I Leap Over the Wall

by Monica Baldwin

  All my life I have been subject to these Urges. Now and again, I have resisted them in order to follow what then sounded like excellent advice. I have invariably regretted it. When, however, I have obeyed my Urge, no matter how crazy the course of action may have seemed at the moment, it has always turned out for the best.

  So that now, when Lord Dawson uttered the word ‘Industry’ and my Inward Urge commanded me to leave it alone, I knew quite well that I should obey.

  Now, it has always appeared to me that, to get the best out of life, there are two things to be done. The first is to make up your mind what it is that you want above all things; the second, to go all out to achieve your end.

  At that particular moment, the thing I most craved for was freedom. And the way to it seemed to me to be my Cornish Cottage. The vision had been vouchsafed. The question was, did I believe in it sufficiently to turn my back doggedly upon every other manner of life and fight on until Peace was won and I could reach my goal?

  I decided that I did.

  (4)

  Three weeks later I wrote and told Lord Dawson of my decision.

  His reply was to invite me to drive down with him the following morning to the country. He said he had to visit a patient and we could talk things over on the way.

  To my relief, he quite understood my reasons for refusing his offer. He said I was not to think any more about it but just follow where my Voices led.

  The great argument of the day started on the way back. We were driving past the lovely ruins of a famous Cistercian abbey when Lord Dawson stopped the car.

  ‘I always try to pause at this place,’ he said. ‘Come along and see whether it affects you as it does me.’

  Together we wandered among the roofless arches. Though the sun lay on the turf outside in pools of gold, the shadows inside the ruined cloisters were cold and grey. Silence, austere and absolute, brooded like a guardian spirit. When we spoke, it was instinctively in an undertone.

  Back in the car, Lord Dawson asked me whether, as what he called an expert, I could explain the passion for building monasteries which had swept Europe in the Middle Ages. Surely it wasn’t only to ensure prayers being said for the founder’s soul?

  I said I supposed the chief motive for building an abbey had always been the glory of God. Patriotism, too, might have had something to do with it.

  He said he didn’t see the connexion.

  ‘But yes!’ I insisted. ‘If you believe religious life to be a life of professional perfection (and therefore the best sort of life that can be lived on earth) and that a country is good or bad in proportion to the goodness or badness of the people in it, then—if you help to increase the numbers of those who lead ‘professionally perfect’ lives, you are surely being very patriotic indeed.’

  He looked unconvinced. There was, he said, unfortunately abundant evidence to show that the people inside those abbeys had lived anything but perfect lives.

  So then we argued about monastic morals in the Middle Ages. I held out that half the accusations made when Henry VIII suppressed the monasteries were based on a comparison with primitive fervour. Gasquet’s carefully documented book on the subject was proof positive of how, for their own ends, the King’s Commissioners had distorted the truth. What was more, when one reflected how terribly unsettled a period for the Church the fifteen-hundreds were, the marvel was that even more of the prevalent unrest hadn’t seeped into the cloister from outside.

  ‘And anyhow,’ I insisted, ‘even though some of them may have been wash-outs, there’s no doubt that the general level of life in the monasteries was—and is—far above that of ordinary people living in the world.’

  I had hoped that would be the end of it. For—as the patient reader has had ample opportunity to observe—controversy is not my best thing. But no. Five minutes later we were at it again. This time the objection was to People Who Shut Themselves Up Behind Four Walls instead of staying in the world to Do Their Bit.

  I marshalled my usual artillery….

  What so surprised me was the obvious interest that lay behind his questionings. It encouraged me—though I felt like a sparrow twittering to an eagle—to let myself go.

  For instance, when I assured him that nuns and monks did not enclose themselves to escape responsibilities, but to continue—(and would he please notice that ‘continue’ meant a great deal more than merely ‘imitate’)—the hidden life of Christ, he said:

  ‘Now, what exactly do you mean by that?’

  So I explained.

