THE OLD FAITH

The Pattern at Kilmulpeter turned into a great day. Mass was said in
the ruins of the cathedral and the old bishop, Dr Gallogly,
preached. Father Devine, who was a bit of an antiquarian, had looked
up the details of St Mulpeter’s life for him. There were a lot of
them, mostly contradictory, and all very, very 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 been put to death through the curses of the
Druids and the machinations of the King’s unfaithful wife. St Mulpeter
miraculously restored them to life and, through the great mercy of
God, they were permitted to sing a song about the Queen’s
misbehaviour, which resulted in St Mulpeter turning her into a
pillar-stone and converting the King to the one true faith.

The Bishop had been Professor of Dogmatic Theology in the seminary; a
job that had suited him excellently for he was a man who dogmatized
about everything. He was a tall, powerfully-built, handsome old man
with a face that was both broad and long, and high cheek-bones that
gave the lower haif of his face an air of unnatural immobility but
drew attention to the fine blue, anxious eyes. He had a quiet manner
and a low voice, but with a touch of the piledriver about him.

For a dogmatic theologian he showed great restraint on reading
Devine’s summary of the saint’s life. He raised his brows a few times,
and then read it through again with an air of resignation.

‘I suppose that’s what you’d call allegorical, father, he said
anxiously,

‘So long as you don’t call it historical,’ said Devine, who had a
tongue he couldn’t control.

The Bishop rarely showed signs of emotion, and he seemed quite
unaffected by the scene in the ruined cathedral, though it impressed
Devine—the crowds of country people kneeling in the wet grass among
the tottering crosses and headstones, the wild countryside framed in
the mullioned windows, and the big deeply-moulded clouds sailing
overhead. The Bishop disposed neatly of St Mulpeter by saying that we
couldn’t all go to sea on flagstones, which required great faith in
anyone who attempted it, but the family Rosary was just as good.

After Mass, Father Devine showed the Bishop and some of the other
clergy round the ruins. Suddenly, a couple of men who had been hiding
in the remains of a twelfth century chapel took to their heels. One of
them stood on a low wall, looking down on the little group of
clergymen with the expression of a terrified rabbit. 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 sternly. ‘What
have you in that?’

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

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

‘I’d like to see the Holy Well that came out of, he said
ironically. ‘Is it any use my preaching to ye about poteen?’

‘Ah, ’tis a wild, windy quarter, Your Eminence,’ said the man,
beginning to scratch himself, ‘and I have the rheumatics something
terrible.’

‘I’d sooner the rheumatics than the cirrhosis,’ grunted the
Bishop. ‘Bring it with you, father,’ he added to Devine, and strode on
with his umbrella against his back.

The same night a few of them had dinner with him at the Palace—Father
Whelan, an old parish priest, who was a cross between a saint and a
half-wit; Father Fogarty, who was a bit of a firebrand, Devine and
Canon Lanigan. The Bishop and the Canon never got on because the
Canon’s supporters were giving it out that the Bishop was doddering
and needed a coadjutor. Besides, the Canon gave himself too many
airs. He was tall and thin, with a long nose and a punchinello chin,
and he let on to be an authority on Church history as well as on food
and wine. The last item was enough to damn him in the Bishop’s eyes,
because he maintained almost ex cathedra that the best food and wine
in the world were to be found on the restaurant car from Holyhead to
Euston.

When Lanigan made a fool of himself by recommending
Chateauneuf-du-Pape, the Bishop turned to Father Devine.

‘Talking about drink, father,’ he said with his anxious glare, ‘what
happened to the bottle of poteen you took off that fellow?’

‘I suppose it’s in the hall,’ Father Devine said vaguely. ‘I can assure
you I wasn’t indulging in it.’

‘You could indulge in worse,’ said the Bishop with a dirty look at the
Canon. ‘Many a good man was raised on it. Nellie? he called, turning
his head a few inches, ‘bring in that bottle of poteen, if you can
find it... You can have it in your tea,’ he added to the Canon. ‘Or is
it coffee you want?’

