The Bell

CHAPTER 7

MICHAEL had known Nick Fawley for a long time. Their acquaintance was a curious one, the details of which were not known to the other members of the Imber community. Michael did not share James’s view that suppressio veri was equivalent tosuggestio falsi. He had first encountered Nick about fourteen years ago, when Nick was a schoolboy of fourteen, and Michael a young schoolmaster of twenty-five, hoping to be ordained a priest. Michael Meade at twenty-five had already known for some while that he was what the world calls perverted. He had been seduced at his public school at the age of fourteen and had had while still at school two homosexual love affairs which remained among the most intense experiences of his life. On more mature reflection he took the conventional view of these aberrations and when he came up to the University he sought every opportunity to encounter members of the other sex. But he found himself unmoved by women; and in his second year as a student he began to fall more naturally into the company of those with inclinations similar to his own. What was customary in his circle soon seemed to him once again permissible.

During this time Michael remained, as he had been since his confirmation, a somewhat emotional and irregular member of the Anglican church. It scarcely occurred to him that his religion could establish any quarrel with his sexual habits. Indeed, in some curious way the emotion which fed both arose deeply from the same source, and some vague awareness of this kept him from a more minute reflection. Toward the end of his student days, however, when the conception of perhaps becoming a priest took shape with more reality in his mind, Michael awoke to the inconsistencies of his position. He had been an occasional communicant. It now seemed to him fantastic that he could, in the circumstances, have come to approach the communion table. He did not, for the moment, alter the mode of his friendships, but he ceased to receive the sacrament and went through a time of considerable distress, during which he continued rather hopelessly to do what he now felt the most dreadful guilt for doing. Even the attraction which his religion exercised upon him, his very love for his God, seemed to be corrupted at the source. After a while, however, and with the help of a priest to whom he had confided his difficulties, more robust counsels prevailed. He gave up the practice of what he had come to regard as his vice, and returned to the practice of his religion.

The change, once he had made up his mind, was attended by surprisingly transitory pains. He emerged from Cambridge chastened and, as it seemed to him, cured. Equally far away now were the days of his indifference and the days of his guilt. His love affairs appeared as the étourderies of a much younger man. Michael set his face towards life, knowing that his tastes would almost undoubtedly remain with him, but certain too that he would never again, in any way which could conflict with his now much stricter sense of morality, gratify them. He had passed through a spiritual crisis and emerged triumphant. Now when he knelt to pray he found himself devoid of the guilt and fear which had previously choked him to silence and made of his prayers mere incoherent moments of emotion. He saw himself with a more rational and a more quiet eye: confident of a Love which lay deeper than the contortions of his egoistic and unenlightened guilt, and which worked patiently to set him free. He looked to the future.

After he left Cambridge he spent a year abroad, teaching in a school in Switzerland, and then came back to a post as Sixth Form Master at a public school. He enjoyed the work and was moderately good at it, but after another year had passed he was firmly decided that he wished to be ordained. He consulted various persons, including the Bishop in whose diocese he found himself, and it was agreed that he should complete another year’s teaching, while studying some theology in his spare time, and then enter a seminary. Michael was overjoyed.

The presence in the school of Nick Fawley was something of which Michael had been acutely aware from his first arrival. Nick, then fourteen, was a child of considerable beauty. He was a clever, impertinent boy, who was a centre of loves and hates among his fellows: a trouble-maker and something of a star. His very dark curling hair, which if it had been allowed to grow would have been hyacinthine, was carefully cut to fringe his long face with affectedly waif-like tendrils. His nose tilted very slightly upward. He was pale, with striking dark grey eyes, with long lashes and heavy eyelids, which he kept narrowed, either to increase their apparent length or his own apparent shrewdness, both of which were already considerable. His well-shaped mouth was usually twisted into a mocking grin or pursed in a menacing expression of toughness. He was a master of the art of grimacing and in every way treated his face as a mask, alarming, amusing, or seductive. He put on a sardonic expression in class and hung his long hands ostentatiously over the edge of his desk. The masters doted on him. Michael, while not blind to his qualities, thought him essentially silly. That was the first year.

