Earthly Powers (27 page)
"Which is the greater sin?" I asked. I was asking the wrong man. The right man to ask was arriving from Paris the following day. He would probably deny the existence of either of them, except as items in some hypothetical list worked out a priori by the Angelic Doctor, who had been so fat that they had to cut a half-disk out of his dining table. Copulatio cum aure porcelli, copulation with a pig's ear, is to be regarded in no different wise from the same act performed in natibus equi, in a horse's arse (A, 3, xiv), this being pollution and the unlawful spending of the seed which is intended for generation and the peopling of the heavenly kingdom with saved souls. Incest wasteth no seed so may be accounted the lesser sin, but see Ambrosius Fracastor, Bibellius, Virgilius Polydor Upyourarse, et cetera, et cetera.
"Sin? Sin?" cried Ellis at a small dog. "Oh my God, sin quotha."
It comes clear in memory now, but I cannot understand why I had walked painfully up from the Condamine to Monte Carlo, prepared to show my bruises to strangers who would think: "He was in a roughhouse with jolly jack-tars, the dirty bugger, serves him right." Had I come to look for that little traitor Curry at the Balmoral? Certainly not. Anyway, he had left. Hortense and Domenico, the hypocrites, had gone to late mass at Sainte Devote. Why had I not stayed in the bed I must the next day give up to Don Carlo, catching up on the sleep I had missed during a long night given over to listening for sounds of padding fornicatory feet (watch this, Toomey; oh, to hell with watching things all the time)? Had I wanted my sister to be defiled and did I now wish her to be married? Masochism, sexual identification with my artbrother Domenico? Did I wish them both to be uneasy about my apparent change of heart? What was going on? I have practised the craft of fiction for many years, but I know less than I ever knew about the tortuosities of the human soul.
Havelock Ellis now looked toward the little hill street between the Casino and the Hotel de Paris and, at the sight of a man coming up it, opened eyes and mouth wide with joy. This man, about fifty, clad in what seemed to be a suit of alpaca that shimmered purply in the intense light, now began to trot toward Ellis, grinning like a gridiron. Ellis met him halfway with speed, though not trotting. "My dear, my dear." This would be the homosexual from Roquebrune. I found out later that Ellis's wife was unabashedly lesbian and he himself quite impotent. There they were, Ellis and this man, embracing each other, the man going "What? What? Eh?" in the patrician manner. Then they went into the Hotel de Paris, embraced. Ellis had forgotten me already, the rude thing. I did not exist. And it was he who had brought me out into the square, leaving me now standing aimless and feeling a fool under the sun and gulls.
But lo, here they are coming up that same hill street to have luncheon with me at the Hotel de Paris—Hortense in appropriate off-white cotton with flowered sidebow at the waist, wide wrapover collar, glass bead necklace, deepcrowned narrow-brimmed hat with wide silk band, and Domenico in decent grey, wearing a curl-brimmed trilby of the kind that Puccini, one of his masters, favoured. They have come out of mass and look sober and demure, the sinners. What is the nature of the luncheon—celebratory, penitential?
"The ceremony," I said over the coffee, "will, I presume, take place in Gorgonzola." Domenico, who was drinking his coffee, spluttered. He had not expected this. I had deliberately kept, during the meal, to the topic of my and Domenico's little opera. Milan's rejection of it, I said, was not the end of the world. My theatrical contacts in London did not include operatic ones, but I was sure that I could get my agent to get Sir Hilary Beauclerk at Covent Garden to consider its production. Domenico had at first been suspicious, but I was affable and charming, despite my half-closed eye and bruises; I was being a gentleman, a breed that Domenico had read about if not previously met. "The marriage ceremony," I amplified.
Hortense said, "Look, Domenico, this is not my idea, you know that. This is him being pompous and heavy and in loco parentis and bloody hypocritical."
"With your brother," I said, "performing that ceremony. I suppose that Hortense must go with you soon to meet the family. This is something that we can work out with Don Carlo when he comes tomorrow. I take it that your family is living in the modern age, with all its social liberties, just as you are. I take it that there will be no antiquated nonsense about a dowry or a marriage settlement. You love each other, enough, no more, no less. Don't you," I said with sudden ferocity, "love each other?"
"You're a nasty filthy pig," said Hortense.