‘Oh, tea, tea,’ sighed the Canon, offering it up. He knew only too
well what the Bishop’s coffee was like. According to the Bishop, it
was the best bottled coffee in the world.

When the housekeeper brought in the poteen, the Bishop took out the
cork and sniffed at the bottle again with an anxious air.

‘I should have found out who made it,’ he said. ‘When they can’t get
the rye, they make it out of anything.’

‘You seem to be quite an expert, my Lord,’ said Devine with his
waspish air.

‘Why wouldn’t I?’ asked the Bishop. ‘Didn’t I make it myself? My poor
father—God rest him!—had a still of his own. In milk he used to
give it to me, for colds. Or like a liniment, rubbed on the chest. Not
that I tasted it now in sixty, sixty-five years.’

He poured a stiff glass for each of them, and drank his own in a gulp
without any change of expression. Then he looked anxiously at the
others to see what they thought of it. Lanigan put on an air of
consternation, but the Bishop knew that was only showing off. Father
Fogarty drank it reverently, as though it were altar wine, but he was
a nationalist and felt that anything that came from the people had to
be treated accordingly. Father Devine disgraced himself; spluttered,
choked, and then went petulantly off to the bathroom.

Meanwhile, the Bishop had decided that it was good poteen and treated
them 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 did not like at all. The Bishop, who
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 own sharpness.

‘Was it on an island you made this stuff?’ the Canon asked blandly.

‘No,’ replied the Bishop, who didn’t know what irony was. ‘A
mountain.’

‘A rather desolate one, I fancy,’ Lanigan said dreamily.

‘It had to be if you didn’t want the police on top of you,’ said the
Bishop. ‘They’d have fifty men out at a time, scouring the mountains.’

‘And bagpipes!’ said the Canon, bursting into an old woman’s cackle at
the memory 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 shortly. ‘As a matter of
fact,’ he added nostalgically, ‘it was very nice up there on a
summer’s night. They’d hide the still in a hollow, and then sit round
and tell stories. Very queer stories, some of them, like that life of
St Mulpeter Father Devine wrote out for me.’

‘Ah, the people were half-savage in those days,’ the Canon said.

‘They were not,’ the Bishop replied 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 the people were rushing to perdition and
that the only hope for them was to send them all back to live in
whitewashed cabins.

‘Ah, a nicer class of people in every way,’ Father Whelan said
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, who always spoke with peculiar affection to Whelan. ‘I
remember they used to put the first mug of poteen in hiding under a
rock. Would that be something to ‘do with the fairies?’ he asked
Devine.

‘Well, at any rate, you can’t deny that the people today are more
enlightened,’ the Canon said warmly.

‘I deny it _in toto_,’ retorted the Bishop. ‘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,’ moaned Father Whelan, taking out his
pipe.

‘And the superstitions, my Lord?’ the Canon hissed
superciliously. ‘The ghosts and fairies and spells?’

‘They might have good reason,’ said the Bishop with a flash of his
blue eyes.

‘By Gor, you’re right, my Lord,’ said Fogarty, in a loud voice,
and then, realizing 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 complacently.

‘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 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, a man called
Muldoon. Father Whelan might remember him.’

‘Con?’ defined Father Whelan. ‘I do, well. His nephew, Peter, was on
the Chinese Mission.’

‘A well-meaning man but a bit coarse, I thought,’ said the Bishop.

‘That was his mother’s side of the family,’ explained Whelan. ‘His
mother was one of the Clasheen Dempseys and they were always a rough
lot.’

‘Was she so?’ the Bishop asked with a great air of enlightenment. ‘I
never knew that. It would explain a lot. He was always preaching
against superstition, you might remember, and he had his knife in one
poor old fellow up the Glen called Johnnie Ryan.’

‘Johnnie the Fairies,’ said Father Whelan. ‘I knew him too.’

‘I knew him well,’ said the Bishop. ‘A gentle poor man but a bit soft
in the head. He was their Living Man.’

‘Their what?’ cried Father Devine in astonishment.

‘Their Living Man,’ said the Bishop.

‘Whose Living Man?’ asked Divine with a baffled air.

