There is no point in telling all the details of how this real but temporary religious fervor of mine cooled down and disappeared. At Easter we went to the church where my father had once been organist, Zion Church, with the white spire standing among the locust trees on the hill between us and the station. And there I was very irritated by the services, and my own pride increased the irritation and complicated it. And I used to walk about the house or sit at the dinner table telling everybody what a terrible place Zion Church was, and condemning everything that it stood for.
One Sunday I went to the Quaker meeting house in Flushing, where Mother had once sat and meditated with the Friends. I sat down there too, in a deep pew in the back, near a window. The place was about half full. The people were mostly middle-aged or old, and there was nothing that distinguished them in any evident way from the congregation in a Methodist or a Baptist or an Episcopalian or any other Protestant church, except that they sat silent, waiting for the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. I liked that. I liked the silence. It was peaceful. In it, my shyness began to die down, and I ceased to look about and criticize the people, and entered, somewhat superficially, into my own soul, and some nebulous good resolutions began to take shape there.
But it did not get very far, for presently one of the middle-aged ladies thought the Holy Ghost was after her to get up and talk. I secretly suspected that she had come to the meeting all prepared to make a speech anyway, for she reached into her handbag, as she stood up, and cried out in a loud earnest voice:
“When I was in Switzerland I took this snapshot of the famous Lion of Lucerne....” With that she pulled out a picture. Sure enough, it was the famous Lion of Lucerne. She held it up and tried to show it around to the Friends, at the same time explaining that she thought it was a splendid exemplification of Swiss courage and manliness and patience and all the other virtues of the watchmaking Swiss which she mentioned and which I have now forgotten.
The Friends accepted it in patience, without enthusiasm or resentment. But I went out of the meeting house saying to myself “They are like all the rest. In other churches it is the minister who hands out the commonplaces, and here it is liable to be just anybody.”
Still, I think I had enough sense to know that it would be madness to look for a group of people, a society, a religion, a church from which all mediocrity would absolutely be excluded. But when I read the works of William Penn and found them to be about as supernatural as a Montgomery Ward catalogue I lost interest in the Quakers. If I had run across something by Evelyn Underhill it might have been different.
I think that one could find much earnest and pure and humble worship of God and much sincere charity among the Quakers. Indeed, you are bound to find a little of this in every religion. But I have never seen any evidence of its rising above the natural order. They are full of natural virtues and some of them are contemplatives in a natural sense of the word. Nor are they excluded from God’s graces if He wills. For He loves them, and He will not withhold His light from good people anywhere. Yet I cannot see that they will ever be anything more than what they claim to be—a “Society of friends.”
That summer, when I went on a slow and dirty train in a round-about way to Chicago to see the World’s Fair, I picked up two pamphlets on the Mormons in the Hall of Religion, but the story of the holy books discovered through revelation on a hill in upper New York State did not convince me and I was not converted. The thin red and yellow walls of the palaces of the Fair, scattered between the lake and the slums and freight-yards, amused me with their noise, and for the first time I walked in the wide-open air of the flat and endless Middle West.
Out of sheer bravado I got myself a job for a few days as a barker in front of a side-show in a part of the Fair called the Streets of Paris, the nature of which is sufficiently evident from that name. The ease with which I got the job astounded and flattered me, and it gave me a sense of power and importance to be so suddenly transported from the order of those who were fleeced of their money to the level of those who did the fleecing. However, in a couple of days I also discovered that perhaps I had not risen above the ranks of the “suckers” after all, since the boss of the side-show was more ready to pay me in promises and fancy words than in dollars, for my services. Besides, it was very tiring to stand in the heat and dust from noon to midnight shouting at the sea of straw-hatted heads and shoulders dressed in duck and seersucker or in open-necked shirts and dresses soaked with healthy Middle-Western sweat. The absolutely open and undisguised and noncommittal frankness of the paganism of Chicago and of this Fair and of this particular part of the Fair and, apparently, of the whole country which it represented, amazed me after the complicated reticences of England and the ornate pornography of France.
When I got back to New York I had lost most of my temporary interest in religion. My friends in that city had a religion of their own: a cult of New York itself, and of the peculiar manner in which Manhattan expressed the bigness and gaudiness and noisiness and frank animality and vulgarity of this American paganism.
I used to go to the Burlesque and hang around Fourteenth Street with Reg Marsh, who was an old friend of my father’s, and who is famous for painting all these things in his pictures. Reginald Marsh was (and I suppose still is) a thick-set man of short stature who gave the impression that he was a retired light-weight prize-fighter. He had a way of talking out of the corner of his mouth, and yet at the same time his face had something babyish and cherubic about it, as he looked out at the world through the simple and disinterested and uncritical eyes of the artist, taking everything as he found it, and considering everything as possible subject matter for one of his Hogarthian compositions, provided only it was alive.
