The Lost Cavern

by H. F. Heard

  Seeing I was at some sort of loss, he went on, “I was sent for this morning. I ought to have been able to get here before but, as we all know, last night we had other duties suddenly sent us. Can I be of any use?” He paused, and then, as I delayed, he added, “If you were going to call on Dr. Tuohill?”

  His question made me say again, “Yes. Yes, Dr. Tuohill, I was wanting to see you for a few moments if …”

  “I am not Dr. Tuohill. Dr. Tuohill died yesterday. My name, if I may introduce myself, is”—he hesitated a moment, looked down at himself, and smiled, looking back at me—“Archdeacon Denshaw. I know I ought to be in my uniform when on active service, but somehow these times are making our trappings seem in a way incongruous; and last night, to be running about in an ecclesiastical apron, frogged coat, gaiters, and a shovel hat—well, I just can’t make it fit with first aid to the wounded and”—he added, in a grave tone which still had no solemnity in it—“and last aid to the dying.”

  Every moment I liked the man more.

  “My Bishop,” he went on, “is a real father in God and he lets me run about in these work clothes as much as I like. But forgive my talking of myself. I thought I owed you this self-identification. As Archdeacon I am naturally sent for in these cases—particularly this case,” he added.

  He waited a moment. I began to suspect that he sensed he might be of some service, and I had already sensed that he was the kind of man who was always being called on for such services because he could yield them.

  I began again my hesitant Yeses and then added, “I did want to see Dr. Tuohill.” But my hesitancy drove me from the point again. How could I open such a subject, least of all to a man who, however kindly, was evidently as sane as a stockbroker? I temporized with a question, “May I ask when Dr. Tuohill died?”

  He neither showed surprise at my question nor tried to parry it with one of his, but answered, “His housekeeper tells me that he was unwell yesterday morning and she persuaded him to rest, but that after keeping him quiet after his breakfast—he had celebrated that morning in the small church he served—he insisted on going out to matins. She heard him get ready, and then she says there was a silence. Somehow this alarmed her, and she went up to his sitting room. He was lying on the floor in his robes, dead. He must have had a sudden heart attack. He had been ill, I believe, for some time, but he was a most conscientious man in all his duties.” He paused, and added, “Such as he considered them to be,” and then added, more to himself than to me, “A remarkable man. I don’t think I ever met anyone like him, and the more one knew him, though I never could say I knew him at all well or saw much of him, the more his—his uniqueness struck one.” He stopped.

  The fact that Dr. Tuohill was dead was puzzling me at the back of my mind. Finally I saw I must somehow keep this new informant of mine until I could think out whether there was any way in which he could help me or indeed any way whereby I could make him understand my pass. I began to realize that the death of a man with whom I had never talked in my life and whose very appearance was really unknown to me might prove a gravely serious matter, perhaps for me the gravest of all possible matters.

  “Would you,” I asked, “please tell me a little more about Dr. Tuohill? I think, if you could do that, I would be more easily able to make clear to you why I wanted to see him—what, in a way, I hoped he might be able to tell me.”

  The Archdeacon nodded. “I’d be very glad to. I didn’t really know much about him, though I suppose I knew as much about him as most people. He was a real solitary. In fact, as far as we know, he has no relatives. That is partly why I have had to be here and, as it happens, I shall have to wait about, for we have notified his solicitor by telegram. As he is in London, I must be on the spot until we hear from him and get his approval for the service and the funeral. So, if you like, let’s go up onto the down and sit in the sun there. The house within is not very cheerful.”

  I readily consented, and in a few minutes we were up by the chapel again.

  “On the south side of this building we shall find some warmth. I think I can tell you all I know in twenty minutes or half an hour.” We sat down on the splayed footings of the south wall with our backs against it. No spot could have appeared more peaceful, no building more at home and mellowed into its surroundings. The lichens spread over the stone-tiled roof; grasses and late-flowering weeds grew from the courses of the masonry. Yet the tumult of the air raid last night had seemed to me infinitely more human and friendly than this quiet place. And the Archdeacon began where my thoughts were.

