The next morning, when John Smith called as usual at Hart’s Ghyll with his bunch of flowers, he was allowed once more to see his friend. The stricken man received him in the library with the most affectionate intimacy.
“My dear, dear fellow,” he said, “how good it is to see you. You bring the light of the sun to this room whenever you enter it.”
The visitor took Brandon’s hand with the caressing touch of a woman. “Dear friend,” he said, “I always pray that the light may accompany me wherever I go.”
The simplicity of the man, which it would have been easy to misread, had now, as always, a strange effect upon Brandon. And yet he was heart-sore and miserable. The weight of sorrow now upon him seemed to transcend all his other sufferings. A cruel sense of the futility of his terrible sacrifice had overtaken him. What proof was there that it had not been in vain? After all, what hope could there be for the future of men; what was there to expect from a purblind, material world? He was now in the throes of a cruel reaction. Somehow his talk with the vicar had struck at his faith in his own kind.
He took no comfort from the thought that Mr. Perry-Hennington was a profoundly stupid man. Turning his mind back, he saw the parson of Penfold as the spiritual guide of the race of average men, of a race which allowed itself to be governed by the daily newspaper, which in one feverish hour threw away the liberties it had cost its father hundreds of years to win. Prussia was being met with Prussia, Baal with the image of Baal.
Throughout a wakeful night, that had been the thought in Brandon’s heart. Behind all the swelling heroics and the turgid phrases of organized opinion, was this Frankenstein monster. The world was moving in a vicious circle. The public press had somehow managed to recreate what it had set out to destroy. The question for Brandon now was, had he been the victim of a chimera? In the course of a long night of bitterness, the thought had taken root in him that all the blood and tears humanity was shedding would merely fix the shackles more cruelly on generations yet unborn.
This morning Brandon saw no hope for the ill-starred race of men. Hour by hour his fever-tinged thoughts had flown to one for whom he had conceived an emotion of the highest and purest friendship, to one whom his fellows were seeking a means to destroy.
“I have been wondering,” said Brandon, “whether you will consent to have your poem published? I know you are shy of print, but this is a rare jewel, the heritage of the whole world.”
“Don’t let us talk of it just now.” There was a shadow upon the eloquent face. “I have need of guidance. My poem, such as it is, is but one aspect of a great matter. I pray that I may find a more universal one.”
Brandon dissembled his surprise, but he could not bridle his curiosity. “Your poem is a great matter,” he said. “To me it is wonderful. You call it ‘The Door.’ Why not let all the world pass through?”