The Yank put me through a severe cross-examination, to test my general reliability I suppose, and finally handed me a letter addressed to a girl in the convent. He directed me in grim tones to deliver it to the girl herself, and to no one else. If I could not find her, I was to bring it back. He made no threats or promises, but as a preliminary reward he gave me a small glass of muddy-looking wine, a dozen puffs from a dirty meerschaum pipe, and sped me on my way, appropriately enough, with a volume of The Path-Finders.
My nose in Fenimore Cooper, I wandered off unquestioned to the convent. I meandered up the long gravelled walk, skirted the convent buildings, and approached the girls’ playground. Clouds of girls dressed in blue were running about. They stopped to stare at me, and I was at once surrounded by dozens of them asking questions. Not being accustomed to the society of ladies, I grew red in the face, and halted in my replies.
All at once the group parted, and I was approached by a tall chinless girl with flaxen hair. She drew me apart, and had the nature of my business out of me with surprising ease and in a few seconds. She stood for a moment considering me, then nodded.
“Come with me,” she said. “I’ll go and fetch her for you.” She took me by the sleeve, and led me away to the back of the convent school.
“Wait here,” she said, and went inside.
I waited for two or three minutes, then grew uneasy, and thought of running away. Suddenly the girl reappeared— but not alone. With her was an attractive-looking young nun, whom I knew already as Sister Paul. The flaxen-haired one gave me a vicious smirk, and was dismissed. Sister Paul brought me to a sort of tumble-down rustic arbour, and made me sit beside her. Strong though my embarrassment was and my sense of peril, I remember being amazed at the enormous size of her skirts. I was staring at them when she said gently, “Now give me that letter.”
I started guiltily, and looked up in her face.
“What letter, Sister?”
“The letter you have for Teresa Barton.”
“Teresa Barton?” I faltered. “I don’t know any Teresa Barton.”
She smiled at me.
“No,” she said, “I know you don’t. But your friend does. The one who gave you the letter to deliver to her.”
I shuffled, I lied, I all but wept, but I had no defence against this novel sort of pressure, so I handed it over.
She questioned me closely about the Yank, and I betrayed my trust. To an older, an uglier, or a more domineering nun I do not think I should have given way, but Sister Paul had a coaxing gentle manner which I could not resist. When at last she was satisfied, she produced a pencil, crossed out the address on the letter, which she handed back unopened, and told me to return to its sender. Then she took me by the hand into the orchard, gave me some fruit, and made me promise never to do anything of the kind again.
I gave the promise, and went back to the monastery. Entering a passage, I ran straight into the Spectre. I stood rigid with horror. Without a word, and as if he knew perfectly well what had happened, he snatched the letter out of my hands, gave me a flip with his cane, and strode away.
I was distraught with anxiety at this fresh complication. I fled to my friends, but told them not a word. I spent a miserable afternoon, watching out for the Yank, avoided him carefully next day and for many days, until, as a boy will, I began to forget the incident.
It was brought back to me a week or so later, when I came round a hedge and found the Yank and the Spectre in low-toned conversation. I remember this confrontation all the more vividly because it was the only time I saw the Spectre talking to a boy. They saw me, and neither spoke; but from that moment the Yank cut me dead. He would pass me without a nod of recognition. In fact, he made me feel like the little worm that I was.
To my relief, he left soon afterwards, and went home to the States, where he developed into a lawyer, and had considerable success.
My next and only other exploit as a messenger was very different. As I have said, the monastery stood some distance out of the town. One of the remotest of the little lanes that branched off the main street wandered away towards us in a meditative sort of way, and finally burst into three or four little cottages that for some obscure reason were known as Hole’s Hole. One of these cottages was a little bit of a shop, and in the shop was a girl. She seemed mature enough to us, but I suppose in reality she was nineteen or thereabouts. She had brown hair, brown eyes, a full bosom, and one of the most beautiful necks I ever saw on a woman. Her face was gentle and serene, if a shade stupid. Her red lips were moist and always half parted, showing little white perfect teeth that even to me, looking up at her as I did, seemed innocent and appealing.
