Grandmother and the Priests

by Taylor Caldwell

  “I saw the door,” said Benedict. “It was here.” He looked at his hands. There was mortar and brick dust on them, and the sides were bleeding a little with tiny lacerations. “The door,” muttered the young priest, stupefied. “I saw it, too.”

  “Never a door,” said the workman. Ruddy bit of business, this, a parson babbling on the street like a chap in his cups. Cautiously, the workman bent his head forward a little to sniff Benedict’s breath. The laddie wasn’t drunk, but had he gone barmy? He was breathing like a chap with a stroke.

  “You’d not like to go inside, Parson?” asked the workman, remembering that the daft should be spoken to calmly. “Through the gate on t’other side?”

  “Yes,” said Benedict, and he was off again, running down the length of the street, throwing himself around the corner. He was followed by jeers and screams of children and women. He did not hear them. He reached the big iron gate, which was standing open to admit a huge dray, and he rushed through the gate and found himself in a yard exactly as Sir Joshua had described, all blank clay and gravel. He raced along it to reach the point where he had seen the door, followed by the stares and shouts of the workmen about him. And then he saw a knot of men standing above something, muttering and swearing. Benedict halted. He knew exactly what he would see. The knot grew larger, and someone called for a doctor. Slowly, heavily, Benedict approached the men, who parted to let him see what was to be seen.

  Sir Joshua was lying, dead, on the gravel and clay, joyously smiling, his open eyes staring at the sky. The great and living gem on his finger was only gray stone now, its fire extinguished, its colors gone forever with the soul who had worn it.

  “ ‘Ow did the toff get here?” the men were asking. “Didn’t see him come in the gate. Standing right here, wasn’t you, ‘Arold? You see him before?”

  “Never,” said the other, astonished. “Not a sign of ‘im. Dead as a flounder he be? One blasted minute he wasn’t there, and then he was. Blimey!”

  Then the men slowly removed their dusty caps, for Benedict was kneeling beside Sir Joshua and beginning the prayers for the dead.

  “I sang the Mass at his funeral,” said old Father Hughes to Grandmother’s other friends. “I know why he had written me as he did. He wanted me to see the door for myself, and to believe in what he had told me. I believe. But still, I do not understand. Not all. Only a little.

  “I do know one thing, however. He had changed my life. I was never a realist again, demanding proof of all things.”

  He looked at his withered hands, which had beaten so futilely against the golden door, then glanced up at a question. “The inquest? Oh, ‘death from natural causes’. But no one was ever found who had seen Joshua alive within the wall; no one had seen him enter through the one gate. No one had seen him fall, and die. As for myself, I was called to testify. I merely said that I had known that Sir Joshua frequently walked in that section of the city, and I had wanted to see him on a matter of importance. I have told no one to this day, except my Bishop, of what I had seen — the golden door through which Sir Joshua had entered, rejoicing.”

  “But the flowers he had sent you, Father?” asked Grandmother.

  “Oh, yes, the flowers.” Father Hughes was silent a moment. “When I returned to my aunt’s house they had disappeared. The water was there, and the vase, but there were no flowers. Aunt Amanda was enraged. She accused the servants, and I had to put a stop to it, after she had them in tears. There was only a fragrance left, and it stayed for many days, long after Sir Joshua was buried beside his parents. No one ever saw C’est Egal again, and those in his conservatory disappeared also, leaving not one petal behind.”

  Chapter Five

  “You’ll be going home tomorrow, Rose,” said Cook. Rose stared at her in dismay, not knowing she was a reprehensible child for not wishing to return so soon to her loving parents.

  “But Father Lewis has promised us a tale tomorrow!” she said with protests that rang over and over with the insistence of childhood.

  “Don’t you want to see your dear Mama and Papa tomorrow?” asked Cook, severely.

  “No,” said Rose.

  Cook raised her eyebrows, but Rose only burst into tears. “Why don’t you want to go home?” asked Cook curiously.

  “I like it here,” sobbed Rose.

  “With her?”

