It was during this void, this period of suspended life, that he began to think of a conversion. The fact that his mother had been a Catholic was a deterrent rather than otherwise, but the void exposed him to irrelevant impulses, and he drifted towards “the old religion.” This was irrational, but he had buried his reason in the tomb of his wife as an expression of remorse, or so he once put it to himself. There was, of course, a magnetism in the uniformity of the habits of these people. When he would sit with Father O’Donnell, one of his new friends, that good priest would stand up and shake himself, exclaiming,“Well now, I must go and settle my accounts with Rome.” The time had come, in other words, to say his office.
René felt attracted to this routine, of office, of pedagogy, of office again, of farm labour; for what he needed just then was a discipline, and prayer was a technique which at last he understood. Hester, with whom he communed continually at present, was of the same order of things with God. God was for all the priests and seminarians, all the other people in this place, the same kind of being that Hester was for him, having a similar obsessional reality. He had been introduced, through what had happened to him, into the world of the devout. It was therefore quite easy, when he fell upon his knees — for the first time since he had been a child — to approach God as though to the manner born; to feel him as a reality, of the same flesh and blood with Hester. There were times when he went from one to the other, as a man visiting a friend in a certain quarter of the town would say to himself, “As old So-and-so lives hereabouts too, I think I will look him up before I return.”
It was after he had been there a month that he asked if he might go to Mass on Sunday. Father Moody’s face was irradiated with a smiling joy, and his forehead was almost a tomato colour.
“Sure! Whoi not! I am so glad, Professor! Come and fetch me on Sunday morning, we will go along to Mass together.” The priest’s eyes shone with so benign a light that René flushed. This was certainly one of God’s most authentic officers. Without any enquiries at all as to why he wished to do this, he began to go to Mass on Sundays.
He imagined God inhabiting a void, a nothingness, which might be thought of as a cavern: his costume was that of a Roman citizen of two thousand years ago. God was historic. How he became aware of Him physically was after the manner of his contacting Hester. He could see only a shadowy face, which was vaguely ecstatic.
When he had said to himself that everyone in this college was engaged in a communion (namely, with God) as he was with Hester, that would only be true ideally. It was only the saints who communed with God as he did with Hester. Naturally, it would be most improbable that any of these teaching priests or seminarians enjoyed any intense and obsessional communion with God similar to his own with his dead wife: the idea of God certainly ruled their lives, but He would hardly be more than an abstraction. And René did realize this, to some extent, and, without formulating it very much, he knew that he was nearer to God, at this period, than most of those around him.
About this time he paid frequent visits to the cell of Father O’Shea. Their conversation bore upon questions of Catholic teaching and a number of other kindred subjects, such as the technique of prayer. It was after a week or two, during which these visits had been continuous, that the priest unexpectedly asked him, “Are you becoming a Catholic?” To this, after a moment’s hesitation, René answered, “Yes.” — “In that case,” Father O’Shea observed, “you will require these.” And he handed him a half-dozen booklets.
René accepted the books. But he was never more explicit than that. All the priests ever knew about his intentions was his “Yes” in reply to Father O’Shea’s question. And it was not long after this that he began to experience a change of heart or a change of mind.
