Collected Stories (71 page)

“Talking about drink, father,” he said with his anxious glare, “what happened the bottle of poteen you took off that fellow?”

“I suppose it's in the hall,” said Father Devine. “I need hardly say I wasn't indulging in it.”

“You could indulge in worse,” said the Bishop with a side-glance at the Canon. “There was many a good man raised on it. Nellie,” he added, going so far as to turn his head a few inches, “bring in that bottle of poteen, wherever it is.… You can have it with your tea,” he added graciously to the Canon. “Or is it coffee you want?”

“Oh, tea, tea,” sighed the Canon, offering it up. He had a good notion what the Bishop's coffee was like.

When Nellie brought in the poteen, the Bishop took out the cork and sniffed it again with his worried look.

“I hope 'tis all right,” he said in his expressionless voice. “A pity we didn't find out who made it. When they can't get the rye, they make it out of turnips or any old thing.”

“You seem to know a lot about it, my lord,” said Devine with his waspish air.

“Why wouldn't I?” said the Bishop. “Didn't I make it myself? My poor father—God rest him!—had a still of his own. But I didn't taste it in something like sixty years.”

He poured them out a stiff glass each and drank off his own in a gulp, without the least change of expression. Then he looked at the others anxiously to see how they responded. Lanigan made a wry face; as a member of the Food and Wine Society he probably felt it was expected of him. Father Fogarty drank it as if it were altar wine, but he was a nationalist and only did it on principle. Father Devine disgraced himself; spluttered, choked, and then went petulantly off to the bathroom.

Meanwhile the Bishop, who had decided that it wasn't bad, was treating his guests to another round, which they seemed to feel it might be disrespectful to refuse. Father Devine did refuse, and with a crucified air that the Bishop didn't like. The Bishop, who, like all bishops, knew everything and had one of the most venomously gossipy tongues in the diocese, was convinced that he was a model of Christian charity and had spoken seriously to Father Devine about his sharpness.

“Was it on an island you made this stuff?” the Canon asked blandly.

“No,” replied the Bishop, who always managed to miss the point of any remark that bordered on subtlety. “A mountain.”

“Rather desolate, I fancy,” Lanigan said dreamily.

“It had to be if you didn't want the police coming down on top of you,” said the Bishop. “They'd have fifty men out at a time, searching the mountains.”

“And bagpipes,” said the Canon, bursting into an old woman's cackle as he thought of the hilly road from Beaune to Dijon with the vineyards at each side. “It seems to go with bagpipes.”

“There were no bagpipes,” the Bishop said contemptuously. “As a matter of fact,” he continued with quiet satisfaction, “it was very nice up there on a summer's night, with the still in a hollow on top of the mountain, and the men sitting round the edges, talking and telling stories. Very queer stories some of them were,” he added with an old man's complacent chuckle.

“Ah,” the Canon said deprecatingly, “the people were half-savage in those days.”

“They were not,” said the Bishop mildly, but from his tone Father Devine knew he was very vexed. “They were more refined altogether.”

“Would you say so, my lord?” asked Father Fogarty, who, as a good nationalist, was convinced that the people were rushing to perdition and that the only hope for the nation was to send them all back to whitewashed cabins fifty miles from a town.

“Ah, a nicer class of people every way,” put in Father Whelan mournfully. “You wouldn't find the same nature at all in them nowadays.”

“They had a lot of queer customs all the same, father,” said the Bishop. “They'd always put the first glass behind a rock. Would that have something to do with the fairies?” he asked of Father Devine.

“Well, at any rate,” the Canon said warmly, “you can't deny that the people today are more enlightened.”

“I deny it in toto,” the Bishop retorted promptly. “There's no comparison. The people were more intelligent altogether, better balanced and better spoken. What would you say, Father Whelan?”

“Oh, in every way, my lord,” said Father Whelan, taking out his pipe.

“And the superstitions, my lord?” the Canon hissed superciliously. “The ghosts and the fairies and the spells?”

“They might have good reason,” said the Bishop with a flash of his blue eyes.

