Free Unconditional surrender by Evelyn Waugh

Lieutenant of the county was in the front pew on the left next to a representative of the Knights of Malta. Lieutenant Padfield sat with the Anglican vicar, the family solicitor, and the headmaster of Our Lady of Victory. The nun’s choir was in the organ loft. The priests, other than the three who officiated, lined the walls of the chancel. Uncle Peregrine had seen that everyone was in his proper place.
    Box-Bender kept his eyes on Angela and Guy, anxious to avoid any liturgical solecism. He genuflected with them, sat, then, like them, knelt, sat again, and stood as the three priests vested in black emerged from the sacristy, knelt again but missed signing himself with the cross. He was no bigot. He had been to Mass before. He wanted to do whatever was required of him. Across the aisle the Lord Lieutenant was equally undrilled, equally well disposed.
    Silence at first; the Confiteor was inaudible even in the front pew. Just in time Box-Bender saw his relations cross themselves at the absolution. He hadn’t been caught that time. Then the nuns sang the
Kyrie
.
    Guy followed the familiar rite with his thoughts full of his father.
    ‘
In memoria aeterna erit justus: ab auditione mala non timebit.
’ The first phrase was apt. His father had been a ‘just man’; not particularly judicious, not at all judicial, but ‘just’ in the full sense of the psalmist – or at any rate in the sense attributed to him by later commentators. Not for the first time in his life Guy wondered what was the
auditio mala
that was not to be feared. His missal gave the meaningless rendering ‘evil hearing’. Did it mean simply that the ears of the dead were closed to the discords of life? Did it mean they were immune to malicious gossip? Few people, Guy thought, had ever spoken ill of his father. Perhaps it meant ‘bad news’. His father had suffered as much as most men – more perhaps – from bad news of one kind or another; never fearfully.
    ‘Not long for purgatory,’ his confessor had said of Mr Crouchback. As the nuns sang the
Dies Irae
with all its ancient deprecations of divine wrath, Guy knew that his father was joining his voice with theirs:
    Ingemisco, tamquam reus:
Culpa rubet vultus meus
Supplicanti parce, Deus;
    That would be his prayer, who saw, and had always seen, quite clearly the different in kind between the goodness of the most innocent of humans and the blinding, ineffable goodness of God. ‘Quantitative judgements don’t apply,’ his father had written. As a reasoning man Mr Crouchback had known that he was honourable, charitable and faithful; a man who by all the formularies of his faith should be confident of salvation; as a man of prayer he saw himself as totally unworthy of divine notice. To Guy his father was the best man, the only entirely good man, he had ever known.
    Of all the people in the crowded church, Guy wondered how many had come as an act of courtesy, how many were there to pray that a perpetual light should shine upon Mr Crouchback? ‘Well,’ he reflected, ‘“The Grace of God is in courtesy”; in Arthur Box-Bender glancing sidelong to be sure he did the right thing, just as in the prelate who was holding his candle in the chancel, representing the bishop; in Lieutenant Padfield, too, exercising heaven knows what prodigy of ubiquity. “Quantitative judgements don’t apply.”’
    The temptation for Guy, which he resisted as best he could, was to brood on his own bereavement and deplore the countless occasions of his life when he had failed his father. That was not what he was here for. There would be ample time in the years to come for these selfish considerations. Now,
praesente cadavere
, he was merely one of the guard who were escorting his father to judgement and to heaven.
    The altar was censed. The celebrant sang: ‘
...Tuis enim fidelibus, Domine, via mutatur, non tollitur...
’ ‘Changed not ended,’ reflected Guy. It was a huge transition for the old man who had walked with