Read War in Heaven for Free Online Page B

authors.”
    â€œIs there?” the Archdeacon asked. “You astonish me.” He looked at the parcel, of which he still held the string. “Do you know,” he said thoughtfully, “I don’t think I have any feeling particularly about it. Whether you publish it or not, whether anyone publishes it or not, doesn’t matter much. I think it might matter if I made no attempt to get it published, for I honestly think the ideas are sound. But with that very small necessary activity my responsibility ends.”
    â€œYou take it very placidly,” Mornington answered, smiling. “Most of our authors feel they have written the most important book of the century.”
    â€œAh, don’t misunderstand me,” the Archdeacon said. “I might think that myself—I don’t, but I might. It wouldn’t make any difference to my attitude towards it. No book of ideas can matter so supremely as that. ‘An infant crying in the night,’ you know. What else was Aristotle?”
    â€œWell, it makes it much pleasanter for us,” Mornington said again. “I gather it’s all one to you whether we take it or leave it?”
    â€œEntirely,” the Archdeacon answered, and pushed the bundle towards him. “I should, inevitably, be interested in your reasons so far as they bear stating.”
    â€œWith this detachment,” the other answered, undoing the parcel, “I wonder you make any reservation. Could any abominable reason shatter such a celestial calm?”
    The Archdeacon twiddled his thumbs. “Man is weak,” he said sincerely, “and I indeed am the chief of sinners. But I also am in the hands of God, and what can it matter how foolish my own words are or how truly I am told of them? Pooh, Mr. Mornington, you must have a very conceited set of authors.”
    â€œTalking about authors,” Mornington went on, “I thought you might be interested in looking at the proofs of this book we’ve got in hand.” And he passed over Sir Giles’s Sacred Vessels .
    The Archdeacon took them. “It’s good work, is it?” he asked.
    â€œI haven’t had time to read it,” the other said, “But there’s one article on the Graal that ought to attract you.” He glanced sideways at the first page of the MS., and read “ Christianity and the League of Nations , by Julian Davenant, Archdeacon of Castra Parvulorum.” “Well, thank God I know his name now,” he reflected.
    Meanwhile the third visitor, with her small companion, had penetrated to Lionel’s room. They had come to the City to buy Adrian a birthday present, and, having succeeded, had gone on according to plan to the office. This arrangement—as such arrangements by such people tend to be—had been made two or three weeks earlier, and the crisis of the previous Friday had made Lionel only the more anxious to see if Barbara’s presence would in any way cleanse the room from the slime that seemed still to carpet it. He had been a little doubtful whether she herself would bear the neighbourhood, but, either because in effect the murder had meant little to her or because she guessed something of her husband’s feelings, she had made no difficulty, had indeed assumed that the visit was still to be paid. Adrian’s persistent interest in the date-stamp presented itself for those few minutes to Lionel as a solid reality amid the fantasies his mind made haste to induce. But Barbara’s own presence was too much in the nature of a defiance to make him entirely happy. He kissed her as she sat on his table, with a sense of almost heroic challenge; neither he nor she were ignorant, and their ignoring of the subject was a too clear simulation of the ignorance they did not possess. But Adrian’s ignorance was something positive. Lionel felt that a dead body beneath the desk would have been to this small and intent being something not