XII

_From Father Oliver Gogarty to Miss Nora Glynn._

'GARRANARD, BOHOLA,

'_June_ 18, 19--.

'Thoughts are rising up in my mind, and I am eager to write them down

quickly, and with as little consideration as possible. Perhaps my

thoughts will seem trivial when I have written them, but the emotion

that inspired them was very wonderful and overpowering. I am, as it

were, propelled to my writing-table. I must write: my emotion must find

expression. Even if I were sure you would not get this letter for

months, I should write it. I believe if I knew you would never get it, I

should write. But if I send it to Beechwood Hall it will be forwarded, I

suppose, for you will not remain whole months without hearing from

Europe.... In any case, you will get this letter on your return, and it

will ease my heart to write it. Above all things, I would have you know

that the report that I was drowned while bathing is not true, for a

report to this effect will certainly find its way into the local papers,

and in these days, once a piece of news gets reported, it flies along

from newspaper to newspaper, and newspapers have a knack of straying

into our hands when they contain a disagreeable item of news.

'You will remember how the interview with Mr. Poole, published in

_Illustrated England_, came into my hands. That was the first number of

_Illustrated England_ I had seen. Father O'Grady brought it here and

left it upon the table, and only the fate that is over us knows why. In

the same way, a paper containing a report of my supposed drowning may

reach you when you return to England, and, as I do not want you to think

that I have gone out of this life, I am writing to tell you that the

report of my death is untrue, or, to speak more exactly, it will not be

true, if my arms and legs can make it a false report. These lines will

set you wondering if I have taken leave of my senses. Read on, and my

sanity will become manifest. Some day next month I intend to swim across

the lake, and you will, I think, appreciate this adventure. You praised

my decision not to leave my parish because of the pain it would give the

poor people. You said that you liked me better for it, and it is just

because my resolve has not wavered that I have decided to swim across

the lake. Only in this way can I quit my parish without leaving a

scandalous name behind me. Moreover, the means whereby I was enlightened

are so strange that I find it difficult to believe that Providence is

not on my side.

'Have not men always believed in bird augury from the beginning of time?

and have not prognostications a knack of coming true? I feel sure that

you would think as I do if what had happened to me happened to you. Yet

when you read this letter you will say, "No sooner has he disentangled

himself from one superstition than he drops into another!" However this

may be, I cannot get it out of my head that the strangely ill-fated bird

that came out of the wood last February was sent for a purpose. But I

have not told you about that bird. In my last letter my mind was

occupied by other things, and there was no reason why I should have

mentioned it, for it seemed at the time merely a curious accident--no

more curious than the hundred and one accidents that happen every day. I

believe these things are called coincidences. But to the story. The day

I went out skating there was a shooting-party in Derrinrush, and at the

close of day, in the dusk, a bird got up from the sedge, and one of the

shooters, mistaking it for a woodcock, fired, wounding the bird.

'We watched it till we saw it fall on the shore of Castle Island, and,

thinking that it would linger there for days, dying by inches, I started

off with the intention of saving it from a lingering death, but a shot

had done that. One pellet would have been enough, for the bird was but a

heap of skin and feathers, not to be wondered at, its legs being tied

together with a piece of stout string, twisted and tied so that it would

last for years. And this strangely ill-fated curlew set me thinking if

it were a tame bird escaped from captivity, but tame birds lose quickly

their instinct of finding food. "It must have been freed yesterday or

the day before," I said to myself, and in pondering how far a bird might

fly in the night, this curlew came to occupy a sort of symbolic

relation towards my past and my future life, and it was in thinking of

it that the idea occurred to me that, if I could cross the lake on the

ice, I might swim it in the summer-time when the weather was warm,

having, of course, hidden a bundle of clothes amid the rocks on the

Joycetown side. My clerical clothes will be found on this side, and the

assumption will be, of course, that I swam out too far.

'This way of escape seemed at first fantastic and unreal, but it has

come to seem to me the only practical way out of my difficulty. In no

other way can I leave the parish without giving pain to the poor people,

who have been very good to me. And you, who appreciated my scruples on

this point, will, I am sure, understand the great pain it would give my

sisters if I were to leave the Church. It would give them so much pain

that I shrink from trying to imagine it. They would look upon themselves

as disgraced, and the whole family. My disappearance from the parish

would ever do them harm--Eliza's school would suffer for sure. This may

seem an exaggeration, but certainly Eliza would never quite get over it.

If this way of escape had not been revealed to me, I don't think I ever

should have found courage to leave, and if I didn't leave I should die.

Life is so ordered that a trace remains of every act, but the trace is

not always discovered, and I trust you implicitly. You will never show

this letter to anyone; you will never tell anyone.

