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began and stopped. “No, I’m babbling. Come and see the other thing, which is different.”
    He led the way back round the easels. He said, “Have you ever heard of Father Simon?”
    â€œHave I not?” said Richard. “Is he or is he not in all the papers, almost as much as the Peace? The Foreign Office has been taking a mild concern in all these new prophets, including this one. Then there’s the Russian one and the Chinese. You get them at times like these. But they all seem, from our point of view, quite innocuous. I’ve not been very interested myself.”
    â€œNor was I,” said Jonathan, “till I met Lady Wallingford. Since then I have read of him, listened to him, met him and now painted him. Lady Wallingford came across him in America when she was there soon after the last war and I gather fell for him then. During this war he became one of their great religious leaders and when he came over she was one of—or rather she was—his reception committee. She’s devoted to him; Betty—not so much, but she goes with her mother.” He paused frowning, as if he were about to make a further remark about Betty and her mother, but he changed his mind and went on. “Lady Wallingford thought it would be a privilege for me to paint the Prophet.”
    Richard said, “Is that what they call him?”
    His hand on the covering of the canvas, Jonathan hesitated. “No,” he said, “I don’t want to be unfair. No. What she actually calls him is the Father. I asked her if he was a priest, but she took no notice. He’s got a quite enormous following in America, though here, in spite of the papers, he’s kept himself rather quiet. It’s been suggested that he’s the only man to evangelize Germany. It’s also been suggested that he and his opposite numbers in Russia and China shall make a threefold World Leadership. But so far he’s not done or said anything about it. He may be just waiting. Well, I did the best I could. Here’s the result.”
    He threw the covering back and Richard was confronted with the painting. It was, at first glance, that of a man preaching. The congregation, of which there seemed a vast number, had their backs to the spectator. They were all a little inclined forward, as if (Richard supposed) in the act of listening, so that they were a mass of slightly curved backs. They were not in a church; they were not in a room; it was difficult to see where they were, and Richard did not particularly mind. It was in an open space somewhere; what he could see of the ground was not unlike the devastation in the other picture, though more rock-like, more in the nature of a wilderness than a City. Beyond them, in a kind of rock pulpit against a great cliff, was the preacher. He seemed to be a tallish dark man of late middle age, in a habit of some sort. His face, clean-shaven, heavy, emaciated, was bent a little downward towards his audience. One hand was stretched out towards them, also a little downward, but the hand was open and turned palm upward. Behind him his shadow was thrown on the rock; above, the sky was full of heavy and rushing cloud.
    Richard began to speak and checked himself. He looked more closely at the preaching figure, especially at the face. Though the canvas was large the face inevitably was small, but it was done with care, and as Richard studied it, the little painted oval began to loom out of the picture till its downward-leaning weight seemed to dominate and press on the audience below, and to make all—clouds and crowds and rock-pulpit—grayer and less determined around it. If it was a pulpit; Richard was not clear whether the figure was casting a shadow on the rock or emerging from a cleft in the rock. But the face—it was almost as if the figure had lowered his face to avoid some expression being caught by the painter, and had failed, for Jonathan had caught it too soon.