She had beautiful hands, too, and very deftly they moved as they screwed up for us our ha’porths and penn’orths of sweets into a twist of paper. There were three good reasons that took us to this little shop. One, it was near and convenient. Two, she gave us absurdly good value for our meagre outlay. Our pennies were worth double and treble with her what they were elsewhere. Three, most of us idolised her, over and above these advantages, with the selfless love of boyhood. I adored her secretly, and Jimmy Brady wrote her a love letter one time which he would not let any of us read.
“She’s like an angel,” he said one night, as we lay in bed in the dark; and we called her the Angel from then on.
I have done the school a wicked injustice in speaking so far only of one of the monks who taught us. The Spectre was not typical: he was a vile exception. All the other monks were good and kind and treated us well, and it is the irony of nature that the exception is best remembered. And, of all these kind and good men, one stands out so brightly that, just as I have given the Spectre a cover of anonymity, so I shall call this one the Hero. I have not invented this name either, for we gave it to him, all of us.
The Hero was a young, robust, dark, curly-haired monk of average height and extraordinary good looks. He had red cheeks, blue dancing eyes, a cleft in his chin, and strong white teeth. His soutane fitted his fine figure as if it was painted on him, his biretta was always at a jaunty and unclerical angle, and these attributes, with his perpetual happy nature and his vast patience, won him the hearts of young and old. He never presumed on his popularity, never even seemed to be aware of it. He had a word and a smile for everyone. If you sauced him, he laughed and chased you and gave you a smack on the bottom. If you were in disgrace, he came and put his arm round you and sorted it all out, and helped you with your poena, and shooed you out of the empty classroom with a clout from his sash, or a flick on the ear from his thick forefinger.
No one could larrup a hurley ball half so far, no one could run, jump, swim, or dive as he could. He cannot have been more than twenty-two or thereabouts, but he was full of quaint stories of his boyhood in a little glen away up in the mountains. Often at lessons something would put him in mind of a character at home, and then he would stop and laugh and cover his face in his hands, while we waited in delight, knowing that he would not be able to resist telling us.
He was grand in every way. The act of eating his dinner may not show a man at his most dignified, but we all loved to watch the Hero devour his. There was a grace and a zest in the way he wielded knife and fork, a finality about his chewing and his swallowing, which we all admired. It reminded me of Uncle John, and that made me love him even more. More than once, too, I saw him smoking a pipe away on the top walk, and I know he secreted tobacco in a private pocket underneath his sash. This little human frailty was the last touch that endeared him to us, even above his virtues.
His patience was a marvel. He instructed our class in arithmetic and agriculture. I don’t know which I detest more, and that despite my admiration for the Hero, which made me sweat blood not to vex him. Even now, it takes me a sheet of foolscap to work out the reading on the gas meter, and only last week I planted a crop of begonias upside down.
You may judge then of our surprise when one day we received from this apostle of tolerance and universal brotherhood
the strict injunction on no account to go near the little shop in Hole’s Hole. The Hero gave us no reason, just the plain prohibition. We discussed the matter in corners of the playground and in the dormitory, but could find no sort of explanation to it. There it was, and we had to take it or leave it. We loved and trusted the Hero, and so we bore the injury to our pockets and our dreams of romance, and did as he told us.
Some time after that, I was sent down to the village on an errand to get some seeds for the garden. On my way back, thoughtlessly and from force of habit, I forgot all about the prohibition, and went into the shop in Hole’s Hole. It was a dark little place, with a flap in the counter which you could lift up, and pass through into a small parlour at the back.
There was no one in the shop. Not a sound anywhere. I looked about me, and then, as we always did on such occasions, I lifted the flap and went into the little parlour. A door from the parlour gave on a tiny passage and a field behind a house, where the Angel might be feeding the chickens or the pigs. We would call her, and she would come in, wipe her lovely hands on her apron, and serve us with what we wanted.
