece, fitted with two leather-covered steel clasps. From the side
+of the box nearest the chair protruded a little china handle.
+
+"Now, my dear," began the nurse quietly, watching the other's eyes turn
+once again to the window, and then back--"now, my dear, you sit there,
+as you are now. Your head right back, please. When you are ready, you
+put this over your mouth, and clasp the springs behind your head....
+So.... it works quite easily. Then you turn this handle, round that way,
+as far as it will go. And that is all."
+
+Mabel nodded. She had regained her self-command, and understood plainly
+enough, though even as she spoke once again her eyes strayed away to the
+window.
+
+"That is all," she said. "And what then?"
+
+The nurse eyed her doubtfully for a moment.
+
+"I understand perfectly," said Mabel. "And what then?"
+
+"There is nothing more. Breathe naturally. You will feel sleepy almost
+directly. Then you close your eyes, and that is all."
+
+Mabel laid the tube on the table and stood up. She was completely
+herself now.
+
+"Give me a kiss, sister," she said.
+
+The nurse nodded and smiled to her once more at the door. But Mabel
+hardly noticed it; again she was looking towards the window.
+
+"I shall come back in half-an-hour," said Sister Anne.
+
+Then her eyes caught a square of white upon the centre table. "Ah! that
+letter!" she said.
+
+"Yes," said the girl absently. "Please take it."
+
+The nurse took it up, glanced at the address, and again at Mabel. Still
+she hesitated.
+
+"In half-an-hour," she repeated. "There is no hurry at all. It doesn't
+take five minutes.... Good-bye, my dear."
+
+But Mabel was still looking out of the window, and made no answer.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+Mabel stood perfectly still until she heard the locking of the door and
+the withdrawal of the key. Then once more she went to the window and
+clasped the sill.
+
+From where she stood there was visible to her first the courtyard
+beneath, with its lawn in the centre, and a couple of trees growing
+there--all plain in the brilliant light that now streamed from her
+window, and secondly, above the roofs, a tremendous pall of ruddy black.
+It was the more terrible from the contrast. Earth, it seemed, was
+capable of light; heaven had failed.
+
+It appeared, too, that there was a curious stillness. The house was,
+usually, quiet enough at this hour: the inhabitants of that place were
+in no mood for bustle: but now it was more than quiet; it was deathly
+still: it was such a hush as precedes the sudden crash of the sky's
+artillery. But the moments went by, and there was no such crash: only
+once again there sounded a solemn rolling, as of some great wain far
+away; stupendously impressive, for with it to the girl's ears there
+seemed mingled a murmur of innumerable voices, ghostly crying and
+applause. Then again the hush settled down like wool.
+
+She had begun to understand now. The darkness and the sounds were not
+for all eyes and ears. The nurse had seen and heard nothing
+extraordinary, and the rest of the world of men saw and heard nothing.
+To them it was no more than the hint of a coming storm.
+
+Mabel did not attempt to distinguish between the subjective and the
+objective. It was nothing to her as to whether the sights and sounds
+were generated by her own brain or perceived by some faculty hitherto
+unknown. She seemed to herself to be standing already apart from the
+world which she had known; it was receding from her, or, rather, while
+standing where it had always done, it was melting, transforming itself,
+passing to some other mode of existence. The strangeness seemed no more
+strange than anything else than that ... that little painted box upon
+the table.
+
+Then, hardly knowing what she said, looking steadily upon that appalling
+sky, she began to speak....
+
+"O God!" she said. "If You are really there really there---"
+
+Her voice faltered, and she gripped the sill to steady herself. She
+wondered vaguely why she spoke so; it was neither intellect nor emotion
+that inspired her. Yet she continued....
+
+"O God, I know You are not there--of course You are not. But if You were
+there, I know what I would say to You. I would tell You how puzzled and
+tired I am. No--No--I need not tell You: You would know it. But I would
+say that I was very sorry for all this. Oh! You would know that too. I
+need not say anything at all. O God! I don't know what I want to say. I
+would like You to look after Oliver, of course, and all Your poor
+Christians. Oh! they will have such a hard time.... God. God--You would
+understand, wouldn't You?" ...
+
+* * * * *
+
+Again came the heavy rumble and the solemn bass of a myriad voices; it
+seemed a shade nearer, she thought.... She never liked thunderstorms or
+shouting crowds. They always gave her a headache ...
+
+"Well, well," she said. "Good-bye, everything---"
+
+Then she was in the chair. The mouthpiece--yes; that was it....
+
+She was furious at the trembling of her hands; twice the spring slipped
+from her polished coils of hair.... Then it was fixed ... and as if a
+breeze fanned her, her sense came back....
+
+She found she could breathe quite easily; there was no resistance--that
+was a comfort; there would be no suffocation about it.... She put out
+her left hand and touched the handle, conscious less of its sudden
+coolness than of the unbearable heat in which the room seemed almost
+suddenly plunged. She could hear the drumming pulses in her temples and
+the roaring of the voices.... She dropped the handle once more, and with
+both hands tore at the loose white wrapper that she had put on this
+morning....
+
+Yes, that was a little easier; she could breathe better so. Again her
+fingers felt for and found the handle, but the sweat streamed from her
+fingers, and for an instant she could not turn the knob. Then it yielded
+suddenly....
+
+* * * * *
+
+For one instant the sweet languid smell struck her consciousness like a
+blow, for she knew it as the scent of death. Then the steady will that
+had borne her so far asserted itself, and she laid her hands softly in
+her lap, breathing deeply and easily.
+
+She had closed her eyes at the turning of the handle, but now opened
+them again, curious to watch the aspect of the fading world. She had
+determined to do this a week ago: she would at least miss nothing of
+this unique last experience.
+
+It seemed at first that there was no change. There was the feathery head
+of the elm, the lead roof opposite, and the terrible sky above. She
+noticed a pigeon, white against the blackness, soar and swoop again out
+of sight in an instant....
+
+... Then the following things happened....
+
+There was a sudden sensation of ecstatic lightness in all her limbs; she
+attempted to lift a hand, and was aware that it was impossible; it was
+no longer hers. She attempted to lower her eyes from that broad strip of
+violet sky, and perceived that that too was impossible. Then she
+understood that the will had already lost touch with the body, that the
+crumbling world had receded to an infinite distance--that was as she had
+expected, but what continued to puzzle her was that her mind was still
+active. It was true that the world she had known had withdrawn itself
+from the dominion of consciousness, as her body had done, except, that
+was, in the sense of hearing, which was still strangely alert; yet there
+was still enough memory to be aware that there was such a world--that
+there were other persons in existence; that men went about their
+business, knowing nothing of what had happened; but faces, names,
+places had all alike gone. In fact, she was conscious of herself in such
+a manner as she had never been before; it seemed as if she had
+penetrated at last into some recess of her being into which hitherto she
+had only looked as through clouded glass. This was very strange, and yet
+it was familiar, too; she had arrived, it seemed, at a centre, round the
+circumference of which she had been circling all her life; and it was
+more than a mere point: it was a distinct space, walled and enclosed....
