Lines from the Armenian (verse)
Walsh, Thomas
296 THE COMMONWEAL January 19 , 1927 The tone of exasperation and suggestion of wounded civic pride, made me idly curious to see the "drsolante silhouette," which had become the object of an...
...Tongue--feel my cutlass...
...always active: praying, planning, voyaging, studying, teaching, all under the grim shadow of an assassin's pursuing arm...
...Edmund's and Ushaw in England...
...Its sole ornament is an army bulletin of procedure to be followed in case of fire...
...That is to have estab- lished at least some contact with its history, a history, the material phase of which measures nearly four centuries, and the great chapters of which can be sketched in as many words: college, military hospital, cotton factory, barracks...
...Here during the Revolution, on the occasion of the sec- ond expulsion, when the rebel functionaries were already in possession, a few students and a priest, under cover of darkness, hurriedly buried the college plate and the altar's relics...
...Somewhat lower, a decaying gutter stretched part- way across the faqade like an unclean reptile...
...his friend Campion...
...There in the trumeaux between the second- story windows were the squares of white stone, twenty-one of them, bearing the arms and names of the English benefactors who had contributed to the reconstruction and enlargement of the college almost two hundred years ago...
...THOMAS WALSH...
...It is stone-paved and slightly concave at the end opposite the entrance, which is through the college...
...I am happy to have seen it and known it at first hand before it crumbles under the wreckers' blows...
...The hammers of the Revolution, weather, and moss had done much to deface them, but they still served to identify what once they had embellished...
...There was a fine moon, but no street lights...
...something of the feeling we experience when we meet an acquaintance of long ago, whose name has escaped our memory...
...the exile and flight to Rheims...
...Although the image was not clear, a growing suspicion occupied me...
...Once I realized that I was in Douai, all thought of barracks was obscured by the moving tableaux that occupied my imagination: sixteenth-century England estranged from the Church...
...We stood within an immense court dosed on three sides behind us, by the build- ing, through the tunneling arch of which we had come--on the left and right, by extensive wings of equal height...
...I was about to seek the "electric cheer" of the hotel, when the recollection of an old woodcut of Douai's English College flashed upon me...
...I was traversing a spacious irregular square, planted with tall starved-looking trees...
...But I had come primarily to look up the old English College, which, from the Elizabethan persecutions when Catholicism and Christ's priesthood were proscribed in England, had been the home of so many learned martyrs and saintly scholars...
...Elizabeth's agents, their plotting and defaming, and the consequent popular hos- tility in Douai to the new institution...
...Heroically sustaining the shock of the collision, he, bicycle, spurs and all wriggled through the slender aperture formed by a swinging wooden gate which the impact had set in motion...
...Heart--with a thrust I quench you in your gore.-Nay, fool...
...My inquiries the next morning revealed nothing...
...This was the old English College...
...Was it possible that here but no, over the round arch of the portal I read: Caserne Durutte...
...Never did shriveled cocoon less suggest its radiant winged issue, than this wretched ruin, the illustrious progeny once nurtured within its walls...
...the halls of Oxford abandoned by a conscientious group of professors and students, whose love for Christ was greater even than their great love for learning, men to whom heaven meant more than home, who abandoned the amenities of their native land for the discomfort and trials of a life of exile in the Low Countries...
...Before I could form my question, it was answered...
...I looked about to assure my return, when a long, silent building flanking one side of the Place attracted me...
...Under the in- fluence of the doubt awakened the preceding evening, I was penetrating into the barracks, when a French officer arrived on bicycle...
...oCines from the Armenian Eyes---to the burning coals till sight is slain...
...Such is the English College of Douai, cradle of martyrs, origin of the English Bible text which bears its name, and very probably the first seminary to be established in conformity with the legislation of Trent, or such it was a twelvemonth ago...
...You loved...
...and then the students, of whom during the next fifty years, lO9 gave their lives in the effort to restore and maintain in England the faith of their fathers--a veritable martyrum candidatus exercitus--who claim, by the rubrics written in their blood, a becoming reverence for the chronicle of their alma mater...
...I reached him as he was dismounting...
...It occupied the ground floor of a two-story rectangular edifice built end to end against an extremity of the body of the college, and form- ing with it a continuous wall along the public square...
...He was somewhat of a Don Quixote and rode full speed against the wooden partition that barricaded the entrance...
...Nothing but a trifling detail in its construction suggested its one-time character...
...Six deep- set windows on the left hand look out into a small lateral court which floods the whitewashed walls and ceiling with a cold light...
...The saintly Doctor Martin, broken in health, but ceaselessly bent over his exhausting task of translating the Bible into English...
...I left the hotel for a short walk before retiring...
...The exploration of the interior was rendered difficult by the masses of drbris encumbering the corridors, and somewhat peril- ous by reason of the insecurity of the floors...
...I saw the energetic Cardinal Allen: now at Rome, now at Louvain, founding his college at Douai, and saving it by re- moval to Rheims...
...Douai seemingly was as ignorant of the existence of the venerable monument I was seeking, as was the English-speaking world at large of that monument's historic significance...
...By daylight, the college or barracks was a skeleton of leprous walls and gaping windows...
...I turned to the building...
...296 THE COMMONWEAL January 19 , 1927 The tone of exasperation and suggestion of wounded civic pride, made me idly curious to see the "drsolante silhouette," which had become the object of an animus so impatient for destruction...
...We were not long in finding what had been the chapel...
...Its spiritual history can never be adequately written, for that has reaches which transcend the limits of space and time...
...Dtsolante silhouette"l--the newspaper's phrase came unsought to my lips...
...And it is probable that somewhere under this disheartening rectangle, there moulders the c/lice of Thomas ~ Becket, and the Cardi- nal's biretta of Saint Charles Borromeo, for all that has been found is the plate which is now at St...
...The central court was a horrid waste of weeds gone to seed...
...A poilu was at the gate and consented to accompany me about, assuring me, however, that it was at my own risk...
...you shall speak no more...
...Above the third story, a black paper roof, invisible at night, was broken by a series of windows en mansarde...
...Through an alley of elms the moon revealed a great plain structure of three stories and three long rows of unlighted windows, the black- ness of which against the pallor of the moonlit wall was suggestively funereal...
...I was astonished at the sense of familiarity it evoked...
...Groan in your little pain...
Vol. 5 • January 1927 • No. 11
