She got on her knees: and the Pontiff blessed her. Then He said,
“When do you go back, Mrs. Dixon?”
“Well, Your ’oly Majesty, I was thinking of looking about a bit while I’m ’ere, so as to have plenty to say to the lodgers: but I can’t stay more than a week longer.”
Hadrian wrote on a card, “The bearer, Mrs. Agnes Dixon, is Our guest. Receive and assist her.” He signed it; and gave it to her, saying, “You know this place is full of lovely things, pictures and so on. And there are heaps of sacred relics in the churches. Well now, that card will admit you to see everything.”
“Will they let me see the fans?”
“Which fans?”
“Them they fan You with when You’re glorified?”
“Oh yes. Show that card to the gentleman who is going to take you downstairs and tell him what you want to see.”
“Will they want me to give the card up at the door?”
“No. Not if you want to keep it.”
“Ah well, I’ll see everything; and I’ll keep the card till I’m laid out, ’oly Father. Oh what ever can I say! You’ll excuse me Sir, and I’m an honest woman: but I must kiss Your ’oly Majesty’s anointed ’and. Oh bless You, my dear, bless You!”
Hadrian paced through and through the apartment as soon as He was alone. “Dear good ugly righteous creature,” He commented. Passing the safe in the bedroom, He let-out with His left and punched the iron door. “That’s what use you are,” He said; and put glycerine on His bleeding knuckles. Catching a glimpse of His face in the mirror, “Beastly hypocrite” He sneered at Himself.
Very disagreeable talk went on in Ragna’s circle. The pontifical acts of Hadrian were vile enough, but His private ones were simply criminal. A Pope who asked you the hour and the date and the place of your birth, drew diagrams on paper, and then told you your secret vices and virtues, was a practisant of arts unholy. Doubtless that frightful yellow cat, which He took into the gardens every morning, was His familiar spirit. It had cursed Cacciatore in a corridor, almost articulately. Balbo, the chamberlain, was prepared to swear two things, which he had gathered from the gentlemen of the secret chamber. First, that His Holiness stood under a tap in His bedroom every morning and evening, and sometimes during the day as well. Undoubtedly that was to allay the fervence of the demon who possessed Him. Secondly, that His Holiness sat up half the night writing or reading, and yet the pontifical waste-paper basket always was empty. Not even a torn shred of paper remained. But then, the ashes in the fireplace. Ah! The disposition was to refer to lunacy, or stupidity, or knavishness, or vileness, whatsoever was novel to the understanding. The Pontiff’s aggressive personality, His ostentatious inconsistency, His peculiarly ideal conception of His apostolic character, His moral earnestness, His practical and uncomfortable embodiment of His views in His conduct, caused Him to be as loathed by Ragna’s set as He was loved by the nine and the six. He was accused of an anarchistical kind of enthusiasm. When He heard that, He said,
“We are conservative in all Our instincts, and only contrive to become otherwise by an effort of reason or principle, as We contrive to overcome all Our other vicious propensities.”
That was considered an additional indecorum. His quaintly correct and archaic diction exasperated men who had no means of expressing their thoughts except in the fluid allusive clipped verbosity of the day. Objections were made to His hendecasyllabical allocutions, by mediocrities who could not away with a man who discoursed in ithyphallics. His autocratic dogmatism, which really was due to His entire occession by His office, shocked the opportunist, irritated the worldly-prudent. Outside in the world too, He was by no means a complete success. People, who were not of His Communion, thought it rather a liberty that a Pope should have the Authorized Version at His fingers’ ends. At first, a lot of fantastic instabilities prepared to hail Him as a Reformer: but He gave dire offence to them, and to all pious fat-wits, by flatly refusing His countenance to any kind of Scheme or Society. “The Church suffices for this life,” He said; and His sentence “Cultivate, and help to cultivate individuality, at your own expense if possible, but never at the expense of your brother,” was highly disapproved of. Where did the Rights of Man come in? But then Hadrian was quite certain that Christians actually had no worldly “rights” at all. Arraigned on the question of superstition by the stolidly commonsense Talacryn, He said “Extra-belief, superstition, that which we hope or augur or imagine, is the poetry of life;” and His utterance was regarded as almost heretical. His utter lack of personal swagger or even dignity, His habit of rolling and smoking continual cigarettes, His natural and patently unprofessional manner, offended many outsiders who only could think of the Pope as partaking of the dual character of an Immeasurably Ambitious Clergyman and a Scarlet Impossible Person. He had enemies at home and abroad. And He remained quite alone, psychically detached: to a very great extent unconscious of, certainly uninterested in, the impression which He personally was creating; and altogether uninfluenced by any other mind or any other creature.
A parcel of curial malcontents waited-on the Pope; and poured forth flocculent interrogations and sophomoric criticisms to their hearts’ content. Hadrian sat perfectly motionless except for an occasional twinkle of His ears—a muscular trick which He had forced Himself to learn for the disconcerting of more than usually oxymorose fools. He was mute: He was grave. He looked, with large omniscient imperscrutable eyes, with the countenance open, with the thoughts restrained. Cavillers recited grievances—His refusal to wear the pontifical pectoral-cross of great diamonds, or any gems except His
