THE Very Reverend Shamus Canon Geoghegan was a dry Iro-Scottish cleric of about fifty-two years of age who had recently been appointed by the lord bishop of Midlothian, in whose diocese the parish was situated, as rector of the church of Saint Margaret of Scotland. His predecessor had been a fat and tubby and thoroughly Scottish priest, a Hamish Canon Buchanty, who had been loved by and loved the Lord’s poor and whose mortal remains had been followed to their last resting place by seven bishops and seven thousand women with shawls over their heads. But Shamus was, in the idiom of these parts, a very different cup o’ tea from Hamish: Shamus, like Manning, had PRIEST written large upon his brow and walked about the aisles of his church with a hoity-toity quasiliturgical sway as though he were, forsooth, an ecclesiastical mannequin parading chasubles in the salons of some spiritual Worth; Hamish, like the holy, undignified old barrel that he was, had rolled onto the sanctuary in carpet slippers and said Mass none the less effectively for all that: Shamus was tall and thin and had black eyebrows of the type that are said to beetle, and never laughed if he could possibly look severe; Hamish was short and stout, an advertisement for porridge and the Grace of God, and had never looked severe if he could possibly laugh: Shamus was all for the minutiae of liturgy; Hamis had hoped, not unreasonably, that God wouldn’t notice a few mistakes; Shamus considered that modern dancing and short skirts were purple sins; Hamish hadn’t seen much harm in a hop now and then and in the ladies, bless their hearts, showing a bit of ankle or even, on the greater festivals, a bit of knee as well. Yet, such is the mission and such the might of the Church, which consecrates a coolie just as surely as she does a king’s son, both were equally untiring in their ministry, and both believed (although now one of them walked no more by faith) with equal sincerity all that the Catholic Church has proposed for acceptance by her children whether they be Spaniards or Frenchmen or Chinamen or subalterns in the Grenadier Guards.
“Ha,” said Shamus, when he received Father Malachy in the dingy brown parlour of the presbytery, “so you’ve come, have you?”
“Yes,” said Father Malachy, “I’ve come.”
“Pleasant journey?”
“Quite, thanks.”
“Sit down, won’t you?”
Father Malachy sat down on the edge of a very uncomfortable-looking chair and rested his hands, palms downwards, on the knees of his shiny black trousers. Canon Geoghegan, who was wearing one of those long sacklike coats affected by the Catholic clergy in England, flicked upward that portion of it which ordinarily concealed his rump and placed himself gingerly on a chair opposite and folded his hands in front of his non-existent paunch. For the moment, both priests seemed all black boots and superseded theology.
There was one of those silences which are nevertheless articulate enough to tell people who don’t know each other well that they don’t know one another well.
“The lord abbot of Fort William…” The canon rolled out the words as though they were celestial thunder from the Psalms. “The lord abbot of Fort William told you exactly why I required the services of one of his monks for a few weeks?”
“Yes,” said Father Malachy. “I understand that you are trying to introduce plain chant into your church.”
“Trying, yes.” The canon smiled a cold little smile, which died almost before it was born. “Believe me, these young curates which I have are not the best material to work on. Maynooth may teach theology, but it doesn’t teach manners. Almighty God’s table manners, I mean. Any Irish priest is incapable of behaving like a gentleman in the sanctuary until he is thirty-five. And as the Irish bishops only loan us their youngest and roughest and then haul them back to their native dioceses as soon as they have learned to behave with moderate decency…” He left his sentence to finish itself in the mind of his hearer, then added: “And, of course, old Buchanty let them do just what they liked.”
“I have always heard Canon Buchanty spoken of with respect and generally with affection,” said Father Malachy.
“Quite.” Canon Geoghegan wore the expres-sion of a dentist being forced to listen to a dentist praising a dentist. “Of course, he was loved. Gave money to newsvendors down on their luck and all that sort of thing. He was Scots, too. Not just Portobello Scots, but the real thing. He came from Inverness and used to preach as though he were wearing a glengarry instead of a biretta. And that made him go down with the Protestants. But he had no idea of liturgy or rubrics.”
