Of New Things — Opening Chapters

The news from Petrograd reached me on a grey afternoon in the November of 1917, carried up the path by a boy who did not understand a word of what he was bringing. I was at the window when I saw him come, the newspaper folded under his arm against the wet; and even at that distance I could see the hunger on him. The plain, settled hunger that no child should have to carry, and that half the children of Europe were carrying by that winter. The fall of a government was nothing to him beside the coin it had earned him, and what the coin would buy; and he was right. And I remember thinking, before I had read a line, that the world had the look of a thing about to be told.

I should say where I was, for it shaped the silence the news fell into. I have lived out the long tail of my life near the top of a mountain, a half-day above the last place the railway troubles to stop: a few grey houses, a few grey people, and a church whose tower has stood dumb since the second winter of the war, when they came and took the bells, and the pipes out of the little organ after them, and carried the whole singing voice of the place down the valley on a cart, to be melted into shell-casings and posted back over the mountains as a louder sort of music. So there was no bell to mark that grey afternoon, nor the ending of the world the boy had folded under his arm. There was only the one timepiece the war had overlooked — a gold hunter watch on the sill beside me, which I wind each night with the last of my attention, as I have wound it through all the years I ought to have let it stop. I will come, in time, to where I got it. It has always kept far better time than I have.

The Provisional Government was fallen. The men called Bolsheviks had taken the palaces and the telegraph and the banks, and there was a photograph, very poor, of a crowd before a gate, and a name I had heard spoken in low rooms many years before now set in type as though it were the name of a government. I read it twice. Then I sat for a long while and did not read anything at all.

I am an old man and I have learned to distrust my own composure, which has carried me past a great many things it ought to have stopped me at. But I will say honestly that what I felt, sitting there with the rain beginning, was not surprise. It was something nearer to the grim ease of a man who has long predicted a death and is at last spared the labour of expecting it. There, I thought. There it is. We were right to be afraid of it. I took a certain comfort in the thought, the way one does in being proved correct, and it was some hours before it occurred to me to wonder whether being correct and being right were the same thing, and longer still — years, if I am truthful — before I understood that in my case, they had been opposites all along.

For the revolution in Russia was the answer to a question, and the question was an old one of mine. Nearly thirty years before, two of us had been sent to look into the condition of the labouring poor and to say what ought to be done for them, and we had quarrelled about the answer until the quarrel broke one of us, and now history had simply reached down and answered it for everyone, in the one currency I had always insisted it would never be paid in. I had been so sure of that. I had built whole arguments upon it. I had been, in the way of careful men, completely wrong, and I had been wrong with such patience and such good manners that no one, least of all myself, had ever quite caught me at it.

Damian would have known what to make of the boy and his newspaper. Damian always knew what to make of things; it was the quality in him I had found most insufferable and now would have given a great deal to sit across a table from once more. But Damian was twenty years dead, and his last letter was in a trunk in the room above my head, where I had put it when it came to me and where I had left it, unopened, telling myself each year that I had not the time, when what I had not was the courage.

That night I went up and stood over the trunk with a lamp, as a man stands over a grave he has been avoiding, and I thought: the thing we feared has come, and there is no longer any use pretending I do not know whose fault some part of it was. So I knelt down, which my knees do not thank me for, and I lifted the lid, and the cold smell of mottled vellum and all those years came up at me, and on the very top, in his impossible upright hand, was a letter with my name on it.

I have decided to begin before that letter. A man should not read the verdict before he has heard the case — not even his own.

It was February, in the year 1889, and I have come to believe that the weather of that month was the first plain word of warning the age was given, if any of us had known how to read it; and that I, who was there, in the thick of it, with the sign coming down out of the sky onto my own shoulders, read it no better than the rest.

I had been three days in the city on an errand of no importance when the great storm came down. I have forgotten now what that errand was, which tells you how little it weighed against what I found there. On the tenth and the eleventh of that month the snow fell in earnest, the worst that the oldest people in those streets could call to mind: a foot of snow and more, driven flat by a gale out of the north that came off the sea like a thing with a grievance, so that the snow did not fall so much as fly, sideways, hour upon hour, and heaped itself against every north wall in drifts a child could be lost in. And it did not stop with the two days. It snowed on sixteen separate days that month; there was sleet between that froze where it struck; and on one of those nights I heard myself, and did not believe my ears until I saw the flash blue on the snow through the shutter. Thunder and lightning, in the middle of a blizzard, which is a thing against nature, a thing the old books set down as a portent and the old women crossed themselves at, and which I, a modern and educated man, told myself was merely an unusual conjunction of the air. It was a portent. I know that now. The heavens were disordered over that city for a reason, and the reason was that a far greater disorder was coming up underneath, in the streets and the years, and the sky had the decency to say so, and we had not the wit to listen. And the great frost that came in behind the storm stopped the river, and the want came up out of the courts like a tide finding its level.

