The monsignor laughed. “Don't think I didn't consider it myself, Frank. But I think you've got to trust fellows. Even young Turks.”
Darragh ate his chops automatically and without the relish the ration coupon which had gone to buy them seemed to justify. It was considered that sermons should deal with the mysteries of faith in the abstract, and with biblical tales or events from the lives of saints. Many priests thought it best to avoid the individual, the anecdotal, the concrete. It was considered dangerous to talk about local illustrative cases, to use the suburban instance as a parable. The rule was sometimes broken to permit a priest to denounce a particular book, generally one he had not read, or a film—one he had not seen, or had seen and left at the end of the first reel. A politician might be denounced, although that had become more dangerous recently, since the war seemed to have driven people's opinions in various directions and produced in them an electoral willfulness. But beyond that you stuck for your examples to the citizens of Christ's Aramaic-speaking locale. The prodigal son, the wedding feast at Cana, Christ walking on the water. And, of course, the woman taken in adultery.
When the monsignor was vanished to his whist, Darragh went to the church for Benediction and to hear evening confessions. Though he encountered anxious souls, souls who thought they were damned for some lie they had told, some theft of a few pounds of steel or timber or food, some lunge driven by lust, he gratefully absolved them all. Their sins were human ones and radiant with absolvability. The last of them had been absolved, indeed, by half past eight. An idea about a protector, a bodyguard, had come to him as well. He went back to the presbytery, changed out of his soutane into his suit, with his stock and clerical collar, and set out down Homebush Road towards the railway line. He wondered if observant policemen were already on his track, but could see nothing much happening here. Pedestrians were rarely thick on these streets, and the now genuinely cold Saturday-night air hung slackly over the wide pavements. If, before the encounters of the Coral Sea, there had been a lack of electric fear in the air, now there was a lack of joy at partial salvation. It all felt as it did before—ageless, and unimpressed by events.
In the Crescent he looked for the police car waiting under the railway embankment. He did not see one. Had they given up the watch? He entered the gate of what he thought of, even though she was now gone from it, as Mrs. Flood's house. Ross Trumble answered the door, which was what he had hoped. He wore a woolly jumper and, hulking and good-looking, did resemble a revolutionary. It was impossible to believe that he was 4F. He seemed to Darragh acutely muscular. And he was sober tonight.
He was taken aback to see Darragh.
“You've come to see Bert?” he decided.
“No, Ross. You.”
“Me? Jesus, you're a game one. The scandalous priest, eh? Did the police spot you on your way past?”
“I don't think they're there tonight. I don't know.”
“Anyhow,” said Ross Trumble, his face cracking into a smile, a feature he had not yet displayed in any of his past meetings with Darragh, “this'll confuse the buggers, won't it? Two suspects meeting. And what a two!” The idea tickled him. “I mean,” he said, “they had to separate us last time.”
He laid his eyes in comradely amusement on Darragh.
“Come in then. Bert's out at a World War I get-together.” People had now begun to call Darragh's father's Great War that. World War I. “I'll make you a cup of tea. Or pour you a beer.”
“I'd like a beer, in fact,” said Darragh. He thought of it as training for the next night, and as a consolation for the harsh day just past. They went through to the kitchen, where Trumble switched off a radio. It had been broadcasting from the Trocadero in town, Andrews Sisters—style performers singing patriotic songs. “It's a brown slouch hat with its side turned up, And it means the world to me . . .” Ross Trumble seemed embarrassed to have such trite lyrics emanating from his radio, or Bert's. He switched the instrument off and went to the ice chest, from which he took out a half-drunk bottle of beer. He found a clean glass in a dresser, held it up to the light, considered it adequate, and poured.
“Beer, the working man's religion,” he said. He shrugged. “Just a thought. Not trying to rile you.” He laughed again. “Given that up as a bad bloody job since the other night. Sit down.”
