Adventures in Two Worlds

by A. J. Cronin

  What was the reason of this extraordinary change of mind and heart? It sprang partly from the fact that, for the first time in my life, no longer in a state of perpetual activity, I had leisure to reflect. And the question which began to haunt me was: Wherein, exactly, lies the value of all this? From my earliest student days everything that I had attempted had ‘come off’. Even this latest, and most difficult, venture into the field of letters had been unbelievably successful. Now my novels sold in large numbers. Even in the remotest districts my name hit back at me from the local bookstore. Apart from royalties, film and serial rights brought me an income greater than I had ever dreamed I would possess. I was rich. Was I happy? I cannot pretend that I was miserable. Nevertheless I experienced, basically, a feeling of emptiness and dissatisfaction, a growing realisation of the futility of my objectives and, indeed, of all material achievement. And more, I began dimly to discern how much attention I had paid to the wrong things in life, and how little to the right. To the exclusion of all else, my energies had been concentrated upon worldly affairs. I had forgotten, or ignored, the kingdom of the spirit. My gods had been false gods. And now, with a shock of disenchantment, my eyes were opening to the vanity of human comfort, and the need of those things that are everlasting.

  In this discovery I was aided by a chance encounter. At this time I was frequently in the company of a man from my home town who had been my contemporary at school and at Glasgow University and whom, for convenience, I have named Chisholm. Endowed with many brilliant attributes, suave, handsome, and glib-tongued, Philip Chisholm had forsaken the medical profession for a political career with such success that he was now a member of Parliament for a northern borough and a junior minister of the shadow cabinet. In the intervening years I had not once heard from him, but, when I became known, he was quick to acknowledge our friendship – and this, perhaps, is a fair index of his character. When we talked together, after dinner at the Garrick Club or at tea on the terrace of the House of Commons, he had the habit of looking back across the years, with humorous derision, to our student days. He and I, of all the members of our group, were the only two who had achieved real fame. We had rocketed upward, leaving the ruck far behind. There was, of course, no limit to the possibilities which the future might hold for us. As for the rest, with the world at our feet, we rather pitied, them.

  In May of that year Chisholm asked me to go fishing with him. A wealthy parliamentary colleague, Sir Harold B—, who owned a beat on the Hampshire Avon, one of the best and most exclusive salmon rivers in England, had been called to a council session in Geneva, and in his absence offered Chisholm his lodge for a fortnight. The opportunity was too good to miss. We set off together.

  The river was in excellent condition and the fish were running well. Chisholm, a true bon viveur and man of the world, an amusing conversationalist with an excellent repertoire of stories, made an agreeable companion. Our host, even in absentia, kept an admirable table.

  Two days after our arrival, the lodge housekeeper slipped on the pantry floor and damaged her kneecap. It looked like a displacement of the patella, but when we two renegades from the healing art offered our assistance the good dame would have none of us. No one would suit her but her own village doctor, of whose skill and notable achievements she drew an enthusiastic picture that made Chisholm glance at me and smile.

  An hour later the practitioner arrived, with all the quick assurance of a busy man. In no time he had silenced the patient with a reassuring word and reduced the dislocation with a sure deft touch. Only then did he turn towards us.

  ‘My God!’ exclaimed Chisholm, under his breath. ‘Carry!’

  Here, indeed, was someone from that past to which Chisholm so often, and so scornfully, referred. We had first known him as a boy, small, insignificant, and poor, who hung on to us, so to speak, by the skin of his teeth – barely accepted by our select band of adventurous youths in the town of Levenford.

  If he were in any way remarkable, it was through his defects, one leg being so much shorter than the other that he was obliged to wear a boot with a sole six inches thick. To see him run, saving his bad leg, his undersized form tense and limping, the sweat breaking out on his eager face, well – Chisholm, acknowledged wit of our band, hit the nail on the head when he dubbed him, with schoolboy cruelty, Dot-and-Carry. It was shortened subsequently to Carry. ‘Look out!’ someone would shout. ‘Here comes Carry. Let’s get away before he tags on to us.’ And off we would dart, to the swimming pool or the woods, with Carry dotting along, cheerful and unprotesting, in our wake.