There was unrest in the air too. The summer before, the match-girls had turned out in Bow at the great factory there and stood up for themselves and won, and the news of it had gone through every poor street in the kingdom like a current.

And the work had stopped. All of it. The whole vast machine of the place brought to a stand, not by any strike, for there was no strike that bitter month, but by the cold itself. The river was choked with ice; the great docks were locked solid, the ships held fast in them as if set in grey glass, their rigging furred white and not a man aloft; the cranes stood still along the wharves under their caps of snow, and the lighters sat idle on the frozen mud, and the brown water, where it moved at all between the floes, moved dark and slow and gave off a cold you could feel from the bank. And the men who should have been at the work stood about in the white cold with their hands pushed up under their arms and nothing at all to do with the long day but feel it pass. Thousands of them, frozen out of their week’s bread by a fortnight of weather, for in that trade a man is paid by the day, and the day must be worked, and you cannot unload a ship that is set in ice.

And I remember thinking, as I looked at those silent idle men, that a turned-out man at least has chosen his idleness and has somewhere to put his anger, whereas these had been turned out by February, and could be angry at nothing but the sky.

One does not, at first, see hunger. One sees its furniture: the pawnbroker with his window full to the back wall, the shutters down on the corner shop because there was nothing left to sell on credit and no credit left to give, the children too quiet in the doorways and too still for the cold. I had been raised, though I did not speak of it, in such a street, and I knew that a quiet child is a frightening thing, and I confess my first clear thought that afternoon was not pity but a kind of recoil, an old animal wish to be back among clean linen and reasonable men. I have noticed that I am honest about small failings in order to be spared the larger ones. The reader will keep his own account.

A woman called me in. She had seen the collar and taken me, correctly, for a priest, and she wanted what a priest is for. The room was below the street and the one window gave on a wall, and there had been no fire in the grate for days, and on the bed, which was a door laid across two boxes, there was a child of perhaps two years who had stopped crying some hours before. The mother told me this as a hopeful sign. He has stopped fretting, she said, he is easier now. I did not correct her. I have wondered since whether that was mercy or cowardice; at the time I told myself it was mercy, and I told it so very smoothly, which I now know to be the sound a lie makes when it is well oiled.

I did what I am ordained to do. I anointed him while he was still warm enough to be anointed — though that cold room would not leave him warm for long. And I said the words, and the words were beautiful, as they always are, and they fed no one and they warmed no one. When it was over the mother thanked me with a courtesy that has never since left me, the dreadful good manners of the very poor, and I went up the steps into the frost with the oils still on my thumb.

I came up into a daylight made indecent by the snow, that terrible clean white laid down over everything as though to make a fair copy of a foul page, and into the strange hush that lies over a working town when its work has stopped. The chimneys I had never once in my life seen idle stood clean and cold against a white sky, every one of them. That sight I knew. That sight was the one piece of it my own childhood had taught me to read, and it frightened me more than the ice did.

One sight from those streets has outlived in me every argument I afterwards built to bury it. A carthorse came down on the ice at the head of the street, all at once, its legs gone from under it. The animal could not rise, having broken something in the fall, and it screamed; and the scream of a horse is a thing I had not heard before and have heard since only in my sleep. The people came out to it: up out of the cellars and the doorways, the quiet children and the straight-backed women and the idle men, and they stood about it in the snow. And not one of them looked away from the horror of it. They looked on, steadily, with a great and terrible patience. And what stood in their faces was not horror at all but hunger: the plain reckoning of how much there was on it, and how soon the screaming would stop and let them begin. They could not afford to be appalled. I could, and was; and I have wondered since whether that horror of mine was a finer thing than their hunger, or only a better-fed one.

But it is the women I have never been able to set down. The men had their cold corner-meetings and their long bitter standing-about; and I do not begrudge it them. It was the women who kept the thing from going over into plain famine. They were at the pawnshop’s door before it was light, in the snow, with the wedding ring and the good blanket and the husband’s one coat; they were in the relief queues with a tin in the one hand and a child on the hip and their own backs kept straight by something I had no name for; they made a loaf and a few coppers run across a week and six mouths by an arithmetic no counting-house could have performed. I saw a girl no older than those match-girls of the summer before divide a single cold herring into five portions with the gravity of a priest at the altar, and I will tell you plainly that I looked away from it, because there was something in the sight I did not wish to be made to feel.

That, I have come to think, is the whole of my history in a single line: that I was a man who looked away from the thing he did not want to feel, and found, every time, a sound reason at his elbow for not having looked.

