Such Is My Beloved (14 page)

 

TWENTY-ONE

F
our days before Easter the Bishop sent for Father Dowling. The Bishop's huge, dark, solemn face with the swift-moving eyes showed a little irritation when Father Dowling came into the library and kissed his ring. He withdrew his hand too hastily. Of course, a bishop rarely gave anybody an opportunity actually to kiss his ring. Usually he put out his hand and withdrew it just when some one was bowing low over it.

Father Dowling, who had expected to hear from either the Bishop or Father Anglin ever since he had taken the girls to Robison's house, had come eagerly, sure that his explanation would be understood, and even now, looking at the Bishop's crimson stock below his white collar, some of his hopefulness was still animating him. He stood still, with his hands stiffly at his sides.

The Bishop's double chin folded softly as he drooped his head, staring for a long time without speaking as though he had never seen Father Dowling before and was trying now to make up his mind about him. There was something so
direct, simple and confident about the young priest that the Bishop grew even more irritated. “Perhaps you know why I wanted to see you, Father Dowling?” he began mildly. “Have you any idea?”

“I would not like to say, Your Grace.”

“You've been in the company of two girls a good deal recently.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“Common prostitutes.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

There had been a little smile on Father Dowling's face but the way the Bishop said common prostitutes hurt him, and his face reddened with resentment and hostility toward the Bishop. Then he was ashamed, knowing that in looking closely at the Bishop, peering into his puzzling, mysterious, heavy face which never revealed his thoughts, and not liking the slight almost rolling motion of one heavy lip on the other, he was looking critically at him, as he would at an ordinary man, instead of simply seeing him as his superior, and accepting his words on these matters as he would the word of God.

“Are you about to object, Father?” the Bishop said.

“No, Your Grace.”

“I've heard you've been going continually to this hotel and seeing these girls and giving them things and staying with them nearly all night, and being seen on the street with them, and so on. You may have some explanation. I'd like to hear it, but it seems to me you've been deliberately courting scandal, scandal in a community where we are in a minority, Father, and where the life of a priest in these matters must be above reproach.” The Bishop drawled these last words out, his voice going nasal, slow and a bit sarcastic. “I believe, of course, that you started out to help these girls, that's true, isn't it, Father?”

“I started out to help them, Your Grace. I kept on helping them. I was helping them up to the time they were arrested.”

“Helping them how, Father?”

“Helping them with my presence.” If only the Bishop wouldn't drawl his words out so slowly, Father Dowling was thinking. The way he asked, “Helping them how?” made Father Dowling suddenly wonder about everything he had tried to do. The simple question was somehow destructive of his faith in himself, but he said boldly, “I was helping them by my presence. I tried to be with them as much as possible.”

“Were you having any effect, do you think?” the Bishop asked with real curiosity. There was a bit of wonder in his voice now, as if he really wanted to believe Father Dowling had helped the girls.

“I was trying to keep them off the streets. There were many times when they delighted me with a bit of feeling, sometimes hard to describe, Your Grace, but filling me with hope.”

“But when you wanted to get them, you knew where to look for them. On the streets, eh?”

“I know the girls often deceived me, Your Grace, but does it matter that they did? I don't think so. Supposing they deceived me again and again. Was I to become impatient or weary, or abandon them, out of disappointment? Your Grace, I've thought of the matter a good deal. I can't understand how we, or the whole race, can ever hope for justice, or can expect to go forward, or can hope for absolution if we can't see that even our dreams disappoint us. Even a dream of social betterment usually is a bitter disappointment. We've got to accept the disappointment and go on. All of us must be terribly disappointing to God. By any standard of justice God might have abandoned us all long ago and left us to shift for ourselves as
those girls are shifting now wherever they are, whatever they are doing.”

“Just a moment, Father. We're not discussing those matters now. I'm simply telling you that you were giving scandal. I'm not arguing with you.”

“I understand, Your Grace.”

“Weren't you tempted, being continually exposed to a life of temptation?”

“No, Your Grace.”

“There was no carnal satisfaction, Father?”

“Not that I know of, Your Grace.”