In the second year Michael saw, owing to the accidents of the time-table, a good deal more of Nick. He became aware too that the boy was directing towards him a more than usual intensity of interest. Nick would sit now in class staring at Michael with an appearance of fascination so bold and unconcealed as to be almost provocative. Yet when questioned he seemed always to be following the lesson. Michael was irritated by what he took to be an impertinent joke. Later on, the boy changed his behaviour, looked down, seemed confused, was less ready with his answers. His expression seemed to have become more sincere, and with that far more attractive. Michael, by now interested, surmised that what Nick had previously feigned for the amusement of his fellows he now perhaps genuinely felt. He was sorry for the boy, thought him now more modest and generally improved, saw him once or twice alone.

Michael was perfectly aware that Nick’s charms were beginning to move him in a way which was more than casual. He knew himself to be susceptible without for a second feeling himself in danger, so confident and happy did he feel in his plans for the future. The fact, too, that he had never before felt attracted in this way by a person so much younger than himself contributed to make him regard his affection for Nick as something rather special but in no way menacing. He felt neither guilt nor distress at the pleasure with which he was now filled by the proximity of this young creature, and when he discovered in himself even physical symptoms of his inclination he did not take fright, but continued cheerfully and serenely to see Nick whenever the ordinary run of his duties suggested it, congratulating himself upon the newly achieved solidity and rational calm of his spiritual life. At prayer the boy’s name came naturally, with others, to his lips, and he felt a painful joy at the contemplation in himself of such a store of goodwill which asked for itself no ordinary reward.

It chanced that Michael’s bedroom, which was also his study, was in a part of the school buildings which was mainly offices and deserted after five o’clock. The door which Michael used opened at the back on to a paddock, now overgrown with small trees and bushes. In this room he kept his books, and boys sometimes came to see him, to continue a discussion or consult a reference. Once or twice after a lesson Nick accompanied him thither, arguing a point or asking a question, and set foot within the door before hurrying off to his next task. He had lately achieved the less restricted status of a senior boy and when free from lessons wandered about at will. It was an evening early in the autumn term, shortly before seven, when Michael working alone in his room heard a knack at his door and opened it to find Nick. It was the first time that the boy had appeared uninvited. He asked to borrow a book and disappeared at once, but it seemed to Michael, looking back, that they had both found it hard to conceal their emotion, and that they had both from that moment known what was bound to happen. Nick came again, this time after supper. He brought the book back, and they talked of it for ten minutes. He borrowed another. It became a custom that he would drop in sometimes in the interval between supper and bed. The gas fire purred in Michael’s small room. Outside were the darkening October evenings. The twilight lingered, the lamp was switched on.

Michael knew what he was doing. He knew that he was playing with fire. Yet it still seemed to him that he would escape unscathed. The whole thing was still, in appearance, innocent, and had a sort of temporary character about it which seemed to reduce its dangers. Until half term, until the end of term. Next term the time-table would be different, Michael might have to move his room. Every meeting was a sort of good-bye; and in any case nothing happened. The boy dropped in, they talked of casual matters, they discussed his work. He read assiduously the books which Michael lent him and obviously profited from the conversations. He never stayed very long.

One evening after Nick had come Michael let the twilight linger and darken in the room. Their talk went on as the light faded, and without seeming to notice they talked on into the dark. So strong was the spell that Michael dared not reach his hand out to the lamp. He was sitting in his low armchair and the boy was sprawled on the floor at his feet. Nick, who had stayed longer than usual, stretched and yawned and said he must be off. He sat up and began to make some observation about an argument which they had had in class. As he spoke he laid his hand upon Michael’s knee. Michael made no move. He answered the boy who in a moment withdrew his hand, rose and took his leave.

After he had gone Michael sat quite still for a long time in the dark. He knew in that moment that he was lost: the touch of Nick’s hand had given to him a joy so intense, he would have wished to say so pure, if the word had not here rung a little strangely. It was an experience such that remembering it, even many years later, he could tremble and feel, in spite of everything, that absolute joy again. Sitting now in his room, his eyes closed, his body limp, he understood that it was not in his nature to resist the lure of a delight so exquisite. What he would do or in what way it would be wrong he did not permit himself to reflect. A mist of emotion, which he did not attempt to dispel, hid from him the decision which he was taking: which indeed it seemed to him he had taken by letting Nick, without comment or withdrawal, lay his hand upon him. He knew that he was lost, and in making the discovery knew that he had in fact been lost for a long time. By a dialectic well known to those who habitually succumb to temptation he passed in a second from the time when it was too early to struggle to the time when it was too late to struggle.

