Chapter IV

Outside, in the warm September sunshine that cut half across the narrow street opening downwards out of the High Street, Kensington, a steadily increasing drift of vehicles choked the thoroughfare; and the crush was further aggravated by the stream of pedestrians that grew, circled and eddied round the church-door. The church was nothing to look at. The end that abutted on the pavement was a facade of white brick, gradually darkening under London smoke. It had a wide, low west-door, over which stood in a niche a stone statue of the Poor Man of Assisi, and above that again a large oval-topped window of clear glass. Two shallow steps led up to the door. It was quite an ugly place, but quite simple; it had Poverty visible all over it.

The clock from St. Mary Abbot's higher up struck the half -hour. A minute later the doors shook and then opened, revealing a smiling young man in a brown habit. The crowd swayed and surged forward, and began to disappear within the dark opening like a stream sucked under an arch.

Within, in the big bare house behind the church, Father Hilary was preparing for his sermon. He was in his cell on the first floor, and that cell contained precisely the following articles and no more:

A low bed, covered with a brown blanket, stood along one wall. A table stood by the window, holding writing materials, a thick book of MS. notes and a Bible. In the

Digitized by Google corner furthest from the bed hung a curtain of red serge, and, behind it, Father Hilary's second habit and a few clothes such as he wore out of his monastery. Finally, there was a chair drawn up opposite the black iron radiator, and in it sat Father Hilary, quite motionless, with closed eyes. There was no washing apparatus in the room — all such things were done in the public lavatory across the passage. The room was lighted, when necessary, by a gas-burner that projected over the radiator. There was no carpet, there were no curtains. There was nothing else at all in the room, except a crucifix over the bed.

He remained quite motionless with closed eyes until the clock below struck three strokes. Then he opened his eyes and stood up.

He was close upon six feet tall. He was dressed in the brown frock of the Capuchins, with its long hood and its cord, and his bare feet were in sandals. He could not have been more than twenty-six or twenty-seven, and his light-brown beard was silky and soft. But his eyes were the most remarkable feature of his face, very large, very wide-open, and of a startling sunny blue. So he stood a moment, his lips still moving, with the abstracted look on his face not yet gone. Then he went across his cell, opened the door and went out.

The corridor outside was as plain as the cells within. There was nothing in it at all from end to end, except two radiators and a statue in a wooden niche. He went along this corridor and turned down the stairs; pushed open a swing-door, went down a couple of steps, passing on his right a door set wide into the garden at the east of the church; walked along another passage or two, up some more stairs, passing on the way, in silence, another figure dressed like himself, and found himself in a little upstairs choir, with lancet windows looking straight out upon the

Digitized by Google high-altar. There he knelt down again and remained motionless.

Father Hilary had had a singularly uneventful life. His mother was Welsh, and he had helped her in her little Cardiff shop out of school-hours until the age of fourteen. Then he had offered himself to the Capuchins, had been accepted, and thenceforward had vanished entirely from the world until just before his profession eight years later. Then he had come home again for a vacation, and to consider himself, and to recover from an illness that threatened him. He had recovered, and gone back again to the novitiate in North Wales. Four years later his mother, at great cost to herself, had travelled north from Cardiff with all her luggage in a single bundle; had been present at his ordination to the priesthood, had kissed his hands and received his blessing; had assisted at his first mass and received Holy Communion from him. Then, in an ecstasy of pain and happiness, she had returned to her shop in Cardiff, and had seen him no more. But she knew that she had for a son a priest and a friar....

A year or two later Father Hilary had been sent to London, and here the surprises began. For within six months after his first sermon he had a reputation sufficiently great to draw at least a third of his congregation from other parishes, and six months after that special tickets had to be issued whenever he preached.

But the surprise chiefly lay in the fact that the matter of his sermons was not at all original: he was never hailed as a thinker by anyone at all. It is true that reporters had tried more than once (in vain) to get an interview with him; but that was out of sheer curiosity. He never said anything particularly profound or startling; he was never cynical, never epigrammatic. He knew nothing at all of

Digitized by Google the world, in the ordinary sense of the word; but he appeared to know a great deal about the next, and spoke as if he lived there — which he probably did. The charm of him apparently lay in his amazing and overwhelming simplicity and the personality that lay behind it. Certainly he was sensational in the pulpit sometimes; that is to say, he called certain practices Sins, and named them by their names. But he did not always provide even such sensationalism as this. For the most part, he preached about the Love of God and the Passion of Jesus Christ and the joy of renunciation — such sermons as might be preached — up to a certain point — by Salvation Army captains. He bore himself quietly in the pulpit, using only such gestures as were obviously natural to him. And yet — here were these motors, these polished broughams, this crowd of foot-passengers. Here was the church beneath him already humming like a hive; here was Brother George holding up a cord at the end of the centre aisle and Brother Francis dancing to and fro on his sandalled feet in a hopeless endeavour to crowd seventeen hundred persons into a church built for fourteen hundred. And meanwhile Father Hilary kneeled alone at the lancet window upstairs, staring out at the wooden altar, the wooden gilded candlesticks and the little white-curtained tabernacle.