It seemed that the blows thrown and the attention of police had by some mysterious formula made them friends. Trumble's gibes were comradely now, for which Darragh was grateful. He half-smiled and began to drink the oaty dinner ale, tasting the gracious grain in it, and feeling a normal fellow.
“Did you get into much trouble with bishops and people like that?” asked Trumble.
“They sent me on a retreat.”
“A retreat?” He obviously and with some justice thought of the term in a military sense.
“You go away to a monastery, keep silent, pray, and have sessions with a spiritual adviser.”
“And you were in the middle of that when the story came out in the papers?”
Darragh said yes.
“So it isn't all beer and skittles, this feeding people the opium of religion.”
“I don't mind admitting it's been pretty hard lately.”
Trumble himself had sat now. He lifted his own half-drunk glass of beer. “I'm supposed to be happy when things go a bit bad for servants of the system. Priests and coppers. But it's different when you get to know somebody.”
Darragh thought that Trumble the revolutionary must, in fact, be a kind of sentimentalist, since he considered having a police-interrupted tussle with another man to be a valid form of getting to know him. There was a sort of innocence in this, and Darragh was surprised but strangely cheered by it.
“We're just ordinary blokes, you know,” said Darragh. “Some of us very ordinary. And we don't see ourselves as you see us.”
“How do you see yourself?”
“As a servant of the people.”
“That is interesting,” said Trumble. “When you bloody think about it.”
“Why?” asked Darragh.
“Well, you see, it makes you a poor bloody exploited sod as well.”
“I don't feel exploited,” said Darragh, though the temptation was there. “I became a priest of my own free will. No one put a gun to my head.”
“No. I bet they just told you you'd go to hell if you didn't.”
“I had a profound desire for it,” said Darragh.
“Yeah. But they conditioned you, you see. They raised you to want it.”
“And did they raise you to want to be what you are?”
“My father bloody did, though I didn't see so much of him. He was without a job five years. Traveled round region to region by foot, and riding the rattler. They kept them on the road, town to town, but they didn't give them the means to travel. Railway police hunted them out from under the carriages. A great system, eh? Some fathers said, ‘Become a lawyer or a doctor, boy, because you'll never be hard up.' But my father said when we met up again: ‘Change the world so that you can be a worker, and don't have to be a doctor or a lawyer to be safe.' That was my education. It made some damn sense.”
“Everyone's childhood makes sense when you're in it,” Darragh said. “That's when the world is simple.”
“And my world was simply bloody awful,” Trumble told him with a grin, but without the note of accusation which had marked their earlier discourses. “If you blokes are the servants of the people, where were you? You were living in your presbyteries, weren't you, and we were lining up at the kitchen door.”
“I was at high school. My father was out of work too. He told me the Church didn't always act well. Some priests locked themselves in against the poor. But the Sisters of Charity were handing out tea and soup to anyone in the side streets. Just for the pure humanity of it.”
They were getting deeply into Kate Heggarty territory—social justice, “Rerum Novarum,” Marx, dignity. As much as these matters interested Darragh at normal times,
they could not be permitted to dominate this kitchen conversation. Darragh took a long sip of the beer, and felt the first onset of deceptive, effervescent brotherliness in his blood. The thought struck him that men drank to achieve this platform of goodwill. The impulse itself was noble if benighted. His father had had a few episodes with whisky during days of unemployment, hiding it in the cistern of the toilet. It was his attempt to mold the world down to a graspable state. But spirits made Mr. Darragh sad and aggressive, and broke down the coherence of his character. He became an unshaven stranger with a gap-toothed slash of a mouth who threw an inaccurate punch at Darragh's mother and told Darragh to fucking grow up, that his mother was making him a lily-fart. Darragh had especially noticed his own liking for liquor on the tennis Mondays. I'll have to be careful, he thought, or I'll become one of those red-nosed priests with the broken facial capillaries of the boozer—or, as they called it, the Tipperary tan. But none of that was as pressing an issue as Fratelli.
