Chapter XVIII: The Priest

The crisis of the fever came upon Georgia so suddenly that she had lapsed into semi-consciousness before the arrival of Father Hervey. She was able, in making her confession to him, barely to gasp out a few broken sentences of contrition.

He anointed with holy oil her eyes, ears, nostrils, lips, hands and feet, absolving her in the name of the Trinity from those sins which she truly repented.

When at last she came out of the shadow, her mother believed that it was the priest even more than the doctors who had saved her, for it is taught that the reception of Extreme Unction may restore health to the body when the same is beneficial to the soul.

A few days later the priest came again to see her and was amazed at the rapidity of her convalescence.

"You're out of the woods this time, Georgia," he said, "sure enough. But I can tell you you had us frightened." He spoke with just the barest shade of a tip of a brogue, too slight to indicate in print.

His coat was shiny, his trousers slightly frayed at the bottom, and his shoes had been several times half-soled. A parish priest, throughout his life he had kept to the vow of personal poverty as faithfully as a Jesuit.

He stayed for half an hour and made himself charming. He asked the nurse not to leave the room, saying that he needed an audience. He had some new stories, he said, and he wanted to test them, which he couldn't do on Georgia alone, she was so solemn. Besides, she was almost sure to hash them up in repeating them, and he had a reputation to preserve. There was a shepherd in County Clare whose wife was from County Mayo, with the head of the color of a fox, inside and out. And so forth.

First the women smiled with him, then laughed, then roared. His touch was sure, his shading delicate, his technique perfected. He had them and he held them. It was excellent medicine for the sick he gave them.

Then he told them a little parish gossip of wedding banns he thought he would shortly be requested to publish. His eyes twinkled at Georgia's astonished "You don't say--well, what she sees in him----" And he finished his pleasant visit with a couple of little anecdotes, each with a moral subtly introduced; simple tales of heroism and self-sacrifice that had lately come under his notice.

When he arose to go Georgia and the nurse bent their heads. He offered a short little prayer, gave them his blessing and departed.

He had not said a word in a serious way to Georgia of her affairs. But she knew that he was merely postponing.

Before his decisive interview with her he prayed earnestly for strength; for strength rather than guidance, for he felt no shade of doubt that the path which he would urge her to take was the right one. The Church had pointed it out long ago, and that settled it. He never questioned the wisdom or the inspiration of the great policies of the Church. He was none of your modernists, questioners and babblers; he was a veteran soldier, a fighting private in the army which will make no peace but a victor's.

"Georgia," he began, "do you feel strong enough for a serious talk? For if you don't I will come later."

She was sitting up in bed. Her skin had the translucent pallor of one whose life has hung in the balance. Her hair, braided and coiled about her head, had lost its peculiar gloss and become dry and brittle.

"Yes, Father; I am strong enough. As well have it over with now as any time."

There was more of defiance in her words than in her heart, for she could not help being a little afraid of this gentle, gray old man with the Roman collar. Since her childhood he had stood in her mind for strange power and mystery. Even in her most rebellious days before her sickness she had not been willing to confront him. She had evaded him, run away from him. Now she could not run away.

"I have seen Jim since I was here last," said he, "and----"

"Father, I know what you're going to say--and a reconciliation is impossible.

"You know that he has stopped drinking?"

"Yes, I heard so."

"It is true. He looks fine, fine. Brown and strong."

"I didn't think he ever could do it," said she, shaking her head. "He is fighting a battle he has lost so often."

"There is none who could help him so much in his struggle as you."

"Oh, there," she answered quickly and bitterly, "I think you are mistaken. He has paid very little attention to me or my wishes for four or five years past."

"Then," said the priest, "he has learned his lesson, for now he depends on you more than on any other person."

She did not answer, but closed her eyes and clenched her fists as tightly as she could, summoning her will to resist. But she realized that her will, like her body, was not in health. The sick bed is the priest's harvest time.

"My child," he said gently, "there is a human soul struggling for its salvation. Will you help or hinder it?"

"I do not think that is quite a fair way to put it."

"Not fair? With all my soul I believe it to be true. And, remember, in helping him to his salvation you are bringing your own nearer."

"But must we consider everything, everything from the standpoint of salvation? Of course, I want to go to Heaven when I die, but I want to be as happy as I can here on earth, too. And that's impossible if I live with Jim."

"If you had a child," he asked patiently, as if going clear back to the beginning again with a pupil that could not learn easily, "and he said to you, 'Mother, I don't want to go to school, for it makes me unhappy and I want to be as happy as I can,' would you let him have his way?" He paused, but she did not answer, so he went on to make his point clearer. "Of course you wouldn't if you loved your child. You would make him undergo discipline and accept instruction, if you wanted him to be a fine, strong, brave man. Our life on earth is but our school days--our preparation for the greater life to come. And we are not always allowed to seek immediate happiness any more than little children are."

She felt that she was being overcome in argument by the priest, as everyone must be who accepts his fundamental premise, namely, that he is more intimately acquainted with the secrets of life and death than laymen are.

