Collected Stories (105 page)

“For God's sake!” the Bishop exclaimed softly. He had put away his glass, and his long, fine fingers were intertwined. Then he gave a little snort that might have passed for laughter. “And me thinking she was an old fool! Which of us was the fool, I wonder. After this, they'll be saying I'm not able to look after myself. They'll be putting in a coadjutor over me, as sure as you're there!”

“They wouldn't do that?” Tim asked in astonishment. It had never occurred to him before that there might be anybody who could interfere with a bishop.

“Oh, indeed they would,” the Bishop said, almost with enjoyment. “And I wouldn't mind that itself if only they'd leave me my housekeeper. The jail won't take much out of her, but 'twill kill me. At my age I'm not going to be able to find another woman to look after me the way she does. Unless they'd let me go to jail along with her.”

Tim was an emotional young man, and he could hardly contemplate the personal problems that the Bishop set up in that casual way of his.

“There's nobody in this place would do anything to upset you,” he said, growing red. “I'm sure they'll be well satisfied if she paid the fine, without sending her to jail. The only thing is, from my point of view, could you control her?”

“I could do nothing of the kind,” the Bishop replied in his blank way. “If I was to give you my oath to control her for the future, would you believe me? You would not. I couldn't control her. You might be able to do it.”

“I'd damn soon do it if I had a free hand,” Tim said loyally.

“I'd give you all the hand you want,” the Bishop said placidly. “I'd give you quarters here if you wanted them. You see, 'tis more in my interest than yours to stop the scandal, before they have me married to her.” From the dryness of his tone, the Bishop, an unemotional man, seemed to be suffering. “I wouldn't forget it for you,” he added anxiously. “Anyway, I'll have a talk to Butcher, and see if he can't do something for you. Not that that poor fool knows what he's doing, most of the time.”

T
HAT AFTERNOON
, the Bishop sat on by his window and watched as a lorry drove up before his palace and Tim Leary loaded it with commodities the Bishop had thought long gone from the world—chests of tea, bags of sugar, boxes of butter. There seemed to be no end to them. He felt crushed and humbled. Like all bishops, he was addicted to power, but he saw now that a bishop's power, like a bishop's knowledge, was little better than a shadow. He was just a lonely old man who was dependent on women, exactly as when they had changed his napkin and he had crowed and kicked his heels. There was no escape.

Mercifully, Nellie herself didn't put in an appearance as the premises were gone through. That evening, when she opened the door and said meekly, “Dinner is served, my lord,” the Bishop went in to a royal spread—the juiciest of roast beef, with roast potatoes and tender young peas drowned in butter. The Bishop ate stolidly through it, reading the book in front of his plate and never addressing a word to her. He was too bitter. He went to his study and took down the history of the diocese, which had so often consoled him in earlier griefs, but that night there was no consolation in it. It seemed that none of the men who had held the see before him was of the sort to be dominated by an old housekeeper, except for an eighteenth-century bishop who, in order to inherit a legacy, had become a Protestant. The door opened, and Nellie looked shyly in.

“What way are you feeling now?” she whispered.

“Let me alone,” he said in a dry voice, without looking at her. “My heart is broken!”

“'Tisn't your heart at all,” she said shamefastly. “'Tis that beef. 'Twasn't hung long enough, that's all. There isn't a butcher in this town will be bothered to hang beef. Would I get you a couple of scrambled eggs?”

“Go away, I said.”

“You're right, my lord. There's nothing in eggs. Would I fry you a couple of rashers?”

“I don't want anything, woman!” he said, almost shouting at her.

“The dear knows, the rashers aren't worth it,” she admitted with a heavy sigh. “Nothing only old bones, and the hair still sprouting on them. What you want is a nice little juicy bit of Limerick ham with a couple of mashed potatoes and milk sauce with parsley. That'll make a new man of you.”

“All right, all right,” he said angrily. “But go away and let me alone.”

His mouth was already watering, but he knew that there was no ham in Limerick or out of it that could lift his sorrow; that whenever a woman says something will make a new man of you, all she means is that, like the rest of her crooked devices, it will make an old man of you before your time.

