The Keys of the Kingdom (31 page)

‘Does it matter?’ Father Chisholm smiled palely. ‘Many of these priests are good and noble men.’

There was a strained silence. Anselm drew his coat about him with a shocked finality.

‘After that, of course, there is nothing to be said, I must confess your attitude pains me deeply. Even Reverend Mother is embarrassed by it. Ever since I arrived it has been plain how much she is at variance with you.’ He got up and went into his own room.

Francis remained a long time in the gathering mist. That last remark had cut him worst of all: the stab of a premonition confirmed. Now he had no doubt that Maria-Veronica had submitted her request to be transferred.

Next morning Canon Mealey took his departure. He was returning to Nankin to spend a week at the Vicariate and would go from there to Nagasaki to inspect six missions in Japan. His bags were packed, a chair waited to bear him to the junk, he had taken his farewells of the Sisters and the children. Now, dressed for the journey, wearing sunglasses, his topee draped with green gauze, he stood in final conversation with Father Chisholm in the hall.

‘Well, Francis!’ Mealey extended his hand in grudging forgiveness. ‘We must part friends. The gift of tongues is not given to all of us. I suppose you are a well-meaning fellow at heart.’ He threw out his chest. ‘ Strange! I’m itching to be off. I have travel in my blood. Good-bye.
Au revoir. Auf Wiedersehen.
And last but not least – God bless you!’

Dropping the mosquito veil he stepped into his chair. The runners groaningly bent their shoulders, supported him and shuffled off. At the sagging mission gates he leaned through the window of the chair, fluttered his white handkerchief in farewell.

At sundown, when he took his evening walk, his beloved hour of stealing twilight and far-off echoing stillness, Father Chisholm found himself meditating, amongst the débris of the church. He seated himself upon a lump of rubble, thinking of his old Headmaster – somehow he always saw Rusty Mac with schoolboy’s eyes – and of his exhortation to courage. There was little courage in him now. These last two weeks, the perpetual effort to sustain his visitor’s patronizing tone, had left him void. Yet perhaps Anselm was justified. Was he not a failure, in God’s sight and in man’s? He had done so little. And that little, so laboured and inadequate, was almost undone. How was he to proceed? A weary hopelessness of spirit took hold of him.

Resting there, with bent head, he did not hear a footstep behind him. Mother Maria-Veronica was compelled to make her presence known to him.

‘Am I disturbing you?’

He glanced up, quite startled. ‘ No . . no. As you observe,’ – he could not suppress a wincing smile, – ‘I am doing nothing.’

There was a pause. In the indistinctness her face had a swimming pallor. He could not see the nerve twitching in her cheek yet he sensed in her figure a strange rigidity.

Her voice was colourless. ‘I have something to say to you. I –’

‘Yes?’

‘This is no doubt humiliating for you. But I am obliged to tell you. I – I am sorry.’ The words, torn from her, gained momentum, then came in a tumbled flood. ‘ I am most bitterly and grievously sorry for my conduct towards you. From our first meeting I have behaved shamefully, sinfully. The devil of pride was in me. It’s always been in me, ever since I was a little child and flung things at my nurse’s head. I have known now for weeks that I wanted to come to you … to tell you … but my pride, my stubborn malice restrained me. These past ten days, in my heart, I have wept for you … the slights and humiliations you have endured from that gross and worldly priest, who is unworthy to untie your shoe. Father, I hate myself – forgive me, forgive me …’ Her voice was lost, she crouched, sobbing into her hands, before him.

The sky was strained of all colour, except the greenish afterglow behind the peaks. This faded swiftly and the kind dusk enfolded her. An interval of time, in which a single tear fell upon her cheek …

‘So now you will not leave the mission?’

‘No, no …’ Her heart was breaking. ‘If you will let me stay. I have never known anyone whom I wished so much to serve … Yours is the best … the finest spirit I have ever known.’

‘Hush, my child. I am a poor and insignificant creature … you were right … a common man …’

‘Father, pity me.’ Her sobs went choking into the earth.

‘And you are a great lady. But in God’s sight we are both of us children. If we may work together … help each other …’

‘I will help with all my power. One thing at least I can do. It is so easy to write to my brother. He will rebuild the church … restore the mission. He has great possessions, he will do it gladly. If only you will help me … help me to defeat my pride.’