‘The fairies,’ explained the Bishop. ‘They had to have a Living Man to
go with them, or else they had no power. That was the way I heard it
anyway. I remember him well playing the Fairy Music on his
whistle. They taught it to him.’

‘You wouldn’t remember how it went?’ Father Fogarty asked
eagerly. Devine could see the scheme forming in his head, for the
convent school orchestra to play it. He could even imagine it on the
programme—‘The Fairy Music, by kind permission of his Lordship the
Bishop of Moyle.’

‘I was never much good at remembering music,’ said the
Bishop. ‘Anyway, I was only a child. Of course, there might be
something in it. You’d often see queer lights on the mountain over our
house. They said it was a fairy funeral. They had some story about a
man from our place who interrupted a funeral like that one night. The
fairies left down the coffin and ran away. The man opened the coffin
and there was a girl inside. A fine-looking girl, too, I believe. When
he breathed on 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,’ Father Whelan said respectfully.

‘Was it Galway?’ asked the Bishop.

‘I dare say with enough poteen in, a man could even believe that,’
said the Canon indignantly.

‘Still, Canon, strange things do happen,’ said Father Fogarty.

‘Why, then, indeed, they do,’ agreed Father Whelan with a sigh.

‘Was this something that happened to yourself, father?’ the Bishop
asked kindly, seeing the young man straining at the leash.

‘It was, my Lord,’ said Fogarty. ‘’Twas 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 in the kitchen, about what they ought to do. “Don’t be a fool,
woman!” said my aunt. “You know there’s ways.”’

‘Well, well, well,’ Father Whelan said, shaking his head.

‘Then my aunt came up with a scissors,’ Father Fogarty continued
excitedly. ‘First, she cut off a bit of the end of my shirt, and then
a bit of hair from behind my ear, and then a bit of fingernail, and
she threw them in the fire. All the time she was muttering 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 got better, all right, but that wasn’t the strangest part of it.’
Fogarty leaned across the table, scowling, and dropped his eager,
boyish voice to a whisper. ‘Inside a year, her two sons, two of the
finest young fellows you ever laid eyes on, died.’ Then he sat back,
took out a cigar and scowled again. ‘Now, wasn’t that extraordinary?’
he asked. ‘I say, wasn’t it extraordinary?’

‘Ah, whatever was waiting to get you,’ Father Whelan said
philosophically, emptying his pipe on to his plate. ‘I suppose it had
to get something. A similar thing happened an old aunt of my own. 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, and when
she went to the door, the cock crowed three times and dropped dead at
her feet. Whatever was waiting for her, of course,’ he added with a
sigh. ‘The cock gave them away, and they took their revenge on him.’

‘Well! Well! Well!’ the Canon exploded. ‘I’m astonished at you, Father
Whelan, absolutely astonished! How can you even repeat such old wives’
tales?’

‘I don’t see what you have to be astonished about, Canon,’ said the
Bishop. ‘It was no worse than what happened to Father Muldoon.’

‘That was a bad business,’ muttered Father Whelan, shaking his head.

‘What happened him?’ asked Devine.

‘I told you he was always denouncing old Johnnie,’ said the Bishop.
‘One day they had words and he struck the old man. It wasn’t fair. The
old man was too feeble. Within a month Muldoon got a breaking out on
his knee.’

‘Poor fellow, he lost the leg after, Father Whelan said, stuffing his
pipe again.

‘I suppose next you’ll say that was the fairies’ revenge?’ said
the Canon, throwing discretion to the winds. It was too much for him,
a man who knew Church history, had lived in France and was a
connoisseur of wine.

‘That was what Father Muldoon thought,’ said the Bishop smugly.

‘More fool he!’ retorted the Canon.

‘That’s as may be, Canon,’ said the Bishop. ‘Anyway, the doctors
couldn’t do much for him. He went back up the Glen again to ask
Johnnie’s advice. “I had nothing to do with it, father,” said Johnnie,
“but you can tell the doctor from me that he might as well take the
leg off you while he’s at it.” “Why so?” says Muldoon. “Because it was
the Queen of the Fairies that fired the shot at you, father, and the
Queen’s wound never heals.” No more it did,’ added the Bishop. ‘As you
say, father, he ended his days on a peg leg.’

