Hadrian the Seventh (Historical Novel). Frederick Rolfe
now I am able to retaliate, I am as touchy as a hornet with a brand new sting. I can't help it. I seem to take an impish delight in making my brother-Catholics, especially clerks, smart and wince and squirm as I myself have squirmed and winced and smarted. I'm sorry. I simply meant to say that, when I have made myself free and independent, then I will try again to give you evidence of my Vocation."
"Have you approached your diocesan recently?" the cardinal inquired.
"His Grace died soon after my expulsion from St. Andrew's College. I approached his successor, who refused to hear me; and is dead. I never have approached the present archbishop, beyond giving him notice of my existence and persistence; for I certainly will not come before him with chains on my hands."
"Chains?"
"Debts."
"Have you any special reason for belonging to the archdiocese of Agneda?"
"There is a certain fascination in the idea of administering to a horde of unspeakable barbarians, 'the horrible and ultimate Britons, ferocious to strangers.' Otherwise I have no special reason. I had no choice. I happen to have been made an ecclesiastical subject of Agneda at the instance of Mr. George Semphill and at the invitation of the late Archbishop Smithson. That is all."
"Would you be inclined to offer your sevices to another bishop now?"
"Eminency, 'it is not I who have lost the Athenians: it is the Athenians who have lost me.' I would say that in Greek if I thought you would understand me. When the Athenians want me, they will not have much difficulty in finding me. But to tell you the truth, I find these bishop-johnnies excessively tiresome. As I said just now, when Agneda silently relieved himself of his obligations to me, I offered my services to half-a-dozen of them, more or less, plainly telling them my history and my circumstances. What a fool they must have thought me,— or what a brazen and dangerous scoundrel! Yes, I do believe they thought me that. I was astonishingly unsophisticate then. I didn't know a tithe of what I know now; and I solemnly assever that I believe those owl-like hierarchs to have been completely flabbergasted because I neither whimpered penitence, nor whined for mercy, but actually had the effrontery to tell them the blind and naked truth about myself. Truth nude and unadorned, is such a rare commodity among Catholics, as you know, and especially among the clergy; and I suppose, as long as we continue to draw the majority of our spiritual pastors from the hooligan class, from the scum of the gutter, that the man who tells the truth in his own despite always emphatically will be condemned as mad, or bad, or both."
"Really, Mr. Rose!" the cardinal interjected.
"Yes, Eminency: we teach little children that there are three kinds of lies; and that the Officiose Lie, which is told to excuse oneself or another— the meanest lie of the lot, I say— is only a Venial Sin. It's in the catechism. Well, naturally enough the miserable little wretches, who can't possibly grasp the subtilty of a distinguo, put undue importance on that abominable world 'only'; and they grow up as the most despicable of all liars. Ouf! I learned all this from a thin thing named Danielson, just after my return to the faith of my forefathers. He lied to me. In my innocence I took his word. Then I found him out; and preached on the enormity of his crime. 'Well, sir,' says he as bold as brass, 'it's only a Venial Sin!'"
"George, you're beside the point," the bishop said.
"His Eminency will indulge me. What was I saying? Oh,— that I had had enough of being rebuffed by bishops. I came to that conclusion when His Lordship of Chadsee blandly told me that I never would get a bishop to accept my services as long as I continued to tell the truth about my experiences. I stopped competing for rebuffs then. I do nor propose to begin again until I am the possessor of a cheque-book."
The cardinal was gazing through the leaves of an indiarubber plant out of the window; his magnificent eyes were drained of all expression. When the nervose deliberately hardened and pathetic voice of the speaker ceased, he brought the argument to a focus with these words, "George Arthur Rose, I summon you to offer yourself to me."
"I am not ready to offer myself to Your Eminency."
"Not ready?"
"I hoped that I had made it clear to you that, in regard to my Vocation, I am 'marking time,' until I shall have earned enough to pay my debts incurred on the strength of my faith in the honour of a parcel of archiepiscopal and episcopal and clerical sharpers, and also a sum sufficient to produce me a small and certain annuity—"
"You keep harping upon that string," the cardinal complained.
"It is the only string which you have left unbroken on my lute."
"I see you are a very sensitive subject, Mr. Rose. I think that long brooding over your wrongs has fixed in you some such pagan and erroneous idea as that which Juvenal expresses in the verse where he says that poverty makes a man ridiculous."
"Nothing of the kind," George retorted with all his claws out. "On the contrary, it is I— the creature of you, my Lord Cardinal, and your Catholics— who make Holy Poverty look ridiculous!"
"A clever paradox!" The cardinal let a tinge of his normal sneer affect his voice.
"Not even a paradox. A poor thing: but mine own," George flung in, glaring through his great-great-grandfather's silver spectacles which he used indoors.
"Well, well: the money-question need not trouble you," said the cardinal, turning again to the window. Indifference was his pose.
"But it does trouble me. It vitally troubles me. And your amazing summons troubles me as well— now. Why do you come to me after all these years?"
"Precisely, Mr. Rose, after all these years, as you say. It has been suggested to me, and I am bound to say that I agree with the suggestion, that we ought to take your singular persistency during all these years— how many years?"
"Say twenty."
"That we must take your singular persistency during twenty years as a proof of the genuineness of your Vocation."
George turned his face to the little yellow cat, who had climbed to and was nestling on his shoulder.
"And therefore," the cardinal continued, "I am here today to summon you to accept Holy Order with no delay beyond the canonical intervals."
"I will respond to that summons within two years."
"Within two years? Life is uncertain, Mr. Rose. We who are here today may be in our graves by then. I myself am an old man."
"I know. Your Eminency is an old man. I, by the grace of God, the virtue of my ancestors, and my own attention to my physique, am still a young man; and younger by far than my years. I have not been preserved in the vigour and freshness of youth by miracle after miracle during twenty years for nothing. And, when I shall have published three more books, I will respond to your summons. Not till then."
"I told you that the money-question need not hinder you."
"Yes, Eminency; and my late diocesan said the same thing several years ago."
"You are suspicious, Mr. Rose."
"I have reason to be suspicacious, Eminency."
The cardinal threw up his hands. The gesture wedded irritation to despair. "You doubt me?" he all but gasped.
"I trusted Your Eminency in 1894; and—"
The bishop intervened: for cardinalitial human nature burst out in vermilion flames.
"George," he said, "I am witness of Zmnts's words."
"What's the good of that? Suppose that I take His Eminency's word! Suppose that in a couple of months he alters his mind, determines to mistake the large for the great and to perpetuate another pea-soup-and-streaky-bacon-coloured caricature of an electric-light-station! What then would be my remedy? Where would be my contract again? And could I hale a prince of the church before a secular tribunal? Would I? Could I subpœna Your Lordship to testify against your Metropolitan and Provincial? Would I? Would you? My Lord Cardinal, I must speak, and you must hear me, as man to man. You are offering me Holy Orders on good grounds, on right and