“Do you know what I think you are?” enquired Chator solemnly. “I think you’re a mystic.”
“I never can understand what a mystic was,” said Michael.
“Nobody can,” said Chator encouragingly. “But lots of them were made saints all the same. I don’t think you ever will be, because you do put forward the most awfully dangerous doctrines. I do think you ought to be careful about that. I do really.”
Chator was spluttering under the embarrassment of his own eloquence, and Michael, delicately amused, looked at him with a quizzical smile. Chator was older than Michael, and by reason of the apoplectic earnestness of his appearance and manner, and the natural goodness of him so sincerely, if awkwardly expressed, he had a certain influence which Michael admitted to himself, however much in the public eye he might affect to patronize Chator from his own intellectual eminence. Along the road of speculation, however, Michael would not allow Chator’s right to curb him, and he took a wilful pleasure in galloping ahead over the wildest, loftiest paths. To shock old Chator was Michael’s delight; and he never failed to do so.
“You see,” Chator spluttered, “it’s not so much what you say now; nobody would pay any attention to you, and I know you don’t mean half what you say; but later on you’ll begin to believe in all these heretical ideas of your own. You’ll end up by being an Agnostic. Oh, yes you will,” he raged with torrential prophecies, as Michael leaned over the seat of his bicycle laughing consumedly. “You’ll go on and on wondering this and that and improving the doctrines of the Church until you improve them right away.”
“You are a funny old ass. You really are,” gurgled Michael. “And what’s so funny to me is that just when I had a moment of really believing you dash in with yourwarnings and nearly spoil it all. By Jove, did you see that Pale Clouded Yellow?” he shouted suddenly. “By Jove, I haven’t seen one in England for an awful long time. I think I’ll begin collecting butterflies again.”
Disputes of doctrine were flung to the wind that sang in their ears as they mounted their bicycles and coasted swiftly from the bare green summits of the downs into a deep lane overshadowed by oak-trees. Soon they came to the Abbey gates, or rather to the place where the Abbey gates would one day rise in Gothic commemoration of the slow subscriptions of the faithful. At present the entrance was only marked by a stony road disappearing abruptly at the behest of a painted finger-post into verdurous solitudes. After wheeling their bicycles for about a quarter of a winding mile, the two boys came to a large open space in the wood and beheld Clere Abbey, a long low wooden building set as piously near to the overgrown foundations of old Clere Abbey as was possible.
“What a rotten shame,” cried Michael, “that they can’t build a decent Abbey. Never mind, I think it’s going to be rather good sport here.”
They walked up to the door that seemed too massive for the flimsy pile to which it gave entrance, and pealed the large bell that hung by the side. Michael was pleased to observe a grille through which peered the eyes of the monastic porter, inquisitive of the wayfarers. Then a bolt shot back, the door opened, and Michael and Chator entered the religious house.
“I’m Brother Ambrose,” said the porter, a stubby man with a flat pock-marked face whose ugliness was redeemed by an expression of wonderful innocence. “Dom Cuthbert is expecting you in the Abbot’s Parlour.”
Michael and Chator followed Brother Ambrose through a pleasant book-lined hall into the paternal haunt where the Lord Abbot of Clere sat writing at a roll-top desk.He rose to greet the boys, who with reverence perceived him to be a tall dark angular man with glowing eyes that seemed very deeply set on either side of his great hooked nose. He could scarcely have been over thirty-five years of age, but he moved with a languid awkwardness that made him seem older. His voice was very remote and melodious as he welcomed them. Michael looked anxiously at Chator to see if he followed any precise ritual of salutation, but Dom Cuthbert solved the problem by shaking hands at once and motioning them to wicker chairs beside the empty hearth.
“Pleasant ride?” enquired Dom Cuthbert.
“Awfully decent,” said Michael. “We heard the Angelus a long way off.”
“A lovely bell,” murmured Dom Cuthbert. “Tubular. It was given to us by the Duke of Birmingham. Come along, I’ll show you the Abbey, if you’re not too tired.”
“Rather not,” Michael and Chator declared.
The Abbot led the way into the book-lined hall.
“This is the library. You can read here as much as you like. The brethren sit here at recreation-time. This is the refectory,” he went on, with distant chimings in his tone.
The two boys gazed respectfully at the bare trestle table and the raised reading-desk and the picture of St. Benedict.
“Of course we haven’t much room yet,” Dom Cuthbert continued. “In fact we have very little. People are very suspicious of monkery.”
