War in Heaven (Chap. 3: The Archdeacon in the City)

The inquest was held on the Monday, with the formal result of a verdict
of "Murder by a person or persons unknown," and the psychological result
of emphasizing the states of mind of the three chief sufferers within
themselves. The world certified itself as being, to Lionel more
fantastic, to Mornington more despicable, to Stephen Persimmons more
harassing. To the young girl who lived in the waiting-room and was
interrogated by the coroner, it became, on the contrary, more exciting
and delightful than ever; although she had no information to give--
having, on her own account, been engaged all the while so closely
indexing letter-books that she had not observed anyone enter or depart
by the passage at the side of her office.

On the Tuesday, however, being, perhaps naturally, more watchful, she
remarked towards the end of the day, three, or rather four, visitors.
The offices shut at six, and about half-past four the elder Mr.
Persimmons, giving her an amiable smile, passed heavily along the
corridor and up to his son's room. At about a quarter past five Barbara
Rackstraw, with Adrian, shone in the entrance--as she did normally some
three or four times a year--and also disappeared up the stairs. And
somewhere between the two a polite, chubby, and gaitered clergyman
hovered at the door of the waiting-room and asked her tentatively if Mr.
Mornington were in. Him she committed to the care of a passing
office-boy, and returned to her indexing.

Gregory Persimmons, a little to his son's surprise and greatly to his
relief, appeared to have shaken off the mood of tantalizing amusement
which had possessed him on the previous Friday. He discussed various
financial points in the balance sheet as if he were concerned only with
ordinary business concerns. He congratulated his son on the result of
the inquest as likely to close the whole matter except in what he
thought the unlikely result of the police discovering the murderer; and
when he brought up the subject of _Intensive Mastery_ he did it with no
suggestion that anything but the most normal hesitation had ever held
Stephen back from enthusiastic acceptance. In the sudden relief from
mental neuralgia thus granted him, Stephen found himself promising to
have the book out before Christmas--it was then early summer--and even
going so far as to promise estimates during the next week and discuss
the price at which it might reasonably appear. Towards the end of an
hour's conversation Gregory said, "By the way, I saw Tumulty yesterday,
and he asked me to make sure that he was in time to cut a paragraph out
of his book. He sent Rackstraw a postcard, but perhaps I might just make
sure it got here all right. May I go along, Stephen?"

"Do," Stephen said. "I'll sign these letters and be ready by the time
you're back." And, as his father went out with a nod, he thought to
himself: "He couldn't possibly want to go into that office again if he'd
really killed a man there. It's just his way of pulling my leg. Rather
hellish, but I suppose it doesn't seem so to him."

Lionel, tormented with a more profound and widely spread neuralgia than
his employer's, had by pressure of work been prevented from dwelling on
it that day. Soon after his arrival Mornington had broken into the
office to ask if he could have a set of proofs of Sir Giles Tumulty's
book on _Vessels of Folklore_.

"I've got an Archdeacon coming to see me," he said--"don't bow--and an
Archdeacon ought to be interested in folklore, don't you think? I always
used to feel that Archdeacons were a kind of surviving folklore
themselves-they seem pre-Christian and almost prehistoric: a lingering
and bi-sexual tradition. Besides, publicity, you know. Don't Archdeacons
charge? 'Charge, Archdeacons, charge! On, Castra Parvulorum, on! were
the last words of Mornington.''

"I wish they were!" Lionel said. "There are the proofs, on that shelf:
take them and go! take them all."

"I don't want them all. Business, business. We can't have murders and
Bank Holidays every day."

He routed out the proofs and departed; and when by the afternoon post an
almost indecipherable postcard from Sir Giles asked for the removal of a
short paragraph on page 218, Lionel did not think of making the
alteration on the borrowed set. He marked the paragraph for deletion on
the proofs he was about to return for Press, cursing Sir Giles a little
for the correction--which, however, as it came at the end of a whole
division of the book, would cause no serious inconvenience--and much
more for his handwriting. A sentence beginning--he at last made out--
"It has been suggested to me" immediately became totally illegible, and
only recovered meaning towards the end, where the figures 218 rode like
a monumental Pharaoh over the diminutive abbreviations which surrounded
it. But the instruction was comprehensible, if the reason for it was
not, and Lionel dispatched the proofs to the printer.

