Chapter Ten

    Broughton Harbour had turned out to be interesting, fulfilling, and a great rung up the ladder to the point where Toby became settled and happy in finding himself as a classroom teacher, but no reason for its purpose in his life was more important than its proving his prophetical instincts. To repeat, the world is full of amateur psychologists, the naysayers of divine wisdom and foresight in the name of the goals and standards of this or that form of materialism, and in order to deal with them at each and every corner on which they like to show their faces - even faces disfigured with good and supposedly kindly intentions - the prophet needs hard external facts as well as faith in his inner promptings. In his own life, these hard facts become a track record, an historical manifestation of the first principle of metaphysics: a thing is what it is. There is no rule on the face of the earth that an amateur psychologist likes to break more than this one, nor is there any rule on the face of the earth which can faster break up an amateur psychologist.
 
     It was hard fact that precisely a year before the move to Gull Island, Toby finished a novel. It was his second completed long work, and an experiment in trying to make a full text out of a lot of things he did not really believe in, nor much care about, a kind of deliberate mistake in the name of proving he could hang in there with a lot of faithless moderns just as well as they could hang in with themselves, before he turned to the things he actually did care about. He definitely accomplished his goal, for the head editor of the major Canadian firm he sent the manuscript to wrote back to tell him that while he plainly could write well, his leading character didn't seem to do much. She recommended that he not try to rewrite the story. Toby was very happy with the result. To have it officially on paper from one of Toronto's most respected editors that he wrote well was one in the eye for his prospective mother-in-law, who by then had started a steady campaign against her daughter marrying him; and to be virtually ordered off the existentialist beat was a solid help to his sometimes confused way of going about his apprenticeship. He felt that he had done his duty by the losers, and could now get on with life as he had been raised to take hold of it.
 
     But the most important aspect of the effort was how he had concluded the story, with the young man who didn't do anything taking the girl he had just met off to a Gulf Island, significantly enough just like the one he had lived on for a while as a boy.
  
    When he had started this novel, earlier in the spring, he had just left law school and was at last once again pouring himself into writing, with once again a tyro writer for a roommate, and battling with the death-throes of his own arguments against particularizing his talents within the bosom of the Church Universal. He had, as he saw it, lofty reasons to leave himself open to any and all of mankind's beliefs, so great was his intellect and imagination that putting it to the service of one institution was to rob all the others.
 
     But he also by then had a battle going with Jelena, who had grown up in a mixed faith family, without being especially grateful for the opportunity, and thus was not looking forward to the same problems repeated under her own roof, especially with a husband with a willful intellect like young Mister Skinner, the instinctive debater. His entire family had assumed he would do well at law, and throughout his adult life people periodically thought he should be in politics.
 
     "You're all over the goddamn place and you're wearing me out! I'm not God! Go find Him for yourself or we're through!" Unlike him, she rarely swore, so this was quite the outburst and among all the other issues he was dealing with, Toby took it to heart. And then, on a strictly personal issue, he had a further rebuke from the Virgin Mary herself. She was consoling, but also critical - not unlike Jelena - and he came out of that event admitting to himself that it was time to take on the Church. He was, after all, for all his mental powers, simply one more poor, stupid, sinner who would need all the offices and sacraments of Catholicism to get his butt out of the hot seat.
 
     And everything after that had been most adventurous. Good Lord. He was a reader, a writer; he knew great copy when he saw it, and great copy he was getting after his turn around. The priests were one after another the most engaging characters, about as stereotyped or predictable as a flock of all species of birds in a hurricane. And he even landed a lovely case of scruples as soon as he changed directions. The Devil, naked as a stripper, coming at him one smoking June afternoon on Tenth Avenue as he walked home from his temporary job as a security guard, laying on him that he was only becoming a Catholic because it would give him an unusual edge as a writer! Converts were automatically interesting, especially if they were writers. It seemed almost unfair, the advantages you had in the market place if you were a convert. What a position to be in, when you'd always preferred to play with the odds against you.
 
