Self Condemned (56 page)

This training centre for the priesthood was a well-disciplined community, whose life moved hither and thither in response to quiet orders, or to a settled routine. It was an idyllically peaceful place for the victim of dynamic excess to go to, or for those wishing to shun the tumult of unplanned life. Every sound in it had been dutifully muted. There, beneath the great wing of the Roman Church, sat the hospital inmate, but now gathering strength and wilfulness every day. He was in another kind of Ward of Silence, but passion had taken possession of him once more, and he was no longer a suitable inmate of this place of ancient rules, where to consult the unconditioned will qualified you for expulsion. For you cannot have
peace
upon any terms but obedience to law.

The peace of the scene, the restful monotony of the lives of these people, whose minds reflected the massively built Summa of all philosophies (providing a static finality in which the restless intellect might find repose), had proved in the end nothing but an irritant to René. His intelligence was too dynamic, his reason was too bitterly bruised, for a static bliss.

When he had arrived in a taxicab, three months before, he was still only fit for silence, and he believed that for the rest of time he would want nothing but peace. He had regarded Sacred Heart College as a magical hospital, an ancient place of healing; what was taught there, a mystical psychiatry. Without any reservation, as he entered the registrar’s office, René was profoundly thankful that so extraordinary an institution as the Catholic Church was still there intact, exultantly human. What other institution — which
was
an institution — lived as the guardian of the great human values of antiquity?

Father Moody was a very kind and pleasant priest, who stood behind a long thick counter which was higher than his navel. He stood there with both his hands flat upon the counter before him. René could scarcely credit his good fortune as the figure of the rosy-faced young priest, his eyes, blazing with childish benevolence, was electrified at the sight of him, his temples flushing a rich joyous pink, his hand outstretched across the solid counter, behind which he functioned.

“Professor Harding, well! Why did you not let me know that you were to arrive today, and I would have met you at the station at Niagara! Did you come over in a taxi? Have you got your things there too? That is fine and dandy!”

Even his secretary, a young layman with the shy manners of a young Englishman of good education, co-operated discreetly in making the unfortunate stranger at home. Later on René learnt that this young man had had much practice in Eastern Canada, in helping to make the despised and rejected welcome, for he had given his services to the House of Friendship night shelters. There he supervised nightly the housing of a dozen or so bums. His parents were wealthy Montrealers. He had been a Trappist: but in a year he had had to give it up, because his health was unequal to the great rigours of those vows. Now Father Moody used him as secretary. He was active in their labour organization and lectured on social problems. The Sacred Heart College Fathers co-operated with American priests in Buffalo in various social activities.

O’Neill was the secretary’s name. He was handsome, sheepishly devout as well as competent, harmlessly sly. Rising now from where he was working at an overloaded table, he followed Father Moody, who had burst out of his enclosure, rubbing his hands heartily, and exclaiming in vigorous Canadian Irish, “So long as you’re
here
, that’s the principal thing. The journey did not tire you too much I hope. I’m glad you feel none the worse for it, you look fairly fit. Let us come along to your apartment; I think you will be comfortable there. I will get a cell ready for you. It won’t take very long.” As they entered the grand corridor (figures at the farther end of it appeared quite diminutive), springing about a little Father Moody shouted, “Professor, where did you park your luggage? … round there to the left, is it?” Father Moody and his secretary swept up the luggage, and carried it, it seemed to René, about half a mile, to the apartment, plushy and gilded, set aside for visitors.

René’s impression of these first days was that he was sinking down into the equivalent of a wonderful feather bed. It was human wills which provided this overall sense of ineffable comfort. Everywhere he was being bolstered and spared any shock.

There was first an ordeal, however, from which he
might
have issued not so cushily supported as all that if there had been any hitch. The potential hitch was a dark, tall young scrutinizing priest, named Father O’Shea. He and two other priests, in the course of the first evening, filed into the apartment, without explanation, headed by Father Moody, saying, “I’ve brought you some visitors. I hope we are not disturbing you?”