But far below the reach of argument and theological dialectics, which are surface things, from the deep springs of her life the increasing warning flowed up to her consciousness that it was the abomination of a slave to embrace where she did not love.

"Father," she said, not trying to argue any longer, but just to make him see, "Oh, don't you understand? Man and wife are so close together--like that." She placed her two palms together before her in the attitude of prayer.

He raised his hand solemnly, to pronounce that phrase which perhaps more than any other has influenced human destinies, "_And they shall be two in one flesh_."

"But to live so close with a man you don't love or care for, oh, that is vile, utterly, utterly vile."

He could not entirely sympathize with the intensity of her point of view. If one's earthly love did not turn out as well as the dreams of it, in that it merely resembled other phases of mortal existence, to be submitted to. He knew many married couples that fell out at times, but if they tried to make the best of things as they were, on the whole they got along pretty well. He was inclined to deprecate the modern tendency to invest with too much dignity the varying shades of erotic emotion. It was one of the things which led to divorce--this beatification of earthly, fleshly love.

Had not the highest and holiest lives been led in the entire absence of it, by its ruthless extirpation? Not merely saints, martyrs and great popes, but ordinary priests like himself, ordinary nuns like the hospital sisters, had yielded up that side of life freely and been the better for it, more single-minded in the service of the Lord.

He did not believe that a woman who had met with disappointment in this regard should make of it such a monument of woe. Let her contemplate her position with a little more courage and resignation; let her not exaggerate the importance of her own personal feelings; let her yield up her pride and stubbornness and essay to do her duty in that relationship which she had chosen for herself, with the sanction of the Church.

Father Hervey had sat in a confessional box for nearly fifty years. He knew a very great deal about marriage from without. He had seen its glories and its shames reflected in the hearts of thousands. But he never felt its meanings in his own heart, at first hand.

Perhaps if its priesthood were not celibate, the Roman Church would not so unyieldingly insist upon the indissolubility of marriage. But if its priesthood were not celibate, the Roman Church would almost surely lose much of its grip upon the imagination. The mind of the average laymen, Catholic or not, cannot but be powerfully moved by the spectacle of a body of educated men, leaders in their communities, voluntarily renouncing the most appealing of human relationships for the sake of a supernatural ideal.

It is because the average man does not and cannot live without women which causes him to regard a priest with a species of awe. Reason as you will about it, justify the married clergy with the words of St. Paul and God's promptings within us, the fact remains that the Roman priest alone does what we can't do, lives as we couldn't live; he alone demonstrates that he is of somewhat different clay; he alone mystifies us; and mystery is the essence of sacerdotalism and authority.

"Georgia," resumed Father Hervey, "if all your pretty dreams have not come true, remember they never do in this life. You must learn to compromise."

"I will compromise, Father--that I will do, but I won't surrender utterly." She drew herself straighter up in bed, leaning forward without the prop of the pillow. Her excitement seemed to invigorate her. "There is another man----"

"Another man?" he asked sternly.

"Yes, but I will give him up. I love him, but I will give him up. On the other side, I will never take Jim back. That is my compromise."

"Is that not something like saying you would not commit murder, but would compromise on stealing?"

"Father, that is the best I can do."

"If he continued in his former evil ways," and there was an unusual tone of pleading rather than command in Father Hervey's voice, "I would not urge you to return to him. It is recognized that there are cases where living apart is advisable. But here is poor Jim, doing his best and needing every helping hand, and you won't extend yours. It is not fair, Georgia, and it is not kind--to him or to yourself."

"I can't go back to him, Father. It is impossible. I hate him when I think of it. I can't live with him again. It is inconceivable. It is a horror to imagine." She averted her head and put her hands before her as if pushing away the image of her husband.

"In the top drawer of the bureau," she said, "you will find some letters--one for every day I have been here. They are from the other man. You may take them if you wish--and I will give you my promise to receive no more from him."

The priest felt as if he were touching unclean things when he took up Stevens' letters. There were more than twenty of them, and most of them were very thick.

"You have read them all?" he asked.

"Yes."

Father Hervey wrapped and tied the letters in a newspaper and rang for an attendant.

"Kindly put this package in the furnace," he directed, "just as it is, without undoing it."

"You have wandered far," he said quietly, then took up his soft black hat and departed without prayer or blessing.

She sank back among her pillows, exhausted from the conflict. She had won, she told herself, she had won, but it was without joy.

She had definitely given up Mason, as she knew she must from the beginning of her sickness, from the day that she entered the hospital. Perhaps that had been part of the price of her getting well.

But she had also stuck to her purpose about Jim. She had refused to violate her natural feelings to the extent of entering into life's deepest intimacies with the one person in all the world whom she most disliked. She had put her will against the priest, the holy man, and she had not given in. She knew that not many women could have done that so openly and so successfully.

He had left her without prayer or blessing. She was not at peace with the Church which meant--her eyes fell upon the sacred picture on the wall opposite--which meant that she was not at peace with The Man whose mournful sufferings and woe had been for her.

Fear slowly came over her.