Father Malachy nearly expressed his opinion that newsvendors down on their luck would be more grateful for sixpences than for liturgy or rubrics; but he remembered in time his rule of being charitable even to the uncharitable and said nothing.
“So you see, the tradition’s bad. Mixed choir and scrambled ceremonies, Roman chasubles and dirty albs. Of course, I’m going to change all that: I’m going to introduce a surpliced choir, teach my curates dignity, and lay in five full sets of Gothic vestments. It will take some doing, I know, but I’m going to do it even if the bishop disapproves.”
“But surely,” said Father Malachy, “the bishop will be only too glad if you succeed in beautifying the services of your church.”
The canon made a grimace which said, without saying: “Will he hell?”
“My dear Father, I am afraid that you don’t know the bishop. I am only speaking the truth when I say that he doesn’t give a snuff about ritual and that, as far as music is concerned, he doesn’t know the difference between ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Pop Goes the Weasel.’ And he wears his mitre as though it were a tam-o’-shanter, all higgledy-anyhow. He’s the sort of priest that would like to say Mass in a tartan chasuble on the anniversary of the birth of Burns. No, my dear Father, we can’t expect much backing from the bishop.”
Father Malachy thought how sad it was that even priests bound to teach the same truths in the same heedless Scotland could not love and understand one another and of how very ultimately alone and dependent upon God was every human soul. Men talked of nations and corporate consciousness of various sorts; they didn’t exist; there were only individual souls, imaged by the Father and superscribed by the Son, trying to pretend that they were essential parts of something greater than themselves, and all, apart from the Trinity and the Hierarchy of Heaven, ridiculously, appallingly alone.
“I understood that he was a very famous bi-shop,” he said gently. “A convert to the Church, isn’t he?”
The canon nodded.
“Oh, he’s famous all right and a convert, a little too famous perhaps, and a great deal too much of a convert. What the Church wants is bishops born to the Faith who will settle down to their job of distributing the Holy Ghost and not waste half their time letting off controversial fireworks with Presbyterians. These converts are no good.” The canon looked blandly out from behind his glasses as, in one short sentence, he banished Newman, Manning, Robert Hugh Benson, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Ronald Knox, and his own Father in God. “Always shouting about the light that they saw on the road to Damascus and forgetting to turn about and set their faces for the New Jerusalem. In any case, no man who’s ever taken seriously the Church of Scotland ought to be allowed to become a bishop of the Church in Scotland; it’s as bad as trying to make a dancing girl pious.”
Father Malachy, who was a gentle soul and loved to see the good in people rather than the evil and who kept ever before his eyes Our Lord’s command to love the sinner whatever the sin, was very unhappy and quite at a loss how to reply to the canon’s indictment of converts and dancing girls. If he had felt justified in following his own inclinations, he would have said nothing; but he decided, after duly considering the matter in the light of his conscience, that to be silent would be to shirk his duty and to sin from motives of human respect.
“I am sorry to disagree with you, Canon,” he said. “In my opinion, the converts have been a signal grace granted to the Church by Almighty God. When I was a boy, I once went to the Oratory in Birmingham and saw Cardinal Newman say Mass, and I’ll never forget it as long as I live. You could see his faith and love and wisdom in every movement he made. No, my dear Canon, I am all for converts. And I seem to have heard quite a lot about dancing girls who went to Holy Communion every morning of their lives.”
