War in Heaven - Charles Williams (reading the story of the .TXT) 📗

about Christianity and the League of Nations. And even then, when they were settled in the garden, he found that by the accident of conversation the priest was already chatting about the deleted paragraph of Sacred Vessels in Folklore.

“Who?” he asked suddenly, arrested by a name.

“Persimmons,” the Archdeacon answered. “I wonder if he had anything to do with your firm. I seem to remember seeing him the day I called on you.”

“But if it’s the man who’s taken a house near here called Mullins or Juggins or something, of course he’s something to do with our firm,” Mornington cried. “He’s Stephen’s father; he used to be the firm. Does he live at Buggins?”

“He lives at Cully,” the Archdeacon said, “which may be what you mean.”

“But how do you know he wanted the paragraph out?” Kenneth demanded.

“Because Sir Giles told me so—confirmed by the fact that he tried to cheat me out of the Graal, and the other fact that he eventually had me knocked on the head and took it,” answered the Archdeacon.

Kenneth looked at him, looked at the garden, looked across at the church. “I am not mad,” he murmured, “‘My pulse doth temperately keep time.’… Yes, it does. ‘These are the thingummybobs, you are my what d’ye call it.’ But that a retired publisher should knock an Archdeacon on the head… “

The Archdeacon flowed into the whole story, and ended with his exit from Cully. Mornington, listening, felt the story to be fantastic and ridiculous, and would have given himself up to incredulity, had it not been for the notion of the Graal itself. This, which to some would have been the extreme fantasy, was to him the easiest thing to believe. For he approached the idea of the sacred vessel, not as did Sir Giles, through antiquity and savage folklore, nor as did the Archdeacon, through a sense of religious depths in which the mere temporary use of a particular vessel seemed a small thing, but through exalted poetry and the high romantic tradition in literature. This living light had shone for so long in his mind upon the idea of the Graal that it was by now a familiar thing—Tennyson and Hawker and Malory and older writers still had made it familiar, and its familiarity created for it a kind of potentiality. To deny it would be to deny his own past. But this emotional testimony to the possibility of its existence had an intellectual support. Kenneth knew—his publicity work had made clear to him—the very high reputation Sir Giles had among the learned; a hundred humble reviews had shown him that. And if the thing were possible, and if the thing were likely… But still, Gregory Persimmons… He looked back at the Archdeacon.

“You’re sure you saw it?” he asked. “Have you gone to the police?”

“No,” the Archdeacon said. “If you don’t think I saw it, would the police be likely to?”

“I do, I do,” Kenneth said hastily. “But why should he want it?”

“I haven’t any idea,” the priest answered. “That’s what baffles me too. Why should anyone want anything as much as that? And certainly why should anyone want the Graal? if it is the Graal? He talked to me about being a collector, which makes me pretty sure he isn’t.”

Kenneth got up and walked up and down. There was a silence for a few minutes, then the Archdeacon said: “However, we needn’t worry over it. What about me and the League of Nations?”

“Yes,” Kenneth said absently, sitting down again. “Oh, well, Stephen simply leapt at it. I read it, and I told him about it, and I suggested sending it to one of our tame experts? only I couldn’t decide between the political expert and the theological. At least, I was going to suggest it, but I didn’t have time. ‘By an Archdeacon? By an orthodox Archdeacon? Oh, take it, take it by all means, by all manner of means.’ He positively tangoed at it.”

“This is very gratifying,” the Archdeacon answered, “and the haste is unexpected.”

“Stephen”, Kenneth went on, “has a weakness for clerical books; I’ve noticed it before. Fiction is our stand-by, of course; but he takes all the manuscripts by clergymen that he decently can. I think he’s a little shy of some parts of our list, and likes to counterbalance them. We used to do a lot of occult stuff; a particular kind of occult. The standard work on the Black Mass and that sort of thing. That was before Stephen himself really got going, but he feels vaguely responsible, I’ve no doubt.”

“Who ran it then?” the Archdeacon asked idly. “Gregory,” Mornington answered. He stopped suddenly, and the two looked at one another.

“Oh, it’s all nonsense,” Mornington broke out. “The Black Mass, indeed!”

“The Black Mass is all nonsense, of course,” the Archdeacon said; “but nonsense, after all, does exist. And minds can get drunk with nonsense.”

“Do you really mean”, Mornington asked, “that a London publisher sold his soul to the devil and signed it away in his own blood and that sort of thing? Because I’m damned if I can see him doing it. Lots of people are interested in magic, without doing secret incantations under the new moon with the aid of dead men’s grease.”

“You keep harping on the London publisher,” the other said. “If a London publisher has a soul—which you’re bound to admit—he can sell it if he likes: not to the devil, but to himself. Why not?” He considered. “I think perhaps, after all, I ought to try and recover that chalice. There are decencies. There is a way of behaving in these things. And the Graal, if it is the Graal,” he went on, unusually moved, “was not meant for the greedy orgies of a delirious tomtit.”

