Such Is My Beloved (15 page)

 

TWENTY-THREE

T
hat Easter was a fine clear sunlit day, the warmest day of the year, when the crowds poured into church wearing their new garments, and the altars were decked with fresh lilies and green stuff, and the great choir tried to sing better than ever before. As he made his preparations for mass Father Dowling suddenly wondered if it could be that the bodies of Midge and Ronnie were being destroyed as the bread and wine in the mass would be destroyed, so that God could enter in in the mystery of transubstantiation. “The death of Christ, the life of souls,” he thought, and was full of hope as he passed through to the altar. In his gold and white vestments, Father Dowling looked very handsome saying mass, for the altar lights gleamed on his black hair and the two little boys serving mass for him and holding the edges of his cape made him look taller than ever.

After mass he went down to the church door, but he stood almost out of sight of people as if he feared that already they were talking about him. He was standing where he could see at least the crowd streaming out to the sidewalk, and where he could look with great eagerness at the bright faces of young
girls, the fresh smooth young faces full of contentment, all the girls wearing their new Easter clothes in so many vivid colors. They all looked beautiful to him. But by the time the last few stragglers had reached the door and were looking up lazily at the intensely blue sky and the strong sunlight, Father Dowling had become very grave. He was thinking that to-day, as on every Easter Sunday, there was a kind of freshening and quickening in the parish girls because it was the most joyful season of the year, but with Midge and Ronnie, even though they did not realize it, it was still the hard dark time of the Good Friday passion.

At the noonday meal he wanted very much to have lively conversation and some laughter, so he started a conversation with Father Jolly about the increasing number of mixed marriages in the parish. He gave it as his opinion that a Catholic girl, marrying a Protestant, often succeeded in bringing him into the Church. But he was interrupted by the old priest saying, “I think you have the wrong attitude altogether to these matters. I think you ought to get straightened out on them.” There was Father Anglin, old and irritable, and growing more untidy every day, fifty years in the priesthood, with his face heavy and pink and his eyes clear and stern from fifty years of unrelenting acceptance of authority, implying by his tone his sharp disapproval and his awareness of the discipline for the young priest that the Bishop was planning. His dreadful uncomprehending primness was overawing; like many another severe old priest, he felt a little like a pope and was ready to excommunicate in his own militant mind all who disagreed with him.

Father Dowling resented the harsh criticism that was in the old priest's eyes, but he said nothing; he remained silent with his head lowered. He knew that from now on every small
disagreement he had ever had with the old priest would be intensified and that from now on they would probably watch him, too. They would ponder over everything he said. They would watch him at night and in the daytime, too, as they did a priest whose conduct had been questioned. Already even, he believed that many people knew in the parish that he was to be sent away, for he realized how rapidly stories about priests spread in a parish. Father Jolly had an aunt living in the neighborhood; she would receive just the faintest intimation from her nephew that Father Dowling was in trouble; for days she would try desperately not to mention the matter to anybody and finally would whisper it to a dear friend and then plead that it be told to no one else.

A sharp awareness of all these things was in Father Dowling as he sat silent with his head lowered at the dinner table and heard the old priest talking to Father Jolly. But since he had decided that his love for the girls was good, he did not care what they said about him. “I only wish I had more love to give them. I dare not look for them,” he thought. He began to think of his love as a steady prayer that would grow more fervent from day to day, and at one moment, when he raised his head from the table, he looked so eager, and at another time, so worried, that the priests stopped talking and stared at him.

That evening he had a letter to write home to his mother, a very difficult letter that he had been avoiding the last two days. He sat in his room and pondered and wrote, “You would not believe how busy I have been and how few moments I have had to myself. Father Jolly is being moved out of town. It is a great disappointment that I will not be home at all during Easter week but I will be thinking of you steadily.” It was not a good letter, but he wanted to conceal any intimation of his
own uneasiness, and it was written three times. “She's a very shrewd woman. She'll start having her own thoughts. Sooner or later she'll hear something,” he thought, and he began to dread hearing from his mother and his brother.