The Wreath

W
HEN
F
ATHER
F
OGARTY
read of the death of his friend Father Devine in a Dublin nursing home, he was stunned. He was a man who did not understand the irremediable.

He took out an old seminary group, put it on the mantelpiece, and spent the evening looking at it. Devine's clever, pale, shrunken face stood out from all the others, not very different from what it had been in his later years except for the absence of pince-nez. He and Fogarty had been boys together in a provincial town where Devine's father was a schoolmaster and Fogarty's mother kept a shop. Even then everybody had known that Devine was marked by nature for the priesthood. He was clever, docile, and beautifully mannered. Fogarty's vocation had come later and was a surprise.

They had been friends over the years, affectionate when together, critical and sarcastic when apart, and had seen nothing of one another for close on a year. Devine had been unlucky. As long as the old Bishop lived he had been fairly well sheltered, but Lanigan, the new one, disliked him. It was partly his own fault; because he could not keep his mouth shut; because he was witty and waspish and said whatever came into his head about his colleagues who had nothing like his gifts. Fogarty remembered the things Devine had said about himself. He affected to believe that Fogarty was a man of many personalities, and asked with mock humility which of them he was now dealing with—Nero, Napoleon, or St. Francis of Assisi.

It all came back, the occasional jaunts together, the plans for holidays abroad which never came to anything; and now the warm and genuine love for Devine which was natural to him welled up, and realizing that never again in this world would he be able to express it, he began to weep. He was as simple as a child in his emotions. He forgot lightly, remembered suddenly and with exaggerated intensity, and blamed himself cruelly and unjustly for his own shortcomings. He would have been astonished to learn that, for all the intrusions of Nero and Napoleon, his understanding had continued to develop through the years, when that of clever men had dried up, and that he was a better and wiser priest at forty than he had been twenty years before.

Because there was no one else to whom he could communicate his sense of loss, he rang up Jackson, a curate who had been Devine's other friend. He did not really like Jackson, who was worldly, cynical, and a bit of a careerist, and had always wondered what it was that Devine saw in him.

“Isn't that terrible news about Devine?” he said, barely keeping the tears out of his voice.

“Yes,” drawled Jackson in his usual cautious, fishy tone, as though even on such a subject he were afraid of committing himself. “I suppose it's a happy release for the poor devil.”

This was the sort of talk which maddened Fogarty. It sounded as if Jackson were talking of an old family pet who had been sent to the vet's.

“I dare say,” he said gruffly. “I was thinking of going to town and coming back with the funeral. You wouldn't come?”

“I don't see how I could, Jerry,” Jackson replied in a tone of concern. “It's only a week since I was up last.”

“Ah, well, I'll go myself,” said Fogarty. “I suppose you don't know what happened him?”

“Oh, you know he was always anemic. He ought to have looked after himself, but he didn't get much chance with that old brute of a parish priest of his. He was fainting all over the shop. The last time, he fainted at Mass.”

“You were in touch with him, then?” Fogarty asked in surprise.

“I just saw him for a while last week. He couldn't talk much, of course.”

And again the feeling of his own inadequacy descended on Fogarty. He realized that Jackson, who seemed to have as much feeling as a mowing machine, had kept in touch with Devine and gone out of his way to see him at the end, while he, the warm-hearted, devoted, generous friend, had let him slip from sight into eternity and was now wallowing in the sense of his own loss.

“God, I feel thoroughly ashamed of myself, Jim,” he said with a new humility. “I never even knew he was sick.”

“I'll see about getting off for the funeral,” Jackson said. “I think I might manage it.”

T
HAT EVENING
, the two priests set off in Fogarty's car for the city. Jackson brought Fogarty to a very pleasant restaurant for dinner. He was a tall, thin man with a prim, watchful, clerical air, who knew his way round. He spent at least ten minutes over the menu and the wine list, and the headwaiter danced attendance on him as headwaiters do only when there is a big tip in view or they have to deal with an expert.