'The Church would allow me, no doubt, to pick up a living as best I

could, and would not interfere with me till I said something or wrote

something that the Church thought would lessen its power; then the cry

of unfrocked priest would be raised against me, and calumny, the great

ecclesiastical weapon, would be used. I do not know what my future life

will be: my past has been so beset with misfortune that, once I reach

the other side, I shall never look back. I cannot find words to tell you

of the impatience with which I wait the summer-time, the fifteenth of

July, when the moon will be full. I cannot think what would have

happened to me if I had stayed at home the afternoon that the curlew was

shot; something would have happened, for we cannot go on always

sacrificing ourselves. We can sacrifice ourselves for a time, but we

cannot sacrifice ourselves all our life long, unless we begin to take

pleasure in the immolation of self, and then it is no longer sacrifice.

Something must have happened, or I should have gone mad.

'I had suffered so much in the parish. I think the places in which we

have suffered become distasteful to us, and the instinct to wander takes

us. A migratory bird goes, or dies of home-sickness; home is not always

where we are born--it is among ideas that are dear to us: and it is

exile to live among people who do not share our ideas. Something must

have happened to me. I can think of nothing except suicide or what did

happen, for I could never have made up my mind to give pain to the poor

people and to leave a scandalous name behind; still less could I

continue to administer Sacraments that I ceased to believe in. I can

imagine nothing more shameful than the life of a man who continues his

administrations after he has ceased to believe in them, especially a

Catholic priest, so precise and explicit are the Roman Sacraments. A

very abject life it is to murmur _Absolve te_ over the heads of

parishioners, and to place wafers on their tongues, when we have ceased

to believe that we have power to forgive sins and to turn biscuits into

God. A layman may have doubts, and continue to live his life as before,

without troubling to take the world into his confidence, but a priest

may not. The priest is a paid agent and the money an unbelieving priest

receives, if he be not inconceivably hardened in sin, must be hateful to

him, and his conscience can leave him no rest.

'At first I used to suspect my conversion, and began to think it

unseemly that a man should cease to believe that we must renounce this

life in order to gain another, without much preliminary study of the

Scriptures; I began to look upon myself as a somewhat superficial person

whose religious beliefs yielded before the charm of a pretty face and

winsome personality, but this view of the question no longer seems

superficial. I believe now that the superficial ones are those who think

that it is only in the Scriptures that we may discover whether we have a

right to live. Our belief in books rather than in Nature is one of

humanity's most curious characteristics, and a very irreligious one, it

seems to me; and I am glad to think that it was your sunny face that

raised up my crushed instincts, that brought me back to life, and ever

since you have been associated in my mind with the sun and the

spring-tide.

'One day in the beginning of March, coming back from a long walk on the

hills, I heard the bleat of the lamb and the impatient cawing of the

rook that could not put its nest together in the windy branches, and as

I stopped to listen it seemed to me that something passed by in the

dusk: the spring-tide itself seemed to be fleeting across the tillage

towards the scant fields. As the spring-tide advanced I discovered a new

likeness to you in the daffodil; it is so shapely a flower. I should be

puzzled to give a reason, but it reminds me of antiquity, and you were

always a thing divorced from the Christian ideal. While mourning you, my

poor instincts discovered you in the wind-shaken trees, and in the

gaiety of the sun, and the flowers that May gives us. I shall be gone at

the end of July, when the carnations are in bloom, but were I here I am

certain many of them would remind me of you. There have been saints who

have loved Nature, but I always wondered how it was so, for Nature is

like a woman. I might have read the Scriptures again and again, and all

the arguments that Mr. Poole can put forward, without my faith being in

the least shaken. When the brain alone thinks, the thinking is very thin

and impoverished. It seems to me that the best thinking is done when the

whole man thinks, the flesh and the brain together, and for the whole

man to think the whole man must live; and the life I have lived hitherto

has been a thin life, for my body lived only. And not even all my body.

My mind and body were separated: neither were of any use to me. I owe

everything to you. My case cannot be defined merely as that of a priest

who gave up his religion because a pretty woman came by. He who says

that does not try to understand; he merely contents himself with

uttering facile commonplace. What he has to learn is the great oneness

in Nature. There is but one element, and we but one of its many

manifestations. If this were not so, why should your whiteness and

colour and gaiety remind me always of the spring-time?