+At the same instant she knew that hearing, too, was gone....
+
+Then an amazing thing happened--yet it appeared to her that she had
+always known it would happen, although her mind had never articulated
+it. This is what happened.
+
+The enclosure melted, with a sound of breaking, and a limitless space
+was about her--limitless, different to everything else, and alive, and
+astir. It was alive, as a breathing, panting body is alive--self-evident
+and overpowering--it was one, yet it was many; it was immaterial, yet
+absolutely real--real in a sense in which she never dreamed of
+reality....
+
+Yet even this was familiar, as a place often visited in dreams is
+familiar; and then, without warning, something resembling sound or
+light, something which she knew in an instant to be unique, tore across
+it....
+
+* * * * *
+
+Then she saw, and understood....
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+I
+
+Oliver had passed the days since Mabel's disappearance in an
+indescribable horror. He had done all that was possible: he had traced
+her to the station and to Victoria, where he lost her clue; he had
+communicated with the police, and the official answer, telling him
+nothing, had arrived to the effect that there was no news: and it was
+not until the Tuesday following her disappearance that Mr. Francis,
+hearing by chance of his trouble, informed him by telephone that he had
+spoken with her on the Friday night. But there was no satisfaction to be
+got from him--indeed, the news was bad rather than good, for Oliver
+could not but be dismayed at the report of the conversation, in spite of
+Mr. Francis's assurances that Mrs. Brand had shown no kind of
+inclination to defend the Christian cause.
+
+Two theories gradually emerged, in his mind; either she was gone to the
+protection of some unknown Catholic, or--and he grew sick at the
+thought--she had applied somewhere for Euthanasia as she had once
+threatened, and was now under the care of the Law; such an event was
+sufficiently common since the passing of the Release Act in 1998. And it
+was frightful that he could not condemn it.
+
+* * * * *
+
+On the Tuesday evening, as he sat heavily in his room, for the hundredth
+time attempting to trace out some coherent line through the maze of
+intercourse he had had with his wife during these past months, his bell
+suddenly rang. It was the red label of Whitehall that had made its
+appearance; and for an instant his heart leaped with hope that it was
+news of her. But at the first words it sank again.
+
+"Brand," came the sharp fairy voice, "is that you?... Yes, I am
+Snowford. You are wanted at once--at once, you understand. There is an
+extraordinary meeting of the Council at twenty o'clock. The President
+will be there. You understand the urgency. No time for more. Come
+instantly to my room."
+
+* * * * *
+
+Even this message scarcely distracted him. He, with the rest of the
+world, was no longer surprised at the sudden descents of the President.
+He came and vanished again without warning, travelling and working with
+incredible energy, yet always, as it seemed, retaining his personal
+calm.
+
+It was already after nineteen; Oliver supped immediately, and a
+quarter-of-an-hour before the hour presented himself in Snowford's room,
+where half a dozen of his colleagues were assembled.
+
+That minister came forward to meet him, with a strange excitement in his
+face. He drew him aside by a button.
+
+"See here, Brand, you are wanted to speak first--immediately after the
+President's Secretary who will open; they are coming from Paris. It is
+about a new matter altogether. He has had information of the whereabouts
+of the Pope.... It seems that there is one.... Oh, you will understand
+presently. Oh, and by the way," he went on, looking curiously at the
+strained face, "I am sorry to hear of your anxiety. Pemberton told me
+just now."
+
+Oliver lifted a hand abruptly.
+
+"Tell me," he said. "What am I wanted to say?"
+
+"Well, the President will have a proposal, we imagine. You know our
+minds well enough. Just explain our attitude towards the Catholics."
+
+Oliver's eyes shrank suddenly to two bright lines beneath the lids. He
+nodded.
+
+Cartwright came up presently, an immense, bent old man with a face of
+parchment, as befitted the Lord Chief Justice.
+
+"By the way, Brand, what do you know of a man called Phillips? He seems
+to have mentioned your name."
+
+"He was my secretary," said Oliver slowly. "What about him?"
+
+"I think he must be mad. He has given himself up to a magistrate,
+entreating to be examined at once. The magistrate has applied for
+instructions. You see, the Act has scarcely begun to move yet."
+
+"But what has he done?"
+
+"That's the difficulty. He says he cannot deny God, neither can he
+affirm Him.--He was your secretary, then?"
+
+"Certainly. I knew he was inclined to Christianity. I had to get rid of
+him for that."
+
+"Well, he is to be remanded for a week. Perhaps he will be able to make
+up his mind."
+
+Then the talk shifted off again. Two or three more came up, and all eyed
+Oliver with a certain curiosity; the story was gone about that his wife
+had left him. They wished to see how he took it.
+
+At five minutes before the hour a bell rang, and the door into the
+corridor was thrown open.
+
+"Come, gentlemen," said the Prime Minister.
+
+The Council Chamber was a long high room on the first floor; its walls
+from floor to ceiling were lined with books. A noiseless rubber carpet
+was underfoot. There were no windows; the room was lighted artificially.
+A long table, set round with armed chairs, ran the length of the floor,
+eight on either side; and the Presidential chair, raised on a dais,
+stood at the head.
+
+Each man went straight to his chair in silence, and remained there,
+waiting.
+
+* * * * *
+
+The room was beautifully cool, in spite of the absence of windows, and
+was a pleasant contrast to the hot evening outside through which most of
+these men had come. They, too, had wondered at the surprising weather,
+and had smiled at the conflict of the infallible. But they were not
+thinking about that now: the coming of the President was a matter which
+always silenced the most loquacious. Besides, this time, they understood
+that the affair was more serious than usual.
+
+At one minute before the hour, again a bell sounded, four times, and
+ceased; and at the signal each man turned instinctively to the high
+sliding door behind the Presidential chair. There was dead silence
+within and without: the huge Government offices were luxuriously
+provided with sound-deadening apparatus, and not even the rolling of the
+vast motors within a hundred yards was able to send a vibration through
+the layers of rubber on which the walls rested. There was only one noise
+that could penetrate, and that the sound of thunder. The experts were at
+present unable to exclude this.