Father O’Shea was in charge of the department of philosophy, which began and ended with St. Thomas Aquinas. He was the uncrowned king of the college, and made his views felt to such good effect that no one dared to do anything without his consent, this applying as much to the Father Superior as to the registrar. The ultimate position of René in this institution would depend upon whether Father O’Shea liked him or not. So when this tall, slightly sinister-looking figure, with a long black cloak sailing out behind him, held at the neck by a spectacular silver clasp, entered the room, and fixed his dark eyes upon the visitor, the latter felt (although he had not been apprised of the true situation) that something of moment was about to occur. Of the other two priests, only one mattered; that was Father McAuliffe. He was the librarian, and a great personal friend of the registrar. The third priest was Father Lemoine, a French-Canadian priest who, for some reason, was a Maurician father. He was small, unlike the other two: and unlike their aggressive Irish faces his was gentle and self-effacing.

Well, the upshot of this examination was that Father O’Shea seemed rather to take to René, so there was no obstacle there to the benevolent designs of the registrar.

René’s mind was still so warped that no practical considerations could matter very much. He had informed no one at Momaco, for instance, where he was going, not even McKenzie. He just took his departure one fine morning, with the first instalment of his convalescent fees. Now, of course, it was entirely irresponsible to book himself up for another job. But he did not regard this place as a
job
: in any event, the fee would be so small that it could not be thought of in the same order of things as the University of Momaco, where the honorarium was larger than might be expected.

When a cell had been found for him, and he had been officially registered as an inmate, Father Moody discussed with him the question of doing something (a merely token activity) to regularize his residence at the college. Was he well enough yet to undertake any work, of however light a kind, the good Father wanted to know? Supposing he did nothing just yet, for a short while? That would be quite agreeable to them. But René declared that he was well enough to play some part in the life of the college. It actually never occurred to him that by accepting any fee, however small, he would be behaving in an extraordinary way, seeing that Momaco was handsomely supporting him as a convalescent professor.What Father Moody proposed was that, to begin with, he should give two lectures a week of a quite elementary kind. This would leave him free to do whatever he liked for the greater part of the week. René gladly consented to this arrangement, and with this went a fee so modest as not to prick his conscience into activity.

René’s mental condition left much to be desired. Prior to the suicide of his wife, his personality had progressively acquired a toughness, a deadness which enabled him to proceed with his life along normal lines, though at a lower level, and only on condition of this kind of numbness. He was deadening and desensitizing himself, and considered that he was proof against any domestic assaults. At that time it would have required a very outstanding shock to de-anaesthetize him; but that shock would probably be fatal. The blow which was suddenly administered in the central police station, when he was confronted with his wife’s mutilated body, was of such severity as to induce a completely new situation; but the sudden exposure of the profounder nervous tracts was a test of endurance beyond his powers. In the hospital the reason lay collapsed and on the verge of a conversion into an irrational entity. For some days it was uncertain what was going to happen, and whether he was going to issue from this internal conflict a man no longer sane, or a man still able to maintain himself in the company of the sane in a mentally precarious condition. It was the second of these alternatives which eventuated, and René went out of the hospital like a sleepwalker, able to go here and to go there, to converse rationally and to carry on with life, but still in a kind of frozen way, the
ultimate
issue not decided.

However, here he was, in an atmosphere very propitious to a satisfactory outcome, surrounded by kindness, and removed from all likelihood of shock. He entered into pleasant social relations with those among whom he had come. He conducted himself normally, or almost normally. He would (infrequently) perhaps weep, but would smile and apologize. Soon he was on the best of terms with the ruling group.

His first evening at the Sacred Heart, then, he was visited by the three priests. On the second evening he was invited to join the select group of priests, described above, in the cell of Father McAuliffe. There the big librarian dispensed a kind of supper of savouries and coffee. He stood before a gas jet on which he cooked Welsh rarebits, sausage items, eggs, sardines on toast, and such things. As he stood there with the smoke rising around his face, he conversed without looking up. Most nights Father Moody and Father O’Shea were present, and several other priests looked in as well sometimes.