  “Grandmother? Oh, she showed me all her butterflies this morning, the gold ones with rubies and emeralds, and her big emerald ring. She said she is saving the ring for me. I don’t want to go home!” exclaimed Rose with new sobs. “We haven’t anything home like Grandmother’s!”

  “Probably all for the best,” said Cook, philosophically. “But she had a letter this morning to send you off. Not that she’s shedding any tears, Wot’s wrong with you now?” added Cook, as Rose swallowed painfully.

  “I have a sore throat,” said Rose.

  “So, that’s how it is,” said Cook, who would have delighted modern psychiatrists with her shrewd understanding. “Well, we’ll see wot can be done, though mind you, that throat will be better if you don’t go home tomorrow. You’d not miss one of those tales!”

  The sore throat was so bad the next morning that Grandmother impatiently sent off a telegram to Rose’s parents. The telegram was no sooner off, and unrecallable, than the throat cleared up miraculously. Grandmother, on being informed of that fact, looked at Rose with a freckled grin and said, “I didna know ye were so fond of me, lassie. Aye, you may stay up and listen to Father Lewis, though mind ye, he’s a Welshman, and one knows the Welsh are daft and tell strange tales.”

  Father Ifor Lewis and the Men of Gwenwynnlynn

  “It began,” said Father Lewis, in his soft and lilting Welsh voice, “when my elderly third cousin, Father Andrew Lewis, wrote me a very strange letter. He was troubled in his mind. He did not expound, for we Celts, being a mysterious people, love mysteries by instinct. But it was obvious that he was indeed troubled, and wanted my advice. There was some controversy with his Bishop, a brisk man who liked everything neat and tidy. I believe his mother was an Englishwoman.”

  The other priests nodded wisely at this, quite understanding. All the English liked tidiness and neatness, and in the realm of the spirit and mysticism things were apt to be above such mundane matters and boredoms.

  “Moreover,” said Father Lewis, “the Bishop was quite young, and a Jesuit, and one knows there is no one so brisk and elegant and down to earth as a young Jesuit. My cousin was none of these, and the Bishop frightened him half to death with his demands for ‘full explanations, examples, names, details, written clearly and consecutively’.” Father Lewis paused. “There’s many a good businessman lost in a Jesuit. Naturally,” he added, “we need such minds, but they do bear down, and country people detest being borne down upon. They know that all the records in the world, and all the briskness, never made an ear of corn ripen faster or a thunderstorm stop its fury on schedule — man’s schedule. They have a respect for nature.”

  “Ah, yes,” said the countrymen-priests at Grandmother’s.

  Father Andrew indeed had a problem. Before he could bring himself, in spite of all his spirit’s willingness, to be ‘full’, teeming with examples and details, he wanted the advice, or at least the encouragement, of his kinsman, whom he had guided into the priesthood and who was twenty-two years younger than himself. So Father Ifor went to his aid, in the little Welsh town of Gwenwynnlynn, a town of miners, cupped in the hollow of harsh violet mountains near the sea.

  “I had heard of ‘wild’ Irishmen and ‘bleak’ Scots,” said Father Ifor, with a smiling and gentle glance for his friends around Grandmother’s fire. “But the Welsh, though their kinsmen, are somewhat different. Your Welshman is apt to be more combative than the Irishman, less inclined to good humor or a joke, and is even more active than a Scotsman, though that hardly seems possible. He is often bad-tempered, fiercely quick to take insult, dogmatic and intolerant, and would as soon bash you as look at you, if you g
ave him an offhand expression. Moreover, on the average, he is shorter than his kinsmen, the Irish and the Scots, usually has a thick thatch of red hair, angry blue eyes, a red face, and the distended nostrils of the belligerent man. Such men are frequently adventurers; the Welshman is not usually so; he rarely emigrates. Perhaps he is too engaged in a feud all the time, or has to work too hard in his savage and lonely land to indulge in fantasies of gold beyond the sea. He is inclined, too, to detest wealth — in others — and resent it as a personal insult to him. As for his pride — ” Father Ifor shook his head. “God help him. I hear he is making the American press, as of this very minute, resound with his union activities in the coal-bearing regions. One can expect broken heads wherever a Welshman takes up residence.”