  “Are you at all an antiquarian?” he asked as a beginning.

  “You mean,” I answered, “do I not remark that this is quite an interesting building?”

  “Yes.” His reply was part of the man’s native frankness that made him immediately reassuring. “This chapel is quite an antiquarian’s quarry—and, what is more, it builds in with the story of the man about whom I am going to tell you what I know, and I think you would wish to know all you can.” He did not turn to me, but I felt he understood increasingly that he was not wasting his time and that though it all seemed a casual encounter there might be more here than appeared, as certainly there was, in this spot where we sat in the quiet noon sunlight.

  “First, then,” he went on, “I’ll tell you about Dr. Tuohill; then I’ll be able, like a good lecturer,” he smiled, “to show how this building fits into our narrative, and then you will perhaps tell me your part and what I can do to help there.

  “Dr. Tuohill was a member of the Church of Ireland. It is one of the few churches of which one may say that it may possibly die out. It will be a pity if it does, for it could have gone on, I believe, playing a part in that strangely moving body, the Churches of Christendom, all split, most mutually repellent, but all needed, I believe—their discords making some harmony too high and rich for our ears that seldom like anything beyond unison. But don’t think that Dr. Tuohill was a normal member of that Church. The Church of Ireland, being very close to and largely outnumbered by the Roman Catholic Church, tended to react to a rather exclusively protestant Protestantism. True, it had thinkers like Sanday and right down to Bernard and D’Arcey, but on the whole it was losing ground. It represented a class, and that class, after Ireland won her independence, was a diminishing class. As far as the Church of Ireland had identified herself with what had been called ‘The Ascendency’—the Protestant rule in Ireland—the victory of nationalism was bound to be in some way her defeat.

  “That, however, was not the reason for Dr. Tuohill’s leaving Ireland. He left before what is called over there ‘The Troubles.’ Not that he hadn’t had troubles, but in the other direction, and of a purely ecclesiastical sort. You can gather, if you do not actually know, that the Church of Ireland has not been at home with what it called High Church views. The reaction of a body which is still proud to call itself Protestant toward sacerdotalism, or, indeed, sacramentalism—well, you are old enough to remember the kind of fuss that used to be made in this country about that kind of thing. But here is the rather unusual thing: Dr. Tuohill was a sacramentalist—yes, and a sacerdotalist—but he was in no wise inclined to favor Rome. Some members of the Irish Church had always maintained that they were the real descendants and inheritors of the early Keltic Church. Of course, Bury has shown that Patrick could not be called a Protestant—nay, more, that he was a Romanizer winning Ireland specifically for Rome—and if there was a St. Palladius before him, he, too, probably looked as loyally to the City of the Seven Hills. Still, Keltic Christianity, however it started, soon became a specific development, and a very intense one, not only in a missionary effort that did much to win back Europe from paganism from the Elbe to Calabria, but also by an intensity of contemplative practice, by a kind of research into prayer which has seldom been equaled and never surpassed.”

  He stopped suddenly and questioned me, “Do you wonder why, like the man in the story, I am beginning with the dawn of history when you are concerned wit
h events of today?”

  I smiled back at him, “I think I have enough of a clue to hold on.”

  “Well, give me a little rope. This is not a parson talking historical shop. It really is needed if we are to understand something which I believe is quite a mystery, and”—he turned round and quietly put his hand on my arm—“I believe you may have found even more mysterious than I know. Perhaps we may help each other.”

  That was certainly reassuring. With a real good will not to miss any part of the clue or any of the information that might be needed, I settled down to listen again.

