NEXT morning at nine o’clock, Father Malachy, wearing the Eucharistic vestments of the Catholic Church, made his way to the foot of the high altar and, pushing back his amice from his head, began the service known to three hundred million Christians as the Sacrifice of the Mass.
Now Father Malachy believed, as every true priest must believe, that he was, for the moment, the representative of Christ and that into the white wafer of bread and welling up within the chalice of wine would come, as he bent to pronounce the holy words, the Body and Blood and Soul of Him Whom he represented. He believed this because the Church told him that this was so and because he realized that, with the wonders of the sun and moon and stars and seasons about him, there was no reason to doubt that Our Lord kept coming among us in this very sweet and lovely manner. And so, unlike some priests who gabble their way through the most beautiful poem and the most beautiful reality which the world has ever known, he pronounced slowly the darling Latin and crossed himself as though he were tracing upon his soul the agony of Our Saviour’s passion and death and moved through the whole glorious mystery with the reverence and dignity of a boy who had been ordained the day before and with the lingering affection of a holy old man who must die that night.
In the nave two broken-down old women watched him with tenderness in their eyes. They lived, those two broken-down old women, by scrubbing floors and they had, each of them, a husband who drank and daughters whose profession was that of Saint Mary Magdalene before she poured the precious ointment upon the feet of Our Lord. Two broken-down old women, all chilblains and rheumatism and teeth that weren’t there, two broken-down old women, illiterate and all the rest of it, who stood, such is the topsy-turviness of the heavenly economy, a very good chance of one day occupying the front row of the stalls with Saint Catherine of Sienna and Saint Francis of Assisi.
But Father Malachy, who kept the custody of his eyes each time that he turned to give a Dominus vobiscum, was as unaware of their presence as he was of the chartered accountants who, bristling with income-tax repayment forms and balance sheets and all the other high intellectual paraphernalia which have made their calling the noble thing it is, were hastening to their offices within an eternity and five minutes of the altar at which he was celebrating.
Outside the trams, red, lusty, and agnostic, clanged by. Outside the great kaleidoscope kept turning and men and women, with bowler hats and powder puffs and Pekinese dogs to hide their immortal souls, went solemnly about their important unimportances. Outside Edinburgh continued to be bleak, Protestant and to lead countries which had never heard of it in science, philosophy, medicine, and respectability. But inside the Church of Saint Margaret of Scotland, perched like a supernatural toad between a music hall and a doubtful lodging house, Father Malachy stood at the altar of God and traced once more the epic of Our Lord’s Crucifixion. To the left he moved, to the centre and to the right, and always slowly and gently as though his feet would do penance for the helter-skelter of modern men. And back to the centre again and on into the deep sea of the Mass where, with Peter and Paul, Simon and Thaddeus, Cosmas and Damian like rocks about him, he bent and brought God to bread amid an unheard fluttering of unseen wings.
2
That same night at half-past six Andrew Gilles-pie, the Bishop’s Bad Brother, leaned across the counter of a very popular bar near the Waverley Steps.
“Winnie,” he said to the young lady on the other side, “what’s on at the Garden to-night?”
Winnie, who was a pretty young girl with the same philosophical outlook as the Dean of Saint Paul’s, smiled a smile which contributors to popular magazines would describe as “displaying two pearly rows of even, white teeth.”
“Eh, don’t kneow, Mr. Gillespie,” she answered in the dreadful English affected by Edinburgh young ladies who wish to appear more de famille than they really are. “But they say that the chirus from the Aimpire is geowing to be thaire and that it’s a lit night.”
“A late night, is it?” The Bee Bee Bee nodded his head in that slow up-and-down manner which, because the deliberateness of the nodding suggests that the nodder is reviewing the whole range of the higher mathematics and physics, has won for Caledonians the reputation of being one hundred times as intelligent as they really are. (A Scotsman nods his head for the same reason as a puppy chases its tail and, expressed in terms of pure thought, the nodding equals the chasing.) “A late night, is it?” he asked again, returning from the higher mathematics and physics which he hadn’t visited. “Och, well, Ah s’pose Ah’d be’er dander along. The bit lass’ll be pleased tae see me.”
His last sentence was almost inaudible, partly because he spoke in that thick, guttural tone which prideful Picts imagine to be as attractive as the Irish brogue and which, in reality, resembles nothing so much as a horse with a cold in the head, partly because the bar was crowded with young gentlemen in chatty golfing suits who were discussing loudly what various teams had been doing with various sorts of balls during the afternoon. But the Bee Bee Bee didn’t care. He spoke as much for the benefit of his own soul as for Winnie’s; and, if Winnie didn’t hear, his own soul did, down beneath the padding of his woolly waistcoat. So he said it again, this time for the exclusive benefit of his own soul (Winnie was now up at the other end of the bar serving a purple-faced stockbroker): “The bit lass’ll be pleased tae see me.”
His soul and the bar kept getting more golden and glorious and jolly. Indeed, as the gin and Italian vermouth dissolved into vapour inside him, he found it increasingly difficult to tell which was his soul and which the bar, so much at one with these hearty, healthy, friendly men did he seem. For the Bee Bee Bee was a low-brow, not of the aggressive my-boy-is-duffer-at-Greek-but-by-Gad-he-plays-for-his-school type, but of the genial beery brand whose critics say, according as charity gives them utterance, that they are “dull but good-hearted” or “good hearted but dull.” And all around him were low-brows: golfing low-brows, footballing low-brows, low-brows who liked to watch other low-brows footballing, biscuit-making low-brows, all the great plus-foured mindless who, getting their names in the papers only when they were hatched, matched, or despatched, did more to mould contemporary Caledonian thought than all the professors, authors and bigwigs that the country had ever produced. He himself belonged to the second hierarchy of Caledonian low-brows, to those who wore a mental kilt and were all for Rabbie Burns whom they never read and for the Church of Scotland which they never attended; but he bore no ill-will to his superiors of the first hierarchy who preferred, or had had preferred for them, Kipling and the nice clean white surplices of what was known by these Scots who didn’t belong to it as the English Church. For, among low-brows of the first hierarchy or among low-brows of the second hierarchy, he was among his ain folk, among the noble army of average men who, by their common sense and breadth of vision, had raised profound thinkers like Vilma Banky and Warwick Deeping to the platform from which, nobody saying them nay, they dispensed their sooth to a world which had poisoned Socrates and burned Savonarola. So his soul, surrounded by other souls with the same image and superscription upon them, expanded, like a balloon into which gas is pumped, into a golden orb of sleek content.
