‘No—I think if I lie down . . .’
‘As you please.’ Father Giffley turned his back. The movement was formal, deliberate.
‘So you followed the rabble. That’s interesting. And singularly unlike you.’
The voice was no longer kind. There was a glass-fronted bookcase in front of Father Giffley. He stared at it, as though trying to locate something. Father O’Connor kept silence.
‘Why?’ his superior asked.
Quietly, the emotion of an earlier moment moving in him again, Father O’Connor said: ‘They are being led away from us.’
‘Did you imagine you could bring them back—even if they were?’
‘Please,’ Father O’Connor pleaded. ‘I must go to bed.’
‘By threatening to change them into goats. That day has passed. Do you know whose fault that is?’
‘I am not well enough to discuss . . .’
‘Ours,’ Father Giffley answered, swinging about suddenly, ‘because we’ve watched in silence while the others turned them into animals.’
‘The devil is at work among them.’
‘The devil is busy everywhere, always; at work on them and at work on the others. He was busy here all day too.’
Father Giffley paused. Then he said: ‘For once his efforts were not very profitable.’
Father O’Connor wondered was he speaking of himself. But he was too sick to care. ‘May I go to bed?’ he asked.
‘Don’t let me detain you,’ Father Giffley replied, lifting the black book from the chair and sitting down. As Father O’Connor closed the door he said, raising his voice slightly: ‘If you need help during the night, call out for me.’
At first it was a relief to get inside his own bedroom, but when he closed the door he began to feel he had walked into a tomb. The curtains were drawn, the window closed, it was completely dark. He crossed and opened a press, the wrong one. Some left-over tins of cocoa fell about the floor. He left them there. He felt unable to stoop. He found he had to stand quite still to remember where he was. He saw the placards twisting this way and that, white against the darkness, he saw the torches sparking and swaying, lurid red against the pitch darkness. He bumped against the bed, leaned heavily on it, heard the noise of its springs and groped with his free hand. He reached the chamber-pot in time to be violently and repeatedly sick. Then he knelt, his cheek against the coverings, until the trembling of his body ceased.
When he felt stronger he removed his collar and went over to draw the curtains and open the window. The sky above the church was a vast, night blue field, stars grew wild all over it, the breeze from the window touched his face with healing and coolness. It was a mild night of June, month of the Sacred Heart. The gardens of Kingstown would smell sweetly at this hour, full of flowers and leafy quiet. Along the coast, on miles and miles of fine wet shingle, about crusted rocks, against the wooden beams of piers, the sea was making night sounds, the tides building and turning in time with the laws of God who was the maker and regulator of all things. He had a sense of sin. Casting back over the day he remembered his lack of humility with the young woman who had once been a servant; the impatience that caused him to turn down Mrs. Bradshaw’s offer of hospitality; his three glasses of wine which, in him, might well count as intemperance; his delight in Yearling’s praise when he played well on the beautiful piano.
Troubled, he fingered his rosary and, leaning against the window jamb, his eyes fixed on the night sky, he began to pray—for his mother’s soul, for Miss Gilchrist, for each face that looked out at him from moment to moment as he examined his conscience and lived in retrospect through the events of the day. He remained so for almost half an hour until, his attention wavering, he became aware of the odour in the room. It was the smell of puke, of half-digested food and sour wine. Away from the window it was worse, an offensive and choking manifestation of infirmity, of uncleanness, of corruption. It was the wine then, that had made him sick.
He shrank from the ordeal of lifting the pot, but there was no help for it. Gingerly he opened the door and stole past Father Giffley’s room once again to the toilet on the upper landing. His stomach turned as he emptied the foul contents and rinsed out the remaining traces. He returned and got into bed, relieved that the unpleasant task was over and done with, relieved too that Father Giffley had not come into the corridor to investigate these latenight comings and goings. There were tins of some kind lying on the floor, he now remembered. Let them stay there.
He lay exhausted, yet sleepless. The retort he had made to Father Giffley returned several times to his mind: ‘I haven’t that habit, Father.’ He regretted it. He wished he could recall and erase it. He had been wrong in his earlier suspicions about the locked room. Father Giffley had been perfectly sober. As he watched the narrow strip of sky between the partly drawn curtains, accusing himself, asking for forgiveness, the meaning of Father Giffley’s phrase about the devil’s efforts not being very profitable—for once, suggested itself. Had he locked his door to shut out temptation? Had he called out for Father O’Sullivan because, at the end of the long day, from that simple, unnoticing man, there would flow the springs of consolation? ‘I haven’t that habit, Father.’ Had he asked for bread, and been given a stone?
Father O’Connor closed his eyes tightly, not in an effort to sleep, but the better to bear the self-accusation which desolated him.
CHAPTER TWO
In October, whenever he walked along the Vico Road, the hills rising at the back of the city reminded Yearling of Connemara. They were turning brown now under evenings of long, yellow sunsets. Often the green sea below him set him thinking of the miles and miles of water and waste; of England; of the too-faraway years of youth. One day, when Father O’Connor strolled with him, he said: ‘I am getting old.’
He stopped to lean for a moment on his cane. It was growing dusk. The sea had a strong, autumn smell. The air was damp.
‘Everybody does,’ Father O’Connor said, agreeably.
‘I begin to think that times are changing, that soon the world we knew will be finished and done with.’
‘There are new ideas,’ Father O’Connor admitted, ‘disturbing ideas, abroad. I feel it too and I’m younger than you are.’
‘And I begin to look back—to remember; that’s a bad sign.’ He knitted his heavy eyebrows and looked sharply at Father O’Connor.
‘Do you think I should have married?’ he asked.
‘There’s still time.’
‘I don’t think so—ah no.’
He sighed and began to walk again.
‘Still,’ he said, after a while, ‘celibacy was never suited to me. I don’t understand how you fellows manage.’
‘We win it by our own means. For some it is easy; for others—it is painfully hard.’
‘Is it the same with drink?’
‘You are confusing what is sinful and what may only be unseemly.’
‘Yes,’ Yearling admitted, ‘you are more broadminded about drink than our crowd. Still, I was jilted for drinking—did I ever tell you that? She was a Catholic too.’
‘Once, when we were playing music with Mr. and Mrs. Bradshaw, you hinted at something. It happened in England, I think?’
‘A long, long time ago. The sea there reminded me of it. I must tell you about it some time.’
‘If you are unhappy at times there are other ways of considering life. There may be a plan, or a reason . . .’
Yearling looked at him sharply.
‘Are you thinking of trying to convert me?’
Father O’Connor did not return the look. But he said: ‘If I thought I could I would not hesitate.’
‘And do you?’
‘It is God who converts . . . not bunglers such as I am.’