Chapter 21

THE BLIND CANON

In a small room in a small house in a small street in Chelsea, Father Molyneux was sitting with a friend. There were a few beautiful things in the room, and a few well-bound books; but they had a dusty, uncared for look about them. It teased the young priest to see a medicine bottle and a half-washed medicine glass standing on a bracket with an exquisite statuette of the Madonna. The present occupier of these lodgings had had very true artistic perceptions before he had become blind.

Mark Molyneux had just been reading to him for an hour, and he now put down the book. The old man smacked his lips with enjoyment. The author was new to him, but he had won his admiration at the first reading.

"What people call his paradoxes," he said, "is his almost despairing attempt at making people pay attention; he has to shout to men who are too hurried to stop. The danger is that, as time goes on, he will only be able to think in contrasts and to pursue contradictions."

The speaker paused, and then, his white fingers groped a little as if he were feeling after something. His voice was rich and low. Then he kept still, and waited with a curious look of acquired patience. At last, the younger man began.

"I want to ask your advice, or rather, I want to tell you something I have decided on."

"And you only want me to agree," laughed Canon Nicholls, and the blind face seemed full of perception.

"Well, I think you will." The boyish voice was bright and keen. "I've come to tell you that I want to be a monk."

"Tut, tut," said Canon Nicholls, and then they both laughed together. "Since when?" he asked a moment later.

"It has been coming by degrees," said Mark, in a low voice. "I want to be altogether for God."

"And why can't you be that now?"

"It's too confusing," he said; "half the day I am amused or worried or tired. I've got next to no spiritual life."

Canon Nicholls did not help him to say more.

"I can't be regular in anything, and now there's the preaching."

"What's the matter with that?"

"Who was it who said that a popular preacher could not save his soul? Father Rector says that it's very bad for me that I crowd up the church. He is evidently anxious about me."

"How kind!"

"Then, since I've been preaching, such odd people come to see me."

"I know," said the Canon, "there's a fringe of the semi-insane round all churches; they used to lie in wait for me once."

"Then I simply love society. I've been to hear such interesting people talk at several houses lately. I go a good deal to Miss Dexter."

"Miss Molly Dexter."

"Yes."

"I wouldn't do that; she's a minx. She is the girl who stayed with that kind little woman, Mrs. Delaport Green, who sometimes comes to see me."

"You see," Mark went on eagerly, "I'm doing no good like this. So I have made up my mind to try and be a Carthusian."

His face lit up now with the same intense delight. "It's such a splendid life! Fancy! No more humbug, and flattery, and insincerity. 'Vous ne jouerez plus la comédie,' an old monk said to me. Wouldn't it be splendid? Think of the stillness, and then the singing of the Office while the world is asleep, like the little birds at dawn. It would be simply and entirely to live for God!"

"I do believe in a personal devil," muttered Canon Nicholls to himself, and Mark stared at him. "Now listen," he said. "There is a young man who has a vocation to the priesthood, and he comes under obedience to work in London. That is, to live in the thick of sin, of suffering, of folly and madness. If it were acknowledged that the place was full of cholera or smallpox it would be simple enough. But the place is thick with disguises. The worst cases don't seem in the least ill; the stench of the plague is a sweet smell, and the confusion is thicker because there are angels and demons in the same clothes, living in the same houses, doing the same actions, saying almost the same things. In every Babylon there have been these things, but this is about the biggest. And the most harmless of the sounds, the hum of daily work, is loud and continuous enough to dull and wear the senses. So confused and perplexed is the young man that he doesn't know when he has done good or done harm; being young, compliments appeal to him very seriously; being young, he takes too many people's opinions; and, being young, he generalises and if, for instance, I tell him not to go often to the house of a capricious woman of uncertain temper, he probably resolves at once never to lunch in an agreeable house again. Meanwhile, above this muddle, this tragicomedy, he sees the distant hills glowing with light; so, without waiting for orders, he leaves the people crying to him for help and turns tail and runs away! And what only the skill of a personal devil could achieve, he thinks in his heart that he is choosing a harder fight, a more self-denying life."