“Aye,” he said again, “the bit lass will be pleased tae see me.” The words were uttered to nobody in particular, as Winnie was still serving the purple-faced stockbroker, but they spiralled up none the less surely into the haze of alcohol and tobacco and passed with them into the great limbo of things said, smelt, and tasted. And as they swung upwards they were heard by a lanky egg merchant who had just finished his second.
“Wimmen,” said the egg merchant sententious-ly and rolling the word around his mouth as though it were a cough lozenge, “wimmen are fair hellish.”
The Bee Bee Bee turned and nodded his head quite seven times before he replied. “Aye, laddie. But there’s wimmen and wimmen, mind. Aye, there’s wimmen and wimmen.” His eyes moistened ginnishly as he thought of Bubbles and her golden hair and of how she snuggled up to him in taxicabs. “Aye, there’s wimmen and wimmen, mind. And mine’s as bonny a wee bit hen as ever cried cock-a-doodle-doo.”
“But hens don’t cry cock-a-doodle-doo,” said the egg merchant, who, de par sa profession, knew something about the matter. “Hens don’t cry cock-a-doodle-doo. Cocks, old man, cocks. You’ve got the blanket the wrong way up.”
The Bee Bee Bee laughed noisily.
“Good for you, Jock,” he said. “Hens don’t cry cock-a-doodle-doo. Anyway, ya ken what An mean. Ah’ve got a dandy wee bit lassie and no mistake. She teaches dancing down by at the Garden of Eden.”
“Is that a fact?” said the egg merchant.
“Yes. And Ah’ve just been asking Winnie here what’s on down by tonight and she tells me that there’s going to be fine carryings-on. A late night, you know, and all the lassies from the Empire waggling their wee bit beam-ends. Ah wouldn’t miss it for worlds. Bubbles—that’s my lassie’s name—doesn’t expect me, but Ah’m thinking that Ah’ll just give her a surprise.” The alcohol that he had consumed and the general brotherly atmosphere common to all bars made him feel that the egg merchant was a man in whom confidences could be safely deposed. “Ah may be on the wrong side of forty, but Ah’ve got young ideas.” He laughed as though the phrase and the feeling were original. “Yes, Ah’ve got young ideas all right.”
The egg merchant, his whisky lapping in a yel-low tide up the side of the glass, leaned nearer.
“Nice piece, is she?” he asked, with a look which showed that he was fully prepared to take a vicarious pleasure in her niceness and in her piece-ness.
The Bee Bee Bee winked cheerfully.
“I should say that she is. She’s only twenty and she has got legs with muscles like a racing champion’s. All yon dancing, Ah s’pose.”
The egg merchant rolled his eyes lugubriously.
“Aye, all yon dancing, as you say.” He stared across at the tiers of bottles on their shelves as though reading on the labels of the Erastian Johnny Walkers and the Ultramontane Benedictines the foretelling of a doom yet to come. “As you say, all yon dancing.” His eyes gradually lost their Calvinistic gloom and he continued briskly and with every appearance of taking pleasure in what he was saying: “Ah hope Ah’m not offending you, mister, but perhaps a word in season mightn’t do any harm. Mind you, no offense meant. But seeing as you and me are standing here pally like and talking away as if we’d known each other all our lives and seeing as you have honoured me with your confidence Ah might as well tell yew that in my opinion all yon dancing is dee-moralizing and is making the lassies o’ Bonnie Scotland no better than a lot o’ koantanental baggages. Mind you, Ah’m no a great boy for the kirk, but there’s something in what the meenisters say about dancing turning little white vurgins into scarlet primer donners. And it’s not just hearsay, mind yew. Ah kent a bit of goods in Glasgow….”
The Bee Bee Bee said with what he imagined to be simple dignity:
“Scarlet primer donners be damned. Ma wee Bubbles is as innocent as the sunlight on her hair. As innocent as the sunlight on her hair, Ah tell you.”
The egg merchant took a gulp at his whisky and continued lusciously.
“Aye, they’re all as innocent as the sunlight on their hair until they’re caught napping.” He nodded with the aggravating self-assurance of a man who knows human frailty too well ever to do business or make love on trust. “As Ah was saying, Ah kent a bit of goods in Glasgow. Proper little pink-and-white angel she was, and to look at her you would have said that butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Real pally with a friend of mine in the motor trade, she was. Said she loved him and all the usual yarn. Loved him!” He laughed loudly and harshly. “Perhaps she did. But she loved his money more. And one day he found out that she’d been up to all sorts of high jinks with medical students when he wasn’t there. He was a middle-aged gentleman like yourself.”
His last sentence discomfited the Bee Bee Bee who, being a neat and pseudo-military forty-five, did not like to be termed “middle-aged.”
“Ah’m on the wrong side of forty,” he admitted again, but heavily this time and despondently as though it were another ten years that he was acknowledging. “But that’s not middle-aged.”
The egg merchant, who was a youthful thirty-eight, emptied his glass.
“The half of three-score years and ten is thirty-five,” he said maliciously. “And yewth to yewth, that’s the trewth. Lassies are all very well and patting a pair of young knees does us old lads good. Makes us younger than we are and more sympathetic to the clarion call of Progress,” he declaimed, misquoting the leading article in the current issue of his favourite technical journal. “Ah, well, must love you and leave you, Ah s’pose. The missus, you know. Doesn’t like to be kept waiting. So long, old scout. No harm meant. Liked the looks of you and just thought Ah’d like to tip you the wink. Cheerio!”
And with a wave of the hand he allowed himself to be caught into the whirlpool of the swing door and was whisked into the Leith tram and non-existence.
