LOST FATHERLANDS

One spring day, Father Felix in the monastery sent word down to Spike
Ward, the motor-driver, to pick up a gentleman for the four-fifteen
train. Spike had no notion of who the gentleman was. All sorts came
and went to that lonesome monastery up the mountain: people on
pilgrimage, drunks going in for a cure, cures coming out for a drunk,
men joining the novitiate, and others leaving it, some of them within
twenty-four hours—they just took one good look at the place and
bolted. One of the novices stole a suit of overalls left behind by a
house painter and vanished across the mountain. As Spike often said,
if it was him he wouldn’t have waited to steal the overalls.

It lay across the mountainside, a gaunt, Victorian barracks.  Spike
drove up to the guesthouse, which stood away in by the end of the
chapel. Father Felix, the Guestmaster, was waiting on the steps with
the passenger—a tall, well-built, middle-aged man with greying
hair. Father Felix himself inclined to fat; he wore big, shiny
glasses, and his beard cascaded over his chest. Spike and the
passenger loaded the trunk and bag, and Spike noticed that they were
labelled for Canada. The liner was due at Cobh two days later.

‘Goodbye now,’ Father Felix said, shaking the passenger’s hand. ‘And
mind and don’t lead Spike into bad ways on me. He’s a fellow I have my
eye on this long time. When are you coming up to us for good, Spike?’
he asked gravely.

‘When ye take a few women into the order, Father,’ Spike replied in
his thin drawl. ‘What this place needs is a woman’s hand.’

The passenger sat in front with Spike, and they chatted as they drove
down the hill, glancing back at the monks working in the fields behind
the monastery. You should see them from a long way off, like magpies.

‘Was it on a holiday you were?’ asked Spike, not meaning to be
inquisitive, only to make conversation.

‘A long holiday,’ said the passenger, with a nod and a smile.

‘Ah, well, everyone to his taste,’ Spike said tolerantly. ‘I suppose a
lot depends on what you’re used to. I prefer a bit of a change myself,
like Father Felix’s dipsos.’

‘He has a few of them up there now,’ said the passenger, with a quiet
amusement that told Spike he wasn’t one of them.

‘Well, I’m sure I hope the poor souls are enjoying it, said Spike with
unction.

‘They weren’t enjoying it much at three this morning,’ said the
passenger in the same tone. ‘One of them was calling for his
mother. Father Felix was with him for over an hour, trying to calm
him.’

‘Not criticizing the good man, ’tisn’t the same thing at all,’ Spike
said joyously.

‘Except for the feeding bottle,’ said the passenger. And then, as
though he were slightly ashamed of his own straight-faced humour: ‘He
does a wonderful job on them.’

‘Well, they seem to have great faith in him,’ Spike said, without
undue credulity. ‘He gets them from England and all parts—a decent
little man.’

‘And a saintly little man,’ the passenger said, almost reproachfully.

‘I dare say,’ Spike said, without enthusiasm. ‘He’d want to be,
judging by the specimens I see.’

They reached town with about three-quarters of an hour to spare, and
put the trunk and bag in the stationmaster’s Office. Old Mick Hurley,
the stationmaster, was inside, and looked at the bags over his
glasses. Even on a warm day, in his own office, he wore his braided
frock-coat and uniform cap.

‘This is a gent from the monastery, Mick,’ said Spike.  ‘He’s
travelling by the four-fifteen. Would he have time for the pictures?’

But Spike might have known the joke would be lost on Mick, who gave a
hasty glance at the clock behind him and looked alarmed. ‘He’d hardly
have time for that,’ he said.  ‘She’s only about twenty-five minutes
late.’

‘You have over an hour to put in,’ said Spike as they left the
office. ‘You don’t want to be sitting round there the whole
time. Hanagan’s lounge is comfortable enough, if you like a drink.’

‘Will you have one with me?’ asked the passenger.

‘I don’t know will I have the time,’ Spike said. ‘I have another call
at four. I’ll have one drink with you, anyway.’