R
ene’s change of mind, and the deep emotional shift, was a process not abrupt, but of so profoundly radical a kind that, from the first moment this movement set in, there was something in the nature of a revolution. It possibly began as a result of his lectures. These were elementary, but they did take him back to his normal way of thought: to things belonging to the sphere of reason, rather than to the spiritist degeneration which had ensued upon the suicide of Hester (which is not, of course, to say that his contacts with God were a “degeneration,” but what led to them was a degeneration for him, the springs of whose life lay far away from the extremes of mysticism). The reason began to assert itself once more — it was a rather queer sensation for him at first. He would, from time to time, find himself thinking about something pertaining to the world of the intellect, which had been so completely displaced by what he soon was to call “Hesteria.” So gradually he recovered his mental health — with a strict limitation which did not, however, make any practical difference, only a profound modification. The “frozenness,” as it has been described, remained. All that occurred was that he came out of the highly artificial atmosphere he had adopted as a temporary sheath of cotton wool, and attempted to force his invalid personality back into life again. These developments progressively weakened the clutch of the dead woman, and, as part of the same movement away from spiritual realities, the reality of God receded. He did not repudiate the latter, but merely ceased to experience it. This was a painful movement, away from “Hesteria” back to the rational; for of course there must be pain in any movement away from something powerfully experienced over to something else violently contradicting it. By the beginning of his third month at the college he was for the first time thinking objectively of the suicide of his wife — and this caused him the acutest discomfort. At first, this return to objectivity had the shock of a revelation. His old love for Hester and their comradely solidarity in the days of hardship, which had been the Hester of the hospital, and which had survived until now, struggled against the unmasking and debunking that had begun. But once the destructive analysis was under way nothing could arrest it. — Why had Hester killed herself? It had been, of course, the culmination of a long period during which, day in and day out, she had been attempting to move him from the position he had taken up. But it was for purely selfish reasons that she desired this return to England. It was not, as frequently she would assert, because of her concern for his career. That was the bunk. It was her private life, not his public life, that was the issue. It was simply because she wished to be near her mother, near Susan, and all her other friends — that was why she was trying to force him to return to England. Then a genuine hatred was there, almost as compelling as love for mother and friends. She did entertain the most vicious feelings where Canada was concerned; she was ferociously obsessed with the memory of the ostracism they had suffered for more than three years. Mr. Furber (who actually in his ghastly way had befriended them) she loathed, and refused to concede him any merit. No Canadian was capable of a good action. No doubt all this bitterness, and rancour, enduring for so long, had built up the state of mind which had made her capable, ultimately, of her furious act. All the circumstances, too, of the fire; incendiarism and murder, and the subsequent execution of the criminal, had done nothing to steady her mind.
But these considerations did not absolve her from the original charge of a destructive selfishness. For had she not placed her private wishes in competition with everything he desired? With insolence she demanded that he should act upon her counsels and not his own.
Her will did not prevail, in spite of long and violent struggling. But does someone kill himself, or herself, because their advice is not taken? Yes: at least Hester did. He now understood precisely why Hester had taken her life. It was with hatred that he brought his analysis to the point at which he declared, “Hester’s suicide was an act of insane coercion. My cold refusal to do what she wanted crazed her egoistic will. She was willing to die in order to force me off the path I had chosen. She probably thought, among other things, that her suicide would oblige me to give up my job at the university. She was acting vindictively.” Having arrived at this explicit condemnation of his dead wife — having denied her any of the usual motives for suicide: namely inability to support the pain of living, life having become an unbearable torture; having decided that her suicide was committed as an act of supreme coercion, and malign retribution, there was a question which had to be answered. He had not asked this directly up till then.Was Hester insane? He was obliged to answer that she must have been demented to do what she did: and had, therefore, not been responsible. In spite of this, Hester had revealed a character disfigured by an unlovely vanity, René told himself. Now he cast his horrified gaze back upon the
graffito
occupying the slab in the police mortuary. There was the severed head; but, in spite of the severance, self-sufficient; as though it could exist all by itself; and, as he stared in memory, with a hardly sane intensity, upon what had been so dear to him, severity melted, his recriminations dissolved, and he almost plunged back again into the “Hesteria” he was abandoning. It was with a mad wrench that he dragged himself away from a new surrender. He all but sank back into the old love and comradeship. And now, as never before, his heart seemed about to break, as he fixed his eyes upon the two slender blood-darkened legs, so pathetically isolated, one behind the other, exhibits displayed in a police court case. — “The severed legs of the deceased.”
