There, dear Lady Porstock, you have my view of the case. I only hope that these stumbling words of mine may help you to know your own mind.
Yours quite sincerely,
Amphibolus Norvic
I had just finished reading this remarkable letter, and was engaged in considering whether it was exactly what I wanted or exactly what I did not want, when the teletypewriter that connected with the front door rang at my elbow, and told me that Cardinal Smith had called. It was not much past five, but I knew his old-fashioned habits, so I whistled for tea and went down to show him up. When I saw him I had a curious experience. There is a certain smile one only sees (I think) on the faces of Catholic ecclesiastics, a smile which their friends call sanctified and their enemies cunning. To me it had always seemed to say, “I can afford to wait,” and it had always irritated me rather, as if its cocksureness indicated that sooner or later he was bound to make a proselyte of me. To-day it still seemed to say, “I can afford to wait,” only I found myself attaching a different significance to it. Well, he came up, and we had a long talk. I do not propose to describe it; after all, this is not a religious autobiography. But soon afterwards, when I was at my Chiswick house, I began to go to the Oratory for instruction.
This is all twenty years ago now, but I do not feel that I need give any description of the Oratory and its ways, for whoever goes there now will find it almost exactly the same as it was then—and has been, I suppose, from a very much earlier time. I could not, of course, penetrate beyond the enclosure: no one of my sex, I was told, had ever done so except once when “Buffalo Bill’s” Indians came to tea—there were still Red Indians in existence down to my own day, and some of these used to be shown off as a circus turn in England, most of them Catholics. At the last moment it was discovered that the good Fathers could not distinguish braves from squaws, and some of the latter had already been admitted into the garden by mistake! “But that was before my time,” said the old priest who had instructed me. The long brown house, with its old-fashioned carriage-sweep, watching unwinking the ceaseless grinding flow of the Brompton Road platform; the stone façade of the church, thrust out like a rock for the daily tide to eddy round, half trapped, half free; the Fathers themselves, still, for all their man-of-the-modern-worldliness, dressed in the very manner of St. Philip, and taking their supper at a quarter to seven after the manner of Father Faber; the interior of the church, housing indeed Saints whom Father Faber had never heard of, yet still the same in its outlines—the same red hangings, the same cope on the Lady statue, spoils of some old South American emperor, the same Corpo Santo, grimed now with London dust till it might have passed for St. Philip himself—all spoke to me of a changelessness which was not dullness, a peacefulness which was not stagnation. Oh yes, I know there are plenty of Congregations which have their roots deeper in the history of the Church, their place in the story of England yet longer and yet more honourable: but it is the Oratory, with the life of the sixteenth century thrown on to the screen of the nineteenth century, and there fixed as if for all time, that stood and stands to me for type of the eternal tradition.
Am I confusing the merely interminable with the eternal? No, it was at High Mass at the Oratory that I realized what eternity meant. The frivolous might find them simply interminable, those long Mozart masses that the Protestants go to hear. But if you are in the right spirit to catch the message of the place, then you find eternity. The three ministers, dwarfed by the height of the building, seem like ants crawling about in the presence of Something immeasurably greater than themselves: the Kyrie and the Miserere nobis of the Gloria sound like what they are, tributes of abject servility to a King whose audience no unclean thing may approach; the spaciousness of the whole setting, music, and building, and ceremonies, stands for a poor sacrament of that Infinitude towards which all this self-annihilating homage is directed: you see the work of man’s hands as the little doll’s house it is. In one breathless moment of the Credo the heart seems to stop still, and all becomes an eternal moment, that silence which is kept before the throne of God.
I do not know why I should have said all this, or centred it all about the Oratory, if it be not that Miss Linthorpe’s warning was right, and there comes a time when you grow old, and drop out of your generation, and the mind, satiated with the ceaseless pageant of the interminable, craves for some outward expression of the eternal. Anyhow, my conversion was neither a hysterical nor a sensational one. I kept very quiet about it beforehand—why, I do not know, unless it be from some vague, inherited instinct. It is true that at the time of which I type it is doubtful whether one-fifth of the population of England was Catholic, and that the act of being received into the Church was not quite the everyday thing it is to us. But already things were very different from my young days, when the Catholic Church was still regarded as something desperate and melodramatic, a conspiracy against the public peace. I remember, for example, when I was about ten years old how the news reached us that a family friend had made his submission, and Lady Trecastle, who was staying with us, talked about it in a hushed, shocked voice as if it were a thing one could hardly mention in front of children, although Lady Trecastle herself had no religious beliefs and never went near a church if she could help it. The day of all that was long over, yet somehow I felt shy and awkward about my religious intentions, and mentioned them to nobody—concealed them, I am afraid, rather deliberately, from Juliet Savage, whose keen criticism I confess that I dreaded.
Actually it was in coming away from the ceremony of my reception that I met her in the street. “Come and have luncheon somewhere,” she said, “I’ve got something to tell you.” When we were comfortably ensconced at Les Rossignols, she turned to me and said, “Opal, my dear, I’ve just become a Catholic.” I said in a stupefied way, “So have I.” Then we giggled idiotically for a little; and cross-questioning proved that she also had written to Bishop Dives, and had been sent identically the same sermon-record! She then ordered a rather good Volnay, and when it appeared, leaning over coquettishly in its basket, she said, “Let us hope that this is drinkable, if not actually drinkworthy. Personally, I’ve got a droughtage on me which will demand a good deal of drinkage.”
CHAPTER XV
ENGLAND ON THE EVE OF THE GREAT WAR
Our fathers, a degenerate race,