“I believe they did their best to anyhow, and to shoot you too, and then where would we be? Are you all right?”
“A bit shaken,” he conceded. But, he did not say, a bit exhilarated too. Particularly now he knew he might be able to keep track of Gervaise. But even before that, in various obscure ways, exhilarated.
“I suppose I'll have to stand by you this time,” said the monsignor. Frank wondered, with a residual acidic briskness, whether his willingness to say early-morning Masses, to hear confessions, to take Benedictions, helped the monsignor to be lenient. “But what you have to understand, you might see things as urgent when they're not. From what I hear this black man was cohabiting with a white woman. He was a deserter from his post. He doesn't sound like grounds for immediate attention. I mean, despite all these romantic ideas about a priest being put in situations where he saves the souls of unknown people, people outside his normal reach, in practice that might happen once or twice in a lifetime. A fellow is faced with a man dying of apoplexy in George Street, outside Hordern's store—that happened to me when I was young. Swallowed his tongue and no one knew how to save his life. But it seems to me there's a tendency in you, Frank, that seeks this sort of drama at every turn. Well, you ought to sit on that. Don't embarrass me with other parish priests. You understand? Let me know if you've got some extraordinary intention. And you're not in the American army. So they can't come here and make you do jobs for them.”
It was a consideration: If there were chaplains, why didn't Fratelli use one of them? But there might have been some official problem about doing that. Fratelli's summoning Darragh might thus have been a gracious, ex tempore gesture towards saving the prisoner. On the other hand, had Darragh not been there to hear Private Aspillon's confession, the MPs might not have begun to fire. Darragh did not have the energy left, in the face of the monsignor's chastisement, to follow the reasoning further.
“Since I did go, Monsignor,” said Darragh, “and since I heard the man's confession and gave him absolution, I want to contact the American chaplains to look after him.”
The monsignor groaned and said, “American chaplains,” in rather the way a person would say, “Bulgarians!”
“I'll get the number from the chancellery. He's a remarkable soul, this black man. . . .”
The monsignor tossed his head and stubbed his cigarette with emphasis. “Residing with a slut in Lidcombe? It sounds like it. Call the chaplains if you must.”
“And I'll speak to Father Tuomey.”
“No, leave the old crank alone.”
The monsignor sat at his desk again and opened a ledger. The Summa Theologica shone down on his financial labors. “One thing I will say for the American troops. They're very generous with the collection plate. But they can't buy redemption, can they?”
Now Darragh felt robust of soul. He still suffered an occasional brimstone whiff of futility from his contacts with Mrs. Heggarty, her air of command and independence, her good heart and self-diagnosed rebelliousness—a combination of traits he considered, as the Church did, dangerous to her. But now his duties possessed some meaning, since Gervaise and he had been welded together under fire and in sacramental intent.
Calling the chancellery, he found that a young priest he had studied with answered the phone and was able to supply him with the number of the U.S. Army Chaplains Corps. Ringing it in turn, he spoke to a soldier who described himself as the chaplains' assistant. He certainly sounded like a doorkeeper to eminent persons. He was unimpressed by the idea that this was an Australian diocesan priest calling. There was no rudeness, but merely a sense that Darragh lay beyond the man's universe and thus need not be treated with too much alacrity. “All the chaplains are busy.”
“There's something called the compound.”
“Yeah,” said the man. “That's out near the Aussie camp. In Ingleburn.”
“Does ‘compound' mean the same as ‘prison'?”
“If you like, Father,” the chaplains' assistant conceded. “A more temporary structure, you'd find. A stockade. That's Captain O'Rourke's territory, anyhow.”
“And Captain O'Rourke is a chaplain?”
“Yessir, that's what he is.”
“So Father O'Rourke,” said Darragh, wanting to assert the essence of all this, that God and not the army, not the white centurion helmets of Fratelli's men, had the claim upon this unknown O'Rourke. “I would like to ask Father O'Rourke to visit this soldier I know. When could I speak to him in person?”
