The Keys of the Kingdom

by A. J. Cronin

It was raining steadily, early that Saturday evening in January when Francis arrived at Shalesley, on the branch line, some forty miles from Tynecastle. But nothing could damp the eagerness, the burning of his spirit. While the train disappeared into the mist, he stood expectantly on the wet open platform, his alert eyes sweeping its dreary vacancy. No one had come to meet him. Undismayed, he picked up his bag and swung into the main street of the colliery village. The Church of the Redeemer should not be hard to find.

  It was his first appointment, his first curacy. He could scarcely believe it. His heart sang … at last, newly ordained, he had his chance to get into the battle and fight for human souls.

  Though he had been forewarned, Francis had never seen greater ugliness than that which now surrounded him. Shalesley consisted of long grey rows of houses and poor cheap shops, interspaced with plots of waste land, slag heaps, – smoking even in the rain, – a refuse dump, several taverns and chapels, all dominated by the high black headstocks of the Renshaw Colliery. But he told himself gaily that his interest lay in the people, not the place.

  The Catholic church stood on the east side of the village, adjacent to the colliery, harmonizing with the scene. It was a big erection of raw red brick with Gothic blue-stained windows, a dark red corrugated iron roof, and a sawed-off rusty spire. The school lay on one side; the Presbytery, fronted by a weedy plot and girded by a broken-toothed fence, upon the other.

  With a deep, excited breath, Francis approached the small, ramshackle house and pulled the bell. After some delay, when he was about to ring again, the door was opened by a stout woman in a blue striped apron. Inspecting him, she nodded.

  ‘It’ll be yourself, Father! His Reverence is expecting you. In there!’ She pointed with privileged good nature to the parlour door. ‘What weather to be sure. I’ll away and put on the kippers.’

  Francis sturdily entered the room. Already seated at a table covered with a white cloth and laid for a repast, a thickset priest of about fifty stopped his impatient knife-tapping to greet his new curate.

  ‘You’re here at last. Come in.’

  Francis extended his hand. ‘Father Kezer, I imagine?’

  ‘That’s right. Who did you expect? King William of Orange? Well, you’re just in time for supper. Trust you!’ Tilting back, he called to the adjoining kitchen. ‘Miss Cafferty! Are you going to be all night?’ Then, to Francis: ‘Sit down and stop looking like the lost chord. I hope you play cribbage. I like a game of an evening.’

  Francis took a chair at the table and soon Miss Cafferty hurried in with a large covered dish of kippers and poached eggs. As Father Kezer helped himself to two eggs and a brace of kippers she laid another place for Francis. Then Father Kezer passed over the dish, his mouth full.

  ‘Go ahead and help yourself. Don’t stint. You’ll have to work hard here so you’d better eat.’

  He himself ate rapidly, his strong crunching jaws and capable hands, felted with black hairs, never at rest. He was burly, with a round cropped head, and a tight mouth. His nose was flat, with wide nostrils out of which sprouted two dark snuff-stained tufts. He conveyed the impression of strength, of authority. Every movement was a masterpiece of unconscious self-assertion. As he cut an egg in two and slipped one half into his mouth his little eyes watched, formed an opinion of Francis, as a butcher might weigh the merits of a steer.

  ‘You don’t look too hardy. Under eleven stone, eh? I don’t know what you curates are coming to. My last was a weak-kneed effort! Should have called himself flea – not Lee – he hadn’t the guts of one. It’s this Continental la-de-da that ruins you. In my time – well, the fellows that came out of Maynooth with me were men.’

  ‘I think you’ll find me sound in wind and limb.’ Francis smiled.

  ‘We’ll soon see.’ Father Kezer grunted. ‘Go in and hear confessions when you’ve finished. I’ll be in later. There won’t be many tonight though … seeing it’s wet. Give them an excuse! They’re bone lazy – my beautiful lot!’

