“And I the French and English.”
“The forgiveness and grace of God relieved me of that sin.”
Dietrich nodded.
“But I have never stopped hating the Great War, Dietrich. I try to practice charity toward my fellow man, but I shall never stop hating the viciousness and pettiness and meanness in humanity that led to the war, and that feeds this new monster.” Bell leaned closer. “It is new, you know. Not tyranny, of course. Tyrants have always been with us. You’ve only got to look at the Soviet Union. My friends here—” he waved his arm at the half-dozen graying men slumped in armchairs reading their newspapers or sleeping beneath them—“think there’s the great threat. Not because it’s tyranny—they can live with all sorts of tyranny. Because it’s Communism. They’re cautiously optimistic about your new government. ‘Well, this Hitler fellow will throw a good scare into the Reds.’ You know the sort of thing, you hear it at home.”
“Things have gone beyond throwing a good scare into anyone,” Dietrich said.
“Oh, to be sure. I’ve no doubt of Hitler’s methods, though your well-off Englishman is pleased to overlook them. But there’s more going on in Germany, you know there’s more going on. There is joy in Germany! Excitement!” Bell was growing more excited himself. “No, my boy, this is much more insidious than Communism. Communism denies man’s spiritual nature. But this new thing, this attacks man’s spiritual nature and turns it inside out. So that people can believe they live as they always have. They can believe they maintain their ancient virtues and religions. They can hate and truly think it love. Oh, we’re not immune to the modern disease here in England, not by any means.”
They were interrupted by an elderly man, also wearing the purple shirt of a bishop. “Ecclesiastical visitor, George?”
Dietrich stood quickly, clicked his heels, and offered his hand to the newcomer.
“This is Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Arthur,” Bell said. “And this is the Rt. Rev. Arthur Headlam, the Bishop of Gloucester.”
“German, then?” Bishop Headlam beamed. “Would have guessed it by your greeting. You Germans are the only race who do manners better than we English.”
“You are very kind,” Dietrich said.
“Will you join us?” Bell inquired.
“No, no time just now,” Headlam waved at him, then turned back to Dietrich. “Interesting man you’ve got now, this Hitler. Giving the trade unions a good scare, I understand. Could use a bit of that in this country, eh George? ’Course he won’t agree,” Headlam continued good-naturedly. “George here is a bloody socialist himself, aren’t you, George? Only one in the Athenaem. Wonder you don’t just pitch it all and go off to live in a tenement somewhere. Doubt you care much for Hitler either.”
“Of course I don’t care for Hitler,” Bell said pleasantly. “I’ve never cared for bullies.”
“Bosh! Good discipline, that’s all. Germany was on the brink, after all, wasn’t it, Pastor—”
“Bonhoeffer,” Dietrich reminded him. “Of course there were problems, but I assure you, sir, Hitler is not the answer to them. He’s jailing Communists and Socialists without cause. And he’s persecuting Jews.”
“Yes, well,” said Headlam, and looked at his pocket watch. “Got to run, I’m afraid. Meeting my wife in half an hour. Going to some damn concert or other.”
When he had gone, Bell did not sit back down. “He’s right about one thing, you know. It is hypocritical for a trades union supporter to inhabit the Athenaeum. But I don’t come here often, actually, just when I have to stay in London overnight. I spend most of my time at home in Chichester. You must come to visit.”
“I would very much like that. But until Easter, at least, I’m afraid I am stuck here. You know what a busy time it is for the clergy.”
“Why not come down in May after our respective Easter duties are over? That’s always a fine time for a clergyman to take a vacation. And Chichester is lovely in the spring.”
Dietrich smiled at the thought of escaping Forest Hill. “Perhaps I will visit in May.”
“Good. And now come along to dinner. They serve a very good leg of lamb downstairs, and I want to hear more about Germany.”
Back into exile in frigid rooms on Manor Mount. He decided he would fill his time by writing a book. A book about what it meant to live an authentic Christian life in the modern world, a book that would challenge the hypocritical pieties of the Buchmans of the world and expose the heresies of the Hossenfelders, the complacencies of the Bishop Headlams. But each attempt at a start ended with a few empty phrases scratched out, paper crammed into balls and tossed in the wastebasket. He took to drinking more wine than he was used to, and sleeping in the afternoons. He scratched his name on icy window panes with his fingernail, like a forlorn child.
