There was also a Catholic chapel in the Lycée, but it was falling into ruins and the glass was out of most of the windows. Nobody ever saw the inside of it, because it was locked up tight. I suppose back in the days when the Lycée was built the Catholics had managed, at the cost of several years of patient effort, to get this concession out of the government people who were erecting the school: but in the long run it did not do them much good.
The only really valuable religious and moral training I ever got as a child came to me from my father, not systematically, but here and there and more or less spontaneously, in the course of ordinary conversations. Father never applied himself, of set purpose, to teach me religion. But if something spiritual was on his mind, it came out more or less naturally. And this is the kind of religious teaching, or any other kind of teaching, that has the most effect. “A good man out of the good treasure of his heart, bringeth forth good fruit; and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth that which is evil. For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.”
And it is precisely this speech “out of the abundance of the heart” that makes an impression and produces an effect in other people. We give ear and pay at least a partially respectful attention to anyone who is really sincerely convinced of what he is saying, no matter what it is, even if it is opposed to our own ideas.
I have not the slightest idea what the little pasteur told us about the Pharisee and the Publican, but I shall never forget a casual remark Father happened to make, in which he told me of St. Peter’s betrayal of Christ, and how, hearing the cock crow, Peter went out and wept bitterly. I forget how it came up, and what the context was that suggested it: we were just talking casually, standing in the hall of the flat we had taken on the Place de la Condamine.
I have never lost the vivid picture I got, at that moment, of Peter going out and weeping bitterly. I wonder how I ever managed to forget, for so many years, the understanding I acquired at that moment of how St. Peter felt, and of what his betrayal meant to him.
Father was not afraid to express his ideas about truth and morality to anybody that seemed to need them—that is, if a real occasion arose. He did not, of course, go around interfering with everybody else’s business. But once his indignation got the better of him, and he gave a piece of his mind to a shrew of a French-woman, one of those spiteful sharp-tongued bourgeoises, who was giving free expression to her hatred of one of her neighbors who very much resembled herself.
He asked her why she thought Christ had told people to love their enemies. Did she suppose God commanded this for His benefit? Did He get anything out of it that He really needed from us? Or was it not rather for our own good that he had given us this commandment? He told her that if she had any sense, she would love other people if only for the sake of the good and health and peace of her own soul, instead of tearing herself to pieces with her own envy and spitefulness. It was St. Augustine’s argument, that envy and hatred try to pierce our neighbor with a sword, when the blade cannot reach him unless it first passes through our own body. I suppose Father had never read any of St. Augustine, but he would have liked him.
This incident with the shrew reminds one a little of Léon Bloy. Father had not read him either, but he would have liked him too. They had much in common, but Father shared none of Bloy’s fury. If he had been a Catholic, his vocation as a lay-contemplative would certainly have developed along the same lines. For I am sure he had that kind of a vocation. But unfortunately it never really developed, because he never got to the Sacraments. However, there were in him the latent germs of the same spiritual poverty and all of Bloy’s hatred of materialism and of false spiritualities and of worldly values in people who called themselves Christians.
In the winter of 1926 Father went to Murat. Murat is in the Cantal, the old Province of Auvergne, a Catholic province. It is in the mountains of central France, green mountains, old volcanoes. The valleys are full of rich pastures and the mountains are heavy with fir trees or raise their green domes into the sky, bare of woods, covered with grass. The people of this land are Celts, mostly. The Auvergnats have been more or less laughed at, in French tradition, for their simplicity and rusticity. They are very stolid people, but very good people.
At Murat, Father boarded with a family who had a little house, a sort of a small farm, on the slope of one of the steep hills outside the town, and I went up there to spend the Christmas holidays, that year.
Murat was a wonderful place. It was deep in snow, and the houses with their snow-covered roofs relieved the grey and blue and slate-dark pattern of the buildings crowded together on the sides of three hills. The town huddled at the foot of a rock crowned by a colossal statue of the Immaculate Conception, which seemed to me, at the time, to be too big, and to bespeak too much religious enthusiasm. By now I realize that it did not indicate any religious excess at all. These people wanted to say in a very obvious way that they loved Our Lady, who should indeed be loved and revered, as a Queen of great power and a Lady of immense goodness and mercy, mighty in her intercession for us before the throne of God, tremendous in the glory of her sanctity and her fullness of grace as Mother of God. For she loves the children of God, who are born into the world with the image of God in their souls, and her powerful love is forgotten, and it is not understood, in the blindness and foolishness of the world.
However, I did not bring up the subject of Murat in order to talk about this statue, but about M. and Mme. Privat. They were the people with whom we boarded, and long before we got to Murat, when the train was climbing up the snowy valley, from Aurillac, on the other side of the Puy du Cantal, Father was telling me: “Wait until you see the Privats.”
In a way, they were to be among the most remarkable people I ever knew.