  Upstairs, in his thin-walled room, massively furnished with a heavy bed and an enormous Victorian wardrobe, Francis washed his hands and face at the stained washstand. Then he hastened down towards the church. The impression Father Kezer had given him was not favourable, but he told himself he must be fair: immediate judgements were so often unjust. He sat for a long time in the cold confessional box, – still marked with the name of his predecessor, FR LEE, – hearing the drumming of the rain on the tin roof. At last he came out and wandered round the empty church. It was a depressing spectacle – bare as a barn and not very clean. An unhappy attempt had been made to marble the nave with dark green paint. The statue of Saint Joseph had lost a hand and been clumsily repaired. The stations of the cross were sad little daubs. On the altar some gaudy paper flowers, in vases of tarnished grass, hit the eye like an affront. But these little short-comings only made his opportunity the greater. The taberacle was there. And Francis knelt before it, with throbbing fervour, dedicating his life anew.

  Habituated to the cultured atmosphere of San Morales, a halfway house for scholars and preachers, men of breeding and distinction moving between London, Madrid and Rome, Francis found the next few days increasingly difficult. Father Kezer was not an easy man. Naturally irascible and inclined to surliness, age, experience, and failure to win affection from his flock had made him hard as nails.

  At one time he had held an excellent parish in the seaside resort of Eastcliffe. He had proved himself so disagreeable that important people in the town had petitioned the Bishop to remove him. The incident, at first bitterly resented, had been hallowed by time into an act of personal sacrifice. He would remark, soulfully: ‘ Of my own free will I stepped from the throne to the footstool … but, ah! … those were the days.’

  Miss Cafferty, his cook and housekeeper combined, alone stood by him. She had been with him for years. She understood him, she was of his own kidney, she could take his slangings and heartily slang him back. The two respected each other. When he departed on his annual six weeks’ holiday to Harrogate he allowed her to go home for her own vacation.

  In his personal habits he had scant refinement. He stamped around his bedroom, opened and slammed the single bathroom door. The matchboard house reverberated with his wind.

  Unwittingly, he had reduced his religion to a formula – with no conception of interior meanings, of the unsubstantial, no elasticity of outlook. ‘Do this or be damned’ was imprinted on his heart. There were certain things to be accomplished with words, water, oil and salt. Without them, hell was ready, hot and gaping. He was deeply prejudiced, loudly voicing his detestation of every other denomination in the village – an attitude which did little to gain him friends.

  Even in his relations with his own congregation he was not at peace. The parish was a poor one with a heavy debt upon the church and despite a stringent economy he was often desperately pressed to make ends meet. He had a legitimate case to place before his people. But his natural ire was a poor substitute for tact. In his sermons, planted solidly on his feet, head thrust aggressively forward, he lashed the sparse congregation for its neglect.

  ‘How do you expect me to pay the rent, and the taxes, and the insurance? And keep the church roof over your heads? You’re not giving it to me, you’re giving it to Almighty God. Now listen to me, every man and woman of ye. It’s silver I want to see in the plate, not your miserable brass farthings. You’re most of you in work you men, thanks to the generosity of Sir George Renshaw. You’ve no excuse! As for the wimmen of the parish – if they’d put more in the offertory and less on their backs it would fit them better.’ He thundered on, then took up the collection himself, glaring accusingly at each of his parishioners as he shoved the plate beneath their noses.

  His demands had provoked a feud, a bitter vendetta between himself and his parishioners. The more he berated them the less they gave. Enraged, he devised schemes, took to distributing little buff envelopes. When they left the empty envelopes behind he went roun
d the church after the service, gathering up the litter and muttering furiously: ‘That’s how they treat Almighty God!’

  In this gloomy financial sky there was one bright sun.

  Sir George Renshaw, who owned the Shalesley colliery, with, indeed, fifteen other coal mines in the country, was not only a man of immense resources and a Catholic but an inveterate philanthropist. Though his country seat, Renshaw Hall, was seventy miles away, on the other side of the shire, the Church of the Redeemer had somehow gained a place upon his list. Every Christmas, with the utmost regularity, a cheque for one hundred guineas reached the parish priest. ‘Guineas, mind ye!’ Father Kezer anointed the word. ‘Not just measly pounds. Ah! There’s a gentleman for ye!’ He had seen Sir George only twice, at public gatherings in Tynecastle many years before, but he spoke of him with reverence and awe. He had a lurking fear that, through no fault of his, the magnate might discontinue the charity.