He sat back and blinked, for he was a nervous man and was somewhat dismayed at the thought of the explosion which he imagined would follow. But he need neither have sat back nor blinked, for the canon, with a kindly smile, came forward and, leading him gently towards the window, said:
“Perhaps you are right, Father, and perhaps I spoke rather bitterly. Newman, I know, was a great man. And how sad it is when one reflects upon how quickly greatness, true greatness even, is forgotten. I am afraid that the majority of my people would say, if questioned as to the occupation of Newman, that he was a billiard player.” He gave a sharp little laugh which was entirely humourless and which was as different from a real laugh as a put-on cough is from a bronchial cough. “But I think that you must allow me to say that, in my opinion, you are mistaken about dancing girls, about dancing girls in Edinburgh, at any rate.” He pulled aside the brown curtain which shut out from the room the outer world where men bought and sold and ate pork chops. “Do you see that building opposite?”
Father Malachy looked and saw a church with a placard outside it, on which was printed, in red and blue:
BRING
YOUR GIRL
TO
EVENSONG
“It’s a church, isn’t it?” he asked half turning to the canon, half re-reading the poster.
“Not that opposite,” said the canon. “That, I ad-mit, is a church of the Scottish Episcopalian heresy and commonly known as an ‘English’ church by Presbyterians who are unable to pronounce ‘Episcopalian.’ The rector is one of those unfortunate schismatics who can’t get a congregation together without resorting to the methods which have made Bovril a household beverage. No, it’s the other opposite I mean. A bit to the right. Just beyond where that lorry’s standing. It’s really not opposite at all, but I have grown so used to referring to it in my sermons as ‘that flaunting Babylon opposite’ that I have come quite to accept the idea that it is really opposite and not, as it is in actual fact, at a distinct angle of forty-five degrees.”
Father Malachy looked and beheld, wedged in between a tea merchant’s premises and a lawyer’s office, a building which seemed, at first sight, harmless enough and which consisted, like its neighbours on either side, of three stories, all equally depressing and matter-of-fact. Indeed, but for a dome of coloured glass above the entrance, it might have been a reflection of the presbytery mirrored on the surface of a rather misty lake.
“I am afraid that I don’t understand,” he said slowly.
There canon explained:
“That building with the coloured glass above the door has caused more scandal in my parish than all the seven deadly sins put together. It is what is known in bad French as a palais-de-danse and furnishes accommodation, music, and girls for young medical students who wish to perform the inartistic and, to my mind, repulsive motions which contemporary thoughtlessness describes as dancing. And, not content with supporting short skirts and bare arms and shaded corners, styled locally squeezitoria, it flouts revelation by calling itself the Garden of Eden.” The canon snorted. “Mind you, I know what I’m talking about when I say that the place is a hotbed of iniquity. My bedroom happens to be the room just above this, and when the place vomits forth its faithful at an early hour in the morning, I don’t half see some carryings-on.” His eyes glinted hardly and humourlessly behind the thick lenses of his metal-rimmed glasses. “The Babylonians at least had the decency to believe the finger when it wrote on the wall. But these people would refuse to pay any attention if Almighty God Himself walked into the dive and painted MENE, MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN in pentecostal scarlet upon the ballroom floor.”
Before Father Malachy had time to say any-thing or, indeed, to wonder what he was going to say (for he believed, like all men of good will, that dancing had its purposes just as spiritual exercises had theirs and that both could be abused), he felt his arm seized from behind and heard the voice of Canon Geoghegan squeaking excitedly:
“Look. Do you see that little man and the girl coming out of the Garden of Eden? I’ll bet you a new breviary to a medal of St. Anthony of Padua that you don’t know who that is.”
“I have always made it a rule never to bet unless I am certain of winning,” said Father Malachy. “But let me have a good look just for the fun of the thing, and then I’ll see if I can guess.”
The canon stood back a little and, without turning round, Father Malachy was conscious of the holy leer on his sleek, shinily shaved face. But he looked, just for fun, as he had said to the canon, at the man and the girl who had come out of the Garden of Eden and were now, arm-in-arm, crossing the tram lines and laughing together as though they were glad to be alive. The man, who appeared to be about forty-five years of age, was wearing a blue serge suit, a grey bowler hat cocked at a rakish angle, and white spats which, so very white they were, reminded Father Malachy of nothing so much as a pair of newly baptized souls; the girl, a fluffy young inconsequence of nineteen or twenty, had golden hair and was dressed in the silken flimsiness of the hour. “I’ve no idea who they are,” he said after he had thoroughly seen them. “But they certainly do seem very happy.”