He sat at his desk with his head in his hands, worrying, thinking of his brother meeting him at the station, remembering the Sunday turkey dinner they had and the bottle of wine and the neighbors who came in and sometimes brought gifts, remembering the way the sunlight shone on the slopes of the blue hills; and then without feeling any other flow in his thoughts, he began to see the face of Midge and sometimes the face of Ronnie, and he began to feel that even by this time their faces would be more hardened and vicious. So again he wanted his love to be like a prayer. He remembered the night he had prepared his sermon out of the Song of Solomon, and he got up and looked for the book and began to read the Song again. He read with his face beginning to glow; he seemed to understand more deeply every passionate avowal of love. “We have a little sister with no breasts, what shall we do for our little sister?” he read, and he smiled. “At night on my bed I sought her whom my soul loveth…” It seemed to Father Dowling as he sat at his desk with the city noises of that spring night coming through the window that he understood this love song as it had never been understood before, that each verse had a special, fresh, new meaning for him. “I'll write a commentary on it verse by verse and show how human love may transcend all earthly things,” he thought, and this resolution gave him joy and a kind of liberation from the small room. He began to plan his commentary, tapping, tapping very lightly with the pen handle on the desk and sometimes nodding his head. He heard the noises from people moving in the house, but these sounds now did not interest him at all.

 

TWENTY-FOUR

D
uring those days when Father Dowling was waiting for the discipline the Bishop had promised, he made no calls among his people. It was not necessary to watch him in the evenings because he did not go out any more. It was not necessary for Father Jolly to shake his little dark head and try and appear good-natured and tolerant in spite of the rumor of scandal and disgrace, for he now had few opportunities for conversation with Father Dowling. It was hard even for Father Anglin to show his disgust and scorn, for Father Dowling avoided him and kept to his room.

Early one evening Charlie Stewart came to see Father Dowling. Night after night he had thought about the two girls, he had wondered how he could help Father Dowling to find them and he had waited to hear from the priest. On this evening when he came to the house, he was full of enthusiasm and ready to spin a fine new social theory and defend it warmly.

The little smiling housekeeper showed him into the waiting-room, a plain room with bad gaudy religious pictures, drab walls and dun-colored curtains. “I wonder why they hate bright colors here,” he thought. “Father Dowling said once he
would like to wear a bright habit rather than the black he wears. Why do they wear black? I'll bet he hates this room.” He waited and the housekeeper returned, still smiling, and she asked him if he would go up to Father Dowling's room. With relief, he followed her, for he had been thinking he might have to sit and talk in the bleak old room where he would feel it was necessary to whisper and guard his words carefully. To-night he felt like speaking with passion. The housekeeper said to him at the top of the stairs, “Father has kept to his room too much lately. You ought to take him for a walk,” and then she rapped on the door and Charlie went in.

Father Dowling was sitting at his desk in such a way that there was a stillness in his whole body and a stillness in his face. He looked up at Charlie Stewart and he frowned two or three times, and then he sighed and got up and shook hands. But no matter how he tried to smile cheerfully, the curious stillness remained in his face. “Sit down, Charlie. Wait a minute, I'll get you a cigar.” He walked over to a shelf and took down a box of cigars. “An Easter gift from one of my parishioners,” he said. “We get many little gifts of this kind, thank the Lord. Maybe I shouldn't ask you to be thankful till you've tried the cigar.”

They both began to smoke. Charlie nodded his head. “Not bad at all,” he said. Father Dowling nodded approval too and blew a cloud of smoke.

“I've been thinking how we talked that night, you remember, when we walked down to that hotel?” Charlie said. “It was one of the best talks we ever had and we've had some fine talks. I've been wondering what might be done about you getting in touch with those girls. I imagine you'd at least like to try, wouldn't you? I was figuring…”

“No, Charlie, I don't think it can be done. There's no use wasting your time, Charlie.”

“Of course it can be done, Father.”

“I'm afraid I wouldn't be able to use any information you secured. I may be going away for a time,” Father Dowling said. He spoke mildly and patiently, but he was plainly worried. He said nothing else. His expression changed slightly till it became an expression of detached sadness. As he went on talking, Charlie was thankful that Father Dowling was listening so intently, although he wished once, when he paused, that the priest was a little more responsive. Father Dowling might just as well not have been in the room at all. Charlie went on talking and then he stopped suddenly and asked, “Aren't you interested, Father?”

Father Dowling might not have heard him, for he didn't turn his head. Charlie said again, “Don't you hear me, Father?” Looking up vaguely, the priest nodded his head and smiled. That detached, depressed, heavy stillness was dulling his eyes.

“Don't you feel well, Father?”

Father Dowling looked up at Charlie as if he had never seen him before. Charlie was scared and he got up to go and he said, “Maybe I'd better see you some other time, Father.”

 

TWENTY-FIVE

I
nstead of sending Father Dowling away for discipline, they took him to the hospital out by the lake. There he had a small white room with a bed and a window that looked out over a wide lawn with new green spring grass, the low red-brick buildings and beyond the buildings and the fields, the great blue lake.