He smiled tolerantly, and his voice faded almost out of the refectory, as if it would soothe the harsh criticism of the world, hence infinitely remote.
“But one day”—from worldly adventure his voice came back renewed with hope—“one day, when we have some money, we shall build a real Abbey.”
“This is awfully ripping though, isn’t it?” observed Michael with sympathetic encouragement.
“I dare say the founder of the Order was never so well housed,” agreed the Abbot.
Dom Cuthbert led them to the guest-chamber, from which opened three diminutive bedrooms.
“Your cells,” the monk said. “But of course you’ll feed in here,” he added, indicating the small bare room in which they stood with so wide a sweep of his ample sleeve that the matchboarded ceiling soared into vast Gothic twilights and the walls were of stone. Michael was vaguely reminded of Mr. Prout and his inadequate oratory.
“The guest-brother is Dom Gilbert,” continued the Abbot. “Come and see the cloisters.”
They passed from the guest-room behind the main building and saw that another building formed there the second side of a quadrangle. The other two sides were still open to the hazel coppice that here encroached upon the Abbey. However, there was traceable the foundations of new buildings to complete the quadrangle, and a mass of crimson hollyhocks were shining with rubied chalices in the quiet sunlight. For all its incompleteness, this was a strangely beautiful corner of the green world.
“Are these the cloisters?” Michael asked.
“One day, one day,” replied Dom Cuthbert. “A little rough at present, but before I die I’m sure there will be a mighty edifice in this wood to the glory of God and His saints.”
“I’d like it best that way,” said Michael. “Not all at once.”
He felt an imaginative companionship with the aspirations of the Abbot.
“Now we’ll visit the Chapel,” said Dom Cuthbert. “We built the Chapel with our own hands of mud and stone and laths. You’ll like the Chapel. Sometimes I feel quite sorry to think of leaving it for the great Abbey Church we shall one day build with the hands of workmen.”
The Chapel was reached by a short cloister of primitive construction, and it was the simplest purest place of worship that Michael had ever seen. It seemed to have gathered beneath its small roof the whole of peace. On one side the hazel bushes grew so close that the windows opened on to the mysterious green heart of life. Two curtains worked with golden blazonries divided the quire from the congregation.
“This is where you’ll sit,” said Dom Cuthbert, pointing to two kneeling-chairs on either side of the opening into the quire. “Perhaps you’ll say a prayer now for the Order. The prayers of children travel very swiftly to God.”
Dom Cuthbert passed to the Abbot’s stall to kneel, while Michael and Chator knelt on the chairs. When they had prayed for awhile, the Abbot took them into the sacristy and showed them the vestments and the sacred vessels of the altar, and from the sacristy door they passed into a straight woodland way.
“The Abbot’s walk,” said Dom Cuthbert, with a beautiful smile. “The brethren cut this wonderful path during their hours of recreation. I cannot envy any cloisters with this to walk in. How soft is the moss beneath our feet, and in Spring how loudly the birds sing here. The leaves come very early, too, and linger very late. It is a wonderful path. Now I must go and work. I have a lot of letters to write. Explore the woods and the downs and enjoy yourselves. You’ll find the rules that the guests must observe pinned to the wall of the guest-room. Enjoy yourselves and be content.”
The tall figure of the monk with its languid awkwardness of gait disappeared from the Abbot’s walk, and the two boys, arm-in-arm, wandered off in the opposite direction.
“Everything was absolutely correct,” burbled Chator. “Oh, yes, absolutely. Not at all Anglican. Perfectly correct. I’m glad. I’m really very glad. I was a bit afraidat first it might be Anglican. But it’s not—oh, no, not at all.”
In the guest-chamber they read the rules for guests, and discovered to their mortification that they were not expected to be present at Matins and Lauds.
“I was looking forward to getting up at two o’clock,” said Michael. “Perhaps Dom Cuthbert will let us sometimes. It’s really much easier to get up at two o’clock than five. Mass is at half-past five, and we must go to that.”
Dom Gilbert, the guest-brother, came in with plates of bread and cheese while the boys were reading the rules, and they questioned him about going to Matins. He laughed and said they would have as much church as they wished without being quite such strict Benedictines as that. Michael was not sure whether he liked Dom Gilbert—he was such a very practical monk.
“If you go to Mass and Vespers and Compline every day,” said Dom Gilbert, “you’ll do very well. And please be punctual for your meals.”
Michael and Chator looked injured.
