Sinister Street Volume I Part 27

"A little."

Mr. Prout sighed.

When the Office was concluded, Michael promised he would attend a rehearsal of next Sunday's ceremony and, if he felt at ease, the Solemn High Ma.s.s itself. Mr. Prout, before Michael went away, lent him a book called Ritual Reason Why, and advised him to buy The Catholic Religion at One Shilling, and meanwhile to practise direct Invocation of the Saints.

At home Michael applied himself with ardour to the mastery of his religion. He wrestled with the liturgical colours; he tried to grasp the difference between Transubstantiation, Consubstantiation and the Real Presence; and he congratulated himself upon being under the immediate patronage of an Archangel. Also with Charles as his first name he felt he could fairly claim the protection of St. Charles the Martyr, though later on Mr. Prout suggested St. Charles Borromeo as a less ordinary patron. However, there was more than ritualism in Michael's new att.i.tude, more than the pa.s.sion to collect new rites and liturgies and ornaments as once he had collected the portraits of famous cricketers or silkworms or silver-paper. To be sure, it soon came to seem to him a terribly important matter whether according to the Roman sequence red were worn at Whitsuntide or whether according to Old English use white were the liturgical colour. Soon he would experience a shock of dismay on hearing that some reputed Catholic had taken the Ablutions at the wrong moment, just as once he had been irritated by ignorant people confusing Mr. W. W. Read of Surrey with Read (M.) of the same county.

Beyond all this Michael sincerely tried to correct his morals and manners in the light of aspiration and faith. He experienced a revolt against impurity of any kind and was simultaneously seized with a determination to suffer Stella's conceit gladly. He really felt a deep-seated avarice for being good. He may not have distinguished between morality due to emotion and morality wrung out of intellectual a.s.sent: but he did know that the Magnificat's incense took him to a higher elation than Dora's curly head upon his shoulder, or even than Alan's bewitching company. Under the influence of faith, Michael found himself bursting with an affection for his mother such as he had not felt for a long time. Indeed Michael was in a state of love. He loved the candles on the altar, he loved his mother's beauty, he loved Stella, he loved the people on the beach and the August mornings and the zest for acquiring and devouring information upon every detail connected with the Catholic religion; and out of his love he gratified Mr. Prout by consenting to bear a torch at the Solemn High Ma.s.s on the Sunday within the octave of St. Bartholomew, Apostle and Martyr and Patron of St.

Bartholomew's Church, Bournemouth.

Michael's first High Ma.s.s was an emotional experience deeper even than that windy Evensong. The church was full of people. The altar was brilliant with flowers and lights. The sacristy was crowded with boys in scarlet ca.s.socks and slippers and zuchettos, quarrelling about their cottas and arguing about their heights. Everybody had a favourite banner which he wanted to escort and, to complicate matters still further, everybody had a favourite companion by whose side he wished to walk.

The procession was marshalled before the altar: the organ boomed through the church: the first thurifer started off, swinging his censer towards the clouded roof. After him went the cross of ebony and silver, while one by one at regular intervals between detachments of the choir the banners of the saints floated into action. Michael escorted the blue velvet banner of Our Lady, triumphant, crowned, a crescent moon beneath her feet and round about her stars and Cherubim. The procession was long enough to fill two aisles at once, and as Michael turned up the south aisle on the return to the chancel, he saw the pomp of the procession's rear--the second thurifer, Mr. Prout in a cotta bordered by lace two feet deep, the golden crucifix aloft, the acolytes with their golden candlesticks, the blood-red dalmatic and tunicle of the deacon and sub-deacon, and solemnly last of all the blood-red cope of the celebrant. Michael took no pleasure in being observed by the congregation; he was simply elated by the privilege of being able to express his desire to serve G.o.d, and during the Ma.s.s, when the Sanctus bell chimed forth, he raised his torch naturally to the paean of the salutation. The service was long: the music was elaborate: it was back-breaking work to kneel on the chancel steps without support; but Michael welcomed the pain with pleasure. During the Elevation of the Host, as he bowed his head before the wonder of bread and wine made G.o.d, his brain reeled in an ecstasy of sublime worship. There was a silence save for the censer tinkling steadily and the low whispered words of the priest and the click of the broken wafer. The candles burned with a supernatural intensity: the boys who lately quarrelled over precedence were hushed as angels: the stillness became fearful; the cold steps burned into Michael's knees and the incense choked him. At last after an age of adoration, the plangent appeal of the Agnus Dei came with a melody that seemed the music of the sobbing world from which all tears had departed in a clarity of harmonious sound.