They went into the bar, which was all done up in chromium, with
concealed lighting. Tommy Hanagan, the Yank, was behind the bar
himself. He was a tall, fresh-faced, rather handsome man, with fair
hair of a dirty colour and smoke-blue eyes. His hat was perched far
back on his head. Spike often said Tommy Hanagan was the only man he
knew who could make a hat speak. He had earned the price of his
public-house working in Boston and, according to him, had never ceased
to regret his return. Tommy looked as though he lived in hopes that
some day, when he did something as it should be done, it would turn
out to be a convenience to somebody. So far, it had earned him nothing
but mockery.  and sometimes his blue eyes had a slightly bewildered
expression, as though he were wondering what he was doing in that
place at all.

Spike loved rousing him. All you had to do was give him one poke about
America and the man was off, good for an hour’s argument. America was
the finest goddam country on the face of the earth, and the people
that criticized it didn’t know what they were talking about. In
America, even the priests were friends: ‘Tommy, where the hell am I
going to get a hundred dollars?’ ‘I’ll get it for you, Father Joe.’ In
Ireland, it was ‘Mister Hanagan, don’t you consider five pounds is a
bit on the small side?’ ‘And I don’t,’ the Yank would say, pulling up
his shirtsleeves. ‘I’d sooner give a hundred dollars to a friend than
fifteen to a bastard like that.’  The same with the women. Over there,
an Irishman would say, ‘I’ll do the washing up, Mary.’ Here it was
‘Where’s that bloody tea, woman?’ And then bawling her out for it!
Not, as Spike noticed, that this ever prevented the Yank from bawling
out his own wife twenty times a day. And Spike suspected that however
he might enjoy rousing the Yank, the Yank enjoyed it more. It probably
gave the poor man the illusion of being alive.

‘What are you drinking?’ the passenger asked in his low voice.

‘Whiskey,’ said Spike. ‘I have to take whiskey every time I go up to
that monastery. It’s to restore the circulation.’

‘Beer for me, please,’ said the passenger.

‘Your circulation is easily damaged, Spike,’ said Hanagan as he turned
to the whiskey bottle.

‘If you knew as much about that place as I do, you’d be looking for
whiskey, too.’

‘Who said I don’t know about it?’ blustered Hanagan. ‘I know as much
about it as you do; maybe more.’

‘You do,’ Spike said mockingly. ‘Yourself and the kids went up there
two years ago, picking primroses. I heard about it. Ye brought the
flask and had tea up the mountain two miles away. ‘Oh, what a lovely
place the monks have!  Oh, what a wonderful life they have up here!’
Damn all you care about the poor unfortunates, getting up at half past
one of a winter’s morning and waiting till half five for a bit of
breakfast.’

The Yank sprawled across the counter, pushing his hat back a shade
farther. It was set for reasonable discussion.  ‘But what’s that, only
habit?’ he asked.

‘Habit!’

‘What else is it?’ the Yank asked appealingly. ‘I have to get up at
half past six every morning, winter and summer, and I have to worry
about a wife and kids, and education and doctors for them, and paying
income tax, which is more than the monks have to do.’

‘Give me the income tax every time!’ said Spike. ‘Even the wife!’

‘The remarkable thing about this country,’ said Hanagan, ‘is that
they’ll only get up in the morning when no one asks them to. I never
asked the monks to get up at half past one.  All I ask is that the
people in this blooming town will get up at half past eight and open
their shops by nine o’clock. And how many of them will do it?’

‘And what the hell has that to do with the argument?’  asked Spike,
not that he thought it had anything to do with it. He knew only too
well the Yank’s capacity for getting carried away on a tide of his own
eloquence.

‘Well, what after all does the argument boil down to’ retorted
Hanagan. ‘The argument is that no one in this blooming country is
respected for doing what he ought to do —only for doing what no one
ever asked him to do.’

‘Are people to sit down and wait for someone to ask them to love God?’
the passenger growled suddenly. Spike noticed that even though he
mentioned God, he looked a nasty customer to cross in a discussion.

‘I didn’t say that,’ Hanagan replied peaceably, ‘But do you know this
town?’

‘No.’

‘I do, said Hanagan. ‘I know it since I was a kid. I spent eighteen
years out of it, and for all the difference it made to the town, I
might have been out of it for a week. It’s dead.  The people are
dead. They’re no use to God or man.’

‘You didn’t answer my question.’

‘You’re talking about one sort of responsibility,’ said Hanagan.  ‘I’m
only saying there are other responsibilities. Why can’t the people
here see that they have a responsibility to the unfortunate women they
marry? Why can’t they see their responsibility to their own country?’