“By Gor, you're right, my lord,” Father Fogarty said in a loud voice, and then, realizing the attention he had attracted, he blushed and stopped short.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy,” added the Bishop with a complacent smile.

“Omar Khayyám,” whispered Father Whelan to Father Fogarty. “He's a fellow you'd want to read. He said some very good things.”

“That's a useful quotation,” said the Canon, seeing he was getting the worst of it. “I must remember that the next time I'm preaching against fortune-tellers.”

“I wouldn't bother,” the Bishop said curtly. “There's no analogy. There was a parish priest in our place one time,” he added reflectively. “A man called Muldoon. Father Whelan might remember him.”

“Con Muldoon,” defined Father Whelan. “I do, well. His nephew, Peter, was on the Chinese Mission.”

“He was a well-meaning man, but very coarse, I thought,” said the Bishop.

“That was his mother's side of the family,” explained Whelan. “His mother was a Dempsey. The Dempseys were a rough lot.”

“Was she one of the Dempseys of Clasheen?” said the Bishop eagerly. “I never knew that. Anyway, Muldoon was always preaching against superstition, and he had his knife in one poor old fellow up the Glen called Johnnie Ryan.”

“Johnnie the Fairies,” said Father Whelan with a nod. “I knew him.”

“I knew him well,” said the Bishop. “He was their Living Man.”

“Their what?” asked Father Devine in astonishment.

“Their Living Man,” repeated the Bishop. “They had to take him with them wherever they were going, or they had no power. That was the way I heard it anyway. I remember him well playing the Fairy Music on his whistle.”

“You wouldn't remember how it went?” Father Fogarty asked eagerly.

“I was never much good at remembering music,” said the Bishop, to the eternal regret of Father Devine, who felt he would cheerfully have given five years of his life to hear the Bishop of Moyle whistle the Fairy Music. “Anyway, I was only a child. Of course, there might be something in that. The mountain over our house, you'd often see queer lights on it that they used to say were a fairy funeral. They had some story of a man from our place that saw one on the mountain one night, and the fairies let down the coffin and ran away. He opened the coffin, and inside it there was a fine-looking girl, and when he bent over her she woke up. They said she was from the Tuam direction; a changeling or something. I never checked the truth of it.”

“From Galway, I believe, my lord,” said Father Whelan respectfully.

“Was it Galway?” said the Bishop.

“I dare say, if a man had enough poteen in, he could even believe that,” said the Canon indignantly.

“Still, Canon,” said Father Fogarty, “strange things do happen.”

“Why then, indeed, they do,” said Father Whelan.

“Was this something that happened yourself, father?” the Bishop asked kindly, seeing the young man straining at the leash.

“It was, my lord,” said Fogarty. “When I was a kid going to school. I got fever very bad, and the doctor gave me up. The mother, God rest her, was in a terrible state. Then my aunt came to stay with us. She was a real old country woman. I remember them to this day arguing downstairs in the kitchen, the mother saying we must be resigned to the will of God, and my aunt telling her not to be a fool; that everyone knew there were ways.”

“Well! Well! Well!” Father Whelan said, shaking his head.

“Then my aunt came up with the scissors,” Father Fogarty continued with suppressed excitement. “First she cut off a bit of the tail of my shirt; then she cut a bit of hair from behind my ear, and the third time a bit of fingernail, and threw them all into the fire, muttering something to herself, like an old witch.”

“My! My! My!” exclaimed Father Whelan.

“And you got better?” said the Bishop, with a quelling glance at the Canon.

“I did, my lord,” said Father Fogarty. “But that wasn't the strangest part of it.” He leaned across the table, scowling, and dropped his eager, boyish voice to a whisper. “I got better, but her two sons, my first cousins, two of the finest-looking lads you ever laid eyes on, died inside a year.” Then he sat back, took out a cigar, and scowled again. “Now,” he asked, “wasn't that extraordinary? I say, wasn't it extraordinary?”

“Ah, whatever was waiting to get you,” Father Whelan said philosophically, emptying his pipe on his plate, “I suppose it had to get something. More or less the same thing happened to an old aunt of mine. The cock used to sleep in the house, on a perch over the door—you know, the old-fashioned way. One night the old woman had occasion to go out, and when she went to the door, the cock crowed three times and then dropped dead at her feet. Whatever was waiting for her, of course,” he added with a sigh.

