Llewellyn nodded. His mind was still occupied with the past. He was remembering the day when the elevator had swept him up to the thirty-fifth floor of a high building. The reception-room, the tall, elegant blonde who had received him, the square-shouldered, thick-set young man, to whom she had handed him over, and the final sanctuary; the inner office of the magnate. The gleaming pale surface of the vast desk, and the man who rose from behind the desk to proffer a hand and utter a welcome. The big jowl, the small, piercing blue eyes. Just as he had seen them that day in the desert.
“… certainly glad to make your acquaintance, Mr. Knox. As I see it, the country is ripe for a great return to God… got to be put over in a big way… to get results we’ve got to spend money… been to two of your meetings… I certainly was impressed… you’d got them right with you, eating up every word… it was great… great!”
God and Big Business. Did they seem incongruous together? And yet, why should they? If business acumen was one of God’s gifts to man, why should it not be used in his Service?
He, Llewellyn, had had no doubts or qualms, for this room and this man had already been shown to him. It was part of the pattern, his pattern. Was there sincerity here, a simple sincerity that might seem as grotesque as the early carvings on a font? Or was it the mere grasping of a business opportunity? The realisation that God might be made to pay?
Llewellyn had never known, had not, indeed, troubled himself even to wonder. It was part of his pattern. He was a messenger, nothing more, a man under obedience.
Fifteen years… From the small open-air meetings of the beginning, to lecture-rooms, to halls, to vast stadiums.
Faces, blurred gigantic masses of faces, receding into the distance, rising up in serried rows. Waiting, hungering…
And his part? Always the same.
The coldness, the recoil of fear, the emptiness, the waiting.
And then Dr. Llewellyn Knox rises to his feet and… the words come, rushing through his mind, emerging through his lips…. Not his words, never his words. But the glory, the ecstasy of speaking them, that was his.
(That, of course, was where the danger had lain. Strange that he should not have realised that until now.)
And then the aftermath, the fawning women, the hearty men, his own sense of semi-collapse, of deadly nausea, the hospitality, the adulation, the hysteria.
And he himself, responding as best he could, no longer the messenger of God, but the inadequate human being, something far less than those who looked at him with their foolish worshipping gaze. For virtue had gone out of him, he was drained of all that gives a man human dignity, a sick exhausted creature, Sled with despair, black, empty, hollow despair.
“Poor Dr. Knox,” they said, “he looks so tired.”
Tired. More and more tired…
He had been a strong man physically, but not strong enough to outlast fifteen years. Nausea, giddiness, a fluttering heart, a difficulty in drawing breath, black-outs, fainting spells-quite simply, a worn-out body.
And so to the sanatorium in the mountains. Lying there motionless, staring out through the window at the dark shape of the pine tree cutting the line of the sky, and the round, pink face bending over him, the eyes behind the thick glasses, owlish in their solemnity.
“It will be a long business; you’ll have to be patient.”
“Yes, doctor?”
“You’ve a strong constitution fortunately, but you’ve strained it unmercifully. Heart, lungs-every organ in your body has been affected.”
“Are you breaking it to me that I’m going to die?”
He had asked the question with only mild curiosity.
“Certainly not. We’ll get you right again. As I say, it will be a long business, but you’ll go out of here a fit man. Only-”
The doctor hesitated.
“Only what?”
“You must understand this, Dr. Knox. You’ll have to lead a quiet life in future. There must be no more public life. Your heart won’t stand it. No platforms, no exertion, no speeches.”
“After a rest-“