The Collar (16 page)

‘Well, I'm sure I hope the poor souls are enjoying it,' said Spike with unction.

‘They weren't enjoying it much at three this morning,' said the passenger in the same tone. ‘One of them was calling for his mother. Father Felix was with him for over an hour, trying to calm him.'

‘Not criticising the good man, 'tisn't the same thing at all,' Spike said joyously.

‘Except for the feeding bottle,' said the passenger. And then, as though he were slightly ashamed of his own straight-faced humour: ‘He does a wonderful job on them.'

‘Well, they seem to have great faith in him,' Spike said, without undue credulity. ‘He gets them from England and all parts – a decent little man.'

‘And a saintly little man,' the passenger said, almost reproachfully.

‘I dare say,' Spike said, without enthusiasm. ‘He'd want to be, judging by the specimens I see.'

They reached town with about three-quarters of an hour to spare, and put the trunk and bag in the stationmaster's office. Old Mick Hurley, the stationmaster, was inside, and looked at the bags over his glasses. Even on a warm day, in his own office, he wore his braided frock-coat and uniform cap.

‘This is a gent from the monastery, Mick,' said Spike. ‘He's travelling by the four-fifteen. Would he have time for the pictures?'

But Spike might have known the joke would be lost on Mick, who gave a hasty glance at the clock behind him and looked alarmed. ‘He'd hardly have time for that,' he said. ‘She's only about twenty-five minutes late.'

‘You have over an hour to put in,' said Spike as they left the office. ‘You don't want to be sitting round there the whole time. Hanagan's lounge is comfortable enough, if you like a drink.'

‘Will you have one with me?' asked the passenger.

‘I don't know will I have the time,' Spike said. ‘I have another call at four. I'll have one drink with you, anyway.'

They went into the bar, which was all done up in chromium, with concealed lighting. Tommy Hanagan, the Yank, was behind the bar himself. He was a tall, fresh-faced, rather handsome man, with fair hair of a dirty colour and smoke-blue eyes. His hat was perched far back on his head. Spike often said Tommy Hanagan was the only man he knew who could make a hat speak. He had earned the price of his public-house working in Boston and, according to him, had never ceased to regret his return. Tommy looked as though he lived in hopes that some day, when he did something as it should be done, it would turn out to be a convenience to somebody. So far, it had earned him nothing but mockery, and sometimes his blue eyes had a slightly bewildered expression, as though he were wondering what he was doing in that place at all.

Spike loved rousing him. All you had to do was give him one poke about America and the man was off, good for an hour's argument. America was the finest goddam country on the face of the earth, and the people that criticised it didn't know what they were talking about. In America, even the priests were friends: ‘Tommy, where the hell am I going to get a hundred dollars?' ‘I'll get it for you, Father Joe.' In Ireland, it was ‘
Mister
Hanagan, don't you consider five pounds is a bit on the small side?' ‘And I don't,' the Yank would say, pulling up his shirtsleeves. ‘I'd sooner give a hundred dollars to a friend than fifteen to a bastard like that.' The same with the women. Over there, an Irishman would say, ‘I'll do the washing up, Mary.' Here it was ‘Where's that bloody tea, woman?' And then bawling her out for it! Not, as Spike noticed, that this ever prevented the Yank from bawling out his own wife twenty times a day. And Spike suspected that however he might enjoy rousing the Yank, the Yank enjoyed it more. It probably gave the poor man the illusion of being alive.

‘What are you drinking?' the passenger asked in his low voice.

‘Whiskey,' said Spike. ‘I have to take whiskey every time I go up to that monastery. It's to restore the circulation.'

‘Beer for me, please,' said the passenger.

‘Your circulation is easily damaged, Spike,' said Hanagan as he turned to the whiskey bottle.

‘If you knew as much about that place as I do, you'd be looking for whiskey, too.'

‘Who said I don't know about it?' blustered Hanagan. ‘I know as much about it as you do; maybe more.'

‘You do,' Spike said mockingly. ‘Yourself and the kids went up there two years ago, picking primroses. I heard about it. Ye brought the flask and had tea up the mountain two miles away. “Oh, what a lovely place the monks have! Oh, what a wonderful life they have up here!” Damn all you care about the poor unfortunates, getting up at half past one of a winter's morning and waiting till half five for a bit of breakfast.'

