The Collar (21 page)

She had got the old man to bed, and he lay there with the engaged look of a human being at grips with his destiny. From his narrow window there was a pleasant view of the sea road and a solitary tree by the water's edge. Beyond the bay was the mountain, with a cap on it – the sign of bad weather. Fogarty gave him the last Sacraments, and he confessed and received Communion with a devotion that touched Fogarty in spite of himself. He stayed on with the daughter until the doctor arrived, in case any special medicines were needed. They sat in the tiny box of a front room with a bay window and a high mahogany bookcase that filled one whole wall. She wanted to stay and make polite conversation for the priest, though all the time she was consumed with anxiety. When the doctor left, Fogarty left with him, and pressed Maisie's hand and told her to call on him for anything, at any time.

Dr Mulloy was more offhand. He was a tall, handsome young man of about Fogarty's own age. Outside, standing beside his car, he said to Fogarty, ‘Ah, he might last a couple of years if he minded himself. They don't of course. You know the way it is. A wonder that daughter of his never married.'

‘How could she?' Fogarty asked in a low voice, turning to glance again at the ill-designed, pretentious little suburban house. ‘He'd think her too grand for any of the boys round this place.'

‘Why then, indeed, if he pops off on her, she won't be too grand at all,' said the doctor. ‘A wonder an educated man like that wouldn't have more sense. Sure he can't have anything to leave her?'

‘No more than myself, I dare say,' said Fogarty, who saw that the doctor only wanted to find out how much they could pay; and he went off to summon one of the boy acolytes to take Considine's place at Mass next morning.

But the next morning when Fogarty reached the sacristy, instead of the boy he had spoken to, old Considine was waiting, with everything neatly arranged in his usual pedantic manner, and a wan old man's smile on his hollow face.

‘Mr Considine!' Fogarty exclaimed indignantly. ‘What's the meaning of this?'

‘Ah, I'm fine this morning, father,' said the old man, with a sort of fictitious drunken excitement. ‘I woke up as fresh as a daisy.' Then he smiled malevolently and added, ‘Jimmy Leary thought he was after doing me out of a job, but Dr Mulloy was too smart for him.'

‘But you know yourself what Dr Mulloy said,' Fogarty protested indignantly. ‘I talked to him myself about it. He said you could live for years, but any exertion might make you go off any time.'

‘And how can man die better?' retorted the teacher, with the triumphant air he wore whenever he managed to produce an apt quotation. ‘You remember Macaulay, I suppose,' he added doubtfully, and then his face took on a morose look. ‘'Tisn't that at all,' he said. ‘But 'tis the only thing I have to look forward to. The day wouldn't be the same to me if I had to miss Mass.'

Fogarty knew that he was up against an old man's stubbornness and love of habitual things, and that he was wasting his breath advising Considine himself. Instead, he talked to the parish priest, a holy and muddleheaded old man named Whelan. Whelan shook his head mournfully over the situation, but then he was a man who shook his head over everything. He had apparently decided many years ago that any form of action was hateful, and he took to his bed if people became too presssing.

‘He's very obstinate, old John, but at the same time, you wouldn't like to cross him,' Whelan said.

‘If you don't do something about it, you might as well put back the Costello Mass another half an hour,' Fogarty said. He was forever trying to induce Whelan to make up his mind. ‘He's getting slower every day. One of these days he'll drop dead on me at the altar.'

‘Oh, I'll mention it to him,' the parish priest said regretfully. ‘But I don't know would it be wise to take too strong a line. You have to humour them when they're as old as that. I dare say we'll be the same ourselves, father.'

Fogarty knew he was wasting his breath on Whelan as well. Whelan would no doubt be as good as his word, and talk about the weather to Considine for an hour, and then end by dropping a hint, which might be entirely lost, that the old teacher shouldn't exert himself too much, and that would be all.

A month later, the old teacher had another attack, but this time Fogarty only heard of it from his mad housekeeper, who knew everything that went on in the village.