HE THOUGHT HE MIGHT BE GOING the way of Mrs. Potts, whom he found one morning curled in a fetal position beneath the kitchen table, muttering to herself. She had been collected by her nephew and a doctor and taken to a hospital for the insane. Not that Dietrich was going mad. But the melancholy which had touched him now and again throughout his life seemed to have taken up permanent residence. He found little to inspire him in his pastoral duties. His congregations were small, their members drawn together on Sunday mornings less for spiritual guidance than to sastisfy their longing to hear German spoken. They tolerated Dietrich’s sermons with bland equanimity, and even the subject of Hitler did not rouse them into any sort of spirited discussion. Dietrich wondered if his own state of mind might be to blame. For a time his only interest lay in firing off letters to Martin Niemöller in Berlin, urging him to push the church to some action against Hitler. He received a few testy replies in response, which plunged him deeper into despair. Then he could not write, could not even read, could summon no more energy than was necessary to plod through his pastoral duties. In the evenings he slumped beside the telephone, wondering if he should call Berlin, hoping someone there would ring him. He could sit without moving for an hour, two hours.
He contemplated suicide. In his darkened rooms he lay on the bed staring at the cracked ceiling and clutching a bottle of sleeping pills. He was using the pills nightly; the bottle was half empty. But also half full. He shook it. Stared at the ceiling. Tried, without success, to pray.
The telephone rang on the bedside stand. Dietrich cradled the receiver to his head as a small child will pillow a favorite stuffed toy. Pastor Martin Niemöller spoke from behind a curtain of light static. “Bonhoeffer? I took the liberty of tracking you down through Uncle Rudi. He didn’t think you’d mind.”
“Uncle Rudi?” Dietrich sat up in the dark. “I’ve been longing to hear something from Uncle Rudi. Anything.”
Niemöller laughed. “You’d not want me to call if I had nothing to tell you. If I called with no news, I’d soon be getting another of those damn letters of yours.”
Dietrich said nothing.
“Still there, Bonhoeffer?”
“Yes,” he said.
“We’ve a meeting scheduled with Hitler himself. Next Thursday.”
“Good God,” Dietrich said, and thought, Are you also going mad, my friend? “Why? What could that accomplish?”
“Probably nothing. But it seems prudent to me to at least try to reason with the man. Otherwise the church can be accused of refusing to be open to his point of view.”
“The church should refuse to be open to Hitler’s point of view,” Dietrich said sharply.
Niemöller’s sigh was audible.
“What do we accomplish,” Dietrich said, “by treating him as if he were legitimate?”
“Damn it, man, he is legitimate. He’s running the country, in case you’ve forgotten!”
“He has no moral standing, he—”
“Dietrich, listen to me. Stop trying to turn me into an opponent. I agree with you. I agree so strongly I may be putting my head in a damn noose here.”
Dietrich lay back on the pillow. “Sorry,” he said. “You’re taking r
isks and I’m not. You’re quite right to upbraid me.”
“I didn’t call to upbraid you. I called to say it’s your turn.”
“Ah.”
“I expect, to be frank, that Hitler will refuse to stop interfering in church affairs.”
“What about the Jews?” Dietrich interrupted. “You must challenge him about his persecution of the Jews.”
“I’ll try to convince the other pastors who’ll be accompanying me,” Niemöller said. “They won’t be happy about it but I’ll try anyway.”
“Good. Good for you Martin.”
“As I was saying, Hitler will probably refuse to listen to us. We will then proclaim our good faith, and our love of the Fatherland. He will still refuse, or at least will give us no direct answer. In that case we will have done all we can. We will go away, and we will call a meeting to separate ourselves once and for all from the state church and set up our own denomination. I’m beginning to see now you were right about that. It’s the only way.”
“Thank God,” Dietrich said. “It’s past time.”
