“I got up. I remember the faces turning to me.”
“I didn’t know what I was going to say. I didn’t think-or expound my own beliefs. The words were there in my head. Sometimes they got ahead of me, I had to speak faster to catch up, to say them before I lost them. I can’t describe to you what it was like-if I said it was like flame and like honey, would you understand at all? The flame seared me, but the sweetness of the honey was there too, the sweetness of obedience. It is both a terrible and a lovely thing to be the messenger of God.”
“Terrible as an army with banners,” murmured Wilding.
“Yes. The psalmist knew what he was talking about.”
“And-afterwards?”
Llewellyn Knox spread out his hands.
“Exhaustion, utter and complete exhaustion. I must have spoken, I suppose, for about three-quarters of an hour. When I got home, I sat by the fire shivering, too dead to lift a hand or to speak. My mother understood. She said: ‘It is like my father was, after the Eisteddfod.’ She gave me hot soup and put hot-water-bottles in my bed.”
Wilding murmured: “You had all the necessary heredity. The mystic from the Scottish side, and the poetic and creative from the Welsh-the voice, too. And it’s a true creative picture-the fear, the frustration, the emptiness, and then the sudden up-rush of power, and after it, the weariness.”
He was silent for a moment, and then asked:
“Won’t you go on with the story?”
“There’s not so much more to tell. I went and saw Carol the next day. I told her I wasn’t going to be a doctor after all, that I was going to be a preacher of some kind. I told her that I had hoped to marry her, but that now I had to give up that hope. She didn’t understand. She said: ‘A doctor can do just as much good as a preacher can do.’ And I said it wasn’t a question of doing good. It was a command, and I had to obey it. And she said it was nonsense saying I couldn’t get married. I wasn’t a Roman Catholic, was I? And I said: ‘Everything I am, and have, has to be God’s.’ But of course she couldn’t see that-how could she, poor child? It wasn’t in her vocabulary. I went home and told my mother, and asked her to be good to Carol, and begged her to understand. She said: ‘I understand well enough. You’ll have nothing left over to give a woman,’ and then she broke down and cried, and said: ‘I knew-I always knew-there was something. You were different from the others. Ah, but it’s hard on the wives and mothers.’
“She said: ‘If I lost you to a woman, that’s the way of life, and there would have been your children for me to hold on my knee. But this way, you’ll be gone from me entirely.’
“I assured her that wasn’t true, but all the time we both knew that it was in essence. Human ties-they all had to go.”
Wilding moved restlessly.
“You must forgive me, but I can’t subscribe to that, as a way of life. Human affection, human sympathy, service to humanity-”
“But it isn’t a way of life that I am talking about! I am talking of the man singled out, the man who is something more than his fellows, and who is also very much less-that is the thing he must never forget, how infinitely less than they he is, and must be.”
“There I can’t follow you.”
Llewellyn spoke softly, more to himself than to his listener.
“That, of course, is the danger-that one will forget. That, I see now, is where God showed mercy to me. I was saved in time.”
CHAPTER six
1
Wilding looked faintly puzzled by Llewellyn’s last words.
He said with a faint trace of embarrassment: “It’s good of you to have told me all you have. Please believe that it wasn’t just vulgar curiosity on my part.”
“I know that. You have a real interest in your fellowman.”
“And you are an unusual specimen. I’ve read in various periodicals accounts of your career. But it wasn’t those things that interested me. Those details are merely factual.”