“Well, he's after-dinner speaker at the officers' club tonight. You could try him in the morning.”
“Would you give him my number as well?”
“Sure, Father,” said the chaplains' assistant with the first note of willingness that had entered their dialogue.
“Please ask him. It's important. It's about one Private Aspillon.” Darragh spelled it.
“Private Aspillon. I'll tell him.” And then, “Don't you worry about it at all, Father.”
But caught between the strictures of Monsignor Carolan and the explosive savagery of the American army, he did worry for the integrity of Gervaise's flesh. On Saturday, Father O'Rourke proved yet again not to be in when Darragh called, and failed to phone back as well. Darragh had spent the day expecting the call and, apart from confessions, prepared a questioning sermon for Sunday. Altogether, it was natural that his sermon should reflect the state of his soul and of his immediate world.
The Dutch and Australians reinforced the text by failing to hold Sumatra. Rabaul was bombed, and its Australian garrison looked likely to follow that of Singapore into indefinite but terrible imprisonment. Soon there would be further Mrs. Heggartys scattered around the pews on Sunday mornings. And in a short time, for all they knew, their church might become a stable for the species of pack mules the Japanese army had been filmed using in China.
“My dear brethren,” said Darragh from the high pulpit on Sunday, “we are in the time of joy following Easter, but even in this season of jubilation, in the forty days after Christ's resurrection, all is still threatened. Our food is rationed, our community endangered, we hear bad news every day on the wireless, while sons are separated from mothers and wives from husbands without any of us knowing how long this will go on. Some of us have the comfort of our faith, but for many good people there's a sense that God has turned His face away. Some wonder if even the armies of the just, the American army and our own, do not harbor some unjust men. Is God testing us, or—and I, like you, hope this is not the truth—does He intend to punish us? For still cricket and rugby league and horseracing from Randwick are front-page news. Still the cinemas hold out images of godless pleasure. Still the divorce courts are full.” He knew this from reading the court proceedings published in every weekend's Telegraph. He, who intended never to have a wife, was as fascinated by tales of divorce as most priests were. At tennis on Monday, his fellow curates recounted divorce cases they had read about over the weekend. They were somehow pleased to have their cynicism about marriage validated.
“And yet everywhere there is hope,” he said, as his brethren wanted him to. “Even today. I take some of my hope from a soldier I spoke to this week. He was a foreign soldier, and he had behaved badly, and he had done wrong. But I found in him a clear sense of what contrition was, and for a moment we were brothers in the Catholic faith, in the way that MacArthur's Americans and General Blamey's Australians are brothers in their crusade against the enemy. So, all can be taken from us. We can be the subject of every disgrace. Bombs might land amongst us, God forbid. Our young men might be captured or die in battle. There is one thing which cannot be taken from us. Our . . .”
He paused because the words “our dignity” had by the force of Mrs. Heggarty's sedition nearly risen to his lips. It was as if the woman and her phrase had lodged under his skin. “Our faith,” he said instead. “That cannot be taken by force. It can be surrendered only of our own volition. We know that whatever happens in the future, however battles fall out, re
surrection in its most important form will come to us, and salvation in its most important form. As for the rest, for the battles which await, we join each other in our prayers for deliverance.”
Though it was early in April, the heavy, white, braid-encrusted chasuble felt hot, and temporarily removing it while waiting in the sacristy between the half-past-six and eight-o'clock Masses, Darragh saw a somehow familiar soldier appear tentatively at the door.
“Hello there,” Darragh said with some enthusiasm. The Mass, and his own words of hope, had made the world more fraternal.
“It's me, Father. I was with the American MPs.”
Darragh saw the corporal's stripes on the man's arm. He was the Australian soldier who had had the look of having been a Great War digger. He also possessed the enduring, creased face of a fellow who'd known the humiliation and the hunger of the Depression.
“I had the Owen gun the Yanks said went off.”
