Chapter XVII

In the course of the weeks that followed, Ainley took a swift turn for the better, but not before Jim had prepared and made his first confession. It had taken him some time to grasp why he should make his confession to God before a priest, and it rather took Mrs. Bligh’s breath away when he explained what finally decided him to agree to it.

‘I’ve been thinking about it,’ he said, ‘and I see it’s the same as playing cards for money, or what they call for love—if you don’t play for money you get careless like, and I daresay it’s the same confessing. Of course God listens to you, but He doesn’t bring you up short like another man.’

Jim made his preparation with an unswerving thoroughness; he spent hours over self-examination; the pain of all his sins drew slow, hot tears from his eyes—the mercy and the love of God hurt him like a physical torment. When he read ‘Our God is a consuming fire’ he knew what it meant.

He lay awake all the night before he made his confession. He wanted to be sure he had left nothing unthought of; no corner in his stained heart unready for forgiveness.

Mrs. Bligh saw him for a moment in the garden before he went to the church. Her eyes lingered on him, full of a quickened sympathy. She had all the cold but earnest tenderness of the missionary spirit for its first convert. Jim felt as if the relationship between them moved suddenly nearer.

Mrs. Bligh did not speak to him; she lifted a late white rose toward him, but she did not touch his hand. The rose was frail and had no scent, and as she gave it to him he felt as if she had given him a symbol of her own purity.

The vicar was waiting for him in the vestry. The vicar felt a little uncomfortable. Mrs. Bligh had warned him that Jim was sure to be awkward, and from the first moment Jim was awkward. He looked at the vicar; a steady, measuring look, as if he expected something from him; then plunged clumsily forward where he was told to kneel before the crucifix, and nearly upset the small desk on which it stood.

The vicar gave him the few introductory words and started him gently, as he had started many stammering and flurried people—for none of the penitents achieved the straightforward impersonality of the Catholic, which the vicar had always so greatly desired.

But once he had begun, Jim was unexpectedly straightforward. He transferred his awkwardness to the vicar.

It was a surprising confession to listen to. Jim gave a perfectly truthful account of the average young man’s heart; and average young men’s hearts are seldom communicated truthfully to their vicars.

Jim didn’t always know what was wicked and what was not, but he wanted to make sure, and he never gave himself the benefit of any doubt.

Of course most young men didn’t murder their fathers, but that was an accident. Jim made no bones about it; nor that he had wished to murder Ainley, and very nearly succeeded.

All his sins, potential and actual, had got to come out; the priest’s eyes, as far as Jim was concerned, weren’t any worse than God’s.

Unfortunately they were a great deal worse. God has made sinners and has presumably to put up with them. The Rev. Anthony Brown had done nothing of the kind, and he had never had, in any serious sense, to put up with sinners, when made.

He was torn between the knowledge that what he was being told was under the seal of confession, so that he couldn’t warn anybody, and the fear that a person so tempted as Jim might become dangerous if he went about in an unwarned world.

He was troubled, too, as to whether he ought to give so practised a sinner absolution. Jim had no doubt about the matter.

‘I’m sorry all right,’ he pointed out to the vicar, who expressed his doubt upon the subject. ‘What more do you want? I’ve come here for it, haven’t I?’

To Jim’s mind the whole thing was perfectly simple. If you were sorry and confessed, you were forgiven. The Bible and the prayer-book both plainly said so, and would have been silly if they hadn’t.

He didn’t see why the vicar should shilly-shally; but the vicar had shilly-shallied all his life and didn’t see why he shouldn’t. Still, in the end he gave in, and absolved Jim.

He was rather upset about it afterward. At the time he was frankly afraid of what Jim might do if he didn’t. But he never admitted to himself that he had been afraid; he told himself that he was struck with the force of Jim’s penitence.

Jim received his absolution, but he didn’t get very much advice.

The vicar told him to flee from his sins, and suggested his learning several penitential psalms off by heart—but fleeing from his sins was precisely what Jim had done in coming to the vestry; and if the penitential psalms weren’t more efficacious than the vicar, Jim felt that he must have come to the wrong place. The vicar hesitated, and then said that he was afraid Jim’s confirmation must be postponed.

‘I must be sure,’ he added warily, ‘of your consistent penitence.’