+
+Again the silence seemed to fall in one yet deeper veil. Then the door
+opened, and a figure came swiftly through, followed by Another in black
+and scarlet.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+He passed straight up to the chair, followed by two secretaries, bowed
+slightly to this side and that, sat down and made a little gesture. Then
+they, too, were in their chairs, upright and intent. For perhaps the
+hundredth time, Oliver, staring upon the President, marvelled at the
+quietness and the astounding personality of Him. He was in the English
+judicial dress that had passed down through centuries--black and scarlet
+with sleeves of white fur and a crimson sash--and that had lately been
+adopted as the English presidential costume of him who stood at the head
+of the legislature. But it was in His personality, in the atmosphere
+that flowed from Him, that the marvel lay. It was as the scent of the
+sea to the physical nature--it exhilarated, cleansed, kindled,
+intoxicated. It was as inexplicably attractive as a cherry orchard in
+spring, as affecting as the cry of stringed instruments, as compelling
+as a storm. So writers had said. They compared it to a stream of clear
+water, to the flash of a gem, to the love of woman. They lost all
+decency sometimes; they said it fitted all moods, as the voice of many
+waters; they called it again and again, as explicitly as possible, the
+Divine Nature perfectly Incarnate at last....
+
+Then Oliver's reflections dropped from him like a mantle, for the
+President, with downcast eyes and head thrown back, made a little
+gesture to the ruddy-faced secretary on His right; and this man, without
+a movement, began to speak like an impersonal actor repeating his part.
+
+* * * * *
+
+"Gentlemen," he said, in an even, resonant voice, "the President is come
+direct from Paris. This afternoon His Honour was in Berlin; this
+morning, early, in Moscow. Yesterday in New York. To-night His Honour
+must be in Turin; and to-morrow will begin to return through Spain,
+North Africa, Greece and the southeastern states."
+
+This was the usual formula for such speeches. The President spoke but
+little himself now; but was careful for the information of his subjects
+on occasions like this. His secretaries were perfectly trained, and this
+speaker was no exception. After a slight pause, he continued:
+
+"This is the business, gentlemen.
+
+"Last Thursday, as you are aware, the Plenipotentaries signed the Test
+Act in this room, and it was immediately communicated all over the
+world. At sixteen o'clock His Honour received a message from a man named
+Dolgorovski--who is, it is understood, one of the Cardinals of the
+Catholic Church. This he claimed; and on inquiry it was found to be a
+fact. His information confirmed what was already suspected--namely, that
+there was a man claiming to be Pope, who had created (so the phrase is)
+other cardinals, shortly after the destruction of Rome, subsequent to
+which his own election took place in Jerusalem. It appears that this
+Pope, with a good deal of statesmanship, has chosen to keep his own name
+and place of residence a secret from even his own followers, with the
+exception of the twelve cardinals; that he has done a great deal,
+through the instrumentality of one of his cardinals in particular, and
+through his new Order in general, towards the reorganisation of the
+Catholic Church; and that at this moment he is living, apart from the
+world, in complete security.
+
+"His Honour blames Himself that He did not do more than suspect
+something of the kind--misled, He thinks, by a belief that if there had
+been a Pope, news would have been heard of it from other quarters, for,
+as is well known, the entire structure of the Christian Church rests
+upon him as upon a rock. Further, His Honour thinks inquiries should
+have been made in the very place where now it is understood that this
+Pope is living.
+
+"The man's name, gentlemen, is Franklin---"
+
+Oliver started uncontrollably, but relapsed again to bright-eyed
+intelligence as for an instant the President glanced up from his
+motionlessness.
+
+"Franklin," repeated the secretary, "and he is living in Nazareth,
+where, it is said, the Founder of Christianity passed His youth.
+
+"Now this, gentlemen, His Honour heard on Thursday in last week. He
+caused inquiries to be made, and on Friday morning received further
+intelligence from Dolgorovski that this Pope had summoned to Nazareth a
+meeting of his cardinals, and certain other officials, from all over the
+world, to consider what steps should be taken in view of the new Test
+Act. This His Honour takes to show an extreme want of statesmanship
+which seems hard to reconcile with his former action. These persons are
+summoned by special messengers to meet on Saturday next, and will begin
+their deliberations after some Christian ceremonies on the following
+morning.
+
+"You wish, gentlemen, no doubt, to know Dolgorovski's motives in making
+all this known. His Honour is satisfied that they are genuine. The man
+has been losing belief in his religion; in fact, he has come to see that
+this religion is the supreme obstacle to the consolidation of the race.
+He has esteemed it his duty, therefore, to lay this information before
+His Honour. It is interesting as an historical parallel to reflect that
+the same kind of incident marked the rise of Christianity as will mark,
+it is thought, its final extinction--namely, the informing on the part
+of one of the leaders of the place and method by which the principal
+personage may be best approached. It is also, surely, very significant
+that the scene of the extinction of Christianity is identical with that
+of its inauguration....
+
+"Well, gentlemen, His Honour's proposal is as follows, carrying out the
+Declaration to which you all acceded. It is that a force should proceed
+during the night of Saturday next to Palestine, and on the Sunday
+morning, when these men will be all gathered together, that this force
+should finish as swiftly and mercifully as possible the work to which
+the Powers have set their hands. So far, the comment of the Governments
+which have been consulted has been unanimous, and there is little doubt
+that the rest will be equally so. His Honour felt that He could not act
+in on grave a matter on His own responsibility; it is not merely local;
+it is a catholic administration of justice, and will have results wider
+than it is safe minutely to prophesy.
+
+"It is not necessary to enter into His Honour's reasons. They are
+already well known to you; but before asking for your opinion, He
+desires me to indicate what He thinks, in the event of your approval,
+should be the method of action.
+
+"Each Government, it is proposed, should take part in the final scene,
+for it is something of a symbolic action; and for this purpose it is
+thought well that each of the three Departments of the World should
+depute volors, to the number of the constituting States, one hundred and
+twenty-two all told, to set about the business. These volors should have
+no common meeting-ground, otherwise the news will surely penetrate to
+Nazareth, for it is understood that, this new Order of Christ Crucified
+has a highly organised system of espionage. The rendezvous, then, should
+be no other than Nazareth itself; and the time of meeting should be, it
+is thought, not later than nine o'clock according to Palestine
+reckoning. These details, however, can be decided and communicated as
+soon as a determination has been formed as regards the entire scheme.
+
+"With respect to the exact method of carrying out the conclusion, His
+Honour is inclined to think it will be more merciful to enter into no
+negotiations with the persons concerned. An opportunity should be given
+to the inhabitants of the village to make their escape if they so desire
+it, and then, with the explosives that the force should carry, the end
+can be practically instantaneous.
+
+"For Himself, His Honour proposes to be there in person, and further
+that the actual discharge should take place from His own car. It seems
+but suitable that the world which has done His Honour the goodness to
+elect Him to its Presidentship should act through His hands; and this
+would be at least some slight token of respect to a superstition which,
+however infamous, is yet the one and only force capable of withstanding
+the true progress of man.
+
+"His Honour promises you, gentlemen, that in the event of this plan
+being carried out, we shall be no more troubled with Christianity.