  “Well,” my new friend went on, “whether such views are historical or not I only know at a very faint second hand. What I do know with ample evidence is that they were held most strongly by Dr. Tuohill. He held them so strongly that he felt he must not yield them. They were a sacred heritage, a light that must not be extinguished. He was a fine scholar. T.C.D., as the famous old Dublin University called itself, could turn out scholars the equal of any in Europe. True, they gave their D.D. loosely, but so have many other universities which have fine records for learning. And Dr. Tuohill refused to earn his save by the hard way. I think it was not merely part of his old-fashioned style but a gentle protest against the cheapening of the doctorate that made him always write his title not as D.D. but in the older style, S.T.P. Still, scholarship, he felt, is only the handmaid of religion, and to religion—as he saw it—he had given his life.

  “He could have lived quietly and, as his needs were most frugal, comfortably—I mean with all he required. Comfort as the world knows it, I doubt if he ever sensed, and had he been told of it he would have called it luxury or concupiscence. But he felt he had his mission. Oh, no: nothing to do with what used to be called the mission field or its new rival the social services. No, his duty was to keep alight the Real Tradition, as he called it. You’d have thought such an out-of-the-way idea would not have disturbed anyone. But in Ireland things are not so simple as that. He was accused by his own Church’s large Protestant majority of being really a Roman boring from within; and the Romans also had a word to say about him; they said he was in league with the devil.

  “Now, how did a quiet, rather stiff scholar manage to get such certainly unsolicited testimonials to the quality of his spirituality? No, don’t think I’m making light of the matter, but I do want us to be as objective as we can, and the dear old man himself had his own sense of humor, as what Irishman has not. Of course it makes for misunderstandings, but as it also makes for humility, there’s gain. It was he, indeed, who used that very phrase about testimonials to me when we were considering his—his offer to—how shall I put it?—practice here. Well, what he had actually done—and it doesn’t really sound too hair-raising, does it?—was to gather together in the district where he lived—some twenty or thirty miles north of Dublin—a small group of people, a confraternity, he called it. And he linked up with them a few, not more than three or four, I believe, of clergy of his church. The place he chose was Mount Mellery, where there is a ruined religious house, once Carthusian—destroyed in one of Ireland’s unnumbered earlier troubles. There he set about, he told me and others confirmed, to make some kind of free contemplative order—he called it, I think, research into prayer. He would tell me little more, and a man’s enemies are certainly not good witnesses. But I gather that he became increasingly interested and indeed absorbed in intercessory prayer.”

  The speaker stopped. “Do I bore you?” he asked.

  I was surprised at the question and answered, “Go on. It deals with this man, doesn’t it?” I was not going to show more of my hand till I was sure if this could be help or only a false hope.

  “Yes,” he answered. “Yes, it certainly deals with this man.” Then, with a most encouraging simplicity that gave me a further sense of trust and confidence, he added, “You see, I fear I really know so little about the subject. But,” with a sudden emphasis, “I know that I don’t know. My Bishop, whom I’ve told you is a real father in God, owns our ignorance of this ultraviolet end of the religious life. He’s a good scholar, considering the number of committees he has to sit upon—and not without holiness, considering the fact that he now has to sit in the House of Lords. One day I was complaining that I was more of a Mason than a Catholic because I had to spend all my time looking after buildings and not souls. He laughed and asked me if I’d ever heard of one of the favorite moot discussions among young theologians in the Middle Ages. It was on the cheerful question, ‘Can an Archdeacon be saved?’ I made a wry face at this pleasantry, but he comforted me by pointing out that the young sprigs of spiritual wisdom did think there was a chance of an archdeacon’s being touched by the light—he was a sort of piebald creature—but they took for granted that a Bishop’s purple made him absolutely opaque. What they were putting their money on was the poor parish priest.

  “Which brings me back to our man. The long and the short of it was that he had to leave. Mystics don’t have much of a time anywhere, and there in Ireland, between a rather crusted and dry Protestantism and a Catholicism vigorous enough to be able to show its active dislike of all competitors, why, the poor man had no purchase. I rather think he may have—” The speaker paused.

