Part 16 (1/2)

XI

_From Father Oliver Gogarty to Miss Nora Glynn._

'GARRANARD, BOHOLA,

'_March_ 12, 19--.

'A long time has pa.s.sed without your hearing from me, and I am sure you must have said more than once: ”Well, that priest has more sense than I gave him credit for. He took the hint. He understood that it would be useless for us to continue to write long letters to each other about remorse of conscience and Mr. Poole's criticism of the Bible.” But the sight of my handwriting will call into question the opinion you have formed of my good sense, and you will say: ”Here he is, beginning it all over again.” No, I am not. I am a little ashamed of my former letters, and am writing to tell you so. My letters, if I write any, will be quite different in the future, thanks to your candour. Your letter from Rapallo cured me; like a surgeon's knife, it took out the ulcer that was eating my life away. The expression will seem exaggerated, I know; but let it remain. You no doubt felt that I was in ignorance of my own state of feelings regarding you, and you wrote just such a letter as would force me to look into my heart and to discover who I really was. You felt that you could help me to some knowledge of myself by telling me about yourself.

'The shock on reading your confession--for I look upon your Rapallo letter as one--was very great, for on reading it I felt that a good deal that I had written to you about the salvation of your soul was inspired, not by any pure fear that I had done anything that might lose a soul to G.o.d, but by pure selfishness. I did not dare to write boldly that I loved yourself, and would always love you; I wore a mask and a disguise, and in order to come to terms with myself I feel it necessary to confess to you; otherwise all the suffering I have endured would be wasted.

'But this is not all my confession; worse still remains. I have discovered that when I spoke against you in church, and said things that caused you to leave the parish, I did not do so, as I thought, because I believed that the morality of my parish must be maintained at any cost.

I know now that jealousy--yes, sensual jealousy--prompted me. And when I went to my sisters to ask them to appoint you to the post of music-teacher in their school, I did not do so for their sake, but for my own, because I wished to have you back in the parish. But I do not wish you to think that when I wrote about atonement I wrote what I knew to be untrue. I did not; the truth was hidden from me. Nor did I wish to get you back to the parish in order that I might gratify my pa.s.sion. All these things were very vague, and I didn't understand myself until now.

I never had any experience of life till I met you. And is it not curious that one should know so little of one's self, for I might have gone down to my grave without knowing how false I was at heart, if I had not been stricken down with a great illness.

'One day, Catherine told me that the lake was frozen over, and, as I had been within doors a long while, she advised me to go out and see the boys sliding on the ice. Her advice put an idea into my head, that I might take out my skates and skate recklessly without trying to avoid the deeper portions where the ice was likely to be thin, for I was weary of life, and knowing that I could not go back upon the past, and that no one would ever love me, I wished to bring my suffering to an end. You will wonder why I did not think of the sufferings that I might have earned for myself in the next world. I had suffered so much that I could think of nothing but the present moment. G.o.d was good, and he saved me, for as I stood irresolute before a piece of ice which I knew wouldn't bear me, I felt a great sickness creeping over me. I returned home, and for several days the doctor could not say whether I would live or die.

You remember Catherine, my servant? She told me that the only answer the doctor would give her was that if I were not better within a certain time there would be no hope of my recovery. At the end of the week he came into my room. Catherine was waiting outside, and I hear that she fell on her knees to thank G.o.d when the doctor said: ”Yes, he is a little better; if there's no relapse he'll live.”

'After a severe illness one is alone with one's self, the whole of one's life sings in one's head like a song, and listening to it, I learned that it was jealousy that prompted me to speak against you, and not any real care for the morality of my parish. I discovered, too, that my moral ideas were not my own. They were borrowed from others, and badly a.s.similated. I remembered, too, how at Maynooth the tradition was always to despise women, and in order to convince myself I used to exaggerate this view, and say things that made my fellow-students look at me askance, if not with suspicion. But while dozing through long convalescent hours many things. .h.i.therto obscure to me became clear, and it seems now to me to be clearly wrong to withhold our sympathy from any side of life. It seems to me that it is only by our sympathy we can do any good at all. G.o.d gave us our human nature; we may misuse and degrade our nature, but we must never forget that it came originally from G.o.d.