+Already the moral effect of the Test Act has been prodigious. It is
+understood that, by tens of thousands, Catholics, numbering among them
+even members of this new fanatical Religious Order, have been renouncing
+their follies even in these few days; and a final blow struck now at the
+very heart and head of the Catholic Church, eliminating, as it would do,
+the actual body on which the entire organisation subsists, would render
+its resurrection impossible. It is a well-known fact that, granted the
+extinction of the line of Popes, together with those necessary for its
+continuance, there could be no longer any question amongst even the most
+ignorant that the claim of Jesus had ceased to be either reasonable or
+possible. Even the Order that has provided the sinews for this new
+movement must cease to exist.
+
+"Dolgorovski, of course, is the difficulty, for it is not certainly
+known whether one Cardinal would be considered sufficient for the
+propagation of the line; and, although reluctantly, His Honour feels
+bound to suggest that at the conclusion of the affair, Dolgorovski,
+also, who will not, of course, be with his fellows at Nazareth, should
+be mercifully removed from even the danger of a relapse....
+
+"His Honour, then, asks you, gentlemen, as briefly as possible, to state
+your views on the points of which I have had the privilege of speaking."
+
+The quiet business-like voice ceased.
+
+He had spoken throughout in the manner with which he had begun; his eyes
+had been downcast throughout; his voice had been tranquil and
+restrained. His deportment had been admirable.
+
+There was an instant's silence, and all eyes settled steadily again upon
+the motionless figure in black and scarlet and the ivory face.
+
+Then Oliver stood up. His face was as white as paper; his eyes bright
+and dilated.
+
+"Sir," he said, "I have no doubt that we are all of one mind. I need say
+no more than that, so far as I am a representative of my colleagues, we
+assent to the proposal, and leave all details in your Honour's hands."
+
+The President lifted his eyes, and ran them swiftly along the rigid
+faces turned to him.
+
+Then, in the breathless hush, he spoke for the first time in his strange
+voice, now as passionless as a frozen river.
+
+"Is there any other proposal?"
+
+There was a murmur of assent as the men rose to their feet.
+
+"Thank you, gentlemen," said the secretary.
+
+
+
+III
+
+It was a little before seven o'clock on the morning of Saturday that
+Oliver stepped out of the motor that had carried him to Wimbledon
+Common, and began to go up the steps of the old volor-stage, abandoned
+five years ago. It had been thought better, in view of the extreme
+secrecy that was to be kept, that England's representative in the
+expedition should start from a comparatively unknown point, and this old
+stage, in disuse now, except for occasional trials of new Government
+machines, had been selected. Even the lift had been removed, and it was
+necessary to climb the hundred and fifty steps on foot.
+
+It was with a certain unwillingness that he had accepted this post among
+the four delegates, for nothing had been heard of his wife, and it was
+terrible to him to leave London while her fate was as yet doubtful. On
+the whole, he was less inclined than ever now to accept the Euthanasia
+theory; he had spoken to one or two of her friends, all of whom declared
+that she had never even hinted at such an end. And, again, although he
+was well aware of the eight-day law in the matter, even if she had
+determined on such a step there was nothing to show that she was yet in
+England, and, in fact, it was more than likely that if she were bent on
+such an act she would go abroad for it, where laxer conditions
+prevailed. In short, it seemed that he could do no good by remaining in
+England, and the temptation to be present at the final act of justice in
+the East by which land, and, in fact, it was more than likely that if
+she were to be wiped out, and Franklin, too, among them--Franklin, that
+parody of the Lord of the World--this, added to the opinion of his
+colleagues in the Government, and the curious sense, never absent from
+him now, that Felsenburgh's approval was a thing to die for if
+necessary--these things had finally prevailed. He left behind him at
+home his secretary, with instructions that no expense was to be spared
+in communicating with him should any news of his wife arrive during his
+absence.
+
+It was terribly hot this morning, and, by the time that he reached the
+top he noticed that the monster in the net was already fitted into its
+white aluminium casing, and that the fans within the corridor and saloon
+were already active. He stepped inside to secure a seat in the saloon,
+set his bag down, and after a word or two with the guard, who, of
+course, had not yet been informed of their destination, learning that
+the others were not yet come, he went out again on to the platform for
+coolness' sake, and to brood in peace.
+
+London looked strange this morning, he thought. Here beneath him was the
+common, parched somewhat with the intense heat of the previous week,
+stretching for perhaps half-a-mile--tumbled ground, smooth stretches of
+turf, and the heads of heavy trees up to the first house-roofs, set,
+too, it seemed, in bowers of foliage. Then beyond that began the serried
+array, line beyond line, broken in one spot by the gleam of a
+river-reach, and then on again fading beyond eyesight. But what
+surprised him was the density of the air; it was now, as old books
+related it had been in the days of smoke. There was no freshness, no
+translucence of morning atmosphere; it was impossible to point in any
+one direction to the source of this veiling gloom, for on all sides it
+was the same. Even the sky overhead lacked its blue; it appeared painted
+with a muddy brush, and the sun shewed the same faint tinge of red. Yes,
+it was like that, he said wearily to himself--like a second-rate sketch;
+there was no sense of mystery as of a veiled city, but rather unreality.
+The shadows seemed lacking in definiteness, the outlines and grouping in
+coherence. A storm was wanted, he reflected; or even, it might be, one
+more earthquake on the other side of the world would, in wonderful
+illustration of the globe's unity, relieve the pressure on this side.
+Well, well; the journey would be worth taking even for the interest of
+observing climatic changes; but it would be terribly hot, he mused, by
+the time the south of France was reached.
+
+Then his thoughts leaped back to their own gnawing misery.
+
+* * * * *
+
+It was another ten minutes before he saw the scarlet Government motor,
+with awnings out, slide up the road from the direction of Fulham; and
+yet five minutes more before the three men appeared with their servants
+behind them--Maxwell, Snowford and Cartwright, all alike, as was Oliver,
+in white duck from head to foot.
+
+They did not speak one word of their business, for the officials were
+going to and fro, and it was advisable to guard against even the
+smallest possibility of betrayal. The guard had been told that the volor
+was required for a three days' journey, that provisions were to be taken
+in for that period, and that the first point towards which the course
+was to lie was the centre of the South Downs. There would be no stopping
+for at least a day and a night.
+
+Further instructions had reached them from the President on the previous
+morning, by which time He had completed His visitation, and received the
+assent of the Emergency Councils of the world. This Snowford commented
+upon in an undertone, and added a word or two as to details, as the four
+stood together looking out over the city.
