FATHER MALACHY'S MIRACLE by Bruce Marshall: Chapter Thirteen

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CHAPTER XIII

THE papers made as great a howl over the second miracle as they had over the first.  The same theories were advanced and the words “trickery,” “mumbo-jumbo,” “black magic” were on everybody’s lips.  Indeed, it was not until the metropolitan dean mounted a special pulpit erected in the middle of the rugby field at Twickenham and loud-speakered to a crowd of eighty thousand that the British public knew exactly what to think.  But from that moment all was plain.  For, as the dean so clearly pointed out, the fact of the Garden of Eden appearing to have come back to the very place from which it appeared to have disappeared indicated that the Garden of Eden had never been moved at all and that the general public illusion to the contrary had been produced by some hypnotic rote which only served further to establish the Mithraic origins of traditional Christianity.  In other words, the so-called miracle might be ascribed to Mithraism masquerading as mediævalism itself masquerading as modernism.  To the majority of the readers of the great dailies the explanation sounded intellectual enough to be true.

So once more the earth went bowling, bowling, bowling.  People were as little in Amsterdam as they were in Southsea.  Canon Geoghegan, annoyed that the Garden of Eden had come back to Edinburgh instead of going on to Timbuctoo, returned once more to his hebdomadal denunciations of crêpe-de-chine and Aldous Huxley.  Poor Father Malachy went back to his monastery and the life of a choir monk which is, perhaps, so useful because it is so useless.  Mr. J. Shyman Bell had to refund a good few thirty shillingses to disgruntled miracle dancers who swore that he had obtained money from them on false pretenses, and Miss Gertie de la Muette and her song were forgotten as quickly as they had been famed.  And when, on the Feast of the Epiphany, the naked body (alive) of a famous musical comedy actress was found in the bedroom of a Cambridge professor of applied mathematics, the world heaved a sigh of relief and continued to be, as it has always been, a very muddled sort of place. 

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