‘What Tommy means is that people shouldn’t be making pilgrimages to
the monastery at all,’ said Spike dryly. ‘He thinks they should be
making pilgrimages to him. He lights candles to himself every
night—all because he doesn’t beat his wife. Good luck to you now, and
don’t let him make you miss your train with his old guff.’

Spike and the passenger shook hands, and after that Spike put him out
of his head completely. Meeting strangers like that, every day of the
week, he couldn’t remember the half of them. But three evenings later
he was Waiting in the car outside the station, hoping to pick up a
fare from the four-fifteen, when Mick Hurley came flopping out to him
with his spectacles down his nose.

‘What am I going to do with them bags you left on Tuesday, Spike?’ he
asked.

What was he to do with the bags? Spike looked at him without
comprehension. ‘What bags, Mick?’

‘Them bags for Canada.’

‘Holy God!’ exclaimed Spike, getting slowly out of the car. ‘Do you
mean he forgot his bags?’

‘Forgot them? Mick Hurley repeated indignantly. ‘He never travelled at
all, man.’

‘Holy God!’ repeated Spike. ‘And the liner gone since yesterday!
That’s a nice state of affairs.’

‘Why?’ asked Mick. ‘Who was it?’

‘A man from the monastery.’

‘One of Father Felix’s drunks?’

‘What the hell would a drunk be coming from Canada for?’ asked Spike
in exasperation.

‘You’d never know,’ said Mick. ‘Where did you leave him?’

‘Over in Tommy Hanagan’s bar.’

‘Then we’d better ask Tommy.’

Hanagan came out to them in his shirtsleeves, his cuffs rolled up and
his hat well back.

‘Tommy,’ said Spike, ‘you remember that passenger I left in your place
on Tuesday?’

Tommy’s eyes narrowed. ‘The big, grey-haired bloke?’ he said. ‘What
about him?’

‘Mick Hurley, here, says he never took that train. You wouldn’t know
what happened him?’

Tommy rested one bare, powerful arm against the jamb of the door,
leaned his head against it, and delicately tilted the hat forward over
his eyes. ‘That sounds bad,’ he said.  ‘You’re sure he didn’t go off
unknown to you?’

‘How could he, man?’ asked Mick excitedly, feeling that some slight on
the railway company was implied. ‘His bags are still there. No one but
locals travelled on that train.’

‘The man had a lot of money on him,’ Hanagan said, looking at the
ground.

‘You’re sure of that, Tommy?’ Spike asked, in alarm. It was bad enough
for a motor-driver to be mixed up in a mysterious disappearance
without a murder coming into it as well.

‘Up to a hundred pounds,’ Hanagan said, giving a sharp glance up the
street. ‘I saw it when he paid for the drinks. I noticed Linehan, of
the guards, going in to his dinner. We might as well go over and ask
him did he hear anything.’

They strode briskly in the direction of the policeman’s house. Linehan
came shuffling out, buttoning up his tunic—a fat, black-haired man who
looked like something out of a butcher’s shop.

‘I didn’t hear a word of it,’ he said, looking from one to another, as
though they might be concealing evidence.  ‘We’ll ring up a few of the
local stations. Some of them might have word of him.’

Hanagan went to get his coat. Mick Hurley had to leave them, to look
after the four-fifteen, and at last Spike, Hanagan, and Linehan went
to the police station, where the others waited while Linehan had long,
confidential chats about football and the weather with other policemen
for ten miles around. Guards are lonely souls; they cannot trust their
nearest and dearest, and can communicate only with one another, like
mountaineers with signal fires. Hanagan sat on the table, pretending
to read a paper, though every look and gesture betrayed impatience and
disgust. Spike just sat, reflecting mournfully on the loss of his good
time and money.

‘We’ll have to find out what his name was,’ Linehan said, at
last. ‘The best thing we can do is drive up to the monastery and get
more particulars.’

‘The devil fly away with Mick Hurley!’ Spike said bitterly.  ‘Wouldn’t
you think he’d tell us what happened without waiting three days? If he
was after losing an express train, he’d wait a week to see would it
turn up.’

