SONG WITHOUT WORDS Even if there were only two men left in the world and both of them to be saints, they wouldn’t be happy even then. One of them would be bound to try and improve the other. That is the nature of things. There were two men one time in the big monastery near our place called Brother Arnold and Brother Michael. In private life Brother Arnold was a postman, but as he had a great name as a cattle doctor they put him in charge of the monastery cows. He had the sort of face you’d expect to see advertising somebody’s tobacco; a big, innocent, good-humoured face with a pair of blue eyes that always had a twinkle in them. Of course, by the rule he was supposed to look sedate and go round in a composed and measured way, but wherever Brother Arnold went his eyes went along with him, to see what devilment would he see on the way, and the eyes would give a twinkle and the hands would slip out of the long white sleeves and he’d be beckoning and doing sign talk on his fingers till further orders. Now, one day it happened that he was looking for a bottle of castor oil and he suddenly remembered that he’d lent it to Brother Michael in the stables. Brother Michael was a fellow he didn’t get on too well with at all; a dour, silent sort of man that kept himself to himself. He was a man of no great appearance, with a mournful, wizened little face and a pair of weak, red-rimmed eyes—for all the world the sort of man that, if you shaved off his beard, clapped a bowler hat on his head and a fag in his mouth, wouldn’t need any other reference to get a job in a stables. There wasn’t any sign of him around the stable yard, but that was only natural because he wouldn’t be wanted till the other monks came back from the fields, so Brother Arnold banged in the stable door and went to look for the bottle himself. He didn’t see the bottle but he saw something else he’d rather not have seen, and that was Brother Michael, hiding in one of the horse-boxes. He was standing against the partition, hoping he wouldn’t be noticed, with something hidden behind his back and the look of a little boy that’s just been caught at the jam. Something told Brother Arnold he was the most unwelcome man in the world at that minute. He got red and waved his hand by way of showing that he hadn’t seen anything and that if he had it was none of his business, and away with him out and back to his own quarters. It came as a bit of a shock to him. You could see plain enough that the other man was up to something nasty and you could hardly help wondering what it was. It was funny; he always noticed the same thing when he was in the world; it was the quiet, sneaky fellows that were always up to mischief. In chapel he looked at Brother Michael and he got the impression that Brother Michael was also looking at him; a sneaky sort of look to make sure he wouldn’t be spotted. Next day again when they met in the yard he caught Brother Michael looking at him, and he gave him back a cold look and nod as much as to say he had him taped. The day after Brother Michael beckoned him to come over to the stable for a minute, as if there was one of the horses sick. Brother Arnold knew well it wasn’t one of the horses, but he went all the same. He was curious to know what explanation he would be offered. Brother Michael closed the door carefully after him and then leaned back against the jamb of the door with his legs crossed and his hands behind his back, a real foxy look. Then he nodded in the direction of the horse-box as much as to say “Remember the day you saw me in there?” Brother Arnold nodded. He wasn’t likely to forget it. So then Brother Michael put his hand up his sleeve and held out a folded newspaper. Brother Arnold grinned as much as to say “Are you letting on now that that was all you were up to, reading a paper?” but the other man pressed it into his hands. He opened it without any great curiosity, thinking it might be some local paper the man got for the news from home. He glanced at the name of it, and then a light broke on him. His whole face lit up as if you’d switched an electric torch on behind, and at last he burst out laughing. He couldn’t help himself. Brother Michael didn’t laugh, but he gave a dry little cackle which was as near as he ever got to a laugh. The name of the paper was _The Irish Racing News_. Brother Michael pointed to a heading about the Curragh and then pointed at himself. Brother Arnold shook his head and gave him another look as if he was waiting for another good laugh out of him. Brother Michael scratched his head for something to show what he meant. He was never much good at the sign language. Then he picked up the sweeping brush and straddled it. He pulled up his skirts; he stretched his left hand out, holding the handle of the brush and began flogging the air behind him, with a grim look on his leathery little puss. And then Brother Arnold nodded and nodded and put up his thumbs to show he understood. He saw now that the reason Brother Michael behaved so queerly was because he read racing papers on the sly, and he read racing papers on the sly because in private life he was a jockey on the Curragh. He was still laughing away like mad with his blue eyes dancing, and then he remembered all the things he thought about Brother Michael and bowed his head and beat his breast by way of asking pardon. After that he took another look at the paper. A mischievous twinkle came into his eyes and he pointed the paper at himself. Brother Michael pointed back at him, a bit puzzled. Brother Arnold chuckled and nodded and