“Breakfast after Mass. Bread and cheese at twelve. Cup of tea at five, if you’re in. Supper at eight.”
Dom Gilbert left them abruptly to eat their bread and cheese alone.
“He’s rather a surly chap,” grumbled Michael. “He doesn’t seem to me the right one to have chosen for guest-brother at all. I had a lot I wanted to ask him. For one thing I don’t know where the lav. is. I think he’s a rotten guest-brother.”
The afternoon passed in a walk along the wide ridge of the downs through the amber of this fine summer day. Several hares were seen and a kestrel, while Chator disposed very volubly of the claims of several Anglican clergymen to Catholicism. After tea in the hour of recreation they met the other monks, Dom Gregory the organist, BrotherGeorge and Brother William. It was not a very large monastery.
Chator found the Vespers somewhat trying to his curiosity, because owing to the interposition of the curtain he was unable to criticize the behaviour of the monks in quire. This made him very fidgety, and rather destroyed Michael’s sense of peace. However, Chator restrained his ritualistic ardour very well at Compline, which in the dimness of the starlit night was a magical experience, as one by one with raised cowls the monks entered in black procession and silence absolute. Michael, where he knelt in the ante-chapel, was profoundly moved by the intimate responses and the severe Compline hymn. He liked, too, the swift departure to bed without chattering good-nights to spoil the solemnity of the last Office. Even Chator kept all conversation for the morning, and Michael felt he had never lain down upon a couch so truly sanctified, nor ever risen from one so pure as when Dom Gilbert knocked with a hammer on the door and, standing dark against the milk-white dawn, murmured ‘Pax vobiscum.’
IN the first fortnight of their stay at Clere Abbas Michael and Chator lived like vagabond hermits rejoicing in the freedom of fine weather. Mostly they went for long walks over the downs and through the woodlands of the southern slope. To the monks at recreation time they would recount their adventures with gamekeepers and contumacious farmers, their discoveries of flowers and birds and butterflies, their entertainment at remote cottage homes and the hospitalities of gipsy camps. To be sure they would often indulge in theological discussions, and sometimes, when caught by the azure-footed dusk in unfamiliar lanes, they would chant plainsong to the confusion of whatever ghostly pursuers, whether Dryads or mediæval fiends or early Victorian murderers, that seemed to dog their footsteps. So much nowadays did the unseen world mingle with the ordinary delights of youth.
“Funny thing,” said Michael to Chator. “When I was a kid I used to be frightened at night—always. Then for a long time I wasn’t frightened at all, and now again I have a queer feeling just after sunset, a sort of curious dampness inside me. Do you ever have it?”
“I only have it when you start me off,” said Chator. “But it goes when we sing ‘Te lucis ante terminum’ or chant the Nicene Creed or anything holy.”
“Yes, it goes with me,” Michael agreed dubiously. “But if I drive it away it comes back in the middle of the night. I have all sorts of queer feelings. Sometimes I feelas if there wasn’t any me at all, and I’m surprized to see a letter come addressed to me. But when I see a letter I’ve written, I’m still more surprized. Do you have that feeling? Then often I feel as if all we were doing or saying at a certain moment had been done or said before. Then at other times I have to hold on to a tree or hurt myself with something just to prove I’m there. And then sometimes I think nothing is impossible for me. I feel absolutely great, as if I were Shakespeare. Do you ever have that feeling?”
But Chator was either not sufficiently introspective so to resolve his moods, or else he was too simply set on his own naive religion for his personality to plunge haphazard into such spiritual currents uncharted.
The pleasantest time of the monastic week was Sunday afternoon, when Dom Cuthbert, very lank and pontifical, would lean back in the deepest wicker chair of the library to listen to various Thoughts culled by the brethren from their week’s reading. The Thought he adjudged best was with a diamond pencil immortalized upon a window-pane, and the lucky discoverer derived as much satisfaction from the verdict as was compatible with Benedictine humility. Dom Cuthbert allowed Michael and Chator to share in these occasions, and he evidently enjoyed the variety of choice which displayed so nicely the characters of his flock.
One afternoon Michael chose for his excerpt Don Quixote’s exclamation, “How these enchanters hate me, Sancho,” with Sancho’s reply, “O dismal and ill-minded enchanters.”
The brethren laughed very loudly at this, for though they were English monks, and might have been considered eccentric by the Saxon world, their minds really ran on lines of sophisticated piety over platitudinous sleepers of thought. Michael blushed defiantly, and looked at Dom Cuthbert for comprehension.
