Hadrian the Seventh · Chapter 7 (1/2)

VII

After his morning’s exertions in the way of taming and domesticating a prince of the church, Hadrian was conscious that He required a change of emotions. His thoughts went to the next thing on His list⁠—the matter of Cardinal Nefski. That would be an exceedingly interesting experience. He did not want to intrude upon grief: but He was attracted by all singular phenomena; and the pathos of the pale young prelate seemed to be quite exemplary. Once in His secular life, George Arthur Rose had been taken by a doctor to see a man who had severed his throat in an unusual manner, using a broken penknife and cutting a jagged triangle, of which the apex missed the larynx, and the base the sterno-kleido-mastoid, avoiding by a hair’s breadth carotid and jugular. The doctor wanted a diagram of the wound made for the enlightenment of the jury which was to pronounce upon attempted suicide; and George had made the sketch from the staring speechless life, noted the furniture of the room and the aspect of his model, quite untouched by the man’s sensations or the horror of the event. Hadrian approached Cardinal Nefski with similar feelings. He was curious, He was psychically apart: but, at the same time, something of subconscious sympathy in His manner elicited the desired revelation. It was a ghastly one. Nefski, Cardinal Archbishop, had rushed to a little city in Russian Poland, occupied by anarchists, for the purpose of pleading with them. He arrived at sunset. There was a college there where a hundred and twenty lads of noble birth were being educated: among them, his own youngest brother, just seventeen years old. The cardinal was seized and crucified with ropes to the fountain in the market-square. Anarchists burst into the college: stripped its inmates naked; and flung them into the street before his eyes. He absolved each one dashed from the lofty windows. Some instantly were smashed and killed: others, who fell on others, were broken and shattered, but not killed outright. All night long, Nefski remained crucified. The anarchists must have forgotten him: for they left him; and at dawn someone, whom he did not know, came and cut him down. He remembered nothing more, until he found himself paralyzed, in a wagon with two priests, en route for Prague. Then he came on to Rome, hoping to lose the phantasm which continually occupied his sight and hearing⁠—the heap in the dark night, the growing groaning heap on red stones of white young bodies and writhing limbs like maggots in cheese, the pale forms strained and curved, the flying hair, the fixed eyes, continually falling, the cut-off shrieks, the thudding bounding ooze of that falling, the interminable white writhing. It was a ghastly tale, quite unimpassionately told. The young man still was in that stupor which benignant Nature sends by the side of extreme pain. His paralysis was passing away. He could walk easily now⁠—only he saw and heard. He spoke affectionately of his murdered brother: but he did not mourn for him.

Hadrian was moved. He put all the human kindness which he had, and it was not much, into His voice and manner. He really tried to comfort the cardinal. He quoted the splendid verses of the herald in the Seven Against Thebes,

being pure in respect to the sacred rites of his country,

blameless hath he fallen, where ’tis glorious for the young to fall.

Nefski seemed grateful. The Pontiff offered to remove him from Prague; and to attach him to the Court of Rome: but he preferred to return to his archbishopric for the present, at least, he said, until this tyranny be overpast. And, anon, he asked permission to retire. The sunlight dazzled him.

During the rest of the time at Castel Gandolfo, the Pope seldom was seen. A boatman rowed Him out on Lake Albano for an hour or two in the afternoon, while He occupied Himself in pencilling corrections on manuscript. But the white figure, set in the blaze of the sunny blue water, did not escape the notice of passersby on the high road near the Riformati; and, finding Himself under observation, He returned to the seclusion of the garden. His memory flew back to the time when people used to jeer at Him for His habit of writing letters, letters which explained a great deal too much, to blind men who could not see, to deaf adders who would not hear. He chuckled at the thought that those same people would read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest, every word and every dotted i of His letters now⁠—letters which were not going to be painfully voluminously conscientiously persuasive any more: but dictatorial. He wrote sheet after sheet; and emended them: He returned to His room and burned all the rejected preliminaries; and He took a fair copy with Him to Rome on the night of the twenty-eighth of April.

