Gregory, after some consideration, had dismissed Sir Giles’s warnings as, on the whole, silly. Things were going very well; by the next night he hoped that both the Graal and Adrian would be, for a while, in his hands or those of his friends. Of all those who lay awake under those midnight stars he was the only one who had a naturally religious spirit; to him only the unknown beyond man’s life presented itself as alive with hierarchical presences arrayed in rising orders to the central throne. To him alone sacraments were living realities; the ointment and the Black Mass, the ritual and order of worship. He beyond any of them demanded a response from the darkness; a rush of ardent faith believed that it came; and in full dependence on that faith acted and influenced his circumstances. Prayer was natural to him as it was not to Sir Giles or Lionel, or, indeed, to Barbara, and to the mind of the devotee the god graciously assented. Conversion was natural to him, and propaganda, and the sacrifice both of himself and others, if that god demanded it. He adored as he lay in vigil, and from that adoration issued the calm strength of a supernatural union. As the morning broke he smiled happily on the serene world around him.
Sir Giles took himself off after breakfast, leaving his small amount of luggage to be sent on. Gregory and Lionel left Ludding to call them if Barbara moved—a nurse was to arrive later—and went to the telephone in the hall. There, after some trouble, Gregory got through to his desired number and, Lionel gathered, to the unknown Manasseh. He explained the circumstances briefly, urging the other to take the next train to Fardles.
“What?” he asked in a moment. “Yes, Cully—near Fardles.… Well, anything in reason, anything, indeed.… What? I don’t understand.… Yes, I know you did, but … No, but the point is, that I haven’t … Yes, though I don’t know how you knew.… But I can’t.… Oh, nonsense!… No, but look here, Manasseh, this is serious; the patient’s had some sort of fit or something.… But you can’t mean it.… Oh, well, I suppose so.… But, Manasseh.… But you wouldn’t … No, stop …”
He put the receiver back slowly and turned very gravely to Lionel. “This is terrible,” he said. “You know that chalice I had? Well, I knew Manasseh wanted it. He thinks he can cure Mrs. Rackstraw, and he offers to try, if I’ll give him the chalice.”
“Oh, well,” Lionel said insincerely, “if he wants that—I suppose it’s very valuable? Too valuable for me to buy, I mean?”
“My dear fellow,” Gregory said, “you should have it without a second thought. Do you suppose I should set a miserable chalice against your wife’s health? I like and admire her far too much. But I haven’t got it. Don’t you remember I told you yesterday—but we’ve been through a good deal since then—the Archdeacon’s bolted with it. He insists that it is his, though Colonel Conyers is quite satisfied that it isn’t, and I really think the police might be allowed to judge. He and Kenneth Mornington and a neighbour of mine bolted with it—out of my own house, if you please! And now, when I’d give anything for it, I can’t get hold of it.” He stamped his foot in the apparent anger of frustrated desire.
The little violence seemed to break Lionel’s calm. He caught Gregory’s arm. “But must your friend have that?” he cried. “Won’t anything else in heaven or hell please him? Will he let Babs die in agony because he wants a damned wine-cup? Try him again, try him again!”
Gregory shook his head. “He’ll ring us up in an hour,” he said, “in case we can promise it to him. That’ll give him time to catch the best morning train to Fardles. But what can I do? I know the Archdeacon and Mornington have taken it to the Duke’s house. But they’re all very angry with me, and how can I ask them for it?” He looked up suddenly. “But what about you?” he said, almost with excitement. “You know Mornington well enough—I daren’t even speak to him; there was a row about that book yesterday at the office, and he misunderstood something I said. He’s rather—well, quick to take offence, you know. But he knows your wife, and he might be able to influence that Archdeacon; they’re very thick. Get on the ’phone to him and try. Try, try anything to save her now.”