“Hark at the idealist’s complaint of disillusionment by the Prince of Darkness,” said Dom Cuthbert, smiling.
“It’s not a complaint,” Michael contradicted. “It’s just a remark. That’s why I chose it. Besides, it gives me a satisfied feeling. Words often make me feel hungry.”
The monks interrupted him with more laughter, and Michael, furiously self-conscious, left the library and went to sit alone in the stillest part of the hazel coppice.
But when he came back in the silent minutes before Vespers he read his sentence on the window-pane, and blinked half tearfully at the westering sun. He never had another Thought enshrined, because he was for ever after this trying to find sentences that would annoy Dom Gilbert, whom he suspected of leading the laughter. Visitors began to come to the Abbey now—and the two boys were much interested in the people who flitted past almost from day to day. Among them was Mr. Prout who kept up a duet of volubility with Chator from morning to night for nearly a week, at the end of which he returned to his Bournemouth bank. These discussions amused Michael most when he was able to break the rhythm of the battledores by knocking down whatever liturgical or theological shuttlecock was being used. He would put forward the most outrageous heresy as his own firm conviction, and scandalize and even alarm poor Mr. Prout, who did not at all relish dogmatic follow-my-leader and prayed for Michael’s reckless soul almost as fervidly as for the confusion of the timid and malignant who annually objected to the forthcoming feast of the Assumption at St. Bartholomew’s. Mr. Prout, however, was only one of a series of ritualistic young men who prattled continually of vestments and ceremonies and ornaments, until Michael began to resent their gossip and withdraw from their society into the woods, there to dream, staring up at the green and blue arch above him, of the past here in wind-stirred solitudeso much the more real. Michael was a Catholic because Catholicism assured him of continuity and shrouded him with a sensuous austerity, but in these hours of revolt he found himself wishing for the old days with Alan. He was fond enough of Chator, but to Chator everything was so easy, and when one day a letter arrived to call him back to his family earlier than he expected, Michael was glad. The waning summer was stimulating his imagination with warm noons and gusty twilights; Chator’s gossip broke the spell.
Michael went for solitary walks on the downs, where he loved to lie in hollows and watch the grasses fantastically large against the sky, and the bulky clouds with their slow bewitching motion. He never went to visit sentimentally the spot where stone and harebell commemorated his brief experience of faith’s profundity, for he dreaded lest indifference should rob him of a perfect conception. He knew very well even already the dangerous chill familiarity of repetition. Those cloud-enchanted days of late summer made him listlessly aware of fleeting impulses, and simultaneously dignified with incommunicable richness the passivity and even emptiness of his condition. On the wide spaces of the downs he wandered luxuriously irresolute; his mind, when for a moment it goaded itself into an effort of concentration, faltered immediately, so that dead chivalries, gleaming down below in the rainy dusk of the valleys, suffered in the very instant of perception a transmutation into lamplit streets; and the wind’s dull August booming made embattled drums and fanfares romantic no more than music heard in London on the way home from school. Everything came to seem impossible and intangible; Michael could not conceive that he ever was or ever would be in a class-room again, and almost immediately afterwards he would wonder whether he ever had been or ever would be anywhere else. He began to imagine himself grown up,but this was a nightmare thought, because he would either realize himself decrepit with his own young mind or outwardly the same as he was now with a mind hideously distorted by knowledge and sin. He could never achieve a consistent realization that would give him definite ambitions. He longed to make up his mind to aim at some profession, and the more he longed the more hopeless did it seem to try to fit any existing profession with the depressing idea of himself grown up. Then he would relax his whole being and let himself be once more bewitched into passivity by clouds and waving grasses.
Upon this mental state of Michael intruded one day a visitor to the Abbey. A young man with spectacles and a pear-shaped face, who wore grey flannel shirts that depressed Michael unendurably, made a determined effort to gain his confidence. The more shy that Michael became, the more earnestly did this young man press him with intimate questions about his physical well-being. For Michael it was a strange and odiously embarrassing experience. The young man, whose name was Garrod, spoke of his home in Hornsey and invited Michael to stay with him. Michael shuddered at the idea of staying in a strange suburb: strange suburbs had always seemed to him desolate, abominable and insecure. He always visualized a draughty and ill-lighted railway platform, a rickety and gloomy omnibus, countless Nonconformist chapels and infrequent policemen. Garrod spoke of his work on Sundays at a church that was daily gaining adherents, of a dissolute elder brother and an Agnostic father. Michael could have cried aloud his unwillingness to visit Garrod. But the young man was persistent; the young man was sure that Michael, from ignorance, was leading an unhealthy life. Garrod spoke of ignorance with ferocity: he trampled on it with polytechnical knowledge, and pelted it with all sorts of little books that afflicted Michael with nausea.Michael loathed Garrod, and resented his persistent instructions, his offers to solve lingering physical perplexities. For Michael Garrod defiled the country by his cockney complacency, his attacks upon public schools, his unpleasant interrogations. Michael longed for Alan that together they might rag this worm who wriggled so obscenely into the secret places of a boy’s mind.