When I made myself attend the street again it had filled, and there were police across the far end of it in a strong line, fetched up in numbers out of all proportion to anything that was happening. For the authorities had taken fright that winter, and had given their orders, and the orders were plain: that the hungry might queue, and might shiver, and might go home, but that they were on no account to be let gather, anywhere, in any number large enough to warm itself on its own anger. So the constables stood thick at every place where a crowd might thicken, and moved the men on, and broke the knots of them up before they could become a body; and between the police and the cold the street was kept, that day, just on the right side of a thing with no name yet. Nothing came of it. But I remember standing at the top of the cellar steps and feeling, God forgive me, that the danger gathering in the street and the small death I had left below me were two faces of a single disorder; that what these people needed, before bread, before warmth, before anything, was order. That if only the world could be persuaded to hold still and keep its stations, the child would not have died. It did not occur to me, then or for a long while after, that the order I hungered for and the cold mute fury the police were drawn up against were the very same arrangement seen from above and from below; that the system which could idle a thousand men with a fortnight’s weather and let a child go out like a candle in a cellar was the very order I was aching to see the world hold fast; and that I had just given the last rites to one of its dividends.

I learned afterward that reports of such troubles from that city, and a dozen like it across England and across Europe all through that murderous winter, had been reaching Rome. And that an old man there had been reading them, and had ceased to trust the men whose business it was to tell him what they meant.

It was the following week that his letter found me; and the snow was still coming down when it came.

I read two things that morning, and I have never been able to think of one without the other.

The first was in the newspaper, and I read it standing at the refectory sideboard with my tea going cold: in a city I had never visited, a man had walked up to a magistrate leaving his carriage and shot him through the throat, and then, before the crowd could lay hands upon him, had shouted some sentence about the people and the future and turned the second barrel on himself. The report dwelt, as such reports did, on the magistrate’s young children, and on the calmness of the murderer, which the writer found more dreadful than any frenzy, and in this the writer was correct. I did not know, reading it, that I was at the near edge of a long season of such mornings — that within a dozen years a President of the French, an Empress, a King of Italy, a President across the ocean, would each be cut down by quiet men who had read the same pamphlets and reached the same arithmetic. I knew only that my hand was not quite steady on the cup, and that the steadiness I wanted, more than I wanted almost anything, was the steadiness of a world that would keep its order and not come for us in the street.

I have set that feeling down plainly because it is the hinge of everything that followed, and because I want it understood that it was not a wicked feeling. Any man with a magistrate’s children before his eyes would have felt it. It is only that some of us went on to build our whole lives upon a fear, and called the building wisdom.

The second was on the salver in the hall, and I had walked past the letter twice — once to the chapel and once back again — before I truly saw it, which is itself a kind of parable; for the great turnings of a life seldom trouble to announce themselves, and a man may pass his own summons on a side-table on his way to do something he imagines more pressing.

It was not like other letters. The paper was heavy and faintly cream, of the sort that is made to be kept rather than read and discarded, and it was sealed — properly sealed, in an age that had all but forgotten how — with wax the colour of dried blood, and pressed into the wax was a device I knew at once to matter: the broad-brimmed hat and its descending ranks of tassels, the shield of some prince of the Church. One does not, in the ordinary way of things, receive such a seal. Such seals go to bishops and to chancelleries and to the governments of nations. I stood in the cold of the hall and turned it over and over, and I am ashamed to record — but I will record it, since the whole purpose of this account is to stop sparing myself — that my heart had begun to go like a schoolboy’s before I had broken a single thread of the wax.

I broke it slowly. I have opened a great many seals, upon documents that decided a great deal more, and never once with that exact catch in my throat, that sense of a door swinging open in a wall where I had not known a door to be. The letter within was short, and courteous to the point of coldness, and it summoned me — there is no softer word for it — to present myself in Rome, at my earliest convenience and with all discretion, that the Holy Father might consult me upon a grave matter touching the present unrest. I read it through, and then I read it again, and at the foot of it was a signature I knew, as every priest in Europe knew it, for the hand of the Cardinal Crescenzi, a man spoken of in the same breath as the Pope. I read it a third time chiefly to go on holding it.

And here is the thing I have never been able to forgive, though it is so small: that the newspaper still lay open on the sideboard, not six feet away, with its murdered magistrate and its motherless children, and that I had already, in the space of one cup of tea, set it aside in my mind as a thing belonging to the world — while this, this single sheet of cream paper that concerned no one on earth but me, had set my blood running as the death of a man and the cracking of a continent had not. A magistrate lay dead and an age was coming apart at its seams, and I stood in a hallway transfigured with private joy because Rome had troubled to write down my name. I have met that man a great many times since, in mirrors and in others, and I have never managed to like him.

Nor, I think, would I have felt it so keenly had I not begun where I began, but I will come to where I began, in its place, and sooner than I should like.

What I will say now is what I believed the letter to mean, because I was so completely wrong, and because being wrong about it from the very first hour is the truest measure of the man I then was. With the newspaper open beside it, I read the word unrest, and I understood, or believed I understood, the whole of it: that Rome was frightened, as we were all frightened; that the Church meant at last to set its face against the dynamiters and the strikers and the levelling tide; and that I was being called to help it do so. I was, I thought, being summoned to the work of order.

