BESIDE THE SINGING RIVER
Father Letheby was coming home a few
nights ago, a little after twelve o’clock, from
a hurried sick-call, and he came down by the cliffs;
for, as he said, he likes to see the waters when the
Almighty flings his net over their depths, and then
every sea-hillock is a star, and there is a moon in
every hollow of the waves. As he skirted along
the cliff that frowns down into the valleys of the
sea on the one hand, and the valleys of the firs and
poplars on the other, he thought he heard some voices
deep down in the shadows, and he listened. Very
soon the harsh rasp of a command came to his ears,
and he heard: “’Shun! ’verse
arms,” etc. He listened very attentively,
and the tramp of armed men echoed down the darkness;
and he thought he saw the glint of steel here and there
where the moonbeams struck the trees.
“It was a horrible revelation,”
he said, “that here in this quiet place we were
nursing revolution, and had some secret society in
full swing amongst us. But then, as the little
bit of history brought up the past, I felt the tide
of feeling sweeping through me, and all the dread
enthusiasm of the race woke within me:
’There beside the singing
river
That dark mass
of men are seen,
Far above their shining weapons
Hung their own
immortal green!’
But this is a bad business, sir, for
soul and body. What’s to be done?”
“A bad business, indeed,”
I echoed. “But worse for soul than body.
These poor fellows will amuse themselves playing at
soldiers, and probably catching pneumonia; and there
’t will end. You didn’t see any policemen
about?”
“No. They could be hiding unknown to me.”
“Depend upon it, they were interested
spectators of the midnight evolutions. I know
there are some fellows in the village in receipt of
secret service money, and all these poor boys’
names are in the Castle archives. But what is
worse, this means anti-clericalism, and consequently
abstention from Sacraments, and a long train of evils
besides. It must be handled gently.”
“You don’t mean to say,
sir,” he replied, “that that Continental
poison has eaten its way in Ireland?”
“Not to a large extent; but
it is there. There is no use in burying our heads
in the sands and pretending not to see. But we
must act judiciously. A good surgeon never acts
hastily, never hurries over an operation.
Lente, lente.”
I saw a smile faintly rippling around
the corners of his mouth. But I was afraid he
might rush matters here, and it would be dangerous.
But where’s the use? He understood but
one way of acting, to grapple with an abuse
and strangle it. “You drop stones,”
he used to say, “and they turn up armed men.”
How he learned their place of meeting
I don’t know. But Sunday afternoon was
a favorite time for the rebels; and the coursing match
on the black hills and the rabbit hunt in the plantations
were only preliminaries to more important and secret
work. Whether by accident or design, Father Letheby
stumbled on such a meeting about four o’clock
one Sunday afternoon. A high ditch and a strong
palisade of fir trees hid him from sight, and he was
able to hear a good deal, and had no scruple in playing
the listener. This is what he heard. The
village tailor, lame in one leg, and familiarly known
as “Hop-and-go-one,” was the orator:
“Fellow countrymen, de time
for action has come. From ind to ind of the land,
the downtrodden serfs of Ireland are rising in their
millions. Too long have dey been juped by false
pretences; too long have the hirelings of England
chated and decaved them. We know now what a shimmera,
what a fraud, was Home Rule. Our counthry has
been dragged at the tail of English parties, who were
purshuing their own interests. But ’t is
all past. No more constitutional agitation, no
more paceful struggle. Lead will do what fine
speeches didn’t. And if the black militia,
wid dere ordhers from Rome, attimpt this time to interfere,
we know what answer to give dem. De West’s
awake, and ’t isn’t priests will set us
to sleep agin ”
At this juncture the orator was caught
by the nape of the neck, and lifted bodily off the
turf ditch, which was his forum. When he looked
around, and saw who was his captor, he shrieked for
mercy; and Father Letheby, dropping him, as one would
drop a rat, he scurried off as fast as his lame leg
would permit, whilst the priest, turning round to the
stupefied boys, warned them of their folly and madness:
“God knows, boys,” he
said, “I pity you. You are bent on a desperate
and foolish course, the end of which no man can foresee.
