‘That was it.’
Lonely, that was it. In the winter it had not been so bad, though. There were more musical evenings. You got used to it. Sometimes, even, you enjoyed it. Guests got to notice you, gradually. They enquired after your health. They said, ‘Miss Gilchrist, you’re a treasure—you really are.’
‘Is it very warm out?’
‘It’s lovely—for October.’
‘Is it October . . .? Well, well.’
She made a noise of disbelief.
‘That’s what I was saying. About the days growing short.’
They always began to grow short in October, the days did. The leaves began to come down on the lawn; a bit of wind and you spent the day sweeping, unless Mrs. Bradhaw saw you and said leave them; a woman that liked leaves lying about, the colours beautiful, the sound as your feet brushed through them on the walks, a sentimental woman. If there was a sup of rain you could slip and break your ankle. Small comfort in the swish and colour then.
The girl handed her the packet and said, ‘Take a little of your snuff.’
It blurred the outer world with water, making the lungs larger inside and the air that entered them weighty and nourishing. She put it back carefully under her pillow.
‘They steal it on me when I’m sleeping,’ she confided. ‘The nurses do it or one of the patients.’
‘Perhaps you mislay it,’ the girl said in a gentle tone.
‘No fear—it’s stolen. If I find out who I’ll crucify her for it. Time and time again I reach under my pillow and it’s gone—spirited away—vanished.’
‘It’s a shame for them,’ Mary said. As she did so the dismissal bell began in a nearby ward. The sound came nearer. She rose, promising to come next Sunday.
‘If I’m still here,’ Miss Gilchrist said.
‘Of course you’ll be here.’
Miss Gilchrist smiled a little and closed her eyes.
They let her sleep through the evening meal. When she awakened she reached for the snuff immediately. It had gone. She raised herself with a great mustering of willpower and looked about her at the other beds.
‘Who took my snuff?’ she shouted. ‘Which of youse thieving trollops made love to my snuff?’ Nobody answered. When she shouted again a nurse came to quieten her.
‘Where did you put it?’ the nurse asked.
‘Here—under my pillow.’
The nurse searched. ‘There’s no snuff,’ the nurse said finally, ‘you must have been dreaming.’
‘I wasn’t dreaming. It was brought to me today.’ The nurse patted the pillow into shape and arranged the bedclothes. Her face was stern.
‘Now, now,’ she said, firmly.
Father Giffley took afternoon devotions. They consisted of rosary, sermon and benediction. While Father O’Sullivan preached the sermon Father Giffley, who sat to one side of the altar, his hands palms downwards on his knees, his head inclined forward, saw the altar boy with ginger hair nod off to sleep—as usual. After tea they sat together in a room on the ground floor which the three priests sometimes shared. Father O’Sullivan, writing at the table, found the matter difficult. He frowned frequently and bit the handle of his pen. At the fireside Father Giffley rested his black book on his knee. He wrote easily but slowly, pausing often to search his memory. He wrote: ‘Thomas A Kempis instructs us as follows: “I had rather feel compunction than know the definition thereof.” Father O’Sullivan, who is still trying to write a devotional booklet, if I recognise the signs, and I ought to be able to by now, is an illustration of what it means. “If thou knowest the whole Bible by heart, and the sayings of all the philosophers, what would it profit thee without love of God and without grace?”
That hits at me, of course. Except that I don’t know very much by heart.
“It is Vanity to desire to live long and not to care to live well.”
My trouble is that I care to live too well. A Kempis means something quite different. There we are—the difficulty of communication. You do not care to live well. You only care to live well.
“Call often to mind the proverb—The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.”
That’s the best thing he has said. We see and we hear. But it is the thing beyond the eye that we immediately wish to see. We hear and there is still something unheard even in what we hear. And it tempts us to seek a more complete satisfaction. What kind of satisfaction? Society, Power, Eminence—what? I do not know. We seek it, just the same. Of course it doesn’t exist, this S-A-T-I-S-F-A-C-T-I-O-N. Only the craving. Of course, a drop from the B. kills it. Temporarily.
“For they that follow their lusts stain their own consciences and lose the grace of God.”
Me again. The drop from the B. Lust of the Belly.’ He closed the book.
‘You are very quiet, Father,’ he said.
Father O’Sullivan looked up vaguely. After a painful knitting of the brows he succeeded in relating the remark to himself.
‘Yes, indeed,’ he said.
‘What is the subject this time?’
Father O’Sullivan left down his pen. He was diffident.
‘The Holy Family as a model for the ordering of the humble Catholic home.’
‘It’s always the humble Catholic home we dare to order, isn’t it?’ Father Giffley remarked. ‘Well, I’m glad you’re still trying.’
‘No longer very hopefully,’ Father O’Sullivan confessed.
‘Oh, I don’t know. In the world of—ah—literature’ (Father Giffley stumbled unintentionally over the word) ‘I’m told it’s quite usual to fail, over and over again.’
Father O’Sullivan smiled and looked embarrassed.
‘You mustn’t call it literature—that would frighten me off altogether.’
‘Pamphlets, religious exhortations, devotional booklets—they all have to be written, haven’t they? Though, having read my fill of them I must confess that frequently I fail to see why.’
‘They serve a very great need.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘I have no doubt about it. That’s why I keep trying to write them.’
‘Thousands are written. Are they not enough? Why should you try to add to them?’
‘I can never answer that question when I put it to myself. When I sit down to write it comes so terribly hard with me that I feel I’m the last one in the world who should attempt it. And yet, whenever I stop trying, I become desperately unhappy.’
Father Giffley grunted impatiently. Yet his face, turned fully now on Father O’Sullivan, was gentle with sympathy and companionship.
‘Some day, never fear, you’ll write one that will be approved. You’ll see it among the others on the bookstand at the door of the Church. The Holy Family, A Devotional Booklet for the Catholic Home. With a nicely coloured cover. Your lifelong ambition available to the world at the popular price of one halfpenny. Does the thought make you happy?’
Father O’Sullivan considered. Then he said:
‘I am not quite sure, Father, whether you are saying that to encourage me or to amuse yourself.’
‘Both,’ Father Giffley confessed. He looked into the fire. His mood changed.
‘How long are you here, John?’
He very rarely used Christian names. He hardly noticed now that he had done so.
‘I came three years after yourself.’
‘And you are contented with St. Brigid’s?’
‘It’s much the same as anywhere else.’
‘In some ways, yes. We baptise, we marry, we minister to the sick, we bury the dead. And that’s all you have to say.’
‘I think so.’
‘Does it never trouble you, John, to think that there are parishes where faces are not hungry and where rooms are not bare and children are not dirty? Don’t you wish, every now and then, that you could hear confessions without having to endure the smell of badly nourished bodies?’