Nick came the next day. Both of them, meanwhile, had been busy in imagination. They were far on. Michael did not rise from his chair. Nick knelt down before him. They stared steadily at each other, unsmiling. Then Nick gave him both his hands. Michael held them tightly, almost violently, for a moment, drawing the boy closer to him as he did so. He was rigid with the effort to prevent himself from trembling. Nick was pale, solemn, his eyes riveted upon Michael, radiant with the desire to beseech and to dominate. Michael released him and leaned back. It was as if a long time had passed. Nick relaxed upon the floor, and a smile which he could not control broke upon his face. The mask was gone now, burnt away by the forces within. Michael smiled too, curiously at peace, as if at some great achievement..Then they began to talk.

The talk of lovers who have just declared their love is one of life’s most sweet delights. Each vies with the other in humility, in amazement at being so valued. The past is searched for the first signs and each one is in haste to declare all that he is so that no part of his being escapes the hallowing touch. Michael and Nick talked so, and Michael “was continually amazed at the intelligence and delicacy of the boy who throughout contrived to hold the initiative, while at the same time wringing from his status as Michael’s pupil and disciple all the sweetness which in this changed situation such a relationship could hold. They spoke of their ambitions, their disappointments, their homes, their childhood. Nick told Michael of his twin sister whom he loved, he swore, with a Byronic passion. Michael told Nick about his parents who had died long ago, his morose father, his clever, fashionable mother, about his life at Cambridge, and with a frankness and suspension of scruple which later amazed him, about his hopes, very distant as he now put it, of the priesthood.

In a week they seemed to live an eternity of passion, although as yet they did nothing but hold hands and exchange the gentlest of caresses. This was a time for Michael of complete and thoughtless happiness. He was strangely set at ease by the knowledge that the term was drawing to its close. This wonderful thing could not last; and so he had no thought of bringing it to an end, and lived in a timeless moment of delight. He would have liked to have taken Nick into his bed; but did not do so, partly from confused scruples and partly because their relationship was for the present so perfect, and indeed the notion that there was so much still reserved was a part of its perfection. Michael did give a sidelong and reluctant attention during this time to the deeper implications of what he was doing. He ceased going to communion. He felt, strangely, no guilt, only a hard determination to hold to the beloved object, and to hold to it before God, accepting the cost whatever it might be, and in the end, somehow, justifying his love. The idea of rejecting or surrendering it did not come to his mind.

He began, hazily, to reflect on how he had formerly felt that his religion and his passions sprang from the same source, and how this had seemed to infect his religion with corruption. It now seemed to him that he could turn the argument about; why should his passions not rather be purified by this proximity? He could not believe that there was anything inherently evil in the great love which he bore to Nick: this love was something so strong, so radiant, it came from so deep it seemed of the very nature of goodness itself. Vaguely Michael had visions of himself as the boy’s spiritual guardian, his passion slowly transformed into a lofty and more selfless attachment. He would watch Nick grow to manhood, cherishing his every step, ever present, yet with a self-effacement which would be the highest expression of love. Nick, who was his lover, would become his son; and indeed already, with a tact and imagination which removed from their relationship any suggestion of crudeness, the boy was playing both parts. When he had reflected a little Michael felt even better, as if these bold reflections had done something to restore his innocence. He let his thoughts return again, very cautiously, to his vision of himself as a priest. After all, it would be possible. Everything would turn out for the best. During this time he prayed constantly and felt, through the very contradictions of his existence, that his faith was increased. With a completeness which he had never known before he was happy.

