Frederick Rolfe - Hadrian the Seventh

"The effect on your own soul?"

"The effect on my own soul is perfectly ghastly. I positively loathe and distrust all Catholics, known and unknown, with one exception. I have become a rudderless derelict. I have lost all faith in man, and I have lost the power of loving."

"How terrible!" the cardinal sighed. "And are there none of us for whom you have a kindly feeling? At times, I mean? You cannot always be in a state of white-hot rage, you know. There must be intervals when the tension of your anger is relaxed, perhaps from sheer fatigue: for anger is deliberate, the effect of exertion. And, in those intervals, have you never caught yourself thinking kindly of any of your former friends?"

"Yes, Eminency, there are very many, clerks and laics both, with whom, strange to say, when my anger is not dynamic, I sometimes wish to be reconciled. However, I myself never will approach them; and they afford me no opportunity. They do not come to me, as you have come." His voice softened a little; and his smile was an alluring illumination.

"But you would meet them with vituperation; and naturally they don't want to expose themselves to affronts?"

"Oh, of course if their sense of duty (to say nothing of decency) does not teach them to risk affronts— But I will not say beforehand how I should meet them beyond this: it would depend on their demeanour to me. I should do as I am done by. For example," he turned to the ruddy bishop, "did I heave chairs or china-ware at Your Lordship?"

"Indeed you did not, although I thoroughly deserved both. Yrmnts," the young prelate continued, "I believe I understand Mr. Rose's frame of mind. He has been hit very hard; and he's badly bruised. He is a burnt child; and he dreads the fire. It's only natural. I'm firmly convinced that he has been more sinned against than sinning; and, though I'm sorry to see him practically keeping us at arms' length, I really don't know what else we can expect until we treat him as we ourselves would like to be treated."

"True, true," the cardinal conceded.

"But it's a pity all the same," the bishop concluded. The cardinal audibly thought, "You have perhaps not many very kindly feelings towards me personally, Mr. Rose."

"I have no kindly feelings at all toward Your Eminency; and I believe you to be aware of my reasons. I trust that I never should be found wanting in reverence to your Sacred Purple: but apart from that—" indignant recollection stiffened and inflamed the speaker)—"indeed I only am speaking civilly to you now because you are the successor of Augustine and Theodore and Dunstan and Anselm and Chichele and Chichester, and because my friend the Bishop of Caerleon has made you my guest for the nonce. My Lord Cardinal, I do not know what you want of me, nor why you have come to me: but let me tell you that you shall not entangle me again in my talk. You are going the Catholic way to work with me; and that is the wrong way. Frankness and open honesty is the only way to win me— if you want me."

"Well, well! You were going to give me your own view of your Vocation."

"Your Eminency first was about to tell me how you found me after your letters to my publishers had been returned."

"I applied to several Catholics who, formerly, had been your friends; and, when they could tell me nothing, I had a letter sent to all the bishops of my province directing inquisition to be made among the clergy. Your personality, if not your name, was certain to be known to at least one of these if you still remained Catholic, you know."

"If I still remained Catholic!" George growled with contemptuous ire.

"People in your position, Mr. Rose, have been known to commit apostasy."

"And it is precisely because people in my position habitually commit apostasy that I decline to do what is expected of me. No. I'll follow my cat's example of exclusive singularity. It would be too obliging and too silly to give you Catholics that weapon to use against me. No, no, Eminency, rest assured that I rather will be a nuisance and poor, as I am, than an apostate and rich, as I might be."

The cardinal raised his eyebrows. "I trust you have a worthier motive than that!"

"I mentioned that I was not in revolt against the Faith, but against the Faithful."

"And the Grace of God?"

"Oh, of course the Grace of God," George hastened in common courtesy conventionally to adjoin.

The fine dark brows came down again, and the cardinal continued, "As soon as I had issued the mandate to my suffragans, Dr. Talacryn at once furnished the desired information."

"I see," said George. Then, "Where would Your Eminency like me to begin?"

"Tell me your own tale in your own way, dear child." George softly and swiftly stroked his little cat. He compelled himself to think intensely, to marshal salient facts on which he had brooded day and night unceasingly for years, and to try to eliminate traces of the acerbity, of the devouring fury, with which they still inspired him.

"Perhaps I'd better tell Mr. Rose, Yrmnts, that we've already gone very deeply into his case," the bishop said. "It will make it easier for him to speak when he knows that it is not information we're seeking, but his personal point of view."

"Indeed it will," said George; "and I sincerely thank Your Lordship. If you already know the facts, you will be able to check my narrative; and all I have to do is to state the said facts to the best of my knowledge and belief. I will begin with my career at Maryvale, where I was during a scholastic year of eight months as an ecclesiastical subject of the Bishop of Claughton, and where I received the Tonsure. At the end of those eight months, my diocesan wrote that he was unable to make any further plans for me, because there was not (I quote his words) an unanimous verdict of the superiors in favour of my Vocation. This was like a bolt from the blue: for the four superiors verbally had testified the exact contrary to me. Instantly I wrote, inviting them to explain the discrepancy. It was the Long Vacation. In reply, the President averred inability to understand my diocesan's statement: advised me to change my diocese; and volunteered an introduction to the Bishop of Lambeth, in which he declared that my talents and energy (I am quoting again) would make me a very valuable priest. The Vice-president declined to add anything to what he already had told me. A dark man, he was, who hid inability under a guise of austerity. The Professor of Dogmatic Theology said that he never had been asked for, and never had volunteered, an opinion. The Professor of Moral Theology, who was my confessor, said the same; and, further, he superintended my subsequent correspondence with my bishop. You will mark the intentions of that act of his. However, all came to nothing. The Bishop of Claughton refused to explain, to recede, to afford me satisfaction. The Bishop of Lambeth refused to look at me, because the Bishop of Claughton had rejected me. It was my first introduction to the inexorability of the Roman Machine, inexorable in iniquity as in righteousness."

"Did you form any opinion at this juncture?" the cardinal inquired, waving a white hand.

"I formed the opinion that someone carelessly had lied: that someone clumsily had blundered; and that all concerned were determined not to own themselves, or anyone else but me, to be in the wrong. A mistake had been made; and, by quibbles, by evasions, by threats, by every hole-and-corner means conceivable, the mistake was going to be perpetuated. Had the case been one of the ordinary type of ecclesiastical student (the hebete and half-licked Keltic class I mean), either I furiously should have apostatized, or I mildly should have acquiesced, and should have started-in as a pork-butcher or a cheesemonger. But those intellectually myopic authorities were unable to discriminate; and they quite gaily wrecked a life. Oh yes: I formed ail opinion; and I very freely stated it."