“Not so easy, though,” Niemöller continued. “Most of our bishops and pastors, most of our members, are not happy at Hitler’s interference but won’t be happy either at an outright break. That’s why this meeting with Hitler is important. It has to be clear he’s given us no other choice.”
“Take care. He’ll try to outmaneuver you, try to co-opt you. He’s cagey.”
“So am I,” Niemöller said. “Besides, I’m going to have your help. Uncle Rudi says you’ve made friends with an English bishop who’s active in the ecumenical movement.”
“Yes. George Bell.”
“Is he influential in London as well? Enough so that the newspapers will notice when he speaks out? Enough so the government will notice?”
“I think so. He seems very well respected, and it’s assumed he’ll be the next Archbishop of Canterbury.”
“Good. Have him primed and ready. As soon as we’ve met Hitler and received no satisfaction, let’s have a letter from your bishop in the Times. Let’s have your bishop telling the world that Hitler is persecuting the true church in Germany and that the state church is a sham. Let’s have him saying Christians in Germany have no choice but to oppose this government. And let’s have your bishop writing all his fellow church leaders in Sweden and France and Switzerland and urging them to say the same things in their own countries.”
“Actually, he’s already been doing the latter, at my urging.”
“Good. If Hitler knows the world is watching him, perhaps he’ll think twice before going any farther than he has. Perhaps he won’t come after us.”
“So you believe he will come after us?” Dietrich asked.
“Who knows?” Niemöller replied. “If he does, you’d best stay where you are.”
That was how Dietrich came to stand beneath the timetable in Victoria Station, suitcase in hand, feeling happier than he had in weeks. The shrill whistles and slamming doors that proclaimed a departure set his heart to thumping, and he nearly ran to the train. Though he was traveling in the opposite direction from Canterbury, he felt as though he were on pilgrimage. Alone in his compartment and yet for once not lonely, he pressed his face against the window glass and dreamed himself into the landscape. He played Noah as the train passed through the green Sussex countryside, plucking this creature and that—sheep and bull and white-tailed rabbit, horse and dog and swan—from landscape to mind’s Ark. At Pulborough the ridge of the South Downs broke the horizon. Three girls in black long-skirted uniforms emerged from a copse of trees into a lush clearing, walking arm in arm, then vanished as though dissolved by sudden smoke.
He stepped down in Chichester to find Bishop Bell himself waiting.
“This is a great deal of trouble for you,” Dietrich fretted.
“Nonsense. It’s only a short way to the cathedral and I often go for a stroll this time of day. Here, we shall send your bag on by a porter and I shall take you home by way of the close gardens.”
They skirted a city wall and passed through a stone gate into a green parkland lined with hedges and flower beds and lit by sprays of yellow and purple and red blossoms. The spires and towers of the cathedral hovered just beyond. Bell stopped. “My favorite view,” he said. “I never tire of it.”
They walked on through the gardens and along the cloisters, the mellow stone enveloping them as comfortingly as a blanket. “There is something here,” Dietrich said, giving himself over to the graceful lines of spire and nave. He stopped to admire a pastel sundial high on a tower. “Something I feel.”
“What do you mean?”
Dietrich said, “When I visit an ancient place, I often pick up a mood, an aura. In the Lambertikirche in Münster, Anabaptists were tortured to death and their rotting corpses suspended from the ceiling in iron cages. When I visited Münster, I could not bear to stay in that so-called sanctuary more than a few minutes. All I felt was dread.”
“And here?” Bell asked.
“Peace,” Dietrich said. “It is as though some heart of goodness resided here.”
Bell thought a moment and then exclaimed, “Ah! I know just what it is, the heart of goodness that resides in Chichester. It will be my secret until tomorrow. But now you’ll want to rest and wash up before dinner. And I’m afraid I haven’t warned you. We’ve another guest this week.”
“Oh,” Dietrich said, a bit disappointed, for he had hoped to have the bishop to himself. “Who is it?”