“Tomtit!” Mornington cried. “If it could be true, he wouldn’t be a tomtit. He’d be a vulture.”

“Well, never mind,” the priest said. “The question is, can I do anything at once? I’ve half a mind to go and take it.”

“Look here,” said Mornington, “let me go and see him first. Stephen thought it would look well if I called, being down here. And let me talk to Lionel Rackstraw.” He spoke almost crossly. “Once a silly idea like this gets into one’s mind, one can’t see anything else. I think you’re wrong.”

“I don’t see, then, what good you’re going to do,” the Archdeacon said. “If I’m mad—”

“Wrong, I said,” Kenneth put in.

“Wrong because being hit on the head has affected my mind and my eyes— which is almost the same thing as being mad. If I’m demented, anyhow— you won’t be any more clear about it after a chat with Mr. Persimmons on whatever he does chat about. Nor with Mr. Rackstraw, whoever he may be.”

Kenneth explained briefly. “So, you see, he’s really been a very decent fellow over the cottage,” he concluded.

“My dear man,” the Archdeacon said, “if you had tea with him and he gave you the last crumpet, it wouldn’t prove anything unless he badly wanted the crumpet, and not much even then. He might want something else more.”

This, however, was a point of view to which Kenneth, when that evening he walked over to the cottage, found Lionel not very willing to agree. Gregory, so far as the Rackstraws were concerned, had been nothing but an advantage. He had lent them the cottage; he had sent a maid down from Cully to save Barbara trouble; he had occupied Adrian for hours together with the motor and other amusements, until the child was very willing for his parents to go off on more or less extensive walks while he played with his new friend. And Lionel saw no reason to associate himself actively—even in sympathy—with the archidiaconal crusade; more especially since Mornington himself was torn between scepticism and sympathy.

“In any case,” he said, “I don’t know what you want me to do. Anyone that will take Adrian off my hands for a little while can knock all the Archdeacons in the country on the head so far as I am concerned.”

“I don’t want you to do anything”, Kenneth answered, “except discuss it.”

“Well, we’re going up to tea at Cully to-morrow,” Lionel said. “I can talk about it there, if you like.”

Kenneth arrived at Cully on the Sunday afternoon, after having heard the Archdeacon preach a sermon in the morning on “Thou shall not covet thy neighbour’s house,” in which, having identified “thy neighbour” with God and touched lightly on the text “Mine are the cattle upon a thousand hills,” he went off into a fantastic exhortation upon the thesis that the only thing left to covet was “thy neighbour” Himself. “Not His creation, not His manifestations, not even His qualities, but Him,” the Archdeacon ended. “This should be our covetousness and our desire; for this only no greed is too great, as this only can satisfy the greatest greed. The whole universe is His house, the soul of thy mortal neighbour is His wife, thou thyself art His servant and thy body His maid—a myriad oxen, a myriad asses, subsist in the high inorganic creation. Him only thou shalt covet with all thy heart, with all thy mind, with all thy soul, and with all thy strength. And now to God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, be ascribed, as is most justly due, all honour… ” The congregation searched for sixpences.

Lionel, Barbara, and Adrian were with Persimmons and Sir Giles on the terrace behind the house when Kenneth arrived, and had already spoken of his probable visit. Gregory welcomed him pleasantly enough, as one of the staff who had originally worked under him. But Kenneth’s mind was already in a slight daze, for, as he had been conducted by the maid through the hall, he had seen on a bracket about the height of his head from the ground, in a corner near the garden door, an antique cup which struck him forcibly as being very like the one the Archdeacon had described to him. It seemed impossible that, if the priest’s absurd suspicions were right, Persimmons should so flaunt the theft before the world—unless, indeed, it were done merely to create the impression of impossibility. “There is no possible idea”, Kenneth thought as he came on to the terrace, “to which the mind of man can’t supply some damned alternative or other. Yet one must act. How are you, Mr. Persimmons? You’ll excuse this call, I know.”

The conversation rippled gently round the spring publishing season and books in general, with backwaters of attention in which Adrian immersed himself.

It approached, gently and unobserved by the two young men, the question of corrections in proof, and it was then that Sir Giles, who had until then preserved a sardonic and almost complete silence, said suddenly: “What I want to know is, whether proofs are or are not private?”

“I suppose they are, technically,” Lionel said lazily, watching Adrian. “Subject to the discretion of the publisher.

“Subject to the discretion of the devil,” Sir Giles said. “What do you say, Persimmons?”

“I should say yes,” Gregory answered. “At least till they are passed for press.”

“I ask,” Sir Giles said pointedly, “because my last proofs were shown to an outsider before the book was published. And if one of these gentlemen was responsible I want to know why.”

“My dear Tumulty, it doesn’t matter,” Gregory in a quiet, soothing tone put in. “I asked you not to mention it, you know.”

“I know you did,” Sir Giles answered, “and I said that I felt I ought to. After all, a man has a right to know why a mad clergyman is allowed to read paragraphs of his book which he afterwards cancels.