How the idyll would have ended if it had been left to Michael to control he was never privileged to know. The matter was abruptly taken out of his hands. In three weeks his relationship with Nick had grown with a miraculous speed, like a tree in a fairy story, and it seemed to him that developments which in an ordinary love might take years were enjoyed by them in a space of days. Perhaps it was just this that was fatal. Michael never knew. He felt that he had known Nick all his life. Perhaps Nick felt this too and had, as after half a century of knowledge, tired of him. Or perhaps the too great intensity of their love had in some way soured him. Or perhaps there was a deeper explanation, more creditable to the boy. This was one thing they were never fated to discuss.

Towards the end of the term an evangelist came to the school. He was a non-conformist preacher who was taking part in a religious revival campaign sponsored by all the churches, and in connexion with which members of various creeds had already spoken to the boys. He was an emotional man, an excellent speaker. Michael sat through two of his tirades, not listening, thinking of Nick’s embraces. Nick evidently had been having other thoughts. On the second day he did not come to see Michael at the time appointed. He went instead to the Headmaster and told him the whole story.

When Nick did not come Michael became worried. He waited a long time, and then left a note and set out looking for the boy. Some premonitory fear had made him, by this time, almost frantic. It was while still on this search that he was summoned urgently to see the Head. He did not see Nick tête à têteagain. The betrayal, which it was immediately evident had taken place, of something to him so utterly pure and sacred was so appalling that it was hot until later that Michael troubled to think of the matter in terms of his own ruin. It was some time afterwards too that, remembering things which the Headmaster had said, it occurred to him that Nick had not given a truthful picture of what had taken place. The boy had contrived to give the impression that much more had happened than had in fact happened, and also seemed to have hinted that it was Michael who had led him unwillingly into an adventure which he did not understand and from which he had throughout been anxious to escape. The picture as the Head saw it, and as Nick seemed to have offered it, was simply of a rather disgraceful seduction.

The term was nearly at an end. Without open scandal Michael took his immediate departure from the school. A carefully worded letter from the Headmaster to his Bishop destroyed completely his hopes of ordination. He went to London and took a temporary job at a University crammer’s establishment. He now had plenty of time for reflection. Whereas success and happiness had kept guilt at bay, ruin and grief brought it, almost automatically, with them; and Michael reflected that after all the idea of the matter which the Headmaster had received was not an unjust one. He had been guilty of that worst of offences, corrupting the young: an offence so grievous that Christ Himself had said that it were better for a man to have a millstone hanged about his neck and be drowned in the depth of the sea. Michael was not then concerned to share his guilt with Nick: he was anxious to take all there was, and if there had been more he would have taken that too.

Much later still, when he could at last view the scene, from a distance of many years, more calmly, he did wonder what Nick’s motive had been in confessing at all, and in confessing in this misleading way. He concluded that the boy had been sincerely led to confess by religious scruples, together with some perhaps half unconscious resentment a-gainst Michael: and that he had told it as he had partly because of his resentment but partly and more explicitly so as to make things seem the very worst since they were already so unpardonably bad. This Michael knew to be a natural instinct in those who confess and he imagined that Nick had turned their love into a dreary tale of seduction without any deliberate malice against himself. But he could never be sure.

The years went by. Michael took a job in the education department of the London County Council. Then restlessly he went back to schoolmastering. Without great difficulty, though sometimes plagued by his inclinations, he avoided amorous adventures. After the emotions and despairs into which the episode had cast him had subsided – and they took long to do so – he began soberly to seek again for what had eluded him, his right place in life, the task for which God had made him. Very distantly the old hopes of becoming a priest dawned again on his horizon, but he would avert his attention from them. At times it seemed to him that the catastrophe which destroyed his first attempt had been designed to humble him; his real chance was still to come. He worked quietly but without satisfaction at various teaching jobs. Then came the call to Imber, the encounter with the Abbess, and the exciting sense of a new life and of the deep and destined pattern emerging at last.

It was very shortly after his first visit to Imber, when the plan for the community was in a vague preliminary stage, that Michael entered a room of some friends of the Abbess in London and was confronted by the head of Nick set upon the body of Catherine. The encounter was so utterly unexpected, the resemblance so close and striking, that Michael had been speechless and had had to sit down and feign a momentary sickness. He had lost sight of Nick completely during the years that followed their severance, though without seeking it he had heard occasional news of him: that he had read mathematics at Oxford, and though thought to be brilliant had missed getting his first, that he had taken a post in aero-dynamic research, but had left this very soon after, when he inherited some money, and bought a share in a syndicate at Lloyds. He was to be seen in the City a good deal, so Michael heard from his few business acquaintances, in the company of the more raffish type of stockbroker. He was mentioned now and then in gossip columns in connexion with women. It was assumed he had taken to drink. Michael had once heard it said, as a vague rumour, that he was homosexual.

