Lord of the World

by Robert Hugh Benson

  CHAPTER II

  I

  It seemed to Percy Franklin as he drew near Rome, sliding five hundredfeet high through the summer dawn, that he was approaching the verygates of heaven, or, still better, he was as a child coming home. Forwhat he had left behind him ten hours before in London was not a badspecimen, he thought, of the superior mansions of hell. It was a worldwhence God seemed to have withdrawn Himself, leaving it indeed in astate of profound complacency--a state without hope or faith, but acondition in which, although life continued, there was absent the oneessential to well-being. It was not that there was not expectation--forLondon was on tip-toe with excitement. There were rumours of all kinds:Felsenburgh was coming back; he was back; he had never gone. He was tobe President of the Council, Prime Minister, Tribune, with fullcapacities of democratic government and personal sacro-sanctity, evenKing--if not Emperor of the West. The entire constitution was to beremodelled, there was to be a complete rearrangement of the pieces;crime was to be abolished by the mysterious power that had killed war;there was to be free food--the secret of life was discovered, there wasto be no more death--so the rumours ran.... Yet that was lacking, to thepriest's mind, which made life worth living....

  In Paris, while the volor waited at the great station at Montmartre,once known as the Church of the Sacred Heart, he had heard the roaringof the mob in love with life at last, and seen the banners go past. Asit rose again over the suburbs he had seen the long lines of trainsstreaming in, visible as bright serpents in the brilliant glory of theelectric globes, bringing the country folk up to the Council of theNation which the legislators, mad with drama, had summoned to decide thegreat question. At Lyons it had been the same. The night was as clear asthe day, and as full of sound. Mid France was arriving to register itsvotes.

  He had fallen asleep as the cold air of the Alps began to envelop thecar, and had caught but glimpses of the solemn moonlit peaks below him,the black profundities of the gulfs, the silver glint of the shield-likelakes, and the soft glow of Interlaken and the towns in the Rhonevalley. Once he had been moved in spite of himself, as one of the hugeGerman volors had passed in the night, a blaze of ghostly lights andgilding, resembling a huge moth with antennae of electric light, and thetwo ships had saluted one another through half a league of silent air,with a pathetic cry as of two strange night-birds who have no leisure topause. Milan and Turin had been quiet, for Italy was organised on otherprinciples than France, and Florence was not yet half awake. And now theCampagna was slipping past like a grey-green rug, wrinkled and tumbled,five hundred feet beneath, and Rome was all but in sight. The indicatorabove his seat moved its finger from one hundred to ninety miles.

  He shook off the doze at last, and drew out his office book; but as hepronounced the words his attention was elsewhere, and, when Prime wassaid, he closed the book once more, propped himself more comfortably,drawing the furs round him, and stretching his feet on the empty seatopposite. He was alone in his compartment; the three men who had come inat Paris had descended at Turin.

  * * * * *

  He had been remarkably relieved when the message had come three daysbefore from the Cardinal-Protector, bidding him make arrangements for along absence from England, and, as soon as that was done, to come toRome. He understood that the ecclesiastical authorities were reallydisturbed at last.

  He reviewed the last day or two, considering the report he would have topresent. Since his last letter, three days before, seven notableapostasies had taken place in Westminster diocese alone, two priests andfive important laymen. There was talk of revolt on all sides; he hadseen a threatening document, called a "petition," demanding the right todispense with all ecclesiastical vestments, signed by one hundred andtwenty priests from England and Wales. The "petitioners" pointed outthat persecution was coming swiftly at the hands of the mob; that theGovernment was not sincere in the promises of protection; they hintedthat religious loyalty was already strained to breaking-point even inthe case of the most faithful, and that with all but those it hadalready broken.

  And as to his comments Percy was clear. He would tell the authorities,as he had already told them fifty times, that it was not persecutionthat mattered; it was this new outburst of enthusiasm for Humanity--anenthusiasm which had waxed a hundredfold more hot since the coming ofFelsenburgh and the publication of the Eastern news--which was meltingthe hearts of all but the very few. Man had suddenly fallen in love withman. The conventional were rubbing their eyes and wondering why they hadever believed, or even dreamed, that there was a God to love, asking oneanother what was the secret of the spell that had held them so long.Christianity and Theism were passing together from the world's mind as amorning mist passes when the sun comes up. His recommendations--? Yes,he had those clear, and ran them over in his mind with a sense ofdespair.

