ONE foggy morning in November, a little old clergyman in a shabby black coat got into a third-class compartment of a train waiting in Queen Street Station, Glasgow, disposed his ancient brown bag on the rack, sat down, shut his tired old eyes the better to rid himself of the world, and began to meditate upon the folly of all human ambition and the wisdom of Almighty God and of the love of Our Lord Jesus Christ and of the way that the Holy Ghost went about the world, now blowing like a wind, now taking the form of a flower and glowing in gorgeous reds and yellows.
Outside on the grey ribbon of platform which ran dismally along the side of the train, newsboys were pushing on wheels pyramids of the contemporary literature, gay magazines within whose covers Ethel M. Dells and E.M. Hulls split their infinitives and modern deans argued as to whether twin beds in matrimony were of the esse or merely of the bene esse of the sacrament. Outside, boys were selling sticky sweets and cigarettes, and porters were pushing luggage, and flabby, colourless people were jostling one another with impatience as though their departure for Falkirk or Edinburgh were important and as though the dreadful immortality of their souls shone out for all to see, through the piggies of their earthly faces. Outside, Queen Street Station, Glasgow, looked just as depressing as the Gare du Nord, Paris, and suggested, just as adequately, milk cans, lavatories, and eternal damnation. Outside, Queen Street Station continued to be Queen Street Station.
A fat man climbed into the same compartment as the little clergyman, a fat man with a face that was so red and pouchy that it looked like a bladder painted to hit other people over the head with at an Italian carnival. He sat down, or rather threw himself down, in the corner opposite the priest and began to read a pink paper in which the doings of horses and erotic young women were chronicled at length. He was followed by a middle-aged woman who had a peaky, shiny nose with a funny little dent in the middle and whose hat was one of those amorphous black affairs which would have been, at any moment, out of fashion in any country.
The priest was distracted from his meditation. It was impossible, he told himself, with a wry little mental smile, to think competently of the Father and the Son and of the Holy Ghost proceeding from Both, with such a bulging red face in front of him and such a peaky, peering woman placing her parcels here, there, and everywhere. How hard it was, here below, and with the material and the temporal crowding out the spiritual and the eternal, to love one’s neighbour, how hard and yet how necessary. For the soul behind that bulging red face had been redeemed by Christ just as surely as had his own, and Our Blessed Lord, while He hung on the cross, had seen the funny little dent in the middle of the peaky, peering woman’s nose just as clearly as He had seen the broad, bland visage of Pope Pius the Eleventh and, so merciful was He, loved it just as much. And yet it was difficult to imagine bulge or dent in heaven unless, among the many mansions, there were one which should be one-tenth Beatific Vision and nine-tenths Douglas, Isle of Man. Of course, if it came to the point, it was difficult to imagine the majority of contemporary humanity in any paradise which did not syncopate Saint Gregory and whose eternal sands were without striped bathing tents and casinos.
He closed his eyes again. If he must love his neighbour, he would love him without looking at him. He closed his eyes, and not only did he close them, but he kept on repeating the reflex action in his brain so that, with the bulging red face and the peaky, peering woman, away went the com-partment, the train, the station, the world; and as Scotland went swinging after Scandinavia and Spain came scampering after and Australia flew to join the stars, he was alone with God.
A great nothingness was before him, a great nothingness that was Something, a great no-thingness that was All; and in the warm freedom from the tangible, he knew his Saviour and was absorbed by Him.
2
Outside on the platform, where man knew God only as a metaphysical conjecture and heaven as a geographical uncertainty, porters continued to trundle barrows and young girls to rush about in coloured sweaters and flying skirts just as though Father Malachy Murdoch, priest of the Order of Saint Benedict, had not, by closing his eyes and letting his mind spiral, annihilated them, their barrows, their sweaters, their thoughts, and their aspirations. They continued, that is to say, to have an objective existence, to be independently of anyone else’s knowing or not knowing that they were, to mirror for their moment on earth the Will that had called them up out of nothingness, to trundle their barrows and rush about in coloured sweaters just as though Descartes had never said “Cogito; ergo sum” and David Hume been skeptical of the reality of his own ego. And they thought, those hurrying, scurrying folks, of whether the tip would be sixpence or merely threepence, of the way men kissed in dark corners at dances, of whether Mexican eagles would rise another point or two, of whether Bobby So-and-So would go round North Berwick in under seventy, and of how, if pigs could fly, Colonel Lindbergh could; and they thought not at all, those hurrying, scurrying folks, of Socrates and of why he had drunk the hemlock, of Jesus and of why He had been nailed to the cross.