It did not cross my mind, and it would not cross my mind for the better part of two years, that the old man in Rome might have wanted something else entirely; and by the time it did, the cost had been paid in a coin I could not redeem. That he had grown weary of being told what the unrest meant by the very men who profited from misreading it, and was casting about, in the last of his strength, for someone who would simply go and look.

He should not have chosen me to look. But that is to run ahead again. I packed within the day.

I had known Rome before — what Dominican has not? I had sweated through summers at our house on the Aventine and argued theology in rooms older than England. But I had known the city, not this; and a man may spend his whole life on a mountain’s lower slopes without once being summoned to its summit.

For that is how it felt to be brought, with a letter and a quiet word, across the invisible border into the Pope’s own country. There was no wall a traveller could point to, and yet one crossed it as plainly as one crosses a frontier; out of the loud, profane, tram-clanging Rome of the Italians, the Rome that had stolen a kingdom not twenty years before, and into the hush of the place that kingdom had been stolen from. The Holy Father had not set foot beyond these gates since the soldiers came in ’seventy; he called himself a prisoner, and the whole vast palace had the air of a great house in mourning that has decided to wear its mourning as magnificence. I have never been anywhere so beautiful, or so sad, or so watchful.

St Peter’s I had seen. One is never ready for it; the dome floats free of its own weight and the colonnade reaches out its two stone arms as though to gather you in or to hold you off, and I could never decide which. But it was the going-in that I remember, past the Swiss at the bronze doors, those absurd and wonderful men in their slashed and parti-coloured costume of four centuries ago, standing with their halberds as if the Renaissance had been told to wait at this threshold and had obediently done so. A boy from where I came from does not pass armed men in cloth-of-gold without his heart performing certain undignified movements. I let it perform them. I have always been honest, at least, about my appetites; it is my virtues I have had to invent.

Within, the great machine. Antechamber gave onto antechamber, each with its violet-sashed monsignore at a writing-table, each with its little crowd of waiting men in black and purple and, here and there, the terrible quiet scarlet of a cardinal passing through. Latin everywhere, and Italian under the Latin, and under the Italian a third language that was spoken by no tongue at all; the language of who was rising and who was finished, who had the Secretary of State’s ear and who had lost it, which congregation was at war with which, whose nephew had got the vacant see. I had half-hoped, coming up, that nearer the summit the air might be cleaner than I had found it lower down; it was not. There was prayer in it (there is always prayer in it), but it ran, as a city runs, on gossip and grievance and the buying and selling of small advantages; and I confess — here is another appetite — that I felt at once horribly at home. I read such rooms quickly. I had been reading rooms like them, in their poorer forms, since I was a child deciding which man on a corner might be coaxed out of a halfpenny.

And I was being read in turn. I had not been an hour in those corridors before I understood that I was a small sensation. That word had gone before me that two religious, a Preacher and a Friar Minor, had been called to the Holy Father privately, no one knew for what, and that the not-knowing was driving the place to a soft frenzy of conjecture. Men I had never met found reasons to fall into step beside me. They were charming. They were unbearably charming. Every one of them was trying, with the delicacy of a pickpocket, to discover what I was for. I told them nothing, chiefly because I did not yet know it; but I let them believe I was being discreet, which is a cheaper thing than discretion and feels exactly the same from the outside.

It was into the smallest and stillest of those antechambers, at last, that they brought me to wait.

It was in Rome, and not before, that I learned I was not to be alone in the business; that the Holy Father, in his wisdom or his cunning, had set a second man to the same task, and that the second man was a Franciscan.

I should explain, for any reader who has never lived inside the Church, that this was not a small thing to be told. We were of the one faith and the one obedience, the friar and I, but we were of different orders, and the orders are families, and families keep their tempers warm down the centuries. I was a Preacher, a Dominican, of the order that had given the Church its Thomas and its Albert, the order of the schools and the disputation and the long cold defence of doctrine; the order, our rivals liked to say, of the dry mind, and I will not pretend the libel had no purchase on me. He was of the other great family, the Friars Minor, the sons of the little poor man of Assisi. And here I must set down honestly the picture that rose in me when I heard the word Franciscan, because it was a contemptible picture and it was mine.

I expected a sentimentalist. I expected one of those friars of the popular sort, all heart and no head, who preach to the crowds and weep over the poor and mistrust a book as their founder had mistrusted it; a man of feeling, where I prided myself on being a man of thought; earnest, tender, easily moved and therefore, I assumed, easily managed. I had spent my whole life learning to distrust the easily moved. They seemed to me to mistake their own warmth for virtue, and to leave the hard thinking to colder men like myself who might then, conveniently, be blamed for having done it.