  The idea that I tried to put across to him is, I suppose, one of the most dynamic dogmas of the Catholic faith. I make no apology for inserting it: it is one of the great foundation ideas of religious life. If theology bores you, you can skip the next paragraph or two: though if you do so, you will miss something that may throw light on what, even for certain devout Catholics, is only too often a stumbling-block.

  It burst, bomb-like, into my own life while I was still hesitating as to whether or no I should become a nun. One had, of course, now and again encountered the phrase ‘Mystical Body of Christ’ in sermons; but it was an address by Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson and what he afterwards said to me on the subject that set the concept ablaze with life. The doctrine, with its tremendous and dizzying implications, swept me clean off my feet. There seemed only one possible thing to be done. So I did it. My hesitations were at an end.

  And now I wanted to make Lord Dawson see it as it had been shown to me.

  For a starting-point, Monsignor Benson had used the Incarnation.

  God, he said, had taken a human body with which to do the work he came on earth to do. Very well. Just as two thousand years ago, Christ’s human body was born and lived and taught and suffered and died and rose again from the dead, so to-day he went on doing just those same things in a ‘mystical body’ formed out of the living human members of the Catholic Church.

  Next, he had explained the figure of the vine and the branches. One couldn’t think of the vine as a vine unless one thought of the branches too: because they and it were one thing. The vine, so to speak, energized through the branches; they were nothing except in so far as they were united to the vine. Well, that was a sort of type of the identity that existed between Christ and the Church. He had quoted St. Paul, whose Epistles, he declared, simply teemed with the same idea. One text had impressed me immensely: the one in which St. Paul says that he is ‘filling up what is lacking of the sufferings of Christ.’ This meant, said Monsignor Benson, that he was carrying on—actually continuing in his own person, the agony and Passion of the Crucified.

  He had pointed out, too, an analogy to help one grasp this concept of Christ’s Mystical Body. Every form of life could be regarded under a twofold aspect. One’s own body, for instance. It had its own bodily life, unique and simple; but inside that life, so to speak, were the innumerable cells which make up every body that exists. Each of these lives separately by its own individual life, but also contributes to the unity of the body as a whole.

  Well, the same applied to that body in which Christ lives to-day—the Mystical Body of Christ. It too consisted of just such a unity of countless cells; each a human entity, separate and complete in itself, yet, at the same time, a cell in the very Body of Christ. In this last capacity it was, of course, infinitely more important and alive than if it only existed, as you might say, on its own.

  Further, Monsignor Benson had insisted (and I can still remember how his light blue eyes had glared and his thatch of fair hair almost appeared to stand on end as he stressed the point) Christ still lives upon earth in the persons of those who truly keep his commandments. The manner of it is, of course, ‘mystical’, but the fact is no less real than it was two thousand years ago. ‘“I live,”’ he had quoted, ‘“yet no longer I, but Christ lives in me.”’

  ‘It is a tremendous claim,’ Lord Dawson said, unconvinced but apparently still interested. I answered:

  ‘Yes. And what’s more, if you accept it,
the consequences which follow automatically are greater still. Because, you see, if Christ really goes on living in his “Mystical Body” the same life that he lived in the Gospels, every aspect of that life will naturally appear in the Church as well.’

  And I picked out, as examples, the absolute authority with which the Church invariably teaches; her way of dealing with suffering and sin and those material needs of her children which simply must be met. And I ended—since it concerned us rather particularly at the moment—by pointing out how Christ still continues, in certain of his members, that ‘hidden life’ which is almost invariably objected to by people in the world.

  So many people seemed to forget that the claims made by humanity upon man were not always paramount: God, too, had certain claims. Surely his rights to the love and service of mankind must come before all else? Naturally, it was important that some lives should be devoted to the service of mankind—and I mentioned Sisters of Charity and the religious orders whose lives were spent in missionary work, teaching, and nursing the sick. But the Church had always held that a hidden life of contemplation should not be given the second place. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that contemplatives were essential to the Church’s life.