     But none of this had turned him swiftly into a Thomas Merton - author of the first book to be given him by priest - nor a Chesterton, whom he had been sent to some months later by a priest who taught history at the university. With his fiction, whenever he seemed to have the grace to write it, he leaned heavily on his old love of nature and quite ordinary human activity, staying away from theological issues until he clearly had the spark to handle them. Thus the book he had begun when he left law school for the second time, not long after Jelena had crossed his bows, even though the last half of it was completed weeks after he had plunged into Rome, reflected none of his new interest.
Nor did it reflect, except in an off-handed symbolic sort of way, the most interesting element of his life, which in fact had always been there to one degree or another, that he was a mystic and already a veteran of aridity and other forms of the dark night. It could not show these things, of course, as long as he was totally ignorant of the language of mystical discourse and understanding; and even more important it could not show them until the Holy Ghost gave him both inspiration and permission, and that which no novelist has ever progressed without, a list of characters and a plot to put them in.
As has been said, he had been born to run against the long odds, and permission of the Holy Spirit being withheld is the longest odds the world can ever know.
 
     Jelena had nailed his predicament early, although not according to the norms of mysticism. "You're like Churchill. You'll have to do a lot before you can write about it."
 
     "But he wrote a novel when he was young."
 
     "And who reads it now? Fin de siecle. You don't want that." She laughed. "I'm not yoking myself to the editorship of anything so forgettable as Winston Churchill's first novel."
 
     "You've read it?"
 
     "No. And that's why I know it's forgettable. I don't mean to be mean. I only mean to be comparative. To be Aristotelean and sensitive to categories. I just won't have you writing any ordinary old novel, that's all."
 
     "Thanks. I think. Don't you ever read ordinary novels? Or is it always a combination of D.H. Lawrence and Saint Teresa?"
 
     "I read what interests me. What keeps me above and away from the mundane."
 
     "You don't worry about the common man? Or what he reads?"
 
     "I don't believe in the common man. That image is even more ridiculous than the image of Plato's Republic. And it's far less noble as an image. The common man is the illiterate imbecile that Pilate gave into, if you really want to know. I suppose that was necessary once, for the sake of the salvation of mankind, but there's no reason for it to happen again. Where did you get this common man idea anyway? In law school?"
 
     "No. In law school you have the doctrine of the reasonable man, which presumes the ability to think. I suspect you don't believe the common man can think."
    "It's not that he can't, because God gave all men reason. It's that he won't. He prefers to remain illiterate. If you won't read, and read well, you won't think well. And you don't really believe in the common man either."
 
     "How do you know?"

    "Because of the way you talk about your friends. Not one of them is a 'common man' to you. They're all real individuals. You love them, you really enjoy them. Nobody enjoys or even thinks of loving a common man. He's just a principle, a false principle, for justifying one more ridiculous doctrine. In Russia it's the proletariat, over here it’s the common man crowd. You're not all wrong. You like people. You're a folk singer. You enjoyed working for the biggest daily in town and writing for twelve-year-old minds. It was a good place to be for a while, but you have to move on. You're too smart not to."
 
     "You're not just being ambitious for your future husband?"

    "I'm being ambitious for my own peace of mind. Having to listen to twaddle at breakfast would give me indigestion. Maybe an ulcer. And you're being far too presumptuous about the husband bit." But she would smile, and maybe give his arm a squeeze and he would feel that the debate had been worth it.
 
     So he had given up the common man routine, somewhat, and moved on to abuse Saint Ignatius, the Spiritual Exercises, and the good old principle of having to believe that if the Church says black is white you'd better believe it, and then, because the pains in his head kept threatening to kill him, he thought that the least the scientist in him could do was to give Rome a chance.
  
    By the time they arrived in Broughton Harbour, a year later, he was thus in great shape to take the place by the throat.
  
    Bloody converts.