XXXIX.

Where he went, he did not know. He walked on and on, his straggling hair blown by the wind, and feeling a little like King Lear on the heath, till, cutting across the Park to the Marble Arch, several open-air meetings beckoned to him as a sign and a portent.

Two hostile meetings, of Free Thinkers and devout Christians, were held side by side, the speakers abusing each other at intervals, as though, Lord Ottercove thought, God and the Day were not in sight! The Christian protagonist, pointing at the blackboard on which a hen and an egg had been sketched by him, questioned his audience: “They talk of science, but what do they know? Can any of them tell me--can any of you here tell me who came first? The hen or the egg? Did the hen first make the egg, or did the egg first make the hen? Now, then, can any one here tell me, I ask ye? Can any of the science students tell me? Ye can’t. Well, _I_ can tell yer!--God made them both!” And he looked round triumphantly.

“They tell us--these Christian fellows,” shouted the Free Thinker, “that Adam and Eve was sent to hell because Eve ‘ad eaten an apple. Now here is an apple.” He held up an apple for all to see. “Now, Ladies and Gentlemen, I ask ye: What is there in an apple? ‘Ere! _And yet they tell us_--the Bible tells us--that Adam and Eve was sent to ‘ell ‘cause Eve’d eaten an apple! Now I ask ye, Ladies and Gentlemen, can ye believe such a silly thing?”

“Free Thinkers!” shouted the Christian protagonist, pointing derisively at his antagonist not five yards away. “Free Thinkers!--Free _Stinkers_ I call them!”

“Because they’d eaten an apple. Now here! Just look at it. Look at it! What is there, I ask, in an apple? And yet they tell us--”

Suddenly the urge to impart to this large gaping audience the momentous message came over Ottercove. It was the end of the visible world. In a few hours, perhaps in a few moments--at most in a week--they would have to face the Judgment. It was for him to break the news. What consolation had he to offer them? Call on their national pride in facing disaster calmly and stoically? Recall the serene joys of eternity? Dwell on the ultimate mercy of God? Or prophesy that there will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Biblical language came readily to his lips: Lord Ottercove, though few knew it, was the greatest living authority on biblical texts. He knew the Bible from cover to cover and backwards: indeed, he could, at a pinch, recite it by heart under an anesthetic.

“What does it profit a man,” he began in a loud robust voice, the crowds gathering round him, “if he gain the whole world (he paused as if to prolong the tension of the ‘poser’; then added quietly:) and lose his own soul? And why should it sadden a man if he lose the whole world (Lord Ottercove paused), never having gained it?” He had the pleasurable sensation of discovering (alas, as the world was about to let him down) that he had the gift of a preacher and prophet, a gift that could hold and sway multitudes. “Before I came here,” he went on, “I sat in the dim light of my study and I dreamed and meditated by the fire; and there came one of the seven angels, and he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and showed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God, having the glory of God: and her light was like unto a stone most precious, even”--Lord Ottercove stopped as if seeking the _mot juste_--“like a jasper stone,” he said, “clear as crystal.”

The audience was writhing with excitement, but he stopped them with a movement of his hand, leaning forward over the stand and speaking almost in a whisper: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.”

Once indeed he was taken aback by an interpellation: “Why the dickens didn’t you stop the man, man?” yelled a dingy figure from the crowd, when he had spoken of the adventist-scientist.

“He wouldn’t stop!” returned Lord Ottercove. There was indeed no sort of good in stopping him, he hastened to add. Did they not know that an invention or discovery was at no time the monopoly of a single brain? What use indeed having this scientist arrested when his successor, whose hiding-place they could not know, was waiting to spring the mine?

But suddenly as he spoke a sort of mental cramp seized upon his brain, and he could not bring himself to utter another word. The harder he tried, the more did thought and words elude him. He stood gazing at them with what seemed to him an inane smile, but so magnetic, so masterful was his personality to the people around him that they stood fascinated, with their eyes glued on him, while he gazed back at them, in silence. Three minutes elapsed.

“Come on!” shouted a man from the crowd.

“Sir,” Lord Ottercove turned to him, “will you be good enough to allow me to complete my prayer?”

At which the interlocutor relapsed into the obscurity whence he had emerged.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” said Lord Ottercove: “I thank you for your kind attention.”

As he walked home, posters of his own newspapers informed him of the imminent dissolution of our planet. He groaned as he saw them. How bad! How unimaginative! Posters depressed him. Never a day, never an hour but that they would trot out some fresh disaster. A train derailed, liners colliding in the Channel, a steamer run aground in the fog, a bus toppled over, an airman lost in the Atlantic. Disaster, disaster, disaster! “Disaster mongers!” he called them. How the public must be getting sick of it. Never good news. He’d have to change all that. And suddenly, he remembered that he could not change it: disaster mongers had for ever triumphed.