When, later on, the Archdeacon arrived, Mornington greeted him with real
and false warmth mingled. He liked the clergyman, but he disliked
manuscripts, and a manuscript on the League of Nations promised him some
hours' boredom. For, in spite of his disclaimer, he knew he would have
to skim the book at least, before he obtained further opinions, and the
League of Nations lay almost in the nadir of all the despicable things
in the world. It seemed to him so entire and immense a contradiction of
aristocracy that it drove him into a positive hunger for mental
authority imposed by force. He desired to see Plato and his like ruling
with power, and remembered with longing the fierce inquisition of the
_Laws_. However, he welcomed the Archdeacon without showing this, and
settled down to chat about the book.

"Good evening, Mr. Archdeacon," he said rapidly, suddenly remembering
that he didn't know the other's name, and at the same moment that it
would no doubt be on the manuscript and that he would look at it
immediately. "Good of you to come. Come in and sit down."

The Archdeacon, with an agreeable smile, complied, and, as he laid the
parcel on the desk, said: "I feel a little remorseful now, Mr.
Mornington. Or I should if I didn't realize that this is your business."

"That," Mornington said, laughing, "is a clear, cool, lucid, diabolical
way of looking at it. If you could manage to feel a little remorse I
should feel almost tender--an unusual feeling towards a manuscript."

"The relation between an author and a publisher", the Archdeacon
remarked, "always seems to me to partake a little of the nature of a
duel, an abstract, impersonal duel. There is no feeling about it."

"Oh, isn't there?" Mornington interjected. "Ask Persimmons; ask our
authors."

"Is there?" the Archdeacon asked. "You astonish me." He looked at the
parcel, of which he still held the string. "Do you know," he said
thoughtfully, "I don't _think_ I have any feeling particularly about it.
Whether you publish it or not, whether anyone publishes it or not,
doesn't matter much. I think it might matter if I made no attempt to get
it published, for I honestly think the ideas are sound. But with that
very small necessary activity my responsibility ends."

"You take it very placidly," Mornington answered, smiling. "Most of our
authors feel they have written the most important book of the century."

"Ah, don't misunderstand me," the Archdeacon said. "I might think that
myself--I don't, but I might. It wouldn't make any difference to my
attitude towards it. No book of ideas can matter so supremely as that.
'An infant crying in the night,' you know. What else was Aristotle?"

"Well, it makes it much pleasanter for us," Mornington said again. "I
gather it's all one to you whether we take it or leave it?"

"Entirely," the Archdeacon answered, and pushed the bundle towards him.
"I should, inevitably, be interested in your reasons so far as they bear
stating."

"With this detachment," the other answered, undoing the parcel, "I
wonder you make any reservation. Could any abominable reason shatter
such a celestial calm?"

The Archdeacon twiddled his thumbs. "Man is weak," he said sincerely,
"and I indeed am the chief of sinners. But I also am in the hands of
God, and what can it matter how foolish my own words are or how truly I
am told of them? Pooh, Mr. Mornington, you must have a very conceited
set of authors."

"Talking about authors," Mornington went on, "I thought you might be
interested in looking at the proofs of this book we've got in hand." And
he passed over Sir Giles's _Sacred Vessels_.

The Archdeacon took them. "It's good work, is it?" he asked.

"I haven't had time to read it," the other said, "But there's one
article on the Graal that ought to attract you." He glanced sideways at
the first page of the MS., and read "_Christianity and the League of
Nations_, by Julian Davenant, Archdeacon of Castra Parvulorum." "Well,
thank God I know his name now," he reflected.

Meanwhile the third visitor, with her small companion, had penetrated to
Lionel's room. They had come to the City to buy Adrian a birthday
present, and, having succeeded, had gone on according to plan to the
office. This arrangement--as such arrangements by such people tend to
be--had been made two or three weeks earlier, and the crisis of the
previous Friday had made Lionel only the more anxious to see if
Barbara's presence would in any way cleanse the room from the slime that
seemed still to carpet it. He had been a little doubtful whether she
herself would bear the neighbourhood, but, either because in effect the
murder had meant little to her or because she guessed something of her
husband's feelings, she had made no difficulty, had indeed assumed that
the visit was still to be paid. Adrian's persistent interest in the
date-stamp presented itself for those few minutes to Lionel as a solid
reality amid the fantasies his mind made haste to induce. But Barbara's
own presence was too much in the nature of a defiance to make him
entirely happy. He kissed her as she sat on his table, with a sense of
almost heroic challenge; neither he nor she were ignorant, and their
ignoring of the subject was a too clear simulation of the ignorance they
did not possess. But Adrian's ignorance was something positive. Lionel
felt that a dead body beneath the desk would have been to this small and
intent being something not so much unpleasant as dull and unnecessary;
it might have got in the way of the movements of his body, but not of
his mind. This was what he needed; his unsteady thought needed
weighting, but with what, he asked himself, of all the shadows of
obscenity that moved through the place of shadows which was the
world--with which of all these could he weight it? From date-stamp to
waste-paper basket, from basket to files, from files to telephone Adrian
pursued his investigations; and Lionel was on the point of giving an
exhibition of telephoning by ringing up Mornington, when the door opened
and Gregory Persimmons appeared.