The three of them got into Spike’s car, and he drove off up the
mountain road, wondering how he was to get his fare out of it and from
whom. The monks were holy enough, but they expected you to run a car
on holy water, and a policeman thought he was doing you a favour if he
was seen in the car with you. The veiled sunlight went out; they ran
into thick mist, and before they reached the mountain-top, it had
turned to rain. They could see it driving in for miles from the
sea. The lights were on in the chapel; there was some service
on. Spike noticed the Yank pause under the traceried window and look
away down the valley. Within the church, the choir wailed, ‘_Et
exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum.  Et vitam venturi saeculi._’

Father Felix came out and beckoned them in from the rain. His face was
very grave. ‘You needn’t tell me what you came about, lads,’ he said.

‘You knew he was missing so, Father?’ said Linehan.

‘We saw him,’ said the priest.

‘Where, Father?’ asked Spike.

‘Out there,’ Father Felix said, with a nod.

‘On the mountain?’

‘I dare say he’s there still,’

‘But what is he doing?’

‘Oh, nothing. Nothing only staring. Staring at the monastery and the
monks working in the fields. Poor fellow!  Poor fellow!’

‘But who is it?’

‘One of our own men. One of the old monks. He’s here these fifteen
years.’

‘Fifteen years!’ exclaimed Linehan. ‘But what came over him after all
that time?’

‘Some nervous trouble, I suppose,’ said Father Felix in the tone of a
healthy man who has heard of nerves as a well-recognized ailment of
quite respectable people. ‘A sort of mental blackout, I heard them
saying. He wouldn’t know where he’d be for a few minutes at a time.’

‘Ah, poor soul! Poor soul!’ sighed Linehan, with a similar blankness
of expression.

‘But what was taking him to Canada?’ asked Hanagan.

‘Ah, well, we had to send him somewhere he wouldn’t be known,’
explained Father Felix sadly. ‘He wanted to settle down in his own
place in Kilkenny, but, of course, he couldn’t.’

‘Why not?’ asked Hanagan.

‘Oh, he couldn’t, he couldn’t,’ Linehan said, with a sharp intake of
breath as he strode to the window. ‘Not after leaving the
monastery. ‘’Twould cause terrible scandal.’

‘That’s why I hope you can get him away quietly,’ Father Felix
said. ‘We did everything we could for him, Now the less talk there is,
the better.’

‘In that bleddy mist you might be searching the mountain for a week,’
sighed Linehan, who had often shot it. ‘If we knew where to look
itself! We’ll go up the road and see would any of Sullivan’s boys have
word of him.’

Sullivan’s was the nearest farmhouse. The three men got into the car
again and drove slowly down under the trees past the monastery. There
was an iron railing, which seemed strangely out of place, and then a
field, and then the bare mountain again. It was coming on to dark, and
it struck Spike that they would find no one that night. He was sorry
for that poor devil, and could not get over the casualness of Mick
Hurley. A stationmaster! God, wouldn’t you think he’d have some sense?

‘It isn’t Mick Hurley I blame at all,’ Hanagan said angrily.

‘Ah, well, Tommy, you can’t be too hard on the poor monks,’ Linehan
said reasonably. ‘I suppose they were hoping he’d go away and not
cause any scandal.’

‘A poor bloody loony!’ snapped the Yank, his emotion bringing out a
strong Boston accent. ‘Gahd, you wouldn’t do it to a dawg!’

‘How sure you are he was a loony!’ Spike said, with a sneer. ‘He
didn’t seem so very loony to me.’

‘But you heard what Father Felix said!’ Hanagan cried.  ‘Mental
blackouts. That poor devil is somewhere out on that goddam mountain
with his memory gone.’

‘Ah, I’ll believe all I hear when I eat all I get,’ Spike said in the
same tone.

It wasn’t that he really disbelieved in the blackouts so much as that
he had trained himself to take things lightly, and the Yank was
getting on his nerves. At that moment he spotted the passenger out of
the corner of his eye. The rain seemed to have caught him somewhere on
top of a peak, and he was running, looking for shelter, from rock to
rock.  Without looking round, Spike stopped the car quietly and lit a
cigarette.

‘Don’t turn round now, boys!’ he said. ‘He’s just over there on our
right,’

‘What do you think we should do, Spike?’ Linehan asked.

‘Get out of the car quietly and break up, so that we can come round
him from different directions,’ said Spike.

‘Then you’d scare him properly,’ said Hanagan. ‘Let me go and talk to
him!”