‘But why didn't he send for me?' he asked sharply.

‘Ah, I suppose he wasn't bad enough,' replied the housekeeper. ‘Mrs MacCarthy said he got over it with pills and a sup of whiskey. They say whiskey is the best thing.'

‘You're sure he didn't send for me?' Fogarty asked. There were times when he half expected the woman, in the exercise of her authority, to refuse the Last Rites to people she didn't approve of.

‘Sure, of coure he didn't. It was probably nothing.'

All the same, Fogarty was not easy in his mind. He knew what it meant to old people to have the priest with them at the end, and he suspected that if Considine made light of his attack, it could only be because he was afraid Fogarty would take it as final proof that he was not fit to serve Mass. He felt vaguely guilty about it. He strode down the village street, saluting the fishermen who were sitting on the sea wall in the dusk. The teacher's cottage was dark when he reached it. The cobbler, a lively little man who lived next door, was standing outside.

‘I hear the old master was sick again, Tom,' said the curate.

‘Begor, he was, father,' said the cobbler. ‘I hear Maisie found him crawling to the fire on his hands and knees. Terrible cold they get when they're like that. He's a sturdy old divil, though. You needn't be afraid you'll lose your altar boy for a long time yet.'

‘I hope not, Tom,' said Fogarty, who knew that the cobbler, a knowledgeable man in his own way, thought there was something funny about the old schoolmaster's serving Mass. ‘And I hope we're all as good when our own time comes.'

He went home, too thoughtful to chat with the fishermen. The cobbler's words had given him a sudden glimpse of old Considine's sufferings, and he was filled with the compassion that almost revolted him at times for sick bodies and suffering minds. He was an emotional man, and he knew it was partly the cause of his own savage gloom, but he could not restrain it.

Next morning, when he went to the sacristy, there was the old teacher, with his fawning smile, the smile of a guilty small boy who has done it again and this time knows he will not escape without punishment.

‘You weren't too good last night, John,' the curate said, using Considine's Christian name for the first time.

‘No, Father Jeremiah,' Considine replied, pronouncing the priest's name slowly and pedantically. ‘I was a bit poorly in the early evening. But those pills of Dr Mulloy's are a wonder.'

‘And isn't it a hard thing to say you never sent for me?' Fogarty went on.

Considine blushed furiously, and this time he looked really guilty and scared.

‘But I wan't that bad, father,' he protested with senile intensity, his hands beginning to shake and his eyes to sparkle. ‘I wasn't as frightened yesterday as I was the first time. It's the first time it frightens you. You feel sure you'll never last it out. But after that you get to expect it.'

‘Will you promise me never to do a thing like that again?' the curate asked earnestly. ‘Will you give me your word that you'll send for me, any hour of the day or night?'

‘Very well, father,' Considine replied sullenly. ‘'Tis very good of you. I'll give you my word I'll send for you.'

And they both recognised the further, unspoken part of the compact between them. Considine would send for Fogarty, but nothing Fogarty saw or heard was to permit him again to try to deprive the old teacher of his office. Not that he any longer wished to do so. Now that he recognised the passion of will in the old man, Fogarty's profound humanity only made him anxious to second it and enable Considine to do what clearly he wished to do – die in harness. Fogarty had also begun to recognise that it was not mere obstinacy that got the old man out of his bed each morning and brought him shivering and sighing and shuffling up the village street. There was obstinacy there, and plenty of it, but there was something else, which the curate valued more; something he felt the lack of in himself. It wasn't easy to put a name on it. Faith was one name, but it was no more than a name and was used to cover too many excesses of devotion that the young priest found distasteful. This was something else, something that made him ashamed of his own human weakness and encouraged him to fight the depression, which seemed at times as if it would overwhelm him. It was more like the miracle of the Mass itself, metaphor become reality. Now when he thought of his own joke about serving the teacher's Mass, it didn't seem quite so much like a joke.