“Science is all the go nowadays,” said Garrod. “And Science is what we want. Science and Religion. Some think they don’t go together. Don’t they? I think they do then.”
“I hate science,” said Michael. “Except for doctors, of course—I suppose they’ve got to have it,” he added grudgingly. “At St. James’ the Modern fellows are nearly always bounders.”
“But don’t you want to know what your body’s made of?” demanded Garrod.
“I don’t want to be told. I know quite enough for myself.”
“Well, would you like to read——”
“No, I don’t want to read anything,” interrupted Michael.
“But have you read——”
“The only books I like,” expostulated Michael, “are the books I find for myself.”
“But you aren’t properly educated.”
“I’m at a public school,” said Michael proudly.
“Yes, and public schools have got to go very soon.”
“Who says so?” demanded Michael fiercely.
“We say so. The people.”
“The people?” echoed Michael. “What people? Why, if public schools were done away with we shouldn’t have any gentlemen.”
“You’re getting off of the point,” said Garrod. “You don’t understand what I’m driving at. You’re a fellow I took a fancy to right off, as you might say. I don’t wantto see you ruin your health, for the want of the right word at the right moment. Oh, yes, I know.”
“Look here,” said Michael bluntly, “I don’t want to be rude, but I don’t want to talk about this any more. It makes me feel beastly.”
“False modesty is the worst thing we’ve got to fight against,” declared Garrod.
So the argument continued, while all the time the zealous young man would fling darts of information that however much Michael was unwilling to receive them generally stuck fast. Michael was relieved when Garrod passed on his way, and he vowed to himself never to run the risk of meeting him again.
The visit of Garrod opened for Michael a door to uneasy speculation. At his private school he had known the hostility of ‘cads,’ and later on he had been aware of the existence of ‘bounders’; the cads were always easily defeated by force of arms, but this sudden attack upon his intimacy by a bounder was disquieting and difficult to deal with. He resented Garrod’s iconoclasm, resented it furiously in retrospect, wishing that he had parried more icily his impudent thrusts; and he could almost have rejoiced in Garrod’s reappearance that with disdain he might have wounded the fellow incurably. Yet he had a feeling that Garrod might have turned out proof against the worst weapons he knew how to use, and the memory of the ‘blighter’s’ self-confidence was demoralizing to Michael’s conception of superiority. The vision of a world populated by hostile Garrods rose up, and some of the simplicity of life vanished irredeemably, so that Michael took refuge in dreams of his own fashioning, where in a feudal world the dreamer rode at the head of mankind. Lying awake in the intense blackness of his cell, Michael troubled himself once more with his identity, wishing that he knew more about himself and his father, wishingthat his mother were not growing more remote every day, wondering whether Stella over in Germany was encountering Garrods and praying hard with a sense of impotency in the darkness. He tried to make up his mind to consult Dom Cuthbert, but the lank, awkward monk, fond though he was of him, seemed unapproachable by daylight, and the idea of consulting him, still more of confessing to him, never crystallized.
These were still days bedewed with the approach of Autumn; milkwhite at morn and at noon breathless with a silver intensity that yearned upwards against an azure too ethereal, they floated sadly into night with humid, intangible draperies of mist. These were days that forbade Michael to walk afield, and that with haunting, autumnal birdsong held him in a trance. He would find himself at the day’s end conscious of nothing but a remembrance of new stubble trodden mechanically with languors attendant, and it was only by a great effort that he brought himself to converse with the monks working among the harvest or for the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin to pick heavy white chrysanthemums from the stony garden of the Abbey.
Michael was the only guest staying in the Abbey on the vigil, and he sat almost in the entrance of the quire between the drawn curtains, not very much unlike the devout figure of some youthful donor in an old Italian picture, sombre against the blazing Vespers beyond. Michael was always hoping for a direct manifestation from above to reward the effort of faith, although he continually reproved himself for this desire and flouted his weakness. He used to gaze into the candles until they actually did seem to burn with angelic eyes that made his heart leap in expectation of the sign awaited; but soon fancy would betray him, and they would become candles again merely flickering.