Before Michael left Bournemouth, Mr. Prout promised to come and see him in London, and Mr. Moneypenny said he would write to a priest who would be glad to prepare him for Confirmation. When Michael reached school again, he felt shy at meeting Alan who would talk about nothing but football and was dismayed to find Michael indifferent to the delights of playing three-quarter on Middle Side. Michael deplored Alan's failure to advance intellectually beyond mere football and the two of them temporarily lost touch with each other's ambitions. Michael now read nothing but ecclesiastical books and was greatly insulted by Mr. Viner's elementary questions. Mr. Viner was the priest to whom Mr. Moneypenny had written about Michael. He had invited him to tea and together they had settled that Michael should be confirmed early in the spring.

Michael borrowed half a dozen books from Mr. Viner and returned home to make an attempt to convert the cook and the housemaid to the Catholic faith as a preliminary to converting his mother and Alan. In the end he did actually convert a boy in the Lower Fifth who for his strange beliefs suffered severely at the hands of his father, a Plymouth Brother. Michael wished that Stella had not gone back to Germany, for he felt that in her he would have had a splendid object on whom to practise his power of controversy. At Mr. Viner's house Michael met another Jacobean called Chator in whom he found a fellow-enthusiast. Chator knew of two other Jacobeans interested in Church matters, Martindale and Rigg, and the four of them founded a society called De Rebus Ecclesiasticis which met every Friday evening in Michael's room to discuss the Catholic Church in all her aspects. The discussions were often heated because Michael had violently Ultra-montane leanings, Chator was narrowly Sarum, Martindale tried to preserve a happy mean and Rigg always agreed with the last speaker. The Society De Rebus Ecclesiasticis was splendidly quixotic and gloriously unrelated to the dead present. To the quartette of members Archbishop Laud was a far more more vital proposition than Archbishop Temple, the society of cavaliers was more vividly realized than the Fabian Society. As was to be expected from Michael's preoccupation with the past, he became very anxious again about his parentage. He longed to hear that in some way he was connected with Jacobite heroes and the romantic Stuarts. Mrs. Fane was no longer able to put him off with contradictions and vagueness: Michael demanded his family tree. The hymn 'Faith of our Fathers' ringing through a Notting Dale mission-hall moved him to demand his birthright of family history.

"Well, I'll tell you, Michael," said his mother at last. "Your father ought to have been the Earl of Saxby--only--something went wrong--some certificate or something."

"An Earl?" cried Michael, staggered by the splendid news. "But--but, mother, we met Lord Saxby. Who was that?"

"He's a relation. Only, please don't tell people about this, because they wouldn't understand. It's all very muddled and difficult."

"My father ought to have been Lord Saxby? Why wasn't he? Mother, was he illegitimate?"

"Michael, how can you talk like that? Of course not."

Michael blushed because his mother blushed.

"I'm sorry, mother, I thought he might have been. People are. You read about them often enough."

Michael decided that as he must not tell Chator, Martindale and Rigg the truth, he would, at any rate, join himself on to the House of Saxby collaterally. To his disappointment, he discovered that the only reference in history to an Earl of Saxby made out that particular one to be a most pestilent Roundhead. So Michael gave up being the Legitimist Earl of Saxby, and settled instead to be descended through the indiscretion of an early king from the Stuarts. Michael grew more and more ecclesiastical as time went on. He joined several Jacobite societies, and accompanied Mr. Prout on the latter's London visit to a reception at Clifford's Inn Hall in honour of the Legitimist Emperor of Byzantium. Michael was very much impressed by kissing the hand of an Emperor, and even more deeply impressed by the Scottish piper who marched up and down during the light refreshment at one shilling a head afterwards. Mr. Prout, accompanied by Michael, Chator, Martindale and Rigg, spent the Sunday of his stay in town by attending early Ma.s.s in Kensington, High Ma.s.s in Holborn, Benediction in Sh.o.r.editch and Evensong in Paddington. He also joined several more guilds, confraternities and societies and presented Michael with one hair from the five hairs he possessed of a lock of Prince Charlie's hair (authentic) before he returned to Bournemouth. This single hair was a great responsibility to Michael, until he placed it in a silver locket to wear round his neck.

During that year occurred what the papers called a Crisis in the Church, and Michael and his three friends took in every week The Church Times, The Church Review, The English Churchman, Church Bells, The Record and The Rock in order to play their part in the crisis. They attended Protestant meetings to boo and hiss from the gallery or to applaud violently gentlemen on their side who rose to ask the lecturer what they supposed to be irrefutable questions. In the spring Michael made his first Confession and was confirmed. The first Confession had more effect on his imagination than the Confirmation, which in retrospect seemed chiefly a sensation of disappointment that the Bishop in view of the crisis in the Church refused to wear the mitre temptingly laid out for him by Mr. Viner. The Confession, however, was a true test of Michael's depth. Mr. Viner was by no means a priest who only thought of candles and lace. He was a gaunt and humorous man, ready to drag out from his penitents their very souls.