“Well! Well! Well!” said the Canon. “I'm astonished at you, Father Whelan. Absolutely astonished! I can't imagine how you can repeat these old wives' tales.”

“I don't see what there is to be astonished, about, Canon,” said the Bishop. “It wasn't anything worse than what happened to Father Muldoon.”

“That was a bad business,” muttered Father Whelan shaking his head.

“What was it, exactly?” asked Father Devine.

“I told you he was always denouncing old Johnnie,” said the Bishop. “One day, he went up the Glen to see him; they had words, and he struck the old man. Within a month he got a breaking-out on his knee.”

“He lost the leg after,” Father Whelan said, stuffing his pipe again.

“I suppose next you'll say it was the fairies' revenge,” said the Canon, throwing discretion to the winds. It was too much for him; a man who knew Church history, had lived in France, and knew the best vintages backwards.

“That was what Father Muldoon thought,” said the Bishop grimly.

“More fool he,” the Canon said hotly.

“That's as may be, Canon,” the Bishop went on sternly. “He went to the doctor, but treatment did him no good, so he went back up the valley to ask Johnnie what he ought to do. ‘I had nothing to do with that, father,' said Johnnie, ‘and the curing of it isn't in my hands.' ‘Then who was it?' asks Muldoon. ‘The Queen of the Fairies,' said Johnnie, ‘and you might as well tell the doctor to take that leg off you while he's at it, for the Queen's wound is the wound that never heals.' No more it did,” added the Bishop. “The poor man ended his days on a peg leg.”

“He did, he did,” muttered Father Whelan mournfully, and there was a long pause. It was clear that the Canon was routed, and soon afterwards they all got up to go. It seemed that Father Fogarty had left his car outside the seminary, and the Bishop, in a benevolent mood, offered to take them across the field by the footpath.

“I'll take them,” said Father Devine.

“The little walk will do me good,” said the Bishop.

He, the Canon, and Father Fogarty went first. Father Devine followed with Father Whelan, who went sideways down the steps with the skirts of his coat held up.

“As a matter of fact,” the Bishop was saying ahead of them, “we're lucky to be able to walk so well. Bad poteen would deprive you of the use of your legs. I used to see them at home, talking quite nicely one minute and dropping off the chairs like bags of meal the next. You'd have to take them home on a door. The head might be quite clear, but the legs would be like gateposts.”

“Father Devine,” whispered Father Whelan girlishly, stopping in his tracks.

“Yes, what is it?” asked Father Devine gently.

“What his lordship said,” whispered Father Whelan guiltily. “That's the way I feel. Like gateposts.”

And before the young priest could do anything, he put out one of the gateposts, which didn't seem to alight properly on its base, the other leaned slowly towards it, and he fell in an ungraceful parody of a ballet dancer's final curtsy.

“Oh, my! My! My!” he exclaimed. Even in his liquor he was melancholy and gentle.

The other three turned slowly round. To Father Devine they looked like sleepwalkers.

“Hah!” said the Bishop with quiet satisfaction. “That's the very thing I mean. We'll have to mind ourselves.”

And away the three of them went, very slowly, as though they owed no responsibility whatever towards the fallen guest. Paddy, the Bishop's “boy,” who was obviously expecting something of the sort, immediately appeared and, with the aid of Father Devine, put the old man on a bench and carried him back to the palace. Then, still carrying the bench between them, they set out after the others. They were just in time to see the collapse of the Canon, but in spite of it the other two went on. Father Fogarty had begun to chuckle hysterically. They could hear him across the field, and it seemed to Father Devine that he was already rehearsing the lovely story he would tell about “the night I got drunk with the Bishop.”

Devine and Paddy left the Canon where he had fallen, and where he looked like being safe for a long time to come, and followed the other two. They had gone wildly astray, turning in a semicircle round the field till they were at the foot of the hill before a high fence round the plantation. The Bishop never hesitated, but immediately began to climb the wall.