“Leadbeater—he wants me to call him George, and somehow I’ve got to get rid of this English trick I’ve got of calling people by their surnames—George simply loves beauty. That’s what gets Leola, you know. Frankly, Dunny, as an old friend, I can tell you that Leola hasn’t had much chance to grow in that home of hers. Fine people, the Cruikshanks, of course, but narrow. But she’s growing fast. George has insisted on lending her this wonderful novel, If Winter Comes by A. S. M. Hutchinson. She’s just gulping it down. But the thing that really impresses me is that George is such a good dresser. And not just for a preacher—for anybody. He’s going to introduce me to his tailor in London. You have to be introduced to the good ones. He says God made beautiful and seemly things, and not to take advantage of them is to miss what God meant. Did you ever hear any preacher say anything like that? Of course he’s no six-hundred-dollar-a-year Bible-buster, but a man who pulls down eighty-five hundred from his pulpit alone, and doubles it with lectures and books! If Christ wasn’t poor—and He certainly wasn’t—George doesn’t intend to be. Would you believe he carries a handful of gemstones—semi-precious but gorgeous—in his right-hand coat pocket, just to feel! He’ll pull them out two or three times a day, and strew them on the madder silk handkerchief he always has in his breast pocket, and let the light play on them, and you should see his face then! “Poverty and sin are not all that God hath wrought,” he says with a kind of poetic smile. “Lo, these are beautiful even as His raindrops, and no less His work than the leper, the flower, or woman’s smile.” I wish you could get up to First Class to meet him, but it’s out of the question, and I wouldn’t want to ask him to come down here.”

So I never met the Reverend George Maldon Leadbeater, though I wondered if he had read the New Testament as often as I had. Furthermore, I had read If Winter Comes when it first came out; it had been the theme of an extravagant encomium from the Right Honourable William Lyon Mackenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada; he had said it was unquestionably the finest novel of our time, and the booksellers had played it up. It seemed to me that Mr King’s taste in literature, like Leadbeater’s in religion, was evidence of a sweet tooth, and nothing more.

(4)

Boy and Leola left the ship at Southampton. I went on to Antwerp, because the first object of my journey was a tour of the battlefields. Unrecognizable, of course. Neat and trim in the manner of the Low Countries; trenches known to me as stinking mudholes were lined with cement, so that ladies would not dirty their shoes. Even the vast cemeteries woke no feeling in me; because they were so big I lost all sense that they contained men who, had they lived, would have been about my age. I got out as soon as I had scoured Passchendaele for some sign of the place where I had been wounded, and where I had encountered the little Madonna. Nobody I could find was of any use in suggesting where I might have been; the new town had probably buried it under streets and houses. Figures of Our Lady—yes, there were plenty of those, in churches and on buildings, but most of them were new, hideous and unrevealing. None was anything like mine. I would have known her anywhere, as of course I did, many years later.