“I, too,” said Brandon. “More has happened in my case than therapeutics can explain. I’ve been given a new soul as well as a new body. But we won’t go into that now. At this particular moment I want to talk to you about that fantastically absurd official, the Censor of Stage Plays.”
But the subject was deferred until the following evening when the two men dined together. Even then George Speke was not very illuminating. After all, the censorship of stage plays was a departmental matter, and this habitual member of governments had the departmental mind. A harmless functionary had been much attacked in the public press by the kind of people who attack every kind of institution, but experience had proved him to be at once wise, necessary, and convenient.
“Wise! Necessary! Convenient!” said Brandon, “to invest a single individual of cynical mediocrity with absolute power? It’s an insult to every pen in the realm.”
Speke laughed at the vehemence but admitted the truth. Yet a threadbare controversy left him cold. To be quite candid, the theater was negligible, the art of dramatic writing equally so. Far better that both should perish than that either should sully the mind of the humblest citizen of Imperial Rome.
XXXIX
In the course of the next few days Brandon interviewed various specialists, and then by their advice he went to Brighton for two months. The result was such a steady gain in physical force and mental equilibrium that he was able to resume his military duties.
Not by his own request was he spared the boredom, the misery, the ghoulish horror of the trenches. The higher expediency was able to realize that men of Brandon’s age, particularly if they have once been badly knocked out, don’t pay for cartage to France. Therefore he was given a commission and sent to the north to train new units.
He didn’t complain. Whatever his job, he would have taken off his coat and set to. He was no subscriber to the military fetish, nothing would ever make him one, but in August, 1914, he had given his services unconditionally to his country and he was not the man to shirk the obligation into which he had entered.
To one of subtle perceptions and fastidious culture, the teaching of a lot of “bandy-legged coal-shovelers” to form fours, and to hurl an imaginary bomb at an imaginary Hun should have been a wearisome, soul-destroying affair. Yet somehow it was not. There was a time when in spite of his honest, democratic liberalism, he would have been tried beyond endurance by the fantastic boredom of it all. But that time had passed. Never again could the human factor, however primitive, be without its meaning. He had been wrought upon by a miracle, and it abided with him during every hour of the new life.
His thoughts were often with John Smith. Enshrined in Brandon’s heart as a divine symbol, he was the key to a Mystery which had the power to cleanse even the thing called war of its bestial obscenity. Many a night when he came back dog-tired and heart-sore, to a dirty, comfortless room and an ill-cooked meal in a rude, miserable colliery township whose like he had never seen, he was sustained by the sublime faith of one who, for the sake of the love he bore his kind, had dared to transcend reason in order to affirm it.