Sinister Street. Compton Mackenzie

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СКАЧАТЬ July noon when Michael and Chator stood untrammelled by anything more than bicycles and luggage upon the platform of the little station that dreamed its trains away at the foot of the Downs.

      "By Jove, we're just like pilgrims," said Michael, as his gaze followed the aspiring white road which rippled upward to green summits quivering in the haze of summer. The two boys left their luggage to be fetched later by the Abbey marketing-cart, mounted their bicycles, waved a good-bye to the friendly porter beaming among the red roses of the little station and pressed energetically their obstinate pedals. After about half a mile's ascent they jumped from their machines and walked slowly upwards until the station and clustering hamlet lay breathless below them like a vision drowned deep in a crystal lake. As they went higher a breeze sighed in the sun-parched grasses, and the lines and curves of the road intoxicated them with naked beauty.

      "I like harebells almost best of any flowers," said Michael. "Do you?"

      "They're awfully like bells," observed Chator.

      "I wouldn't care if they weren't," said Michael. "It's only in London I want things to be like other things."

      Chator looked puzzled.

      "I can't exactly explain what I mean," Michael went on.

      "But they make me want to cry just because they aren't like anything. You won't understand what I mean if I explain ever so much. Nobody could. But when I see flowers on a lovely road like this, I get sort of frightened whether God won't grow tired of bothering about human beings. Because really, you know, Chator, there doesn't seem much good in our being on the earth at all."

      "I think that's a heresy," pronounced Chator. "I don't know which one, but I'll ask Dom Cuthbert."

      "I don't care if it is heresy. I believe it. Besides, religion must be finding out things for yourself that have been found out already."

      "Finding out for yourself," echoed Chator with a look of alarm. "I say, you're an absolute Protestant."

      "Oh, no I'm not," contradicted Michael. "I'm a Catholic."

      "But you set yourself up above the Church."

      "When did I?" demanded Michael.

      "Just now."

      "Because I said that harebells were ripping flowers?"

      "You said a lot more than that," objected Chator.

      "What did I say?" Michael parried.

      "Well, I can't exactly remember what you said."

      "Then what's the use of saying I'm a Protestant?" cried Michael in triumph. "I think I'll play footer again next term," he added inconsequently.

      "I jolly well would," Chator agreed. "You ought to have played last football term."

      "Except that I like thinking," said Michael. "Which is rotten in the middle of a game. It's jolly decent going to the monastery, isn't it? I could keep walking on this road for ever without getting tired."

      "We can ride again now," said Chator.

      "Well, don't scorch, because we'll miss all the decent flowers if you do," said Michael.

      Then silently for awhile they breasted the slighter incline of the summit.

      "Only six weeks of these ripping holidays," Michael sighed. "And then damned old school again."

      "Hark!" shouted Chator suddenly. "I hear the Angelus."

      Both boys dismounted and listened. Somewhere, indeed, a bell was chiming, but a bell of such quality that the sound of it through the summer was like a cuckoo's song in its unrelation to place. Michael and Chator murmured their salute of the Incarnation, and perhaps for the first time Michael half realized the mysterious condescension of God. Here, high up on these downs, the Word became imaginable, a silence of wind and sunlight.

      "I say, Chator," Michael began.

      "What?"

      "Would you mind helping me mark this place where we are?"

      "Why?"

      "Look here, you won't think I'm pretending? but I believe I was converted at that moment."

      Chator's well-known look of alarm that always followed one of Michael's doctrinal or liturgical announcements was more profound than it had ever been before.

      "Converted?" he gasped. "What to?"

      "Oh, not to anything," said Michael. "Only different from what I was just now, and I want to mark the place."

      "Do you mean—put up a cross or something?"

      "No, not a cross. Because, when I was converted, I felt a sudden feeling of being frightfully alive. I'd rather put a stone and plant harebells round it. We can dig with our spanners. I like stones. They're so frightfully old, and I'd like to think, if I was ever a long way from here, of my stone and the harebells looking at it—every year new harebells and the same old stone."

      "Do you know what I think you are?" enquired Chator solemnly. "I think you're a mystic."

      "I never can understand what a mystic was," said Michael.

      "Nobody can," said Chator encouragingly. "But lots of them were made saints all the same. I don't think you ever will be, because you do put forward the most awfully dangerous doctrines. I do think you ought to be careful about that. I do really."

      Chator was spluttering under the embarrassment of his own eloquence, and Michael, delicately amused, looked at him with a quizzical smile. Chator was older than Michael, and by reason of the apoplectic earnestness of his appearance and manner, and the natural goodness of him so sincerely, if awkwardly expressed, he had a certain influence which Michael admitted to himself, however much in the public eye he might affect to patronize Chator from his own intellectual eminence. Along the road of speculation, however, Michael would not allow Chator's right to curb him, and he took a wilful pleasure in galloping ahead over the wildest, loftiest paths. To shock old Chator was Michael's delight; and he never failed to do so.

      "You see," Chator spluttered, "it's not so much what you say now; nobody would pay any attention to you, and I know you don't mean half what you say; but later on you'll begin to believe in all these heretical ideas of your own. You'll end up by being an Agnostic. Oh, yes you will," he raged with torrential prophecies, as Michael leaned over the seat of his bicycle laughing consumedly. "You'll go on and on wondering this and that and improving the doctrines of the Church until you improve them right away."

      "You are a funny old ass. You really are," gurgled Michael. "And what's so funny to me is that just when I had a moment of really believing you dash in with your warnings and nearly spoil it all. By Jove, did you see that Pale Clouded Yellow?" he shouted suddenly. "By Jove, I haven't seen one in England for an awful long time. I think I'll begin collecting butterflies again."

      Disputes of doctrine were flung to the wind that sang in their ears as they mounted their bicycles and coasted swiftly from the bare green summits of the downs into a deep lane overshadowed by oak-trees. Soon they came to the Abbey gates, or rather to the place where the Abbey gates would one day rise in Gothic commemoration of the slow subscriptions of the faithful. At present the entrance was СКАЧАТЬ