One morning in April, Fogarty noticed as he entered the sacristy that the old man was looking very ill. As he helped Fogarty, his hands shook piteously. Even his harsh voice had a quaver in it, and his lips were pale. Fogarty looked at him and wondered if he shouldn't say something, but decided against it. He went in, preceded by Considine, and noticed that though the teacher tried to hold himself erect, his walk was little more than a shuffle. He went up to the altar, but found it almost impossible to concentrate on what he was doing. He heard the labouring steps behind him, and as the old man started to raise the heavy book onto the altar, Fogarty paused for a moment and looked under his brows. Considine's face was now white as a sheet, and as he raised the book he sighed. Fogarty wanted to cry out, ‘For God's sake, man, lie down!' He wanted to hold Considine's head on his knee and whisper into his ear. Yet he realised that to the strange old man behind him this would be no kindness. The only kindness he could do him was to crush down his own weak warm-heartedness and continue the sacrifice. Never had he seemed farther away from the reality of the Mass. He heard the labouring steps, the panting breath, behind him, and it seemed as if they had lasted some timeless time before he heard another heavy sign as Considine managed to kneel.

At last, Fogarty found himself waiting for a response that did not come. He looked round quickly. The old man had fallen silently forward on to the altar steps. His arm was twisted beneath him and his head was turned sideways. His jaw had fallen, and his eyes were sightless.

‘John!' Fogarty called, in a voice that rang through the church. ‘Can you hear me? John!'

There was no reply, and the curate placed him on his back, with one of the altar cushions beneath his head. Fogarty felt under the surplice for his buttons and unloosed them. He felt for the heart. It had stopped; there was no trace of breathing. Through the big window at the west end he saw the churchyard trees and the sea beyond them bright in the morning light. The whole church seemed terribly still, so that the mere ticking of the clock filled it with its triumphant mocking of the machine of flesh and blood that had fallen silent.

Fogarty went quickly to the sacristy and returned with the sacred oils to anoint the teacher. He knew he had only to cross the road for help, to have the old man's body removed and get an acolyte to finish the Mass, but he wanted no help. He felt strangely light-headed. Instead, when he had done, he returned to the altar and resumed the Mass where he had left off, murmuring the responses to himself. As he did so, he realised that he was acutely aware of every detail, of every sound, he had no feeling that he was lacking in concentration. When he turned to face the body of the church and said ‘Dominus vobiscum', he saw as if for the first time the prostrate form with its fallen jaw and weary eyes, under the light that came in from the sea through the trees in their first leaf, and murmured ‘Et cum spiritu tuo' for the man whose spirit had flown. Then, when he had said the prayers after Mass beside the body, he took his biretta, donned it, and walked by the body, carrying his chalice, and feeling as he walked that some figure was walking before him, slowly, saying goobye. In his excited mind echoed the rubric: ‘Then, having adored and thanked God for everything, he goes away.'

T
HE
W
REATH

W
HEN FATHER FOGARTY 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 the rest, 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 had been a schoolmaster and Fogarty's mother had kept a shop. Even then, everybody had known that Devine was marked out by nature for the priesthood. He was clever, docile and beautifully mannered. Fogarty's vocation had come later and proved a surprise, to himself as well as to others.

They had been friends over the years, affectionate when together, critical and sarcastic when apart. They had not seen one another for close on a year. Devine had been unlucky. As long as the old Bishop, Gallogly, lived, he had been fairly well sheltered, but Lanigan, the new one, disliked him. It was partly Devine's own fault. He could not keep his mouth shut. He was witty and waspish and said whatever came into his head about colleagues who had nothing like his gifts. Fogarty remembered the things Devine had said about himself. Devine had affected to believe that Fogarty was a man of many personalities, and asked with mock humility which 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 that never took place; and now the warm and genuine love for Devine which was so natural to Fogarty welled up in him, and, realising 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. When he was in high spirits he devised practical jokes of the utmost crudity; when he was depressed he brooded for days on imaginary injuries: 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 when that of cleverer men had dried up, and that he was a better and wiser man at forty than he had been twenty years before.