Michael had received this information with interest and asked for no more. He packed it away in a part of his mind where he still held and cherished the boy he had known, and commended continually to the Love which comprehends and transforms, the old passion whose intensity had made him think it so pure. But this was at a deep level, where Michael’s thoughts were hardly explicit. More superficially he developed, as the years went by, a quiet resentment against Nick for having so efficiently spoilt his life – and thought soberly that though he might be a bit to blame he was certainly not wholly to blame if Nick had gone to the bad. The boy was clearly unbalanced and irresponsible, as had been quite evident to Michael before he fell in love with him. He did not wish to minimize his own guilt, but he knew that at a certain point further reflection on it became mere self-indulgence. He regarded the chapter as closed.

He was overwhelmed by the meeting with Catherine. He did not need to be told that the handsome young lady with the grey eyes and the abundant dark hair whose long hand, in a moment, he limply held, was Miss Fawley. He wondered at once what she knew of him, whether she saw him, with hostility, and a little contempt, as an obscure schoolmaster who had been dismissed for seducing her brother. Contempt in fact it was hard to read into those gentle and evasive eyes, but Michael rapidly decided that if Nick’s relation to his sister had been as close as he declared, and somehow those declarations had seemed truthful, he would have given her some, probably fairly accurate, version of what had occurred. She might not remember his name. But a certain confusion and too deliberate kindliness during the first meeting made Michael sure that she knew very well who he was.

It might be thought that since Nature by addition had defeated him of Nick, at least by subtraction it was now offering him Catherine: but this did not occur to Michael except abstractly and as something someone else might have felt. He knew from his first meeting with Catherine that she was destined to be a nun. But it was in any case remarkable how little she seemed to attract him. He liked her, and found appealing a certain pleading sweetness in her manner, but the great pale brow and sleepy eyes, cast now in the unmistakable feminine mould, moved his passions not a whit. It was indeed strange that God could have made two creatures so patently from the same substance and yet in making them so alike made them so different. Catherine’s head in repose exactly resembled Nick’s, though a little smaller and finer. But her expressions, her smile, gave to the same form a very different animation; and when she inclined her chin towards her bosom, for Catherine was much given to looking modestly down, Michael felt that he was the victim of some appalling conjuring trick. He found her, as he found all women, unattractive and a trifle obscene, and the more so for so cunningly reminding him of Nick.

The people who were introducing them, and who obviously knew of no previous connexion, were busy explaining, with a little help from Catherine, how Catherine was eventually to go into the Abbey and how she hoped she might spend some time with the projected community before she went in. This was an idea of the Abbess’s, who had said she would write to Michael, who should by now have had the letter. Michael said he had been divided from his correspondence by a country visit: the Abbess’s letter was probably waiting at his flat. He was sure that such a plan would work splendidly; and for him in any case the wish of the Abbess was law. Miss Fawley got up to go. As Michael watched her standing by the door making her good-byes, her long slim umbrella tapping the floor, her grey coat and skirt desperately well cut and inconspicuous, her abundant hyacinth hair held in a firm bun under a small and undeniably smart hat, he wondered at her, and at the strange destiny which had made their paths cross, and which he did not for a second doubt would sooner or later re-unite him with Nick.

This happened in fact even sooner than he had expected. He found the Abbess’s letter at his flat: she commended Catherine to him, spoke of her as a “specially favoured child”, a person, potentially, of great spiritual gifts. She hoped he would accept her as a temporary member of the new community. Something in the tone of the letter made Michael feel that the Abbess must know about Nick. Catherine would almost certainly have told her. He could not imagine that that pallid and gentle being, confronted with a personality like that of the Abbess, could have held anything back. In any case, confession ran in the family.