The Yank sprawled across the counter, pushing his hat back a shade farther. It was set for reasonable discussion. ‘But what's that, only habit?' he asked.

‘Habit!'

‘What else is it?' the Yank asked appealingly. ‘I have to get up at half past six every morning, winter and summer, and I have to worry about a wife and kids, and education and doctors for them, and paying income tax, which is more than the monks have to do.'

‘Give me the income tax every time!' said Spike. ‘Even the wife!'

‘The remarkable thing about this country,' said Hanagan, ‘is that they'll only get up in the morning when no one asks them to. I never asked the monks to get up at half past one. All I ask is that the people in this blooming town will get up at half past eight and open their shops by nine o'clock. And how many of them will do it?'

‘And what the hell has that to do with the argument?' asked Spike, not that he thought it had anything to do with it. He knew only too well the Yank's capacity for getting carried away on a tide of his own eloquence.

‘Well, what after all does the argument boil down to?' retorted Hanagan. ‘The argument is that no one in this blooming country is respected for doing what he ought to do – only for doing what no one ever asked him to do.'

‘Are people to sit down and wait for someone to ask them to love God?' the passenger growled suddenly. Spike noticed that even though he mentioned God, he looked a nasty customer to cross in a discussion.

‘I didn't say that,' Hanagan replied peaceably. ‘But do you know this town?'

‘No.'

‘I do,' said Hanagan. ‘I know it since I was a kid. I spent eighteen years out of it, and for all the difference it made to the town, I might have been out of it for a week. It's dead. The people are dead. They're no use to God or man.'

‘You didn't answer my question.'

‘You're talking about one sort of responsibility,' said Hanagan. ‘I'm only saying there are other responsibilities. Why can't the people here see that they have a responsibility to the unfortunate women they marry? Why can't they see their responsibility to their own country?'

‘What Tommy means is that people shouldn't be making pilgrimages to the monastery at all,' said Spike dryly. ‘He thinks they should be making pilgrimages to him. He lights candles to himself every night – all because he doesn't beat his wife. Good luck to you now, and don't let him make you miss your train with his old guff.'

Spike and the passenger shook hands, and after that Spike put him out of his head completely. Meeting strangers like that, every day of the week, he couldn't remember the half of them. But three evenings later he was waiting in the car outside the station, hoping to pick up a fare from the four-fifteen, when Mick Hurley came flopping out to him with his spectacles down his nose.

‘What am I going to do with them bags you left on Tuesday, Spike?' he asked.

What was he to do with the bags? Spike looked at him without comprehension. ‘What bags, Mick?'

‘Them bags for Canada.'

‘Holy God!' exclaimed Spike, getting slowly out of the car. ‘Do you mean he forgot his bags?'

‘Forgot them?' Mick Hurley repeated indignantly. ‘He never travelled at all, man.'

‘Holy God!' repeated Spike. ‘And the liner gone since yesterday! That's a nice state of affairs.'

‘Why?' asked Mick. ‘Who was it?'

‘A man from the monastery.'

‘One of Father Felix's drunks?'

‘What the hell would a drunk be coming from Canada for?' asked Spike in exasperation.

‘You'd never know,' said Mick. ‘Where did you leave him?'

‘Over in Tommy Hanagan's bar.'

‘Then we'd better ask Tommy.'

Hanagan came out to them in his shirtsleeves, his cuffs rolled up and his hat well back.

‘Tommy,' said Spike, ‘you remember that passenger I left in your place on Tuesday?'

Tommy's eyes narrowed. ‘The big, grey-haired bloke?' he said. ‘What about him?'

‘Mick Hurley here says he never took that train. You wouldn't know what happened him?'

Tommy rested one bare, powerful arm against the jamb of the door, leaned his head against it, and delicately tilted the hat forward over his eyes. ‘That sounds bad,' he said. ‘You're sure he didn't go off unknown to you?'

‘How could he, man?' asked Mick excitedly, feeling that some slight on the railway company was implied. ‘His bags are still there. No one but locals travelled on that train.'

