by David Lodge
At that time he had been a practising Catholic for two or three months. The experience had been undramatic. He was, in the eyes of the Church, already a Catholic, since he had been baptized into the Church, and had received the sacraments of Penance, Communion and Confirmation before leaving the convent. To the Church he was not a convert at all, but merely a lapsed Catholic who had returned to the practice of his Faith. Not for him was the formal ceremony of admission, with its conditional baptism and its awesome recital of categorical promises. He had undergone a course of instruction with Father Kipling: the evidences for the truth of the Catholic Faith were acceptable if one was disposed to accept them, and he was so disposed. He could have raised objections to Father Kipling’s arguments—but then he could have raised objections to his objections. Catholicism was a reasonable Faith, but like any other, it could not be justified by reason alone. He had returned to the sacraments, become a dutiful practising Catholic. But he had felt that he was still the same Mark Underwood, drearily going through the motions of belief instead of drearily going through the motions of disbelief; that the searing, galvanic experience men called conversion was like an unexploded bomb ticking away inside him. Perhaps Student Cross would provide the detonator. In a sense it had. He flipped back the pages of his note-book, and found the scrappy diary of those few days.
Saturday: evening
Today we started, from the University Church in the City. First there was Mass in the crypt, with the Cross standing before the altar. A plain wooden cross, about twelve feet tall, and six feet from arm to arm. It weighs, I believe, about 120 pounds. It is grubby from the sweat and dirt of several pilgrimages. We walk in a column, line of three. The Cross leads, carried horizontally on the shoulders of three students, one to each arm, and the other at the foot. You carry it for the duration of five decades of the Rosary (about ten minutes), recited by the trio immediately behind. Then they move up to take the Cross, and you drop back to the end of the file. The body of the column sing hymns now and again, led by the Dominican chaplain Fr Courtney. Otherwise, we talk quite freely.
The students are a curious lot. A good proportion of hearties, well-equipped with rucksacks, sleeping bags, and studded boots: for them the pilgrimage is a kind of spiritual hike. They probably do the same thing for pleasure in the Lake District every summer. There are a few like myself, who look as if they wished they weren’t there, and would like to get the whole thing over as quickly as possible. Then there are some pathetic, weedy-looking swots, inadequately equipped and unsuitably dressed, in gaberdine raincoats and Oxford shoes, unwieldy packs all done up with string, who look as if they have never walked farther than a hundred yards at any time in their lives. But appearances are deceiving. You can’t categorize in this neat fashion. You find that some of the hearties are doing the pilgrimage for the first time, and begin to limp quite early on; that some of the weeds have been on the pilgrimage once or even twice before—and finished. There is a lot of humorous reminiscing by the veterans about previous pilgrimages, about blisters, about the student who was cautioned for cooling his feet in a public reservoir, about the crippling last mile of the pilgrimage which, apparently (who says we’re not living in the Middle Ages?), we walk barefoot.
All this chaff makes me feel uneasy and isolated—or rather, did make me. For I am writing this on Saturday evening, and already I have been blooded. I have pricked my first blister, squeezed out the fluid, and dabbed it with surgical spirit. Already I feel I belong. On the whole I have enjoyed the day. It certainly was a curious experience to flaunt one’s religion in the face of London. First, through the City with a policeman holding up the traffic with an impassive countenance which implied that he would do the same for the Seventh Day Adventists, the Anti-Vivisection Society or the Paddington Communist Party. The City streets were fairly quiet of course, but as we passed into the suburbs we found ourselves in the midst of the Saturday morning shopping rush. It is such a bizarre situation, that it is difficult to believe that one is really there, really carrying a wooden cross through bustling, irreligious, unreflective suburbia. The reaction of spectators was less marked than I had expected. Plenty of curious stares of course, but quite as many people would look hastily away, more embarrassed than we were. There were no jeers or cat-calls. Children seemed to find us particularly intriguing, and would gaze unselfconsciously, with the characteristically grave, uncommitted regard of the young, before being yanked away from the kerb by their mothers.
At Enfield, the destination of our first day’s march, we were met and accompanied for the last mile by a procession of Catholic parishioners. This part of Enfield has those yellow sodium lamps that have that delicate rosy glow for the first few minutes after they are switched on. It was a beautiful evening. Even when the sun had disappeared, the night sky was like a dark blue glass globe, lit by a faint glow from within. Against this background the rosy-tipped lamp standards seemed like fabulous lantern plants in a land of faerie. This transformation of a suburban arterial road was assisted by the historic chant of the Credo which rose impressively from the throats of the pilgrims and parishioners.
Altogether, I have enjoyed the first day more than I anticipated.