“Look, Ross,” Darragh said, leaning forward, getting down to business. “I'm not a soldier because I'm a minister of religion, exempt. I believe you're 4F. I'm not saying this in any jingoistic way—I don't want you to go and get killed or anything like that. But it's just, you seemed so strong the other night, when we were having our . . . our little scrum . . . down the street.”
“I am 4F though, fair and square,” said Trumble. “Had tuberculosis. And bad. Part of a lung gone. That's where I met Rosie. Up in the Boddington sanitarium in the Blue Mountains. It's easy to die in a place like that, but I thought, Build yourself up, son! I even chopped wood to the limit of what breath I had. And I wanted to live. Because wars always bring on a revolution, so I knew this one would too, if I could just stick around.”
Darragh was tempted to say, “Perhaps it'll be a revolution against Stalin,” but he didn't want to get into that argument.
“So I can hold my own,” Trumble concluded.
“I think you can too.” Once more a polemic urge surfaced in Darragh to ask, “Can you really imagine the whole of Australia Communist?” But that would alter the direction of the conversation. He said instead, “I came because I want you to do me a favor.”
“Here we go,” said Trumble with a broad smile, but again it had a jolliness to it.
Darragh told him about Private Aspillon. At least Trumble believed in the universal brotherhood of men, said Darragh. He and Darragh had that in common.
“But,” said Trumble, “you've got to ask whether it's wise for a black man to strike up an acquaintance with a white woman. It's all bloody right in theory, but . . .”
“But society doesn't like it?”
“Bloody right,” agreed Trumble, suddenly like a gatekeeper of the known world.
Darragh expanded on his experience with Aspillon, leaving out the more pious aspects. Aspillon was now in a military prison, and Darragh claimed to be interested in his welfare. So he was to meet an American MP in a pub in the Cross, and he wasn't sure about the fellow, not after the events in the backyard in Lidcombe. He wanted to make sure he got home safely. Would Trumble consider coming? Except, said Darragh, he wasn't asking Trumble to take part in the dialogue. If he wouldn't mind sitting across the room, and just keeping an eye on things. They'd go into the Cross by train and bus. “And I don't want to come home too late,” said Darragh. “I always have the early Mass Monday.”
“Sounds like exploitation to me,” said Trumble with an enthusiastic grin. But the invitation had fascinated, and as far as Darragh could tell, delighted him. “Look, not only will we have a good night out on this Yank, and not only will I keep an eye on you, we'll get a cab home. It'll be easy to get a cab home if a Yank's with us.”
“Well, I'll pay for it,” said Darragh, in a rash burst of gratitude to Trumble. It would make a massive dent in his savings from the one pound ten shillings the archdiocese paid him a week.
“No,” said Trumble. “I can handle it. It's good pay at the brickworks now. The capitalists want what we produce.”
He winked, and so it was agreed that the priest and the brickworker would meet at half past six on Sunday evening, at browned-out Homebush railway station, and it was Trumble who seemed more concerned about guilt by association than Darragh. “One thing,” he said. “Let's both catch it as individuals, and link up once it's on the way. I don't want to shock any of your parish people.”
“My parish people?” asked Darragh. “Or yours?”
Even so, Trumble seemed so hugely tickled that Darragh himself felt partially appeased for the dreadful afternoon, partly reassured that the human species could be repaired and redeemed. In that spirit, he let Trumble pour him a second glass of beer.
XXII
As the monsignor had foretold, even Darragh's half-past-six Mass, a Mass recited in all-green vestments and designed to accommodate the early risers—the penitential, the insomniacs—was considerably more crowded than usual. Some 350 or more of the faithful, he would have guessed. The sermon he had prepared the previous night had been enriched and armored by his alliance with Trumble.
The gospel of the Mass, which Darragh read from St. Margaret's pulpit of paneled native cedar, seemed crowded with omens and significance, perhaps to too great a degree. Christ, smelling bitter persecution in the air, warns his followers, “They will put you out of the synagogues: yea, the hour cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he does a service to God. . . .”