And when I learned, as I very shortly did, that this particular friar had been born to a great deal of money, that he was a gentleman’s son who had signed away an inheritance to put on a rope and a patched grey habit, my contempt did not lessen but only changed its colour. A poor man’s poverty I could honour; I had clawed my own way out of one, and I knew to the ounce what it weighed. But a rich man who chose poverty seemed to me then a kind of actor, a tourist in the country where I had been born, playing at a destitution he might end at any hour with a letter to his bankers. The pose of it offended me. The waste of it offended me more.

I did not yet understand that this was the most revealing thought I had ever had, or that it was about myself and not about him at all. I have his letters now, still in that trunk, and I know at last what manner of man it was that I went down to meet that morning in a cold Roman antechamber. I knew nothing of it then.

I went to meet a fool. I was, of the two of us, the only fool in Rome.

He rose when I came in. Too quickly, I thought, with the eagerness of a man who has not learned to keep his seat before a stranger until the measure of him is taken. He was younger than I had pictured, or carried his years more lightly. The grey habit was genuinely old; it had been mended at the elbow by a hand that was not a tailor’s, and the cord at his waist had been knotted and worn and reknotted until it was a kind of map of years. I had come prepared to despise a rich man’s costume of poverty, and I confess it cost me something to see that the costume, at least, was real.

He put out his hand and said my name. My name, which no one had given him, and said that he was glad, truly glad, that it was to be the two of us. And the dreadful thing, the thing I had no defence against, was that he meant it.

And then — I have no better way to write it — something turned over in me, far down, like an old stone shifting at the bottom of a well, and for the length of one breath I was certain that I had seen his face before, in a place I could not name and did not wish to. It was gone before I could close my hand on it. I laid it to the strangeness of the day. I was forever laying things down; I kept a whole cellar of things I had laid down and not gone back for, and this went on to the heap with the rest, and I thought no more of it.

We had not got through a dozen words before the door opened and the Cardinal came in, scarlet and unhurried, and the temperature of the room changed, as it does when power enters and the lesser men present begin, without intending it, to arrange themselves. He was all silk and consideration. Crescenzi, whose hand I had last seen at the foot of my summons, a man whose smile arrived a half-second ahead of his eyes; and he contrived to make us feel, without once descending to say it, that the matter before us was of the gravest delicacy; that the Holy Father’s wishes in it were particular and that older and wiser heads than ours already held views upon what an honest inquiry ought, in the end, to find.

I knew that music. I had been hearing some arrangement of it the whole of my life, in workhouse boardrooms and chapter meetings, the gentle voice that tells you in advance the conclusion to which a man of sense will naturally come. I knew how to incline my head to it and keep my own counsel, and I did.

But the friar did a thing I should not have dared. He asked the Cardinal, plainly, as a child asks, what it was that the Holy Father wished to know. And when the Cardinal returned him a courtier’s answer, three sentences long and hollow as a drum, the friar said nothing. Only waited, and then asked it again, in the very same words, as though he had not heard; which of course he had. I was mortified for him. I understand now that he was the one honest man in that gilded little room, and that the Cardinal understood it too, and did not care for it, and marked him down for it then and there.

I would remember that, afterward. I would remember a great many things afterward, when remembering could no longer be of use to anyone.

Then a bell sounded somewhere beyond the wall, and a door I had taken for part of the panelling was drawn open from within by a chamberlain in black, who looked once to the Cardinal and then, with the smallest inclination imaginable, did not. He addressed himself to the two of us. His Holiness, he said, would receive us. Alone.

I have watched a great many faces try to hold themselves still, my own among them, and I have seldom seen one fail so completely in so small a compass. The Cardinal’s smile stayed precisely where it was; it was everything beneath the smile that gave way. He began to observe, reasonably, with the whole weight of precedent behind him, that it was not customary, that one in his office attended His Holiness in a matter of such gravity and that there were forms to be considered. And the chamberlain, who outranked him in nothing on this earth save the present wish of one dying man, simply waited, exactly as the friar had waited upon the Cardinal not ten minutes before, until the sentence died of its own accord. The Holy Father had been precise, he said. Alone.

So we left him there. I looked back once as we passed through, and the last I saw of the Cardinal in that beautiful room was a man of very great importance standing quite still in the middle of it, shut out of the one door in Rome he had supposed would always open to him, and beginning to be afraid.

It was only later, turning it over, that I understood what I had been shown. The smooth man who had told us, an hour before, with such fine authority, what the Holy Father ‘really’ desired of us, had not had the smallest idea what the Holy Father desired. He had never been told. His steer had been the court’s own wishful presumption got up in the costume of knowledge; and the old man behind that hidden door had locked his own secretary out of his own mind as deliberately as he had locked out the Kingdom of Italy. I should have found it terrible, that a Pope could trust no one living. Instead, I found it flattering. For if he trusted no one, and had nonetheless sent for me, then what, I asked myself, going in, must I be?