Catherine duly appeared at Imber in the earliest days of the community, when only Michael and Peter and the Straffords were living in the great empty house. Quietly, indeed during the first weeks hardly opening her mouth, she busied herself with the innumerable tasks which confronted the little group. She worked till she was ready to drop and Michael had to restrain her. Seeing her in the country, she seemed changed. There was no appearance of smartness now. She wore old and rather shapeless clothes and her curling purple-dark hair was carelessly knotted or else tumbling down her back. She seemed consumed by a wish to efface herself, to make herself very small and unheeded, while being as busy and ubiquitous as possible. She seemed to Michael at this time a rather strange young person, unbalanced perhaps and given to excesses, though as in the case of her brother he soon forgot that he had ever thought this about her. He liked her increasingly and respected her efforts, allowing himself sometimes to look at her, searching for another face, and finding now and then her cool eyes resting upon him.

Patchway arrived, James arrived. The community began very tentatively to take shape. The garden was dug, the first seeds ceremonially planted. Then Catherine spoke to Michael of her brother. She made no reference then or later to the past, except by implicitly assuming that Michael and Nick knew each other. She was seriously worried, she said, about her brother. It seemed that Nick had been living a life of dissipation – Catherine gave no details -from which, although he hated it, he lacked the strength to withdraw. He was very unhappy and had threatened suicide. It was necessary that something drastic, something imaginative, be done for him. Catherine thought it possible that if he were asked to come to Imber he would come. Some work could surely be found for him. If he stayed even for a little time it would be to the good, if only from the point of view of his health; and who knows, with prayer, and with the proximity of that great storehouse of spiritual energy across the lake, one might hope perhaps for more than that. So Catherine pleaded, speaking as one that fears a refusal, her face pale and solemn with the force of her wish, resembling her brother.

Michael was extremely dismayed by her request. He had, since he first met her, held it vaguely in his mind, and not without a certain melancholy pleasure, that now some day he would see Nick again: briefly perhaps, in some house in London, as he imagined it. They would give an embarrassed smile and then not meet again for years. But to have the boy here – he still thought of Nick as a boy – here at Imber, at so sacred a place and time, entered in no way into Michael’s plans or wishes. He had been very busy, very excited, with his developing project. He had even at times almost forgotten who Catherine was: which was partly perhaps a success on her side. Her proposal struck him as untimely and thoroughly tiresome, and his first reaction to it was almost cynical. In a case like he imagined Nick’s to be the proximity of storehouses of spiritual force was just as likely to provoke some new outrage as to effect a cure. Spiritual power was indeed like electricity in that it was thoroughly dangerous. It could perform miracles of good: it could also bring about destruction. Michael feared that Nick at Imber would make trouble for others and win no good for himself. Also he simply did not want Nick at Imber.

However he said none of this to Catherine, but indicated that he would think the matter over and consult the Abbess and the rest of the community. Catherine then said that she had already talked the whole matter over with the Abbess who was thoroughly in favour of the plan. Michael was surprised at this, and ran straight away across to the Abbey: but this turned out to be a time when the great lady for reasons of her own would not grant him an audience. She said if he wrote to her she would answer the letter. By now distracted, Michael wrote several letters which he tore up, and finally sent a brief note which assumed that the Abbess knew the relevant facts and asked her for a judgement. She replied with a sort of feminine vagueness that almost drove Michael into a frenzy that she was in favour of the plan on the whole, but that since he knew, and must know, far more than she did about how it was all likely to work out she must leave the final choice to his wisdom, in which she had, she said, a perfect confidence. Michael stormed about the house and finally called on James. To James, who was never curious or suspicious and who always seemed to believe that he was being told the whole truth, he vaguely indicated that he had known young Fawley as a boy but had lost sight of him since. He described what he knew of his character and career. What did James think?

With a vehemence which did Michael’s heart good James said he thought the idea perfectly silly. They had no room, at present, for a passenger of that sort. No one would have time to play nursemaid to him. Perhaps they could give poor old Catherine some help in lodging her deplorable brother (of whom James said he’d heard one or two nasty rumours) in some other place where he’d be out of harm’s way; but, heaven preserve us, not here! James was a little shaken to hear that the Abbess was, with qualifications, in favour of the plan, but he appealed to Michael to hold out soberly against her. After all, he knew the exact situation of the community and she, as she admitted, did not. It was a mark of James’s more robust and unemotional faith that he was not one of those who regarded the Abbess’s word as necessarily being law. Michael promised he would hold out and went to bed feeling much better. He dreamt of Nick.