He wheeled round to the telephone and explained what he wanted to the local Exchange; then the two of them waited together. “Manasseh’s a hard man,” Gregory went on. “I’ve known him cure people in a marvellous way for nothing at all, but if he’s asked for anything he never makes any compromise. And he doesn’t always succeed, of course, but he does almost always. He works through the mind largely—though he knows about certain healing drugs he brought from the East. No English doctor would look at them or him, naturally, but I’ve never known an English doctor succeed where he failed. Understand, Rackstraw, if you can get the Archdeacon to see that he’s wrong, or to give up the chalice without seeing that he’s wrong, it’s yours absolutely. But don’t waste time arguing. I know it’s no good my arguing with Manasseh, and I don’t think it’s much good your arguing with the Archdeacon. Tell Mornington the whole thing, and get him to see it’s life or death—or worse than life or death. Beg him to bring it down here at once and we’ll have it for Manasseh when he comes. There you are; thank God they’ve been quick.”
In a torrent of passionate appeal Lionel poured out his agony through the absurd little instrument. At the other end Kenneth stood listening and horrified in the Duke’s study; the Duke himself and the Archdeacon waited a little distance “But what’s the matter with Babs?” Kenneth asked. “I don’t understand.”
“Nobody understands,” Lionel answered desperately. “She seems to have gone mad—shrieking, dancing—I can’t tell you. Can you do it? Kenneth, for the sake of your Christ! After all, it’s only a chalice—your friend can’t want it all that much!”
“Your friend seems to want it all that much,” Kenneth said, and bit his lips with annoyance. “No, sorry, Lionel, sorry. Look here, hold on—no, of course, you can’t hold on. But I must find the Archdeacon and tell him.” He held up a hand to stop the priest’s movement. “Tell me, what’s Babs doing now?”
“Lying down with morphia in her to keep her quiet,” Lionel answered. “But she’s not quiet, I know she’s not quiet, she’s in hell. Oh, hurry, Kenneth, hurry.”
Considerably shaken, Mornington turned from the telephone to the others. “It’s Barbara Rackstraw,” he said, paused a moment to explain to the Duke, and went on. “Gregory’s been doing something to her, I expect; Lionel doesn’t know what’s the matter, but she seems to have gone mad. And that—creature has got a doctor up his sleeve who can put her right, he thinks, but he wants that——” He nodded at the Graal, which stood exposed in their midst, and went over the situation again at more length to make the problem clear.
Even the Archdeacon looked serious. The Duke was horrified, yet perplexed. “But what can we do?” he asked, quite innocently.
“Well,” Kenneth said restrainedly, “Lionel’s notion seemed to be that we might give him the Graal.”
“Good God!” the Duke said. “Give him the Graal! Give him that—when we know that’s what he’s after!”
Kenneth did not answer at once, then he said slowly: “Barbara’s a nice thing; I don’t like to think of Barbara being hurt.”
“But what’s a woman’s life—what are any of our lives—compared to this?” the Duke cried.
“No,” Kenneth said, unsatisfied, “no.… But Barbara.… Besides, it isn’t her life, it’s her reason.”
“I am the more sorry,” the Duke answered. “But this thing is more than the whole world.”
Kenneth looked at the Archdeacon. “Well, it’s yours to decide,” he said.
During the previous day it had become evident in Grosvenor Square that a common spiritual concern does not mean a common intellectual agreement. The Duke had risen, the morning after the attack on the Graal, with quite a number of ideas in his mind. The immediate and chief of these had been the removal of the Graal itself to Rome, and its safe custody there. He urged these on his allies at breakfast, and by sheer force of simple confidence in his proposal had very nearly succeeded. The Archd
eacon was perfectly ready to admit that Rome, both as a City and a Church, had advantages. It had the habit of relics, the higher way of mind and the lower business organization to deal with them. Rome was as convenient as Westminster, and the Apostolic See more traditional than Canterbury. But he felt that even this relic was not perhaps so important as Rome would inevitably tend to make it. And he felt his own manners concerned. “It would rather feel like stealing my grandmother’s lustres from my mother to give to my aunt,” he explained diffidently, noted the Duke’s sudden stiffening, and went on hastily: “Besides, I am a man under authority. It isn’t for me to settle. The Bishop or the Archbishop, I suppose.”
