it slowly, like a child repeating a difficult lesson—‘you say that—you—hate—John Gabriel? Is that what you say, please?’
‘That’s right,’ I said.
She smiled—a maddening smile.
‘No, no,’ she said indulgently, ‘that is not possible … No one could hate John Gabriel. He is very great—very good man. All of us who know him, we die for him gladly.’
‘Good God,’ I cried, exasperated. ‘What’s the man ever done that people should feel like that about him?’
Well, I had asked for it! She forgot the urgency of her mission. She sat down, she pushed back a loop of greasy hair from her forehead, her eyes shone with enthusiasm, she opened her mouth, and words poured from her …
She spoke, I think, for about a quarter of an hour. Sometimes she was incomprehensible, stumbling with the difficulties of the spoken word. Sometimes her words flowed in a clear stream. But the whole performance had the effect of a great epic.
She spoke with reverence, with awe, with humility, with worship. She spoke of John Gabriel as one speaks of a Messiah—and that clearly was what he was to her. She said things of him that to me seemed wildly fantastic and wholly impossible. She spoke of a man tender, brave, and strong. A leader and a succourer. She spoke of one who risked death that others might live; of one who hated cruelty and injustice with a white and burning flame. He was to her a Prophet, a King, a Saviour—one who could give to people courage that they did not know they had, and strength that they did not know they possessed. He had been tortured more than once; crippled, half-killed; but somehow his maimed body had overcome its disabilities by sheer willpower, and he had continued to perform the impossible.
‘You do not know, you say, what he has done?’ she ended. ‘But everyone knows Father Clement—everyone!’
I stared—for what she said was true. Everyone has heard of Father Clement. His is a name to conjure with, even if some people hold that it is only a name—a myth—and that the real man has never existed.
How shall I describe the legend of Father Clement? Imagine a mixture of Richard Coeur de Lion and Father Damien and Lawrence of Arabia. A man at once a fighter and a Saint and with the adventurous recklessness of a boy. In the years that had succeeded the war of 1939–45, Europe and the East had undergone a black period. Fear had been in the ascendant, and Fear had bred its new crop of cruelties and savageries. Civilization had begun to crack. In India and Persia abominable things had happened; wholesale massacres, famines, tortures, anarchy …
And through the black mist a figure, an almost legendary figure had appeared—the man calling himself ‘Father Clement’—saving children, rescuing people from torture, leading his flock by impassable ways over mountains, bringing them to safe zones, settling them in communities. Worshipped, loved, adored—a legend, not a man.
And according to Catherine Yougoubian, Father Clement was John Gabriel, former MP for St Loo, womanizer, drunkard; the man who first, last and all the time, played for his own hand. An adventurer, an opportunist, a man with no virtues save the virtue of physical courage.
Suddenly, uneasily, my incredulity wavered. Impossible as I believed Catherine’s tale to be, there was one point of plausibility. Both Father Clement and John Gabriel were men of unusual physical courage. Some of those exploits of the legendary figure, the audacity of the rescues, the sheer bluff, the—yes, the impudence of his methods, were John Gabriel’s methods all right.
But John Gabriel had always been a self-advertiser. Everything he did, he did with an eye on the gallery. If John Gabriel was Father Clement, the whole world would surely have been advised of the fact.
No, I didn’t—I couldn’t—believe …
But when Catherine stopped breathless, when the fire in her eyes died down, when she said in her old persistent monotonous manner, ‘You will come now, yes, please?’ I shouted for Parfitt.
He helped me up and gave me my crutches and assisted me down the stairs and into a taxi, and Catherine got in beside me.
I had to know, you see. Curiosity, perhaps? Or the persistence of Catherine Yougoubian? (I should certainly have had to give way to her in the end!) Anyway, I wanted to see John Gabriel. I wanted to see if I could reconcile the Father Clement story with what I knew of the John Gabriel of St Loo. I wanted, perhaps, to see if I could see what Isabella had seen—what she must have seen to have done as she had done …
I don’t know what I expected as I followed Catherine Yougoubian up the narrow stairs and into the little back bedroom. There was a French doctor there, with a beard and a pontifical manner. He was bending over his patient, but he drew back and motioned me forward courteously.
I noticed his eyes appraising me curiously. I was the person that a great man, dying, had expressed a wish to see …
I had a shock when I saw Gabriel. It was so long since that day in Zagrade. I would not have recognized the figure that lay so quietly on the bed. He was dying, I saw that. The end was very near now. And it seemed to me that I recognized nothing I knew in the face of the man lying there. For I had to acknowledge that, as far as appearances went, Catherine had been right. That emaciated face was the face of a Saint. It had the marks of suffering, of agony … It had the asceticism. And it had, finally, the spiritual peace …
And none of these qualities had anything to do with the man whom I had known as John Gabriel.
Then he opened his eyes and saw me—and he grinned. It was the same grin, the same eyes—beautiful eyes in a small ugly clown’s face.
His voice was very weak. He said, ‘So she got you! Armenians are wonderful!’
Yes, it was John Gabriel. He motioned to the doctor. He demanded in his weak suffering imperious voice, a promised stimulant. The doctor demurred—Gabriel overbore him. It would hasten the end, or so I guessed, but Gabriel made it clear that a last spurt of energy was important and indeed necessary to him.
The doctor shrugged his shoulders and gave in. He administered the injection and then he and Catherine left me alone with the patient.
Gabriel began at once.
‘I want you to know about Isabella’s death.’
I told him that I knew all about that.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t think you do …’
It was then that he described to me that final scene in the café in Zagrade.
I shall tell it in its proper place.
After that, he only said one thing more. It is because of that one thing more that I am writing this story.
Father Clement belongs to history. His incredible life of heroism, endurance, compassion, and courage belongs to those people who like writing the lives of heroes. The communities he started are the foundation of our new tentative experiments in living, and there will be many biographies of the man who imagined and created them.
This is not the story of Father Clement. It is the story of John Merryweather Gabriel, a VC in the war, an opportunist, a man of sensual passions and of great personal charm. He and I, in our different way, loved the same woman.
We all start out as the central figure of our own story. Later we wonder, doubt, get confused. So it has been with me. First it was my story. Then I thought it was Jennifer and I together—Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Iseult. And then, in my darkness and disillusionment, Isabella sailed across my vision like the moon on a dark night. She became the central theme of the embroidery, and I—I was the cross-stitch background—no more. No more, but also no less, for without the drab background, the pattern will not stand out.
Now, again, the pattern has shifted. This is not my story, not Isabella’s story. It is the story of John Gabriel.
The story ends here, where I am beginning it. It ends with John Gabriel. But it also begins here.