stuffed the paper up his own sleeve. Then Brother Michael winked and gave the thumbs-up sign, and in that slow cautious way of his he went down the stable and reached up to the top of the wall where the stable roof sloped down. That was his hiding hole. He took down several more and gave them to Brother Arnold. For the rest of the day Brother Arnold was in the best of humour. He winked and smiled at everyone round the farm till they were all wondering what the joke was. All that evening and long after he went to his cubicle, he rubbed his hands and giggled with delight every time he thought of it; it gave him a warm, mellow feeling as if his heart had expanded to embrace all humanity. It wasn’t till next morning that he had a chance of looking at the papers himself. He took them out and spread them on a rough desk under a feeble electric-light bulb high up in the roof. It was four years since last he’d seen a paper of any sort, and then it was only a bit of a local newspaper that one of the carters had brought wrapped about a bit of bread and butter. Brother Arnold had palmed it as neatly as any conjure; hidden it away in his desk and studied it as if it was a bit of a lost Greek play. There was nothing on it but a bit of a County Council wrangle about the appointment of seven warble-fly inspectors, but by the time he was finished with it he knew it by heart. So he didn’t just glance at the papers the way a man would in the train to pass the time. He nearly ate them. Blessed bits of words like fragments of tunes coming to him out of a past life; paddocks and point-to-points and two-year-olds; and there he was in the middle of a race-course crowd on a spring day, with silver streamers of light floating down the sky like heavenly bunting. He was a handsome fellow in those days. He had only to close his eyes and he could see the refreshment tent again, with the golden light leaking like spilt honey through the rents in the canvas, and there was the little girl he used to be sparking, sitting on an upturned lemonade box. “Ah, Paddy,” she said, “sure there’s bound to be racing in Heaven!” She was fast; too fast for Brother Arnold, who was a quiet-going sort of fellow, and he never got over the shock when he found out that she was running another fellow all the time. But now, all he could remember of her was her smile, and afterwards, whenever his eyes met Brother Michael’s he longed to give him a hearty slap on the back and say “Michael, there’s bound to be racing in Heaven,” and then a grin spread over his big sunny face, and Brother Michael, without once losing that casual, melancholy air, replied with a wall-faced flicker of the horny eyelid; a tick-tack man’s signal; a real expressionless, horsy look of complete understanding. One day Brother Michael came in and took out a couple of papers. On one of them he pointed to the horses he’d marked; on the other to the horses that came up. He didn’t show any sign of jubilation. He just winked, a leathery sort of a wink, and Brother Arnold gaped as he saw the list of winners. It filled him with wonder to think that where so many clever people lost, a simple little monk, living hundreds of miles away, could foresee it all. The more he thought of it, the more excited he got. He went to the door, reached up his long arm and took down a loose stone from the wall above it. Brother Michael nodded slowly three or four times as much as to say “Well, you’re a caution!” Brother Arnold grinned broadly. He might have been saying “That’s nothing.” Then he took down a bottle and handed it to Brother Michael. The jockey gave him one look; his face didn’t change, but he took out the cork and sniffed. Still his face never changed. Then all at once he went to the door, gave a quick glance up and a quick glance down and raised the bottle to his mouth. The beer was strong; it made him redden and cough. He cleaned the neck of the bottle with his sleeve before he gave it back. A shudder went through him and his little eyes watered as he watched Brother Arnold’s throttle moving on well-oiled hinges. The big man put the bottle back in its hiding-place and beckoned to Brother Michael that he could go there himself whenever he liked. Brother Michael shook his head but Brother Arnold nodded earnestly. His fingers moved like lightning while he explained how a farmer whose cow he had cured left a bottle in the yard for him every week. Now, Brother Michael’s success made Brother Arnold want to try his hand, and whenever Brother Michael gave him a copy of a racing paper with his own selections marked, Brother Arnold gave it back with his, and then they contented themselves as well as they could till the results turned up, three or four days late. It was a new lease of life to the little jockey, for what comfort is it to a man even if he has all the winners when there isn’t a soul in the whole world he can tell? He felt now if only he could have a bob each way on a horse, he’d never ask any more of life. Unfortunately, he hadn’t a bob. That put Brother Arnold thinking. He was a resourceful chap, and it was he who invented the dockets, valued for so many Hail Marys. The man who lost had to pay up in prayers for the other man’s intention. It was an ingenious scheme and it worked admirably. At first Brother Arnold had a run of luck. But it wasn’t for nothing that the other man had been a jockey. He was too hardy to make a fool of himself, even over a few Hail Marys, and everything he did was carefully planned. Brother Arnold began carefully enough, but the moment he struck it lucky, he