“Which perhaps one oughtn’t to make,” said the vicar rather uneasily. And then, as if a little shocked by his own boldness, he hastened to quit such perilous ground. “To return to stage plays. Things of that kind will not help us to win the war.”
“And yet the pen is mightier than the sword.”
“That is a dark saying I have never been able to understand. We live not by words but by deeds, and never more so than in this stern time.”
“A play may be a great deed.”
“If it be sufficiently inspired. But there is much virtue in an ‘if.’”
Brandon did not continue the argument. Feeling the ground on which he stood to be impregnable, he could well afford not to do so. Besides it was scarcely the act of a friend to press the vicar too hard in the present amazing circumstances. He was no longer intrenched in self-security. If certain odd changes of manner meant anything, the walls of his little world were falling in, and a perplexed and bewildered Thomas Perry-Hennington was now visible amid the ruins.
XLII
The very remarkable news from New York gave Brandon, for the rest of his brief stay at Hart’s Ghyll, a feeling of almost perilous exhilaration. Since his recovery, less than a year ago, his whole life had been a subtle embodiment of the miraculous. And the letter from Urban Meyer had intensified the sense of the miraculous to such a degree, that at first it hardly seemed possible to meet the bald facts of the case in its new aspect and remain perfectly rational. For more years than Brandon cared to count, he had held the cold faith that miracles do not occur; it had now been proved to him, beyond a doubt, that miracles do occur, and he had to face the truth squarely, and yet continue in the work of the world.
To make his task the more difficult, he could not help feeling that his present job was one for which he was ill-qualified; certainly it was not the one he would have chosen. Somehow it filled him with a deep repugnance to train others in the art of killing, even in the art of killing the Hun; but it was not for him to decide where such powers as he had could be of most use to the state. He did not quarrel with the edict which declared him unfit for the trenches, but there were times when he would almost have preferred their particularly foul brand of boredom to the dismal routine of acquiring a parade voice, and the grind of rubbing up his mathematics, a branch of knowledge in which he had never shone.
It came to him, therefore, with a sense of grateful relief, when one day, about a week after he had returned to his unit, a letter reached him of an informal friendliness, yet written on government paper. It said: