Life does strange things to human beings. Charles T. Alston had been raised in a small farming community of Indiana, and here he was, a specialist in geography, ethnography, and allied branches of learning, helping to decide the destinies of men in lands whose very names were unknown to the people of the Hoosier state. In his village as a boy he had attended a tiny Congregational church, which could not afford a regular pastor but had the services of students from a near-by church school. One of these students had eaten fried chicken and cornmeal mush in little Charlie Alston's home, and had helped to awaken in him a longing for knowledge. Thirty-five years had passed, during which Alston had never seen him; but here he came strolling into the Hotel Crillon — having been in the interim a doctor of divinity, a professor of “Applied Christianity,” a Socialist agitator, and finally one of the trusted agents and advisers of President Wilson in Europe.
Lanny watched him while he talked to his old friend, and thought he was one of the strangest-looking men he had ever known. His unusually sweet and kindly features had not merely the pallor of marble, but seemed to have its texture. His hair, mustache, and beard were jet-black. He was obviously not in good health, and his whole aspect was pain-driven, haunted not merely by his own griefs but by those of mankind; his manner was quiet, his voice low, and his language apocalyptic. He rarely smiled, and when he did so, it seemed to be reluctantly, as a concession to other people's ways. A sense of impending doom rested upon his spirit, as if he saw more of the future of Europe than any of the persons he met.
George D. Herron was his name; and later on Alston told Lanny about the tragedy which had broken his health and happiness. He had been one of the leaders of a movement called “Christian Socialist,” seeking to bring justice and brotherhood in the name of the proletarian carpenter. A clergyman and professor in a small college of Iowa, Herron had been unhappily married, and had fallen in love with the dean of women of his college. He had left his wife — something not in accord with the ethics prevailing in the “corn and hog belt.” The enemies of his dangerous ideas had taken this opportunity to ruin him, and he had been expelled from his job in the college, and had gone abroad with his new wife to live.
That had been a long while ago, and the unhappy professor and his great sin had been pretty well forgotten. In Europe he had come to know working-class leaders, pacifists, humanitarians — those whose spirits could not rest while their fellow-men were being butchered, mutilated, starved, frozen, drowned in mud, and fed upon, hate and falsehood. Living in Geneva, he had been accessible to both sides in the war, and friends and strangers had come to him from Austria and Germany, to sound him out and use him as a means of communicating with the Allied lands. First he had reported to the American embassy in Switzerland, and later to the President direct. He had had something to do with the shaping of the Fourteen Points and had outlined a plan for the forming of a League of Nations. This Socialist agitator who had been driven from his own country in disgrace now possessed the freedom of the Crillon, and could have audiences with the President at a time when the latter was so overburdened that not even the members of his own Peace Commission could see him.
The second time that Lanny met Herron he was walking on the street toward the hotel. He walked slowly, because he suffered from arthritis. Lanny joined him, and he started talking about some of the developments of the day. When they reached the hotel, Lanny waited politely for the elder to go through the revolving doors. He had entered the moving space, when a large military man, coming the other way in haste, pushed the doors violently, and a carved wooden cane which Herron was carrying got caught in the doors and cracked in two. When Lanny came through, his friend was standing with the pieces in his hand, gazing at them and exclaiming: “My Jerusalem cane!”
“Is it valuable?” asked the youth.
“Not to anyone but me. I bought it when I was young and visited the Holy Land. It has been precious to me as a souvenir of deeply felt experiences.”
“Oh, I'm sorry,” said Lanny, sympathetically.
The other still held the broken pieces. “I am not superstitious,” he continued; “but I will tell you a curious incident. When I was leaving home, my sixteen-year-old son asked me why I was carrying that cane, and I said, half playfully: 'I am going to Paris to set up the kingdom of heaven, and this staff from the country of Jesus is a symbol of my purpose.' 'See that they don't break it, Father!' said my son.”
The professor looked at the pieces a moment or two longer and then called a bellboy and gave them to him to dispose of. “Absit omen!” he remarked to Lanny.