  That was his quality, a shy, a smiling cheerfulness – and how we mocked it! To us, Carry was an oddity. His clothes, though carefully patched and mended, were terrible. Socially he was almost beyond the pale. His mother, a gaunt little widow of a drunken loafer, supported herself and her son by scrubbing out sundry shops. Again Chisholm epitomised the jest with his classic epigram: ‘Carry’s mother takes in stairs to wash.’

  Carry supplemented the family income by rising at five o’clock every morning to deliver milk. This long milk round sometimes made him late for school. Then a small lame boy would be halted, hot and trembling, in the middle of the classroom floor, while the master drew titters with his shafts.

  ‘Well, well … Can it be possible ye’re late again?’

  ‘Y-y-yes, sir.’

  ‘And where has your lordship been? Taking breakfast with the provost, no doubt?’

  ‘N-n-n.’

  At such moments of crisis Carry had a stammer which rose and tortured him. He could not articulate another syllable. And the class, reading permission in the master’s grim smile, dissolved in roars of mirth.

  If Carry had been clever, all might have been well for him. In Scotland everything is forgiven the brilliant ‘lad o’ pairts’. But though Carry did well enough at his books, oral examinations were to him the crack of doom.

  There was heartburning in this fact for Carry’s mother. She longed for her son to excel, and to excel in one especial field. Poor, humble, despised, she nourished in her fiercely religious soul a fervent ambition. She desired to see her son an ordained minister of the Church of Scotland. Sublime folly! But Carry’s mother had sworn to achieve the miracle or die.

  Carry much preferred the open countryside to a stuffy prayer meeting. He loved the woods and the wide spaces of the moor. And while he limped beside us on our rambles he would listen eagerly while we spoke of entering the University as medical students. The truth was, Carry had a tremendous longing to be a doctor.

  But obedience was inherent in his gentle nature, and when he left school it was to enter college as a student of divinity. Heaven knows how they managed. His mother scrimped and saved, her figure grew more gaunt, but in her deep-set eye there glowed unquenchable fire. Carry himself, though his heart was not in what he did, worked like a hero.

  And so it happened, quicker than might have been imagined, that Carry was duly licensed at the age of twenty-four in the cure of souls according to the Kirk of Scotland. Locally there was great interest in the prodigy of the scrubwoman’s son turned parson. He was proposed for the parish church assistantship and named to preach a trial sermon.

  A full congregation assembled to see ‘what was in the young meenister.’ And Carry, who for weeks past had rehearsed his sermon, ascended the pulpit feeling word-perfect. He began to speak in an earnest voice, and for a few moments he went well enough. Then all at once he became conscious of those rows and rows of upturned faces, of his mother dressed in her best in a front pew, her eyes fixed rapturously upon him. A paralysing shiver of self-distrust swept over him. He hesitated, lost the thread of his ideas, and began to stammer. Once that frightful impotence of speech had gripped him he was lost. He laboured on pitifully, but while he struggled for the words he saw the restlessness, the significant smiles; heard even a faint titter. And then again he saw his mother’s face, and broke down completely. There was a long and awful pause, then falteringly Carry drew the s
ervice to a close by announcing the hymn.

  Within the hour, when Carry’s mother reached home, she was mercifully taken by an apoplectic seizure. She never spoke again.

  The funeral over, Carry disappeared from Levenford. No one knew or cared where he went. He was stigmatised, branded contemptuously for life, a failure. When some years later news reached me that he was teaching in a board school in a farming district, I thought of him for a moment, with a kind of shame-faced sorrow, as a despairing soul, a man predestined for disaster. But I soon forgot him.

  I was working in Lochlea when Chisholm, now first assistant to the Regius Professor of Anatomy, dropped into my rooms one evening. ‘You’ll never guess’ – he grinned – ‘who’s dissecting in my department. None other than our boyhood friend, Dot-and-Carry.’