I know it is useless to reason with you on the score
of danger; but I warn you that you are violating the
laws of God and the Church, and that no blessing comes
from such action. And yet,” he continued,
placing his hand in the breast-pocket of his coat,
and drawing out a blue official paper, “this
may convince you of your folly; at least, it may convince
you of the fact that there is a traitor and informer
in your midst. Who he is I leave yourselves to
conjecture!”
He read out slowly the name of every
young man that had been sworn in that secret society
in the parish. The young men listened sullenly,
and swore angrily between their teeth. But they
could not deny their betrayal. They were vexed,
humbled, disgraced; but they had to make some defence.
“The priests are always agin
the people,” said one keen-looking fellow, who
had been abroad.
“That’s an utter falsehood,”
said Father Letheby, “and you know it. You
know that priests and people for seven hundred years
have fought side by side the battle of Ireland’s
freedom from civil and religious disabilities.
I heard your own father say how well he remembered
the time when the friar stole into the farmyard at
night, disguised as a pedlar, and he showed me the
cavern down there by the sea-shore where Mass was
said, and the fishermen heard it, as they pretended
to haul in their nets.”
“Thrue enough for you, your
reverence,” said a few others; “’t
is what our fathers, and our fathers’ fathers,
have tould us.”
“And now,” continued Father
Letheby, “look at the consequences of your present
folly. Possible imprisonment in the dungeons of
Portland and Dartmoor; exile to America, enforced
by the threats of prosecution; and the sense of hostility
to the Church, for you know you are breaking the laws.
You dare not go to confession, for you cannot receive
absolution; you are a constant terror to your mothers
and sisters and all at the dictation of
a few scoundrels, who are receiving secret service
money from the government, and a few newspapers that
are run by Freemasons and Jews.”
“Ah, now, your reverence,”
said one of the boys, a litterateur, “you are
drawing the long bow. How could Irish newspapers
be run by Freemasons and Jews?”
“Would you be surprised to hear,”
said Father Letheby, “that all the great Continental
papers are the property of Freemasons and Jews; that
all the rancor and bitterness stirred up against the
Church for the past fifty years has been their work;
that the anti-clerical feeling in Germany and in France
has been carefully originated and fostered by them;
that hatred of the Holy See is their motto; and that
they have got into Ireland. You can see the cloven
foot in the virulent anti-religious and anti-clerical
articles that you read by the light of the fire at
the forge; and yet, the very prayer-books you used
at Mass to-day, and the beads that rolled through
your mothers’ fingers, have been manufactured
by them. But the Irish are always fools, never
more so than now.”
It was a magnificent leap of imagination
on Father Letheby’s part, that which
attributed to Jews and Freemasons the manufacture of
beads and prayer-books on the one hand, and anti-clericalism
on the other. Yet there was truth in what he
had said. Indeed, there were many indications,
as I could point out to him to his surprise, which
proved that the anti-Catholic agencies here in Ireland
were pursuing exactly the same tactics which had led
to the extinguishing of the faith in parts of France
and Italy, namely, the dissemination of
pornographic literature. They know well that
there is but one thing that can destroy Irish faith,
and that is the dissemination of ideas subversive of
Catholic morality. Break down the earthworks that
guard the purity of the nation, and the citadel of
faith is taken. He was very silent all that evening,
as I notice all Irish priests grow grave when this
awful fact, which is under their very eyes, is made
plain to them. It is so easy to look at things
without seeing them. Then, as the full revelation
of this new diablerie dawned upon him, he grew
very angry. I think this is the most charming
thing about my curate, that he is a thorough hater
of everything cunning and concealed, and breaks out
into noble philippics against whatever is foul and
vicious. But I know he will be now on the alert;
and God help any unfortunate that dares to peddle
unwholesome wares under the necklaces and matches of
his basket!
The tailor came duly to report Father
Letheby for the drastic treatment he had received.