"I beg your pardon," he said, stopping on the threshold, "I really beg
your pardon, Rackstraw."

"Come in, sir," Lionel said, getting up. "It's only my wife."

"I've met Mrs. Rackstraw before," Persimmons said, shaking hands. "But
not, I think, this young man." He moved slowly in Adrian's direction.

"Adrian," Barbara said, "come and shake hands."

The child politely obeyed, as Persimmons, dropping on one knee, welcomed
him with a grave and detached courtesy equal to his own. But when he
stood up again he kept his eyes fixed on Adrian, even while saying to
Barbara, "What a delightful child!"

"He is rather a pet," Barbara murmured. "But, of course, an awful
nuisance."

"They always are," Persimmons said. "But they have their compensations.
I've always been glad I had a son. Training them is a wonderful
experience."

"Adrian trains himself, I'm afraid," Barbara answered, a little
embarrassed. "But we shall certainly have to begin to teach him soon."

"Yes," Gregory said, his eyes still on Adrian. "It's a dreadful
business, teaching them what's wrong. It has to be done all the same,
and he's too fine a child to waste. I beg your pardon again--but I do
think children are so wonderful, and when one meets the grown-ups one
feels they've so often been wasted." He smiled at Barbara. "Look at your
husband; look at me!" he said. "We were babies once."

"Well," Barbara said, smiling back, "I wouldn't say that Lionel had been
altogether wasted. Nor you, Mr. Persimmons."

He bowed a little, but shook his head, then turned to Lionel. "All I
came for, Rackstraw," he said, "was to say that I saw Tumulty yesterday,
and he was rather anxious whether you could read a postcard he sent you
about his book."

"Only just," Lionel answered, "but I managed. He wanted a paragraph
knocked out."

"And you got it in time to make the correction?" Gregory asked again.

"Behold the proof," Lionel said, "_in_ the proof. It goes off to-night."
He held the sheet out to the other man, who took it with a word of
thanks and glanced at the red-ink line. "That's it," he said, "the last
paragraph on page 218." He stood for a moment reading it through.

In the room across the corridor the Archdeacon turned over page 217 and
read on.

"It seems probable therefore," the book ran, "if we consider these
evidences, and the hypothetical scheme which has been adduced, not
altogether unreasonably, to account for the facts which we have--a
scheme which may be destroyed in the future by discovery of some further
fact, but till then may not unjustifiably be considered to hold the
field--it seems probable that the reputed Graal may be so far
definitely traced and its wanderings followed as to permit us to say
that it rests at present in the parish church of Fardles."

"Dear me!" the Archdeacon said; and, "Yes, that was the paragraph," said
Mr. Gregory Persimmons; and for a moment there was silence in both
offices.

The Archdeacon was considering that he had, in fact, never been able to
find out anything about a certain rarely used chalice at Fardles. A year
or two before the decease of the last Vicar a very much more important
person in the neighbourhood had died--Sir John Horatio Sykes-Martindale,
K.V.O., D.S.O., and various other things. In memory of the
staunch churchmanship of this great and good man, his widow had
presented a complete set of altar fittings and altar plate to the parish
church, which was then doing its best with antique but uncorresponding
paten and chalice. These were discarded in favour of the new gift, and
when the Archdeacon succeeded to the rectory and archdeaconry he
followed his predecessor's custom. He had at different times examined
the old chalice carefully, and had shown it to some of his friends, but
he had had no reason to make any special investigation, nor indeed would
it have been easy to do so. The new suggestion, however, gave it a fresh
interest. He was about to call Mornington's attention to the paragraph,
then he changed his mind. There would be plenty of time when the book
was out: lots of people--far too many--would hear about it then, and
he might have to deal with a very complicated situation. So many people,
he reflected, put an altogether undue importance on these exterior and
material things. The Archbishop might write? and Archaeological
Societies--and perhaps Psychical Research people: one never knew.
Better keep quiet and consider.

"I should like", he said aloud, "to have a copy of this book when it
comes out. Could you have one sent to me, Mr. Mornington?"

