The City of Comrades

by Basil King

He passed on to the kitchen, where a Greek named Pappa—nicknamed Momma by the boys—had taken the place of Mouse; but he left me with a new outlook.

Following his instructions, I began almost immediately to get some of the reward he promised me. My mother wrote to me within a week, timidly but tenderly, and with joy at being in touch with me again. A few weeks later my sister wrote, affectionately, if with reserve. When my birthday came in March, and I was thirty-two, I had small presents from them both, and from my two sisters-in-law as well. I noticed that all letters, even from my mother, were hesitatingly expressed, and in something like an undertone of awe. My family, too, felt apparently that I had put an abyss between myself and them, and that in the effort to recross it there was a suggestion of the supernatural. It was as if my father were saying to them, “This, thy brother, was dead, and is alive again”—and they were experiencing some of the strangeness that Mary and Martha must have known when Lazarus came back to the house at Bethany.

But that was not my only reward, though of what I received in addition I find it difficult to tell you. Indeed, I should make no attempt to tell you at all were it not so essential to this small record of a human life. All I want to say is that that thing came to me as a new revelation which is probably an every-day fact to you—that by the simple process of loving I could dwell in God, I could be aware that God was all round me.

I mean that once I understood that love was God the great mystery that had tantalized me all my life was solved. All my life I had been tortured by the questions: Who is God? What is God? What is my relation to Him—or have I any? And now I seemed to have found the answer. When I got back to love—the common, natural love for my father and mother and sisters—when I got back to feeling more gently toward my brothers—I began to see—you must forgive me if I seem blatant, but that is not my intention—I began to see faintly and very inadequately that I was actually in touch with God.

I am far from saying that all my difficulties were overcome. Of course they were not. I mean only that that divine force of which I had been told the universe was full, but which had always seemed apart from me, remote from my needs, actually came, in some measure at least, within my possession. Just as Beady Lamont found the furniture-moving business shiny with it, once he knew where to look for it, so I began to see my work as an architect. It was as if a golden key had been put into my hand which unlocked the richest of life’s secrets.

All at once people whom I had known to be well disposed toward me, and whom I had dismissed at that, began to translate God to me. Ralph Coningsby, Cantyre, Lovey, Christian, Pyn, not to speak of others, were like reflectors that threw the rays of the great Central Sun straight into my soul. I am not declaring that there was no tarnish on the surfaces that caught those beams and transmitted them to me—probably there was—but light and warmth were poured into me for all that. Not that there was a change in their attitude toward me; the change was in my point of view, in my capacity for seeing. What I had thought of only as human aid I now perceived to be the celestial bread and wine; and where I had supposed I was living only with men, I knew I was walking with God.

And yet there was a love with regard to which I could not have this peace of mind. Christian would perhaps have ascribed that defect to the fact that there was passion in it. My own fear was that, having had its inception in a moment of crime, it could never free itself from the conditions that gave it birth.

After the Christmas dinner there was a change toward me in the bearing of Regina Barry and her mother. Without growing colder, they became slightly more formal; and that I understood. As they had come so far in my direction, it was for me to go some of the distance in theirs, and I didn’t.

I didn’t because I couldn’t. I was like a man who would have been glad to walk if paralysis hadn’t nailed him to his seat. As, however, it was emotional paralysis and not physical, there was no means by which they could become aware of it; nor could I make up my mind to tell them.