The Collar (8 page)

‘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 a 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 his 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.

‘I must be gone wrong, father,' he said anxiously. ‘I don't know what happened me tonight. I can usually do this easy enough. We'll go over the wall and up the wood.'

‘I can't,' shouted Father Fogarty in a paroxysm of chuckles.

‘Nonsense, man!' the Bishop said sternly, holding on to a bush and looking down at him from the top of the wall. ‘Why can't you?'

‘The fairies have me,' roared Father Fogarty.

‘Pull yourself together, father,' the Bishop said sternly. ‘You don't want to be making an exhibition of yourself.'

Next moment Father Fogarty was lying flat at the foot of the wall, roaring with laughter. Father Devine shouted to the Bishop, but he slid obstinately down at the other side of the wall. ‘The ould divil!' Paddy exclaimed admiringly. ‘That's more than we'll be able to do at his age, father.'

A few minutes later they found him flat under a tree in the starlight, quite powerless, but full of wisdom, resignation, and peace. They lifted him on a bench, where he reclined like the effigy on a tomb, his hands crossed meekly on his breast, and carried him back to bed.

‘Since that evening,' Father Devine used to say in the waspish way the Bishop so much disliked, ‘I feel there's nothing I don't know about fairies. I also have some idea about the sort of man who wrote the life of St Mulpeter of Moyle.'

T
HE
M
IRACLE

V
ANITY, ACCORDING TO THE BISHOP
, was the Canon's great weakness, and there might be some truth in that. He was a tall, good-looking man, with a big chin, and a manner of deceptive humility. He deplored the fact that so many of the young priests came of poor homes where good manners weren't taught, and looked back regretfully to the old days when, according to him, every Irish priest read his Virgil. He went in a lot for being an authority on food and wine, and ground and brewed his own coffee. He refused to live in the ramshackle old presbytery which had served generations of priests, and had built for himself a residence that was second only to the Bishop's palace and that was furnished with considerably more taste and expense. His first innovation in the parish had been to alter the dues which, all over the Christian world, are paid at Christmas and Easter and have them paid four times a year instead. He said that this was because poor people couldn't afford large sums twice a year, and that-it was easier for them to pay their dues like that; but in fact it was because he thought the dues that had been fixed were far too low to correspond in any way with the dignity of his office. When he was building his house he had them collected five times during the year, and as well as that, threw in a few raffles and public subscriptions. He disliked getting into debt. And there he ate his delicate meals with the right wines, brewed coffee and drank green chartreuse, and occasionally dipped into ecclesiastical history. He like to read about days when the clergy were really well off.

It was distasteful to the Canon the way the lower classes were creeping into the Church and gaining high office in it, but it was a real heartbreak that its functions and privileges were being usurped by new men and methods, and that miracles were now being performed out of bottles and syringes. He thought that a very undignified way of performing miracles himself, and it was a real bewilderment of spirit to him when some new drug was invented to make the medicine men more indispensable than they were at present. He would have liked surgeons to remain tradesmen and barbers as they were in the good old days, and, though he would have been astonished to hear it himself, was as jealous as a prima donna at the interference of Bobby Healy, the doctor, with his flock. He would have liked to be able to do it all himself, and sometimes thought regretfully that it was a peculiar dispensation of Providence that when the Church was most menaced, it couldn't draw upon some of its old grace and perform occasional miracles. The Canon knew he would have performed a miracle with a real air. He had the figure for it.

There was certainly some truth in the Bishop's criticism. The Canon hated competition, he liked young Dr Devaney, who affected to believe that medicine was all hocus-pocus (which was what the Canon believed himself), and took a grave view of Bobby Healy, which caused Bobby's practice to go down quite a bit. When the Canon visited a dying man he took care to ask: ‘Who have you?' If he was told ‘Dr Devaney', he said: ‘A good young man', but if it was ‘Dr Healy' he merely nodded and looked grave, and everyone understood that Bobby had killed the unfortunate patient as usual. Whenever the two men met, the Canon was courteous and condescending, Bobby was respectful and obliging, and nobody could ever have told from the doctor's face whether or not he knew what was going on. But there was very little which Bobby didn't know. There is a certain sort of guile that goes deeper than any cleric's: the peasant's guile. Dr Healy had that.

But there was one person in his parish whom the Canon disliked even more than he disliked the doctor. That was a man called Bill Enright. Nominally, Bill was a farmer and breeder of greyhounds; really, he was the last of a family of bandits who had terrorised the countryside for generations. He was a tall, gaunt man with fair hair and a tiny, gold moustache; perfectly rosy skin, like a baby's, and a pair of bright blue eyes which seemed to expand into a wide unwinking, animal glare. His cheekbones were so high that they gave the impression of cutting his skin. They also gave his eyes an Oriental slant, and, with its low, sharp-sloping forehead, his whole face seemed to point outward to the sharp tip of his nose and then retreat again in a pair of high teeth, very sharp and very white, a drooping lower lip, and a small, weak, feminine chin.

Now, Bill, as he would be the first to tell you, was not a bad man. He was a traditionalist who did as his father and grandfather had done before him. He had gone to Mass and the Sacraments and even paid his dues four times a year, which was not traditional, and been prepared to treat the Canon as a bandit of similar dignity to himself. But the Canon had merely been incensed at the offer of parity with Bill and set out to demonstrate that the last of the Enrights was a common ruffian who should be sent to jail. Bill was notoriously living in sin with his housekeeper, Nellie Mahony from Doonamon, and the Canon ordered her to leave the house. When he failed in this he went to her brothers and demanded that they should drag her home, but her brothers had had too much experience of the Enrights to try such a risky experiment with them, and Nellie remained on, while Bill, declaring loudly that there was nothing in religion, ceased going to Mass. People agreed that it wasn't altogether Bill's fault, and that the Canon could not brook another authority than his own – a hasty man!

To Bobby Healy, on the other hand, Bill Enright was bound by the strongest tie that could bind an Enright, for the doctor had once cured a greyhound for him, the mother of King Kong. Four or five times a year he was summoned to treat Bill for an overdose of whiskey; Bill owed him as much money as it was fitting to owe to a friend, and all Bill's friends knew that when they were in trouble themselves, it would be better for them to avoid further trouble by having Dr Healy as well. Whatever the Canon might think, Bill was a man it paid to stand in well with.

One spring day Bobby got one of his usual summonses to the presence. Bill lived in a fine Georgian house a mile outside the town. It had once belonged to the Rowes, but Bill had got them out of it by the simple expedient of making their lives a hell for them. The avenue was overgrown, and the house with its fine Ionic portico looked dirty and dilapidated. Two dogs got up and barked at him in a neighbourly way. They hated it when Bill was sick, and they knew Bobby had the knack of putting him on his feet again.

Nellie Mahony opened the door. She was a small, fat, country girl with a rosy complexion and a mass of jet-black hair that shone almost as brilliantly as her eyes. The doctor, who was sometimes seized with these fits of amiable idiocy, took her by the waist, and she gave a shriek of laughter that broke off suddenly.