"Oh, but I didn't show it to you for that reason," Mornington answered.
"I only thought it might amuse you."

"It interests me very deeply," the Archdeacon agreed. "In one sense, of
course, the Graal is unimportant--it is a symbol less near Reality now
than any chalice of consecrated wine. But it is conceivable that the
Graal absorbed, as material things will, something of the high intensity
of the moment when it was used, and of its adventures through the
centuries. In that sense I should be glad, and even eager," he added
precisely, "to study its history."

"Well, as you like," Mornington answered. "So long as I'm not luring or
bullying you into putting money into poor dear Persimmons's pocket."

"No one less, I assure you," the Archdeacon said, as he got up to go.
"Besides, why should one let oneself be lured or bullied?"

"Especially by a publisher's clerk," Mornington added, smiling. "Well,
we'll write to you as soon as possible, Mr. Davenant. In about forty
days, I should think. It would be Lent to most authors, but I gather it
won't be more than the usual Sundays after Trinity to you."

The Archdeacon shook his head gravely. "One is very weak, Mr.
Mornington," he said. "While I would do good, and so on, you know. I
shall wonder what will happen, although it's silly, of course, very
silly. Good-bye and thank you."

Mornington opened the door for him and followed him out into the
corridor. As they went along it they saw a group, consisting of Gregory
and the Rackstraws outside Stephen Persimmons's room at the top of the
stairs, and heard Gregory say to Barbara, "Yes, Mrs. Rackstraw, I'm sure
that's the best way. You can't teach them what to want and go for
because you don't know their minds. But you can teach them what not to
do with just a few simple rules about what's wrong. Be afraid to do
wrong--that's what I used to tell Stephen."

"_Le malheureux!_" Mornington murmured as he bowed to the group, and let
his smile change from one of respect to Gregory to one of friendliness
for Barbara. The Archdeacon's foot was poised doubtfully for a moment
over the first stair. But, if he had been inclined to go back, he
changed his mind and went on towards the front door, with the other in
attendance.

"Yes," Barbara said, distracted by Mornington's passing, "yes, I expect
you're right."

"I suppose," Gregory remarked, changing the conversation, "that you've
settled your holiday plans by now. Where are you going?"

"Well, sir," Lionel said, "we weren't going away this year at all. But
Adrian had a slight attack of measles a month or so ago, so we decided
we ought to, just to put him thoroughly right. Only every place is
booked up and we don't seem able to get anything."

"I don't want to seem intrusive," Gregory said hesitatingly, "but, if
you really want a place, there's a cottage--not a very grand one--down
near where I live. It's on my grounds actually, and it's quite empty
just now...if it's any good to you."

"But, Mr. Persimmons, how charming of you!" Barbara cried. "That would
be delightful and just the thing. Where do you live, by the way?"

"I've just taken a place in the country," Gregory answered, "in
Hertfordshire, near a little village called Fardles. Indeed, I've only
just moved in. It belonged to a Lady Sykes-Martindale, but she's been
advised to go to Egypt for her health, and I took the house. So it's
quite new to me. Adrian and I could explore it together."

"How splendid!" Barbara said. "But are you quite sure, Mr. Persimmons? I
did want to get away, but we were giving up hope. Are you quite sure we
shan't be intruding?"

"Not if you will let me see something of you there," Gregory assured
her. "And, if Adrian liked me enough," he smiled at the boy, "you and
your husband--" A motion of his hand threw England open to their
excursions.

"It's very good of you, sir," Lionel began.

"Nonsense, nonsense," the other answered. "There's the cottage and here
are you. I'll write about it. When do you go, Rackstraw? July? I'll
write in a week or two, then. And now I must go and look at more
figures. Good night, Mrs. Rackstraw. I shall see you again in five weeks
or so. Good night, Adrian." He bowed down to shake the small hand. "Good
night, Rackstraw. I'm delighted you'll come." He waved his hand
generally and departed.

"What a divine creature!" Barbara said, going down the stairs. "Adrian
darling, we're really going away. Would you like to go into the
country?"

"Where is the country?" Adrian said.

"Oh--out there," Barbara said. "Away from the streets. With fields and
cows."

"I don't like cows," Adrian said coldly.

"I daresay you won't see any," Lionel put in. "It does seem rather
fortunate, Barbara."

"I think it's perfectly splendid," Barbara said joyously.

"Can I take my new train?" Adrian asked. And, in a whirl of assurances
that he should take anything he liked or needed or had the slightest
inclination to take, they came out into the hot June evening.