The Collar (7 page)

‘Remember the sentry last night?' he asked expressionlessly.

‘Yes, father,' she said nervously. ‘What about him?'

‘He's after being arrested.'

‘Oh!' she said, and then, after a long pause: ‘For what, father?'

‘Stealing my onions and being absent from duty. I had an officer here, making inquiries. It seems he might be shot.'

‘Oh,' she gasped. ‘Isn't that awful?'

‘'Tis bad.'

‘Oh!' she cried. ‘Isn't that the English all out? The rich can do what they like, but a poor man can be shot for stealing a few onions! I suppose it never crossed their minds that he might be hungry. What did you say?'

‘Nothing.'

‘You did right, I'd have told them a pack of lies.'

‘I did,' said Father Michael.

‘Oh!' she cried. ‘I don't believe for an instant that 'tis a sin, father. I don't care what anybody says. I'm sure 'tis an act of charity.'

‘That's what I thought too,' he said, ‘but it didn't go down too well. I liked the officer, though. I'll be seeing him again and I might be able to get round him. The English are very good like that, when they know you.'

‘I'll start a novena at once,' she said firmly.

T
HE
O
LD
F
AITH

I
T WAS A GREAT DAY WHEN
, on the occasion of the Pattern at Kilmulpeter, Mass was said in the ruined cathedral and the old Bishop, Dr Gallogly, preached. It was Father Devine, who was a bit of an antiquarian, who looked up the details of the life of St Mulpeter for him. There were a lot of these, mostly contradictory and all queer. It seemed that, like most of the saints of that remote period, St Mulpeter had put to sea on a flagstone and floated ashore in Cornwall. There, the seven harpers of the King had just been put to death through the curses of the Druids and the machinations of the King's bad wife. St Mulpeter miraculously brought them all back to life, and, through the great mercy of God, they were permitted to sing a song about the Queen's behaviour, which resulted in St Mulpeter's turning her into a pillarstone and converting the King to the one true faith.

The Bishop had once been Professor of Dogmatic Theology in a seminary; a subject that came quite naturally to him, for he was a man who would have dogmatised in any station of life. He was a tall, powerfully built, handsome old man with a face that was both long and broad, with high cheekbones that gave the lower half of his face an air of unnatural immobility but drew attention to the fine blue, anxious eyes that moved slowly and never far. He was a quiet man who generally spoke in a low voice, but with the emphasising effect of a pile-driver.

For a dogmatic theologian, he showed great restraint on reading Father Devine's digest of the saint's life. He raised his brows a few times and then read it again with an air of resignation. ‘I suppose that's what you'd call allegorical, father,' he said gravely.

He was a man who rarely showed signs of emotion. He seemed to be quite unaffected by the scene in the ruined cathedral, though it deeply impressed Father Devine, with the crowds of country people kneeling on the wet grass among the tottering crosses and headstones, the wild countryside framed in the mullioned windows, and the big, deeply moulded clouds drifting overhead. The Bishop disposed neatly of the patron by saying that though we couldn't all go to sea on flagstones, a feat that required great faith in anyone who attempted it, we could all have the family Rosary at night.

After Mass, Father Devine was showing the Bishop and some of the other clergy round the ruins, pointing out features of archaeological interest, when a couple of men who had been hiding in the remains of a twelfth-century chapel bolted. One of them stood on a low wall, looking down on the little group of priests with a scared expression. At once the Bishop raised his umbrella and pointed it accusingly at him.

‘Father Devine,' he said in a commanding tone, ‘see what that fellow has.'

‘I have nothing, Your Eminence,' wailed the man on the wall.'

‘You have a bottle behind your back,' said the Bishop grimly. ‘What's in that?'

‘Nothing, Your Eminence, only a drop of water from the Holy Well.'

‘Give it here to me till I see,' ordered the Bishop, and when Father Devine passed him the bottle he removed the cork and sniffed.

‘Hah!' he said with great satisfaction. ‘I'd like to see the Holy Well that came out of. Is it any use my preaching about poteen year in year out when ye never pay any attention to me?'

‘'Tis a cold, windy quarter, Your Eminence,' said the man, ‘and I have the rheumatics bad.'

‘I'd sooner have rheumatics than cirrhosis,' said the Bishop. ‘Bring it with you, father,' he added to Devine, and stalked on with his umbrella pressed against his spine.

The same night they all had dinner in the palace: Father Whelan, a dim-witted, good-natured old parish priest; his fiery Republican curate, Father Fogarty, who was responsible for the Mass in the ruined cathedral as he was for most other manifestations of life in that wild part, and Canon Lanigan. The Bishop and the Canon never got on, partly because the Canon was an obvious choice for the Bishop's job and he and his supporters were giving it out that the Bishop was getting old and needed a coadjutor, but mainly because he gave himself so many airs. He was tall and thin, with a punchinello chin and a long nose, and let on to be an authority on Church history and on food and wine. That last was enough to damn anyone in the Bishop's eyes, for he maintained almost
ex cathedra
that the best food and wine in the world were to be had on the restaurant car from Holyhead to Euston. The moment Lanigan got on to his favourite topic and mentioned Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the Bishop turned to Father Devine.

‘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 sideglance 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 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, realising 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 Khayyam,' 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 yean 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 countrywoman. 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.'