Uncle Phineas was right. It might still be true that the sun did not actually go round the earth, that the earth was not literally fixed, or flat, as Uncle Phineas had wished him to believe; but there was nevertheless a principle of fixture in eternal truth, fixture rather than evolution or motion, going much deeper into the nature of things than he had supposed. He became, all at once, curiously doubtful of his doctrine of Relative Truth, for he saw that to his exposition of this more divine and direct dispensation it might prove a hindrance.

It was for his followers he was now troubled. As regards himself he had no difficulty in getting rid of it. For the recovery of that purer faith his early training now stood him in good stead, and Uncle Phineas became a rock in whose shadow he could hide. What he had trained himself to believe in his ’teens, what he had broken away from in his early twenties, what he had exploitively used for opportunist purposes in the propaganda of war and of Mosaic reprisals on savages who could not otherwise be taught better, was still in his blood—waiting to give him the upward push. In his new childlikeness he thanked whatever gods there be that he had always treated with tender allowance and regard the primitive views of Caroline, both as wife and mother; and that he had never allowed the scepticism of Davidina—Davidina, who had now found a new sphere for her dispensing powers in the exploration and humane taming of savage tribes—to discolour the rainbow gradients of his mind. The theological problems she had maliciously presented to him in old days, he had happily ignored: they had at least done him no permanent harm. Reversion to type, in his case at all events, was not difficult. In a certain sense Relative Truth helped him; for even if the simpler faith were not as absolutely true as it now seemed to him, it was true relatively to the immediate purpose in hand. And so still, as one might say, upon two legs—one numbed and quiescent but the other lithe and active—he entered confidently and with singleness of purpose into the Kingdom that had been prepared for him.

Going up to bed in the small hours he was very tired, and did not stop to look in the glass, did not stop to do anything. He switched out the light and got into bed. Only then did the great recovery he had made dawn on him.

Turning his head sideways in comfortable adjustment for slumber, he saw upon the pillow a patch of yellow light, faint, but for small immediate use efficient. In the centre of its radiance marched a flea.

Mr. Trimblerigg did not like fleas; he made an instinctive pounce, and the flea died the death. Then the wonder of it occurred to him. He sat up, he got out of bed, he went to the glass. In the darkness he could see himself: Crocean dawn was round him once more. His surreptitious action of the last few hours, Heaven had now justified. He had no longer any doubts, any fears; he did not even see difficulties, for now the world was running to meet him, and millions of his fellow-creatures were prepared to take without question anything he offered them.

Faint with bliss, he tottered back to bed, laid his crowned head upon the pillow, and slept.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The Procession Continues

THE next morning there was a small fly in the ointment of his bliss; a letter from Davidina. Thousands of miles away, among the swamps of the Amazon, news had apparently reached her of her brother’s marvellous doings; and of course, as he might have expected, her comment sounded the note of criticism.

‘My dear Jonathan,’ ran the letter, ‘if you go on like that, you will burst.

‘Yours affectionate,
‘D. T.’