Early on the morning of the thirtieth, at a secret audience in the new throne-room, Caerleon introduced five rather startled very dishevelled and travel-stained priests, five priests who had undergone a mental shock. Mr. Semphill, with a white close-cropped head and the face of a clean pink schoolboy, contrived to remind himself that he was in the presence of the most amusing man he ever had met. He bucked-up; and made his obeisance with an aplomb which was a combination of the Service, Teddy Hall, an Anglican curacy and a Pictish rectory. Mr. Sterling, a stalwart brown schoolmaster, very handsome except for a mole on his nose, hid his feelings in calm inscrutability. Mr. Whitehead, a levelheaded commonsense Saxon, golden-hearted, who never had had any wild oats for sowing, observed reticence in a matter which was beyond his comprehension. Mr. Leighton, plump, clean, curly-haired, blinked genially and waited. Mr. Carvale, a lithe intense little Gael, with the black hair and rose-white skin and the delicate lips and self-contained mien of a dreamer, looked upon his old college-acquaintance with clear eyes of burning blue. Some of the five had the remembrance of sins of omission at the back of their minds. None remembered sins of commission. All were wondering what was required of them⁠—what the devil it all meant, as Semphill secularly put it. If any of them expected allusion to the past, they must have been disappointed. Hadrian gave them no sign of recognition. It was the Supreme Pontiff Who very apostolically received them and addressed them.

“Reverend Sirs, Our will is to have such assistance in the work of Our Apostolature as the organs of sense can render to the mind, or as the experimentalist can render to the theorist. For reasons known unto Ourself, We have selected you. Believing you to be single-hearted in this one thing, namely the service of God, We call upon you to devote yourselves actually to the service of His Vicegerent. To this end, We would attach you to Our Person in a singular and intimate connection, by raising you to the cardinal-diaconate. Those of you who believe yourselves unable to do God-service better in this than in your present capacity, can depart without forfeiting Our goodwill. The conscience of each man is his own sole true light. Far be it from Us to interfere with any man’s prerogative as his own director in so grave a matter.”

The five remained standing, saying nothing. Semphill was sincerely delighted: the literary quality, the tops-i’-th’-turfy straightforwardness of the allocution gave him the keenest joy. The others felt obedience to be their plain duty: for George Arthur Rose never had been wantonly fantastic, there always had been a fundamental element of reason about his eccentricities, he never had revolved at random but always round some deliberately fixed point. And, to plain priests, the voice of the Successor of St. Peter was a call, to be answered, and obeyed.

The Pope addressed Semphill. “Your Reverency quite legitimately hoped to end your days at St. Gowff’s?”

“True⁠—(hum!)⁠—Holiness: but I may be translated elsewhere by a telegraph’s notice from my diocesan.”

“You are not yet a missionary-rector?”

“Merely a poor master-of-arts of Oxford.”

“But you have been at St. Gowff’s as long as We can remember.”

Mr. Semphill choked a chuckle. “Having a little patrimony, Holiness, I made my will in favour of the archdiocese of St. Gowff’s and Agneda; and I did not omit to mention the fact to my archbishop. I happened also to say that, in the event of my being moved from St. Gowff’s, I should be compelled to make another will: but of course I did not contemplate being moved as far as Rome.”

Hadrian turned to Mr. Sterling. “The last words, which We said to Your Reverency, were that you had cause to be ashamed of yourself.”

“One had cause, Holy Father.”

“To you, Our invitation is a means of repairing a single small defect in a praiseworthy career.”

“It shall be repaired, Holy Father.”

To the others the Pope said nothing: for He saw their clean souls.

In the Sacred Consistory, the Supreme Pontiff dictated to consistorial advocates a pontifical act, denouncing the Lord Francis Talacryn, Bishop of Caerleon, as Cardinal-presbyter of the Title of the Four Holy Crowned Ones:⁠—the Lord George Semphill as Cardinal-deacon of St. Mary-in-Broad Street:⁠—the Lord James Sterling as Cardinal-deacon of St. Nicholas-in-the-Jail-of-Tully:⁠—the Lord George Leighton as Cardinal-deacon of The Holy Angel-in-the-Fish-Market:⁠—the Lord Gerald Whitehead as Cardinal-deacon of St. George-of-the-Golden-Sail:⁠—the Lord Robert Carvale as Cardinal-deacon of St. Cosmas and St. Damian. Then the six were brought in, and sworn of the College: their heads were hatted, their fingers ringed with sapphires, their mouths were closed and opened by the Pope; and they retired in ermine and vermilion.