3
The Bee Bee Bee was a simple soul who lived as do many souls less simple than he, as though his sense perceptions were the only realities and as though armchairs and pork pies and pretty girls were exclusively and finally armchairs, pork pies, and pretty girls. For him science and her mysteries were as uninteresting and as unintelligible as theology and her mysteries, and the tremendous implication of electrons dancing within the illusion called matter left him as unmoved as the equally tremendous implication of angels dancing on the point of the combination of illusions called a needle. He lived, therefore, the inconsistent life which men and women around him lived: he believed, or said that he believed, or allowed it to be said that he believed, that this world was a school for eternity and he lived just as though he were persuaded that when you were dead you were very, very dead, and he was among the first to laugh at those who deprived themselves of pleasures here below so that they might find a more lasting habitation beyond the grave. Like most of his kind, he would have scorned the name of mystic even if he had known precisely what it meant. And yet that was what he was: a mystic, an inverted mystic who found in beer and dancing instructresses what tired business men found in golf, and worldly young women in love-making, and monks and nuns in prayer and contemplation: an escape from his own personality or rather a taking of it and plunging it in something bigger than and exterior to itself. For, from Saint John of the Cross to Miss Gertie Gitana, we are all of us, hypodermically or hyper-physically, transcen-dentalists; and Andrew Gillespie, leather merchant and hedonish, was, pathologically, a great deal nearer to the Right Reverend Monsignor Robert Gillespie, Bishop of the Catholic Church and repressionist, than either he or the bishop realized.
Miserably, mechanically, feeling that the egg merchant’s remarks had called in question the security of one of the two great sources of his spiritual ecstasy, the Bee Bee Bee clamped half a crown on the counter and wandered out along the corridor to the grill room of the North British Station Hotel which, like the bar, was full of beefy young men discussing rugby, golf, cricket (in Australia), fornication (in Paris) and aëronautics. Miserably, mechanistically, he sat down and ordered a mixed grill, a bottle of Guinness and a Welsh rarebit to follow and, closing his mind to and annihilating the beefy young men around him just as successfully as Father Malachy had, a month or so previously, closed his mind to and annihilated the crowds in Queen Street Station, Glasgow, he called up before him, radiant in her confinement with himself, Bubbles whom he loved and who said, laughingly and with a wind in her words, that she loved him, Peggy McNab of number two-hundred-and-something Cross-causwayside; and, so real was her presence in his mind; and, so real was her pressure in his mind and so perfectly did he re-fashion and create her from the threads of his memory, he annihilated not only the beefy young men around him, but also the mixed grill, the bottle of Guinness, the Welsh rarebit when it followed and the humble, pathetic little waitress who served them.
Peggy McNab. He remembered the night that he had first met her and the way that she had laughed, all down in her tummy and up in her eyes, when he had called her “Ma bonny wee hen” and, when the dimming of the lights for a tango had made him bolder, “Ma ain wee bluebell.” So slim had she looked and so proud in her black silk frock and so very much the lady that he hesitated, primed though he was, to present himself at the pen where she sat with others less fair than herself and ask her for “this one please.” But when he had seen young man after young man and elderly man after elderly man come up and claim her with a brief question and had seen her give a nod of her head and rise and sail away, golden hair, black frock, slim pride and all, in their embrace, he had hesitated less and less and finally had gone as the others had gone and taken her in his arms, an impersonal loveliness rented at sixpence per five minutes.
At first he had not dared to converse with her, but had contented himself with the feel of her at the points of his fingers; but the warmness of her flesh and her so-near-and-yet-so-far-ness had made his contact with her, due only to the fact that he had sixpences and that she wanted them, seem of such little value that he had, at the finish of his fourth consecutive dance, invited her to the upper balcony where they had drunk lemonade and exchanged the awkward remarks that are always exchanged between two people who desire to be friendly and who have not as yet sufficient knowledge of each other’s souls to make good conversation or good silence. Cigarettes, however, had succeeded where lemonade had failed, for, after a few and unscientific puffs, she had, tapping here forefinger against the thick butt of Messrs. Abdulla’s Number Eleven, flicked onto the carpet a thin powder of ash. “Ash is good for carpets,” she had smiled, remarking that his eyebrows were lifted in mock censure. “Yes,” he had agreed, “when it’s not your own carpet.” At which sally they had both laughed just as though it had never been made before and when, five minutes later, they had both agreed that summer was warmer than winter they were well on their way to their subsequent romance and bi-weekly lunches at the North British Station Hotel.
Yes, he thought, he had sat at this very table with her and, oblivious of the prosperous lawyers and stockbrokers around them, told her that she was his puir wee doo and she, as fundamentally Caledonian as himself, had wriggled with pleasure from gat to shoes and had said that she might be puir and she might be wee, but that she didn’t like doos, who were the saftest o’ the burrds, and that she preferred, when all was said and done, to be his puir wee hen. Yes, at this table which, with its vacant place opposite and its bottle of Worcester sauce like a gloomy steeple, looked as though it had never seen her and the gold of her and the teeth of her when she laughed. But it had, though, and it had seen her twenty times if it had seen her once, now in pale green, now in a flaming scarlet business, now in black. And, closing his eyes, it seemed to him that she was there now, laughing to his laughs, preedling to his preedle, answering “Sugar Daddy” to his “Bubbles.” The ghost of her, perhaps, just as there were ghosts of her in the woods at Roslyn and on the sands at North Berwick and in a wee bit bunker on the golf course at Gullane. Hundreds of ghosts of her who should return—who knew?—until the end of time to tables and Worcester sauce bottles and woods and sands and bunkers just as, on nights when nobody was looking, a ghostly Mary, Queen of Scots, was rowed, by ghostly oarsmen in a ghostly boat, across the black and silent waters of Loch Leven.
He opened his eyes. No, she was not there, not a suggestion of her, not a ghost of a ghost. Perhaps he was just a foolish elderly man and perhaps, as that fellow in the bar had hinted, wimmen were fair hellish and perhaps, when he wasn’t there, she carried on with young fellows and let them kiss her. Perhaps even she laughed at him behind his back and imitated, to more competent lovers, his billing and cooing. Perhaps he was, to her, just a well tailored free lunch. But no, she had said it as though she had meant it. Perhaps he ought to have asked her to marry him and have freed her from the necessity of having to earn her living by dancing, night after night, in the arms of a succession of potentially amorous young men. Perhaps….