The door closed behind us, and the cold of the inner room came up to meet us, and I put the Cardinal out of my thoughts, where he declined to remain.

I have said that I thought no more of the friar’s face, that I laid it on the heap with the other things I would not look at, and went in. That was true of the man I then was; but I had seen that face before, and I know now where. So before I tell you what passed in that cold room, I must take you to the place it came from, for the one will not stand without the other. It is the afternoon I first met the woman who made me, and first crossed the path of the man who would one day rise to greet me in a Roman antechamber, though neither of us knew the other, then. I went into that hour a thief who belonged to no one, and came out of it with the whole shape of my life decided. We are never told when the hinge of us is turning. It turns in silence, and we hear the click of it only long afterward, in rooms like this one, with the lamp burned low.

I was seven or eight and I knew that court as a rat knows its own wall. I knew which ginnels ran clean through and which ended in a midden; I knew the loose board over the corner cellar; I knew, above everything, the smell of money coming into a place that owned none, for money has a smell in a slum and the smell of it is soap. That afternoon the wind off the court came to me soaped and strange, and I went towards it the way I went towards all things in those days; low, and sideways, and certain.

There were three of them, and they were quality, or near enough. A woman of the place was leading them; and a foreign gentleman, easy in an expensive coat, his English so exact it was almost a foreign thing in itself; and a boy of my own age, got up like something out of a shop window. I crept up under their talk as I crept up under everything, and the talk, as I came in beneath it, was the strangest duet, and I have spent the rest of my life understanding what I half-heard in that reeking court with my fingers already beginning to itch.

The boy was speaking of God. He said carefully, piously, and with a real and useless kindness: that it was a hard sight, but that surely God must love the poor very greatly, to entrust them with so heavy a cross; and that, borne with patience, it would be repaid the richer in the hereafter.

And the gentleman answered him, not unkindly, but flatly, as a man reads out a sum. He said there was no God in it anywhere. He said this was not Providence but profit; that the men who had raised these courts had killed the people in them as surely as with a knife, only slowly, and at a distance, and at a handsome return. He had a name for it, a cold two-word name I would not hear again for thirty years and would never, after that, get out of my head: social murder. He said there was not a clean shirt in all Manchester that had not a court like this one stitched into its hem. He said that what men had built, men could pull down, and that the boy’s good God had been invented chiefly to keep the poor lying patient until they died.

Two answers, crossing in the bad air over my head; the boy’s heaven and the gentleman’s account-book. I believed neither. I had an urchin’s theology of my own, and it lived in my fingers.

For while the boy spoke of the reward hereafter, I drew mine on the spot. His purse sat in the side of his coat, where only a fool or a stranger keeps a purse, and it was in my fist and gone before he reached the word patience.

And then he felt it. Quicker, that boy, than his own sermon and turned, and our eyes met for the first time, and he cried out; and I ran.

I should have lost them in three streets. I knew the ground and they did not. But the foreigner was fast, faster than a gentleman has any business being, and he did not chase me. He cut. He read that warren like a printed map and sent the boy one way round while he took the other, and twice I came tearing round a corner I had meant to vanish at and found the boy planted there ahead of me, white-faced and game and blocking it, and had to break back; and so they worked me, the man and the boy between them. Herding me in one long foul loop through my own kingdom, until — winded, cornered, the purse gone heavy as a stone in my hand — I broke back out into the very court I had started from. And there was the woman.

She had not moved. She stood square in the middle of that rookery with the whole patience of the slum in her face, and she saw me come, and saw what came behind me, and she knew (I understand it only now) exactly what waited for a caught thief in such a place: the boot, or the constable, or the black water. And she made up her mind in the half-second it takes a good woman to damn herself for a stranger. She lifted her arm, and she swept me in against her, and she put me under her skirts.

I had never in my life been under a woman’s skirts. I had had no mother that I could remember, and no woman had ever gathered me into anything at all, and the dark under there was warm and total, and it smelled. I will write it down, for it is the truest thing I own, and I have never told it to a living soul: it smelled of woman, and of wet wool, and old smoke, and sweat, and under all of it of something that was simply warmth, simply another body choosing to keep you; and it is that smell, God forgive me, that I have spent the whole of my life since trying to find my way back to, and calling, when I found its counterfeits, by other names — order, and safety, and Rome. I crouched in the dark of her and felt the great calm column of her not move, and heard her tell the gentleman and the boy, broad and serene as a Sunday, that there were no thieves in her court, only honest folk for the quality to come and gape at, and that they had best be getting along back to where they were wanted. The boy’s voice went on protesting a while, and then was drawn away, up and out of the court, into the clean world he had come down from; and the danger went up and out with it.