Before they could hinder him, he was out of the car and running up the
slope from the road. Spike swore. He knew if the monk took to his
heels now, they might never catch him.  Hanagan shouted and the monk
halted, stared, then walked towards him.

‘It looks as if he might come quietly,’ said Linehan. He and Spike
followed Hanagan slowly.

Hanagan stopped on a little hillock, hatless, his hands in his trouser
pockets. The monk came up to him. He, too, was hatless; his raincoat
was covered with mud; and he wore what looked like a week’s growth of
beard. He had a sullen, frightened look, like an old dog called to
heel after doing something wrong.

‘That’s a bad evening now,’ Hanagan said, with an awkward smile, which
made him look unexpectedly boyish.

‘I hope you’re not taking all this trouble for me,’ the monk said,
looking first at Hanagan, then at Spike and the policeman, who stood a
little apart from him.

‘Ah, what trouble?’ Hanagan said, with fictitious lightness.  ‘We were
afraid you might be caught in the mist. ‘It’s bad enough even for
those that know the mountain. You’d want to get those wet things off
you quick.’

‘I suppose so,’ the monk said, looking down at his drenched clothes as
though he were seeing them for the first time. Spike could now believe
in the mental blackout, the man looked so stunned, like a sleepwalker.

‘We’ll stop at the pub and Spike can bring over whatever bags you
want,’ said Hanagan.

The public-house hotel looked uncannily bright after the loneliness of
the mountain. Hanagan was at his most obnoxiously efficient. Linehan
wanted to take a statement from the monk, but Hanagan stopped him. ‘Is
it a man in that state? How could he give you a statement?’ He rushed
in and out, his hat on the back of his head, producing hot whiskeys
for them all, sending Spike to the station for the bag, and driving
his wife and the maid mad seeing that there was hot water and shaving
tackle in the bathroom and that a hot meal was prepared.

When the monk came down, shaved and in dry clothes, Hanagan sat
opposite him, his legs spread and his hands on his thighs.

‘What you’ll do,’ he said, with a commanding air, ‘is rest here for a
couple of days.’

‘No, thanks,’ the monk said, shaking his head.

‘It won’t cost you anything,’ Hanagan said, with a smile.

‘It’s not that,’ said the monk in a low voice. ‘I’d better get away
from this.’

‘But you can’t, man. You’ll have to see about getting your tickets
changed. We can see to that for you, You might get pneumonia after
being out so long.’

‘I’ll have to go on,’ the monk said stubbornly. ‘I have to get away.’

‘You mean you’re afraid you might do the same thing again?’ Hanagan
said in a disappointed tone. ‘Maybe you’re right. Though what anyone
wants to go back to that place for beats me.’

‘What do people want to go back anywhere for?’ the monk asked in a
dull tone.

Spike thought it was as close as he’d ever seen anyone get to knocking
the Yank off his perch. Hanagan grew red, then rose and went in the
direction of the door, suddenly changed his mind, and turned to grasp
the monk’s left hand in his own two. ‘I’m a good one to talk,’ he said
in a thick voice.  ‘Eighteen years, and never a day without thinking
of this place. You mightn’t believe it, but there were nights I cried
myself to sleep. And for what, I ask you? What did I expect?’

He had changed suddenly; no longer the big-hearted, officious ward
boss looking after someone in trouble, he had become humble and almost
deferential. When they were leaving, he half opened the front door and
halted. ‘You’re sure you won’t stay?’ he snapped over his shoulder.

‘Sure,’ said the monk, with a nod.

Hanagan waved his left arm, and they went out across the dark square
to the station.

Spike and he saw the last of the monk, who waved to them till the
train disappeared in the darkness. Hanagan followed it, waving, with a
mawkish smile, as though he were seeing off a girl. Spike could see
that he was deeply moved, but what it was all about was beyond
him. Spike had never stood on the deck of a liner and watched his
fatherland drop away behind him. He didn’t know the sort of hurt it
can leave in a boy’s mind, a hurt that doesn’t heal even when you try
to conjure away the pain by returning. Nor did he realize, as Hanagan
did at that moment, that there are other fatherlands, whose loss can
hurt even more deeply.

(1954


Source: _Masculine Protest and other stories_ [From _Collection
Three_], Pan Books, 1972, pp. 135-147