His mind, dazed with imaginings to which it was unaccustomed, refused to conjecture any more; and he determined that that night he would go early to the Garden of Eden and would ask Miss Peggy McNab his bride and his bonnie to be.
4
They were dancing a tango when he arrived and the red and yellow lights which ordinarily lit the polished arena were lowered to a dull, indeterminate purple. Pish-pish, shish-pish, pish-pish whispered the feet of the dancers as, half-closing their eyes and looking as languorous as their blood and their upbringing would allow them, they did their best to appear, according as they were male or female, like Mexican lads of the village holding broadminded women of the world or like broadminded women of the world being held by Mexican lads of the village, pish-pish, shish-pish, pish-pish; and the music, a dreamy wail suggestive of practical ungodliness beneath orange trees, ta-a-a-a-a, ta-la-la-la-la-la-ta-la-la-la-a-a-a-a, it went, and ta-a-a-a-a, ta-la-ta-la-la-la-la-la-la-a-a-a again.
He looked, as he entered, in the pen on the left; but there was nobody there except a pale and rather unattractive instructress who was reading, as best she could in the insufficient light, a paper edition of the late Miss Marie Corelli’s Temporal Power. He moved, therefore, across the strand of crimson carpet which led to the edge of the dancing floor and, after darting his eyes in between and around the Mexican lads of the village and the broadminded women of the world, caught sight of her moving her body in slow and apparently rapturous harmony with that of a tall young man who was holding her slightly away from him and was gazing down upon her upturned face as though he read there the assurance that she was quite willing to be his baby and anything else that contemporary erotics demanded. She was, as usual, in black and the silk seemed to swirl out from her and back to her all the more sweetly because it was not he who piloted her; and her hair, always golden, was now a great torturing sun which he would never see again. He saw her and, seeing her, he saw her all the times that he had ever seen her and as he had never seen her before. Pish-pish, shish-pish, pish-pish went her feet and ta-a-a-a-a, ta-la-la-ta-la-la-la-la-a-a-a-a went the music and, as she glided around and away from him, the nights in which he had walked with her seemed to glide away too and his heart felt sicker and wearier than it had ever felt before.
But when the dance was over and she saw him standing there she left her partner and came running to meet him, all flying skirts and smiles.
“Sugar Daddy!” she exclaimed, holding out both her hands to him. “This is a surprise.” He wanted, of course, to smile back and to hail her with the same cordiality as that with which she had hailed him; but Satan, dressed as an egg merchant, stood behind him and whispered that wimmen were fair hellish and that she seemed to be enjoying her bit caper with that laddie, hadn’t she now?
“Who was that young squib?” he asked.
She rounded her eyes to two great orbs of in-quiry.
“What young squib, Sugar Daddy?”
“That young la-di-da loon you were dancing with just now?”
“Oh, him.” She jerked her head backwards. “Oh, yon’s just one of those lounge lizards. All feet and no head, you know.” She noticed the unhappy expression on his face and, puzzled by it, asked: “Why, what’s the matter, Sugar Daddy? You’ve not been going and getting jealous, have you?”
“Ah…” But how could he explain about that skinny-malink in the bar without appearing foolish and unnecessarily suspicious? How could he explain having trusted her all these months and then, because of a few words from a man whom he had never seen before and would never see again, beginning to doubt her? Of course, it was that remark about his being middle-aged that had done it. Yes, of course, but he could never explain that to Bubbles. Besides, it might make her think him older than he actually was. “Ah…” he said again and stood looking like an overgrown schoolboy who has forgotten the piece of poetry which he is supposed to have learnt by heart.
But Peggy McNab was a young woman who combined will power with tact.
“Well,” she said, “perhaps you’ll tell me when we’re nice and cozy upstairs, Sugar Daddy.” She put her arm in his and began to propel him, prancingly, towards the pay desk. “So you can just buy me out for ten dances, Sugar Daddy, and come with me like a good boy and tell your Bubbles what’s biting you. That’ll cost you five bob, Sugar Daddy, and it’s cheap at that price. So run along and pay up like a man.”
He went to the cash desk and asked, with hea-vy self-consciousness, the girl who presided at it for ten dances, please. A button was pressed and, ting, ten rectangles of pink cardboard came sliding out of a silver canal. “Tain. That’ll be faive shillings, please, Mr. Gilaispie,” said the girl, who knew him. “Faive shillings, please. Paig’s in luck to-night, and no mistake.”
“It had never previously occurred to him that dancing instructresses could have too much dancing, but the girl’s remark opened his eyes to the possibility that his Bubbles might get as tired of dancing as he himself of buying and selling leather. And the valedictions of her companions, who were waiting behind the barrier for some Satuday night Juan to look with favor upon them, made the possibility seem more probable. “Cheerio, Paig,” they sang in ragged anthem. “If you can’t be good be careful and think of us still shaking a leg while you’re playing at being well-off up there.”
But he had not time to meditate upon this new revelation, for Peggy took him firmly by the arm and marched him upstairs to what was known as the “sit-ootery” and, pulling him onto a sofa uncomfortable enough to be moral, went straight to the point.
“Spit it out, Sugar Daddy,” she said. “What’s the little black beast on your back? Come on, now. There’s nothing whatever to be afraid of. I’m all ears and noses. ’Specially noses, Sugar Daddy.”
“Ah…” Once more he was tossing on waves of inarticulation, once more the words refused to come. And she was looking so sweet, too, with that perky wee look in her eye, just like a saucy bit sparrow asking for bread. He was a great big stookie, that was what he was. Only a great big stookie would have had ideas about such a lassie as Bubbles carrying on behind his back. Why, Auld Nick himself would have seen that the lassie was as straight as a long drink of water. Yon yellow yite in the bar. He’d like, by heavens, to have the baisting of him. He’d kick him all the way from the Barclay Church to Ferguson and Forrester’s. He’d…But there was Bubbles, the wee soul, waiting for an answer. “Ah…” he said again and stuck again.