There was a long silence. She sobbed more softly. A great warmth filled his heart. He took her arm to raise her but she would not rise. So he knelt beside her and gazed, without praying, into the pure and peaceful night where, across the ages, amongst the shadows of a garden, another poor and common man also knelt and watched them both.

One sunny forenoon in the year 1912 Father Chisholm was separating beeswax from his season’s yield of honey. His workshop, built in Bavarian style, at the end of the kitchen garden – trim, practical, with a pedal lathe and tools neatly racked, as much a source of delight to him as on the day Mother Maria-Veronica had handed him the key – was sweet with the fume of melted sugar. A great bowl of cool yellow honey stood among fresh shavings upon the floor. On the bench, setting, was the flat copper pan of tawny wax from which, tomorrow, he would make his candles. And such candles – smooth-burning and sweet-scented; even in St Peter’s one would not find the like!

With a sigh of contentment, he wiped his brow, his short fingernails blobbed with the rich wax. Then, shouldering the big honey jar, he pulled the door behind him and set off through the mission grounds. He was happy. Waking in the morning with the starlings chattering in the eaves, and the coolness of the dawn still dewed upon the grass, his second thought was that there could be no greater happiness than to work – much with his hands, a little with his head, but mostly with his heart – and to live, simply, like this, close to the earth which, to him, never seemed far from heaven.

The province was prospering and the people, forgetting flood, pestilence and famine, were at peace. In the five years which had elapsed since its reconstruction, through the generosity of Count Ernst von Hohenlohe, the mission had flourished in a quiet fashion. The church was bigger, stouter than the first. He had built it solidly, with grim compunction, using neither plaster nor stucco, after the monastic model which Queen Margaret had introduced to Scotland centuries before. Classic and severe, with a simple bell-tower, and aisles supported by groined arches, its plainness grew on him until he preferred it to the other. And it was safe.

The school had been enlarged, a new children’s home added to the building. And the purchase of the two adjoining irrigated fields provided a model home farm with pigpen, byre, and a chicken run down which Martha stalked, thin-shanked, in wooden shoes and kilted habit, casting corn and clucking joyously in Flemish.

Now his congregation comprised two hundred faithful souls, not one of whom knelt under duress before the altar. The orphanage had trebled in size and was beginning to bear the first fruits of his patient foresight. The older girls helped the Sisters with the little ones, some were already novices, others would soon be going into the world. Why, last Christmas he had married the eldest, at nineteen, to a young farmer from the Liu village. He smiled ruefully at the implications of his cunning. At his recent pastoral visit to Liu – a happy and successful expedition from which he had returned only last week – the young wife had hung her head and told him he must return presently to perform another baptism.

As he shifted the heavy honey to his other shoulder, a bent little man of forty-three, growing bald, with rheumatism already nibbling at his joints, a bough of jessamine flailed him on the cheek. The garden had seldom been so lovely: that, also, he owed to Maria-Veronica. Admitting some adroitness with his hands, he could not remotely claim to have green fingers. But Reverend Mother had revealed an unsuspected skill in growing things. Seeds had arrived from her home in Germany, bundles of shoots wrapped tenderly in sacking. Her letters, begging for this cutting and for that, had sped to famous gardens in Canton and Peking – like his own swift white doves, importunate and homing. This beauty which now surrounded him, this sun-shot sanctuary, alive with twittering hum, was her work.

Their comradeship was not unlike this precious garden. Here, indeed, when he took his evening walk, he would find her, intent, coarsely gloved, cutting the full white peonies that grew so freely, training a stray clematis, watering the golden azaleas. There they would briefly discuss the business of the day. Sometimes they did not speak. When the fireflies flitted in the garden they had gone their separate ways.

As he approached the upper gate he saw the children march in twos across the compound. Dinner. He smiled and hastened. They were seated at the long low table in the new annex to the dormitory, two-score little blue-black polls and shining yellow faces, with Maria-Veronica at one end, Clotilde at the other. Martha, aided by the Chinese novices, was ladling steaming rice broth into a battery of blue bowls. Anna, his foundling of the snow, now a handsome girl, handed round the bowls with her usual air of dark and frowning reserve.