‘The man had a lot of money on him,' Hanagan said, looking at the ground.

‘You're sure of that, Tommy?' Spike asked, in alarm. It was bad enough for a motor driver to be mixed up in a mysterious disappearance without a murder coming into it as well.

‘Up to a hundred pounds,' Hanagan said, giving a sharp glance up the street. ‘I saw it when he paid for the drinks. I noticed Linehan, of the Guards, going in to his dinner. We might as well go over and ask him did he hear anything.'

They strode briskly in the direction of the policeman's house. Linehan came shuffling out, buttoning up his tunic – a fat, black-haired man who looked like something out of a butcher's shop.

‘I didn't hear a word of it,' he said, looking from one to another, as though they might be concealing evidence. ‘We'll ring up a few of the local stations. Some of them might have word of him.'

Hanagan went to get his coat. Mick Hurley had to leave them, to look after the four-fifteen, and at last Spike, Hanagan and Linehan went to the police station, where the others waited while Linehan had long, confidential chats about football and the weather with other policemen for ten miles around. Guards are lonely souls; they cannot trust their nearest and dearest, and can communicate only with one another, like mountaineers with signal fires. Hanagan sat on the table, pretending to read a paper, though every look and gesture betrayed impatience and disgust. Spike just sat, reflecting mournfully on the loss of his good time and money.

‘We'll have to find out what his name was,' Linehan said, at last. ‘The best thing we can do is drive up to the monastery and get more particulars.'

‘The devil fly away with Mick Hurley!' Spike said bitterly. ‘Wouldn't you think he'd tell us what happened without waiting three days? If he was after losing an express train, he'd wait a week to see would it turn up.'

The three of them got into Spike's car, and he drove off up the mountain road, wondering how he was to get his fare out of it and from whom. The monks were holy enough, but they expected you to run a car on holy water, and a policeman thought he was doing you a favour if he was seen in the car with you. The veiled sunlight went out; they ran into thick mist, and before they reached the mountain-top, it had turned to rain. They could see it driving in for miles from the sea. The lights were on in the chapel; there was some service on. Spike noticed the Yank pause under the traceried window and look away down the valley. Within the church, the choir wailed, ‘Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum. Et vitam venturi saeculi.'

Father Felix came out and beckoned them in from the rain. His face was very grave. ‘You needn't tell me what you came about, lads,' he said.

‘You knew he was missing so, father?' said Linehan.

‘We saw him,' said the priest.

‘Where, father?' asked Spike.

‘Out there,' Father Felix said, with a nod.

‘On the mountain?'

‘I dare say he's there still.'

‘But what is he doing?'

‘Oh, nothing. Nothing only staring. Staring at the monastery and the monks working in the fields. Poor fellow! Poor fellow!'

‘But who is it?'

‘One of our own men. One of the old monks. He's here these fifteen years.'

‘Fifteen years!' exclaimed Linehan. ‘But what came over him after all that time?'

‘Some nervous trouble, I suppose,' said Father Felix in the tone of a healthy man who has heard of nerves as a well-recognised ailment of quite respectable people. ‘A sort of mental blackout, I heard them saying. He wouldn't know where he'd be for a few minutes at a time.'

‘Ah, poor soul! Poor soul!' sighed Linehan, with a similar blankness of expression.

‘But what was taking him to Canada?' asked Hanagan.

‘Ah, well, we had to send him somewhere he wouldn't be known,' explained Father Felix sadly. ‘He wanted to settle down in his own place in Kilkenny, but, of course, he couldn't.'

‘Why not?' asked Hanagan.

‘Oh, he couldn't, he couldn't,' Linehan said, with a sharp intake of breath as he strode to the window. ‘Not after leaving the monastery. 'Twould cause terrible scandal.'

‘That's why I hope you can get him away quietly,' Father Felix said. ‘We did everything we could for him. Now the less talk there is, the better.'

‘In that bleddy mist you might be searching the mountain for a week,' sighed Linehan, who had often shot it. ‘If we knew where to look itself! We'll go up the road and see would any of Sullivan's boys have word of him.'