In a week they seemed to live an eternity of passion, although as yet they did nothing but hold hands and exchange the gentlest of caresses. This was a time for Michael of complete and thoughtless happiness. He was strangely set at ease by the knowledge that the term was drawing to its close. This wonderful thing could not last; and so he had no thought of bringing it to an end, and lived in a timeless moment of delight. He would have liked to have taken Nick into his bed; but did not do so, partly from confused scruples and partly because their relationship was for the present so perfect, and indeed the notion that there was so much still reserved was a part of its perfection. Michael did give a sidelong and reluctant attention during this time to the deeper implications of what he was doing. He ceased going to communion. He felt, strangely, no guilt, only a hard determination to hold to the beloved object, and to hold to it before God, accepting the cost whatever it might be, and in the end, somehow, justifying his love. The idea of rejecting or surrendering it did not come to his mind.
He began, hazily, to reflect on how he had formerly felt that his religion and his passions sprang from the same source, and how this had seemed to infect his religion with corruption. It now seemed to him that he could turn the argument about; why should his passions not rather be purified by this proximity? He could not believe that there was anything inherently evil in the great love which he bore to Nick: this love was something so strong, so radiant, it came from so deep it seemed of the very nature of goodness itself. Vaguely Michael had visions of himself as the boy’s spiritual guardian, his passion slowly transformed into a lofty and more selfless attachment. He would watch Nick grow to manhood, cherishing his every step, ever present, yet with a self-effacement which would be the highest expression of love. Nick, who was his lover, would become his son; and indeed already, with a tact and imagination which removed from their relationship any suggestion of crudeness, the boy was playing both parts. When he had reflected a little Michael felt even better, as if these bold reflections had done something to restore his innocence. He let his thoughts return again, very cautiously, to his vision of himself as a priest. After all, it would be possible. Everything would turn out for the best. During this time he prayed constantly and felt, through the very contradictions of his existence, that his faith was increased. With a completeness which he had never known before he was happy.
How the idyll would have ended if it had been left to Michael to control he was never privileged to know. The matter was abruptly taken out of his hands. In three weeks his relationship with Nick had grown with a miraculous speed, like a tree in a fairy story, and it seemed to him that developments which in an ordinary love might take years were enjoyed by them in a space of days. Perhaps it was just this that was fatal. Michael never knew. He felt that he had known Nick all his life. Perhaps Nick felt this too and had, as after half a century of knowledge, tired of him. Or perhaps the too great intensity of their love had in some way soured him. Or perhaps there was a deeper explanation, more creditable to the boy. This was one thing they were never fated to discuss.
Towards the end of the term an evangelist came to the school. He was a non-conformist preacher who was taking part in a religious revival campaign sponsored by all the churches, and in connexion with which members of various creeds had already spoken to the boys. He was an emotional man, an excellent speaker. Michael sat through two of his tirades, not listening, thinking of Nick’s embraces. Nick evidently had been having other thoughts. On the second day he did not come to see Michael at the time appointed. He went instead to the Headmaster and told him the whole story.
When Nick did not come Michael became worried. He waited a long time, and then left a note and set out looking for the boy. Some premonitory fear had made him, by this time, almost frantic. It was while still on this search that he was summoned urgently to see the Head. He did not see Nick tête à têteagain. The betrayal, which it was immediately evident had taken place, of something to him so utterly pure and sacred was so appalling that it was hot until later that Michael troubled to think of the matter in terms of his own ruin. It was some time afterwards too that, remembering things which the Headmaster had said, it occurred to him that Nick had not given a truthful picture of what had taken place. The boy had contrived to give the impression that much more had happened than had in fact happened, and also seemed to have hinted that it was Michael who had led him unwillingly into an adventure which he did not understand and from which he had throughout been anxious to escape. The picture as the Head saw it, and as Nick seemed to have offered it, was simply of a rather disgraceful seduction.
The term was nearly at an end. Without open scandal Michael took his immediate departure from the school. A carefully worded letter from the Headmaster to his Bishop destroyed completely his hopes of ordination. He went to London and took a temporary job at a University crammer’s establishment. He now had plenty of time for reflection. Whereas success and happiness had kept guilt at bay, ruin and grief brought it, almost automatically, with them; and Michael reflected that after all the idea of the matter which the Headmaster had received was not an unjust one. He had been guilty of that worst of offences, corrupting the young: an offence so grievous that Christ Himself had said that it were better for a man to have a millstone hanged about his neck and be drowned in the depth of the sea. Michael was not then concerned to share his guilt with Nick: he was anxious to take all there was, and if there had been more he would have taken that too.
Much later still, when he could at last view the scene, from a distance of many years, more calmly, he did wonder what Nick’s motive had been in confessing at all, and in confessing in this misleading way. He concluded that the boy had been sincerely led to confess by religious scruples, together with some perhaps half unconscious resentment a-gainst Michaeclass="underline" and that he had told it as he had partly because of his resentment but partly and more explicitly so as to make things seem the very worst since they were already so unpardonably bad. This Michael knew to be a natural instinct in those who confess and he imagined that Nick had turned their love into a dreary tale of seduction without any deliberate malice against himself. But he could never be sure.
The years went by. Michael took a job in the education department of the London County Council. Then restlessly he went back to schoolmastering. Without great difficulty, though sometimes plagued by his inclinations, he avoided amorous adventures. After the emotions and despairs into which the episode had cast him had subsided – and they took long to do so – he began soberly to seek again for what had eluded him, his right place in life, the task for which God had made him. Very distantly the old hopes of becoming a priest dawned again on his horizon, but he would avert his attention from them. At times it seemed to him that the catastrophe which destroyed his first attempt had been designed to humble him; his real chance was still to come. He worked quietly but without satisfaction at various teaching jobs. Then came the call to Imber, the encounter with the Abbess, and the exciting sense of a new life and of the deep and destined pattern emerging at last.
It was very shortly after his first visit to Imber, when the plan for the community was in a vague preliminary stage, that Michael entered a room of some friends of the Abbess in London and was confronted by the head of Nick set upon the body of Catherine. The encounter was so utterly unexpected, the resemblance so close and striking, that Michael had been speechless and had had to sit down and feign a momentary sickness. He had lost sight of Nick completely during the years that followed their severance, though without seeking it he had heard occasional news of him: that he had read mathematics at Oxford, and though thought to be brilliant had missed getting his first, that he had taken a post in aero-dynamic research, but had left this very soon after, when he inherited some money, and bought a share in a syndicate at Lloyds. He was to be seen in the City a good deal, so Michael heard from his few business acquaintances, in the company of the more raffish type of stockbroker. He was mentioned now and then in gossip columns in connexion with women. It was assumed he had taken to drink. Michael had once heard it said, as a vague rumour, that he was homosexual.