Henry and Cato by Iris Murdoch Read Free Book Online Page A

need any spectacular ‘vision’ of Christ. He was with Christ, he was Christ. He was invaded, taken over, and it all happened so quietly and with such a sense of perfect reality. Cato said nothing to his father, nothing to Colette. He waited to be told, and he was told. It was not a headlong rush into a new life of self-sacrifice and strenuous devotion. It was like a river, like a growing plant. The will did nothing, there was no will. That nothing less than the gift of his entire being would be adequate to this reality was from the first clear, he was already given, indeed possessed. What exactly he had to do emerged more slowly. He must become a priest, his whole life must be a showing of what he now knew. And he did not even think that it would be easy, he did not even feel himself in any danger of being deluded, since with his new cleansed vision he also saw, still existing, still there as part of the world, his old self, unchanged and perhaps (and this was one of the most remarkable teachings of all) unchangeable.
    After a while he visited a Roman priest (the idea of entering the Protestant Communion somehow never seriously occurred to him), not at Laxlinden, where there was no Catholic community, but in a nearby village. The priest turned out to be very unwilling to have anything to do with Cato and his new certainties. He told him to go away for six months and see what he felt like then. Cato could not wait six months. By now he was back at his university continuing his studies. Here he remembered a Catholic lecturer, Brendan Craddock, a man a few years older than himself, whom he had known slightly in his student days, and who was now a priest in a religious house in the city and went to him. Craddock treated him with the same cool suspicious detachment and passed him to Father Sidney Bell, who later became his godfather. About a year afterwards he entered the order of which Father Craddock and Father Bell were members, and a few years after that he was ordained.
    Of course the glow of those early experiences faded a little with the years, as he perfectly expected them to do, although that joy was renewed for him at intervals as he penetrated into the complex simplicity of the mass and began to make his home inside the everyday life of the church. He thought that he would faint with happiness when he celebrated his first mass, and he did indeed nearly faint. His new mentors taught him to fear exaltation, but as he lived and grew in Christ he quite sufficiently felt in every day of his life that magnetic bond that joined him to the ground of being. He lived close to, and very often inside, a perfect happiness. Yet ordinary pains and anxieties did not disappear; and the gravest of these was the extreme anger and bitterness of his father. His father met his announcements with absolute incredulity. He thought that his son almost literally had gone mad, and could scarcely have been more stunned and amazed if Cato had declared that Peter the Great was risen from the grave and was now his constant companion. For a short time John Forbes behaved with the energy of desperation, behaved as he might have done if he had seen his child drowning before his eyes. He begged, he threatened, he went and stormed at Father Craddock and Father Bell and practically accused them of sorcery, he talked wildly of going to law, he even (in a frenzy, although he despised psychiatrists) besought Cato to admit himself to be mentally ill and enter a hospital. Cato went quietly and steadily on with his plans, never arguing, constantly begging his father’s pardon for the pain he had to cause him. At last John Forbes gave up and retired into a bitter contemptuous coldness which had lasted ever since. Cato wrote to his father and visited him at slightly increasing intervals. The letters received no reply, the visits passed off politely, with no discussion of anything of importance. His sister Colette was upset by the family quarrel but she