  Carry it was. Carry, at nearly twenty-five years of age, starting out to be doctor! A strange figure he made, with his shabby suit, his limp and stoop among the gay young bucks who were his fellow students. No one ever spoke to him. He occupied a room in a poor district, husbanded the slender savings from his teacher’s pittance. His age, appearance, and traitorous stammer hampered him. But he went plodding indefatigably on, refusing to admit defeat, the old dogged cheerfulness and hopeful courage still in his eyes.

  And here, again, was Carry. Yes, Carry it was. But not the shy, shabby, stammering Carry of old. He had the quietly confident air of a man who, within himself, is at last secure. In a flash of recognition he greeted us warmly, and pressed us to come to supper at his home. Meanwhile, he had an urgent case to attend.

  It was with an odd expectancy, half excitement and half lingering derision, that we entered the village doctor’s house that evening. What a shock to find that Carry had a wife! Yet it was so. She welcomed us, fresh and pretty as her own countryside. Since the doctor (she gave the title with a naïve reverence) was still engaged in his surgery, she took us upstairs to see the children. Two red-cheeked girls and a little boy, already asleep. Surprise made us mute.

  Downstairs, Carry joined us with two other guests. Now, at his own table, he was a man poised and serene, holding his place as host with quiet dignity, unafraid to bow his head and murmur a reverent grace. His friends, both men of substance, treated him with deference. Less from what he said than what was said by others we gathered the facts. His practice was wide and scattered through the valley of the Avon. His patients were country folk, silent, hard to know. Yet somehow he had won them.

  Carry was a force now, permeating the whole countryside, wise and gentle, blending the best of science and religion, unsparing, undemanding, loving this work he had been born to do, a man who had refused defeat and won through to victory at last. As we sat in his little study after dinner I chanced to observe on his desk a small framed card. It bore this brief quotation: ‘Whatever thou takest in hand, remember thy last end and thou shalt never do amiss.’ This, without question, was the motive of his life.

  Late that night as we left the doctor’s house and trudged through the darkness, silence fell between Chisholm and myself. Then, as with an effort, he declared:

  ‘It looks as though the little man has found himself at last.’

  Something patronising in the remark jarred me. Shamed by the thought of our joint vanities, I could not resist a sharp reply.

  ‘Which would you rather be, Chisholm – yourself, or the doctor of Avon?’

  ‘Confound you,’ he muttered, ‘don’t you know?’

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  This chance meeting with Carry, inconsequential though it might appear, accelerated a change in me which, no doubt, was already on the way. The dormant half of my nature, so long overlaid and suppressed, began at last to awaken and, persuasively, to assert itself. Was it the spirit, prim and puritanical, of my mother’s Covenanting ancestors? Or a whisper, far back on my father’s side, from some Celtic mystic rapt in the dim interior of a turf-roofed tuath on the hill of Tara? I cannot attribute it to senility, since I was not yet forty and full of health and vigour. Yet whatever the primal cause, the effects were apparent enough.

  The word ‘conversion’ is thoroughly obnoxious to me, suggestive of a revivalist meeting where, under stress of mass emotion, the erstwhile sinner leaps forth with a hysterical promise of atonement. Nor am I prig enough to claim for myself any great and dramatic moral regeneration. I was no Saul of Tarsus, no Augustine impelled by a sudden vision to swift and passionate amendment. Nevertheless there was manifest in me about this time a new attitude towards life, and especially towards religion. This in itself was a remarkable reversal since, because of the peculiar circumstances of my upbringing, I had long maintained a show of indifference towards organised belief.

  I may be better understood when I explain that my mother, a Montgoremie, branch of one of the oldest and most Protestant Scottish families, had, when only nineteen, fallen deeply in love with a young Irish Catholic, had run away from home, married him, and, in the excess of her affection, voluntarily adopted his faith. As the sole child of this union, I was baptised into the Catholic Church and for seven years knew nothing but the sweet stories of the saints and the untroubled tranquillity of a happy home. Then, quite suddenly, my father died. He had always lived to the full extent of his resources – beyond the memory of his beloved and handsome figure, his open-handedness and inextinguishable charm, there was little he could leave us. For two years my mother struggled to make ends meet; then, inexorably, through sheer necessity, she was forced to return to the paternal roof.