Cripes, but the lass really looked as though she meant to get the truth out of him.
“Ah was just wondering if you still loved me, Bubbles,” he evaded unconvincingly.
“That’s a lie, Sugar Daddy. You know perfectly well that I love you and that I’ll always love you. The truth, please.”
There was nothing for it. Slowly and with many incoherencies he told her the truth: how that he had been having a wee hoot in Winnie’s bar and how that he had got into a conversation with a blether there and how that the blether had blethered that wimmin were fair hellish and that dancing instructresses carried on behind their middle-aged admirers’ backs and how that seeing her dancing with that all-dressed-up-and-nowhere-to-go young swanker had made it seem that the blether had been right and that wimmin were just a lot of worthless besoms. And then, the difficult part over, he became more fluent and told her that he was very sorry for being so silly and asked her to forgive him and, as a sign of her forgiveness, to marry him. “You see how it is, Bubbles?” he concluded. “Ah’m just so much in love with you that I can’t bear to go on living without you.”
Peggy did not immediately reply. She sat and stared, or rather she sat and did not stare ahead, for the conventional declaration seemed to her as golden and shining as a new line of poetry uttered for the first time. And as she sat there the past few years came chasing back along the lanes of her memory. There had been good times and there had been bad times, but chiefly bad times, for it is not easy for a girl to live by dancing alone; and what with boys wanting to take her for runs in motor cars and elderly mooners imagining that just because she was an instructress they could do what they liked she had had her work cut out. Of course, there had been decent men, heaps of them; but none had been so decent as this funny, woolly, silly old Sugar Daddy of hers who loved her for herself and who had just asked her to marry him. No, she was not sorry that this dancing business was all over. And she would just love being married and having pink, squiggly babies.
“You’re a daft cookie, Sugar Daddy,” she said when she had swallowed some of her emotion. “A daft cookie.” She tapped her forefinger three or four times on her forehead. “Quite balmy.”
“How daft?” he asked, afraid that she was re-jecting him.
“Oh, just daft, Sugar Daddy,” she answered and laid her head as nearly on his shoulder as the etiquette of the establishment permitted. But from the tone of her voice and from the way that she came as near to him as she could he realized that she was his to marry; and from the sigh that he gave and the way that his hand made for her shoulder and then drew back she knew what embarrassment had prevented her from putting into words. For quite half an hour they sat there with the lemonade untouched on the table in front of them and with their hearts going pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat deep down within them. Pish-pish, shish-pish, pish-pish went the feet of the dancers below them, pish-pish, shish-pish, pish-pish, rather like the waves of an invisible sea creeping up a phantom beach. Now it was a tango, now it was a fox trot, now it was a waltz; but the procession of events below meant no more to them than the contemporary status quo of French politics. For they loved mutually and knew that they loved mutually and were tasting one of the two great ecstasies as yet undamaged by a hyper-mechanized civilization.
It was twenty minutes past eleven when he spoke.
“Let’s get out of here, lassie. Let’s get a taxi and drive to the Back of Beyond.”
“I’m with you every time, Sugar Daddy,” she said. “But don’t forget that you’ll have to pay for the rest of my dances.”
So once more he had to present himself at the cash desk and once more he had to receive, in exchange for a number of sixpences, an equal number of rectangles of pink cardboard. And when he had pocketed them and fetched his hat and coat and when Bubbles, all powdered and fluffed, had descended from a mysterious privacy it was twenty-eight minutes past eleven and the chorus ladies from the Whose Baby Are You? company had arrived and, in purples and greens and yellows and slim, tanatlizing scarlet, were moving round the floor with deliberate, feline grace, like free-thinking tigresses self-consciously having a night out.
“Get me a taxi,” said the Bee Bee Bee to a uni-formed boy, who immediately vanished through a whirling glass door.
5
From six o’clock to nine o’clock Father Mala-chy, with the purple stole of penance about his neck, had sat in the confessional and listened to those who came to tell him their sins and had forgiven them in the name of our Lord Who said to His apostles: “Quorum remiseritis peccata, remittuntur cis; et quorum retinueritis, retenta sunt.” From Leith Walk and the High Street, from Morningside and the respectable parts of Murrayfield they had come to be shriven and to rise up from their sins and to lead lives more worthy of Him Who died for them on Calvary: young women who had gazed too long in the looking-glass, old women in shawls who had thrown plates at their husbands, young men who had lusted after women in their hearts, old men who had found it difficult to supernaturalize their charity, potential saints and actual sinners, high and low, rich and poor, all God’s children without wings. And to each of them, after the tale had been told and the pardon asked and the amendment promised, had come the voice of Father Malachy, borne through the grille on the breath of the Holy Ghost: “Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in Nomine Patris et Filii at Spiritus Sancti”; and to each of them, as their sins fell from them and were washed away in the great stream of dead longings and hated loves and burned-out passions, had stolen down the peace of Christ, a stalactite of compassion to their stalagmite of contrition.
And in the other three confessionals Canon Geoghegan and Father Neary and Father O’Flaherty had also been giving a rub to their portion of the hebdomadal laundering. “My son, you’re hanging over hell fire by a thread,” Father Neary roared to a fishmonger’s assistant who had passed a rather too undenominational week-end at Dunoon and “I take a very serious view of your case,” Canon Geoghegan had minced to a university lecturer in Spanish who, from motives of intellectual pride, had given the Sacraments the go-by for eighteen months; but to both the fishmonger’s assistant and the university lecturer in Spanish had come the same sweet absolution and Father Neary and Canon Geoghegan, wiping, like barbers cleaning razors in between customers, the sins which they had just heard from their minds, had to greet and to bless the next penitent and to apply to his soul, in virtue of their priesthood, the mystic Lysol which, so antiseptic were its fumes, cleansed and healed almost before it had been put on.