We got along very well together, because of the harmony of our views, I worshipping life as such, and he worshipping it especially in the loud, wild bedlam of the crowded, crazy city that he loved. His favorite places of devotion were Union Square and the Irving Place Burlesque, stinking of sweat and cheap cigars and ready to burn down or collapse at any minute. But I guess his cathedral was Coney Island. Everybody who has ever seen his pictures, knows that much about Reg Marsh.
All that summer I hung around his Fourteenth Street studio, and went with him to many of the parties to which he was invited, and got to know my way around New York.
But when September came I sailed for England once more. This time I made the crossing on the Manhattan, a garish and turbulent cabin class steamer full of Nazi spies working as stewards and detesting the Jewish passengers. The voyage was a violent one. One night I looked down one of the deep stair-wells and saw six or seven half-drunk passengers having a general fight on the swaying linoleum floor of E deck. And one afternoon in the middle of one of those paralyzing synthetic amusements that are fixed up for the passengers on Atlantic liners—I think it must have been the “horse race”—an American dentist stood up with a loud roar and challenged a French tailor to come out and fight him on the promenade deck. The challenge was not taken up, but all the business men and tourists savored the delicious scandal, for there was no one on board who was not aware that behind it all stood the six-foot daughter of someone prominent in Washington, D.C.
At Plymouth they put those of us who were bound for London on to a fat launch in the middle of the harbor, and once again I looked upon the pale green downs of England. I landed with one of the worst colds I ever had in my life.
And so on the tide of all these circumstances of confusion I swept into the dark, sinister atmosphere of Cambridge and began my university career.
VIII
PERHAPS TO YOU THE ATMOSPHERE OF CAMBRIDGE IS NEITHER dark nor sinister. Perhaps you were never there except in May. You never saw anything but the thin Spring sun half veiled in the mists and blossoms of the gardens along the Backs, smiling on the lavender bricks and stones of Trinity and St. John’s, or my own college, Clare.
I am even willing to admit that some people might live there for three years, or even a
lifetime, so protected that they never sense the sweet stench of corruption that is all around them—the keen, thin scent of decay that pervades everything and accuses with a terrible accusation the superficial youthfulness, the abounding undergraduate noise that fills those ancient buildings. But for me, with my blind appetites, it was impossible that I should not rush in and take a huge bite of this rotten fruit. The bitter taste is still with me after not a few years.
My freshman year went by very fast. It was a dizzy business that began in the dark, brief afternoons of the English autumn and ended after a short series of long summer evenings on the river. All those days and nights were without romance, horrible. They could not help being everything that I did not want them to be.
I was breaking my neck trying to get everything out of life that you think you can get out of it when you are eighteen. And I ran with a pack of hearties who wore multicolored scarves around their necks and who would have barked all night long in the echoing shadows of the Petty Cury if they had not been forced to go home to bed at a certain time.
At first it was confusing. It took me a month or two to find my level in this cloudy semi-liquid medium in whose dregs I was ultimately destined to settle. There were my friends from Oakham. At first we clung together for protection, and used to spend much time in one another’s rooms, although Andrew’s digs were far away in the wilds beyond Addenbrooke’s hospital. To get there I cycled through a mysterious world of new buildings dedicated to chemistry, and at the end of the journey drank tea and played St. Louis Blues on the piano. Dickens was much nearer. He was around the corner from my lodgings. You travelled through two or three courts of St. John’s College and crossed the river. He was in the so-called New Building. His room directly overlooked the river and he and I and Andrew would eat breakfast there and throw bits of toast to the ducks while he told us all about Pavlov and conditioned reflexes.
As the year went on I drifted apart from them, especially from Andrew who ended up as the leading man in the Footlights show that year. He was something of a singer. My crowd had no interest in singing and a certain amount of contempt, indeed, for the Footlights and all that it represented. I remember that I almost made friends with one or two serious and somewhat complicated young men who were reading modern languages with me and belonged to my own college, but their reticences bored me. And they, in their turn, were rather shocked by the two-handed heartiness with which I was grabbing at life.
In the room underneath mine, in my lodgings, was a round red-faced Yorkshireman who was a pacifist. He too was full of reticences. But on Armistice Day he got into some kind of a demonstration and all the rugger players and oarsmen threw eggs at him. I knew nothing about it until I saw the pictures in the evening paper.
I would not have been interested in making friends with him either—he was too tame and shy. But in any case the landlord took to coming into my room and calumniating the poor man while I listened patiently, knowing of no way to shut him up. Before the end of the year the landlord was much more disgusted with me than with any lodger he had ever had before or, probably, since.
I think it was after Armistice Day, when I had finally become acquainted with some two hundred different people, that I drifted into the crowd that had been gravitating around the nether pole of Cambridge life.
We were the ones who made all the noise when there was a “bump supper.” We lived in the Lion Inn. We fought our way in and out of the “Red Cow.”