  What a homecoming for one who had, in the eyes of a stern father, disgraced her lineage! And for me, unwanted grandchild, intolerable incubus, the little Papist, what a sad change of circumstances and scene! When I was sent to a Protestant school, my religion, soon discovered, brought upon me the jeers of the class, and indeed of the master, a sadistic brute who took delight in openly baiting me upon such matters as the forgiveness, of sins and the infallibility of the Pope. For many months thereafter, a pariah harassed and badgered by a predatory mob, I suffered to the full – since I stubbornly refused to deny the creed into which I had been born – the cruel intolerance of a small Scots community. In that era bigotry was rampant throughout the west of Scotland. On such days as commemorated, for example, the birth of John Knox and the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, I saw racial and religious hatreds stirred to the dregs, witnessed the bitter antagonisms of the sects, knew only the worst side of Christianity. In this wilderness I wandered alone, a solitary little boy, swept by doubts and fears, desperately striving to prove to myself the truth of this faith which was so derided and despised.

  Later, I grew harder, fought off the worst of my tormentors, laughed with the others at my difficulties, became popular through my skill at games. Then came the time when, winning a series of scholarships, I was able to attend the University, and here the latent revolt brewing within me against the hampering hair shirt of my religion came actively to a head. Proud of my critical faculties, I found impossibilities in the Scriptures, objections to the immortality of the individual soul extremely convenient to my new status as a student of biology. My anatomical studies and scientific training confirmed me in this new attitude of indifference. And when I married, although from a perverse sense of honour I maintained the outward form of Catholicism, I had little thought of carrying out its tenets and obligations. The forces of nature were, in fact, stirring strongly within me. If my conscience troubled me, I buried it beneath a mass of worldly interests. While I never openly disowned Christianity – I was too much of a coward to do so – I conveniently forgot about it. I had reached the supreme goal of egoistic existence.

  With such a history, at this late stage of self-deception and self-indulgence, it might seem inconceivable that I should have sought peace of mind and soul in returning to my childhood faith, despite those words of encouragement: ‘Unless you go back and become like little children you shall not enter the kingdom of God.’ Yet it was not strange to me, for in truth, however much
I beat against them, its bars had always enclosed me, and intermittently in my heart, sounding quiet through the tumult of the world, I had heard the echo of that voice which would not be denied. And even while ‘ I fled Him, down the nights and down the days … down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind … in the midst of tears and under running laughter,’ I still could hear the beat of those pursuing feet, that secret whisper, ‘Rise, clasp my hand, and come.’

  It was not an easy step to take, and one bitter to self-love. For years I had gone on in pride and self-complacency. But that growing interior desolation was irresistible in its compulsion. I stumbled forward, my last defences beaten down, yielded to the craving in my soul. And by whatever means it was accomplished, my period of rebellion against Heaven at last was ended.

  There is little virtue in this experience, which is simply the inevitable circuit made by many weak and ordinary souls who, despite the cross-currents of the world, have not been able to escape the inexorable appeal of the Cross. Indeed for some, encased in their armour of scornful contempt, such ‘repentance’ may evoke no more than a pitying smile. In my defence I cannot even offer visible evidence of the imprint of grace resulting from my surrender. Unlike those who at one lightning stroke consider themselves as ‘saved’ and thereafter walk upon their toes, wearing the prim presanctified smile of the elect, I was still filled with my old imperfections – with ill timper, jealousy, and selfishness. The secret sources of my greatest faults would not dry up. Nor, while I tried to make my pillow less luxurious, could I bring myself to renounce completely my pleasure in transitory and ephemeral things. The mystical empire of the saints was far from being mine.