He was striding up and down his cell as he was in travail with his new picture of his dead wife. At this point he banged himself down aggressively upon a chair. “This sentiment that misleads,” he reproached himself. It was just the same with his mother! We (men) have all these tender reactions about any women, but they (women) on their side do not entertain feelings of that sort about us. It is a one-way sentiment. All their life is spent in fooling us, in creating such feelings as these. To make themselves desirable, “little,” pathetic. They very well understand what a wealth of tenderness is associated with the sensation of pity. In most cases they are the
smaller
animal, sometimes only half the size of the male. This they put to wonderful advantage. They congratulate themselves when they hear themselves called “little rabbit” or “little squirrel” or some such diminutive; it signifies that they have succeeded. Then an unfailing
passivity
is a prettiness that goes with smallness. They ideally, in this ancient technique, are the passive little things to whom things are done. (The only women who have discarded this technique are the Americans, with a corresponding loss of something of vital use to the female. Had Hemingway [in
For Whom the Bell Tolls
] been putting his hero into a fleabag with an American woman, “little rabbit” would not have been the endearment employed.) So René’s mind whirled on. And when he looked at the
graffito
again (in his brightly lit memory) he saw nothing but a masterpiece of illusionism. How uniquely useful it was that the head (the face) was intact. She had, even in death, whisked it out of the way, when something was about to smash or disfigure it, as she lay under the truck. That
must
survive intact, to pull the heartstrings. In the Momaco newspapers, in their account of the suicide, they had said that her head rolled away into the gutter, miraculously escaping destruction. Ah! thought René, she had steered it to safety, using the neck to give whatever impulse desired. He now regarded his
graffito
with the scorn which would be meted out to some unmasked impostor, more especially when the technique employed in the imposture had been designed to awaken pity and tenderness.
At this point he went to his suitcase and took from it Hester’s letter, which had been delivered to him in the hospital. He examined it sentence by sentence. The text of it was as follows:
What can I say, René darling, except to ask your forgiveness. I loathe this country so much, where I can see you burying yourself. I cannot leave you physically — go away from you back to England. I can only go out of the world. Goodbye, my darling. Ess.
When he had read this in the hospital, he had smiled tenderly as he saw the handwriting, but later on had burst into a hurricane of tears, beating his head up and down on the pillow. Now he violently crushed the letter in his hand, tore it into several pieces, flung it upon the floor, sprang up, and stamped upon it.
“Quelle
comédie! Quelle sale comédie!”
And he spat down at the ruined sheets —
“Fumier!”
Immediately after this scene, nine weeks after his arrival in the college, he sent a note to McKenzie, upon College of the Sacred Heart paper; but asking him not to reveal his whereabouts. “Soon I shall be back in Momaco,” he added. He enclosed a larger envelope, stamped and addressed, asking McKenzie to forward any letters which might have arrived for him. Five days later this large envelope returned, well swelled out with mail. There was a long letter from McKenzie, a couple of cheques from the university, several letters from the New York publisher, one accepting the work, and offering him generous terms, and the rest urging him to reply. There were other letters, of less urgency. He despatched telegrams at once to McKenzie, to Momaco University (Registrar), and to the U.S. publisher, accepting terms.
But this first striking triumph over “Hesteria” was not as yet conclusive. A piteous and reproachful Hester dogged him for a time, approaching him in moments when he was off his guard, or genially relaxed, having laid aside his new militancy; or even during Mass. There was one occasion when Hester won a distinct victory. He had gone to bed, after listening to the radio for two hours or more. Buffalo, N.Y. was only a few miles away, and that was the station in to which he always tuned. “Henry Aldridge,” that splendid satire on the American schoolboy, was part of the program. One of the things which had lightened the burden of their life at the Hotel Blundell had been precisely this radio serial. As he lay on his bed, listening to the whining voice, full of a dry cunning, of Homer Brown; to the tremulous and querulous appeals of the hero; and to the ironic expostulation of Aldridge Senior, massively resigned at having given birth to such a son — absorbed in this wonderful entertainment, without realizing it, he had slipped back into the years of evenings passed in the Room, where Hester and he were enabled to forget the ghastly isolation and boredom of their lives. Nothing so much as the American radio, with all its wonderful gusto, the many-sidedness of its interests, provided the necessary anaesthesia. There was one moment at which he forgot where he was, and it was his impulse to turn to Hester, to share with her the joy of some quip of Schnozzle Durante. It was at that point that he realized what had been happening, and that he had allowed himself to be led into a past where the living Hester was unavoidably to be encountered. But
after
that, and quite consciously, he gave himself up to the retrospective enjoyment of the warm comfort of this shabby room in the Blundell Annex, the zero weather outside, and the wonderful companionship of this woman he had shared so much with, and with whom he would soon coagulate in the pneumatic expanses of the Murphy bed. This was one of the pleasantest evenings he had spent at the college.