Darragh unpinned the maniple from his wrist and stepped forward. “Please come in,” he said. The man did so, looking in awe at the vestment benches and the little stained-glass window which featured St. Brigid of Ireland. To Catholics, a sacristy was an august place, occupied chiefly by clerics and acolytes.
“I didn't like that the other day,” said the man. “I didn't like what the Yank sergeant said. But they've had an inquiry and I got shouted down. I know how to use an Owen gun, and I didn't make any mistake. The sergeant started it off. With his bloody pistol, Father. Pardon my language.”
If this was the truth, there was part of him which would not have wanted to know. That the angelic courtier and warrior, Fratelli, could be so crafty. Could he also be vicious in his cunning?
Darragh said, like a military veteran, “Well, I wouldn't hold it against any man if his gun misfired.”
“That's the whole thing, Father. I wouldn't have come here to see you—my parish is Stanmore. If I thought I'd done it, I'd just lie doggo and feel silly, like any other chap would. You know you said in your sermon that not all soldiers are just men. Well that bugger—I mean, that American—he isn't. He's a blame-shifter, that one.”
“He seemed sincere enough to me. What I mean is, he had the welfare of the Negro man at heart.”
“Well, he was more than willing to set his blokes off. And everyone knows the Yanks are trigger-happy. Australian armies, we were raised to be sparing with ammunition. But not them. They squander. That's why I think in the end they might do all right. Their soldiers aren't as good as ours. Full of cheek, absolute skites. But, crikey, they've got some gear.”
“So you think he blamed you to save his own embarrassment.”
“That's be right. And we're handy too, for them to blame. They think we're hillbillies. Even their hillbillies think we're hillbillies. But I wanted to tell you, anyhow. It wasn't the Owen. The Owen is a gun a bloke can depend on.”
Frank thanked the corporal, wished him well and saw him vanish. The corporal's accusations against Fratelli would have been easier to dismiss had Darragh—in the ten minutes during which he waited to go out to the altar for the next Mass—not been able to review his brief but intense contacts with Fratelli and decide that they had, after all, displayed from the sergeant's side, among the decisiveness and goodwill, and perhaps because of them, the shadow of an indefinite excess. Diverting his convoy just to pick up a priest in Strathfield seemed part of it. And yet, how could the man be condemned? The fine-spirited Gervaise, the theologically accurate Private Aspillon, had been comprehensively saved by Fratelli's decision.
On a busy Sabbath it was easy to attribute what the corporal had told him to the rivalry between Americans and Australians, which, as everyone knew, lay beneath the surface of their brotherly cooperation in the cause of the Christian world.
XIV
That Sunday evening he got a call from the American chaplain. “Captain O'Rourke,” the man announced himself, and Darragh explained that he was concerned for Gervaise Aspillon.
“Yeah, I know the case, Father,” said O'Rourke. He had a voice like James Cagney.
“Gervaise made a sincere confession to me. I'm concerned that he might not be well treated in the . . . the compound.”
“Well, the guy was AWOL three weeks. Sounds like desertion to me. Only stood out where he was hiding because he was a colored.”
“I wondered would you visit him, Captain?” Darragh used the military title because he had a sense Father O'Rourke was flattered by it.
“Sure. I've already been around there. Said a decade of the rosary with him.”
“And was he well?”
He heard a sigh from Father O'Rourke. What business was it of this Australian curate?
“You see,” said Darragh, “I was at the capture with him.”
“Yeah. I can't see why that Fratelli guy didn't ask one of us. Made my feelings known to him, too.”
It seemed Father Tuomey's was not the only territory which had been violated.
“Look,” said the American priest, “you can't pretend they won't be a bit hard on him. Not with all that's going on. He shouldn't have fornicated with a white woman either. That gets us in bad with the Australians. You guys don't like that any more than we do.”
“He has a genuine taste for the sacraments and a strong doctrinal sense.”
“I'll do what I can. I've got the compound, the hospital, the Dental Corps, and the signals personnel to attend to. We're overstretched. I've got nothing against the man, but he doesn't stand for more than the others do. The truth is, the others do their duty better than he has.”