Jim thought that was quite natural. He wanted to be sure of it himself; but he never had been as inconsistent as most people liked.

He came to the conclusion that he wouldn’t go to confession to a priest again, but that he would ask Wivvle to teach him boxing.

He found it helped him to keep his temper nearly as well as his prayers.

Mrs. Bligh gave him extra confirmation lessons on Sundays, but though he loved the sound of her voice, he sometimes found it difficult to believe all that she told him.

The superiority of even a sacramental system stuck in his throat.

‘The way I look at it,’ he explained to her, ‘is that if we were all made by God everything is His, and every religion—that people mean—is His too. I daresay you like sacraments better, and find Him in them easier than anywhere else, but He must be wherever faith has called Him.’

This was a Protestant theory, and Mrs. Bligh said so; but even that didn’t put Jim off it.

‘I must,’ he said, ‘take truth where I find it. I can’t believe what I’m told unless I see the sense of it, can I?’

Mrs. Bligh explained patiently that this was exactly what he must do; he was too ignorant to find it for himself.

‘Truth,’ she said, ‘is not what you and I think—or think we think. It is infinite and divine; only those who study the divine and have the special sacramental grace given them for that purpose, can judge what is true or not.’

Jim looked at her curiously. Suddenly his heavy mouth took its ironic twist.

‘They might feed you up with a lot of lies, that way, mightn’t they?’ he questioned. ‘And, anyway, parts of truth aren’t divine. Some of it’s right down nasty—what are you going to do about that?’

Mrs. Bligh did not propose to do anything about it; she never had; but she smoothed the question over with her usual skill.

On the whole Jim’s conversion went off very well. Jim accepted a great deal that he was told and agreed that, if he didn’t see it all now, he might in time. The proof of it was the life of the woman who taught him.

He believed what made her so beautiful; he did not know that it was her beauty which made him believe it.

The confirmation service was a disappointment to Jim. He had used up his emotional force beforehand; the bishop was old, a trifle overworked, and a good deal bored.

He had given his confirmation address a great many times before; and he liked large congregations and rows of listening candidates. In the small church before him only twenty had been enlisted from five reluctant villages; and, though of course the bishop wouldn’t have said so, he privately wondered if it was worth the petrol he had used in motoring there. He looked grave and felt cross. Unfortunately he wasn’t really very fond of young people, though he said that he was.

Jim listened to him for a few moments with a concentration as powerful as collected electricity—then he turned his attention completely off him.

Mrs. Bligh had told him that it was the office which mattered; but he couldn’t help wondering if even the office mattered very much.

He felt happier about his first communion. It was Christmas morning, and Mrs. Bligh went out alone with him into a shimmering darkness of new-fallen snow. The trees bent low with wreaths of fantastic loveliness; as far as the eye could see, a mantle of soft and endless purity was pressed down over the world. A late star lingered in the gray sky.

The church was full of light and holly; the music of the Christmas hymns rang out victorious and certain. It sounded as if there really had been some one who saved the world.

Jim remembered, with a shock of joy, that for all these months of preparation and prayer his physical thirsts had never troubled him. They had been transferred into some other portion of his being; they were still there, but it was for his soul he thirsted, and for all the souls of men.

As he knelt with his head buried in his hands, the visible world melted away from him—he was conscious of an immense gift about to descend upon him, an unseen presence, white as the outer world, shaking away all that was earthly and could be shaken, and leaving in him only invisible forces built for eternity.

There was a faint movement beside him; he knew that the great moment had come. Mrs. Bligh rose to her feet, and he followed her.

His shoes creaked; he knew who the people were who stood in the aisle. The waiting seemed interminable, and filled with uncomfortable clutching thoughts. He wished he needn’t have got up from his knees and the dark.

Then he found he was kneeling beside her again; there was the altar in front of them, white and red with flowers.

He made an enormous effort to blot out the little intrusive, conscious world; the hurried, whispered bleat of the vicar’s voice; the sense of the actual silver cup lifted and given into his hands.

He would not think of anything at all, but let the presence of God reach him as it would.

He was sorry for his sins and he wanted God: that would be enough.

He thought the presence had reached him; but he was never sure.

It was just as difficult getting back into his seat afterward; in fact, it was more difficult because he forgot about the footstool.

When they came out into the air again, the snow had already begun to melt, and most of it had run to puddles.