The next day everything seemed different. As soon as Michael awoke he knew with absolute certainty that he could not go to Catherine and tell her that he would not receive her brother. Supposing in a month or a year Nick were to do something really outrageous, suppose he got himself into serious trouble (no unlikely result, according to the details which Michael confidently filled in to Catherine’s picture), suppose he killed himself – how would Michael feel then? He could not deny this suppliant, and most especially because of the past. He prayed long and passionately about the matter. He became the more convinced: and with the dawning of a strange joy he apprehended in the way things had gone a certain pattern of good. Nick had been brought back to him, surely by no accident. He did not dare to imagine that he was himself to be the instrument of the boy’s salvation; but he thought it possible that he might be destined, in some humble way, to stand by, as one who has a small part in some great ceremony, while this was indeed achieved. He was after all, where Nick was concerned, to have a second chance. He could not be meant to reject it. The thing chimed in so exactly with Catherine’s departure from the world. A being of such purity, as he now in exalted mood saw her, might indeed effect the salvation of her brother, and in some way his own as well, and miraculously the redemption of the past.

This highly coloured frame of mind did not last long; yet the essence of the hope and vision which it had brought him remained with Michael and he was now as firmly determined to have Nick as before he had been not to have him. Rather disingenuously pleading the authority of the Abbess he soon brought the others round, although James remained sceptical. Catherine was asked to write to her brother. Michael could not bring himself to do so. She immediately received a reply to say that he would come.

It was a morning early in August that trembling at the knees Michael had gone down to the station to meet Nick Fawley. He had parted from a boy; he was to meet a man. Yet, as happens at such times, the interval was in imagination annihilated, and what chiefly worked in Michael’s mind as he drove to the station was his last glimpse of Nick, it seemed yesterday, white as a sheet at school prayers, avoid- “ ing his eye. Catherine, who had visited London the previous weekend to see her brother, had tactfully indicated that she was, that morning, unavoidably busy. No one else was much interested in Nidk at the moment; the market garden, producing its first summer crop, was far too absorbing. So Michael, amazed that his agitation had apparently escaped notice, slipped away and stood, far too early, nervously smoothing down his collar, upon the station platform. He had by an effort prevented himself from looking in the mirror in the waiting-room. He reflected with surprise that it was many years since he had had so sharp a consciousness of his external appearance.

By the time the train arrived Michael could hardly stand up. He saw several ladies get off, and then saw a man at the far end of the platform carrying a rifle and a shot-gun and accompanied by a dog. It was Nick all right. He seemed far away yet very clear, like a figure in a dream. Michael set his feet in motion to walk towards him. He had temporarily forgotten about the dog, though Catherine had warned him, and he felt an immediate irritation as at the presence of a third. Nick, not sustaining his glance as he approached, was leaning down to fuss with the animal. He straightened up as, Michael came close to him, a nervous smile breaking involuntarily upon both their faces. Michael had wondered if he would be able not to embrace him. But it was quite easy. They shook hands, babbling trivial remarks, although they could not conceal their emotion. The dog provided a useful diversion. Michael took Nick’s large suitcase from him, which Nick in a dazed way surrendered, keeping the firearms slung over his shoulder. They walked out to the car. Michael drove back to Imber in a state resembling drunkenness. He was unable later to recall the journey with any clarity. The conversation was not so much difficult as mad. They talked constantly but completely at random, sometimes both starting up a sentence at the same time. Michael made imbecile remarks about dogs. Nick asked banal questions about the countryside. On two occasions he asked the same question twice. The car swept onto the gravel in front of the house.

Catherine was waiting. The brother and sister greeted each other in a muted and deliberately casual way. Margaret Strafford bustled up. Nick was taken inside. Michael went back to his office. Once alone he put his head down upon the desk and found himself shuddering: he did not know whether he was glad or sorry. Nick had seemed at first dreadfully changed. His face, once so pale, was now reddish and fatter; his hair was receding over the tall brow and grew untidily down his neck, curling vigorously, but looking greasy rather than glossy. The heavy eyelids had thickened in layers, the eyes were vaguer, less full of power. He was a handsome man, but heavy, florid, almost coarse.

