Читать книгу The Holy Terror - H.G. Wells - Страница 14

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Rud did not make another speech for a week or so, and even then attempted nothing so elaborate as his first outbreak; his instinct told him that a second oration in the same term would not do; he wrote nothing but lecture notes, gave four hours a day grimly but with a watch on his desk, to text-books, and talked with the utmost discretion. He felt that something very important had happened in his life and he did not quite know what. In such brief leisure as his steadfast pursuit of a good degree permitted him, he would catch himself dreaming over a gazetteer and an atlas, or reading books about Napoleon and Hitler and Mussolini. Or simply he dreamt and schemed. If he could move people once, he could move them again...

He did his best to control those extravagant reveries. For they went even beyond the range of his schoolboy battle-dreams.

People made his acquaintance now—almost with an effect of seeking him. This did much to confirm his new-born sense of his own value. If there was something they valued in him, then he would be a fool to give it away. Of course these reveries were reveries, but for all that there might be something in them. He could not help posing a little. He regarded his various visitors with a faintly hostile expression, hands behind his back, replied without committing himself to anything and summed them up one after another in his own mind.

The latest thing in religion presented itself one afternoon as a man too old for an undergraduate and too oily and shiny for a don, a queer fish with a slightly American accent. He had called, he said, and stopped. Whitlow thought he might be a canvasser. But he was much too rich and smug-looking for that.

"I heard your speech," resumed the intruder. "You have, what shall I call it?—mental energy. You have persuasive power—oh—great persuasive power. There was something contagious in your indignation. I feel it imperative upon me to implore you not to waste these gifts."

"I have my ideas," said Rudolf. "What do you suggest?"

"Where do they take you?"

"Nowhere yet. I asked you what do you suggest?"

"Have you Guidance?"

"Tell me about it."

The visitor wanted to walk about the room. He had played for the hearthrug but Rudie had got that. "Do sit down," said Rudie. "In that chair there, the low one. No; I cannot listen to you if I have to keep on watching you moving around. It distracts me. What is this Guidance?"

"Guidance," said the visitor, sinking into his chair. "Just that."

Rudie replied with an uncivil monosyllable.

The missioner was spurred to exposition. "You don't know," he said.

"I'm asking you."

"Let me illustrate."

"I'm attending."

The illustrations rambled a good deal. Rudie listened with a lowering expression, that hampered the teller. He spoke of the fear and uncertainty in so many lives nowadays, the constant struggle against sinful impulses, of suicidal moments and how when at last it broke upon them—

"What broke upon them?"

"Guidance!"

"Ugh!"

"Guidance and the fellowship of those who share. Then everything grew simple, everything grew plain."

Rudolf remained in a pose of enigmatical attention. He realised that he was embarrassing this spiritual windbag. He liked that. There was power in this still silence; it was giving him an ascendency. It was a sort of hypnotism. He must try it again. "Don't you feel something—?" said the visitor, trying to break this stony irresponsiveness.

"You go on with what you came to say," said his host.

Presently he brought the interview to an end. It was a sudden inspiration came to him. He lost his breath for an instant and then forced himself to speak.

"Tell me," he said. "This Guidance brought you here?"

"I felt impelled—"

"Yes, and now, don't you think it about time that Guidance packed you up and took you away again?..."

When his oak closed on the intruder, Rudie's stern face relaxed into a delighted grin. His mature earnestness fell from him like a mask. He stuck out his tongue at the door and then put his thumb to his nose and spread out his fingers in twiddling triumph. "That for you and your Guidance," he said.

By which it is manifest that he was still only very partially grown-up.