  “My sister,” said Father McGlynn, with a reminiscent smile, “married a Welshman. But it was the big hand on her, and he six inches shorter. If there was a black eye, sure and it was on the husband’s face.”

  “It is with good cause that the Englishman calls the Welshman ‘the red cock’,” said Father Ifor Lewis. “And Gwenwynnlynn was full of red cocks, and red hens, and a noisier people you never knew. They can out-argue Lucifer, himself, even the children. I have heard it denied, but a violent land, I have seen, breeds a violent people, or perhaps it is that only violent people remain in a violent land. The others discreetly move elsewhere. All Italians are artists because how is it possible to live in so beautiful a country of color and song and exquisite natural form and not be an artist? People are more like their land than some of our ‘advanced’ scientists would want you to believe.

  “My cousin, Andrew, however, was a strange Welshman. He was gentle, simple and good, though in his youthful years he had had the Welshman’s red hair and fiery blue eyes and quick temper. The years had leeched away the red hair and the fieriness of the eyes, had bent his small back and made slow his active limbs, but he never lost the gentleness, which, God knows, certainly did not come from his people! However, he did possess the Welshman’s resentment of oppression, the privileges of arrogant wealth, and injustice. He believed in fighting evil with good and patience — ” Father Lewis paused, looking blandly at his fellow-priests, who had immediately put on pious expressions. He smiled to himself. “Instead of with fists, and the mace and the dirk,” added Father Lewis, with a twinkle.

  “Ah, well,” he said, in his musical voice. “I knew my cousin’s hamlet well, having been born there, and visiting him, though not in the past twelve years. Slag, smoking piles of debris from the mines, the acrid smell of coal, the pits, dirt, soot, dust, small and meager little cottages, blackened tiny gardens, the odor of the sea at night, the dirty rain, and the terrible wall of stark mountains beyond. A very poor hamlet. The Catholic population composed about forty-five percent of the whole. They were much poorer than their neighbors, and bigotry was everywhere. My cousin’s church was falling into ruins; there was no school for the children. But the Anglican church gleamed strongly and the communicants always seemed better dressed. They were not miners. They were shopkeepers. Which reminds me of Napoleon’s remark. Ah, well, we need shopkeepers, too, though they have carriages in my cousin’s hamlet, and look very English and are pleased if they are mistaken for Englishmen in that God forsaken place. This proves, certainly, that even the Welsh are quite human, though this has been disputed in London.”

  Father Ifor Lewis bridled a little. “One should always deprecate pride, but a Welshman’s pride is an awesome thing. It is not to be despised, for it arises from courage. A Welshman, in the coal hamlets, needs all the courage Our Lord can give him. The mines, of course, were owned by Englishmen — absentee ownership, as it is called.

  “Wales is a beautiful if savage country. Mountainous. Stony. Haggard. But so beautiful, if so cold as it faces the wild grayness of the ocean, and so bitter of soul. It has grandeur, and an eerie terror, and an awful, valorous history. Yes, I know it well, for I was born there, and its vision stands in my soul.”

  The Irishman, said Father Lewis, has clung to the Church through faith and devotion, the Scotsman partly because he despises the Sassenach and will not be dictated to by anyone, but the Welshman has retained his religion, if Catholic, through sheer and angry stubbornness. No one can beguile him. The Irishman will be respectful in the Confessional, the Scotsman reserved and cautious. The Welshman will argue noisily with the priest if opinions collide as to the weight of the sin, and especially over the penance. An Irishman will rarely write to the Bishop complaining about a priest. It is quite usual with a Welshman; he complains all the time. He is absolutely convinced that if he does not fight for himself he will be taken advantage of, even by his priest, who, being Welsh, too, has things to say about the vast amount of alcohol a Welshman can ingest with disastrous results. If alcohol is often direful for the Irishman — the Scotsman is usually not too susceptible, as whiskey is expensive — alcohol is poisonous for a Welshman, as it is for most violent men. And the Welshman drinks, unless he belongs to a Baptist or Methodist sect; even then, he frequently relapses under the sheer pressure of his nature. And his circumstances.

