Dan England and the Noonday Devil by Connolly Myles

Author:Connolly, Myles [Connolly, Myles]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Publisher: Cluny Media, LLC
Published: 2017-11-06T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

Dan sat in silence a long time staring into the fire. Now, he seemed like a stranger, a man I had not seen before. Henry, concerned at his mood, stopped sketching.

Dan raised the wine bottle to pour himself wine, changed his mind, put the bottle down.

“Do you remember,” be turned to me, “those last words in Leon Bloy’s The Woman Who Was Poor?” I said I did not know Leon Bloy’s work. “I think you’d like the book,” he went on. “It is in praise of poverty, real poverty, the wretched poverty of the streets, as a way to God. And the woman who was poor says at the end, ‘There is only one unhappiness and that is—not to be one of the saints.’”

He returned to the fire. When, finally, he spoke again, it was with a solemnity that was so alien to him as to be disturbing. Henry, I could see, was deeply troubled, the more so because of the love he had for him.

He spoke meditatively, slowly. It was the first time up to then I had heard him speak in real seriousness of himself. His theme, if his rather fitful talk can be said to have had a theme, was the worthlessness of his life. He had that evening, in an instant, seen himself as a wastrel, “good for nothing in time or in eternity,” to use his own words. He had always followed his own inclinations, had never done anything to thwart himself, and such religion as he had was merely another indulgence for him. (This is, of course, his description of himself, not mine certainly.) His Faith, he said, was very much incense and candlelight, Christmas Eve and our Lady (and her compassion in which he declared he had always found succor) and Easter Sunday morning. He had taken the sweet and left the bitter. (Again I am merely giving his opinion of himself.) He had always considered himself a sort of pet of Providence—“one of God’s weaknesses” was the phrase he used—and he lived in complete assurance of having all this world and heaven too.

“That is one of the most serious temptations of the Faith,” he explained. “For the Faith can make life so adventurous and beautiful, it is hard to see the Cross looking down on us from the Hill. It is so easy to become a Christian hedonist, and it seems so reasonable to do so. It is the temptation I have never resisted.”

Now, he went on, he was realizing how superficial his life had been. He had accomplished nothing, nothing in terms of his immortality. He was at last beginning to understand the one great unhappiness Leon Bloy had mentioned—that of not being one of the saints.

I tried to point out to him that, so far as I knew it, his Me had been anything but worthless. I commented on his kindness and generosity, rare in an acquisitive world. In his way, I said, he was what I would consider a saint.

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