'My pen is running fast, I hardly know what I am writing, but it seems

to me that I am beginning to see much clearer. The mists are dissolving,

and life emerges like the world at daybreak. I am thinking now of an old

decrepit house with sagging roof and lichen-covered walls, and all the

doors and windows nailed up. Every generation nailed up a door or a

window till all were nailed up. In the dusty twilight creatures wilt and

pray. About the house the sound of shutters creaking on rusty hinges

never ceases. Your hand touched one, and the shutters fell, and I found

myself looking upon the splendid sun shining on hills and fields, wooded

prospects with rivers winding through the great green expanses. At first

I dared not look, and withdrew into the shadow tremblingly; but the

light drew me forth again, and now I look upon the world without fear. I

am going to leave that decrepit dusty house and mix with my fellows, and

maybe blow a horn on the hillside to call comrades together. My hands

and eyes are eager to know what I have become possessed of. I owe to

you my liberation from prejudices and conventions. Ideas are passed on.

We learn more from each other than from books. I was unconsciously

affected by your example. You dared to stretch out both hands to life

and grasp it; you accepted the spontaneous natural living wisdom of your

instincts when I was rolled up like a dormouse in the dead wisdom of

codes and formulas, dogmas and opinions. I never told you how I became a

priest. I did not know until quite lately. I think I began to suspect my

vocation when you left the parish.

'I remember walking by the lake just this time last year, with the story

of my life singing in my head, and you in the background beating the

time. You know, we had a shop in Tinnick, and I had seen my father

standing before a high desk by a dusty window year after year, selling

half-pounds of tea, hanks of onions, and farm implements, and felt that

if I married my cousin, Annie McGrath, our lives would reproduce those

of my father and mother in every detail. I couldn't undertake the job,

and for that began to believe I had a vocation for the priesthood; but I

can see now that it was not piety that sent me to Maynooth, but a

certain spirit of adventure, a dislike of the commonplace, of the

prosaic--that is to say, of the repetition of the same things. I was

interested in myself, in my own soul, and I did not want to accept

something that was outside of myself, such as the life of a shopman

behind a counter, or that of a clerk of the petty sessions, or the habit

of a policeman. These were the careers that were open to me, and when I

was hesitating, wondering if I should be able to buy up the old mills

and revive the trade in Tinnick, my sister Eliza reminded me that there

had always been a priest in the family. The priesthood seemed to offer

opportunities of realizing myself, of preserving the spirit within me.

It offered no such opportunities to me. I might as well have become a

policeman, and all that I have learned since is that everyone must try

to cling to his own soul; that is the only binding law. If we are here

for anything, it is surely for that.

'But one does not free one's self from habits and ideas, that have grown

almost inveterate, without much pain and struggle; one falls back many

times, and there are always good reasons for following the rut. We

believe that the rutted way leads us somewhere: it leads us nowhere, the

rutted way is only a seeming; for each man received his truth in the

womb. You say in your letter that our destinies got entangled, and that

the piece that was being woven ran out into thread, and was rewound upon

another spool. It seemed to you and it seemed to me that there is no

pattern; we think there is none because Nature's pattern is

undistinguishable to our eyes, her looms are so vast, but sometimes even

our little sight can follow a design here and there. And does it not

seem to you that, after all, there was some design in what has happened?

You came and released me from conventions, just as the spring releases

the world from winter rust.

'A strange idea has come into my mind, and I cannot help smiling at the

topsyturvydom of Nature, or what seems to be topsyturvydom. You, who

began by living in your instincts, are now wandering beyond Palestine in

search of scrolls; and I, who began my life in scrolls, am now going to

try to pick up the lost thread of my instincts in some great commercial

town, in London or New York. My life for a long time will be that of

some poor clerk or some hack journalist, picking up thirty shillings a

week when he is in luck. I imagine myself in a threadbare suit of

clothes edging my way along the pavement, nearing a great building, and

making my way to my desk, and, when the day's work is done, returning

home along the same pavement to a room high up among the rafters, close

to the sky, in some cheap quarter.

'I do not doubt my ability to pick up a living--it will be a shameful

thing indeed if I cannot; for the poor curlew with its legs tied

together managed to live somehow, and cannot I do as much? And I have

taken care that no fetters shall be placed upon my legs or chain about

my neck. Anything may happen--life is full of possibilities--but my

first concern must be how I may earn my living. To earn one's living is

an obligation that can only be dispensed with at one's own great risk.

What may happen afterwards, Heaven knows! I may meet you, or I may meet

another woman, or I may remain unmarried. I do not intend to allow

myself to think of these things; my thoughts are set on one thing

only--how to get to New York, and how I shall pick up a living when I

get there. Again I thank you for what you have done for me, for the

liberation you have brought me of body and mind. I need not have added

the words "body and mind," for these are not two things, but one thing.

And that is the lesson I have learned. Good-bye.

'OLIVER GOGARTY.'