The Auvergnats are, as a rule, not tall. The Privats were both of them not much taller than I was, being then twelve, but tall for my age. 1 suppose M. Privat was about five foot three or four, but not more. But he was tremendously broad, a man of great strength. He seemed to have no neck, but his head rose from his shoulders in a solid column of muscle and bone, and for the rest, his shadow was almost completely square. He wore a black broad-brimmed hat, like most of the peasants of the region, and it gave his face an added solemnity when his sober and judicious eyes looked out at you peacefully from under the regular brows and that regular brim above them. These two decks, two levels of regularity, added much to the impression of solidity and immobility and impassiveness which he carried with him everywhere, whether at work or at rest.
His little wife was more like a bird, thin, serious, earnest, quick, but also full of that peacefulness and impassiveness which, as I now know, came from living close to God. She wore a funny little headdress which I find it almost impossible to describe, except to say that it looked like a little sugar-loaf perched on top of her head, and garnished with a bit of black lace. The women of Auvergne still wear that headdress.
It is a great pleasure for me to remember such good and kind people and to talk about them, although I no longer possess any details about them. I just remember their kindness and goodness to me, and their peacefulness and their utter simplicity. They inspired real reverence, and I think, in a way, they were certainly saints. And they were saints in that most effective and telling way: sanctified by leading ordinary lives in a completely supernatural manner, sanctified by obscurity, by usual skills, by common tasks, by routine, but skills, tasks, routine which received a supernatural form from grace within, and from the habitual union of their souls with God in deep faith and charity.
Their farm, their family, and their Church were all that occupied these good souls; and their lives were full.
Father, who thought more and more of my physical and moral health, realized what a treasure he had found in these two, and consequently Murat was more and more in his mind as a place where I should go and get healthy.
That winter, at the Lycée, I had spent several weeks in the infirmary with various fevers
, and the following summer, when Father had to go to Paris, he took the opportunity to send me once again to Murat, to spend a few weeks living with the Privats, who would feed me plenty of butter and milk and would take care of me in every possible way.
Those were weeks that I shall never forget, and the more I think of them, the more I realize that I must certainly owe the Privats for more than butter and milk and good nourishing food for my body. I am indebted to them for much more than the kindness and care they showed me, the goodness and the delicate solicitude with which they treated me as their own child, yet without any assertive or natural familiarity. As a child, and since then too, I have always tended to resist any kind of a possessive affection on the part of any other human being—there has always been this profound instinct to keep clear, to keep free. And only with truly supernatural people have I ever felt really at my ease, really at peace.
That was why I was glad of the love the Privats showed me, and was ready to love them in return. It did not burn you, it did not hold you, it did not try to imprison you in demonstrations, or trap your feet in the snares of its interest.
I used to run in the woods, and climb the mountains. I went up the Plomb du Cantal, which is nothing more than a huge hill, with a boy who was, I think, the Privats’ nephew. He went to a Catholic school taught, I suppose, by priests. It had not occurred to me that every boy did not talk like the brats I knew at the Lycée. Without thinking, I let out some sort of a remark of the kind you heard all day long at Montauban, and he was offended and asked where I had picked up that kind of talk. And yet, while being ashamed of myself, I was impressed by the charitableness of his reaction. He dismissed it at once, and seemed to have forgotten all about it, and left me with the impression that he excused me on the grounds that I was English and had used the expression without quite knowing what it meant.
After all, this going to Murat was a great grace. Did I realize it? I did not know what a grace was. And though I was impressed with the goodness of the Privats, I could not fail to realize what was its root and its foundation. And yet it never occurred to me at the time to think of being like them, of profiting in any way by their example.
I think I only talked to them once about religion. We were all sitting on the narrow balcony looking out over the valley, at the hills turning dark blue and purple in the September dusk. Somehow, something came up about Catholics and Protestants and immediately I had the sense of all the solidity and rectitude of the Privats turned against me, accusing me like the face of an impregnable fortification.
So I began to justify Protestantism, as best I could. I think they had probably said that they could not see how I managed to go on living without the faith: for there was only one Faith, one Church. So I gave them the argument that every religion was good: they all led to God, only in different ways, and every man should go according to his own conscience, and settle things according to his own private way of looking at things.
They did not answer me with any argument. They simply looked at one another and shrugged and Monsieur Privat said quietly and sadly: “Mais c’est impossible.”
It was a terrible, a frightening, a very humiliating thing to feel all their silence and peacefulness and strength turned against me, accusing me of being estranged from them, isolated from their security, cut off from their protection and from the strength of their inner life by my own fault, by my own wilfulness, by my own ignorance, and my uninstructed Protestant pride.
One of the humiliating things about it was that I wanted them to argue, and they despised argument. It was as if they realized, as I did not, that my attitude and my desire of argument and religious discussion implied a fundamental and utter lack of faith, and a dependence on my own lights, and attachment to my own opinion.
What is more, they seemed to realize that I did not believe in anything, and that anything I might say I believed would be only empty talk. Yet they did not give me the feeling that this was some slight matter, something to be indulged in a child, something that could be left to work itself out in time, of its own accord. I had never met people to whom belief was a matter of such moment. And yet there was nothing they could do for me directly. But what they could do, I am sure they did, and I am glad they did it. And I thank God from the bottom of my heart that they were concerned, and so deeply and vitally concerned, at my lack of faith.