  By the end of his first month at Shalesley, close association with Father Kezer began to take effect on Francis. He was continually on edge. No wonder young Father Lee had had such a bad nervous breakdown. His spiritual life became overcast, his sense of values confused. He found himself regarding Father Kezer with growing hostility. Then he would recollect himself with an inward groan, and strive wildly for obedience, for humility.

  His parochial work was desperately hard, particularly in this wintry weather. Three times a week he had to bicycle to Broughton and Glenburn, two distant wretched hamlets, to say mass, hear confessions, and take the catechism class in the local town hall. The lack of response amongst his people increased his difficulties. The very children were lethargic, shuffling. There was much poverty, heartrending destitution; the whole parish seemed steeped in apathy, savourless and stale. Passionately he told himself he would not surrender to routine. Conscious of his clumsiness and inefficiency, he had a burning desire to reach these poor hearts, to succour and revive them. He would kindle a spark, blaze the dead ashes into life, if it were the last thing he did.

  What made it worse was the fact that the parish priest, astute and watchful, seemed to sense, with a kind of grim humour, the difficulties his curate was experiencing, and to anticipate slyly a readjustment of the other’s idealism to his own practical common sense. Once when Francis came in, tired and wet, having bicycled ten miles through wind and rain to an outlying sick call at Broughton, Father Kezer compressed his attitude into a single gibe. ‘Handing out haloes isn’t what you thought it was – eh?’ He added, naturally: ‘A good-for-nothing lot.’

  Francis flushed hotly. ‘Christ died for a good-for-nothing lot.’

  Deeply upset, Francis began to mortify himself. At meals he ate sparingly, often only a cup of tea and some toast. Frequently, when he woke up in the middle of the night, tortured by misgivings, he would steal down to the church. Shadowed and silent, washed in pale moonlight, the bare edifice lost its distracting crudity. He flung himself down on his knees, begging for courage to embrace the tribulations of this beginning, praying with impetuous violence. At last, as he gazed at the wounded figure on the cross, patient, gentle, suffering, peace would fill his soul.

  One night, shortly after midnight, when he had made a visit of this nature and was tiptoeing upstairs he found Father Kezer waiting on him. Wearing his nightshirt and an overcoat, a candle in his hand, the parish priest planted his thick hairy legs on the top landing, angrily barred the way.

  ‘What d’you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Going to my room.’

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘To the church.’

  ‘What! At this time of night!’

  ‘Why not?’ Francis forced a smile. ‘Do you think I might wake our Lord up?’

  ‘No, but you might wake me up.’ Father Kezer lost his temper. ‘I won’t have it. I never heard such nonsense in my life. I’m running a parish, not a religious order. You can pray all you want in the day, but while you’re under my orders you’ll sleep at night.’

  Francis suppressed the hot answer on his tongue. He walked to his bedroom in silence. He must curb himself, make a great effort to get on with his superior, if he were to do any good in the parish at all. He tried to concentrate on Father Kezer’s good points: his frankness and courage, his odd jocularity, his adamantine chastity.

  A few days later, choosing a moment which he thought propitious he diplomatically approached the older priest.

  ‘I’ve been wondering, Father … we’ve such a scattered district, so out of the way, with no proper places of amusement … wondering if we couldn’t have a club for the youngsters of the parish.’

  ‘Aha!’ Father Kezer was in his jocular mood. ‘So you’re out for popularity, my lad!’

  ‘Good gracious, no.’ Francis took up an equal heartiness, so intent was he on winning his point. ‘I don’t want to presume. But a club might take the young people off the streets – and the older ones out of the pubs. Develop them physically and socially.’ He smiled. ‘Even make them want to come to church.’

  ‘Ho, ho!’ Father Kezer guffawed. ‘It’s well you’re young. I believe you’re worse than Lee. Well, go ahead if you want to. But you’ll get all your thanks in one basket from the good-for-nothing crowd that hangs out here.’

  ‘Thank you, thank you. I only wanted your permission.’