On this September dusk there were crimson shadows of sunset deepening to purple in the corners of the chapel;the candles were very bright; the brethren in the stalls sang with austere fervour; the figure of Dom Cuthbert veiled from awkwardness by the heavy white cope moved before the altar during the censing of the Magnificat with a majesty that filled the small quire; the thurible tinkled its perfumed harmonies; and above the contentment of the ensuing hush blackbirds were heard in the garden or seen slipping to and fro like shadows across the windows.
Michael at this moment realized that there was a seventh monk in the quire, and wondered vaguely how he had failed to notice this new-comer before. Immediately after being made aware of his presence he caught the stranger’s eye, and blushed so deeply that to cover his confusion he turned over the pages of a psalter. Curiosity made him look up again, but the new monk was devoutly wrapped in contemplation, nor did Michael catch his eye again during the Office. At supper he enquired about the new-comer of Dom Gilbert, who reproved him for inquisitiveness, but told him he was called Brother Aloysius. Again at Compline Michael caught his glance, and for a long time that night in the darkness he saw the eyes of Brother Aloysius gleaming very blue.
On the next day Michael, wandering by the edge of the hazel coppice, came upon Brother Aloysius with deep-stained mouth and hands gathering blackberries.
“Who are you?” asked the monk. “You gave me a very funny look at Vespers.”
Michael thought this was an extremely unusual way for a monk, even a new monk, to speak, and hesitated a moment before he explained who he was.
“I suppose you can help me pick blackberries. I suppose that isn’t against the rules.”
“I often help the brothers,” said Michael simply. “But I don’t much care for picking blackberries. Still, I don’t mind helping you.”
Michael had an impulse to leave Brother Aloysius, but his self-consciousness prevented him from acting on it, and he kept the picker company in silence while the blackberries dropped lusciously into the basket.
“Feel my hand,” said Brother Aloysius suddenly. “It’s as hot as hell.”
This time Michael stared in frank astonishment.
“Well, you needn’t look so frightened,” said the monk. “You don’t look so very good yourself.”
“Well, of course I’m not good,” said Michael. “Only I think it’s funny for a monk to swear. You don’t mind my saying so, do you?”
“I don’t mind. I don’t mind anything,” said Brother Aloysius.
Tension succeeded this statement, a tension that Michael longed to break; but he could do no more than continue to pick the blackberries.
“I suppose you wonder why I’m a monk?” demanded Brother Aloysius.
Michael looked at his questioner’s pale face, at the uncomfortable eyes gleaming blue, at the full stained mouth and the long feverish hands dyed with purple juice.
“Why are you?” he asked.
“Well, I thought I’d try if anything could make me feel good, and then you looked at me in Chapel and set me off again.”
“I set you off?” stammered Michael.
“Yes, you with your big girl’s eyes, just like a girl I used to live with. Oh, you needn’t look so proper. I expect you’ve often thought about girls. I did at your age. Three months with girls, three months with priests. Girls and priests—that’s my life. When I was tired of women, I became religious, and when I was tired of Church, I took to women. It was a priest told me to come here to see if this would cure me, and now, damn you, you comeinto Chapel and stare and set me thinking of the Seven Sisters Road on that wet night I saw her last. That’s where she lives, and you look exactly like her. God! you’re the image of her. You might almost be her ghost incarnate.”
Brother Aloysius caught hold of Michael’s arm and spoke through clenched teeth. In Michael’s struggle to free himself the basket of blackberries was upset, and they trod the spilt fruit into the grass. Michael broke away finally and gasped angrily:
“Look here, I’m not going to stay here. You’re mad.”
He ran from the monk into the depths of the wood, not stopping until he reached a silent glade. Here on the moss he sat panting, horrified. Yet when he came to compose the sentences in which he should tell Dom Cuthbert of his experience with the new monk, he found himself wishing that he had stayed to hear more. He actually enjoyed in retrospect the humiliation of the man, and his heart beat with the excitement of hearing more. Slowly he turned to seek again Brother Aloysius.
“You may as well tell me some more, now you’ve begun,” said Michael.