began to gamble wildly. Brother Michael had often seen it happen on the Curragh, and he remembered the fate of the men it happened to. Fellows he’d known with big houses and cars were now cadging drinks on the streets of Dublin. “Aha, my lad,” he said to himself, thinking of his companion, “God was very good to you the day he called you in here where you couldn’t do harm to yourself or those belonged to you.” Which, by the way, was quite uncalled for, because in the world Brother Arnold’s only weakness was for a drop of stout, and it never did him any harm, but Brother Michael was rather given to a distrust of human nature; the sort of man who goes looking for a moral in everything, even when there’s no moral in it. He tried to make Brother Arnold take a proper interest in the scientific side of betting, but the man seemed to take it all as a great joke, a flighty sort of fellow. He bet more and more wildly, with that foolish good-natured grin on his face, and after a while Brother Michael found himself being owed the deuce of a lot of prayers. He didn’t like that either. It gave him scruples of conscience and finally turned him against betting in any shape or form. He tried to get Brother Arnold to drop it, but Brother Arnold only looked hurt and a little indignant, like a child you’ve told to stop his game. Brother Michael had that weakness on his conscience too. It suggested that he was getting too attached to Brother Arnold, as in fact he was. He had to admit it. There was something warm and friendly about the man that you couldn’t help liking. Then one day he went in to Brother Arnold and found him with a pack of cards in his hand. They were a very old pack that had more than served their time in some farmer’s house. They gave Brother Michael a turn, just to look at them. Brother Arnold made the gesture of dealing them out and Brother Michael shook his head. Brother Arnold blushed and bit his lip, but he persisted. All the doubts Brother Michael had been having for weeks turned to conviction. This was the primrose path with a vengeance; one thing leading to another. Brother Arnold grinned and shuffled the deck; Brother Michael, biding his time, cut for deal and Brother Arnold won. He dealt two hands of five and showed the five of hearts as trump. Just because he was still waiting for a sign, Brother Michael examined his own hand. His face got grimmer. It wasn’t the sort of sign he had been expecting, but it was a sign all the same: four hearts all in a bunch; the ace, the jack, two other trumps and the three of spades. All he had to do was surrender the spade and pick up the five of trumps, and there he was with an unbeatable hand. Was that luck? Was that coincidence, or was it the Old Boy himself, taking a hand and trying to draw him deeper down into the mud? He liked to find the moral in things, and the moral in this was as plain as a pikestaff though it went to his heart to admit it. He was a lonesome, melancholy little man and the horses had meant a lot to him in his bad spells. At times it seemed as if they were the only thing that kept him from going clean dotty. How was he going to face maybe twenty or thirty years more of life, never knowing what horses were running or what jocks were up—Derby Day, Punchestown, Leopardstown and the Curragh, all going by and he knowing no more of them than if he was dead? “O Lord,” he thought bitterly, “a fellow gives up the whole world for You, his chance of a wife and kids, his home and his family, his friends and his job, and goes off to a bare mountain where he can’t even tell his troubles to the man alongside him; and still he keeps something back. One little thing to remind him of what he gave up. With me ’twas the horses and with this man ’twas the sup of beer, and I daresay there’s fellows inside that have a bit of a girl’s hair hidden somewhere they can go and look at it now and again. I suppose we all have our little hiding hole, if the truth was known, but as small as it is, the whole world is in it, and bit by bit it grows on us again till the day You find us out.” Brother Arnold was waiting for him to play. He gave a great sigh and put his hand on the desk. Brother Arnold looked at it and then looked at him. Brother Michael idly took away the spade and added the heart, and still Brother Arnold couldn’t see. Then Brother Michael shook his head and pointed down through the floor. Brother Arnold bit his lip again as though he were on the point of crying, threw down his own hand and walked away to the other end of the cow-house. Brother Michael left him so for a few moments. He could see the struggle that was going on in the man; he could almost hear the Old Boy whispering in his ear that he, Brother Michael, was only an old woman (Brother Michael had heard that before); that life was long and that a man might as well be dead and buried as not have some little thing to give him an innocent bit of amusement—the sort of plausible whisper that put many a man on the gridiron. He knew that however hard it was now, Brother Arnold would be thankful to him in the next world. “Brother Michael,” he’d say, “I don’t know what I’d ever have done without the example you gave me.” Then Brother Michael went up and touched him gently on the shoulder. He pointed to the bottle, the racing paper and the cards in turn. Brother Arnold heaved a terrible sigh but he nodded. They gathered them up between them, the cards and the bottle and the papers, hid them under their habits to avoid all occasion of scandal and went off to confess their crimes to the Prior.