The Burden - Christie Agatha (читать книги TXT) 📗

"It wasn't the sort of thing you would have cared for-crude, rather melodramatic. It didn't move me. I was a little disappointed that that was so. Various people got up to testify. Then the command came to me, clear and quite unmistakable.

"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."

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?"