The clamour stilled upon his entry. He shot a shamed boyish look at the Reverend Mother, craving indulgence, and placed the honey jar triumphantly on the table.

‘Fresh honey today, children! It is a great pity. I am sure no one wishes it!’

Shrill, immediate denial rose like the chatter of little monkeys. Suppressing his smile he shook his head dolefully at the youngest, a solemn mandarin of three who sat swallowing his spoon, swaying dreamily, his soft small buttocks unstable on the bench.

‘I cannot believe a good child could enjoy such monstrous depravity! Tell me, Symphorien –’ It was dreadful the way in which new converts chose the most resounding saint names for their children – ‘ Tell me, Symphorien … would you not rather learn nice catechism than eat honey?’

‘Honey!’ answered Symphorien dreamily. He stared at the lined brown face above him. Then, surprised by his own temerity, he burst into tears and fell off the bench.

Laughing, Father Chisholm picked up the child. ‘There, there! You are a good boy, Symphorien. God loves you. And for speaking the truth you shall have double honey.’

He felt Maria-Veronica’s reproving gaze upon him. She would presently follow him to the door and murmur: ‘Father … we must consider discipline!’ But today – it seemed so long since he stood outside the buzzing classroom, troubled and unhappy, afraid to penetrate the chill unfriendly air – nothing could restrain his manner with the children. His fondness towards them had always been absurd, it was what he named his patriarchal privilege.

As he expected, Maria-Veronica accompanied him from the room but, though her brow seemed unusually clouded, she did not even mildly rebuke him. Instead, after some hesitation, she remarked: ‘Joseph had a strange story this morning.’

‘Yes. The rascal wants to get married … naturally. But he is deafening me with the beauties and convenience of a lodge … to be built at the mission gate … not, of course, for Joseph or for Joseph’s wife … but solely for the benefit of the mission.’

‘No, it isn’t the lodge.’ Unsmiling, she bit her lip. ‘The building is taking place elsewhere, in the Street of the Lanterns – you know that splendid central site – and on a grander scale, much grander than anything we have accomplished here.’ Her tone was strangely bitter. ‘Scores of workmen have arrived, barges of white stone from Sen-siang. Everything. I assure you money is being spent as only American millionaires can spend it. Soon we shall have the finest establishment in Pai-tan, with schools, for both boys and girls, a playground, public rice kitchen, free dispensary, and a hospital with resident doctor!’ She broke off, gazing at him with tears in her troubled eyes.

‘What establishment?’ He spoke automatically, stunned by a presage of her answer.

‘Another mission. Protestant. The American Methodists.’

There was a long pause. Secure in the remoteness of his situation, he had never contemplated even the possibility of such intrusion. Reverend Mother, recalled to the refectory by Clotilde, left him in painful silence.

He walked slowly towards his house, all the brightness of the morning dimmed. Where was his mediaeval fortress now? In a quick throwback to his childhood, he had the same sensation of injustice as when, out berry-picking, another boy had encroached upon a secret bush of his own discovery and rudely begun to strip it of its fruit. He knew the hatreds which developed between rival missions, the ugly jealousies, above all, the bickerings on points of doctrine, the charge and countercharge, the raucous denunciation which made the Christian faith appear, to the tolerant Chinese mind, an infernal tower of Babel where all shouted at lung-pitch: ‘Behold, it is here! Here! Here!’ But where? Alas! When one looked, there was nothing but rage and sound and execration.

At his house he found Joseph, duster in hand, idling about the hall, in pretence of work, waiting to bemoan the news.

‘Has Father heard of the hateful coming of these Americans who worship the false God?’

‘Be silent, Joseph!’ The priest answered harshly. ‘ They do not worship the false God, but the same true God as we. If you speak such words again you will never get your gate-house!’

Joseph edged away, grumbling beneath his breath.

In the afternoon Father Chisholm went down to Pai-tan and, in the Street of the Lanterns, received the fateful confirmation of his eyes. Yes, the new mission was begun – was rising rapidly under the hands of many squads of masons, carpenters, and coolies. He watched a string of labourers, swaying along a strip of planking, bearing baskets of the finest Soochin glaze. He saw that the scale of operations was princely.