“Would I be able to visit him?” asked Darragh. Let me know if you've got some extraordinary intention, the monsignor had told him. Was visiting Gervaise an extraordinary intention?
O'Rourke sighed yet again. “Look, we can do the job with him. Guys like him love to get on the good side of a civilian.”
Darragh weighed this monsignor-like advice, and considered whether he needed to see Gervaise more than Gervaise needed to see him. “He seemed concerned about his safety, though,” said Darragh.
“He'd say that.”
Darragh paused again, to think of more pretexts. “I'd consider it a great favor. And I think he'd feel safer. . . .”
To Darragh's surprise, O'Rourke relented. “I'll have to check it out with the MPs, and then get back to you.”
As Darragh waited for O'Rourke to contact him again, Monsignor Carolan pursued his career as a student of battles. He still conned the battle maps reproduced on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald and matched them against the maps of his Times Atlas to give them an added dimension.
In the third week after Easter, the monsignor sat for periods by his cabinet radio, with the Herald and the Atlas in his hands, studying maps which represented the great island-dotted blankness of the Southwest Pacific. Through this and other overheard news, Darragh became aware that a crucial confrontation was brewing in that theater of lethal blue called the Coral Sea. This wing of the Pacific was hemmed in on three sides by the Solomons, Papua, and Australia's north coast. It was believed that the Japanese Admiral Inouye was on his way across the huge arena of the Coral Sea to capture Port Moresby in New Guinea. And as the monsignor told Frank at breakfast on May 7, if Moresby went, then Australia would in short order be invaded.
Over the next days, the monsignor kept track of the events in the Coral Sea with a military fervor rather than that of a potential martyr of the one true Church. He seemed bravely undisturbed about the possible impact of the battle upon his plans for paying off the church and expanding the school. He was passionately intrigued by the fact that this was the first battle in the history of humankind in which the sailors of both sides did not see each other's ships, but only each other's lethal planes. Japanese carrier planes tried to sink the American and the Australian flotillas in this new and fantastical warfare. The destiny of the Western and Christian world was decided in these bright, equatorial waters, and Darragh was surprised he felt so little urgency, al
armed at his wooden sense of separation from the God of history and of the immanent world. By the time he emerged from the confessional on Saturday evening, the flagship Australia had valiantly saved itself from persistent attack. Two more American aircraft carriers had been damaged, but the Japanese flotillas were broken and Japanese aircraft carriers had been sent to the bottom. By the time Darragh met the monsignor in the sacristy, Darragh heard that it was official. The Japanese had been turned back for the moment. They would no doubt try again, but they need not succeed any better than they had this time.
“I intend to declare this a Mass of thanksgiving,” said the monsignor, robing for his nine-o'clock, his face translucent with happiness.
The next day's tennis was in large part a farewell to a classmate of Darragh's who had had experience as a youth in the militia and who had been appointed a chaplain to units in northern New South Wales. There were rumors that these battalions were about to go to New Guinea, so the after-match beer was drunk to jokes about rank—the classmate would begin as a one-pip lieutenant, a “second looie,” as Australian jargon had it—and about the comic likelihood that the young priest might need or be tempted to take up arms, and thus become a warrior priest, like Father Murphy of the Irish 1798 uprising, or the Irish monk who had won the Military Cross for killing Prussians in the Great War. Darragh kept the story of his sharing the siege with Gervaise to himself. He was pleased no rumor of it had reached his friends.
Darragh returned to St. Margaret's about dusk, his mind flickering with daydreams about a martial career. If the Japanese succeeded in the end, how much preferable would it be for a man to be amongst fellow soldiers, to be a military prisoner if necessary rather than part of the great mass of hostages. His nature was not a rancorously envious one, however. The daydream was more pleasant than bitter. Yet it was in its way intense again, as it had been on the day four years earlier when the exorcist had urged him to be a merciful confessor.