The Most Reluctant Convert in All England

The coal bucket was heavier than usual that night, or maybe I only felt it that way because of the hour. Half past eleven, and the lamp in his window on the New Building staircase was still burning, the only lit pane on that side of Magdalen looking out over Deer Park. I climbed the stone stairs slow, the way I always did after dark, and knocked soft enough that a man asleep wouldn't wake, and loud enough that a man awake would hear. He was awake. He was always awake, that spring.

I'd tended that staircase for years by then, brought up the coal and the post and the boot-black, and a scout learns the temperature of a room before he's set one foot past the threshold. Mr. Lewis's rooms had a different weather in them that season, something close and electric, like the air before a storm breaks over the water meadow. He'd be sitting at his desk with papers spread and his pen capped, not writing, just sitting, and when I came in with the scuttle he'd look up at me the way a man looks up when he's been caught at something, though I never once caught him at anything but sitting still.

I knew a little of him already, the way servants know things, in pieces, secondhand, over years. Belfast born, they said, and his mother gone to cancer when he was a boy of ten, and after that shipped off with his brother to English schools that hadn't much kindness in them. He'd worn the King's uniform in France in the last war, same as half the dons on that staircase, and come back the way they all came back, changed in ways nobody asked after. He'd lost whatever churchgoing his mother left him somewhere in those years, lost it and didn't seem to miss it, or said he didn't. But he read. God, how that man read. Norse sagas and George MacDonald and a fat volume of Chesterton that sat dog-eared on the shelf nearest his chair, and I used to think, setting down his tea, that a man who reads that hungrily is looking for something he hasn't named yet even to himself.

He had a new friend by then, a philologist from Pembroke, Mr. Tolkien, who came round often enough that I knew his coat on the peg before I knew his face well. The two of them and a handful of others had taken to meeting at a pub on St. Giles, the Eagle and Child, reading pages to each other and arguing them to pieces, and Mr. Lewis would come back from those evenings with his color up and his voice louder than usual, the way a man sounds after he's been properly contradicted by someone he respects.

But it was the private hours that told the story, the ones nobody but a scout with a coal bucket ever sees. Through that spring of 1929 I watched him grow more restless, not less, as if the reading and the arguing were closing in on him from every side at once. I'd bring the fire up and find him standing at the window instead of at the desk, looking out toward the deer park in the dark where there was nothing to see, and once he said to me, not quite meaning to say it aloud, something about feeling followed. I didn't understand him then. I understood him better later.

It came to a head, so far as I ever learned of it, on an ordinary night that Trinity term, no different in the ledger from any other night I logged coal against his name. I brought the scuttle up as always and there was no answer at first, and when I let myself in soft I found him not at the desk and not at the window but on his knees on the floorboards, which was not a thing I had ever seen a fellow of Magdalen do in that room before or after. I set the coal down without a sound and went back down the stair, and whatever passed in him that night he wrote of afterward in words sharper than anything I could have set down myself, about the steady approach of the One he had so wished to avoid, about giving in at last, about being, that night, perhaps the most dejected and reluctant soul to come to God in the whole of England.

I did not think that was the end of it, and it wasn't. There is a difference, though I did not know it then, between admitting there is a God and admitting who that God is, and it took Mr. Lewis two years more to close that second, harder distance. He went on teaching, went on walking the water meadow with his brother Warren of an evening, went on arguing at the Eagle and Child, but there was a waiting in him now instead of a running, and a scout notices the difference between a man being chased and a man standing still to see what will catch him.

It was September of 1931 when the second thing happened, and I have the fact of the date only because the whole college talked of it after, the way college talks of anything unusual on a quiet night. Mr. Lewis had Mr. Tolkien to dine, and a colleague of Tolkien's, a man named Dyson down from Reading, and after the meal the three of them went out walking the path along the river that they called Addison's Walk, under the trees behind the New Building, and they did not come back in for hours.

I was on the staircase late that night on other business, and I heard them return well past what any sensible household calls an hour, talking still, none of the three willing to let the thread drop even at the door. I did not hear the particulars, only the shape of the voices, Tolkien's low and patient, Dyson's quicker, Lewis's rising now and again the way it did when something had struck him hard enough to need saying twice. They talked, from what filtered down to the rest of us after, of old stories, of dying gods in myths that men had told themselves for centuries without believing a word of them literally, and of whether one particular story of a dying god might be different, might be the myth that had gone and actually happened, in a field, under a real sky, with real nails. I do not know if those were the words used between them. I only know that whatever was said on that walk under the trees near the deer park settled something in him that two years of solitary kneeling had not managed to settle.