But that had finished two hours ago and as the last absolved sinner, his soul glowing like a newly polished frying pan beneath his waistcoat, had left the church they had all of them come out of their confessionals and, after a brief prayer to Our Lord cradled in Bread on the high altar, had passed through the sacristy to the clergy house where they had sat down to their Saturday night supper of Cambridge sausages and tea. The meal had been a silent one and not, as happened when Fathers Neary and O’Flaherty were in good spirits, a noisy recapitulation of the day’s association football exploits. For the fact that one of their number had contracted to bring off a miracle that night depressed rather than exhilarated them and the Worcester sauce with which the Reverend Father Neary had liberally seasoned his sausages tasted, as the seasoner afterwards remarked to the Reverend Father O’Flaherty, “like mucky wather from a mangy ould Prothestant drain, begorra.” It was not that they did not believe in miracles (to have heard Father O’Flaherty on the Lives of the Saints would have startled the Pope); it was rather that they felt that Almighty God was a bit economical with miracles these days and that, if He were prevailed upon to modify His policy, it would not be to play swallows and eagles with semi-unrighteous dancing halls. Indeed so silent were they all that, as soon as the last drop of tea had chased the last bit of sausage into the last sacerdotal belly, they had all gone upstairs to their bedrooms where they remained until eleven o’clock when they met again by appointment in the dining room.
Father Malachy was the last to arrive. He was rubbing his hands vigorously as he entered and his eyes were twinkling with that merriment which seems, here below, to have been reserved for those who are fools for Christ’s sake.
“Well, reverend Fathers,” he greeted, “it’s a cold night for a miracle.”
The other priests, who were standing in an irregular semicircle on the far side of the table, looked at one another with quick, slanting glances and Canon Geoghegan cleared his throat and delivered a little speech which he had obviously prepared for the occasion.
“My dear Father,” he said, “I do not think that there is any need to tell you that, during your brief stay with us, you have endeared yourself to us by your charity, by your wisdom and, above all, by your great love for Our Blessed Lord. We have all of us—I speak, my dear Father, for Father Neary and for Father O’Flaherty as well as for myself—we have all of us come to look upon you as a real friend because a true friend, and as an ideal priest because a true priest. But we think—again I speak for Father Neary and for Father O’Flaherty as well as for myself—we think that you may have been led by an excess of zeal into this contract which is the cause of our meeting here to-night. Please, Father, try not to misunderstand what I am saying. Believe me, I am speaking from a deep affection for the truths of our holy religion and not from any desire to hurt you or to retard the work of God. Briefly, what I want to say is this: if you feel, my dear Father, that you have been over-zealous and that you are asking rather a lot of Almighty God in demanding this particular miracle at this particular time, then we will undertake to see Mr. Humphrey Hamilton on your behalf and to inform him that—the phrase, Father, is Father Neary’s, not mine—the miracle has been scratched; but if you still persist that you are acting under the Diving Guidance, then we shall be only too willing to do anything in our power which may aid you to carry out what would be a great vindication of the supernatural and the removal of a great spiritual stumbling-block from the parish of Saint Margaret of Scotland.”
Father Malachy’s eyes became damp with feeling as he listened to Canon Geoghegan’s words, for he realized that they were prompted, not by any ca’ canny mammonishness, but by a real love for the truth and dignity of religion.
“Shall we sit down, reverend Father?” he asked. “We look so like a lot of parsons in a worldly drawing room when we are standing up like this. All smiles for the hostess, you know, but wishing that her daughter would not put quite so much paint on her face.” And, when they were seated round the table at which they had so recently eaten, he continued: “Reverend Fathers, I cannot thank you enough for the very kind words which your hearts have spoken to me through the mouth of Canon Geoghegan. It is very pleasing for an old man who must soon go to meet his Lord to know that his last few deeds and words on earth have been pleasing to the most worthy of his fellow men. And for your offer to arrange matters for me with Mr. Humphrey Hamilton I must also thank you because I know that it was made in a kind and generous spirit. For that offer, reverend Fathers, I must thank you, I say, but I must not accept it. I want you to trust me”—he looked quickly back at the clock—“for twenty-five more minutes. Twenty-five more minutes, reverend Fathers, and I think that each of you will realize that, in this little matter of the translation of the Garden of Eden, I have been walking by a faith so certain that it has almost been knowledge.”
Once again the three secular priests glanced unhappily at one another. Miracles were their everyday business or rather—which was not quite the same thing—the raison d’être of their everyday business. They believed that Jesus Christ had been born of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit, which was a miracle; they believed that He had risen from the dead and ascended into heaven, which was another miracle; they believed that the Holy Ghost had descended upon the Apostles and, pouring out from their hands, had consecrated bishops and priests right down through the centuries, which was a succession of miracles; they believed that Our Blessed Lady had appeared to certain privileged saints and that, to this very day, miracles by healing were performed by her intercession at Lourdes. But, in spite of the fact that their whole religion was based upon and permeated with the supernatural, they felt that it really would be a little bit too much of a good thing if the Garden of Eden were suddenly to dissociate itself from God’s ordinary laws of conservation and start flying through the air like a super-zeppelin. Their hesitation expressed itself momentarily upon their eyes and then passed back into the secret places of their souls; for they had given their word to Father Malachy that, if it still seemed to him that he must attempt his miracle, they would help him to the utmost of their capabilities.
“I must thank you, Father, for so finely inter-preting our feelings in this matter,” said Canon Geoghegan. “And now, I don’t think that there remains anything to be said except to tell you once more that we are all at your disposition and shall be willing to undertake any tasks which you may assign to us.”