  It was with some depression that Father Ifor boarded a train to Wales, remembering the poverty, the soot, the broken streets, the collapsing little cottages, the half-ruined church and bitter misery of his cousin’s rectory, and the all-pervading atmosphere of angry wretchedness of the hamlet. It had been twelve years since he had seen all that, and he had devoutly hoped that it would be at least twelve more. But the old cousin, Andrew, was, like his countrymen, too proud to wail about his personal troubles, and so if he had asked Ifor to come he had had an overpowering reason. As the train proceeded into Wales the character of the people in the third-class carriage changed, so that they became progressively shorter, more stocky or massive, more red of hair and face, more furiously blue of eye, and more sullen of lip. Their clothing, too, became much poorer and patched. Father Ifor sighed. He glanced at the big old silver watch his father had given him on the occasion of his ordination, and he saw that within an hour he would be in Gwenwynnlynn. He looked about him at the next station. It had begun to rain, a cold, black, early summer rain, drizzling and surly. The station was tiny, the walls of granite, the roof of the thick black slate of the region. But the people waiting on the platform, to Father Ifor’s surprise, appeared well dressed and contented. A county meeting, perhaps? Then he saw that they were workingmen and not gentry, and that they wore wool caps of good material, and their high boots were polished. A holiday? Father Ifor shook his head. Not even an Anglican one. This station was the last stop to Gwenwynnlynn and so the men and women, cheerily boarding the train and talking loudly, were inhabitants of his cousin’s village. They had the polished and ruddy skins of the well-fed, and the bright, quick eyes of those who possessed well-being of body and soul. A woman or two had a bonnet definitely citified, and two or three girls wore shawls that resembled woolly lace.

  They rushed into the third-class carriages, but Father Ifor noticed that a few, with importantly set shoulders and lifted red heads, made for the second-class ones, too. Those who came into the third-class carriage with Father Ifor either looked at him darkly and explosively — which marked them as not being Catholics — or touched caps or curtseyed, which marked them as Catholic. He shifted on the wooden bench towards the middle-aged man next to him, and said diffidently, “And you’ll be from Gwenwynnlynn, perhaps?”

  The man swelled out his chest like a cock and removed his cap for a moment. Then he folded his thick arms across his chest. “That we’ll be!” he said, with pride. “And it’s the finest village in the country! I be a miner, Father, but well paid I am! I live in a cot, but the roof is tight and the walls painted, and there be plenty of ham and beef in the larder! Not as it was. It’s when we laid down the laws to the English owners, and asked! They with their millions of pounds! Or perhaps,” he added without much conviction, “they was moved to Christian charity and decency.” He looked about him with arrogance, and his neighbors
smiled and nodded. “It be my opinion it was our firmness when we asked for the better wages and machinery. A man lays down the laws to the Englishman, if he be a man of spirit.”

  A surly, patched man, middle-aged and stained with coal dust, lifted up a louder voice: “More fool you, man of Gwenwynnlynn. It be we have the same owners, and we has the spirit, too, and they done nothing for us. It’s the saint ye have in your Godforsaken hamlet, which I be visiting to see my father, and it was my father who told me.”

  The well-dressed man removed his cap again, laid it deliberately on his knee, and stared at it. He shrugged. “Well, be it as it may. I think it be the owners, and our spirit — ”

  “Spirit!” snorted the other. “We be men of spirit, and as for wrestling, it minds me we wrestled the men of Gwenwynnlynn and — ”

  Father Ifor recognized all the makings of a hearty, and physical, fight developing, and though no one loved to watch a boxing match or a wrestling more than he, he was too interested now in the conversation to permit the fight to develop. Such a fight could lead to a huge brawl among everyone in the coach and there were two or three young women who were obviously pregnant. He said, hastily, to the well-dressed man, “I am Father Ifor Lewis, cousin, third removed, to your own priest. He’s asked me to visit him, and seemed troubled. Perhaps you can tell me why; he’s an old man — ”