Whitehall,
December 2.
My dear Brandon:
If a square peg can be persuaded to forsake a round hole, some of us here feel that the country might make a more profitable use of your services, that is to say, there is an opportunity to give your highly specialized qualities freer play. A ministry of Social Reconstruction is being formed, to deal mainly with post-war problems—it is not quite our English way to take time by the forelock in this audacious fashion, but some of our Colonial friends are teaching us a thing or two—and last night in conversation with Prowse and Mortimer among others, your name came up. We agreed that your particular light is not one to hide under a bushel of coal. One shudders to think of the number of tricks of the kind that have been played already, but at last we are beginning to realize that the country can’t afford it. So if you will consent to work under Prowse, with or without payment, I think the War Office can be persuaded to spare you for a larger sphere of usefulness.
Yours ever,
George Speke.
In the depths of his boredom Brandon could have kissed the letter, and have wept for joy. The tact of an expert handler of men, who well understood the bundle of quixotisms with whom he had to deal, had played the tempter’s part with rare success. A letter of that kind left no doubt that the country was about to gain enormously by depleting the Tynesi de Terriers of a morbidly conscientious subaltern, while at the same time enriching a government department with a real live ex-fellow of Gamaliel.
It was not until early in the new year, however, that Brandon was transferred to a wooden structure in Saint James’s Park, the headquarters of the newly-created department. He was almost ashamed to find how much more congenial was the work he had now to do. To the really constructive mind, there is something repellent in the naïve formulas, and the crude paraphernalia of mere destruction. Here in the new “billet” was scope for a rather special order of brain. He was able to look forward to a future in which a new England would arise. There were already portents in the sky, portents which told him that the world of the future was going to be a very different place from the world of the past. Much depended on whether the grim specter of war could be laid with reasonable finality for a long time to come, but from the day in which he took up his new labors he did not doubt that, whatever the final fate of Prussia, the issue of Armageddon itself would be a nobler, a broader spirit in the old land which he loved so dearly, and a freer, humaner world for every race that had to live in it.
His position in the Social Reconstruction Bureau was one of importance. Long before the war, even before he came into the Hart’s Ghyll property, it had been his ambition to make the world a rather better place for other people to inhabit. And the opportunities which came to him now gave rare scope to a reawakened energy. A marvelous field had been offered to this protagonist of works and faith.
In spite of the last terrible clinch in which the new world as well as the old was now involved, these were great days for Brandon. His powers burgeoned nobly in the service of that nation which had now definitely emerged, in spite of all her limitations and her legacies from the past, as the banner bearer of civilization.