He surveyed his congregation. Fortunately, not too many families at this time of morning. They were certainly attentive. Their frowns were the frowns of goodwill. He addressed them as priests were meant to. “My dearly beloved brethren.” He began to speak of the incident of the adulteress, as related by St. John. Jesus was on the Mount of Olives, approaching the Temple of Jerusalem, whose stones would be in one generation tumbled by the Roman army. And the “scribes and Pharisees,” the members of priestly factions in the Temple, brought him a woman who had been arrested for adultery and said, to test him, that Moses's law decreed this woman must be stoned to death. “But what sayest thou?” Christ bent and wrote in the dust of the ground, as if He did not hear them, but they kept pressing Him—they wanted his answer as potential evidence against Him. Then He rose and famously said, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” Darragh could tell by the pale upturned faces below him that, of course—no fools—they caught his drift. They knew he spoke about the judgment which had been brought down on him by the press, and the fiercer one which had been brought down on Kate Heggarty.
“Stoned to death,” he said. “We're used to that term. We first heard it as children, at a stage when we were involved in the stone fights boys enjoy, and it did not seem too terrible a death. Consider how ferocious it was to be in the center of all the hurled stones, though, to have the consciousness slowly bludgeoned out of you, and then at last, under the hail of rocks, to breathe for the last time, and to be still. Now the men who threw the stones felt gratified, and went back in that state to their homes, unaware they had been savages.”
The congregation looked very concerned. Some seemed ready to weep in compassion. Others were agog. In the back pews one of the few children was hushed.
“The stone-throwing impulse is very strong in humans,” he intoned fairly plainly, a banal but authoritative idea since it came from him. “The papers are very good at it.” There was a faint knowing chuckle. “The Sunday Telegraph are experts.” A relieved uproar of laughter enabled parishioners to glance at each other and grin. Darragh felt a little abashed, since it revealed they had all read the article about him, a thought which was for a moment oppressive. “Christ realized that men with lumps of granite in their fists were not the best ministers to deal with the woman's sin. A woman who died in our parish in the past few weeks has been harshly judged in the manner of the Pharisees. It is all too human of us to judge her, because she paid the excessive price of being murdered for her sin. I believe that this woman needed our compassion and
our considered help. We were not able to aid her in her daily life, to prevent her undertaking an association which has had this horrible result. Christ, who saved the woman so long ago, might have left the saving of this woman to us, particularly to her priest, and there's an extent to which we, and I, might have failed.
“I cannot think it right to judge her savagely after the fact. Let us remember that had she not suffered this dreadful result, if the breath had not been crushed from her, we would have known nothing about her supposed sin, and our judgment would be mild. It is the murderer who is the sinner. We should not burden her memory with the murderous guilt, any more than Christ saw fit to burden the woman taken in adultery with the guilt of a transgression which involved both a woman and a man.”
He felt a sudden tiredness, and, like air from a tire, the power went out of his oratory. He closed with the normal remarks about the services the faithful could provide the dead through their prayers. “May their souls, and all the souls of the faithful departed, rest in peace, Amen.”
That same sermon, in essence, he gave again at the eight-o'clock Mass, before a congregation containing more young families. Only children made noises during it.
As usual, he hoped to finish the eight-o'clock Mass by seven minutes to nine at the latest, to ensure that he had unvested and had left the sacristy by a few minutes to nine, allowing Monsignor Carolan some moments of silent reflection before he went out to the altar to say the nine-o'clock Mass. But the number of people receiving communion kept Darragh a minute or so over, and he was conscious as he left the altar and went into the sacristy that he might encounter an irritated monsignor.
The monsignor stood at the vestment bench in his white alb, with a cincture on, and a maniple at his wrist, while altar boys strained to lift an emerald thread-of-gold-decorated chasuble over his head and arrange it on his shoulders. Darragh and his altar boys edged up to the long vestment drawers, and parallel to his parish priest he began disrobing, taking off his own chasuble as the monsignor in turn assumed his. He undid his white cincture and divested himself of his stole, kissing the cross embroidered on it.