That was the afternoon Mary Burns took me up. She kept me until she died, and everything I have ever been able to do in this world started then. And the boy whose purse was still warm in my fist while she hid me, the grave, kind child who had told a stinking court that God loved the poor too well to spare them, was the friar. Was Damian. He gave away, in the end, every penny he had been born to, and put on a rope, and went to live out his life in courts no better than the one he was robbed in. And I took my reward on the spot, and never once gave it back, and became the man you are coming to know. I hid with that purse in the dark, though I have come to believe the dark it went into was hers, and not the night’s, and that I have been trying to crawl back under it ever since.

The room beyond was smaller than I had supposed the centre of the world to be, and plainer, and very cold. There was a crucifix, and a writing-table heaped with papers, and a single lamp; and at the door, when I troubled to notice him at all, a guard; a Swiss, very young, in his voluminous and paned woollens, his halberd grounded at his side and his face composed into the well-schooled nothing of a man paid to be furniture. I gave him about as much thought as I would have given the chair he stood beside. I will come back to him. I did not, then; that was rather the difficulty.

The man who had risen to meet us was the frailest I have ever seen who was not upon a deathbed. Leo, thirteenth of that name, was in his eightieth year, and he had the look of a candle burned almost to the socket that somehow continues to give light. The skin had gone to paper over the fine bones; the hands were all but transparent; and in the remains of that face there were two eyes so dark and quick and wholly present that within a moment I forgot the dying body that held them and was conscious only of being, very thoroughly, looked at.

We knelt and kissed the ring. I remember the cold of the stone against my lips, and the faint tremor in the hand, and that he let that hand rest upon my bowed head an instant longer than the rite required, as a man rests his palm on a thing he is trying to weigh in the dark. Then he bade us rise, and sit — which is not commonly done — and lowered himself back into his chair with the care of one folding something that might break.

He spoke first to the friar. And I saw that he knew him already; knew the whole of it, the given-away inheritance, the years in the cellars and the fever-wards among the poor. And there was in the way the old man looked at Damian a kind of ease that was almost hunger, the look of one who has been served wine for a very long time and is brought, at last, a cup of plain water.

To me he turned more slowly. And what he said was kindly meant, and it went through me like a blade, and I have never in the passing years got it out again. They tell me, he said, that you were born with nothing.

I said that it was true.

He nodded, as though it confirmed some hope of his, and he said: Then you will know these people as a stranger never can. You will not be deceived by them, nor for them. You will tell me what is truly there.

He was wrong. He was more wrong about me than any man has ever been, and he was wrong out of the pure goodness of his own heart, which is the most hopeless way to be wrong, for there is no arguing with it. He believed that because I had come up out of the poor, I would not lie to him about them. He did not understand. How could he, who had given his whole life away, understand a man who had spent his whole life getting out? He did not see that there is no liar about the poor so accomplished as the one who has escaped them and means, before God, never to go back.

Then he told us what he wanted, and here I must be scrupulous, and set it down as he said it and not as I have since wished he had said it.

He did not ask us to defend the Church. He did not ask us to find the strikers seditious or the dynamiters damned, though God knows the men about him asked for little else, all day, in their beautiful Latin. He was old, he said; the Church had lost her earthly kingdom within his own lifetime, and was hated now in the streets of her own city, and was afraid; and a frightened thing strikes out blindly. He was afraid. He, the Pope, said this aloud, to two obscure friars in a cold room: that the Church in her fear might strike at the wrong thing. That she would curse the cry of the poor and bless the hand that had struck them.

He had men without number, he said, to tell him what the unrest meant. And every one of them, he had come to see, told him a thing that happened to serve the teller. He wanted, once, before he died, to be told the truth by men who wanted nothing from him. And so, with the smallest smile, a smile that was the shrewdest thing in that whole shrewd ancient face, he had chosen a Preacher and a Friar Minor. Two religious who could be relied upon to agree about nothing under heaven, and meant to set us grinding against one another, and trusted that the truth might fall out from between us as a coin falls from between two stones.

Go and look, he said. Fear nothing. Flatter no one. Bring me what is there.

I have carried those four sentences ever since; I have them yet. And I did, in the event, each single thing he told me not to do, and left undone the one thing he asked of me.

He believed himself unheard. He had shut his own secretary out of that room with the whole weight of his office; the cleverest precaution of a clever and frightened old man. And he had done it so thoroughly, I think, that the doing had used up the whole of his suspicion and left none over for the boy with the halberd standing not six feet from his chair. The Holy Father, who would trust no living soul with the matter, had forgotten that furniture has ears. And I forgot it with him. We were so wholly taken up, the two of us, with the great game of who had been kept out of the room that neither of us spared a thought for who was already standing in it. Every word the old man gave us; the cry and the hand, the truth he wanted before he died, the two friars set grinding for it, was heard, and kept, and carried out again. And the smooth Cardinal we had left stranded in the antechamber would have his answer soon enough, and not from either of us. I have come to believe that the whole of what followed ran out through that one unconsidered entrance, the way a great house will burn from a single window that somebody forgot to close.