  “Well,” he went on, “that’s premature, anyhow. We can come to it later. He settled here in this west diocese, in this small town, and had evidently been here some time when he decided to write to our Bishop. He handed the letter to me. As far as I remember, it ran as follows. In courteous but archaic language he presented his compliments, made his apologies for intrusion, and then stated his request. It was an odd one. He wished to be, briefly, appointed as curate in charge of this chapel. He pointed out that the building had been carefully restored but was not being used, and he ventured to add that should the Bishop accede to his request, he would wish to be allowed to shoulder the upkeep of the House of God, as he was a man of some small means and few calls. Well, you know, that kind of offer is rare. Even the best of men want a living, and those who are willing to give services and also supply the resources are very uncommon. Of course, he enclosed his letters of credence and other evidences. We could and did take these up and they were all accurate. Indeed, in scholarship his record was more remarkable than he had disclosed, and one or two of the references he gave brought back from people whose word was worth attention something like eulogy—though one did say that of the exact quality of his cultus there might be discussion, but no question at all of theology, still less of morality. My final ‘of course’ is that when to a hard-worked Bishop and to an Archdeacon obsessed with structural costs, repairs, dilapidations, restorations, new church building, there comes an offer which might possibly be acceptable from someone who is ready to take a building off their hands and promises also to put it back into actual use—well, such offers start with a certain material weight in their favor.

  “I was asked by my Bishop, then, to go and see and report. I found Dr. Tuohill in that house out of which you met me coming. He was living in austere simplicity. Books there were in plenty, and when he gave me tea—for I stayed a little while with him—it was served with that queer mixture of nationalism and taste that somehow I associate with Ireland. The porcelain was that soapy-glazed iridescent stuff made, I think, near Dr. Tuohill’s home and called, I believe, Beleek. The silver was very elegant later eighteenth century; I could see the harp with the crown over it, the hallmark, you know, of the old Irish office of silver issue—and the spoons ‘rat-tailed.’ But we didn’t talk connoiseurship. He had a great simplicity about him and asked as soon as we were seated what he might tell me about himself, further than the information he had already forwarded, so that I might form an opinion whether his request could be granted.

  “We got on very well, I think. There was something very—how shall I put it?—remote about him, but not inflexible. He had, if you take me, his center of gravity far within, and, because of that, he could come forward with a certain ease of outer courtesy which in no wise committed
him, still less gave him away. You felt all the while that though he had deployed and seconded an ample division of attention to look after you with courtesy and forward the matters in hand, he himself, having dispatched this embassy to the frontier, sat back in some distant capital, concerned, maybe, with other affairs and interests until his messengers sent for further instructions. I asked him frankly what could have caused trouble in the Mourne district over in Ireland and so spoiled his work there.

  “His reply amused me, almost startled me. ‘Inexperience, Mr. Archdeacon, inexperience!’ His voice had that finish to the consonants, that slight breadth to the vowels, which distinguishes an Irish accent from a brogue. I raised my eyebrows as a question.

  “‘We were pioneers, or rather re-explorers. I am sure you have been too busy to study the Keltic Church’s origins, as we few scattered and provincial students of necessity look to the pit from which we have been digged, the rock whence we were hewn. There are many mysteries about it, much neglected. I myself was set on my very tentative researches when I came as a college student on the passage which tells of the twelve monks from the Thebaid who came right round from Egypt to Ireland and lie now buried at Clonmacnoise on the Shannon. The Desert Fathers were men who took the Kingdom of Heaven by violence, but they took it, though their casualty rate no doubt was high. Their spirit certainly shone out again—much heat and some light—with the cult of Bridget—the Mary of the Gaels. Flagellation, long immersions in ice-cold water’—he smiled—‘please have another cup of tea—Boddhidarma who brought the severe Theravadin form of meditation (the Protestantism of the East) into China specially commended Chinese tea as an aid to contemplation. With these violent physical methods they held their night-long vigils in those dry-wall-built huts of stone—vigils as long as any contemplative has, I believe, attempted. Of course, some of them won through, and, of course, also many perished on the pass before entering the Promised Land.