I N 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 feel
as 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 solitude
so 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 want
to 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, wishing
that 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 come
into 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 was
twisted, 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 himself
shaken 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 wide
awake 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.