What their emotions were, need not be inquired. Indeed, they had little time for emotion, seeing that during the rest of the day they sat in the secret chamber, writing writing writing from Hadrian’s dictation. In the evening, Whitehead and Carvale put on their old cassocks and posted a carriage-full of letters at San Silvestro. These all were sealed with the Fisherman’s Ring; and, as they were addressed to kings, emperors, prime-ministers, editors of newspapers, and heads of various religious denominations, it was considered undesirable to trouble Prince Minimo, the pontifical postmaster, with material for gossip. Meanwhile Hadrian and Cardinal Semphill sat in the Vatican marconigraph office alone with the operators; and the Pope dictated, while the experts’ fingers expressed His words in dots and dashes in London and New York. By consequence, what His Holiness called “the five decent newspapers” came out on the first of May with an apostolic epistle, a pontifical bull, and editorial leaders thereupon.

The world found the “Epistle to All Christians” very piquant, not on account of novelty, but because of the nude vivid candour with which old and trite truths were enunciated dogmatically. Christianity, the Pope proclaimed, was a great deal more than a mere ritual service. It extended to every part of human life; and its rules must regulate Christians in all matters of principle and practice. He laid great stress on the assertion of the principle of the Personal Responsibility of the Individual. It was quite unavoidable, quite incapable of being shifted on to societies or servants. Each soul would have to render its own account to its Creator. In connection with the last doctrine, He denounced as damnable nonsense the fashionable heresy which is crystallized in the Quatrains of Edward Fitzgerald,

O Thou, Who didst with pitfall and with gin

Beset the road I was to wander in,

Thou wilt not, with predestined evil, round

Enmesh; and then impute my fall to sin.

O Thou, Who man of baser earth didst make;

And, e’en with paradise, devise the snake;⁠—

For all the sin, wherewith the face of man

Is blackened, man’s forgiveness give⁠—and take!

He described those lines as the whine of a whimpering coward: pertinently inquiring whether a human father would be blameable, who, having taught his boy to swim, should fling him into the sea that he might have the merit of fighting his own way to shore where the rope was ready at hand? He condemned all attempts at uniformity as unnatural crimes, because they insulted the Divine intelligence Which had deigned to differentiate His creatures. He declared that God’s servants were to be known by their broad minds, generous hearts, and staunch wills.

“The Church of God is not narrow, nor ‘Liberal,’ but Catholic with room for all: for ‘there are diversities of gifts.’ ”

It was the individual soul which must be saved; and it was that which was addressed in the Evangel. He considered the immense strength of the single verse,

“Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind.” Hence He would have no barrier erected between Christians of the Roman Obedience and Christians of other denominations. The following passage, containing His Own idea of His relation to other men, attracted much attention:⁠—

“It is in no man’s power to believe what he list. No man is to be blamed for reasoning in support of his own religion: for he only is accountable. ‘Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold’; and these deserve more care and love, but not cheap pity, nor insulting patronage, nor irritated persecution: for if, as has been said, a man shall follow Christ’s Law, and shall believe His Words according to his conscientious sense of their meaning, he will be a member of Christ’s Flock although he be not within the Fold. And, though We know that he understands Christ’s Words amiss, yet that is no reason for Our claiming any kind of superiority over an honest man, the purpose of whose heart and mind is to obey and to be guided by Christ. Such an one is a Christian and Our good brother, a servant of God; and, if he will have Us, We, by virtue of Our Apostolature, are his servant also.”

The conclusion of the “Epistle” contained a very striking admonition addressed to members of His Own communion, to the effect that the being Christian did not confer any title to physical or external dominion, but rather the contrary. Perhaps the peroration is worthy of quotation:⁠—

“Persuade, if ye can persuade, and if the world will permit you to persuade: but seek not to persuade. Better to live so that men will convince themselves through the contemplation of your ensample. That way only satisfaction lies. Accept, but claim not, obedience. Seek not suffering, nor avoid it: but, when it is deigned to you, most stringently conceal it and tolerate it with jubilation, remembering the words of Plato where it is written ‘Help cometh through pain and suffering, nor can we be freed from our iniquity by any other means!’ Scorn not the trite. Scorn no brother-man. Scorn no thing. Yet, if ye (being men) must scorn, then scorn the enemies of God and the King, which be the Devil and Dishonour and Death.”