+
+Briefly, the plan was as follows, at least so far as it concerned
+England. The volor was to approach Palestine from the direction of the
+Mediterranean, observing to get into touch with France on her left and
+Spain on her right within ten miles of the eastern end of Crete. The
+approximate hour was fixed at twenty-three (eastern time). At this point
+she was to show her night signal, a scarlet line on a white field; and
+in the event of her failing to observe her neighbours was to circle at
+that point, at a height of eight hundred feet, until either the two were
+sighted or further instructions were received. For the purpose of
+dealing with emergencies, the President's car, which would finally make
+its entrance from the south, was to be accompanied by an _aide-de-camp_
+capable of moving at a very high speed, whose signals were to be taken
+as Felsenburgh's own.
+
+So soon as the circle was completed, having Esdraelon as its centre with
+a radius of five hundred and forty miles, the volors were to advance,
+dropping gradually to within five hundred feet of sea-level, and
+diminishing their distance one from another from the twenty-five miles
+or so at which they would first find themselves, until they were as near
+as safety allowed. In this manner the advance at a pace of fifty miles
+an hour from the moment that the circle was arranged would bring them
+within sight of Nazareth at about nine o'clock on the Sunday morning.
+
+* * * * *
+
+The guard came up to the four as they stood there silent.
+
+"We are ready, gentlemen," he said.
+
+"What do you think of the weather?" asked Snowford abruptly.
+
+The guard pursed his lips.
+
+"A little thunder, I expect, sir," he said.
+
+Oliver looked at him curiously.
+
+"No more than that?" he asked.
+
+"I should say a storm, sir," observed the guard shortly.
+
+Snowford turned towards the gangway.
+
+"Well, we had best be off: we can lose time further on, if we wish."
+
+It was about five minutes more before all was ready. From the stern of
+the boat came a faint smell of cooking, for breakfast would be served
+immediately, and a white-capped cook protruded his head for an instant,
+to question the guard. The four sat down in the gorgeous saloon in the
+bows; Oliver silent by himself, the other three talking in low voices
+together. Once more the guard passed through to his compartment at the
+prow, glancing as he went to see that all were seated; and an instant
+later came the clang of the signal. Then through all the length of the
+boat--for she was the fastest ship that England possessed--passed the
+thrill of the propeller beginning to work up speed; and simultaneously
+Oliver, staring sideways through the plate-glass window, saw the rail
+drop away, and the long line of London, pale beneath the tinged sky,
+surge up suddenly. He caught a glimpse of a little group of persons
+staring up from below, and they, too, dropped in a great swirl, and
+vanished. Then, with a flash of dusty green, the Common had vanished,
+and a pavement of house-roofs began to stream beneath, the long lines of
+streets on this side and that turning like spokes of a gigantic wheel;
+once more this pavement thinned, showing green again as between
+infrequently laid cobble-stones; then they, too, were gone, and the
+country was open beneath.
+
+Snowford rose, staggering a little.
+
+"I may as well tell the guard now," he said. "Then we need not be
+interrupted again."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+I
+
+The Syrian awoke from a dream that a myriad faces were looking into his
+own, eager, attentive and horrible, in his corner of the roof-top, and
+sat up sweating and gasping aloud for breath. For an instant he thought
+that he was really dying, and that the spiritual world was about him.
+Then, as he struggled, sense came back, and he stood up, drawing long
+breaths of the stifling night air.
+
+Above him the sky was as the pit, black and empty; there was not a
+glimmer of light, though the moon was surely up. He had seen her four
+hours before, a red sickle, swing slowly out from Thabor. Across the
+plain, as he looked from the parapet, there was nothing. For a few yards
+there lay across the broken ground a single crooked lance of light from
+a half-closed shutter; and beneath that, nothing. To the north again,
+nothing; to the west a glimmer, pale as a moth's wing, from the
+house-roofs of Nazareth; to the east, nothing. He might be on a
+tower-top in space, except for that line of light and that grey glimmer
+that evaded the eye.
+
+On the roof, however, it was possible to make out at least outlines, for
+the dormer trap had been left open at the head of the stairs, and from
+somewhere within the depths of the house there stole up a faint
+refracted light.
+
+There was a white bundle in that corner; that would be the pillow of the
+Benedictine abbot. He had seen him lay himself down there some time--was
+it four hours or four centuries ago? There was a grey shape stretched
+along that pale wall--the Friar, he thought; there were other irregular
+outlines breaking the face of the parapet, here and there along the
+sides.
+
+Very softly, for he knew the caprices of sleep, he stepped across the
+paved roof to the opposite parapet and looked over, for there yet hung
+about him a desire for reassurance that he was still in company with
+flesh and blood. Yes, indeed he was still on earth; for there was a real
+and distinct light burning among the tumbled rocks, and beside it,
+delicate as a miniature, the head and shoulders of a man, writing. And
+in the circle of light were other figures, pale, broken patches on which
+men lay; a pole or two, erected with the thought of a tent to follow; a
+little pile of luggage with a rug across it; and beyond the circle other
+outlines and shapes faded away into the stupendous blackness.
+
+Then the writing man moved his head, and a monstrous shadow fled across
+the ground; a yelp as of a strangling dog broke out suddenly close
+behind him, and, as he turned, a moaning figure sat up on the roof,
+sobbing itself awake. Another moved at the sound, and then as, sighing,
+the former relapsed heavily against the wall, once more the priest went
+back to his place, still doubtful as to the reality of all that he saw,
+and the breathless silence came down again as a pall.
+
+* * * * *
+
+He woke again from dreamless sleep, and there was a change. From his
+corner, as he raised his heavy eyes, there met them what seemed an
+unbearable brightness; then, as he looked, it resolved itself into a
+candle-flame, and beyond it a white sleeve, and higher yet a white face
+and throat. He understood, and rose reeling; it was the messenger come
+to fetch him as had been arranged.
+
+As he passed across the space, once he looked round him, and it seemed
+that the dawn must have come, for that appalling sky overhead was
+visible at last. An enormous vault, smoke-coloured and opaque, seemed to
+curve away to the ghostly horizons on either side where the far-away
+hills raised sharp shapes as if cut in paper. Carmel was before him; at
+least he thought it was that--a bull head and shoulders thrusting itself
+forward and ending in an abrupt descent, and beyond that again the
+glimmering sky. There were no clouds, no outlines to break the huge,
+smooth, dusky dome beneath the centre of which this house-roof seemed
+poised. Across the parapet, as he glanced to the right before descending
+the steps, stretched Esdraelon, sad-coloured and sombre, into the
+metallic distance. It was all as unreal as some fantastic picture by one
+who had never looked upon clear sunlight. The silence was complete and
+profound.
+
+Straight down through the wheeling shadows he went, following the
+white-hooded head and figure down the stairs, along the tiny passage,
+stumbling once against the feet of one who slept with limbs tossed loose
+like a tired dog; the feet drew back mechanically, and a little moan
+broke from the shadows. Then he went on, passing the servant who stood
+aside, and entered.
