“He would not, however, appear to have advanced very far in the matter I sent him down to investigate. He thinks the rector is a perfectly sincere enthusiast. He has his eye on three people, any one of whom might have been planted in the village to work on the rector. Have you been able to discover anything?”
“I’m not sure,” said Mr. Behrens. “I’ve made the round of our usual contacts. I felt that the International Brotherhood Group was the most likely. It’s a line they’ve tried with some success in the past. Stirring up local prejudice and working it up into a national campaign. You remember the schoolchildren who trespassed on the missile base at Loch Gair and were roughly handled?”
“Were alleged to have been roughly handled.”
“Yes. It was a put-up job. But they made a lot of capital out of it. I have a line on their chief organizer. My contact thinks they are up to something. Which means they’ve got a secret agent planted in Hedgeborn.”
“Or that the rector is their secret agent.”
“Yes. The difficulty will be to prove it. Their security is rather good.”
Mr. Fortescue considered the matter, running his thumb down the angle of his prominent chin. He said, “Might you be able to contrive, through your contact, to transmit a particular item of information to their agent in Hedgeborn?”
“I might. But I hardly see—”
“In medicine,” said Mr. Fortescue, “I am told that when it proves impossible to clear up a condition by direct treatment it is sometimes possible to precipitate an artificial crisis which can be dealt with.”
“Always bearing in mind that if we do precipitate a crisis, poor old Calder will be in the middle of it.”
“Exactly,” said Mr. Fortescue.
It was on Friday during the second week of his stay that Mr. Calder noticed the change. There was no open hostility. No one attacked him. No one was even rude to him. It was simply that he had ceased to be acceptable to the village.
People who had been prepared to chat with him in the bar of the Viscount Townshend now had business of their own to discuss whenever he appeared. Mr. Smedley did not answer his knock, although Mr. Calder could see him through the front window reading a book. Mr. Smallpiece avoided him in the street.
It was like the moment, in a theater, when the safety curtain descends, cutting off the actors and all on the stage from the audience. Suddenly he was on one side and the village was on the other.
By Saturday the atmosphere had become so oppressive that Mr. Calder decided to do something about it. Stokes had driven the Colonel into Thetford on business. He was alone in the house. He decided, on the spur of the moment, to have a word with the rector.
Although it was a fine afternoon the village street was completely empty. As he walked he noted the occasional stirring of a window curtain and he knew he was not unobserved, but the silence of the early-autumn afternoon lay heavily over everything. On this occasion he had left a strangely subdued Rasselas behind.
His knock at the rectory door was unanswered. Remembering the rector saying, “We never lock our doors here,” he turned the handle and went in. The house was silent. He took a few steps along the hall, then stopped. The door on his left was ajar. He looked in. The rector was there. He was kneeling at a carved prie-dieu, as motionless as if he had been himself part of the carving. If he had heard Mr. Calder’s approach he took absolutely no notice of it. Feeling extremely foolish, Mr. Calder withdrew by the way he had come.
Walking back down the street he was visited by a recollection of his days with the Military Mission in wartime Albania. The mission had visited a remote village and had been received with the same silent disregard. They had usually been well received, and this time it puzzled them. When he returned to the village some months later Mr. Calder learned the truth. The village had caught an informer and were waiting for the mission to leave before they dealt with him. He had heard the details of what they had done to the informer, and although he was not naturally queasy it had turned his stomach.
That evening Stokes waited on them in unusual silence. When he had gone, the Colonel said, “Whatever it is, it’s tomorrow.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m told that the rector has been fasting since Thursday. Also that morning service tomorrow has been canceled, and Evensong brought forward to four o’clock. That’s when it’ll break.”
“It will be a relief,” said Mr. Calder.
“Stokes thinks you ought to leave tonight. He thinks I shall be all right, but you might not be.”
“That was thoughtful of Stokes. But I’d as soon stay. That is, unless you want to get rid of me.”
“Glad to have you,” said the Colonel. “Besides, if they see you’ve gone they may put it off. Then we shall have to start all over again.”
“Did you make contact with the number I asked you to?”
“Yes. From a public phone booth in Thetford.”
“And what was the answer?”
“It was so odd,” said the Colonel, “that I was afraid I might get It wrong, so I wrote it down.” He handed Mr. Calder a piece of paper.
Mr. Calder read it carefully, folded it up, and put it in his pocket.
“Is it good news or bad?”
“I’m not sure,” said Mr. Calder. “But I can promise you one thing. You’ll hear a sermon tomorrow which you won’t forget.”
When the rector stepped into the pulpit his face was pale and composed, but it was no longer gentle. Mr. Calder wondered how he could ever have considered him nondescript. There was a blazing conviction about the man, a fire that lit up the whole church. This was no longer the gentle St. Francis. This was Peter the Hermit, “whose eyes were a flame and whose tongue was a sword.”
He stood for a moment, upright and motionless. Then he turned his head slowly, looking from face to face in the crowded congregation, as if searching for support and guidance from his flock. When he started to speak it was in a quiet, almost conversational voice.
“The anti-Christ has raised his head once more. The Devil is at his work again. We deceived ourselves into thinking that we had dealt him a shrewd blow. We were mistaken. Our former warning has not been heeded. I fear that it will have to be repeated, and this time more strongly.”
The Colonel looked anxiously at Mr. Calder, who mouthed the word, “Wait.”
“Far from abandoning its foul work at Snettisham Manor, I have learned that it is not only continuing, but intensifying it. More of God’s creatures are being imprisoned in its cells and tortured by methods which would have shamed the Gestapo. In the name of science, mice, small rabbits, guinea pigs, and hamsters are being put to obscene and painful deaths. Yesterday a cargo of African tree beavers, harmless and friendly little animals, arrived at this — at this scientific slaughterhouse. They are to be inoculated with a virus which will first paralyze their limbs, then cause them to go mad with pain, and finally to die. The object of the experiment is to hold off the moment of death as long as possible—”
Mr. Calder, who was listening with strained attention to every word, had found it difficult to hear the closing sentence and realized that the rector was now speaking against a ground swell of noise which burst out suddenly into a roar. The rector’s voice rode over the tumult like a trumpet.
“Are we going to allow this?”
A second roar crashed out with startling violence.
“We will pull down this foul place stone by stone! We will purge what remains with fire! All who will help, follow me.”
“What do we do?” said the Colonel.
“Sit still,” said Mr. Calder.
In a moment they were alone in their pew with a hundred angry faces round them. The rector, still standing in the pulpit, quelled the storm with an upraised hand. He said, “We will have no bloodshed. We cannot fight evil with evil. Those who are not with us are against us. Enoch, take one of them. Two of you the other. Into the vestry with them.”