“I am very glad to hear Your Eminency say so. But such things are said. They are the formulae which spite or indolence or foolishness uses of a man whom it has not seen for a month. Sometimes they are detrimental. To me they are offensive; and I am not in a mood to tolerate them.”
The cardinal swallowed the cachet; and proceeded, “I first wrote to you at your publishers; and my letters were returned unopened, and marked ‘Refused.’ ”
“That was in accordance with my own explicit directions. A few years ago, the opportunity was given me of drawing a sharp line across my life—”
“You mean—”
“I allude to a series of libels which were directed against me in the newspapers, especially in Catholic newspapers—dirty Keltic wood-pulp—”
“Precisely. But why was that an occasion for drawing what you call a sharp line across your life?”
“Eminency,” said George, calming down and setting out to be concise and categorical, “scores of people who had known me all my life must have seen that those attacks were libellous, and false. You yourself must have seen that.” He stretched out a hand and opened and shut it, as though claws protruded from velvet and retired. “Yet only a single one out of all those scores came forward to assure me of friendship in that dreadful moment. All the rest spewed their bile or licked their lips in unctuous silence. I was left to bear the brunt alone, except for that one; and he was not a Catholic. Except from him, I had no sympathy and no comfort whatever. I don’t know any case in all my reading, to say nothing of my experience, where a man had a better or a clearer or a more convincing test of the trueness and the falseness of his friends. Not to do any man an injustice, and that no one might call me rash or precipitate in my decision, I waited two years—two whole years. The Bishop of Caerleon came to me in this period of isolation; and one other Catholic, a man of my own trade. Later, that one betrayed me again, so I will say no more of him. Women, of course, I neglect. And the rest unanimously held aloof. Then I published a book; and I told my publishers to refuse all letters which might be addressed to them for me. The sharp line was drawn. I wanted no more fair-weather friends, afraid to stand by me in storms. If, after those two awful years, I had received overtures from my former acquaintances, I really think I should have fulminated at them St. Matthew 25:41–43—”
“What is that?”
“ ‘I was an hungred and ye gave me no meat’ down to ‘Depart from me, ye cursed, into aeonial fire.’ Yes, the sharp line was drawn across my life. I had one true friend, a protestant. As for the Faith, I found it comfortable. As for the Faithful, I found them intolerable. The Bishop of Caerleon at present is the exception which proves the rule, because he came to me in the teeth of calumny.”
“You are hard, Mr. Rose, very hard.”
“I am what you and your Catholics have made me.”
“Poor child—poor child,” the cardinal adjected.
“I request that Your Eminency will not speak to me in that tone. I disdain your pity at this date. The catastrophe is complete. I nourish no grudge, and seek no revenge, no, nor even justice. I am content to live my own life, avoiding all my brother-Catholics, or treating them with severe forbearance when circumstances throw them in my path. I don’t squash cockroaches.”
“The effect on your own soul?”
“The effect on my own soul is perfectly ghastly. I positively loathe and distrust all Catholics, known and unknown, with one exception. I have become a rudderless derelict. I have lost all faith in man, and I have lost the power of loving.”
“How terrible!” the cardinal sighed. “And are there none of us for whom you have a kindly feeling? At times, I mean? You cannot always be in a state of white-hot rage, you know. There must be intervals when the tension of your anger is relaxed, perhaps from sheer fatigue: for anger is deliberate, the effect of exertion. And, in those intervals, have you never caught yourself thinking kindly of any of your former friends?”
“Yes, Eminency, there are very many, clerks and laics both, with whom, strange to say, when my anger is not dynamic, I sometimes wish to be reconciled. However, I myself never will approach them; and they afford me no opportunity. They do not come to me, as you have come.” His voice softened a little; and his smile was an alluring illumination.
“But you would meet them with vituperation; and naturally they don’t want to expose themselves to affronts?”
“Oh, of course if their sense of duty (to say nothing of decency) does not teach them to risk affronts—But I will not say before hand how I should meet them beyond this: it would depend on their demeanour to me. I should do as I am done by. For example,” he turned to the ruddy bishop, “did I heave chairs or chinaware at Your Lordship?”
“Indeed you did not, although I thoroughly deserved both. Yrmnts,”2 the young prelate continued, “I believe I understand Mr. Rose’s frame of mind. He has been hit very hard; and he’s badly bruised. He is a burnt child; and he dreads the fire. It’s only natural. I’m firmly convinced that he has been more sinned against than sinning; and, though I’m sorry to see him practically keeping us at arms’ length, I really don’t know what else we can expect until we treat him as we ourselves would like to be treated.”
“True, true,” the cardinal conceded.
“But it’s a pity all the same,” the bishop concluded.
The cardinal audibly thought, “You have perhaps not many very kindly feelings towards me personally, Mr. Rose.”
“I have no kindly feelings at all toward Your Eminency; and I believe