+
+There were half-a-dozen men gathered here, silent, white figures
+standing apart one from the other, who genuflected as the Pope came in
+simultaneously through the opposite door, and again stood white-faced
+and attentive. He ran his eyes over them as he stopped, waiting behind
+his master's chair--there were two he knew, remembering them from last
+night--dark-faced Cardinal Ruspoli, and the lean Australian Archbishop,
+besides Cardinal Corkran, who stood by his chair at the Pope's own
+table, with papers laid ready.
+
+Silvester sat down, and with a little gesture caused the others to sit
+too. Then He began at once in that quiet tired voice that his servant
+knew so well.
+
+"Eminences-we are all here, I think. We need lose no more time, then....
+Cardinal Corkran has something to communicate---" He turned a little.
+"Father, sit down, if you please. This will occupy a little while."
+
+The priest went across to the stone window-seat, whence he could watch
+the Pope's face in the light of the two candles that now stood on the
+table between him and the Cardinal-Secretary. Then the Cardinal began,
+glancing up from his papers.
+
+"Holiness. I had better begin a little way back. Their Eminences have
+not heard the details properly....
+
+"I received at Damascus, on last Friday week, inquiries from various
+prelates in different parts of the world, as to the actual measure
+concerning the new policy of persecution. At first I could tell them
+nothing positively, for it was not until after twenty o'clock that
+Cardinal Ruspoli, in Turin, informed me of the facts. Cardinal Malpas
+confirmed them a few minutes later, and the Cardinal Archbishop of Pekin
+at twenty-three. Before mid-day on Saturday I received final
+confirmation from my messengers in London.
+
+"I was at first surprised that Cardinal Dolgorovski did not communicate
+it; for almost simultaneously with the Turin message I received one from
+a priest of the Order of Christ Crucified in Moscow, to which, of
+course, I paid no attention. (It is our rule, Eminences, to treat
+unauthorised communications in that way.) His Holiness, however, bade me
+make inquiries, and I learned from Father Petrovoski and others that the
+Government placards published the news at twenty o'clock--by our time.
+It was curious, therefore, that the Cardinal had not seen it; if he had
+seen it, it was, of course, his duty to acquaint me immediately.
+
+"Since that time, however, the following facts have come out. It is
+established beyond a doubt that Cardinal Dolgorovski received a visitor
+in the course of the evening. His own chaplain, who, your Eminences are
+perhaps aware, has been very active in Russia on behalf of the Church,
+informs me of this privately. Yet the Cardinal asserts, in explanation
+of his silence, that he was alone during those hours, and had given
+orders that no one was to be admitted to his presence without urgent
+cause. This, of course, confirmed His Holiness's opinion, but I received
+orders from Him to act as if nothing had happened, and to command the
+Cardinal's presence here with the rest of the Sacred College. To this I
+received an intimation that he would be present. Yesterday, however, a
+little before mid-day, I received a further message that his Eminency
+had met with a slight accident, but that he yet hoped to present himself
+in time for the deliberations. Since then no further news has arrived."
+
+There was a dead silence.
+
+Then the Pope turned to the Syrian priest.
+
+"Father," he said, "it was you who received his Eminency's messages.
+Have you anything to add to this?"
+
+"No, Holiness."
+
+He turned again.
+
+"My son," he said, "report to Us publicly what you have already
+reported to Us in private."
+
+A small, bright-eyed man moved out of the shadows.
+
+"Holiness, it was I who conveyed the message to Cardinal Dolgorovski. He
+refused at first to receive me. When I reached his presence and
+communicated the command he was silent; then he smiled; then he told me
+to carry back the message that he would obey."
+
+Again the Pope was silent.
+
+Then suddenly the tall Australian stood up.
+
+"Holiness," he said, "I was once intimate with that man. It was partly
+through my means that he sought reception into the Catholic Church. This
+was not less than fourteen years ago, when the fortunes of the Church
+seemed about to prosper.... Our friendly relations ceased two years ago,
+and I may say that, from what I know of him, I find no difficulty in
+believing---"
+
+As his voice shook with passion and he faltered, Silvester raised his
+hand.
+
+"We desire no recriminations. Even the evidence is now useless, for what
+was to be done has been done. For ourselves, we have no doubt as to its
+nature.... It was to this man that Christ gave the morsel through our
+hands, saying _Quod faces, fac cities. Cum ergo accepisset Me buccellam,
+exivit continuo. Erat autem nox._"
+
+Again fell the silence, and in the pause sounded a long half-vocal sigh
+from without the door. It came and went as a sleeper turned, for the
+passage was crowded with exhausted men--as a soul might sigh that passed
+from light to darkness.
+
+Then Silvester spoke again. And as He spoke He began, as if
+mechanically, to tear up a long paper, written with lists of names, that
+lay before Him.
+
+"Eminences, it is three hours after dawn. In two hours more We shall say
+mass in your presence, and give Holy Communion. During those two hours
+We commission you to communicate this news to all who are assembled
+here; and further, We bestow on each and all of you jurisdiction apart
+from all previous rules of time and place; we give a Plenary Indulgence
+to all who confess and communicate this day. Father--" he turned to the
+Syrian--"Father, you will now expose the Blessed Sacrament in the
+chapel, after which you will proceed to the village and inform the
+inhabitants that if they wish to save their lives they had best be gone
+immediately--immediately, you understand."
+
+The Syrian started from his daze.
+
+"Holiness," he stammered, stretching out a hand, "the lists, the lists!"
+
+(He had seen what these were.)
+
+But Silvester only smiled as He tossed the fragments on to the table.
+Then He stood up.
+
+"You need not trouble, my son.... We shall not need these any more....
+
+"One last word, Eminences.... If there is one heart here that doubts or
+is afraid, I have a word to say."
+
+He paused, with an extraordinarily simple deliberateness, ran the eyes
+round the tense faces turned to Him.
+
+"I have had a Vision of God," He said softly. "I walk no more by faith,
+but by sight."
+
+
+
+II
+
+An hour later the priest toiled back in the hot twilight up the path
+from the village, followed by half-a-dozen silent men, twenty yards
+behind, whose curiosity exceeded their credulousness. He had left a few
+more standing bewildered at the doors of the little mud-houses; and had
+seen perhaps a hundred families, weighted with domestic articles, pour
+like a stream down the rocky path that led to Khaifa. He had been cursed
+by some, even threatened; stared upon by others; mocked by a few. The
+fanatical said that the Christians had brought God's wrath upon the
+place, and the darkness upon the sky: the sun was dying, for these
+hounds were too evil for him to look upon and live. Others again seemed
+to see nothing remarkable in the state of the weather....