At a street corner he bought a newspaper. “End of the World” meetings, he read, were being held in various parts of London. People began to close their shops, and the excitement increased to such an extent that later troops were called out, and large forces of police appeared at the street corners, and the approach to Downing-street was barricaded, the Prime Minister having refused to receive deputations who, resenting his wait-and-see policy, were eager to compel him to do something _and do it now_. Riots broke out in the east end of London, led by persons of an irreligious disposition desiring to have a last good run for their money, and men and women were committing suicide and going insane. There was a vast crowd in Trafalgar Square. The Bishop of London, it seemed, was addressing it. “Nearer my God to Thee, nearer to Thee....” Voices, out of time and tune, soared to the skies. A score of elderly virgins, earnest, spectacled ladies in white, sang with transport, invoking speedy transportation to the Seat of Judgment to be first among the Brides of the Lamb. “A scramble,” thought Ottercove. “A queue before a first-night. Wish I could be sure of my dramatic critic. Bright lad, Allan Scoffer, might manage to get in.”

The Brides’ white stood out luminously against the drab crowd. “What a chance to make a corner in muslin,” Ottercove thought to himself, “to meet the sure demand for Ascension robes!” The untimeliness of such an enterprise, in the face of timelessness, which would rob him of the fruits, damped his speculative ardour. He had long since lost interest in making money, though the habit persisted into middle life, and whenever now he sold a yacht or a Venetian palace or a country house in Scotland, he would pride himself on a minimum profit of £5, as a private reassurance that his old cunning had not left him. He was like a veteran golfer who suddenly, during a quiet walk in the country, borrows a club to show his friends the stuff he is made of. “Not lost the knack yet,” they say tonelessly.

He walked all the way home to Stonedge House and, unnoticed by his servants, sauntered sombrely into his ground-floor sitting-room. His mood was sombre. He stood at the wide French windows and looked out at the darkling park which stretched before him, melting away into the mist, stood there, a little weary and disenchanted. So this was the end. Good! He felt sorry for the world, and for himself, and for the race robbed of the promise of fulfilment. The imminent end of human life and, with it, of his career on earth, threw him back upon a reminiscent mood. He saw himself a boy way back in Ottercove, bright-eyed, eager, wide awake, the visible world a glittering prize, a pear waiting to be plucked. Well, he had plucked it. It had proved, however, more than he really cared to chew; his appetite had waned as he partook of it. He had had his fill; and, perhaps--he had always kept an open mind about these things, had always been awake to other worldly possibilities--perhaps there was room for his versatile talents beyond. He had always been keen, modest, ready to learn the rules of the game--any game--to appreciate the change in the nature of things, and always successful. Those oft-quoted words with which his father once adorned his dreary sermons, words whose beauty had arrested his attention, now stood before him, cavernous with meaning: “We shall not all sleep: but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump.”

Probably. His father--a curious man. No pliability of mind. No disinterested curiosity. Only a rigid belief in heaven and hell. Wrong! Life was pliable, generous and miraculous to a degree we could not even guess; it opened out suddenly, wondrously, as a flower overnight. To-day a caterpillar--to-morrow a butterfly. But we, dull, sodden ruffians ruminating over our existence, like cows chewing the cud, could not imagine a heaven other than of grass and water--greener grass and clearer water. Fools!

He paced up and down. A series of articles on the nature of immortality, for _The Sunday Runner_, commended themselves to his mind. A fitting counter-blast to the precocious spiritualism exploited by a rival group of newspapers. He would write them himself. It was wonderful how his mind was opening out, like a bed of flowers, all looking, straining to the sun. Intuitive orientation. Knew where the sun was, in fact had always had a place in it. And God was just there, too, behind the sun. He felt that he would get on well with God, owing to his reasonableness, modesty, and readiness for transfiguration at short notice. He would not ask questions, but watch every movement of God’s brow and anticipate His every mood.

Ah, well! he had faith. He would go on believing in a personal immortality till, with a poker, from behind, Providence would knock him dead.... A sinister afterthought; he brushed it aside. He stretched out his hands to the unseen: “I am reasonable. Will not the reasonable from beyond the grave claim me?” Half forgotten feelings flooded his heart. He remembered his arrival in England back from his New Zealand tour, as the train rolled noisily over the bridge into the great metropolis, the witness of his crowning triumphs. He remembered a thrush outside his bedroom window way back in Ottercove in early boyhood. The trees seemed to stand still, as if waiting for something. These feelings, eternal essences of things, were they to be wasted? These anticipations, were they not to be fulfilled? They were pledges of something that was to be, had always been, existed now, as if round the corner but somehow out of reach. The quickness with which people disposed of dead bodies, the rapidity with which they resigned themselves to their loss, suggested that, at bottom, they thought it was all right. It was all right. _How_ all right, he could not say, but all right it was.

“Time for bed.” He stretched out his arms to the ceiling and yawned. “I am,” he said aloud, “such as I am, and what I am--neither more nor less--for the universe to chew and digest and assign to the requisite uses.”