“Of course, of course,” the priest agreed. “By the way, your faith seems to be resisting the batterings of external progress very stoutly. I’m glad, old chap.”
“I’m not sure that I have much faith, but I certainly haven’t given up hope,” Michael said gravely. “I think, you know, that hope, which is after all a theological virtue, has never had justice at the hands of the theologians. Oh, lord, I wish earnest young believers weren’t so smug and timid. Or else I wish that I didn’t feel the necessity of coordinating my opinions and accepting Christianity as laid down by the Church. I should love to be a sort of Swedenborgian with all sorts of fanciful private beliefs. But I want to force everything within the convention. I hate Free Thought, Free Love, and Free Verse, and yet I hate almost equally the stuffy people who have never contemplated the possibility of their merit. Do you ever read a paper called The Spectator? Now I believe in what The Spectator stands for, and I admire its creed enormously, but the expression of its opinions makes me spue. If only earnest young believers wouldn’t treat Almighty God with the same sort of proprietary air that schoolgirls use toward a favorite mistress.”
“Michael, Michael!” cried Viner, “where are you taking me with your coördinating impulses and your Spectators and your earnest young believers? What undergraduate paradox are you trying to wield against me? Remember, I’ve been down nearly twenty years. I can no longer turn mental somersaults. I thought you implied you were a believer.”
“Oh, no, I’m watching and hoping. And just now I’m afraid the anchor is dragging. Hope does have an anchor, doesn’t she? I’m not asking, you know, for the miracle of a direct revelation from God. The psychologists have made miracles of that sort hardly worth while. But I’m hoping with all my might to see bit by bit everything fall away except faith. Perhaps when I behold God in one of his really cynical moods ... I’m groping in the dark after a hazy idea of subordination. That’s something, you know. But I haven’t found my own place in the scheme.”
“You see you’re very modern, after all,” said Viner, “with your coördinations and subordinations.”
“But I don’t want to assert myself,” Michael explained. “I want to surrender myself, and I’m not going to surrender anything until I am sure by faith that I’m not merely surrendering the wastage of myself.”
Michael left Viner with a sense of the pathetic sameness of the mission-priest’s existence. He had known so well before he went that, because it was Monday, he would find him sitting in that armchair, smoking that pipe, reading that novel. Every other evening he would be either attending to parochial clubs in rooms of wood and corrugated iron, or his own room would be infested with boys who from year to year, from month to month, never changed in general character, but always gave the same impression of shrill cockney, of boisterous familiarity, of self-satisfied election. To-morrow morning he would say Mass to the same sparse congregation of sacristan and sisters-of-mercy and devout old maids. The same red-wristed server would stump about his liturgical business in Viner’s wake, and the same coffee pot put in the same place on the same table by the same landlady would await his return. There was a dreariness about the ministrations of this Notting Hill Mission which had been absent from the atmosphere of Burgos Cathedral. No doubt superficially even at Burgos there was a sameness, but it was a glorious sameness, a sameness that approximated to eternity. Long ago had the priests learned subordination. They had been absorbed into the omnipotence of the church against which the gates of hell could not prevail. Viner remained, however much as he might have surrendered of himself to his mission work, essentially an isolated, a pathetic individual.
As usual, Michael met Alan at Paddington, and he was concerned to see that Alan looked rather pale and worried.
“What problems have you been solving this vac?” Michael asked.
“Oh, I’ve been swatting like a pig for Mods,” said Alan hopelessly. “You are a lucky lazy devil.”