“The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council is the final voice of authority still, isn’t it?” the Duke pointedly asked. “I know Southend is a Jew and one or two others are notorious polygamists—unofficially.”
“The Privy Council, as everybody knows, has no jurisdiction …” Mornington began.
“There we go again,” the Archdeacon complained. “But, anyhow, so far as the suggestion is concerned, mere movement in space and time isn’t likely to achieve much. It couldn’t solve the problem, though it might delay it.”
“Well, what do you propose to do?” the Duke asked.
“I don’t know that I really thought of doing anything,” the Archdeacon answered. “It would be quite safe here wouldn’t it? Or we might simply put it in a dispatch-case and take it to the Left Luggage office at Paddington or somewhere. No,” he added hastily, “that’s not quite true. But you staunch churchpeople always make me feel like an atheist. Frankly, I think the Bishop ought to know—but he’s away till next week. So’s the Archbishop. And then there are the police. It’s all very difficult.”
There certainly were the police. Colonel Conyers made a call that morning; the Assistant Commissioner made a point of having tea with the Duchess, who was the Duke’s aunt, that afternoon. The Duke was at his most regal (ducal is too insignificant a word) with both. Neither of them were in a position to give wings to a colossal scandal by taking action unless forced to it by Mr. Persimmons, and Mr. Persimmons had returned to Cully, after reiterating to the Colonel his wish that public action should not be taken. To the Assistant Commissioner the Duke intimated that further attacks on the vessel had taken place.
“What, burglars?” the other said.
“Not burglars,” the Duke answered darkly. “More like black magic.”
“Really?” the Assistant Commissioner said, slightly bewildered. “Oh, quite, quite. Er—did anything happen?”
“They tried to destroy It by willing against It,” the Duke said. “But by the grace of God they didn’t succeed.”
“Ah … willing,” the other said vaguely. “Yes, I know a lot can be done that way. Though Baudouin is rather against it, I believe. You—you didn’t see anything?”
“I thought I heard someone,” the Duke answered. “And the Archdeacon felt It soften in his hands.”
“Oh, the Archdeacon!” the Assistant Commissioner said, and left it at that.
The whole day, in short, had been exceedingly unsatisfactory to the allies. The Duke and Mornington, in their respective hours of vigil before the sacred vessel, had endeavoured unconsciously to recapture some of their previous emotion. But the Graal stood like any other chalice, as dull as the furniture about it. Only the Archdeacon, and he much more faintly, was conscious of that steady movement of creation flowing towards and through the narrow channel of its destiny. And now when, on the next morning, he found himself confronted with this need for an unexpected decision he felt that he had not really any doubt what he would do. Still—“‘Wise as serpents’,” he said, “Let us be serpentine. Let us go to Cully and see Mrs. Rackstraw, and perhaps meet this very obstinate doctor.”
The Duke looked very troubled. “But can you even hesitate?” he asked. “Is anything worth such a sacrifice? Isn’t it sacrilege and apostasy even to think of it?”
“I do not think of it,” the Archdeacon said. “There is no use in thinking of it and weighing one thing against another. When the time comes He shall dispose as He will, or rather He shall be as He will, as He is.”
“Does He will Gregory Persimmons?” Kenneth said wryly.
“Certainly He wills him,” the Archdeacon said, “since He wills that Persimmons shall be whatever he seems to choose. That is not technically correct perhaps, but it is that which I believe and feel and know.”
“He wills evil, then?” Kenneth said.
“‘Shall there be evil in the City and I the Lord have not done it?’” the Archdeacon quoted. “But I feel certain He wills us to get down to Fardles. And of the rest we will talk later.”
Neither Kenneth nor the Duke accused the priest of evading the issue, for both of them felt he was speaking from a world of experience into which they had hardly entered. They fell back on the simpler idea that agony and evil were displeasing to God, but that He permitted them, and indeed Kenneth, at any rate, found it necessary, while he telephoned to Lionel their decision to come to Cully, and even on the way there, to keep this firmly in his mind as a counterbalance to the anxiety that he felt. For never before had he been confronted with the fact that certain strong and effective minds were ready and willing to inflict pain with or without a cause. He was becoming frightened of Gregory, and he naturally and inevitably therefore decided that Gregory was displeasing to God. It was his only defence; in such a crisis “if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent Him.”