Michael found that first Confession an immense strain upon his truthfulness and pluck, and he made up his mind never to commit another mortal sin, so deeply did he blush in the agony of revelation. Venial faults viewed in the aggregate became appalling, and the real sins, as one by one Michael compelled himself to admit them, stabbed his self-consciousness with daggers of shame. Michael had a sense of completeness which prevented him from making a bad Confession, from gliding over his sins and telling half-truths, and having embarked upon the duties of his religion he was not going to avoid them. The Confession seemed to last for ever. Beforehand, Michael had supposed there would be only one commandment whose detailed sins would make his heart beat with the difficulty of confessing them; but when he knelt in the empty church before the severe priest, every breach of the other commandments a.s.sumed a demoniac importance. Michael thought that never before could Father Viner have listened to such a narration of human depravity from a boy of fifteen, or even from a man full grown. He half expected to see the priest rise in the middle and leave his chair in disgust. Michael felt beads of sweat trickling from his forehead: the strain grew more terrible: the crucifix before him gave him no help: the book he held fell from his fingers. Then he heard the words of absolution, tranquil as evening bells. The inessentials of his pa.s.sionate religion faded away in the strength and beauty of G.o.d's acceptation of his penitence. Outside in the April sunlight Michael could have danced his exultation, before he ran home winged with the ecstasy of a light heart.

Chapter VI: _Pax_

The Lower Fifth only knew Michael during the Autumn term. After Christmas he moved up to the Middle Fifth, and, leaving behind him. many friends, including Alan, he found himself in an industrious society concentrated upon obtaining the Oxford and Cambridge Higher Certificate for proficiency in Greek, Latin, Mathematics and either Divinity, French or History. Removed from the temptations of a merry company, Michael worked very hard indeed and kept his brain fit by argument instead of football. The prevailing att.i.tude of himself and his contemporaries towards the present was one of profound pessimism. The scholarship of St. James' was deteriorating; there was a dearth of great English poets; novelists were not so good as once they were in the days of d.i.c.kens; the new boys were obviously inferior to their prototypes in the past; the weather was growing worse year by year; the country was plunging into an abyss. In school Michael prophesied more loudly than any of his fellow Jeremiahs, and less and less did it seem worth while in these Certificate-stifled days to seek for romance or poetry or heroism or adventure. Yet as soon as the precincts of discipline and study were left behind, Michael could extract from life full draughts of all these virtues.

Without neglecting the Oxford and Cambridge Higher Certificate he devoured voraciously every sc.r.a.p of information about Catholicism which it was possible to acquire. Books were bought in tawdry repositories--Catholic Belief, The Credentials of the Catholic Church, The Garden of the Soul, The Glories of Mary by S. Alphonso Liguori, Alban Butler's Lives of the Saints, The Clifton Tracts, and on his own side of the eternal controversy, Lee's Validity of English Orders, The Alcuin Club Transactions with many other volumes. Most of all he liked to pore upon the Tourist's Church Guide, which showed with asterisks and paragraph marks and sections and daggers what churches throughout the United Kingdom possessed the five points of Incense, Lights, Vestments, Mixed Chalice and Eastward Position. He found it absorbing to compare the progress of ritual through the years.

Michael, as once he had known the ranks of the British Army from Lance-corporal to Field Marshal, could tell the hierarchy from s.e.xton to Pope. He knew too, as once he knew the history and uniform of Dragoons, Hussars and Lancers, the history and uniform of the religious orders--Benedictines, Cistercians, Franciscans, Dominicans (how he loved the last in their black and white habit, _Domini canes_, watchdogs of the Lord), Carmelites, Praemonstratensians, Augustinians, Servites, Gilbertines, Carthusians, Redemptorists, Capuchins, Pa.s.sionists, Jesuits, Oblates of St. Charles Borromeo and the Congregation of St.

Philip Neri. Michael outvied Mr. Prout in ecclesiastical possessions, and his bedroom was nearly as full as the repository from which it was stocked. There were images of St. Michael (his own patron), St. Hugh of Lincoln (patron of schoolboys) and St. James of Compostella (patron of the school), together with Our Lady of Seven Dolours, Our Lady Star of the Sea and Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, Our Lady of Victories; there were eikons, scapulars, crucifixes, candlesticks, the Holy Child of Prague, rosaries, and indeed every variety of sacred bric-a-brac. Michael slept in an oriental atmosphere, because he had formed the habit of burning during his prayers cone-shaped pastilles in a saucer. The tenuous spiral of perfumed smoke carried up his emotional apostrophes through the prosaic ceiling of the old night-nursery past the stars, beyond the Thrones and Dominations and Seraphim to G.o.d.