Who knows how much I owe to those two wonderful people? Anything I say about it is only a matter of guessing but, knowing their charity, it is to me a matter of moral certitude that I owe many graces to their prayers, and perhaps ultimately the grace of my conversion and even of my religious vocation. Who shall say? But one day I shall know, and it is good to be able to be confident that I will see them again and be able to thank them.
VI
FATHER HAD GONE TO PARIS TO BE BEST MAN AT THE WEDDING of one of his friends from the old days in New Zealand. Capt. John Chrystal had made himself a career in the British army and was an officer in the hussars. Later on he became Governor of a prison: but he was not as dreary as that might imply. After the wedding, the Captain and his wife went off on their honeymoon, and the mother of the new Mrs. Chrystal came down to St. Antonin with Father.
Mrs. Stratton was an impressive kind of a person. She was a musician, and a singer, but I forget whether she had been on the stage: in any case, she was not a very theatrical character, rather the opposite, although she had a certain amount of dash about her.
She was not what you would call elderly, by any means, and besides she was a woman of great vitality and strength of character, with rich intelligence and talent, and strong and precise ideas about things. Her convictions commanded respect, as did her many talents, and above all her overwhelming personal dignity. You felt that she ought to have been called Lady Stratton, or the Countess of something.
At first I was secretly resentful of the great influence she at once began to exercise over our lives, and thought she was bossing our affairs too much, but even I was able to realize that her views and advice and guidance were very valuable things. But so strong was her influence that I think it was due to her more than to anyone else that we gave up the idea of living permanently in St. Antonin.
The house was almost finished and ready for occupation, and it was a beautiful little house too, simple and solid. It looked good to live in, with that one big room with the medieval window and a huge medieval fireplace. Father had even managed to procure a winding stone stair and it was by that that you went up to the bedroom. The garden around the house, where Father had done much work, would have been fine.
On the other hand, Father was travelling too much for the house to be really useful. In the winter of 1927 he was some months at Marseilles and the rest of the time at Cette, another Mediterranean port. Soon he would have to go to England, for by this time he was ready for another exhibition. All this time I was at the Lycée, becoming more and more hard-boiled in my precocity, and getting accustomed to the idea of growing up as a Frenchman.
Then Father went to London for the exhibition.
It was the spring of 1928. The school year would soon be over. I was not thinking much about the future. All I knew was that Father would be back from England in a few days.
It was a bright, sunny morning in May when he arrived at the Lycée, and the first thing he told me was to get my things packed: we were going to England.
I looked around me like a man that has had chains struck from his hands. How the light sang on the brick walls of the prison whose gates had just burst open before me, sprung by some invisible and beneficent power: my escape from the Lycée was, I believe, providential.
In the last moments in which I had an opportunity to do so, I tasted the ferocious delights of exultant gloating over the companions I was about to leave. They stood around me in the sun, with their hands hanging at their sides, wearing their black smocks and their berets, and laughing and sharing my excitement, not without envy.
And then I was riding down the
quiet street in a carriage, with my luggage beside me, and Father talking about what we were going to do. How lightly the cab-horse’s hoofs rang out in the hard, white dirt of the street! How gaily they echoed along the pale smug walls of the dusty houses! “Liberty!” they said, “liberty, liberty, liberty, liberty,” all down the street.
We passed the big polygonal barn of a post-office, covered with the tatters of ancient posters, and entered under the dappled shadow of the plane trees. I looked ahead, up the long street to Villenouvelle station, where I had taken the train so many times in the small hours of the morning, on my way home to spend the Sunday in St. Antonin.
When we got on the little train, and travelled the way we had first come to the Aveyron valley, I did indeed feel my heart tighten at the loss of my thirteenth century: but oh, it had long ceased to belong to us. We had not been able to hold on, for very long, to the St. Antonin of the first year: and the bitter lye of the Lycée had burned all its goodness out of me again, and I was cauterized against it, and had become somewhat insensitive to it: not so much so, however, that I did not feel a little sad at leaving it for ever.
It is sad, too, that we never lived in the house that Father built. But never mind! The grace of those days has not been altogether lost, by any means.
Before I was really able to believe that I was out of the Lycée for good, we were racing through Picardy on the Nord railway. Pretty soon the atmosphere would take on that dim pearlish grey that would tell us we were nearing the Channel, and all along the line we would read the big billboards saying, in English: “Visit Egypt!”
Then, after that, the channel steamer, Folkestone cliffs, white as cream in the sunny haze, the jetty, the grey-green downs and the line of prim hotels along the top of the rock: these things all made me happy. And the cockney cries of the porters and the smell of strong tea in the station refreshment room spelled out all the associations of what had, up to now, always been a holiday country for me, a land heavy with awe-inspiring proprieties, but laden with all kinds of comforts, and in which every impact of experience seemed to reach the soul through seven or eight layers of insulation.