But Father Malachy, alone with God in a third-class smoking compartment of the Lincoln & North Eastern Railway, knew their thoughts, although he did not know them, yet knew them not as Isaiah said that Jehovah knew the thoughts of the children of Israel, knew them rather kindly, for he was a monk and a priest for ever and had drunk Christ’s Blood and raised up, morning after morning and with trembling, uncertain hands, Christ’s poor, battered Body and because he loved, so truly Christian was he, his neighbour as himself. He knew, and knew with gentle pity, all their follies: all their silly listings in secret places, all their silly jazz and broadcastings and speed trials which made them think the Trinity such poor fun, all their silly interpretations of all the silly scientists which made them think the Trinity such poor geology, all their prideful belching of opinion, all their imaginings that comfort was civilization and sin a mediæval name for taking away for a weekend an actress to whom you were not married, all their petty conceits, all their superstitious rationalisms.
He had been sent, had Father Malachy Mur-doch, by the abbot of the Benedictine monastery at Fort William, to instruct the priests and the people of the Church of Saint Margaret of Scotland, Edinburgh, in the use of the Gregorian chant. And here it may be as well to point out, for the instruction of those who imagine that ritual is absurd when ordered for the worship of God and reasonable when applied to the comings-in and goings-out of lord mayors and transatlantic film actresses, that Saint Benedict and his followers have always been of the opinion that the service of the temple is of greater importance than the service of the market and that it is, in view of eternity, more sensible and indeed more dignified to consecrate all stateliness and pageantry to the Almighty Father than to petty princes and princesses who strut their hour and are forgotten almost before the click-clack of their heels has died away on the boards of the somewhat irregular platform that Shakespeare called a stage. But, be the Benedictines right or be they wrong, Father Malachy Murdoch, being of their number, was persuaded that they were right, and, as he wished the good Catholics of Edinburgh to love the worship of God at least as much as they loved the theatre and dancing, he had been glad when the abbot had called him aside one morning after the Conventional Mass and said to him: “Father, I know that you look like a monkey and that at first sight it would seem that you had precious little dignity in your bones; but I know also that you are the best ceremoniarius that Scotland has produced since that horrible piece of open sin called the Reformation, and I want you to pack up your traps and chasubles and go to Edinburgh, where a priest who calls himself the Very Reverend Shamus Canon Geoghegan is trying to instruct his consecrated hobbledehoys of curates in the differences between entering the sanctuary and the grandstand at a football match.” He had been glad, and he had answered with a very good will: “Yes, Father Abbot, I’ll go.”
But it was not of the Very Reverend Shamus Canon Geoghegan and his liturgical ambitions, nor yet of the people in the compartment with him, nor of the odd million in the city about him that he thought as the train jerked itself out of the station and began to pound, snort-a-snort, along the forty iron miles which separated Glasgow from Edinburgh. For, as has already been pointed out, Father Malachy Murdoch was meditating upon God and His existence and His absolute attributes. And so, as the train went clanging through time and space, he pondered the mystery of miracle and of how absurd it was that men should deny to the Creator the power of doing what He would with His creation. For it was surely evident that He Who had ordered the tides should also, if the caprice should take Him or if there were souls to be saved that way, be able to disorder them and that He Who had commanded the sun to move should be able to command it to stand still. Nay, more, was not the miracle of sequence more marvellous than the miracle of the interruption of the same sequence? Was it not more marvellous that, when one woke in the morning, one’s coat was still hanging over the back of the same chair than it would have been if, during the night, God had caused it to be transferred to a scarecrow in Russia? More marvellous and more kind. And it needed, as the theologians said, just as much of a miracle on the part of God to conserve the world as to create it or to destroy it. The fact that mountains and tram lines and telegraph poles remained where they were was just as miraculous as Christ walking on the Sea of Galilee or the feeding of the five thousand. For as the earth spun round before God, He poured his will over it so that it might continue to be the earth and cattle to get up where they had lain down. Omnia, as Saint Thomas Aquinas had pointed out, exibant in mysterium.
Such was the pondering of Father Malachy Murdoch, of the Order of Saint Benedict, as the train trundled him along to Edinburgh; and the gentleman with the bulging red face scratched his ear and rustled his paper and decided that, if Hot Dog didn’t run, Pink Nightie would be a dead cert, for the two-thirty.
Father Malachy's Miracle, Chapter Two
Notes
esse: that which is of the essence of the very existence of the Church’s life
bene esse: that which is of benefit for the Church’s life
Cogito; ergo sum: I think; therefore I am.
ceremoniarius: master of ceremonies
Omnia exibant in mysterium: All things issued in mystery.
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