For the last twenty minutes Percy had been like a cat in a strange room. Every fibre of him was alive and sensitive: he smelled the peculiar smell of rich ladies — furs and silk and eau-de-cologne; he listened to violently whispered expostulations from seat-holders before and behind, and the endless rattle of footsteps on the bare wood-paved aisles; he felt the pressure of a stout lady on one side and

Digitized by Google a lean man on the other, who sat forward with his elbows out; and he eyed incessantly every detail of places, persons and things that were within his vision.

Of course he was chiefly absorbed by the lay brothers and the altar. The altar he did not think much of: it was only of very common stained wood, and the wooden, gilded candlesticks had no particular brilliancy of outline or colour. Between the candlesticks were two large white earthenware vases filled with artificial flowers. It seemed to him to be (as, indeed, it was) very cheap and common. There was nothing else sensational in view — except occasionally a friar, as Brother Francis darted up the aisle with a new convoy. But he had seen two or three statues on the way up to his place, that he had dismissed with the same epithets as those which he applied to the altar — one of a friar with a labelled money-box in front of him, and a child in his arms — all of evident plaster; and one of a barefooted woman in a confusing dress of black and brown holding some kind of gilded object in her hands.

But the lay-brothers were the point. They we*e no statues; they were living facts, here, in Kensington, in the twentieth century; real human beings who were dressed in brown robes and had real bare feet. It appeared to him incredible.... He craned in his place once or twice to catch a sight again of Brother Francis' bare feet.. •.

The chief emotion he had, at present, was that of oddness. He was not awed, he was not frightened, he was not fascinated, he merely found it all very odd. By the time that the organ began to play he had begun to propound a theory to himself — namely, that the dress of friars was really no more than a kind of cassock which they wore in church in order to make a sensation; at other times, probably, they wore coats and trousers like other people.

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Through that door, there, where a face occasionally appeared, and whence, once, a complete friar issued forth, life was probably very much what it was elsewhere. It was incredible that people really lived, here and now, in Kensington, in the kind of way in which (he understood) friars and monks had lived in the Middle Ages. It was probably, he thought, rather like college life. Dim memories of comic pictures began to come back to him — of red-faced friars and barrels of wine; of smoking dishes in a refectory; of stout abbots with mitres. Obviously that kind of thing must have stopped long ago... it had been put an end to by Henry VIII., he thought.

The organ rose louder; a door opened somewhere; and then to his amazement, Reggie, also in a brown dress, with a very short surplice, came out with a taper. He seemed quite at home, thought Percy, and highly self-conscious; he went up to the altar, performed a curious movement there, and began to light the candles. Then once more he disappeared; and an instant later out came a little procession with three men in white and shining robes in the midst....

Ill

It is not necessary to say more, as to the effect of the first part of the mass upon Percy, than that he grew more bewildered and more repelled every moment. It seemed to him the most confusing, the most unintelligible, and the most meaningless ceremony he had ever looked upon. These three men went to and fro without cause and without excuse. No sooner had they formed one figure than they broke it again; now they were in line, now in single file; now one turned round to bellow an incoherent gabble of words; then, turning, he ducked again in an absurd

Digitized by Google manner. It seemed to Percy that the half had not been told him of the superstitious mummery of Rome; it was not even pleasing to human senses; and as to its acceptability before God!

Percy compared it with the service that he ought to have been engaged in himself — the service proceeding at this very moment, in far-away Hanstead — this dark, cheap altar with the gracious brass-glimmering white stone east-end of St. James'; these posturing, mouthing men with the Vicar in his clean surplice and Oxford hood and white stole, and Mr. Main in his no less clean surplice and his Durham hood; this bellowed unintelligible Latin, with the well-turned sentences of morning-prayer and litany. Above all he compared the murmurous, incoherent roaring of the hidden men's choir with his own dear " Gadsby in C."... And he had expected so much: he had expected almost to have to guard himself against the seductive strains and the languorous harmonies and the sonorous Latin and the nerve-entrancing perfumes. He had expected a dark, jewelled sanctuary, an hieratic celebrant splendid in mystery and cloth of gold. He had heard endlessly of the glamour of Rome and the plain, honest simplicity of Anglicanism.... Well, if this were glamour, he preferred simplicity.

When at last the three white men retired to the side and sat down, Percy leaned back in his seat with scarcely an illusion left.

He paid no great attention to Father Hilary at first, when that friar first appeared in the pulpit. Certainly he looked a fresh, decent sort of man, thought Percy; and he listened, scarcely aware that it was this man whom he had come to hear, to an endless and quite unintelligible series of notices. He heard a list of names read out with the

Digitized by Google mention of certain days on which "the Holy Sacrifice would be offered" for this and that individual: some observations on something called a " novena " and something else about an " indulgence " that * ' could be gained on the usual terms." He pricked up his ears a little at this. Reggie had told him that an indulgence did not mean apaid-for permission to commit sin; but it seemed as if this sounded uncommonly like it

Finally Father Hilary laid the book aside and faced the congregation. There was first a rustle, and then a deep, absorbed silence. Then the friar uttered these words:

" I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor might, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Words taken from the thirty-eight and thirty-ninth verses of the eighth chapter of the epistle of Saint Paul to the Romans. In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen."

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