'If you come back, which Heaven ordain, you'll be all the more use to the priesthood,' the Superintendent of Missions said. 'Go and serve with our fearless and faithful, approach as an acolyte the altar of freedom. Supposing you don't see your way to go, I would remind you of a certain passage about "Curse ye Meroz!" I need not insult your knowledge of the Scriptures by finishing my quotation.'
Osborne listened respectfully, but his eyes were looking far away, with dreams of the veld in them.
The Superintendent's preaching of a sort of Christian Jehad appealed to him infinitesimally.
There was a silence. He knocked his pipe out, and offered the
Superintendent a sundowner.
'I'm glad to have had your opinion,' he said. 'I take it you don't want me just now as a candidate for ordination?'
The Superintendent flushed and hesitated.
'You mustn't put it like that,' he said almost irritably. 'The decision rests with you, of course. Of course we want men now and want them badly. Yet I wouldn't press my recruiting needs just now. It doesn't seem to me the right time to do so. Afterwards. . . . '
He gulped and spluttered as the big words rushed so fast to his lips.
He was enlarging on the big days for God's priesthood, when the war, please God, should be over. Big days, that is to say, if the only sort of fit and proper issue should be reached, as doubtless it would be before long.
'You mean a complete knock-out for the other side?' his hearer interpolated crudely.