It was a noisy, jovial scene, reminiscent of what one associates with, let us say, eighteenth-century undergraduate life — it was a kind of cross between that and the life of men in the North Lands of Canada. All taking part at this nightly gathering-place were bold and intimate, very comradely, Fathers. And the next day, when René was asked to go up and visit Father McAuliffe by himself, after a little talk the librarian went across to where a short curtain hung in front of a recess, and pulling it back produced a bottle of gin and two glasses. “Let us have a snort, what do you say?” And when René left, about an hour later, Father McAuliffe, as he was putting the gin back into the recess, remarked,“Whenever you feel you would like a drink, just come along. I always have something here.”

So the atmosphere was of the most genial kind. These new companions were a little too vigorous for him as yet. He spent a good deal of time resting, but otherwise his habits differed in no way from those of the Fathers. He had his meals in the large refectory: he sat with the priests at a long table dominating the hall. There was a rapid grace, and then the twenty priests dropped quickly into their places, and set about devouring the food automatically and sometimes violently. About two hundred Seminarians sat at four or five tables in front of the long table, and during the meal a young cassocked priest-to-be read in a loud, harsh, expressionless voice some section of the Old Testament. This was a rather alarmingly noisy place for someone who was still a sick man, but the food was good.

So there he was, in the next thing to a monastery, nursing his sick mind; the rest and peace of a negation of life (or of the dynamic order which was what life meant for him). This was as much a negation as the Hotel Blundell. It was his second withdrawal and suspension of the intellectual processes, the giving-up of being himself. Some weeks before Hester killed herself he had mailed the MS of his new book to the New York publisher by whom his last book had been taken. But he had forgotten that he had done this: it was just as though no book had been written at all. As he had not told anyone in Momaco where he was going, he would hear nothing about what was happening to his book. He had turned his back upon all that, upon the new start he had made at Momaco, and the book he had been so breathlessly writing; he was repeating the gesture by which he had given up his academic career in England. Only, the earlier of these two exits had for its rationale a great moral issue, and his second exit was not a martyrdom but a sacrifice, an emotional act of propitiation and to assuage a phantom.

In the first weeks here, Hester was constantly in his mind. But he was not so fundamentally changed that he was not ready to be amused. There were, almost weekly, cultural and social visitors to the college. Every month some well-known personality came to lecture, the lecture taking place in some cinema or hall in Niagara. There was always a good attendance, a number of people coming over from the United States. These lecturers spent the night in the visitors’ suite. René insisted that his presence in the college was a circumstance as regards which a silence should be observed. But, although he did not attend the lectures, he was at times entertained by what he saw of these eminent personalities. Once, for instance, he was passing the visitors’ suite, and the Irish poet, Padraic O’Flaherty, emerged from one of the doors ahead of him. The Father Superior and another priest were deep in conversation a short distance away. As Padraic observed the dignitary, he crossed himself, and greeted him. René had never seen crossing oneself employed as a salute. An oblate, who had just arrived from Ireland, was informing the Superior of the object of his visit. By affecting to look at a notice board René was able surreptitiously to observe what transpired. The poet now drew level with the Father Superior, and crossed himself again. Next the poet and the oblate greeted one another, Padraic again crossing himself.This may have been because of the enormous cross blotting out the stomach of the oblate, suspended by a gold chain around his neck. Killarney was where the young oblate came from, and his childish blue eyes burst into a shy smile as his fellow countryman addressed him. Padraic involved the Father Superior in his boisterous but dignified Irish mirth, and all three were laughing now. After two minutes perhaps the poet moved away, crossing himself as he left. Some further remark of the Superior’s arrested him; and, after delivering his jovial reply, he crossed himself again as he turned away, the Superior adding his breast-cross to the sum of lavish salutes. So these two Irishmen between them, the poet, and the oblate with his terrific metal cross shining upon his stomach, filled the corridor with an unusual atmosphere of holiness. A German priest who had been staying at the college for some weeks disapproved of the oblate, describing the enormous cross hanging from his neck as “exaggerated.” He would certainly have disapproved of Padraic too, thought René, but he realized that he himself was on the side of Padraic, and smiled at this discovery.