  For himself, he scarcely knew if he believed what he professed. Hisemotions seemed to have been finally extinguished in the vision of thewhite car and the silence of the crowd that evening three weeks before.It had been so horribly real and positive; the delicate aspirations andhopes of the soul appeared so shadowy when compared with that burning,heart-shaking passion of the people. He had never seen anything like it;no congregation under the spell of the most kindling preacher alive hadever responded with one-tenth of the fervour with which that irreligiouscrowd, standing in the cold dawn of the London streets, had greeted thecoming of their saviour. And as for the man himself--Percy could notanalyse what it was that possessed him as he had stared, muttering thename of Jesus, on that quiet figure in black with features and hair solike his own. He only knew that a hand had gripped his heart--a handwarm, not cold--and had quenched, it seemed, all sense of religiousconviction. It had only been with an effort that sickened him toremember, that he had refrained from that interior act of capitulationthat is so familiar to all who have cultivated an inner life andunderstand what failure means. There had been one citadel that had notflung wide its gates--all else had yielded. His emotions had beenstormed, his intellect silenced, his memory of grace obscured, aspiritual nausea had sickened his soul, yet the secret fortress of thewill had, in an agony, held fast the doors and refused to cry out andcall Felsenburgh king.

  Ah! how he had prayed during those three weeks! It appeared to him thathe had done little else; there had been no peace. Lances of doubt thrustagain and again through door and window; masses of argument had crashedfrom above; he had been on the alert day and night, repelling this,blindly, and denying that, endeavouring to keep his foothold on theslippery plane of the supernatural, sending up cry after cry to the LordWho hid Himself. He had slept with his crucifix in his hand, he hadawakened himself by kissing it; while he wrote, talked, ate, walked, andsat in cars, the inner life had been busy-making frantic speechless actsof faith in a religion which his intellect denied and from which hisemotions shrank. There had been moments of ecstasy--now in a crowdedstreet, when he recognised that God was all, that the Creator was thekey to the creature's life, that a humble act of adoration wastranscendently greater than the most noble natural act, that theSupernatural was the origin and end of existence there had come to himsuch moments in the night, in the silence of the Cathedral, when thelamp flickered, and a soundless air had breathed from the iron door ofthe tabernacle. Then again passion ebbed, and left him stranded onmisery, but set with a determination (which might equally be that ofpride or faith) that no power in earth or hell should hinder him fromprofessing Christianity even if he could not realise it. It wasChristianity alone that made life tolerable.

  Percy drew a long vibrating breath, and changed his position; for faraway his unseeing eyes had descried a dome, like a blue bubble set on acarpet of green; and his brain had interrupted itself to tell him thatthis was Rome. He got up presently, passed out of his compartment, andmoved forward up the central gangway, seeing, as he went, through theglass doors to right and left his fellow-passengers, some still asleep,some staring out at the view, some reading. He put his eye to the glasssquare in the door, and fo
r a minute or two watched, fascinated, thesteady figure of the steerer at his post. There he stood motionless, hishands on the steel circle that directed the vast wings, his eyes on thewind-gauge that revealed to him as on the face of a clock both the forceand the direction of the high gusts; now and again his hands movedslightly, and the huge fans responded, now lifting, now lowering.Beneath him and in front, fixed on a circular table, were the glassdomes of various indicators--Percy did not know the meaning of half--oneseemed a kind of barometer, intended, he guessed, to declare the heightat which they were travelling, another a compass. And beyond, throughthe curved windows, lay the enormous sky. Well, it was all verywonderful, thought the priest, and it was with the force of which allthis was but one symptom that the supernatural had to compete.

  He sighed, turned, and went back to his compartment.

  It was an astonishing vision that began presently to open beforehim--scarcely beautiful except for its strangeness, and as unreal as araised map. Far to his right, as he could see through the glass doors,lay the grey line of the sea against the luminous sky, rising andfalling ever so slightly as the car, apparently motionless, tiltedimperceptibly against the western breeze; the only other movement wasthe faint pulsation of the huge throbbing screw in the rear. To the leftstretched the limitless country, flitting beneath, in glimpses seenbetween the motionless wings, with here and there the streak of avillage, flattened out of recognition, or the flash of water, andbounded far away by the low masses of the Umbrian hills; while in front,seen and gone again as the car veered, lay the confused line of Rome andthe huge new suburbs, all crowned by the great dome growing everyinstant. Around, above and beneath, his eyes were conscious of wideair-spaces, overhead deepening into lapis-lazuli down to horizons ofpale turquoise. The only sound, of which he had long ceased to bedirectly conscious, was that of the steady rush of air, less shrill nowas the speed began to drop down--down--to forty miles an hour. There wasa clang of a bell, and immediately he was aware of a sense of faintsickness as the car dropped in a glorious swoop, and he staggered alittle as he grasped his rugs together. When he looked again the motionseemed to have ceased; he could see towers ahead, a line of house-roofs,and beneath he caught a glimpse of a road and more roofs with patches ofgreen between. A bell clanged again, and a long sweet cry followed. Onall sides he could hear the movement of feet; a guard in uniform passedswiftly along the glazed corridor; again came the faint nausea; and ashe looked up once more from his luggage for an instant he saw the dome,grey now and lined, almost on a level with his own eyes, huge againstthe vivid sky. The world span round for a moment; he shut his eyes, andwhen he looked again walls seemed to heave up past him and stop,swaying. There was the last bell, a faint vibration as the car groundedin the steel-netted dock; a line of faces rocked and grew still outsidethe windows, and Percy passed out towards the doors, carrying his bags.