He was embarrassed and unhappy.
‘Your charitable efforts will be a cover for hypocrisy, because you know you can do nothing for these people by throwing them a blanket or giving them a hot meal.’
‘A family left our church for that.’
‘You see. You are worried exclusively about souls, Father. You must worry now and then about human beings. Ask the ladies of Kingstown and their husbands to give back what they have taken.’
Father Giffley began to laugh. It was not the sort of laughter that was meant to be shared. Father O’Connor remained silent. The fact that one of his cloth should be a drunkard distressed him unbearably. He looked pointedly at the clock.
‘I have the funeral to receive,’ he said. He rose.
Father Giffley fixed his eyes on the young, hurt, disapproving face.
‘Let me tell you something before you leave,’ he said, in a kindlier tone. ‘It may help you—it may not.’ Father O’Connor sat down again.
‘You have seen a Mrs. Bartley from time to time?’
Father O’Connor had. Before first mass, or very late at night, he had seen her on her knees, scrubbing the floors, scraping candle-grease from the sanctuary carpet with the broken blade of a knife. She was one of a number of casual cleaners.
‘Mrs. Bartley had a child who was very ill once. He was on the point of death,’ Father Giffley continued. ‘I sat in her room throughout the whole of a winter’s night and watched the child. I don’t know why I did it. I prayed some of the time. Some of the time I wiped the sweat from the child’s forehead. The woman sat with me and so did the father. She made tea for me throughout the night, but they spoke to me hardly at all. They had never heard before of a priest sitting all night with a child. When I left in the morning the child had not died. He was sleeping easily and by the next day it was obvious that he was going to live.’
Father Giffley sighed and added:
‘For some months I was highly edified by my priestly conduct. Mrs. Bartley believed there had been a miracle. In fact she is probably the only parishioner who, whenever she salutes this poor, drunken oddity, feels she is in the presence of a saint. You see—she thinks I have a harmless fondness for peppermints.’
‘Father . . . please.’
‘And, oddly enough, I should not like her to learn the truth.’
‘You feel there was a miracle?’
‘The child? No. But in me there was. For one isolated night I had found the true disposition, so that even if the child had died they would still have drawn comfort and peace from me.’
‘It was a privileged experience.’
‘Your ladies of Kingstown will never teach you how to find it. They’ll do worse. They’ll draw you away, into self-satisfied almsgiving. But if you can find it for yourself you will be the comforter of the destitute, even when your pocket and your belly are as empty as theirs.’
Father O’Connor hardly knew what to say. He looked at the purple-veined face, the bulging eyes, the strong nose with the sprouting hairs marking each nostril. This heavy-breathing boor was trying to show him the road to sanctity. At last he said:
‘I appreciate what you have told me.’
‘It is the only piece of truth I have ever learned,’ Father Giffley said.
Father O’Connor guessed he was being challenged. If so, organising charity was an excellent beginning. Some of the poor, at least, could be fed. Not them all, because there were too many. One started with the most deserving. And, of course, with those who seemed tempted to apostasise, even though the apostate could never be said to be deserving.
‘I will give thought to what you’ve told me, Father,’ he said.
In the presbytery the clerk had Father O’Connor’s black cope and biretta laid out for him and beside it the brass bowl and the sprinkler for the holy water. He was rubbing his hands with the cold. Hanlon’s labours, though inefficient at the best of times, were missed. The boilerman was dead, and the pipes out of action. A damp cold had gripped every part of the church.
‘He went off very sudden, Father,’ the clerk said.
‘He did, poor man.’
‘The oul chest was very poorly,’ the clerk said. Father O’Connor took the book and marked the appropriate section with a purple-coloured tab. He did not answer the clerk. Recognising that the priest had no desire to talk about the dead boilerman, the clerk turned to business.
‘There are two people in the outer room wishing to see you,’ he said.
‘They must wait,’ Father O’Connor told him.
He vested reluctantly and went down the church to the porch-way, where he paused and saw that the funeral had arrived and was marshalled on the far side of the street. In the light of the gas-lamps the leading horses waited, their black plumes stiff and upright. On each side of the hearse a candle flame wavered in its little glass tomb. Behind stood the mourners: the women with shawls over their heads, the men—now that the church door had been reached—uncovered. Traffic passed slowly to show respect and stopped on either side when the hearse and followers began to cross the street. They held the coffin at the church door while Father O’Connor, about to admit it, sprinkled it with holy water, welcoming what was left of Hanlon back to the church he had spent some winters working in. Under his aloft hand the fittings became marked with blobs of holy water. The leading women began to weep loudly. One of the men, grey-haired and shabby, nodded a greeting to Father O’Connor, who did not know him but placed him as a brother of Hanlon’s because there was a clear resemblance. Without acknowledging him Father O’Connor turned and walked down the echoing church. It amplified the sounds of grief and the sharp contact of boots on marble. In the mortuary chapel he stood at the head of the coffin once again and read the prayers, four candles in front of him. The people were poor, yet the coffin was a good one. It was a point of honour with them to bury their dead decently. He led them in a decade of the rosary, his voice unhurried but efficient, his mind quite detached from his surroundings. He found it impossible to feel anything about his congregation. Here, in a shadowed chapel, dismal with cold, where the air was unpleasant because of the corpse and the close-packed mourners, another one of the obscure thousands was poised between the anonymity of his life and the anonymity of the grave. Day after day he said the same prayers and went through the same ceremonial. There were particular deaths no longer, only Death in general.
He conduded and was approached by the grey-haired man.
‘I was his brother,’ he said in a whisper. Father O’Connor realised that he expected formal sympathy.
‘I see,’ Father O’Connor said. He handed the sprinkler back to the clerk.
‘Good evening, Andy,’ the man said to the clerk.
‘I’m sorry for your trouble, Pat,’ the clerk said.
‘You were a good friend, Andy.’
Father O’Connor took the man’s hand.
‘I will pray for your brother at my masses,’ he said.
‘Thank you, Father, you’re very kind.’
It seemed to be enough. The grip on Father O’Connor’s hand tightened for a moment and was withdrawn. He returned to the sacristy.
Father O’Connor unvested. There was a void inside him as though Jesus Christ himself were a lie and there was no Church, no Belief, nothing but the dominion of darkness and mortality. He wondered that he should want to help anybody, least of all the poor. They came carrying their stinking corpses to be blessed and despatched. They were uncouth and ill-clad and rough of tongue. They had faces and forms that were half animal. The clerk whispered:
‘The two people is still inside, Father. A young couple. They want to arrange to get married.’
To get married. To sleep in the sweat of one bed and deposit in due time a few more animal faces among the dirt and the dilapidation.