There was dead silence in the parlour, too, and precious little light. In the middle was a small round table covered with a red cloth, and on it a lamp of colza oil, with a pink glass shade, which cast a dim, unnatural light on everything.
Then a tiny sound made me turn round: and there, close to me, on a sofa, lay the Hero in the Angel’s arms, both of them fast asleep, their brown and black curls intermingled. I have always remembered that moment, and always shall, as if it was happening now: a moment without emotion, without thought, in which the soul faces something altogether too big for it.
How long I stood like that I’ve no idea—probably a few seconds. Then the Hero opened his eyes and gazed at me. His face flushed slowly. The Angel awoke, too, and sat up, her face flooding swiftly with red.
The Hero spoke to me, but I don’t know what he said. As soon as I heard his voice, something seemed to tear violently inside me. I turned and ran, banging myself hard against the counter. The next thing I remembered, I was running along the road, running, running, running, and crying bitterly as I ran. The moment I got to the monastery, I rushed straight to the dormitory and threw myself on my bed, where I lay for hours, trying to puzzle out what had happened.
Next day, at the arithmetic class, the Hero looked pale and avoided my eye. When the class broke up, he spoke to me.
“Mangan—will you stay, please? I want to have a word with you.”
The others looked at me curiously, and one or two tried to linger, but he drove them out and shut the door. Then he came to me. He took my chin in his hands, and stared deep into my eyes, as if to read my soul. I heard his voice asking me questions, I heard my own voice, strained and broken, answering: but I cannot for the life of me imagine what we said, much less remember.
At last he let me go, and looked past me, his face white and working with pain. He began to speak, as much to himself as to me.
“I am going away with her, Luke. Going away with her and leaving everything. I am, by God. You must never breathe a word of it. Never tell a soul.”
He looked at me again. “Can I trust you, Luke?”
I could not speak. I just nodded.
“Take this, then.”
He groped in the pocket under his sash—his hand was shaking violently—took out a letter, and put it into my hands. I remember noticing even then what a fat letter it was.
“Go down to the shop at once, and give it to her. Will you?”
I nodded once more.
He stroked my head, put a hand on my shoulder, turned me about, and watched me go.
It was blazing noon, and the road was white and dusty. I was panting before I reached the shop. Full of fear and misgiving, I pushed open the door and went in. The Angel was there, sitting on the counter, all dressed up for the street. She was swinging her shapely legs to and fro in anguish, and sobbing bitterly into a blue handkerchief.
She looked up as I came in, and her face changed. I thought she was going to reproach me, and I put the letter into her hand before she had time to say a word.
She snatched it, and frantically tore it open. It held a bundle of paper money, and a short note, a few lines only. She read the note in a couple of seconds, and was transformed. Her eyes flashed with light like the sun on a river. She sprang to the floor, seized me in her arms, pressed me against her wildly beating heart, and kissed me on the lips. Into that long, salt, scalding kiss went the full strength of her joy and the ardour of her passion. The kiss drowned me, it drained me to the dregs, it left a mark on me somewhere that I have never lost. But I understood, young though I was, and my love of women dates from that hour.
The story should perhaps end there, but life is no respecter of patterns. Twenty-five years later, in a big store in the Midlands, my eye was caught by a handsome and beautifully dressed shopwalker. He had put on a little weight about the middle, but his hair was black and curly as ever, his cheeks as red, and he still had the cleft in his chin. Every woman in the place was conscious of him, as well she might be.
He never recognised me, but I knew him at once. I watched him for a while, and then, as I was leaving, and passed close to him, a thing happened which I would give half a world to undo. What devil tempted me God only knows, but as I passed, I whispered to him.
“Well, Brother So-and-So,” I said. “And how is the Angel?”