'What I am saying may not be in accordance with current theology, but I am not thinking of theology, but of the things that were revealed to me during my sickness. It was through my fault that you met Mr. Walter Poole, and I must pray to G.o.d that he will bring you back to the fold. I shall pray for you both. I wish you all happiness, and I thank you for the many kind things you have said, for the good advice you have given me. You are quite right: I want a change. You advise me to go to Italy, and you are right to advise me to go there, for my heart yearns for Italy. But I dare not go; for I still feel that if I left my parish I should never return to it; and if I were to go away and not return a great scandal would be caused, and I am more than ever resolved not to do anything to grieve the poor people, who have been very good to me, and whose interests I have neglected this long while.

'I send this letter to Beechwood Hall, where you will find it on your return. As I have already said, you need not answer it; no good will come by answering it. In years to come, perhaps, when we are both different, we may meet again.

'OLIVER GOGARTY.'

_From Miss Nora Glynn to Father Oliver Gogarty._

'IMPERIAL HOTEL, CAIRO, EGYPT,

'_May_ 5, 19--.

'DEAR FATHER GOGARTY,

'By the address on the top of this sheet of paper you will see that I have travelled a long way since you last heard from me, and ever since your letter has been following me about from hotel to hotel. It is lucky that it has caught me up in Egypt, for we are going East to visit countries where the postal service has not yet been introduced. We leave here to-morrow. If your letter had been a day later it would have missed me; it would have remained here unclaimed--unless, indeed, we come back this way, which is not likely. You see what a near thing it was; and as I have much to say to you, I should be sorry not to have had an opportunity of writing.

'Your last letter put many thoughts into my head, and made me anxious to explain many things which I feel sure you do not know about my conduct since I left London, and the letters I have written to you. Has it not often seemed strange to you that we go through life without ever being able to reveal the soul that is in us? Is it because we are ashamed, or is it that we do not know ourselves? It is certainly a hard task to learn the truth about ourselves, and I appreciate the courage your last letter shows; you have faced the truth, and having learned it, you write it to me in all simplicity. I like you better now, Oliver Gogarty, than I ever did before, and I always liked you. But it seems to me that to allow you to confess yourself without confessing myself, without revealing the woman's soul in me as you have revealed the man's soul in yourself, would be unworthy.

'Our destinies got somehow entangled, there was a wrench, the knot was broken, and the thread was wound upon another spool. The unravelling of the piece must have perplexed you, and you must have wondered why the shape and the pattern should have pa.s.sed suddenly away into thread again, and then, after a lapse of time, why the weaving should have begun again.

'You must have wondered why I wrote to you, and you must have wondered why I forgave you for the wrong you did me. I guessed that our friends.h.i.+p when I was in the parish was a little more than the platonic friends.h.i.+p that you thought it was, so when you turned against me, and were unkind, I found an excuse for you. When my hatred was bitterest, I knew somehow, at the back of my mind--for I only allowed myself to think of it occasionally--that you acted from--there is but one word--jealousy (not a pretty word from your point of view); and it must have shocked you, as a man and as a priest, to find that the woman whom you thought so much of, and whose society gave you so much pleasure (I know the times we pa.s.sed together were as pleasant to you as they were to me), should suddenly without warning appear in a totally different light, and in a light which must have seemed to you mean and sordid. The discovery that I was going to have a baby threw me suddenly down from the pedestal on which you had placed me; your idol was broken, and your feelings--for you are one of those men who feel deeply--got the better of you, and you indulged in a few incautious words in your church.