In that year most of my friends were gated at one time or another, and by the end of it not a few of us were sent down. I cannot even clearly remember who most of them were—except for Julian. He stands out vividly enough. He wore horn-rimmed spectacles and looked, I will not say like an American, but like a Frenchman trying to look like an American. He could tell long complicated stories in an American accent too nasal to be true. He was the grandson or the great-grandson of a Victorian poet and lived in the old man’s house on the Isle of Wight. He roomed in a big rabbit warren of a place on Market Hill which was going to be torn down at the end of the year to make room for a new building, belonging to Caius College. Before the wreckers came in, Julian’s friends had already begun the ruin of the house by attempting to destroy the precarious section of it where he himself lived. I seem to remember some trouble when somebody threw a teapot out of the window of these rooms and nearly brained the Dean of Kings who was passing by in the street below.
Then there was a laconic, sallow-faced fellow who came from Oundle and drove a racing car. He sat still and quiet most of the time with the strange, fevered mysticism of the racing driver in his veins while the rest of us talked and yelled. But when he got under the wheel of his car—which he was not allowed to drive as a freshman—he was transformed into a strange sort of half-spiritual being, possessed by a weird life belonging to another frightening world. The prohibition on driving could not, of course, hold him. Once in a while he would disappear. Then he would come back relatively happy, and sit down and play poker with anybody who would take him on. I think he was finally sent down altogether for the wildest of his expeditions which ended with him trying to drive his car down one of the zig-zag cliff paths at Bournemouth.
But why dig up all this old scenery and reconstruct the stews of my own mental Pompeii after enough years have covered them up? Is it even worth the obvious comment that in all this I was stamping the last remains of spiritual vitality out of my own soul, and trying with all my might to crush and obliterate the image of the divine liberty that had been implanted in me by God? With every nerve and fibre of my being I was laboring to enslave myself in the bonds of my own intolerable disgust. There is nothing new or strange about the process. But what people do not realize is that this is the crucifixion of Christ: in which He dies again and again in the individuals who were made to share the joy and the freedom of His grace, and who deny Him.
Aunt Maud died that November. I found my way to London and to Ealing, and was at the funeral.
It was a grey afternoon, and rainy, almost as dark as night. Everywhere the lights were on. It was one of those short, dark, foggy days of the early English winter.
Uncle Ben sat in a wheel-chair, broken and thin, with a black skullcap on his head, and this time he really did look like a ghost. He seemed to have lost the power of speech, and looked about him with blank uncomprehension, as if all this story of a funeral were a gratuitous insult to his intelligence. Why were they trying to tell him that Maud was dead?
They committed the thin body of my poor Victorian angel to the clay of Ealing, and buried my childhood with her. In an obscure, half-conscious way I realized this and was appalled. She it was who had presided in a certain sense over my most innocent days. And now I saw those days buried with her in the ground.
Indeed the England I had seen through the clear eyes of her own simplicity, that too had died for me here. I could no longer believe in the pretty country churches, the quiet villages, the elm-trees along the common where the cricketers wait in white while the bowler pensively paces out a run for himself behind the wicket. The huge white clouds that sail over Sussex, the bell-charmed spires of the ancient county towns, the cathedral closes full of trees, the deaneries that ring with rooks—none of this any longer belonged to me, for I had lost it all. Its fragile web of charmed associations had been broken and blown away and I had fallen through the surface of old England into the hell, the vacuum and the horror that London was nursing in her avaricious heart.
It was the last time that I saw any of my family in England.
I took the last train back to Cambridge and was so exhausted that I fell asleep and woke up at Ely, and had to turn back, so that I got in long after midnight. And I felt offended at being gated for what was not, as I thought, my fault. It was the first of the two times I was gated that year.
Shall I follow the circle of the season down into the nadir of winter darkness, and wake up the dirty ghosts under the trees of the Backs, and out beyond the Clare New Building and
in some rooms down on the Chesterton Road? When it began to be spring, I was trying to row-in the Clare fourth boat, although it nearly killed me. But at least, since we were supposed to be in training, I got up early for a few weeks and went to the College for breakfast, and went to bed without being too dizzy in the nighttime.
In these days I seem to remember there was a little sunlight. It fell through the ancient windows of Professor Bullough’s room in Caius. It was a large, pleasant room, lined with books, and with windows opening on the grass of two courts. It was below the level of those lawns and you had to go down a couple of steps to get into his sitting room. In fact I think his sitting room itself was on two levels, and in the corner he had a high medieval lectern. There he stood, a tall, thin, grey, somewhat ascetic scholar, placidly translating Dante to us, while ten or a dozen students, men and women, sat about in the chairs and followed in our Italian texts.
In the winter term we had begun with the Inferno, and had progressed slowly, taking each day part of a Canto. And now Dante and Virgil had come through the icy heart of hell, where the three-headed devil chewed the greatest traitors, and had climbed out to the peaceful sea at the foot of the seven-circled mountain of Purgatory. And now, in the Christian Lent, which I was observing without merit and without reason, for the sake of a sport which I had grown to detest because I was so unsuccessful in it, we were climbing from circle to circle of Purgatory.
The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition Page 17