As I spoke, I looked in his face, and was shot back twenty-five years, for it was racked with a dozen emotions, as when I had seen it last. I went on, and reached the swing doors. As I was passing through, he recovered himself.
“Hi!” I heard him shout after me. “One minute, sir——”
But the devil had me still. I went through the door, and never saw him again.
But to return to the Spectre, and to the episode which was the climax of this stormy opening to my school career.
There was one boy of whom I have as yet said nothing. His name was Caldwell, he was somewhere between sixteen and seventeen years old, and very powerfully built, and he came from Wexford. He was a calm, quiet individual, addicted to whistling in moments of stress—and very beautifully he could whistle, low, soft, liquid notes like a flute. Rumour had it that his father was a blacksmith, and that the boy got his great strength from helping at the forge.
One terrible stormy night in winter, when all the winds of Ireland howled outside, we poor little devils sat benumbed in a row, trying to concentrate our frozen faculties upon our books. The study hall was a long room, with a high ceiling and smoke-begrimed wooden rafters, from which dangled uneasily some twenty oil lamps with white delft shades, swinging each upon three brass chains. By the end of an evening, several of these lamps were smoking, or had broken chimneys, or reeked of the paraffin which as often as not dripped from them. Their light was indifferent, and they smelled abominably. On each side of the hall were tall windows, old as the monastery and rickety, and through a hundred crevices a perpetual gale blew from that vast countryside, which was bleak and had never a tree to break the force of the wind.
It seemed to be always winter in that grim room, which might have been part of a prison, save that on each wall were a dozen or more hideous oleographs, the greater part of them devoted to martyrdoms, blood and torture. There was the death of the good man, smug and pious, and that of the bad man, the latter event taking place on a red bed surrounded by a grinning congregation of jet-black devils. There was a St. Sebastian, of effeminate appearance, wearing an inane smile, his carcase a pincushion for arrows, cascades of blood descending from his wounds, while several benign-looking foreigners stood by, with very long spears, very large stones, and an absurd-looking yellow dog. In the background were Caesar Borgia with a ladder, a city of Euclidian design, and, above the roofs, what I took to be a species of Cupid, flatulently blowing white fleecy clouds across a menacing sky. There was a St. Patrick, with pastoral crook and mitre, and a distinctly peevish e
xpression, hanging in a golden frame with a round tower as his drop scene. Another oleograph showed a tortured, brown-bearded Christ, fastened to a broken white pillar, being scourged by four laughing Romans, with immaculate pigeons strutting at the base of the pillar. This picture hung close beside my desk, and I knew every detail of it by heart.
On the night in question, the crazy oil lamps were swaying on their chains, the windows were rattling like doom, and we shivered in the throes of tomorrow under the pitiless lizard gaze of the Spectre. Cold seemed as powerless to touch him as heat. He stood motionless.
Suddenly we heard, even above the clamour of the elements, that savage intake of breath, like the hiss of a snake, which meant he was about to strike. He tilted forward from the rostrum, and swept down the room, swinging his heavy beeswaxed cane. Coming to the end of my desk, he seized the luckless Frankie, who, happily oblivious of the cold, was fast asleep over the wrong book.
Without a change of countenance or a flicker of his deadly eyes, he hauled the shrieking boy up on the rostrum, and flogged and slashed him dreadfully. Frankie’s yells nearly drove us mad. When I was on the point of screaming with pent-up hysteria, I heard a liquid, flute-like whistling which made my spine creep. Caldwell rose, went calmly over to the door, and locked it. We all stiffened with amazement, and turned to watch him. He strode up the hall, still whistling, and mounted the rostrum. Taking no notice of the Spectre or his victim, he turned and faced us. Instantly his unnatural calm was wiped out. His face went scarlet, his tousled hair bristled, and his lips quivered. He seemed tremendous, bigger even than he was. He opened his mouth to speak to us, when the Spectre left off beating Frankie for a moment.
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