Palm Sunday: evening
This, then, is the real thing. The pain, the exhaustion, the monotony of one’s own thoughts (I was too tired to talk for most of the day): how many miles to go? how many miles have we covered? can I keep going? When is the next break? when will we get to the top of this hill? Will there be more hills like this one? Is it my turn with the Cross already? How many more minutes must I carry it? What mystery are they saying? only the third sorrowful mystery? When is the next break? How many miles to go? Can I keep going?
Yesterday was a deceiving dream. I encountered the reality of a penitential pilgrimage the moment I woke and levered my stiff limbs off the hard school-room floor where we slept last night, and winced as my blister contacted the floor. Blister? That one blister I was rather proud of, is now lost in a rich crop of blisters, bloated, white, obscene—a big blister on each heel and sole, and small blisters disposed neatly on the underside of each toe. Tonight we are staying at St Peter’s seminary, and mercifully there are baths, and mattresses spread upon the floors, and nursing sisters in grey habits with gentle fingers and sympathetic cluckings and sterilized needles and soothing ointments and bandages. Even so, it was agony to shuffle in slippers into the chapel for Compline. And this is only the second day! Five days and God knows how many miles to go. Eighteen miles today, and tomorrow, the worst leg of all, twenty-six miles to Cambridge that can’t be broken because there is nowhere to stop overnight. How can I go on tomorrow? For that matter, how did I keep going today?
Again and again you tell yourself, as you place each throbbing foot before the other on the hard tarmac, that the whole thing is monstrous, insane, self-inflicted torture. If only you could believe that! But you can’t. Something forces you to stumble on, and that is the conviction that what you are doing has a meaning. That meaning is in front of you—the Cross, like a magnet, dragging you up hill and down dale, a magnet that attracts not iron and steel, but suffering flesh and bone. I think …
I was interrupted, and am too tired to remember what I thought. A seminarist has brought me a blanket off his own bed. Absurdly, my eyes almost filled with tears of gratitude. One of the things this experience does is to make one appreciate small mercies and small acts of kindness. While the sisters were tending my blisters, I felt an inexpressible love choking me, I regretted all the uncharitable things I had thought or said about nuns, I felt as if I were the Magdalene, and Christ were anointing my feet.
Monday: evening
Well, it’s all over already. I have given up. I am writing this on the train to London, carrying me on smooth, oiled wheels away from the pain, the exhaustion, and, above all, the one worth-while thing I ever did—or tried to do—in my life. This morning was hell. I decided early in the morning that I would struggle somehow to Cambridge, and t
hen go back home. In the end I didn’t even walk to Cambridge, but went ignominiously by bus from Royston, where we stopped for lunch. As soon as you set a limit to your endurance, you are lost. As soon as I decided not to go farther than Cambridge, I wanted to stop dead in the middle of the road. Somehow I got to Royston—somehow? I know how. There was one tremendous hill before Royston. My heart sank as I looked at it. On top of everything else, my line had to take over the Cross at the foot of the hill.
We took that hill at a cracking pace, and as we handed over at the crest, and dropped back to the end of the column, Fr Courtney called out ‘Well done! ’ to us. I know it was only the extra weight of the Cross that got me up that hill. Walking alone I would never have made it. It was an extraordinary experience. But as we stumbled down the other side of the hill, and into the dark, dingy pub where we ate our sandwich lunch, the exaltation of that moment passed. I sat silently in a chair by the fire, not moving, getting stiffer and stiffer, and yet not moving. I couldn’t go on. I knew that several of the others were in as bad shape as myself—probably worse. I knew that the Cross would drag me to Cambridge if I allowed myself to be dragged, but I refused.
I feel the onus of that refusal now. To shake off my depression I thought I would get myself something light to read on the train. I addressed myself thus: ‘All right, you have given up; but you tried, you did your best (hollow laughter), you are in a mood of religious melancholia. Shake it off. You’ve absorbed too much religion too rapidly. Try an antidote.’ So I bought a glossy, frivolous ‘man’s magazine’. But something has happened to me. These breasty pin-ups, these laboured mutations of suggestive posture, these roguish captions, fail to arouse even a flicker of my usual amused interest. My thoughts are with that pitiful, struggling file, stumbling through the dusk into Cambridge, bowed under their packs and the Cross.
Yes, something has happened to me.
Something had happened to him all right. The detonator had worked, his ‘conversion’ had gone off bang, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could never put the old Mark Underwood together again. But the task of rebuilding was a daunting one. The foundations might have been securely laid if he had got to Walsingham. But he had brought back with him from the pilgrimage no feeling of achievement or merit, only a sense of failure with which he was already too familiar. It was no use comparing yourself with those who never started; you had to compare yourself to those who went on.