“Happy!” The canon was again at his elbow, flattening his nose against the window pane and breathing mists of hot air all over the glass. “Happy! I should think they are. But do you know who they are? Do you know who the man is?”
“I’ve already told you that I don’t,” said Father Malachy. “I am a stranger to Edinburgh, you must remember.”
“Well, the man is the bishop’s brother.” The canon shot out the information with gleeful sorrow. “The Bishop’s Bad Brother or the Bee Bee Bee, as he is known in every presbytery and public house in the diocese.”
“Dear me,” said Father Malachy. “Is that so? And is he really bad?”
The canon waived his arms in a gesture that was almost Gallic.
“You ask me that after what you have just seen? My dear Father, the man’s behaviour is a positive menace to society. To begin with, he is an unbeliever of that school which states that God is to be found on green golf courses and underneath blue skies just as much as in cathedrals which they are pleased to describe as having ‘massive golden altars.’ And he is famed for the amount of alcohol he can put away at any single sitting and for his promiscuous association with gay young women who earn their living by dancing. And everyone knows that he’s the bishop’s brother.”
Father Malachy kept nodding his head.
“I see. And that girl he’s with now is a gay young woman?”
“Certainly. She’s one of the official instruct-resses attached to the Garden of Eden. I expect that she’s just been giving him a few lessons in the fox trot or the tango or whatever they call it. My sacristan tells me that in the mornings from eleven to one they give ‘tuition in terpsichorean deportment’ at the rate of five shillings an hour.”
“She looks a nice, bright young thing,” said Father Malachy. “Perhaps she isn’t as bad as you make out she is.”
The canon looked at Father Malachy with a questioning gleam in his eye.
“My dear Father, I haven’t been a priest for thirty years without learning that pretty women who earn their living by dancing are—well, pretty women who earn their living by dancing. And now, if you’ve quite finished looking at the young lady in question, I’ll take you upstairs and introduce you to Fathers Neary and O’Flaherty.”
2
Meanwhile, as spiritually remote from their observers and commentators as they would have been physically if they had been in Siberia, the Bishop’s Bad Brother and his companion continued slowly and happily on their way to the grill room of the North British Station Hotel.
“Bubbles,” said the Bishop’s Bad Brother, “your eyes are as sweet as bluebells.”
“Sugar Daddy,” said the little lady at his side, “you’re not half a bad sort, really.”
The Bishop’s Bad Brother swung his shoulders with pleasure and wriggled his whole body as a tomcat does when he is caressed.
“Bubbles, I’ll stand you a dry martini for that. Two very martinis. And three if you’ll say that you love me more than Mandy Condison.”
Bubbles, who was not, as the French say, a dancing instructress for prunes, pressed herself, cuttingly, against him and droned:
“Sugar Daddy, I love you more than all the men in the world. Cut my throat, cross my heart, and see all the rest of it if I do.”
And the Bishop’s Bad Brother, feeling that the cup of his happiness was filled to overflowing and heeding not the prim matrons and lawyers of these parts, sang out above the booming of the electric trams:
“Nachum nachum nu
Nachum nachum norus
Nachum nachum nu
And that’s the healing chorus.”
Somewhere in France solemn-faced men were sitting down to discuss the payment of reparations and three hundred yards down the street Father Malachy was telling Father O’Flaherty that the Irish had indeed kept burning the sanctuary lamps of the entire world. But Bubbles and her Sugar Daddy neither knew nor cared about reparations and sanctuary lamps; they were happy and, in their happiness, sufficient unto themselves.
Father Malachy's Miracle, Chapter Three
Father Malachy's Miracle, Chapter One
No comments:
Post a Comment