  ‘People,’ I said, ‘will insist on imagining the Church to be a philanthropic society; whereas she is so infinitely more than that.’

  And I tried to explain how the Church was, in reality, a Person; and how that Person was Divine. In fact, the whole notion of a life dedicated to contemplation really sprang from the fact that the Church was—well, quite simply—Christ himself.

  ‘If you study his life,’ I said, ‘you’ll see that for thirty years it was obscure and hidden. And yet at the end of that time, what happened? God the Father spoke from the sky and said he was well pleased. And there were the forty days spent in the wilderness, utterly alone and absorbed in prayer. And even when the people crowded round him to be healed so that he hadn’t even time for food, yet at sunset he used to go up to the mountain and spend the night in what the gospel calls “the prayer of God”.’

  Lord Dawson leaned forward and I remember being struck by the curious mingling in his face of lines which suggested spiritual thoughtfulness with something which was unmistakably of this world. I continued.

  Well, I asked, didn’t all this point to how, in the Mystical Body of Christ, there must be certain cells whose whole business was to continue that prayer of Christ and his silent absorption in the Vision of God? Christ to-day went on living the different parts of his life in the different members of his Mystical Body. Like a division of labour. During his earthly life, it was from those hidden periods of solitude and prayer that he drew the tremendous spiritual force that lay behind all he said or did. Well, in the Catholic Church to-day the same thing was to be found. Teaching, preaching, nursing, missionary work and so on made up the ‘public life’ of the Mystical Body; but behind all this activity were the power-houses of the great contemplative orders—Carthusians, Cistercians, Carmelites, Benedictines and the rest—which, by their hidden lives of prayer and penance supplied the necessary dynamic spiritual force. The help that they brought to the world was practically unlimited, for they were at the very heart of things. People who were truly united to God were able, in virtue of that union, to do more for God in one second than during a lifetime of merely human activity. The contemplative’s place in the Mystical Body was at the white-hot centre of the furnace: at the very source of that Infinite, Absolute Force that created and preserved the world. Indeed, their contact with It was so vital that they might almost be said, in a certain sense, to control It. When God raised a soul to the highest degree of contemplation, he refused it nothing. So that such a soul would be in a position to do really tremendous things for the salvation and sanctification of the world. That, of course, was the explanation of the ‘miraculous answers’ so often granted to the prayers of the saints….

  I shall never know what effect this torrent of eloquence had upon Lord Dawson. For at this point the car stopped in front of the important-looking entrance to my lodging in Chepstow Villas.

  My last glimpse of him was leaning back comfortably in his corner, bare-headed, the wind ruffling the hair above his high, wide, nobly proportioned brow. He did not look a day more than sixty, though I believe he was actually then in his seventy-eighth year.

  I never saw him again.

  (5)

  The next month or two at the Royal Society of Medicine was uneventful.

  I worked in my dark little corner of the Returns Office, watched spring break through in the neglected sooty gardens of Cavendish Square, gulped down my sandwich lunch of stale bread, fish-paste and limp tomato and wondered how long the country would have to continue paying out £15,000,000 a day before the war was won.

  Air raids provided the chief excitement. Like the rest of the staff I took my turn of fire watching. I remember especially one stuffy April night, when, between two particularly savage raids, I climbed the roof-ladder and spent an agitated hour among the chimney-pots. And, watching the searchlights jittering among the night-wrack, I reflected how very surprised I should have been if, five years previously, it had been revealed to me in my convent cell that before 1943 was out, I should find myself perched on the roof of a high house at the corner of Wimpole Street, tin-hatted and trouser-clad, watching for fire-bombs while the most frightful war in history raged madly on every side. Which just shows what a mistake it is ever to tuck in one’s toes and declare that Life is Over. Anything may happen to anybody, and at any time. Provided you obey your Inward Urges, adventure follows as the night the day.