For three or four days Michael was always in the company of Brother Aloysius, plying him with questions that sounded abominable to himself, when he remembered with what indignation he had rejected Garrod’s offer of knowledge. Brother Aloysius spared no blushes, whether of fiery shame or furtive desire, and piece by piece Michael learned the fabric of vice. He was informed coldly of facts whose existence he had hitherto put down to his own most solitary and most intimate imaginations. Every vague evil that came wickedly before sleep was now made real with concrete examples; the vilest ideas, that hitherto he had considered peculiar to himself and perhaps a few more sadly tempted dreamers tossing through the vulnerable hours of the night, were commonplace to Brother Aloysius, whose soul wastwisted, whose mind was debased to such an extent that he could boast of his delight in making the very priest writhe and wince in the Confessional.
Conversations with Brother Aloysius were sufficiently thrilling journeys, and Michael was always ready to follow his footsteps as one might follow a noctambulatory cat. The Seven Sisters Road was the scene of most of his adventures, if adventures they could be called, these dissolute pilgrimages. Michael came to know this street as one comes to know the street of a familiar dream. He walked along it in lavender sunrises watching the crenellated horizon of housetops; he sauntered through it slowly on dripping midnights, and on foggy November afternoons he speculated upon the windows with their aqueous sheen of incandescent gas. On summer dusks he pushed his way through the fetid population that thronged it, smelling the odour of stale fruit exposed for sale, and on sad grey Sabbaths he saw the ill-corseted servant girls treading down the heels of their ugly boots, and plush-clad children who continually dropped Sunday-school books in the mud.
And not only was Michael cognizant of the sordid street’s exterior. He heard the creak of bells by blistered doors, he tripped over mats in narrow gloomy passages and felt his way up stale rickety stairs. Michael knew many rooms in this street of dreams: but they were all much alike with their muslin and patchouli, their aspidistras and yellowing photographs. The ribbed pianos tintinnabulated harshly with songs cut from the squalid sheets of Sunday papers: in unseen basements children whined, while on the mantelpiece garish vases rattled to the vibration of traffic.
Michael was also aware of the emotional crises that occur in the Seven Sisters Road, from the muttered curses of the old street-walkers with their crape bonnets cocked awry and their draggled musty skirts to Brother Aloysius himselfshaken with excess of sin in colloquy with a ghostly voice upon a late winter dawn.
“A ghost?” he echoed incredulously.
“It’s true. I heard a voice telling me to go back. And when I went back, there she was sitting in the arm-chair with the antimacassar round her shoulders because it was cold, and the carving-knife across her knees, waiting up to do for the fellow that was keeping her. I reckon it was God sent me back to save her.”
Even Michael in his vicious mood could not tolerate this hysterical blasphemy, and he scoffed at the supernatural explanation. But Brother Aloysius did not care whether he was believed or not. He himself was sufficient audience to himself, ready to applaud and condemn with equal exaggeration of feeling.
After a week of self-revelation Brother Aloysius suddenly had spiritual qualms about his behaviour, and announced to Michael that he must go to Confession and free himself from the oppressive responsibility of his sin. Michael did not like the thought of Dom Cuthbert being aware of the way in which his last days at the monastery had been spent, and hoped that Brother Aloysius would confess in as general a manner as possible. Yet even so he feared that the perspicacious Abbot would guess the partner of his penitent, and, notwithstanding the sacred impersonality of the Confessional, regard Michael with an involuntary disgust. However, the confession, with all its attendant pangs of self-reproach, passed over, and Michael was unable to detect the slightest alteration in Dom Cuthbert’s attitude towards him. But he avoided Brother Aloysius so carefully during the remainder of his stay, that it was impossible to test the Abbot’s knowledge as directly as he could have wished.
The night before Michael was to leave the monastery, a great gale blew from the south-west and kept him wideawake hour after hour until the bell for Matins. He felt that on this his last night it would be in order for him to attend the Office. So he dressed quickly and hurried through the wind-swept corridor into the Chapel. Here, in a severity of long droning psalms, he tried to purge his mind of all it had acquired from the shamelessness of Brother Aloysius. He was so far successful that he could look Dom Cuthbert fearlessly in the face when he bade him good-bye next day, and as he coasted over the downs through the calm September sunlight, he to himself seemed like the country washed by the serene radiance of the tempest’s aftermath.
MICHAEL somehow felt shy when he heard his mother’s voice telling him to come into her room. He had run upstairs and knocked excitedly at her door before the shyness overwhelmed him, but it was too late not to enter, and he sat down to give her the account of his holidays. Rather dull it seemed, and robbed of all vitality by the barrier which both his mother and he hastened to erect between themselves.