He was beginning to understand the appeal of the religious life, particularly of the life governed by a religious Rule, with its vows of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience. First, it brought the body into subjection. One wasted so much time arguing with the body, urging it through the laborious and uncomfortable routine of physical existence—getting up, washing, shaving, even moving. Little acts of kindness which required the body’s co-operation, such as helping with the washing-up after a good meal, demanded a prodigious amount of persuasion; while a really big thing, like finishing Student Cross, just met with stubborn resistance. The body was like the surly, recalcitrant electorate of a democratic state, with the mind a nervous, impatient, and ultimately helpless executive. The body required autocratic government. It had been his mind, not his feet, that had given up at Royston—the mind which foolishly recognized the right of the feet to protest.
He was tired of his body, tired of dragging it after him everywhere like a petulant child. Part of his admiration for the Mallorys derived from the cheerful, uncomplaining way in which they put up with discomforts and performed small acts of self-denial. Or was this part of the Mallory myth he had been constructing? In any case, self-denial was a habit with them. His own lazy, selfish body might require a more drastic discipline. Then, with the body subdued, one might at last grapple with the real problems.
He began to reread his account of the pilgrimage, and became suddenly impatient of its posturing, self-dramatizing artificiality. He ripped the pages from the note-book, screwed them up, and hurled them at the waste-paper basket. The ball of paper hit the lip of the basket and fell to the floor. He picked it up and smoothed it out. Then he clipped the pages together and slipped them into a file. There was still enough of the egotistical writer in him to protest at its destruction.
* * *
Mr Berkley hurried through the early Sunday-morning streets, empty but for Catholics, car-cleaners and cats, wincing under the glare of the sun which shone with a brutal cheerfulness into his eyes. It would have been more in keeping with his mood if yesterday’s rain had persisted. Mr Berkley was worried. Last night he had forgotten the necessary, but Doreen had insisted on going through with it. For the first time no thin rubber insulation had kept them ultimately apart, and Mr Berkley had found the experience oddly moving and disturbing. Physically he had been just one millimetre closer to Doreen than ever before, but emotionally he had crossed a frontier. Afterwards he had felt absurdly near to tears. Doreen, loyal to her role of concubine, had tried to cheer him up by saying that it had never been so good. But, for once, he had not been concerned with his own pleasure. Instead he had been overwhelmed by a sense of gratitude and a sense of responsibility. Gratitude because of the unhesitating generosity with which Doreen gave him the hospitality of her body; responsibility because he had ceased to be a passing visitor to that body, taking what he could get, and had become a guest, leaving behind something as a token of their intimacy. That was what was worrying Mr Berkley this morning. The tender emotions of the night had evaporated, to leave only a bitter sediment of anxiety as to whether he had fathered a bastard on Doreen.
Mr Berkley slipped into the Palladium by a side-exit, and burrowed gratefully into the darkness. The thought that Doreen might be pregnant, that the processes of gestation might be irretrievably in motion at that very moment, returned at regular intervals with more and more force, pumping worry into his heart as if it were a balloon. His chest felt intolerably tight, and he leant against the passage wall to allow the tension to subside. Half-consciously he listened to the murmur of Dolly and Gertrude talking in the auditorium, their voices carrying through the curtain which screened him.
‘Just look at this—i’n it disgusting?’
‘What?’
‘Why somebody’s left an ’ole choc-ice on the floor, and it’s run all over the place. What did ’e buy it for if ’e didn’t want it? That’s what I’d like to know.’
‘St! Terrible i’n it?’
‘One of them young teds, I ’spect.’
There was silence for a moment, punctuated only by the grunts and wheezes of the two ancient dames, until Gertrude said:
‘’Ow’s the family, Doll?’
‘Oh, mustn’t grumble, y’know. My Stan’s been very bad with ’is bladder again.’
‘St!’
‘’E’s overworked it. That’s what I tell ’im: three or four pints every weekday, and Gawd knows ’ow many on Saturday night. Now ’e’s payin’ for it. ’Ow’re all yours, Gert?’
‘Well Alf’s much better. They bin’ givin’ ’im ’lectrical treatment at the ’ospital. Done ’im a world of good it ’as. Says ’e feels like a young man again.’ She cackled. ‘I told ’im not to be so silly, or e’d strain ’imself, and oo’d ’ave to look after ’im then, I’d like to know? … No, Alf’s all right, but our Else is drivin’ us all barmy.’
‘Oh?’ said Dolly with sympathetic interest.