“A very fine poet, Tom Eliot. American, but he’s been in this country for years. I’ve asked him to write a play, you see, for a church festival next year at Canterbury. Poor fellow’s been having a rough time lately. He’s separated from his wife, a mentally unstable woman. She’s taken to following Tom around, staring at him through restaurant windows, denouncing him in the street, interrupting his poetry readings. Very sad for them both. He’s had the best doctors trying to see her, but she isn’t the most cooperative patient. It’s driving him to distraction and he hasn’t been able to write. He called me up, desperate to get out of London for a few weeks, so I invited him here. I feel somewhat responsible, since he’s writing this play at my instigation and he’s miserable if the work isn’t going well.”
“I understand,” Dietrich said.
“Well, the palace is quite spacious, as you can see”—gesturing at a rambling stone lodge at the end of a gravel drive. “You and Tom needn’t disturb one another, unless it turns out you enjoy one another’s company.”
Dietrich didn’t meet Tom Eliot that evening, since the poet was, according to Bell’s wife, Hettie, “on a writing tear that he doesn’t want to interrupt.”
“Not even for dinner?” Bell asked as they sat down to eat.
“He requested a tray be sent to his room. And if I’ve guessed his mood, I doubt he’ll taste a bite of it.” Hettie Bell, a tall dark-haired woman with a blaze of white at one temple, smiled at Dietrich. “Do you write, Dietrich?”
“I’ve written a few short theological volumes,” he said shyly. “Nothing major yet. As a matter of fact, I’ve a book in mind that I think could be important, but I’ve not been able to make myself start it.”
He sipped an excellent consommé and took note of his surroundings. The Tudor dining hall was large enough to feed a school of small boys. A massive fireplace at one end was empty now that the weather had turned warm and the tall milk-paned windows stood open in their stone casements. Two servants brought plates of salmon in dill sauce and asparagus and new potatoes. They finished with a strawberry tart in cream. Mrs. Bell poured the coffee herself from a silver urn. “Tomorrow I suppose George will give you a tour of the close, won’t you, George?”
“Oh, yes,” Bell said. “We saw a bit today, didn’t we? Dietrich had a most interesting observation. He believes there’s a mysterious good presence here at the cathedral. What do you think it might be, my dear?”
She thought a moment. “The Fitzalan tomb?” she suggested,
then, seeing this was not the right answer, thought some more. “Oh!” she exclaimed, and her eyes lit up.
“No, no, don’t say yet,” Bell wagged his finger at her.
“In the—” chapel, she mouthed.
“Yes, that’s it.”
She smiled, pleased with herself, and took her husband’s hand across the table. Dietrich looked enviously from one to another.
“Our secret is a quiet one,” Bell was saying. “This cathedral has not been the site of momentous events, no martyrdoms at the altar or tombs of kings. We’ve a few bishops and knights buried in our vaults. People living and marrying, giving birth and dying. Only the shades of everyday life haunt Chichester.”
“Nothing like Canterbury,” said a voice from the door. The man who stood there was thin, with a shock of brown hair that he pushed back from his forehead in an almost gallant gesture. He walked delicately to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat ramrod straight with his hands folded in his lap, looking down a long, sharp nose at Dietrich. “Chichester,” he continued, “is certainly nothing like Canterbury with its blood-spattered altars and rifled treasures and hordes of foul-smelling, fornicating pilgrims. No fat King Henry the Fourth rotting in his sarcophagus in Chichester, no Black Prince dreaming on his stone bed about the wondrous times he had while dashing babies against walls. No Becket at Chichester. Good evening, Pastor Bonhoeffer. Tom Eliot. Sorry I have been so impolite as to miss dinner.”
All this before anyone else could breathe.
“And how did the writing go?” Hettie Bell asked indulgently, as though quite used to such flights.
Eliot turned his head to answer without moving his body. “My wastebasket,” he said, “is full. All in all, a frantic evening.”
“Oh dear,” Bell said. “Perhaps we’d better retire to the library and hear about this over a drink.”
“Scotch,” said Eliot, “would clear the head marvelously.”
Dietrich was himself feeling a bit muddle-headed. He followed the others down the oak-paneled hall and into the library, where a pair of auburn-haired retrievers lay before the hearth. Bell poured drinks from a crystal flask on the sideboard while Dietrich settled on the sofa beside Hettie Bell. Eliot perched on the edge of an armchair.
Saints and Villains Page 22