Michael quickly pulled himself together and turned back to his work. The encounter had been, on the whole, less upsetting than he had expected; and he was rather relieved than otherwise to find Nick now so devoid of the taut pallid charm which he had possessed as a boy and which dreamily survived in his sister. Michael had already resolved to see as little as possible of Nick during his sojourn at Imber; he did not feel, now that the first shock was over, that this would be difficult. Nick was, at his own urgent request, given a room outside the main house. Michael did not like leaving him there alone, but it was not immediately easy to find him a companion. Catherine had not proposed herself, Patchway had refused, the Straffords were impossible as there was only a small room available, an egotistical delicacy prevented Michael from asking Peter (who knew nothing of the story), and James had taken an instant dislike to the newcomer. So it was that until the arrival of Toby Gashe three weeks later Nick was by himself in the Lodge.

In so far as Michael had had serious hopes that any individual other than Catherine might be of any genuine help to Nick at Imber he had thought that James Tayper Pace was the man. He was disappointed in James’s reaction. James showed himself, where Nick was concerned, stiffly conventional. “He looks to me like a pansy,” he said to Michael, soon after Nick’s arrival. “I didn’t like to say so before, but I had heard it about him in London. They’re always troublemakers, believe me. I’ve seen plenty of that type. There’s something destructive in them, a sort of grudge against society. Give a dog a bad name, and all that, but we may as well be prepared! Who’d believe that thing was twin to dear Catherine?”

Michael demurring a little, wondered what James would think if he knew a bit more about his interlocutor, and marvelled once again at this curious naivety in one who had, after all, seen plenty of the world. James was certainly no connoisseur in evil; a result perhaps of a considerable pureness of heart. Could one recognize refinements of good if one did not recognize refinements of evil, Michael asked himself. He concluded provisionally that what was required of one was to be good, a task which usually presented a singularly simple though steep face, and not to recognize its refinements. There he left the matter, having no time for philosophical speculation.

As the days went by Nick’s presence, somehow, began to seem to Michael less remarkable. Nick was given the nominal post of engineer, and did in fact occasionally attend to the cars and cast an eye over the electricity plant and the water pump. He seemed to know a lot about engines of all kinds. But most of the time he just mooched about, accompanied by Murphy, and until asked to stop, shot down with remarkable accuracy crows, pigeons, and squirrels, whose corpses he left lying where they fell. Michael watched him from afar, but felt no urge to see more of him. Half guiltily he began to see Nick a little through the eyes of James and Mark Strafford; and once in conversation he found himself calling him a “poor fish”. Nick on his side seemed passive, almost comatose at times. Once or twice, when opportunity offered, he seemed to want to talk to Michael, but Michael did not encourage him and nothing came of these half explicit gestures. Michael felt curious about Nick’s relations with his sister, but this curiosity remained unsatisfied. They seemed to meet infrequently, and Catherine continued with her work, seemingly unobsessed by the proximity of her eccentric brother. As for the lines of force from the power house across the water, in which Catherine had had so much faith, they were apparently impinging without effect upon the thicker hide of her twin.

Michael did not altogether give up hope that Imber might work some miracle. But he could not help seeing, after a while with some sadness, and some relief, that Nick was neither inspired nor dangerous but simply bored; and it was hard to see how he could escape boredom on a scene in which he chose to participate so little. Michael, who was exceedingly busy with other things, did not at present see how he could be further “drawn in”, while, congratulating himself on his good sense, he avoidedtète-à-têtes with his former friend. Nick lingered on, looking a little healthier, a little browner, a little thinner. Doubtless he was drinking less, though his seclusion in the Lodge, chosen perhaps with just that in mind, made it difficult to know. Michael guessed that he would hang around, taking Imber as a cheap rest cure, until Catherine had gone into the Abbey. Then he would return to London and carry on as before. It looked as if the strange tale would have, after all, a rather dull and undistinguished ending.