He blessed us. The thin hand shook as it moved over us. And we went out, past the Cardinal, who looked at us now with the angst of a man who has been left on the wrong side of a door, into the cold of the corridors; and the friar walked beside me without a word, and his silence was full to the brim of what had been said to us, and mine was full of nothing whatever but myself.

I have not yet told you my name, and I notice I have been putting it off, which is itself worth the setting down; for a man who is shy of his name is shy of the boy who wore it. I was not always the priest whose hand is making these marks. Before the Church gave me a saint to stand in front of, I was Tom — Tom Brennan — and the courts of Angel Meadow were the whole of my geography, and it is to Tom Brennan that this part of the story belongs, and not to me, who would have crossed a wide street to avoid him.

We lived, when we lived anywhere, in the Irish end of Manchester, in a quarter the respectable called by names I will not trouble to repeat and we called simply home, because the word was free and there was nothing else of the kind going. I will not give you the catalogue of it; the cellars a family slept in below the water-line of the street, the one privy to twenty souls, the river that was less a river than an open drain wearing a river’s name, the smoke that turned noon the colour of weak tea, the cough that everyone had and that took, in the end, everyone it had. Another man has written all that down, and written it better than I could, and I will come to him; for it happens, by one of those turns the Almighty seems to find amusing, that I have met him, and quarrelled with him, and that he was nearer to me as a boy than either of us ever knew.

But in that place, among women who were old at thirty and men who were finished at forty, there was Mary.

You have seen already how she came by me, how she swept a cornered thief in under her skirts and lied the quality out of her court to be rid of them. Why she kept me, after, when I was nothing to her and a danger besides, I never learned. I was not a winning child. I was watchful and ravenous and sharp, and the sharpness was the only thing about me worth the feeding, and she fed it. And fed me, which mattered more, on a great many evenings I have never repaid and now never can. She had no children of her own; she had a temper that could empty a court and a laugh you could hear from two courts off; and she lived, to the loud scandal of the parish, with a foreigner. A gentleman, educated, easy in his money, who came and went and was never quite accounted for, and whose name the priests declined to set in the same breath as hers. Mary cared remarkably little what the priests would and would not do. She spoke of God as of a landlord who had let the property fall to ruin and might, should He ever trouble to call, expect a few words from her on the management of it.

She got me my letters. She had barely any herself, and she got me mine, by means I did not inquire into, because she had decided that the one quick thing in the Meadow should not go to waste in it. I have built a life out of those letters. I have stood in the libraries of Rome and disputed in three languages, and every word of it was struck from the flint she put into my hand in a cellar that smelled of the river.

And she saw the thing in me that no one else had troubled to name, and she named it. I wanted out. I wanted out of the cold and the cellars and the smell of us, and — here is the marrow of it — I was ashamed, even then in years I could count on two hands if I knew the exact number, of the people I had come from; and the shame was the engine that drove me, and Mary, who was not fooled by my quickness as the good Fathers were so shortly to be fooled, saw the engine plainly. One evening she took my chin in her hard hand and turned my face up to what light there was and looked at me a long while, and she said: You’ll get out of here, Tom Brennan. And then you’ll be ashamed you ever knew us. And then you’ll be ashamed of being ashamed. And that’s the one there’s no getting out of, child, so mind it.

I thought it cruel. I was nine, or thereabouts, and I thought it the cruellest thing anyone had ever said to me. I have spent the better part of sixty years arriving at the truth of it, and Mary was right in every particular, the woman who could not sign her own name.

She died too, of the thing that killed them all. I think I was twelve, and I will not pretend I was at the end the help to her that she had been to me, for I was a child and frightened and already, God help me, half-turned to the door. The Church, which has always had a use for quick hungry boys, took me up not long after, and gave me Latin and a bed and a roof and a name that was not Tom Brennan’s; and I went up, and I went out, and I never, exactly as she had promised, went back.

I had not let myself think of her. I had trained myself off it as a man trains himself off any habit that costs more than it returns. And it unsteadies me even now, with the lamp low and the trunk waiting, that it should have been Damian’s quiet face, in a cold Roman room, that hauled her up out of the well where I had so carefully drowned her. For some buried thing in me had known that face. The boy whose purse I once carried off into the warm dark of her skirts had come back to me grown, in a patched grey habit; and at the sight of him I felt, across the span of years, the hard kind hand of a dead woman close once more beneath my chin. And I looked full upon him, and would not let myself see, and called him a stranger.

That was the cruelty of it, and the whole of my case in a single stroke: the one face in the world that might have called me home, I would not let myself see. To have seen it would have been to let her back in; and I had built the whole of my life on keeping her out.