He was rather too emphatic in demanding his immediate
removal, and hinting at suspension. In lieu of
that satisfaction, he would immediately institute
proceedings in the Court of Queen’s Bench for
assault and battery, and place the damages at several
thousand pounds. I listened to him patiently,
then hinted that an illiterate fellow like him should
not be making treasonable speeches. He bridled
up at the word “illiterate,” and repudiated
the vile insinuation. He could read and write
as well as any priest in Connaught.
“But you cannot read your own
writing?” I said, tentatively.
“Couldn’t he? Try him!”
I thrust under his eyes his last letter
to the sub-inspector of the district. I thought
he would get a fit of apoplexy.
“Now, you scoundrel,”
I said, folding the letter and placing it beyond reach,
“I forgive you all your deception and treason.
What Father Letheby has got in store for you I cannot
say. But I’ll never forgive you, you most
unscientific and unmathematical artist, for having
given me so many shocking misfits lately, until I
have looked like a scarecrow in a cornfield; even
now you are smelling like a distillery. And tell
me, you ruffian, what right had you to say at Mrs.
Haley’s public house that I was ‘thauto thauto gogical’
in my preaching? If I, with all the privileges
of senility, chose to repeat myself, to drive the truths
of Christianity into the numskulls of this pre-Adamite
village, what is that to you, you ninth
part of a man? Was it not the immortal Homer
that declared that every tailor ”
“For God’s sake, spare
me, your reverence, and I’ll never do it again.”
“Do you promise to cut my garments
mathematically in the future?”
“I do, your reverence.”
He spoke as emphatically as if he were renewing his
baptismal vows at a great mission.
“Do you promise to speak respectfully
of me and my sermons for the future?”
“I do, your reverence.”
“Now, go. Exi, erumpe, evade,
or I’ll turn you into a Sartor Resartus.
I hand you over now, as the judge hands the culprit,
to Father Letheby. Don’t be too much surprised
at eventualities. Do you know, did you ever hear,
what the women of Marblehead did to a certain Floyd
Ireson? Well, go ask Father Letheby. He’ll
tell you. And I shall be much surprised if the
women of Kilronan are much behind their sisters of
Marblehead in dealing with such a scoundrel as you.”
I proposed this conundrum to Father
Letheby that same evening: “Why is it considered
a greater crime to denounce and correct an evil than
to commit it?” He looked at me as if he doubted
my sanity. I put it in a more euphemistic form:
“Why is success always the test of merit?
To come down from the abstract to the concrete, Why
is a gigantic swindler a great financier, and a poor
fellow that steals a loaf of bread a felon and a thief?
Why is a colossal liar a great diplomatist, and a petty
prevaricator a base and ignoble fraud? Why is
Napoleon a hero, and that wretched tramp an ever to
be dreaded murderer? Why is Bismarck called great,
though he crushed the French into a compost of blood
and rags, ground them by taxation into paupers, jested
at dying children, and lied most foully, and his minor
imitators are dubbed criminals and thieves? Look
here, now, young man! If you, by a quiet, firm,
indomitable determination succeed in crushing out
and stamping out forever this secret society here,
it will redound to your infinite credit in all men’s
eyes. But mark, if with all your energy and zeal
you fail, or if you pass into a leaderette in some
Freemason journal, and your zeal is held up as fanaticism
and your energy as imprudence, the whole world will
regard you as a hot-headed young fool, and will ask
with rage and white lips, What is the Bishop doing
in allowing these young men to take the reins into
their own hands and drive the chariot of the sun?
It is as great a crime to be a young man to-day as
it was in the days of Pitt. Nothing can redeem
the stigma and the shame but success. Of course,
all this sounds very pagan, and I am not identifying
myself with it. I believe with that dear barefooted
philosopher, St. Francis, who is to me more than fifty
Aristotles, as a Kempis is more than fifty Platos,
that a man is just what he is in the eyes of God,
and no more. But I am only submitting to you
this speculative difficulty to keep your mind from
growing fallow these winter evenings. And don’t
be in a hurry to answer it. I’ll give you
six months; and then you’ll say, like the interlocutor
in a Christy Minstrel entertainment: ‘I
give it up.’”