“But I haven’t any tasks to assign to anybody,” Father Malachy exclaimed. “The Garden of Eden is going to fly by the grace of God. I shan’t require anyone to stand by and blow if the miracle doesn’t come off.” His quick mind perceived that his confidence was serving only to make the others more uneasy than they already were, so he ceased to banter and continued gravely: “Reverend Fathers, I can see that you are still unconvinced. I am sorry because I know that my power over words is so slight that I shall not be able to displace that unconviction by conviction. But I would, for your own peace of mind, ask you to remember that all that I am going to do is ask Almighty God to superimpose one miracle on top of another. We all of us know that God’s will is always actively employed in conserving the universe and that the fact that no inanimate object can move without being moved by some natural agency is just as much one of God’s miracles as if all the dancing halls in the world were suddenly to be levitated into the air and never to come down again. And remember, I beg of you, that we literally know nothing about the real form of matter. Matter, reverend Fathers, is anything but what our senses tell us that it is. Matter is all electrons just as the Host consecrated at Mass is all God and we know no more about the motion of electrons in the one than we know about the motion of God in the Other. Please, reverend, Fathers, try to show a little more confidence in my inspiration than I would in yours if our positions were suddenly to be reversed.” He laughed, half at his own sally, half because he was feeling so very serious. “Twenty minutes more, reverend Fathers, and we’ll all be cock-a-hoop singing the Te Deum in front of the high altar.” He laughed again, but this time in a far-away manner, as though the joke were between himself and God. “Which reminds me that I have got a job for one of you. I should be grateful, Canon, if you would send either Father Neary or Father O’Flaherty into the sacristy to lay out the white vestments for a solemn Te Deum and to light the six liturgical candles on the high altar.”
Canon Geoghegan turned at once to Father Neary.
“Father, will you kindly do as Father Malachy has suggested?” He waited until Father Neary, after an unhappy grimace at Father O’Flaherty, had left the room. “Well, that accounts for one of us. What about the other two?”
Father Malachy appeared to consider before replying.
“Perhaps you, Canon, will be good enough to accompany me. Yes, on the whole, I think that I should feel happier if you were with me. Father O’Flaherty can wait here and watch from the window.”
“And sacramentals?” The canon was busi-nesslike. “Holy water and a hyssop, I mean. You’ll need those if you are going to asperge the building. And a stole, of course.”
Father Malachy shook his head.
“No, Canon. I shan’t need anything like that. I shall just go as I am. No, on second thoughts, I shall put on my hat and coat, as it is a cold night. And now, Canon, as it is quarter past eleven, I think that we had better be going. I should like, if possible, to arrive before Mr. Humphrey Hamilton.”
6
Outside the night was all black and silver, like a pall over the bier of the faithful departed. The simile occurred to Father Malachy as soon as the front door had closed behind them and he murmured, of his charity, a short prayer for all the poor down-and-outs in Christ. But by the time that he had uttered “requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine,” he was already, with Canon Geoghegan, who was smelling slightly from the brandy he had just taken to steady his nerves, at the edge of the pavement and he had to give his whole mind to the practical problem of dodging prams which, like lighted galleons of an anachronous armada, were sailing swiftly up and down the street.
They found, when they had crossed to the other side, a whole rank of motor cars parked with their back wheels in the gutter and their noses pointing with mute optimism towards the presbytery of the Church of Saint Margaret of Scotland. Morris (Oxford and Cowley), Citroën, Rover, Vauxhall, Singer, Daimler, they were all there, the Minerva lying down with the Ford and the Baby Austin sticking her snout in the Hispano Suiza’s exhaust.
“Like the green bay tree,” Canon Geoghegan anathematized as, two dumpy little figures in black, they began to move along the file of municipally numbered sterns. “And yet, in another place, the Psalmist says that he has been young and now old and yet never saw he the righteous forsaken nor his children begging their bread. All that I can say is that he must have had an extra fine lunch the day that he trotted out that verse. For my own part, I think that the verse about the ungodly flourishing like the green bay tree is finer poetry and sounder philosophy. The owners of these cars did not come by them by frequenting the sacraments and they are certainly not using them to-night for the greater glory of God.”
His words, borne on a little private wind, came unpleasantly to Father Malachy’s ears. Surely, he thought and tried to keep himself from thinking, this was not a time to be imputing motives to people whose good faith or bad faith was known only to God. But he said nothing and kept on walking with short, sure steps towards the lighted entrance of the Garden of Eden which was a conglomeration of gorgeous splotches of red, purple and yellow. And as they kept on walking, the one loving and the other hating, they were joined by the Reverend Humphrey Hamilton who looked, in his magnificent top hat, like one having authority and cultured in all English Literature from Beowulf to If Winter Comes.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” he greeted in his rich, broadminded voice. “I see that you believe in arriving in time. Well, well, trains and miracles wait for no man, do they? And my dear friend the Canon, too. I do hope that none of my good parishioners see me for, if they did, they might think that I was on the point of going over to the Church of Rome.”
“Yes,” said Canon Geoghegan, who hated Mr. Humphrey Hamilton as far as was not inconsistent with the divine precept. “And yet neither your parishioners nor mine would imagine, from seeing us in your company, that we were going over to the Church of England. Isn’t that, my dear sir, rather a warming thought for a cold Saturday night in early December?”
“Very neat,” said the Reverend Humphrey Hamilton who, having left a glowing fireside, a glass of toddy, and a book by Mr. J. Middleton Murry in order to witness what he was persuaded would be a dud miracle, was not feeling in the best of tempers. “And yet if I were to be seen coming out of a side street in which there was a house of ill-fame and a theosophical bookshop it would be presumed by all who met me that it was the former establishment which I had been patronizing.”
But, before Canon Geoghegan could think of an acerbity with which to cap the Reverend Humphrey Hamilton’s, father Malachy intervened.
“Please,” he begged in a tone so earnest that the two disputants immediately felt ashamed of themselves. “We may differ in doctrine, but surely this wrangling must sound very disagreeable to Our Blessed Lord Whose servants we all profess to be.”
Now when Father Malachy pronounced the Sacred Name he did not, like many priests, articulate It as though It were “Ramsey MacDonald”; but he spoke It slowly and reverently so that the syllables seemed to be printed before the eyes in scarlet and gold, as indeed they are in illuminated mediæval missals. And Canon Geoghegan and the Reverend Humphrey Hamilton, hearing him, knew, each in his own way, that here was a man to whom the practise of religion was as important as the theory. They were silent, therefore; and even when three very unspiritual-looking young women got out of a taxi and ran, all legs and laughter, into the Garden of Eden, Canon Geoghegan forebore to make the criticism which he imagined that Saint Paul would have made and tried instead to see them as their Lord Who died for them must see them: as charming silly-billies who found it difficult to watch with Him for one hour.
