As Dornal left the Palace, on his way past the Cathedral, he met young
Fenton, the High Churchman who some months earlier had refused to
recognize Meynell after the first Modernist meeting in Markborough.
Fenton was walking slowly and reading the local newspaper--the
same which contained the anonymous letter. His thin, finely modelled
face, which in a few years would resemble the Houdon statue of St. Bruno,
expressed an eager excitement that was not unlike jubilation. Dornal was
practically certain that he was reading the paragraph that concerned
Meynell, and certain also that it gave him pleasure. He hurriedly
passed over to the other side of the street, that Fenton might not accost
him.
Afterward, he spent the evening, partly in writing urgently in Meynell's
defence to certain of his own personal friends in the diocese, and partly
in composing an anti-Modernist address, full of a sincere and earnest
eloquence, to be delivered the following week at a meeting of the Church
party in Cambridge.
* * * * *
Meanwhile Cyril Fenton had also spent the evening in writing. He kept an
elaborate journal of his own spiritual state; or rather he had begun to
keep it about six months before this date, at the moment when the
emergence of the Modernist Movement had detached him from his nascent
friendship with Meynell, and had thrown him back, terrified, on a more
resolute opposition than ever to the novelties and presumptions of free
inquiry. The danger of reading anything, unawares, that might cause him
even a moment's uneasiness had led to his gradually cutting himself off
entirely from modern newspapers and modern books, in which, indeed, he
had never taken any very compelling interest. His table was covered by
various English and French editions of the Fathers--of St. Cyprian in
particular, for whom he had a cult. On the bare walls of his study
were various pictures of saints, a statuette of the Virgin, and another
of St. Joseph, both of them feebly elegant in the Munich manner. Through
his own fresh youthfulness, once so winning and wholesome, something
pinched and cloistered had begun to thrust itself. His natural sweetness
of temper was rapidly becoming sinful in his own eyes, his natural love
of life also, and its harmless, even its ideal, pleasures.
It was a bitter winter day, and he had not allowed himself a greatcoat.
In consequence he felt depressed and chilled; yet he could not make up
his mind to go to bed earlier than usual, lest he should be thereby
pampering the flesh. He was thoroughly dissatisfied with his own
spiritual condition during the day, and had just made ample confession
thereof in the pages of his diary. A few entries from that document will
show the tone of a mind morbid for lack of exercise:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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