  With thrilling eagerness Francis immediately began to carry out his plan. Donald Kyle, the manager at Renshaw Colliery, was a Scot and a steady Catholic who had showed signs of good will. Two other officials at the pit, Morrison the check-weigher, whose wife occasionally came in to help at the Presbytery, and Creeden, the head shot-firer, were also members of the church. Through the manager, Francis received permission to use the Colliery first-aid hall three nights a week. With the help of the other two he set out to stir up interest in the proposed club. His own money, added up, made less than two pounds, and he would have died sooner than ask assistance from the parish. But he wrote to Willie Tulloch – whose work brought him into touch with the Tynecastle Corporation Recreation Centres – begging him to send along some old and cast-off athletic gear.

  Puzzling how he might best launch the venture, he decided that nothing could draw the young people better than a dance. There was a piano in the room and Creeden was a first-rate performer on the fiddle. He posted up a notice on the Red Cross door, and when Thursday arrived, he expended his capital on a buffet of cakes, fruit and lemonade.

  The success of the evening, after a stiff start, surpassed his wildest expectations: so many turned out they managed eight sets of lancers. Most of the lads had no shoes, they danced in their pit boots. Between the dances they sat on the benches round the room, red-faced and happy, while the girls went to the buffet to find them refreshment. When they waltzed they all sang the words of the refrain. A little group of pitmen going off shift gathered at the entrance, the gaslight showing their teeth white against their grimed faces. Towards the end they joined in the singing, and one or two of the brighter sparks amongst them nipped in and stole a dance. It was a merry evening.

  As he stood at the door, with their good-nights ringing in his ears, Francis thought with a surge of trembling joy: ‘They’ve begun to come alive. Dear God, I’ve made a start.’

  Next morning Father Kezer came in to breakfast in a towering rage.

  ‘What’s this I hear? A fine to-do! A right royal example. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’

  Francis looked up in amazement. ‘What on earth do you mean?’

  ‘You know what I mean! That infernal stew you put on last night.’

  ‘You gave me permission – only a week ago.’

  Father Kezer snarled: ‘I didn’t give you permission to start a promiscuous rigadoon on the very doorstep of my church. I’ve had trouble enough to keep my young girls pure without your introducin’ your immodest pawing and prancing!’

  ‘The entire evening was perfectly innocent.’

  ‘Innocent! – As God is above us!’ Father Kezer wa
s dark red with anger. ‘Don’t you know what that sort of gallantry leads to – you poor dolt – clutching and clasping and bodies and legs together? It starts bad thoughts working in these young folks’ minds. It leads to concupiscence, carnality and lusts of the flesh.’

  Francis was very pale, his eyes were blazing with indignation.

  ‘Aren’t you confusing lust with sex?’

  ‘Holy St Joseph! What’s the difference?’

  ‘As much as there is between disease and health.’

  Father Kezer’s hands made a convulsive gesture. ‘What in the foul fiend’s name are you talking about?’

  The pent-up bitterness of the past two months broke over Francis in a tempestuous wave. ‘ You can’t suppress nature. If you do it’ll turn on you and rend you. It’s perfectly natural and good for young men and women to mix together, to dance together. It’s a natural prelude to courtship and marriage. You can’t keep sex under a dirty sheet like a stinking corpse. That’s what starts the sly laugh, the prurient sneer. We must learn to educate and transmute sex, not choke it as though it were an adder. If you try that you’ll fail, besides making something filthy out of what is clean and fine!’

  A horrible silence. The veins in Father Kezer’s neck were swollen, purple. ‘You blasphemous pup! I’ll not have my young folks couplin’ in your dance halls!’

  ‘Then you’ll drive them to couple – as you call it – in the dark lanes and fields.’

  ‘You lie,’ Father Kezer stuttered. ‘I’ll keep the maidenhood of this parish undeflowered. I know what I’m about.’

  ‘No doubt,’ Francis answered bitterly. ‘But the fact remains that statistics show the Shalesley illegitimacy rate to be the highest in the diocese.’

  For a moment it seemed as though the parish priest must have a fit. His hands clenched and unclenched, as though seeking something to strangle. Rocking slightly on his feet, he raised his finger and levelled it at Francis.

  ‘Statistics’ll show another thing. And that is there’s no club within five miles of this spot I’m standing on. Your fine plan is finished, smashed, done for. I say that! And in this case my word is final!’ He flung himself down at the table and furiously began his breakfast.