  One dangerous temptation to abandon my plan for a Cornish cottage crossed my path about this time in the form of Wim, who, back in London for a few days’ leave from his mysterious war job, invited me out to dine. Thanks to the technique that I had acquired at the Dorchester, I came through the ordeal without too many blunders and spent a more or less delightful evening listening to further lyric descriptions of Skye.

  Places have always meant more to me than people. And because my sequestered life had prevented more than a glimpse of anything outside enclosure walls, Wim’s word-pictures of what he declared was the most magical spot in Scotland, stirred my imagination to the depths.

  I may here mention that the word ‘magic’ has always held a peculiar fascination for me. I have been told, with contumely, that this is because I have never completely ‘grown up’. Quite possibly this is so. All I know is that the faun-and-fairy-haunted world (at which it would now appear to be the fashion to jeer contemptuously) of my childhood is to-day just as real to me as it was then. Even the power of ‘seeing things’, though atrophied by nearly thirty years of inhibition, is now beginning to return.

  Another thing. Whenever I find myself where pebbles are—as on the sea-shore, or now and again as I wander along a drive—I begin instinctively to hunt for the equivalent of Mr. Bultitude’s Garuda Stone. As for old junk shops, they are always to me potential treasure troves. Who knows what historic ring, lamp, mirror, amulet or bottle may not lie waiting, with its attendant djinn invisibly attached to it, in some dusty corner? And only the other day, some friends presented me with a carpet. A single glance told me that it was one of those which can transport you in a flash back to Baghdad, Ur of the Chaldees, Old Cathay—or whirl you forward to the utmost outposts of the Atomic Age…. At the moment, it is still standing, neatly rolled, in a corner of the bathroom. One day, however, I shall begin experimenting. Interesting phenomena may then be expected to occur.

  But in spite of Wim’s repeated assurances that in Skye I should ‘find myself’ as in no other place on earth, the lure of Cornwall proved in the end to be too strong for me. Impelled by an Inward Urge of more than usual intensity, I began once more to fill my moments perdus with dreams about my Cottage-in-the-Clouds.

  (6)

  One of the most exciting presents I have ever received was given to me about this time.

  It was a wi
reless; and it brought so many thrills into my life that I feel they ought to be recorded here.

  Apart from the news (which just then was concerned chiefly with the first great victorious push in North Africa), what I most enjoyed listening to was music. I will say nothing here about the classics; a fairly severe and comprehensive musical education had made me familiar from childhood with many works of most of the great masters. What delighted me now was the lighter music of the years between the wars.

  When I fled from the world, London was prancing gaily to the new syncopated music which had just come over from America. People called it ‘rag-time’. In 1914 it was all the rage. The hit tunes of the day were: On the Mississippi, Hitchy Coo, The Wedding Glide, and Oh! You Beautiful Doll! And at my last ball, I had danced ecstatically to Nights of Gladness, The Quaker Girl, Destiny, and the lilting waltzes from The Girl in the Taxi, The Merry Widow, and The Count of Luxembourg. The tango had only just begun to show the tip of its nose and was still looked upon as faintly improper. I remember causing quite a sensation in a London ballroom by trying it out with a partner (whom I had trained carefully during the preceding afternoon) to the tune of Tommy, Won’t You Teach Me how to Tango?

  Probably nobody would believe it if I were to try and describe just how enraptured I was with the songs and tunes which had become favourites during my years of seclusion. My first encounter, for instance, with The Lambeth Walk, The Song of the Volga Boatmen, Lady Be Good, and the haunting I’ll See You Again. All so hackneyed to-day that everybody hates them. And there were the gay, catchy songs from The Bing Boys and The Maid of the Mountains—new to me and oh, how completely delightful! besides the ballets, with the enchanting waltzes from Coppelia, Swan Lake, and Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Princess. Eric Coates was another welcome discovery: even now I can never hear a number from the London Suite without wanting to cut capers in a manner alas, wholly unsuitable to my years.