+
+There was no change in that sky from its state an hour before, except
+that perhaps it had lightened a little as the sun climbed higher behind
+that impenetrable dusky shroud. Hills, grass, men's faces--all bore to
+the priest's eyes the look of unreality; they were as things seen in a
+dream by eyes that roll with sleep through lids weighted with lead. Even
+to other physical senses that unreality was present; and once more he
+remembered his dream, thankful that that horror at least was absent. But
+silence seemed other than a negation of sound, it was a thing in itself,
+an affirmation, unruffled by the sound of footsteps, the thin barking of
+dogs, the murmur of voices. It appeared as if the stillness of eternity
+had descended and embraced the world's activities, and as if that world,
+in a desperate attempt to assert its own reality, was braced in a set,
+motionless, noiseless, breathless effort to hold itself in being. What
+Silvester had said just now was beginning to be true of this man also.
+The touch of the powdery soil and the warm pebbles beneath the priest's
+bare feet seemed something apart from the consciousness that usually
+regards the things of sense as more real and more intimate than the
+things of spirit. Matter still had a reality, still occupied space, but
+it was of a subjective nature, the result of internal rather than
+external powers. He appeared to himself already to be scarcely more than
+a soul, intent and steady, united by a thread only to the body and the
+world with which he was yet in relations. He knew that the appalling
+heat was there; once even, before his eyes a patch of beaten ground
+cracked and lisped as water that touches hot iron, as he trod upon it.
+He could feel the heat upon his forehead and hands, his whole body was
+swathed and soaked in it; yet he regarded it as from an outside
+standpoint, as a man with neuritis perceives that the pain is no longer
+in his hand but in the pillow which supports it. So, too, with what his
+eyes looked upon and his ears heard; so, too, with that faint bitter
+taste that lay upon his lips and nostrils. There was no longer in him
+fear or even hope--he regarded himself, the world, and even the
+enshrouding and awful Presence of spirit as facts with which he had but
+little to do. He was scarcely even interested; still less was he
+distressed. There was Thabor before him--at least what once had been
+Thabor, now it was no more than a huge and dusky dome-shape which
+impressed itself upon his retina and informed his passive brain of its
+existence and outline, though that existence seemed no better than that
+of a dissolving phantom.
+
+It seemed then almost natural--or at least as natural as all else--as he
+came in through the passage and opened the chapel-door, to see that the
+floor was crowded with prostrate motionless figures. There they lay, all
+alike in the white burnous which he had given out last night; and, with
+forehead on arms, as during the singing of the Litany of the Saints at
+an ordination, lay the figure he knew best and loved more than all the
+world, the shoulders and white hair at a slight elevation upon the
+single altar step. Above the plain altar itself burned the six tall
+candles; and in the midst, on the mean little throne, stood the
+white-metal monstrance, with its White Centre....
+
+Then he, too, dropped, and lay as he was....
+
+* * * * *
+
+He did not know how long it was before the circling observant
+consciousness, the flow of slow images, the vibration of particular
+thoughts, ceased and stilled as a pool rocks quietly to peace after the
+dropped stone has long lain still. But it came at last--that superb
+tranquillity, possible only when the senses are physically awake, with
+which God, perhaps once in a lifetime, rewards the aspiring trustful
+soul--that point of complete rest in the heart of the Fount of all
+existence with which one day He will reward eternally the spirits of His
+children. There was no thought in him of articulating this experience,
+of analysing its elements, or fingering this or that strain of ecstatic
+joy. The time for self-regarding was passed. It was enough that the
+experience was there, although he was not even self-reflective enough to
+tell himself so. He had passed from that circle whence the soul looks
+within, from that circle, too, whence it looks upon objective glory, to
+that very centre where it reposes--and the first sign to him that time
+had passed was the murmur of words, heard distinctly and understood,
+although with that apartness with which a drowsy man perceives a message
+from without--heard as through a veil through which nothing but thinnest
+essence could transpire.
+
+_Spiritus Domini replevit orbem terrarum.... The Spirit of the Lord hath
+fulfilled all things, alleluia: and that which contains all things hath
+knowledge of the voice, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia._
+
+_Exsurgat Deus_ (and the voice rose ever so slightly). "_Let God arise
+and let His enemies be scattered; and let them who hate Him flee before
+His face._"
+
+_Gloria Patri...._
+
+Then he raised his heavy head; and a phantom figure stood there in red
+vestments, seeming to float rather than to stand, with thin hands
+outstretched, and white cap on white hair seen in the gleam of the
+steady candle-flames; another, also in white, kneeled on the step....
+
+_Kyrie eleison ... Gloria in excelsis Deo ..._ those things passed like
+a shadow-show, with movements and rustlings, but he perceived rather the
+light which cast them. He heard _Deus qui in hodierna die ..._ but his
+passive mind gave no pulse of reflex action, no stir of understanding
+until these words. _Cum complerentur dies Pentecostes...._
+
+"_When the day of Pentecost was fully come, all the disciples were with
+one accord in the same place; and there came from heaven suddenly a
+sound, as of a mighty wind approaching, and it filled the house where
+they were sitting...._"
+
+Then he remembered and understood.... It was Pentecost then! And with
+memory a shred of reflection came back. Where then was the wind, and the
+flame, and the earthquake, and the secret voice? Yet the world was
+silent, rigid in its last effort at self-assertion: there was no tremor
+to show that God remembered; no actual point of light, yet, breaking the
+appalling vault of gloom that lay over sea and land to reveal that He
+burned there in eternity, transcendent and dominant; not even a voice;
+and at that he understood yet more. He perceived that that world, whose
+monstrous parody his sleep had presented to him in the night, was other
+than that he had feared it to be; it was sweet, not terrible; friendly,
+not hostile; clear, not stifling; and home, not exile. There were
+presences here, but not those gluttonous, lustful things that had looked
+on him last night.... He dropped his head again upon his hands, at once
+ashamed and content; and again he sank down to depths of glimmering
+inner peace....
+
+* * * * *
+
+Not again, for a while, did he perceive what he did or thought, or what
+passed there, five yards away on the low step. Once only a ripple passed
+across that sea of glass, a ripple of fire and sound like a rising star
+that flicks a line of light across a sleeping lake, like a thin thread
+of vibration streaming from a quivering string across the stillness of a
+deep night--and be perceived for an instant as in a formless mirror that
+a lower nature was struck into existence and into union with the Divine
+nature at the same moment.... And then no more again but the great
+encompassing hush, the sense of the innermost heart of reality, till he
+found himself kneeling at the rail, and knew that That which alone truly
+existed on earth approached him with the swiftness of thought and the
+ardour of Divine Love....