“I'm having steak,” Fogarty said to cut it short.

“Father Fogarty is having steak, Paddy,” said Jackson, looking at the headwaiter over his spectacles. “Make it rare. And stout, I suppose?”

“I'll spare you the stout,” said Fogarty. “Red wine.”

“Mind, Paddy,” said Jackson warningly. “Father Fogarty said
red
wine. You're in Ireland now, remember.”

Next morning, they went to the mortuary chapel, where the coffin was resting on trestles before the altar. Beside it, to Fogarty's surprise, was a large wreath of red roses. When they rose from their knees, Devine's uncle Ned had come in with his son. Ned was a broad-faced, dark-haired, nervous man, with the anemic complexion of the family.

“I'm sorry for your trouble, Ned,” Father Fogarty said.

“I know that, father,” said Ned.

“I don't know if you know Father Jackson. He was a great friend of Father Willie's.”

“I heard him speak of him,” said Ned. “He talked a lot about both of you. Ye were his great friends. Poor Father Willie!” he added with a sigh. “He had few enough of them.”

Just then the parish priest entered and spoke to Ned Devine. He was a tall man with a stern, unlined, wooden face. He stood for a few moments by the coffin, then studied the breastplate and the wreath, looking closely at the tag of the wreath. It was only then that he beckoned the two younger priests aside.

“Tell me,” he asked in a professional tone, “what are we going to do about this?”

“About what?” Fogarty asked in surprise.

“This wreath,” said Father Martin, giving him a candid glare.

“What's wrong with it?”

“'Tis against the rubrics.”

“For Heaven's sake!” Fogarty said impatiently. “What have the rubrics to do with it?”

“The rubrics have a lot to do with it,” Martin said sternly. “And, apart from that, 'tis a bad custom.”

“You mean Masses bring in more money?” Fogarty asked with amused insolence.

“I do not mean Masses bring in more money,” said Martin, who seemed to reply to every remark verbatim, like a solicitor's letter. “I mean that flowers are a pagan survival.” He looked at the two young priests with the same innocent, anxious, wooden air. “And here am I, week in, week out, preaching against flowers, and a blooming big wreath of them in my own church. And on a priest's coffin too, mind you! What am I going to say about that?”

“Who asked you to say anything?” asked Fogarty. “The man wasn't from your diocese.”

“Oh, now, that's all very well,” said Martin. “And that's not the whole story, and you know it.”

“You mean, the wreath is from a woman?” broke in Jackson.

“I do mean the wreath is from a woman.”

“A woman?” Fogarty exclaimed in astonishment. “Does it say so?”

“It does not say so. But 'tis red roses.”

“And does that mean it's from a woman?”

“What else could it mean?”

“It could mean it's from somebody who didn't study the language of flowers the way you seem to have done,” said Fogarty.

“Oh, well,” Jackson intervened again with a shrug, “we know nothing about it. You'll have to decide about it yourself. It's nothing to do with us.”

“I don't like doing anything when I wasn't acquainted with the man,” said Martin, but he made no further attempt to interfere, and one of the undertaker's men took the wreath and placed it on the hearse. Fogarty controlled himself with difficulty. As he banged open the door of the car and started the engine, his face was very flushed. He drove with his head bowed and his brows jutting down like rocks above his eyes. As they cleared the Main Street he burst out.

“That's the sort of thing that makes me ashamed of myself! ‘Flowers are a pagan survival.' And they take it from him, Jim! They listen to that sort of stuff instead of telling him to shut his ignorant gob.”

“Oh, well,” Jackson said in his nonchalant, tolerant way, “he was right, of course.”

“Right?”

“I mean, on the appearance of the thing. After all, he didn't know Devine.”

“All the more reason why he shouldn't have interfered. Do you realize that he'd have thrown out that wreath only for us being there? And for what? His own dirty, mean, suspicious mind!”

“Ah, I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't have let that wreath go on the coffin.”

“You wouldn't? Why not?”

“It was from a woman all right.”

Jackson lit his pipe and looked over his spectacles at Fogarty.