Chapter 29

    We need some more John of the Cross. What else will do as well? What else is intense enough, what else is true enough? This is his annotation for the sixth stanza of the Spiritual Canticle.
   "But, over and above all this, speaking now according to the sense and affection of contemplation, it is to be known that in the vivid contemplation and knowledge of the creatures the soul sees that there is in them such abundance of graces and virtues and beauty wherewith God endowed them, that, as it seems to her, they are all clothed with marvellous natural virtue and beauty, wondrously derived from and communicated by that infinite supernatural beauty of the image of God, Whose beholding of them clothes the world and all the heavens with beauty and joy; just as does also the opening of His hand, whereby, as David says, He fills every animal with blessing. And therefore the soul, being wounded in love by this trace of the beauty of her Beloved with she has known through the creatures, yearns to behold that invisible beauty which caused this visible beauty, and speaks as in the stanza following."

    When Toby reached Prince George in the middle of the afternoon, the modern Greyhound for Vancouver was open and taking on passengers well before it was scheduled to leave. He did not have to sit waiting in the station, but climbed aboard and found a seat toward the back on the right hand side, so he could have a full view of whatever countryside awaited them. There would be healing in the woods, or the open pastures, as he had found on the first bus, the old one, and memories, now that his mind was freely working again. He could do what he had always done when he travelled, simply enjoy the passing scene. How had he let himself get so far away from himself? Never in his life had he known such a trip as the one coming north, when his mind had hardly ever belonged to its owner. Thank God for the German fellow. Otherwise, to a writer, the trip would have been a complete loss. Well, no. The pain had been useful for something. Was it just a lesson? So that he would remember never to get himself into such a predicament again? Certainly the brief stop at some lake or another, the last stop before Prince George, in the bright sunshine, had been utterly delightful, his normal kind of reaction to a pretty scene, when an unspoiled prospect of nature seemed like all one ever needed to feel totally happy and fulfilled. There had been a bus trip in Hemingway, in The Sun Also Rises, when Jake Barnes was going to the bull fights at Pamplona. The writer had made such an ordinary and common event into something quite extraordinary, yet out of the simplest possible language. Was there a simile in the entire book? He had worried about his poor ability with similes, until he'd read Hemingway's short stories, and understood how little they were really needed. Things and actions were what mattered.
 
     But Hemingway had never written about what had happened to him over the last week. Hemingway had only been unhappy, or scared out of his wits, by purely natural events. War stuff, or the danger of a pair of sharp horns on an angry bull. This other thing had to be something different. Something to do with God, like all the other strange events that had been going on, with increasing regularity, and increasing intensity, for months. It had always been there, to some degree, but it had really cranked itself up once he'd left home to live on his own, more or less, and especially after he left law school and set up his own study programme. Basically, it had been bloody adventurous, one great escapade of the mind and social experience after another, with his often wondering how he had a right to so much happiness, and not more pain, from time to time, than he could handle. And, after all, the pain seemed to legitimize the sheer joy. Until the last few days, that is, when there was no end to the certainty of his demise, unless he abandoned ship.
  
    Had he ever fled from his responsibilities before, especially in so drastic a manner? All this time that he had been bothered by Hemingway's description of Frederick Henry vacating himself from the Italian army, and here he was doing the same thing himself. Sort of. Had Henry had something banging around in his skull which could only be God? Promising to destroy him if he didn't run?
He was very peaceful now. All his faculties alive again and running in the right direction. Just sitting on a bus going home was as pleasant an occupation as he could think of, especially with a little company.
 
     "Excuse me," said a female voice behind him. It came from two seats away, where when he chose his own seat he had noticed a young mother and a child still young enough to be feeding out of a bottle. Toby turned around. "I wonder if you could help me. I forgot to bring an extra nipple, and he's chewed this old one so much that it's got a big hole in it and spills all over the place. Do you think you could go to the drugstore for me and get a new one? In fact two new ones, in case it happens again. He likes to chew his nipples."
  
    "Sure. Certainly. Be glad to. We're not going anywhere for half-an-hour. How do I find a drug store?"

    "Oh, thank you." She gave him the directions, to a pharmacy only four blocks away. "That would be a great help."
 
     A help to me too, he thought. It was nice to be useful, after having been such a failure. He found the store and made the purchase and came back, and went on feeling good about how the trip was working out. He had travelled with his own mother, more than once, but from his memories he had been years older than her little fellow. Travelling with a kid this small would be no easy chore. The mother found some more formula in one of her bags and started feeding the child again. It struck Toby that in the Europe Hemingway had written about, any feeding mother would have been nursing from the breast. How did they get started with bottles anyway? Some women simply didn't have enough milk, he had read or been told, but why was it all so common to use bottles and cows' milk? Jelena had said she was having none of that, when the day came, unless her own supply of milk was inadequate.
  
    But even with a bottle in the kid's mouth the image behind reminded him of the Madonna, which reminded him of his rosary, which he had been unable to say on the way up, nor had it been any use to him during his strange week. Not even the sorrowful mysteries offered any comfort, although ever since Jelena's mother had given him the brown wooden beads, some weeks earlier, he'd become adept at saying them, always silently to himself, somewhere quiet in a corner. They had slipped into him easily, quite as if he'd never had a cynical thought in his life, and had always been used to making the sign of the cross that started off the entire business. Except for songs, he had never liked memorizing, but the relevant prayers had gone down easily enough, with even a certain degree of modest pleasure, and the subsequent change in his character had been by no means unwelcome.
  