The Bishop seemed to become more sullen than ever but really it was only that his conscience was bothering him. One part of his mind was telling him that the young priest was utterly without blame; the other part of his mind was urging him to be rational, to be firm, to administer his office according to his highest conception of duty. While he was looking so sullen and uncommunicative, he was fearing that he was softening, yielding to a personal sentiment, or liking the young priest and letting himself meditate on his conduct whereas he knew definitely, as a bishop, that such conduct could not be tolerated in this community. Besides there was also the charity drive throughout the city that would be spoiled by circulation of scandalous stories about priests. “This you can see at least, Father,” he said patiently. “Let us say in the beginning when you went to visit those girls you were moved by a kind of divine love. But can't you see how you were drawn into their lives, how you were sucked in and immersed in their lives so your single besetting worry became the comfort and life of those streetwalkers? It became a purely human love, if I may put it in that way. I mean the quality of your interest changed completely.”

“Do you mean, Your Grace, that I came to love them for themselves?”

“Yes, so that they themselves were more important than the sinfulness they represented. Let me see how I ought to put it….”

Becoming intensely interested, the Bishop leaned forward, anxious to probe into the matter and discover the nature of this love, to see it objectively as a philosophical problem.

“Yes, I did grow to love them for themselves,” Father Dowling said.

“Can't you see it was an impossible state of affairs for you, a priest?”

“It seems to me it was loving them in the only way I knew how, Your Grace.”

“Father, as an older priest, let me tell you something. It was a form of arrogance on your part to think you could go on with that relationship. Do you understand now?”

“I do not understand that aspect of it. Those girls have been arrested and sent away. They will live now as thousands of other prostitutes live till they grow old, then they'll just be old prostitutes with nothing to do.”

Smiling, the Bishop said, “I believe they were living that way now, anyway,” but he was thinking “He's still worried about them. He's still absorbed in their lives. It won't do at all.” Then he said, “I should imagine the notion of prostitution alone would make you sick with disgust.”

“If I start hating prostitutes where am I going to stop?” Father Dowling asked. “These girls have prostituted their bodies. All around us there are all kinds of people prostituting their souls and their principles for money. I know people in this city who prostitute our faith for the sake of expediency. I watch it going on all around and wonder how corrupt our
faith can become before it dies. So if I can't have charity for those girls, certainly I can have no love for many others in higher places.”

The Bishop saw that he was making no impression on Father Dowling with his arguments so he said impatiently, “I've tried to state the matter clearly. I say you can't go on in this way. You'll have to obey me in this matter.”

“I will do whatever Your Grace advises.”

“Except agree with me, eh? I'll have to think of something to do about it most certainly, something in the way of discipline. You ought to be taken away from here.”

“If you think it best, Your Grace.”

“That's all, Father.”

Father Dowling's smooth skin was flushed with embarrassment. Almost pleading for some informal conversation, he looked anxiously at the Bishop, who was fussing with some papers on his desk. “Good afternoon, Your Grace,” Father Dowling said.

“Good afternoon, Father.” The Bishop put out his hand laconically as if the conversation had lost its importance for him.

There was such a nervous trembling in Father Dowling when he left the Bishop's palace that he found it hard to think at all. A fearful disappointment was shaking him, and this came from knowing that he would be disciplined like a fallen priest, or like one who was simply not a good priest. His mother would be expecting him home for Easter, too. Then he grew calmer and more meditative, for he was thinking, “Obedience is necessary. Obedience is to be preferred even to sacrifice.” In his spiritual reading he had learned that sacrifice was always much easier than obedience. As he reached the corner and stood looking across at a drug store, he knew that
in his thoughts he could not obey the Bishop and this disturbed him. He decided to go into the drug store and have a soft drink and he sat there staring at the marble counter, blinking his eyes and pondering his wilful lack of obedience. The Bishop had said that his love had degenerated. “How could God have loved those girls if not for themselves? How otherwise then could I have loved them?” he asked himself. And if God was able to love all souls without distinction in His divine way in spite of their failures, their lusts and avariciousness and their miserable condition, wasn't he, a simple priest, through his love of these two girls, loving the whole world, too? He began to smile, and he felt very confident with a swift rush of marvellous joyfulness.

