152
PARTISAN REVIEW
Wounds hide me
the image fought in his mind with the image of
those small but deadly wounds
in
the body of Jesus, in which surely
nobody could hide, not even the one the spear made
in
His side.
But not there either, he insisted to himself; not even
if
He wasn't a
man. Yet there
in
his mind's eye, made all the worse by
all
the
most insipid and effeminate, simpering faces of Jesus that he had ever
seen in pictures, was the hideous image of a huge tom bleeding
gulf at the supine crotch, into which an ant-swarm of the pious,
millions of them, all pleading and rolling up their eyes, laden souls,
by thousands meekly stealing, struggled to crowd themselves, and
lose themselves, and drown, and dissolve.
It was the Devil, that was
all.
Just the Devil Himself, tempting
him.
o
good Jesu hear me, he prayed with deep self-loathing, almost
aloud: and realized with gratitude that for once he had been able
to say these words, which for months now had seemed to him fulsome
and insincere, with complete desire and sincerity. You just have to
mean it, he thought, for
it
to mean anything.
Suffer me not to
be
separated from Thee (a mortal sin is a sin
that cuts us off from God):
From the Malicious Enemy defend me:
Of these closing lines he never felt doubt and now he repeated,
with reverent emphasis and relish:
From the Malicious Enemy defend me:
In the hour of my death call me and bid me come to Thee:
That with Thy
No there was something really wrong about
He prayed, with fear and determination: That with Thy Saints
I may praise Thee, forever and ever, Amen.
All the same it was wrong for people to ask to be saints, as
flat as
all
that. Or even just to be
with
the saints,
if
that was what it
meant. To just barely manage through God's infinite mercy to
escape burning eternally in the everlasting fires of Hell ought to
be just about as much as any good Catholic could pray for; and
now Richard remembered still another prayer at which, when he
was serving at Mass, he had for quite a while now been accustomed
to keep silence or at most to make approximate sounds of the words,
with
his
fingers crossed: where, in the General Confession, reviewing