When he first came to the hospital the doctors looked at his teeth and his tonsils and were of the opinion that some local infection was the cause of his malady. But they could find nothing wrong with him, and there he was, depressed, slow-moving and ever unanswering. Sometimes he stood looking at the sunlight on the water, or he would go down to the front steps of the main building and sit down by himself not far from the rest of the patients who were enjoying the fine clear weather. They used to sit there together in the sunlight in the middle of the afternoon as if it was a great garden party to which they had all been invited; they used to move around in the rotunda, bowing to each other and talking charmingly. There was one old woman who wore ancient, long flowing dresses, an old, wide velvet hat and a neat little black jacket.
She imagined she was hostess at the garden party for all these people and she kept placing her withered hand lightly on their arms, begging them not to be impatient, for soon tea would be served. Father Dowling puzzled this woman because he sat by himself on the step, his eyes wandered over the grass, he never smiled, and he merely looked up patiently when this woman spoke to him as if he would never be able to understand her. So she apologized to him for the strong sunlight; she had asked the management, she said, to provide umbrellas in many beautiful colors, and she expected them to come at any moment.

There was no wall around the hospital; there were no strait jackets, chains, wristlets, anklets or other implements of restraint. There was only the one building for dangerous patients. Father Dowling was free except that he was held there by an absolute stillness within him. Sometimes he was aroused a little by the blue lake and he watched it when the wind was blowing, the sun glistening on the whitecaps and the waves rolling, endlessly rolling and breaking with the old dull sound on the shore.

In the afternoon when the good patients were on the steps and the ones who were getting well were out hoeing in the garden, there appeared at the window of the brick building on the other side of the lawn the frozen face of a gray mad woman who began to explain patiently in a quavering tone the time of her marriage and the country where she had come from and the city where she had lived, and her voice kept rising as she screamed out the violence she was planning. Her wild voice kept ringing over the lawns. No one on the steps seemed to hear her. Father Dowling walked over by the new ploughed land and he looked a long time at the rich brown fertile soil, heavy and dark and moist, and he looked at the
men in the big straw hats, working in the fields, and never raising their heads.

There were a few times when Father Dowling had a normal clarity in his thoughts. The first time came one afternoon, four days after he had come there. He was walking around the grounds when he suddenly realized that his thoughts were dreadfully clear. He walked all over, he talked to the men working in the garden, he spoke to some of the white-jacketed orderlies, he saw for the first time the face of the wretched gray-haired woman, he stood at the furthest extremity of the grounds looking out over the clear lake which was so very blue and calm to-day. “I'm out here because most of the time I'm out of my mind,” he thought. “God help me and make me well.” And he sat down by himself on the grass and wept.

But when he returned to the pavilion, to the smiling women and polite gentlemen, he talked to them for a long time with compassion till they walked away and left him. Later, after he had eaten, he went to his own small room. It had begun to get dark out. He was still grasping eagerly at his swift thoughts as if they were fresh and new and he could caress them. But then he began to weep again, and soon he began to pray.

He realized that he was mad from worrying about Ronnie and Midge, but his worry and love for them now seemed stronger than ever before. “It must all be to some purpose,” he thought. “It must be worth while, even my madness. It has some meaning, some end.” And in that quiet room, he wondered where the two girls were and what had become of them; they were among the living, they were moving among those who slowly passed before him, all those restless souls the world over who were struggling and dying and finding no
peace; he thought with sudden joy that if he would offer up his insanity as a sacrifice to God, maybe God might spare the girls their souls.

He knelt down in the twilight of the room, with his head just above the window ledge, with his face turned to the lake, and he said fervently, “O my God, accept my sickness and insanity as a sacrifice and I will willingly endure it, and my God, for this sacrifice I ask only that You spare the souls of those two poor girls. Preserve their souls and the souls of all the living who need Your pity and justice. Deliver them from all evil.” His hands were clenching the window sill and he remained silent for a long time.

Then he got up and stood looking out over the lake. The water was darkening now. There was a cold light on the water. There were no wave lines, no break, only the soft rise and enormous flow toward him. Growing calmer, he said, “I'm content now. I may have many periods of clarity,” and then he thought eagerly, “I can go on with my commentary on the Song of Songs.”

There was a peace within him as he watched the calm, eternal water swelling darkly against the one faint streak of light, the cold night light on the skyline. High in the sky three stars were out. His love seemed suddenly to be as steadfast as those stars, as wide as the water, and still flowing within him like the cold smooth waves still rolling on the shore.