"Don't," I snarled. "How dare you address me in that manner. You're not too old to be smacked. On your bare bottom too." At a table some five meters away Ellis's friend from Roquebrune was fluting at Ellis some Jacobean lines which I recognised: "Kiss me. Never aftertimes should hear Of our fast-knit aflections, though perhaps The laws of conscience and of civil use May justly blame us, yet when they but know Our loves, that love will wipe away that rigour, Which would in other insects be abhorr'd."
Then he giggled.
"Yes yes," growled Ellis, too loud, a bit tipsy, "vocal metathesis. Scared of the word. I shall never forget the occasion, the bloody fool. Like 'Good Hamlet, cast thy coloured nightie off.' But that was only in rehearsal, got it out of her system."
"That play," I said to Hortense. She did not seem to know the keyword of the title for all her sophistication, sophistication meaning defilement. "Cognate with German Hure. Sister Gertrude may perhaps have used the word in some admonitory context or other."
"Yes," Domenico now said, having drunk his coffee and wiped thoroughly his lips with his napkin. "We love each other." And he put his hairy paw out toward Hortense's thin wrist across the table.
CHAPTER 27
Don Carlo's telegram had said he was coming for five days, but in fact he stayed well over a week. He had been gaining a reputation, I gathered, in the field of exorcism, and there was a tough job of exorcism to perform just outside Nice. The Bishop of Nice had requested his services, and so he had been granted a week's leave of absence from the Catho in Paris. A bit irregular, apparently, but Don Carlo was said by His Grace to be the best man in Europe at fighting the devil, and this was meant very literally. The devil was no metaphor to some of these churchmen but a palpable entity, or rather a well-structured army of entities (hence the name Legion, as in British Legion), with the Son of the Morning as generalissimo in charge of Belial and Beelzebub and Mephistopheles, as well as a large number of NCOs and privates eager to fight the bad fight and gain promotion. A lot of nonsense I thought at the time, but Don Carlo was ready to march in armed with the Rituale Romanum and, so to speak, knock hell out of these minor devils that had camped in the bodies of the innocent. He never had any doubt about the externality of evil, and this is what made him so formidable. Man was God's creation, and therefore perfect. The devil got in in the Garden of Eden and taught man how to be evil, and he was still doing it. Why didn't God annihilate the devil, then, and all his works? Because of free will. He had permitted the Revolt of the Angels because of free will. A divine bestowal by no manner of means nor in any wise to be rescinded. But let us hear the words of Don Carlo himself. The tough process of exorcism at which he daily laboured (I imagined him with coat off and sleeves rolled up) had got into the columns of Nice-Matin. The victim of the attentions of some minor but limpet-like devils who had, apparently, names like Chouchou, Ranran, and Piquemonsieur, was a boy of eight, son of a railway worker who talked to a reporter in a bistro. Don Carlo believed, not without cause, that the press could do with its own exorcism and he refused to speak to its representatives. Instead he spoke to the world at large, or such of it as it was represented at eleven o'clock mass the following Sunday at Sainte Devote. He gave a sermon in very reasonable, though Milan-accented, French, taking as his text the ninth verse of the fifth chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Mark, the one about our name being Legion and us being many. He said: "A mere five months ago we came to the end of an excruciating, debilitating, murderous, thoroughly evil war. When I use that word evil I do not do so in the way of the politician or the journalist. For they use it loosely and vaguely, as a mere synonym for painful or undesirable. We have all heard phrases like 'the evils of capitalism' or 'the evil of slum landlordism' and we have permitted the term to take on a purely secular meaning. But mal, male, evil properly means an absolute force that has run riot in the world almost since the day of its creation and will only be quelled at the Day of Judgment. This force, being absolute, is not man-made. It is the monopoly of spiritual beings, creatures of God, high and majestic and beautiful servants of the Almighty who, under a leader, the most beautiful of them all, one whose name was Bringer of Light, rejected God's dominion, conceived rebellion, declined to serve, and were thrown from the empyrean into dark and empty space. They arrested what would have been an endless fall, for space knows no limits, by willing into existence a new abode of their own, which we call Hell, and substituting for the principle of eternal good the opposed principle of eternal evil.
