‘Very funny, very funny,’ said Caroline out loud. A woman just then passing in the corridor observed her talking to herself. Caroline thought, Good God, now my trouble is growing noticeable.
The shock of having been observed brought some relief. As her mental pain subsided, Caroline began to reflect. Am I justified?
I bloody well am. Carefully and intently she began to recollect what St Philumena’s had been like.
On her second evening when she had joined the other residents in the recreation-room, ‘I must remember they are called “pilgrims”,’ she thought. She had already made the blunder of referring to them as residents’.
Anyway, there were eight of them besides Caroline. She brought them one by one to mind as she sat, still as a telegraph post, in the train which carried her to London.
That evening she had looked very seldom at her fellow guests, but now revoking, she peered into their eyes, stared up and down at their clothes, scrutinized the very skin on their faces.
She recalled them, first singly, and then in a half-circle round the fireplace; she could even see herself.
And as the train chugged south, her memory dwelling continuously on the fireside group, while at the same time she repeated mentally the formula of the rosary, touched the beads imperceptibly in her pocket, which she did for its outward effect on her person, the automatic act of the rosary prevented her from fidgeting in her agitation, it stopped her talking aloud to herself, made her unnoticeable. For the group round St Philumena’s fire inflamed her; after all, she was a most jumpy woman at the best of times.
Two nights ago that group were exchanging anecdotes about the treatment of Catholics in England by non- Catholics. It was their favourite theme.
‘What do you think, they won’t employ Catholics on the passenger transport where my mother lives.’
‘Not one Catholic child got a scholarship…
‘Forty per cent were Catholics, but not one …
It was well known, said a large florid lady from the West of Ireland, that the University of Cambridge would not take Catholics.
‘Oh no, that’s not true,’ Caroline said at once.
‘And they do their best for to set the Catholics asunder,’ the lady from the West of Ireland went on.
‘Not noticeably,’ Caroline said.
The young lawyer agreed with her, but his testimony was suspect. The lady from Ireland whispered aloud to her neighbour.
‘He’s curing from alcohol, poor lad.’
The lawyer added, ‘Of course, there’s always a prejudice in certain quarters,’ which put him right with the company.
‘My brother in the public library, when they found he was a Catholic …
As the atrocities mounted up, the lady from the West of Ireland continued to ply Caroline, ‘What d’ye make of that?… Isn’t it awful? What d’ye think of it?’
At last, rising to leave, ‘I think it very quaint,’ Caroline answered.
Throughout, Mrs Hogg had been volubly present. She too had offered some relishes, had known what persecution was, and her eyes were frequently directed towards Caroline the suspect.
Recalling these proceedings, Caroline recalled too a similar fireside pattern, her family on the Jewish side with their friends, so long ago left behind her. She saw them again, nursing themselves in a half-circle as they indulged in their debauch of unreal suffering; ‘Prejudice!’ ‘… an outright insult!’ Caroline thought, Catholics and Jews; the Chosen, infatuated with a tragic image of themselves. They are tragic only because they are so comical. But the thought of those fireside martyrs, Jews and Catholics, revolted Caroline with their funniness. She thought she might pull the emergency cord, halt the train, create a blinding distraction: and even while planning this action she reflected that she would not positively perform it.
But in her own rapacity for suffering, Caroline seized and held the images of the world she had left years ago and the world she had newly entered. She tugged and pulled the rosary in her pocket, while her thoughts, fine as teeth, went into action again and again with the fireside congregations of mock martyrs, their incongruity beside the real ones … it was an insult.
It was in the dining-car that Caroline got round once more to Mrs Hogg. Mrs Hogg stuck in her mind like a lump of food on the chest which will move neither up nor down. Suddenly Caroline realized that she was bolting her lunch, and simultaneously the memory of mealtimes at St Philumena’s returned, with the sight of Mrs Hogg chewing in rhythm with the reading from the Scriptures delivered in the sister’s refined modulations: ‘Beloved, let us love one another, love springs from God… . If a man boasts of loving God, while he hates his own brother, he is a liar.., the man who loves God must be one who loves his brother.’
Caroline thought, ‘The demands of the Christian religion are exorbitant, they are outrageous. Christians who don’t realize that from the start are not faithful. They are dishonest; their teachers are talking in their sleep. “Love one another … brethren, beloved … your brother, neighbours, love, love, love” — do they know what they are saying?’
She had stopped eating, was conscious of two things, a splitting headache and Mrs Hogg. These bemused patterers on the theme of love, had they faced Mrs Hogg in person? Returning to her carriage Caroline passed a married couple who had been staying at St Philumena’s, on their way to the dining-car. They had been among the fireside company. She remembered that they were to have left today.
‘Oh, it’s you, Miss Rose! I didn’t think you were leaving so soon.’ People were pressing to pass, which gave Caroline a chance to escape. ‘I was called away,’ she said, moving off.
The couple had been received into the Church two months ago, so they had told the company round the fire.
Their new-found faith was expressed in a rowdy contempt for the Church of England, in which the woman’s