+
+Then, as the mass ended, and he raised his passive happy soul to receive
+the last gift of God, there was a cry, a sudden clamour in the passage,
+and a man stood in the doorway, gabbling Arabic.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+Yet even at that sound and sight his soul scarcely tightened the languid
+threads that united it through every fibre of his body with the world of
+sense. He saw and heard the tumult in the passage, frantic eyes and
+mouths crying aloud, and, in strange contrast, the pale ecstatic faces
+of those princes who turned and looked; even within the tranquil
+presence-chamber of the spirit where two beings, Incarnate God and all
+but Discarnate Man, were locked in embrace, a certain mental process
+went on. Yet all was still as apart from him as a lighted stage and its
+drama from a self-contained spectator. In the material world, now as
+attenuated as a mirage, events were at hand; but to his soul, balanced
+now on reality and awake to facts, these things were but a spectacle....
+
+He turned to the altar again, and there, as he had known it would be, in
+the midst of clear light, all was at peace: the celebrant, seen as
+through molten glass, adored as He murmured the mystery of the
+Word-made-Flesh, and once more passing to the centre, sank upon His
+knees.
+
+Again the priest understood; for thought was no longer the process of a
+mind, rather it was the glance of a spirit. He knew all now; and, by an
+inevitable impulse, his throat began to sing aloud words that, as he
+sang, opened for the first time as flowers telling their secret to the
+sun.
+
+_O Salutaris Hostia
+Qui coeli pandis ostium. . . ._
+
+They were all singing now; even the Mohammedan catechumen who had burst
+in a moment ago sang with the rest, his lean head thrust out and his
+arms tight across his breast; the tiny chapel rang with the forty
+voices, and the vast world thrilled to hear it....
+
+Still singing, the priest saw the veil laid as by a phantom upon the
+Pontiff's shoulders; there was a movement, a surge of figures--shadows
+only in the midst of substance,
+
+_... Uni Trinoque Domino ...._
+
+--and the Pope stood erect, Himself a pallor in the heart of light, with
+spectral folds of silk dripping from His shoulders, His hands swathed in
+them, and His down-bent head hidden by the silver-rayed monstrance and
+That which it bore....
+
+_... Qui vitam sine termino
+Nobis donet in patria ...._
+
+... They were moving now, and the world of life swung with them; of so
+much was he aware. He was out in the passage, among the white, frenzied
+faces that with bared teeth stared up at that sight, silenced at last by
+the thunder of _Pange Lingua_, and the radiance of those who passed out
+to eternal life.... At the corner he turned for an instant to see the
+six pale flames move along a dozen yards behind, as spear-heads about a
+King, and in the midst the silver rays and the White Heart of God....
+Then he was out, and the battle lay in array....
+
+That sky on which he had looked an hour ago had passed from darkness
+charged with light to light overlaid with darkness--from glimmering
+night to Wrathful Day--and that light was red....
+
+From behind Thabor on the left to Carmel on the far right, above the
+hills twenty miles away rested an enormous vault of colour; here were no
+gradations from zenith to horizon; all was the one deep smoulder of
+crimson as of the glow of iron. It was such a colour as men have seen at
+sunsets after rain, while the clouds, more translucent each instant,
+transmit the glory they cannot contain. Here, too, was the sun, pale as
+the Host, set like a fragile wafer above the Mount of Transfiguration,
+and there, far down in the west where men had once cried upon Baal in
+vain, hung the sickle of the white moon. Yet all was no more than
+stained light that lies broken across carven work of stone....
+
+_... In suprema nocte coena,_
+
+sang the myriad voices,
+
+_Recumbens cum fratribus
+Observata lege plena
+Cibis in legalibus
+Cibum turbae duodenae
+Se dat suis manibus ...._
+
+He saw, too, poised as motes in light, that ring of strange
+fish-creatures, white as milk, except where the angry glory turned their
+backs to flame, white-winged like floating moths, from the tiny shape
+far to the south to the monster at hand scarcely five hundred yards
+away; and even as he looked, singing as he looked, he understood that
+the circle was nearer, and perceived that these as yet knew nothing....
+
+_Verbum caro, panem verum
+Verbo carnem efficit ....
+
+They were nearer still, until now even at his feet there slid along the
+ground the shadow of a monstrous bird, pale and undefined, as between
+the wan sun and himself moved out the vast shape that a moment ago hung
+above the Hill.... Then again it backed across and waited ...
+
+_Et si census deficit
+Ad formandum cor sincerum
+Sola fides sufficit ...._
+
+He had halted and turned, going in the midst of his fellows, hearing,
+he thought, the thrill of harping and the throb of heavenly drums; and,
+across the space, moved now the six flames, steady as if cut of steel in
+that stupendous poise of heaven and earth; and in their centre the
+silver-rayed glory and the Whiteness of God made Man....
+
+... Then, with a roar, came the thunder again, pealing in circle beyond
+circle of those tremendous Presences--Thrones and Powers--who,
+themselves to the world as substance to shadow, are but shadows again
+beneath the apex and within the ring of Absolute Deity.... The thunder
+broke loose, shaking the earth that now cringed on the quivering edge of
+dissolution....
+
+TANTUM ERGO SACRAMENTUM
+VENEREMUR CERNUI
+ET ANTIQUUM DOCUMENTUM
+NOVO CEDAT RITUI.
+
+Ah! yes; it was He for whom God waited now--He who far up beneath that
+trembling shadow of a dome, itself but the piteous core of unimagined
+splendour, came in His swift chariot, blind to all save that on which He
+had fixed His eyes so long, unaware that His world corrupted about Him,
+His shadow moving like a pale cloud across the ghostly plain where
+Israel had fought and Sennacherib boasted--that plain lighted now with a
+yet deeper glow, as heaven, kindling to glory beyond glory of yet
+fiercer spiritual flame, still restrained the power knit at last to the
+relief of final revelation, and for the last time the voices sang....
+
+PRAESTET FIDES SUPPLEMENTUM
+SENSUUM DEFECTUI ....
+
+... He was coming now, swifter than ever, the heir of temporal ages and
+the Exile of eternity, the final piteous Prince of rebels, the creature
+against God, blinder than the sun which paled and the earth that shook;
+and, as He came, passing even then through the last material stage to
+the thinness of a spirit-fabric, the floating circle swirled behind Him,
+tossing like phantom birds in the wake of a phantom ship.... He was
+coming, and the earth, rent once again in its allegiance, shrank and
+reeled in the agony of divided homage....
+
+... He was coming--and already the shadow swept off the plain and
+vanished, and the pale netted wings were rising to the cheek; and the
+great bell clanged, and the long sweet chord rang out--not more than
+whispers heard across the pealing storm of everlasting praise....
+
+.... GENITORI GENITOQUE
+LAUS ET JUBILATIO
+SALUS HONOR VIRTUS QUOQUE
+SIT ET BENEDICTIO
+PROCEDENTI AB UTROQUE
+COMPAR SIT LAUDATIO.
+
+and once more
+
+PROCEDENTI AB UTROQUE
+COMPAR SIT LAUDATIO ....
+
+Then this world passed, and the glory of it.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Lord of the World, by Robert Hugh Benson
+
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