    They said that a cat had nine lives, and Jelena had sent his mind on a wild escapade one morning by quoting something from F. Scott Fitzgerald about the variety of personalities he was wrestling with.
  
    I have that problem, Toby had thought. Why is it? In the autumn, God knows from what combination of influences, he had been trying to boil himself down to one single personality, or so he thought from time to time, and that had not really worked, if only because he could swing from being so utterly peaceful and content in one moment to having an outrageous burst of temper in the next.     Fortunately the temper was occasional rather than a habit, but it was still a factor, still disturbing. Still puzzling. And with some of his fellow students he could be so accommodating, like a lamb meekly led to slaughter, while with others he froze like an iceberg, and tolerated no invasive persuasions to dominate him. Where was he weak, where was he strong? And which was right?
  
    He put his hand in his pocket and felt the rosary. Now, there was strength in that little device. But he would not say it now, he would wait until the bus was on the road and the light was lower. Right now he simply enjoyed studying the view out of the window, hearing the murmuring of his fellow passengers. From time to time he could hear the little fellow pulling on his bottle.
  
    But he still felt somewhat numb, and not quite in control of things. The week had shaken him up in a fashion he had never known in all his life before. Once he had been badly shaken for an entire day, when he was much younger, and a friend had left his life forever, but that had been only for a day. No, two days, and then his mother had put him back together by telling him to take his younger brother out in the woods to pick blackberries. Her advice had been like that of the fairy godmothers in the fairy tale books he had discovered in grade three, in the school library in Nova Scotia, and it had worked. Only it was not a princess who had showed up in the woods to replace the princess he had just lost on the beach, it was God, this time the Father. He'd run into the Son when he was really young, then the Holy Spirit when he was eight, and then the Father when he was ten. There was no mistaking who it was. He'd made those very woods, which were full of healing, as well as full of His goodness. This was neat, because losing his princess had been a very painful experience, quite unlike anything that had ever happened to him before. He'd told the story to Jelena, very early on, along with some of the other stories from his months on the northern Gulf Island, and she had immediately insisted that he should write the stories and he had immediately insisted that he could not do that until he was absolutely ready. The stories struck him as absolutely sacred, whereas he, the potential story teller, was a very long way from being sacred himself.
 
     "Ah," Jelena had said. "The envelope is the message."
 
     Toby had never heard that expression before, and he wasn't sure it made any sense to him, but he knew he'd have to think about it, try to make it fit into his new patterns of thinking. Jelena was younger than he was, by a couple of years, and not everything she said came directly from the oracle at Delphi, but she had an awful lot of wisdom about her, and nothing she said could be rejected out of hand because it came from a philosophy he already knew was suspect. No automatic politics of left or right, no class prejudices, certainly no racial prejudices - except for wondering at some West Indians who had tricked her and a friend into eating extremely hot peppers - and an extremely matter-of-fact coexistence with the arts. And always the quiet pressure against his intellect of the fundamental claims of the Faith. Right from the beginning, and only a fool could deny that this had been a definite part of the electricity. Already he had begun to wonder why it had taken him all those months to admit it. Odd thing, the will. Odder still, the conscience. Once upon a time he had felt so secure in his talent belonging to all mankind, not to be put at the service of any particular creed. But this policy, while it might have dominated his thinking in his first three years at the university, had come under rewrite once he'd left law school the first time and set up his own study programme, beginning with the social sciences and moving on to philosophy, simply because such a bland policy left him rather spineless as a writer and suddenly without any confidence in his own vocabulary. He had found himself using words he really did not know the fundamental meaning of: in other words, failing at his own trade! So after all his months of delightful reading, and feeling wonderfully alive as perhaps he never had before, he also felt more ignorant, and appallingly so! And yet the city and the universe at large had never been more worth living in, nor the smallest events more meaningful. He came upon the realization, not too long before he went to work in the mountains, that he had never seen a character in a film whom he could believe had a more interesting intellectual life than he had acquired by then.
  
    So then he had gone to work in the woods, and a few weeks into that most happy opportunity, a friend had sent him the book wherein he later found a very readable page on Thomas Aquinas and realized in his heart of hearts that he would one day have to become a Catholic. He was - to repeat, in his heart of hearts - certain that such would be the outcome. It was the only logical conclusion of all the efforts of his life so far. And not only a Catholic, but a Catholic unshakably aware of something called perfection.
 
     But not yet, he had said to himself on the banks of the Moseley, a mile upstream from its confluence from the Homathko. Not  yet. Ten years younger than Augustine in a similar predicament he was to learn many months later, he had uttered the same cry of resistance. But very quietly, and only to himself. And yet not without complete expectation that there would be even more most satisfactory thunder and lightning as he traversed the lower slopes of Mount Sinai. In his earlier apprehensions of himself as a Christian he had no doubt been moved - and sometimes very much moved - not only by emotion, and by no mean intellectual and spiritual encounters with God - but never with bald, clear, even pedestrian, statements in plain English about the incontestable intellectual superiority over all comers of the mighty mind of the little monk from Rocca Secca. (When I say "little, of course, I refer to the six-year-old Thomas, sent to Monte Cassino by his parents, in order that he should eventually become abbot, according to their ambitions, but who asked his monk supervisor "what is God?") He was not unlike a lost child, a child who had been forever lost, suddenly encountering his father. Thomas was not only the man who could understand his searching with his heart, but also the teacher who could consolidate that heart and will with his head.