'I thought of these things sometimes, not often, I admit, in the little London lodging where I lived till my baby was born, seeing my gown in front getting shorter, and telling lies to good Mrs. Dent about the husband whom I said was abroad, whom I was expecting to return. That was a miserable time, but we won't talk of it any more. When Father O'Grady showed me the letter that you wrote him, I forgave you in a way. A woman forgives a man the wrongs he does when these wrongs are prompted by jealousy, for, after all, a woman is never really satisfied if a man is not a little jealous. His jealousy may prove inconvenient, and she may learn to hate it and think it an ugly thing and a crooked thing, but, from her point of view, love would not be complete without it.

'I smiled, of course, when I got your letter telling me that you had been to your sisters to ask them if they would take me as a schoolmistress in the convent, and I walked about smiling, thinking of your long innocent drive round the lake. I can see it all, dear man that you are, thinking you could settle everything, and that I would return to Ireland to teach barefooted little children their Catechism and their A, B, C. How often has the phrase been used in our letters! It was a pretty idea of yours to go to your sisters; you did not know then that you cared for me--you only thought of atonement. I suppose we must always be deceived. Mr. Poole says self-deception is the very law of life. We live enveloped in self-deception as in a film; now and again the film breaks like a cloud and the light s.h.i.+nes through. We veil our eyes, for we do not like the light. It is really very difficult to tell the truth, Father Gogarty; I find it difficult now to tell you why I wrote all these letters. Because I liked you? Yes, and a little bit because I wished you to suffer; I don't think I shall ever get nearer the truth than that. But when I asked you to meet us abroad, I did so in good faith, for you are a clever man, and Mr. Poole's studies would please you. At the back of my mind I suppose I thought to meet him would do you good; I thought, perhaps, that he might redeem you from some conventions and prejudices. I don't like priests; the priest was the only thing about you I never liked. Was it in some vain, proselytizing idea that I invited you? Candidly, I don't know, and I don't think I ever shall. We know so very little about this world that it seems to me waste of time to think about the next. My notion is that the wisest plan is to follow the mood of the moment, with an object more or less definite in view.... Nothing is worth more than that. I am at the present moment genuinely interested in culture, and therefore I did not like at all the book you sent me, ”The Imitation,” and I wrote to tell you to put it by, to come abroad and see pictures and statues in a beautiful country where people do not drink horrid porter, but nice wine, and where Sacraments are left to the old people who have nothing else to interest them. I suppose it was a cruel, callous letter, but I did not mean it so; I merely wanted to give you a glimpse of my new life and my new point of view. As for this letter, Heaven knows how you will take it--whether you will hate me for it or like me; but since you wrote quite frankly to me, confessing yourself from end to end, I feel bound to tell you everything I know about myself--and since I left Ireland I have learned a great deal about myself and about life. Perhaps I should have gone on writing to you if Mr. Poole had not one day said that no good would come of this long correspondence; he suspected I was a disturbing influence, and, as you were determined to live in Ireland, he said it were better that you should live in conventions and prejudices, without them your life would be impossible.

'Then came your last letter, and it showed me how right Mr. Poole was.

Nothing remains now but to beg your forgiveness for having disturbed your life. The disturbance is, perhaps, only a pa.s.sing one. You may recover your ideas--the ideas that are necessary to you--or you may go on discovering the truth, and in the end may perhaps find a way whereby you may leave your parish without causing scandal. To be quite truthful, that is what I hope will happen. However this may be, I hope if we ever meet again it will not be till you have ceased to be a priest. But all this is a long way ahead. We are going East, and shall not be back for many months; we are going to visit the buried cities in Turkestan. I do not know if you have ever heard about these cities. They were buried in sand somewhere about a thousand years ago, and some parts have been disinterred lately. Vaults were broken into in search of treasure. Gold and precious stones were discovered, but far more valuable than the gold and silver, so says Mr. Poole, are certain papyri now being deciphered by the learned professors of Berlin.