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“Indeed I am not! That big man over there is Do
“Father O’Hara,” broke in the Collector with authority. “Both you and the Padre are mistaken. I happen to know that the man in the middle is Do
“But, Mr Hopkins …”
“Which lad is it?”
“This medium-sized corpse is the one you require.”
“Should we not open up the stitching to make sure?”
“Certainly not. The middle one is Do
“Well, come along then, if you’re Jim Do
So rapidly was the Padre now digging that to the weary Collector it seemed that he must be visibly sinking into the ground. The Collector, too, set to work in a more determined fashion, thinking with a mixture of virtue and self-pity: “I’m tired but it’s my duty. It’s right that a leader should bury with his own hands his followers and comrades.” All the same, he was rather put out when the Padre dropped his spade for a moment to drag the shorter of the two remaining corpses over to measure against his half-dug trench. “He might at least have chosen the bigger one since he’s dug twice as much of his grave as I have.”
“Can I be of any assistance?” asked a voice at the Collector’s side, causing him to jump violently for he had heard nothing and now a luminous green wraith appeared to be trembling at his elbow. But it was only Fleury. He had stopped by on his way back to the banqueting hall for the night’s watch, still full of the energy generated by his love for Louise.
“Is that Mr Fleury?” came the Padre’s voice.
“Yes.”
A gargle of joy came from where the Padre was digging. Misinterpreting the reason for it the Collector said firmly: “He’s taking over my spade for a while, Padre,” and went to sit down on a nearby tombstone.
For a few moments there was no sound but the scrape of the spades in the earth; then, gentle as a dove, cu
“Oh, is there?” Fleury’s mind was still lovingly reviewing the birthday party which had just taken place; he was trying to remember all the charming and intelligent remarks he had just made in Louise’s presence; he had done rather well, he thought … “I wonder what she thought when I said such-andsuch and everyone laughed? I wonder what she thought when Harry was telling everyone about us spiking the guns? I wonder …”
“Yes,” went on the Padre, making a superhuman effort to maintain his conversational tone. “It is being studied as if it were not a sacred text, by the method of philological and linguistic investigation.”
“Oh yes, I think I may have heard something along those lines.”
Louise, Fleury had noticed, had a way, while seated of shifting her position slightly with a thoughtful look. There was something so feminine about it.
“A great variety of opinion has been advanced,” continued the Padre impartially, breaking into a sweat. “Now people think one thing, now another.”
“You mean like ‘the dancing clergy’ … Some people think it’s alright for them to do so, some don’t?”
“I suppose the question of the ‘dancing clergy’ might be so considered,” agreed the Padre mildly, but thinking: ‘Surely the Devil is putting words on this young man’s tongue!’ “But I was thinking more of another much-debated question whether the Bible is literally true or not?”
The Padre had uttered these final words as casually as his exhausted state and impassioned convictions would allow. He had stopped digging. In his excitement he had dug one end of the grave to a tremendous depth, the other hardly at all, so that the body lying beside it would have to be buried at a peculiar angle … But he was not thinking of this, he was waiting for Fleury’s reply.
“Will the Padre never cease from these inquisitions?” wondered the Collector irritably. “Haven’t we enough to worry about already?” He still felt displeased because the Padre had so selfishly snatched the smaller body.
The Padre was waiting for Fleury to reveal the thoughts in his mind about the Bible, but Fleury was having trouble seeing them against the radiance shed by Louise. What was it that he was supposed to be thinking about? Oh yes, the Bible, literally true or not?
“Frankly,” he said in a mature and condescending way, “I tend to agree with Coleridge that it doesn’t particularly matter …”
“Not matter!”
”… that the important thing about the Bible is not that it tells us that Moses did this or that … he may or may not have, for all I know, but I don’t think it’s important whether these German wallahs manage to prove it one way or another … in other words not whether it’s literally true, but whether …” Fleury’s voice took on a more solemn note, “… whether it’s morally true, whether it appeals to and satisfies our i
“The Bible is the word of God, Mr Fleury,” exclaimed the Padre gesturing in the darkness with his spade. “How will you interpret the spirit precisely, man? How will you say it is this and not that? Every man will set to work subjecting the Bible to his own limited intelligence and end up floundering in apostasy. You will have men like this misguided Schleiermacher who pick and choose among the doctrines of the Church and who decide, puffed up by confidence in their own powers of reason, that the Fall is not a moral teaching or that the Atonement is distasteful to them.”
“But if it seems clear that certain parts of the Bible are not, hm, moral according to our latest nineteenth-century conceptions of morality …”
“Fallen man is not able to understand the purposes of God,” interrupted the Padre, who had thrown away his spade and was trying to ram the small, shrouded corpse into the hole he had dug in such a way that the feet would not stick up into the air. “Human conceptions of morality must be fallible like all human ideas!”
“The letter killeth, the Spirit giveth life, all the same, if you see what I mean,” quoted Fleury feebly. He found himself unable to match the Padre’s positive assertions with anything better than vague equivocations. Nevertheless, like all intellectual young men he disliked coming off worst in an argument, whatever the subject. He fell into a sullen silence as the Padre continued to harangue him, and looked around to see if the Collector would be thinking of relieving him soon. But the Collector had left his tombstone and melted deeper into the darkness.
“You ca
“Thy wisdom and thy knowledge, it hath perverted thee!”
The Padre’s words echoed after the Collector as he retreated through the darkness and he thought: “Young Fleury is perfectly right … How arid the eighteenth century was in comparison to our own. They did their best, no doubt, but they were at best only a preparation for our own century. How barren in taste they were, how lacking in feeling! What a poor conception of Man, what fruitless ratiocination! Everything which they approached so ineffectually, we have brought to culmination. The poor fellows had no conception how far Art, Science, Respectability, and Political Economy could be taken. Where they hesitated and blundered we have gone forward … Ah!” He stumbled. A round shot, skipping through the darkness, landed in the mud wall of the churchyard, showering him with pebbles.