“Well, dear, did you enjoy yourself at this Monastery?”
“Oh, rather.”
“Is the—what do you call him?—the head monk a nice man?”
“Oh, yes, awfully decent.”
“And your friend Chator, did he enjoy himself?”
“Oh, rather. Only he had to go before me. Did you enjoy yourself abroad, mother?”
“Very much, dear, thank you. We had lovely weather all the time.”
“We had awfully ripping weather too.”
“Have you got everything ready for school in the morning?”
“There’s nothing much to get. I suppose I’ll go into Cray’s—the Upper Fifth. Do you want me now, mother?”
“No, dear, I have one or two letters to write.”
“I think I’ll go round and see if Chator’s home yet. You don’t mind?”
“Don’t be late for dinner.”
“Oh, no, rather not.”
Going downstairs from his mother’s room, Michael had half an impulse to turn back and confide in her the real account of his holidays. But on reflection he protested to himself that his mother looked upon him as immaculate, and he felt unwilling to disturb by such a revolutionary step the approved tranquillities of maternal ignorance.
Mr. Cray, his new form-master, was a man of distinct personality, and possessed a considerable amount of educative ability; but unfortunately for Michael the zest of classics had withered in his heart after his disappointment over the Oxford and Cambridge Certificate. Therefore Mr. Cray with his bright archæology and chatty scholarship bored Michael more profoundly than any of his masters so far had bored him. Mr. Cray resented this attitude very bitterly, being used to keenness in his form, and Michael’s dreary indolence, which often came nearer to insolence, irritated him. As for the plodding, inky sycophants who fawned upon Mr. Cray’s informativeness, Michael regarded them with horror and contempt. He sat surrounded by the butts and bugbears of his school-life. All the boys whose existence he had deplored seemed to have clambered arduously into the Upper Fifth just to enrage him with the sight of their industrious propinquity. There they sat with their scraggy wrists protruding from shrinking coat-sleeves, with ambitious noses glued to their books, with pens and pencils neatly disposed for demonstrative annotation, and nearly all of them conscious of having figured in the school-list with the printed bubble of the Oxford and Cambridge Higher Certificate beside their names. Contemplating them in the mass, Michael scarcely knew how he would endure another dusty year of school.
“And now we come to the question of the Homericgate—the Homeric gate, Fane, when you can condescend to our level,” said Mr. Cray severely.
“I’m listening, sir,” said Michael wearily.
“Of course the earliest type of gate was without hinges—without hinges, Fane! Very much like your attention, Fane!”
Several sycophants giggled at this, and Michael, gazing very earnestly at Mr. Cray’s benign but somewhat dirty bald head, took a bloody revenge upon those in reach of his javelin of quadruple penholders.
“For Monday,” said Mr. Cray, when he had done with listening to the intelligent advice of his favourite pupils on the subject of gates ancient and modern, “for Monday the essay will be on Patriotism.”
Michael groaned audibly.
“Isn’t there an alternative subject, sir?” he gloomily enquired.
“Does Fane dislike abstractions?” said Mr. Cray. “Curious! Well, if Fane wishes for an alternative subject, of course Fane must be obeyed. The alternative subject will be An Examination into the Fundamental Doctrines of Hegelian Idealism. Does that suit Fane?”
“Very well indeed,” said Michael, who had never heard of Hegel until that moment, but vowed to himself that somehow between this muggy Friday afternoon and next Monday morning he would conquer the fellow’s opinions. As a matter of fact, the essay proved perfectly easy with the assistance of The Popular Encyclopedia, though Mr. Cray called it a piece of impudence and looked almost baleful when Michael showed it up.
From this atmosphere of complacent effort Michael withdrew one afternoon to consult Father Viner about his future. Underneath the desire for practical advice was a desire to talk about himself, and Michael was disappointed on arriving at Father Viner’s rooms to hear thathe was out. However, learning that there was a prospect of his speedy return, he came in at the landlady’s suggestion to amuse himself with a book while he waited.
Wandering round the big bay-windowed room with its odour of tobacco and books, and casting a careless glance at Father Viner’s desk, Michael caught sight of his own name in the middle of a neatly written letter on the top of a pile of others. He could not resist taking a longer glance to see the address and verify the allusion to himself, and with this longer glance curiosity conquered so completely the prejudice against prying into other people’s correspondence that Michael, breathing nervously under the dread of interruption, took up the letter and read it right through. It was in his present mood of anxiety about himself very absorbing.