“We have still another five minutes to wait,” said Father Malachy when they halted outside the main entrance to the Garden of Eden. “It is, of course, possible that Almighty God would effect the miracle now if I were to ask Him nicely; but as I can see no purpose beyond our own personal comfort in doing so I think that I had better not. For all we know He may have some special grace to grant in Australia at this moment and it would be impolite, in view of the nature of my request, to disturb Him before the hour agreed upon. In any case, Mr. Humphrey Hamilton has not indicated to me the place to which he would wish the Garden of Eden to be transferred.”
“My dear Father, I wish to have the Garden of Eden transferred to nowhere. It is you who wish to have it transferred to somewhere in order that you may convince me that miracles are possible in the present as they are supposed to have been in the past. I remember, however, that in your challenge to me you stipulated that I should choose the place; and as, in this case as in that of Saint Denis carrying his head, ‘la distance n’y fait rien; c’est le premier pas qui coûte,’ I challenge you to transfer this building which we see in front of us to the top of the Bass Rock which lies, as we all know, in the Firth of Forth and slightly to the northeast of North Berwick.”
Canon Geoghegan frowned inwardly as he heard the Reverend Humphrey Hamilton’s challenge because the Bass Rock, although inhabited only by a lighthouse keeper and his family, was in the diocese of Midlothian and he would have much preferred the Garden of Eden , if a-flying it would go, to make a thorough job of it and settle down on some desert in partibus infidelium; but he recognized that any suggestion on his part was out of the question and prayed to God that he would hear the prayer of his servant Malachy and cleanse the parish of Saint Margaret of Scotland from an establishment which hindered the sanctification of souls.
“Right,” said Father Malachy. “The Bass Rock it shall be.” He pulled out his watch, glanced at it, put it back again. “And as it is now twenty-seven minutes past I think I shall, with your permission, begin to recite the preliminary prayers. At half-past exactly I think that you will both of you be rewarded for your patience.”
And with these words Father Malachy took off his hat and handed it to Canon Geoghegan and bowed his grey head in great and silent prayer. He did not see the few late couples passing up the steps of the Garden of Eden any more than he saw the curiosity with which they turned round to look at the unusual spectacle of three clergymen standing reverently on the pavement outside. He did not see the boy in uniform come tearing out and rush off up the street whistling for a taxi which wasn’t there. He did not see and did not hear the trams as, all unconscious of the mystery which was then being hatched, they came clanging up from the Leith. He did not see and he did not hear because his mind was shut to God and because he was praying that He would, of His infinite mercy, grant this little sign and wonder that men might again come to believe in Him and in the truths which He had revealed to them. Through Jesus, by Mary, by Michael, by John the Baptist, by Peter and Paul he prayed, through them and by them and round them and over them to God; and at half-past eleven precisely the Garden of Eden stirred on its foundations, heaved tremendously, rose slowly and surely into the air and was absorbed by the night into a cluster of coloured lights which disappeared rapidly in the direction of North Berwick.
“Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto,” mur-mured Father Malachy when he opened his eyes and saw what had happened.
“Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum. Amen,” answered Canon Geoghegan, seizing Father Malachy by the arm and rushing across the street to the presbytery before the policeman on point duty could arrest them.
7
Ten minutes later three figures in shimmering white made their way to the altar of an empty church lit only by six tall candles. “Te Deum Laudamus,” intoned Father Malachy, and Father O’Flaherty, invisible in the organ loft, pulled out stops and let her rip. “…te Dominum confitemur,” took up Canon Geoghegan and Father Neary. “Te æternum Patrem, omnis terra veneratur. Tibi omnes Angeli, tibi cæli et universæ potestates; Tibi Cherubim et Seraphim, incessabili voce proclamant: Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus, Dominus Deus Sabaoth.”
On it went, the glorious canticle of Ambrose and Augustine, louder and louder it grew, the heavenly thunder of sheer praise, louder and louder until it seemed that the whole church must burst from matter into sound and go soaring to join the hymns which angels sang round the Throne of God, louder and louder until the praise quietened to prayer and the three priests dropped to their knees in humble commemoration of the Redemption of men by Jesus Christ. And then, rising, they sang to God that He might save His people and that they, who had trusted in Him, should not be confounded for ever.
And when it was all over the three figures in shimmering white went as silently as they had come and the candles were put out and the church became again a huge darkness lighted by a single ruby lamp.
Father Malachy's Miracle, Chapter Six
Father Malachy's Miracle, Chapter Four
Notes
Vilma Bánky (9 January 1901–18 March 1991): a Hungarian-born American silent-film actress
George Warwick Deeping (28 May 1877–20 April 1950): an English novelist and short-story writer
Gertie Gitana (27 December 1887 – January 1957): a British music-hall entertainer.
Marie Corelli (née Mary Mackay [(1 May 1855–21 April 1924]) was an English novelist. Temporal Power: A Study in Supremacy was published in 1902.
stookie: fool
Quorum remiseritis peccata, remittuntur cis; et quorum retinueritis, retenta sunt: “Whose sins ye shall forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins ye shall retain, they are retained.”
Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in Nomine Patris et Filii at Spiritus Sancti: I absolve thee from thy sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.
requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine: Grant them eternal rest, O Lord.
If Winter Comes: a novel by A.S.M. Hutchinson published in 1921
John Middleton Murry (6 August 1889–12 March 1957): a prolific English author, producing more than 60 books and thousands of essays and reviews on literature, social issues, politics, and religion.
James Ramsay MacDonald FRS (12 October 1866–9 November 1937): a British statesman who was the first Labour Party politician to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
la distance n’y fait rien; c’est le premier pas qui coûte: Distance doesn’t matter; it’s the first step that costs [counts?].
in partibus infidelium: In [the] parts of the unbelievers.
…te Dominum confitemur. Te æternum Patrem, omnis terra veneratur. Tibi omnes
Angeli, tibi cæli et universæ potestates; Tibi Cherubim et Seraphim, incessabili voce proclamant: Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus, Dominus Deus Sabaoth: Eternal Father, everyone worships [Thee]. To Thee all Angels: to Thee the heavens and all the Powers therein; Cherubim and Seraphim continually do cry, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts.
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