 

TWENTY-TWO

T
hat evening the Bishop's spiritual adviser had come to hear his confession. The Bishop was kneeling down on a plush footstool conducting an examination of his conscience and the plump fingers of one big hand were folded softly over the other hand that held a rosary. His heavy head was hanging on the side and his eyes kept opening slowly, then remaining shut for some time. As he prayed his lips made a whispering sound, and when he drew in his breath it was like a thin whistle. Over and over he kept questioning himself about every sin he might have committed in the last week. His sins seemed to be so few that he was alarmed and groped anxiously for more, knowing he could not be without guilt. He asked himself if he had always been charitable in his transactions. Whenever the Bishop was worried about his failure to see his sins clearly, he charged himself with a consistent lack of charity. “Have I been harsh in my judgments? Have I dwelt upon the faults of others? Have I been arrogant in my office?” he asked himself. More than anything else the Bishop dreaded the spiritual complacency that was often the lot of some good men in the priesthood. His enormous shoulders were drooping
and his dark impassive face was full of perplexity as he tried to strip away all concealment till he would be as frank with himself as a little child. In the course of a long consideration of his judgments he finally thought of Father Dowling and the way he had rebuked him. Suddenly the carefully tabulated points in his examination of conscience went out of his head; he began to think of himself as a young priest, he remembered the time when he had been young, slim, extraordinarily tall and had longed to love Christ in everything he did; he remembered how he had trembled with joy that day when he had finished saying his first mass, and how slow, laconic and indifferent the older priests had appeared, how their patient smiles had seemed to come out of spiritual inertia. This ardor had lasted him many years and nothing else had been necessary but to abandon himself to his own good intentions, and then as he had grown older he had become more intellectual, more cautious and had formed estimates of the value of all human actions. “I never was so happy as when I was a young priest, not much younger than Father Dowling,” he thought.

It was then that he realized he was thinking of Father Dowling as though he loved and wanted to help him. This startled the Bishop. “Don't I believe in my own actions? I know he was giving scandal. There was nothing else to do. He must be sent away, probably to a monastery. I don't have to go over all that again.” But he couldn't help feeling that he, judging the young priest, might not have been without some kind of sin in the matter. “Father Dowling made a fool of himself. It became a kind of arrogance in him. Who does he think he is to win those girls over just by his presence?”

A feeling stronger than his reason was urging him that his doubt and perplexity was a matter for his spiritual adviser. He seemed to be trying to grip and hold his own conscience,
refusing to let himself reconsider his judgment of Father Dowling. “My own conscience must give me the answer in these questions,” he thought. “If it is not so then it is impossible for me to administer my office.” And he tried to start praying again. He began to move his lips rapidly with the words of a prayer flowing steadily out of him. “But how could Father Dowling have been successful with the girls?” he asked himself suddenly. “What might he have done? It's absurd. He would have to have been a saint. I don't know much about him. It's odd I've never really heard of him before,” he whispered.

The Bishop, who thought he was ready now to make a good confession, closed his eyes, became silent, ready to stand up, and then it came into his head again, “Father Dowling in the beginning may have loved them in a general way and, of course, that was good. His love for them became too concrete. How could it become too concrete? From the general to the particular, the conception expressed in the image.” It seemed to become a kind of philosophical problem for the Bishop and he was groping for an abstract statement. “From the word to the flesh, the word made flesh, from the general to the particular, the word made flesh, no, no, nonsense…then the general made concrete…no, no.” But the Bishop could not meditate at all now and had become angry with himself. “What is the matter with me? Do I feel I suffer from the sin of hardness of heart?” he muttered. He knew he would have to wait for another mood, a more peaceful frame of mind before going to confession, and he got up slowly, his knees feeling stiff. Up and down the room he paced restlessly, feeling sure that as a rational man there had been only one way to consider the question of Father Dowling's conduct. “If I had it to do over again, I would face the problem in exactly the same way,” he thought firmly. “What on earth is bothering me
then? He was an honest man who committed himself to a piece of folly that can't be tolerated, that's all there is to it.”

The Bishop paced up and down irritably in this way, muttering to himself about Father Dowling, while his spiritual adviser was still waiting to hear his confession.