"But I could help those people more by my prayers."

"Granted, if it were God's will that you should lead the life of contemplation, but I don't believe it is. I don't see what right you've got to believe it is. As to not living altogether for God here, that's His affair. Mind you, I don't undervalue the difficulties, and it's uncommon hard to human nature. Don't think too much of other people's opinions; I know you feel a bit out of it with the priests about you. They are rough to young men like you--it's jealousy, if they only knew it. Jealousy is the fault of the best men, because they never suspect themselves of it. If they saw it, they would fight it. Face facts. You have some gifts; you will be much humbler if you thank God for them instead of trying to think you haven't got them. And be quite particularly nice to the growler sort of priest; he's had a hard time and, lived a hard life; much harder than the life of a monk. Mind you respect his scars."

He talked on, partly to give Mark time; he saw he had given him a shock.

"Mind," he said, "there is sometimes an acute personal temptation, but you've not got that now. You've got a sort of perception of what it might be. It won't be unbearable." He crossed his legs and put the long, white fingers into each other. "But I'm old now, and it's my experience that the mischief for all priests is to let society be their fun. It ought to be a duty, and a very tiresome duty too. Take your amusements in any other way, and go out to lunch in the same state of mind as you visit a hospital. Do you think the best women, whether Protestant or Catholic, think society their fun? They may like it or not, but it is a serious duty to them."

Mark sprang up suddenly. "I can't stand this!" he said. "You go on talking, and I want to be a Carthusian, and I will be one." He laughed; his voice was troubled and the clear joy of his face was clouded.

Canon Nicholls felt in his pocket for a snuff-box, and brought it out. "Go along, if you can't stand it. And don't come back till you've seen through the devil's trick. I don't mind what I bet that you won't run away."

Left alone, Canon Nicholls covered his blind eyes with his hands and heaved a deep sigh.

The man who had just left him was the object of his keenest affection, the apple of those blind eyes that craved to look upon his face. But his love was not blind, and he felt the danger there lay in the seeming perfectness of the young man. Mark's nature was gloriously sweet and abounding in the higher gifts; his love of God had the awe of a little child, and his love of men had the tenderness of a shepherd towards his lost sheep. Mark had loved life and learning, had revelled in Oxford, and would, in one sense, be an undergraduate all his days. He had known dreams of ambition, and visions of success in working for his country. Then gently--not with any shock--had come the vocation to the priesthood, and so tenderly had the tendrils that attached him to a man's life in the world been loosened, that the process hardly seemed to have hurt any of the sensitive sympathies and interests he had always enjoyed. Even in the matter of giving up great possessions, all had come so gradually as to seem most natural and least strained.

Long before the Groombridges could be brought to believe that the brilliant and favourite young cousin had rejected all that they could leave him, it had become a matter of course to the rest of the family and their friends that Mark Molyneux would be a priest, and give up the property to the younger brother.

When the outer world took up the matter, Father Molyneux always made people feel as if allusions to his renunciation of Groombridge were simply quite out of taste, and nothing out of taste seemed in keeping with anything connected with him. It was all so simple to Mark, and so perfect to Canon Nicholls, that the latter almost dreaded this very perfection as unlikely, and unbefitting the "second-rate" planet in which it was his lot to live. And to confirm this almost superstitious feeling of a man who had lived to know where the jolts and jars of life cause the acutest suffering to the idealist, had come this fresh aspiration of Mark's after a life more completely perfect in itself. Strong instincts were entirely in accord with the older man's sober judgment of the situation. And yet he wished it could be otherwise. He had no opinion of the world that Mark wanted to give up. He would most willingly have shut any cloister door between that world and his cherished son in the spirit. It was with no light heart that he wanted him to face all the roughness of human goodness, all the blinding confusion of its infirmities, all the cruelty of its vices. The old man's own service in his last years was but to stand and wait, but, even so, he was too often oppressed by the small things that fill up empty hours, small uncharitablenesses, small vanities, small irritations. Was it not a comfort at such moments to believe that in another world we should know human nature in others and in ourselves without any cause for repugnance and without any ground for fear?