Michael had received this information with interest and asked for no more. He packed it away in a part of his mind where he still held and cherished the boy he had known, and commended continually to the Love which comprehends and transforms, the old passion whose intensity had made him think it so pure. But this was at a deep level, where Michael’s thoughts were hardly explicit. More superficially he developed, as the years went by, a quiet resentment against Nick for having so efficiently spoilt his life – and thought soberly that though he might be a bit to blame he was certainly not wholly to blame if Nick had gone to the bad. The boy was clearly unbalanced and irresponsible, as had been quite evident to Michael before he fell in love with him. He did not wish to minimize his own guilt, but he knew that at a certain point further reflection on it became mere self-indulgence. He regarded the chapter as closed.
He was overwhelmed by the meeting with Catherine. He did not need to be told that the handsome young lady with the grey eyes and the abundant dark hair whose long hand, in a moment, he limply held, was Miss Fawley. He wondered at once what she knew of him, whether she saw him, with hostility, and a little contempt, as an obscure schoolmaster who had been dismissed for seducing her brother. Contempt in fact it was hard to read into those gentle and evasive eyes, but Michael rapidly decided that if Nick’s relation to his sister had been as close as he declared, and somehow those declarations had seemed truthful, he would have given her some, probably fairly accurate, version of what had occurred. She might not remember his name. But a certain confusion and too deliberate kindliness during the first meeting made Michael sure that she knew very well who he was.
It might be thought that since Nature by addition had defeated him of Nick, at least by subtraction it was now offering him Catherine: but this did not occur to Michael except abstractly and as something someone else might have felt. He knew from his first meeting with Catherine that she was destined to be a nun. But it was in any case remarkable how little she seemed to attract him. He liked her, and found appealing a certain pleading sweetness in her manner, but the great pale brow and sleepy eyes, cast now in the unmistakable feminine mould, moved his passions not a whit. It was indeed strange that God could have made two creatures so patently from the same substance and yet in making them so alike made them so different. Catherine’s head in repose exactly resembled Nick’s, though a little smaller and finer. But her expressions, her smile, gave to the same form a very different animation; and when she inclined her chin towards her bosom, for Catherine was much given to looking modestly down, Michael felt that he was the victim of some appalling conjuring trick. He found her, as he found all women, unattractive and a trifle obscene, and the more so for so cunningly reminding him of Nick.
The people who were introducing them, and who obviously knew of no previous connexion, were busy explaining, with a little help from Catherine, how Catherine was eventually to go into the Abbey and how she hoped she might spend some time with the projected community before she went in. This was an idea of the Abbess’s, who had said she would write to Michael, who should by now have had the letter. Michael said he had been divided from his correspondence by a country visit: the Abbess’s letter was probably waiting at his flat. He was sure that such a plan would work splendidly; and for him in any case the wish of the Abbess was law. Miss Fawley got up to go. As Michael watched her standing by the door making her good-byes, her long slim umbrella tapping the floor, her grey coat and skirt desperately well cut and inconspicuous, her abundant hyacinth hair held in a firm bun under a small and undeniably smart hat, he wondered at her, and at the strange destiny which had made their paths cross, and which he did not for a second doubt would sooner or later re-unite him with Nick.
This happened in fact even sooner than he had expected. He found the Abbess’s letter at his flat: she commended Catherine to him, spoke of her as a “specially favoured child”, a person, potentially, of great spiritual gifts. She hoped he would accept her as a temporary member of the new community. Something in the tone of the letter made Michael feel that the Abbess must know about Nick. Catherine would almost certainly have told her. He could not imagine that that pallid and gentle being, confronted with a personality like that of the Abbess, could have held anything back. In any case, confession ran in the family.
Catherine duly appeared at Imber in the earliest days of the community, when only Michael and Peter and the Straffords were living in the great empty house. Quietly, indeed during the first weeks hardly opening her mouth, she busied herself with the innumerable tasks which confronted the little group. She worked till she was ready to drop and Michael had to restrain her. Seeing her in the country, she seemed changed. There was no appearance of smartness now. She wore old and rather shapeless clothes and her curling purple-dark hair was carelessly knotted or else tumbling down her back. She seemed consumed by a wish to efface herself, to make herself very small and unheeded, while being as busy and ubiquitous as possible. She seemed to Michael at this time a rather strange young person, unbalanced perhaps and given to excesses, though as in the case of her brother he soon forgot that he had ever thought this about her. He liked her increasingly and respected her efforts, allowing himself sometimes to look at her, searching for another face, and finding now and then her cool eyes resting upon him.
Patchway arrived, James arrived. The community began very tentatively to take shape. The garden was dug, the first seeds ceremonially planted. Then Catherine spoke to Michael of her brother. She made no reference then or later to the past, except by implicitly assuming that Michael and Nick knew each other. She was seriously worried, she said, about her brother. It seemed that Nick had been living a life of dissipation – Catherine gave no details -from which, although he hated it, he lacked the strength to withdraw. He was very unhappy and had threatened suicide. It was necessary that something drastic, something imaginative, be done for him. Catherine thought it possible that if he were asked to come to Imber he would come. Some work could surely be found for him. If he stayed even for a little time it would be to the good, if only from the point of view of his health; and who knows, with prayer, and with the proximity of that great storehouse of spiritual energy across the lake, one might hope perhaps for more than that. So Catherine pleaded, speaking as one that fears a refusal, her face pale and solemn with the force of her wish, resembling her brother.
Michael was extremely dismayed by her request. He had, since he first met her, held it vaguely in his mind, and not without a certain melancholy pleasure, that now some day he would see Nick again: briefly perhaps, in some house in London, as he imagined it. They would give an embarrassed smile and then not meet again for years. But to have the boy here – he still thought of Nick as a boy – here at Imber, at so sacred a place and time, entered in no way into Michael’s plans or wishes. He had been very busy, very excited, with his developing project. He had even at times almost forgotten who Catherine was: which was partly perhaps a success on her side. Her proposal struck him as untimely and thoroughly tiresome, and his first reaction to it was almost cynical. In a case like he imagined Nick’s to be the proximity of storehouses of spiritual force was just as likely to provoke some new outrage as to effect a cure. Spiritual power was indeed like electricity in that it was thoroughly dangerous. It could perform miracles of good: it could also bring about destruction. Michael feared that Nick at Imber would make trouble for others and win no good for himself. Also he simply did not want Nick at Imber.