‘He did, God rest him, he did,’ muttered Father Whelan mournfully, and
there was a long pause. It was clear that the Canon was routed, and
soon after they all got up to go. Father Fogarty had left his car
outside the Seminary, and the Bishop, in a benevolent mood, offered to
guide them across the field by the footpath.

‘No, I’ll do that,’ Devine said irritably. In his cranky way he was
fond of the Bishop and he didn’t want him perambulating through the
fields at that hour.

‘Ah, I need the little walk,’ said the Bishop.

He, the Canon and Father Fogarty went first down the palace
steps. Father Devine followed with Father Whelan, who went down
sideways with the skirts of his coat held up.

‘That was a very good drop of poteen,’ the Bishop was saying. ‘For
some reason, bad poteen strikes at the extremities. I used to see the
people at home, talking as clearly as yourself or myself, and then
dropping off the chairs, paralysed. 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,’ Father Whelan whispered girlishly, stopping in his
tracks.

‘Yes, father, what is it?’ Devine asked gently.

‘What his Lordship said,’ whispered Father Whelan guiltily. ‘That’s the
way I feel. Like gateposts.’

And before the young priest could catch him, he put out one of the
gateposts which failed to alight properly on its base: the other
leaned slowly towards it, and he collapsed in an ungraceful parody of
a ballet dancer’s curtsey.

‘Oh, my, my, my!’ he exclaimed guiltily. Even in his liquor he was
melancholy and gentle.

The other three turned round slowly, very slowly, to study him. To
Devine they looked like sleep-walkers.

‘Hah!’ the Bishop said with quiet satisfaction. ‘It wasn’t as good as
I thought. We’d want to mind ourselves.’

And off the three of them went, arm-in-arm, as though they recognized
no responsibility to their fallen colleague. Paddy, the Bishop’s
‘boy’, who had been anticipating trouble, immediately appeared, and he
and Devine carried the old man back to the hallway. ‘Father Whelan
isn’t feeling well,’ he explained unnecessarily to the housekeeper.
Then, the two of them took the hall bench and set out after the
others. They were in time to see the collapse of the Canon, but in
spite of it, the other two went on. Devine shouted a warning, but they
ignored him. Father Fogarty had begun to chuckle hysterically. It
occurred to Devine that he was already beginning to rehearse his story
of ‘the night I got drunk with the Bishop’.

Devine and Paddy left the Canon and pursued the other two. They had
gone wildly astray, turning in a semi-circle round the field, till
they were at the foot of the hill and before a high fence round the
plantation. The Bishop never hesitated but began to climb the wall.

‘I must be gone wrong, father,’ he said anxiously. ‘This never
happened to me before. We’ll go over the wall and up the wood.’

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

‘Nonsense, father!’ 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 Fogarty.

‘Pull yourself together, father,’ the Bishop said sternly.

‘You don’t want to be making an exhibition of yourself.’

Next moment Fogarty was lying flat at the foot of the wall, laughing
his head off. Devine shouted again to the Bishop, but the Bishop only
turned his back contemptuously and slid down at the other side of the
wall. They found him there under a tree in the starlight, quite
powerless but full of wisdom, resignation and peace. When they lifted
him on to the bench he reclined there, his hands crossed meekly on his
breast, like an effigy on a tomb-chest.

‘The most remarkable example of historical regression I’ve ever seen,
Devine told young Fogarty when he woke up later with a terrible
head. ‘I must write a paper on it for the Archaeological Society. I
didn’t mind your retreat into the Early Bronze Age so much, but I was
afraid you’d forget yourselves and go neolithic on me all of a
sudden.’

‘Ah, how bad the neolithic fellows were!’ groaned Fogarty. ‘I’m damn
full sure they never felt as bad as I do.’

‘The neolithic fellows?’ Devine said in mock surprise, ‘And have the
Bishop proposing to build Lanigan into the wall of the new cathedral?
My dear fellow, believe me, you can take this historical regression
business too far.’

(1954)