"Now how do we define this evil? Very simply. As a principle, an essence designed to counter God's good and, through a series of acts of war, eventually to defeat it. Blind angels, misled in their sinful pride, hopelessly setting themselves up against the ever powerful, their own Creator, Him who could, with a snort from His divine nostrils, puff their being out like a candle-flame! But God is defined as the Creator, not as the Annihilator, nor is it in His nature to destroy what He has created. Why then, the ignorant may ask, did He not quell that act of rebellion in its initiatory spark, choke the avowal of disobedience in the very throat of him who enunciated it? Because He gave to His creatures the awful and mysterious benison of freedom of choice. It may be said that God, being omniscient as well as omnipotent, foreknew from the very beginning that the act of angelic rebellion would be conceived and fulfilled, and that this foreknowledge must, of necessity, be a denial of the freedom of the creature. But this is a shameful and all too human imposition on the nature of the Godhead of a limitation which leaves out of account the illimitable fervour of His love. He loves His creatures so well that He grants them the gift of His own essence—utter freedom. To foreknow would be to abrogate that gift, for what can be foreseen is predestined, and where there is predestination there is no freedom of will. No, God, in His terrible love, denied Himself foreknowledge, imposed upon Himself a kind of human ignorance which we may take as the very seed of his eventual incarnation in human form. With the ghastly cataclysm of the Fall of the Angels God begins already to assume the potentialities of the Redeemer.
"Redeemer of whom or what? Not of Lucifer and his wickedness. There there is no turning back. Evil has been chosen and may not now be unchosen. But, out of a mysterious and awful divine necessity, God is drawn to the making of man. When I speak of the making of man I do not necessarily ask you to conceive of a literal forging of a being of flesh and bone from the dust. I will leave it to the literalists of America to deny the possibility of a long process of creation which we may even term evolution. Take it, anyway, that, at some point in the long workings of time, the creature called man emerges, flesh, blood, bone, into whom His Creator breathes a soul, and the essence of this soul is the endowment of freedom of choice, the pledge of His love. And what is the nature of this choice? It is a choice between the kingdom of good and the kingdom of evil. Indeed, we may say, as certain Church Fathers have said, Theodosius among them, that evil is a necessity, since if there were only good there would be only good to choose, and that would be no choice. So God makes man and gives man the divine liberum arbitrium, and behold there are two kingdoms for him to choose between, that eternal and luminous one of the Divine Lord's own making, and the noisome stinking pit of pain and horror that is the abode of God's Enemy.
"Let me make it clear to you, brethren, that as good is beyond man's making, being an eternal essence revealed to him for his choosing, so is evil, that deadly opposite, similarly beyond his making. It is the work of another eternal, leader of the Legion of the lost and damned, who seeks to strike at the Almighty through striking at His dearest creation. To speak of the evil works of man is possible only in an extreme looseness of thought and phraseology. To employ a convenient image, we may say that man plays on a keyboard the melody of evil, but he is not its composer. No, there is a deadly genius behind him, invisible but revealed through his works, and these works have a common property, a signature, a recognisable essence. As God is the Creator, so the Enemy of God, and of man, is the Destroyer. Evil is destruction, but we must consider now briefly the nature of this destruction.
"To destroy, as we know, is not in the human dispensation necessarily an action to be deplored or condemned. A decayed building may be razed to the ground that a fairer building may be erected on its site. An epoch of tyranny may be destroyed in order that an age of freedom may take its place. But note that these modes of destruction are of a special kind: they destroy what is already recognised as destructive. The decayed building is a danger to its inhabitants, more, it is ugly and displeasing to the sight. Ugliness is a recognisable attribute of the bad. The tyrant is a destroyer, and to destroy the destroyer and his works is the first step in the building of an era of good, of which beauty is a recognisable attribute. The nature of diabolic destruction is wholly different. It seeks to strike at the good and the beautiful, seeing in these things reflections of the divine. It strikes also at the true, the third of the blessed trinity of God's attributes. The devil's works of destruction may be recognised by their wantonness, by their apparent meaninglessness. They serve no end, other than that of spitting in the face of the Creator. We have seen, in the war that ended but five months ago, an unexampled panorama of destruction, with the meaningless loss of millions of lives, the infliction of wanton cruelty, the sowing of the seed of disease and destitution, the crushing of great cities, the poisoning of the air and the earth. And there are some who speak of the waste, the madness, the human dementia, the inexplicability of man's seeking to destroy himself. But may we speak of waste, when so many men, and women too, were driven to acts of heroism, love and self-sacrifice that could never have been persuaded to emerge out of an era of peace and torpor? May we speak of madness when the devil manifests such care and cunning in his setting up of the occasions of the massive enactment of evil, making the bad cause appear the good? May we speak of the inexplicable, when Holy Scripture and the teachings of Holy Church make it all too clear that the prevalence of evil is one of the two abiding facts of our lives, the other being the prevalence of good?