Yet this, even up to the moment when they all met in the hall at Cully, Lionel had refrained from doing. That the universe was displeasing to him did not prove that a god existed who could save him from the universe. But the universe seemed sometimes to relax a little, to permit a little grace to be wrung from it; and he thought it barely possible that such small grace might be granted now. It was undignified to be so greedy, but it was for Barbara—he excused himself to his own scornful mind.
Manasseh had arrived before the other three, and had spent the interval chatting with Gregory in the hall. Persimmons had begged Lionel so earnestly not to make any attempt to moderate his terms, and had seemed to have such a belief in and such a respect for his skill and obstinacy, that Lionel had easily fallen in with the suggestion. Cully had been placed so entirely at his disposal; the chalice itself had been—or was to be—his to yield to Manasseh; his anxiety about Adrian had been reduced; lastly, the possibility of a cure for Barbara had been so wholly Gregory’s idea that prudence as well as gratitude demanded so much. He remained therefore, rather to the annoyance of the nurse, who had come by the same train as Manasseh, in Barbara’s room, wondering whether the occasional flicker of movement he seemed to discern in her was real or only the suggestion of his own hope or fear.
Manasseh chatted with Gregory, and as the two paced the hall their sympathy with Lionel and Barbara seemed considerably lightened. “It only needs two things,” Gregory said. “You must be firm when the other people come, and you ought to be able to do something to make Rackstraw think his wife is getting over it.”
“Trust me to be firm,” Manasseh answered. “As for the other—I think I can do that too. I’ve got some stuff that will send her into the heaviest sleep she’s ever known; morphia’s nothing to it. And it’ll last for forty-eight hours or so. By then we can be away.”
“I wonder if we’ve done wisely, after all,” Gregory said. “But I don’t altogether trust the way things are shaping here. They carry heavy guns, with the Duke—and Tumulty tells me the police haven’t dropped that killing yet.”
“What—Pattison?” Manasseh asked in surprise. “But Dmitri told me that he thought you’d managed that very well. He was sent to you, wasn’t he?”
“He was sent from within,” Gregory said. “It was made clear to me that I must kill, and he happened to be getting difficult. He did a pretty little piece of forgery for me once and played up well. But a few months ago he came across a Wesleyan mission-preacher and be
gan to get troublesome. I was going to send him to Canada—but the other chance seemed too good to lose. So it was that.”
Manasseh looked at him approvingly. “You will find soon,” he said, “that possession is nothing besides destruction. We will go together to the East, and take the child and the Cup with us. And we will leave this madness behind us—and perhaps something else. We will talk with Dmitri. I should like to leave a memory of us with that priest.”
There was a ring at the front door. Ludding, who had been told to be in attendance, came through to open it. At the other end of the hall Gregory and Manasseh turned to meet their guests, and Ludding, almost achieving irony, cried out in the voice of a herald: “The Duke of the North Ridings, the Archdeacon of Fardles, Mr. Mornington.”
They entered, the Archdeacon carrying a small case, from which Persimmons carefully kept his eyes averted. They entered, and he said to Ludding: “Ask Mr. Rackstraw to come down.” Then, as the man went away, he went on: “It is better that Mr. Rackstraw, and Dr. Manasseh here, and you should settle what is to be done. I have given over to Mr. Rackstraw all my interest in the chalice.”
The Archdeacon bowed formally and looked at Manasseh. Immediately afterwards Lionel came down the stairs to join them, nodded to Kenneth, and was introduced by Gregory to Manasseh. Then Persimmons went on: “I’ll leave you to discuss it for a few minutes. But one way or another the thing should be settled at once.” He turned away up the stairs and along the corridor from which Lionel had come.
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