Michael's contest with the sins of youth had become much more thrilling since he had accepted the existence of a personal fiend, and in an ecstasy of temptation he would lie in bed and defy the Devil, calling upon his patron the Archangel to descend from heaven and battle with the powers of evil in that airy arena above the coal-wharf beyond the railway lines. But the Father of Lies had many tricks with which to circ.u.mvent Michael; he would conjure up sensuous images before his antagonist; succubi materialized as pretty housemaids, feminine devils put on tights and openwork stockings to encounter him from the pages of pink weekly papers, and sometimes Satan himself would sit at the foot of his bed in the darkness and tell him tales of how other boys enjoyed themselves, arguing that it was a pity to waste his opportunities and filling his thoughts with dissolute memories. Michael would leap from his bed and pray before his crucifix, and through the darkness angels and saints would rally to his aid, until Satan slunk off with his tail between his legs, personally humiliated.

At school the fever of the examination made Michael desperate with the best intentions. He almost learned the translations of Thucydides and Sophocles, of Horace and Cicero. He knew by heart a meanly written Roman History, and no pa.s.sage in Corneille could hold an invincible word.

Cricket was never played that summer by the Middle Fifth; it was more useful to wander in corners of the field, murmuring continually the tables of the Kings of Judah from Maclear's sad-hued abstract of Holy Scripture. In the end Michael pa.s.sed in Greek and Latin, in French and Divinity and Roman History, even in Algebra and Euclid, but the arithmetical problems of a Stockbroker, a Paper-hanger and a Housewife made all the rest of his knowledge of no account, and Michael failed to see beside his name in the school list that printed bubble which would refer him to the tribe of those who had satisfied the examiners for the Oxford and Cambridge Higher Certificate. This failure depressed Michael, not because he felt implicated in any disgrace, but because he wished very earnestly that he had not wasted so many hours of fine weather in work. He made up his mind that the mistake should never be repeated, and for the rest of his time at St. James' he resisted all set books. If Demosthenes was held necessary, Michael would read Plato, and when Cicero was set, Michael would feel bound to read Livy.

Michael looked back on the year with dissatisfaction, and wondered if school was going to become more and more boring each new term for nine more terms. The prospect was unendurably grey, and Michael felt that life was not worth living. He talked over with Mr. Viner the flatness of existence on the evening after the result of the examination was known.

"I swotted like anything," said Michael gloomily. "And what's the good?

I'm sick of everything."

The priest's eyes twinkled, as he plunged deeper into his wicker arm-chair and puffed clouds of smoke towards the comfortable shelves of books.

"You want a holiday," he remarked.

"A holiday?" echoed Michael fretfully. "What's the good of a holiday with my mater at some beastly seaside place?"

"Oh, come," said the priest, smiling. "You'll be able to probe the orthodoxy of the neighbouring clergy."

"Oh, no really, it's nothing to laugh at, Mr. Viner. You've no idea how beastly it is to dawdle about in a crowd of people, and then at the end go back to another term of school. I'm sick of everything. Will you lend me Lee's Dictionary of Ecclesiastical Terms?" added Michael in a voice that contained no accent of hope.

"I'll lend you anything you like, my dear boy," said the priest, "on one condition."

"What's that?"

"Why, that you'll admit life holds a few grains of consolation."

"But it doesn't," Michael declared.

"Wait a bit, I haven't finished. I was going to say--when I tell you that we are going to keep the a.s.sumption this August."

Michael's eyes glittered for a moment with triumph.

"By Jove, how decent." Then they grew dull again. "And I shan't be here.

The rotten thing is, too, that my mater wants to go abroad. Only she says she couldn't leave me alone. But of course she could really."

"Why not stay with a friend--the voluble Chator, for instance, or Martindale, that Solomon of schoolboys, or Rigg who in Medicean days would have been already a cardinal, so admirably does he incline to all parties?"

"I can't ask myself," said Michael. "Their people would think it rum.

Besides, Chator's governor has gout, and I wouldn't care to be six weeks with the other two. Oh, I do hate not being grown up."

"What about your friend Alan Merivale? I thought him a very charming youth and refreshingly unpietistic."

"He doesn't know the difference between a chasuble and a black gown,"

said Michael.

"Which seems to me not to matter very much ultimately," put in Mr.

Viner.

"No, of course it doesn't. But if one is keen on something and somebody else isn't, it isn't much fun," Michael explained. "Besides, he can't make me out nowadays."

"Surely the incomprehensible is one of the chief charms of faith and friendship."