The Collar

by Frank O'Connor

  ‘Ah, what perjure!’ Norton replied wearily. ‘Sure, can’t you say a few words for the boy? No one is asking you to say much. What harm will it do you to tell the judge he’s an honest, good-living, upright lad, and that he took the money without meaning any harm?’

  ‘My God!’ muttered the priest, running his hands distractedly through his grey hair. ‘There’s no talking to ye, no talking to ye, ye lot of sheep.’

  When he was gone the committeemen turned and looked at one another in bewilderment.

  ‘That man is a terrible trial,’ said one.

  ‘He’s a tyrant,’ said Daly vindictively.

  ‘He is, indeed,’ sighed Norton, scratching his head. ‘But in God’s holy name, boys, before we do anything, we’ll give him one more chance.’

  That evening when he was at his tea the committeemen called again. This time they looked very spruce, businesslike, and independent. Father Crowley glared at them.

  ‘Are ye back?’ he asked bitterly. ‘I was thinking ye would be. I declare to my goodness, I’m sick of ye and yeer old committee.’

  ‘Oh, we’re not the committee, father,’ said Norton stiffly.

  ‘Ye’re not?’

  ‘We’re not.’

  ‘All I can say is, ye look mighty like it. And, if I’m not being impertinent, who the deuce are ye?’

  ‘We’re a deputation, father.’

  ‘Oh, a deputation! Fancy that, now. And a deputation from what?’

  ‘A deputation from the parish, father. Now, maybe you’ll listen to us.’

  ‘Oh, go on! I’m listening, I’m listening.’

  ‘Well, now, ’tis like this, father,’ said Norton, dropping his airs and graces and leaning against the table. ‘’Tis about that little business this morning. Now, father, maybe you don’t understand us and we don’t understand you. There’s a lot of misunderstanding in the world today, father. But we’re quiet simple poor men that want to do the best we can for everybody, and a few words or a few pounds wouldn’t stand in our way. Now, do you follow me?’

  ‘I declare,’ said Father Crowley, resting his elbows on the table, ‘I don’t know whether I do or not.’

  ‘Well, ’tis like this, father. We don’t want any blame on the parish or on the Cronins, and you’re the one that can save us. Now all we ask of you is to give the boy a character –’

  ‘Yes, father,’ interrupted the chorus, ‘give him a character! Give him a character!’

  ‘Give him a character, father, and you won’t be troubled by him again. Don’t say no to me now till you hear what I have to say. We won’t ask you to go next, nigh or near the court. You have pen and ink beside you and one couple of lines is all you need write. When ’tis over you can hand Michael John his ticket to America and tell him not to show his face in Carricknabreena again. There’s the price of his ticket, father,’ he added, clapping a bundle of notes on the table. ‘The Cronins themselves made it up, and we have his mother’s word and his own word that he’ll clear out the minute ’tis all over.’

  ‘He can go to pot!’ retorted the priest. ‘What is it to me where he goes?’

  ‘Now, father, can’t you be patient?’ Norton asked reproachfully. ‘Can’t you let me finish what I’m saying? We know ’tis no advantage to you, and that’s the very thing we came to talk about. Now, supposing – just supposing for the sake of argument – that you do what we say, there’s a few of us here, and between us, we’d raise whatever little contribution to the parish fund you’d think would be reasonable to cover the expense and trouble to yourself. Now do you follow me?’

  ‘Con Norton,’ said Father Crowley, rising and holding the edge of the table, ‘I follow you. This morning it was perjury, and now ’tis bribery, and the Lord knows what ‘twill be next. I see I’ve been wasting my breath … And I see too,’ he added savagely, leaning across the table towards them, ‘a pedigree bull would be more use to ye than a priest.’

  ‘What do you mean by that, father?’ asked Norton in a low voice.

  ‘What I say.’

  ‘And that’s a saying that will be remembered for you the longest day you live,’ hissed Norton, leaning towards him till they were glaring at one another over the table.

  ‘A bull,’ gasped Father Crowley. ‘Not a priest.’

  ‘’Twill be remembered.’

  ‘Will it? Then remember this too. I’m an old man now. I’m forty years a priest, and I’m not a priest for the money or power or glory of it, like others I know. I gave the best that was in me – maybe ’twasn’t much but ’twas more than many a better man would give, and at the end of my days …’ lowering his voice to a whisper he searched them with his terrible eyes, ‘… at the end of my days, if I did a wrong thing, or a bad thing, or an unjust thing, there isn’t a man or woman in this parish that would brave me to my face and call me a villain. And isn’t that a poor story for an old man that tried to be a good priest?’ His voice changed again and he raised his head defiantly. ‘Now get out before I kick you out!’

  And true to his word and character not one word did he say in Michael John’s favour the day of the trial, no more than if he was a black. Three months Michael John got and by all accounts he got off light.

  He was a changed man when he came out of jail, downcast and dark in himself. Everyone was sorry for him, and people who had never spoken to him before spoke to him then. To all of them he said modestly: ‘I’m very grateful to you, friend, for overlooking my misfortune.’ As he wouldn’t go to America, the committee made another whip-round and between what they had collected before and what the Cronins had made up to send him to America, he found himself with enough to open a small shop. Then he got a job in the County Council, and an agency for some shipping company, till at last he was able to buy a public-house.

  As for Father Crowley, till he was shifted twelve months later, he never did a day’s good in the parish. The dues went down and the presents went down, and people with money to spend on Masses took it fifty miles away sooner than leave it to him. They said it broke his heart.

  He has left unpleasant memories behind him. Only for him, people say, Michael John would be in America now. Only for him he would never have married a girl with money, or had it to lend to poor people in the hard times, or ever sucked the blood of Christians. For, as an old man said to me of him: ‘A robber he is and was, and a grabber like his grandfather before him, and an enemy of the people like his uncle, the policeman; and though some say he’ll dip his hand where he dipped it before, for myself I have no hope unless the mercy of God would send us another Moses or Brian Boru to cast him down and hammer him in the dust.’

  SONG WITHOUT WORDS

  EVEN IF THERE WERE ONLY two men left in the world and both of them saints they wouldn’t be happy. One of them would be bound to try and improve the other. That is the nature of things.

  I am not, of course, suggesting that either Brother Arnold or Brother Michael was a saint. In private life Brother Arnold was a postman, but as he had a great name as a cattle doctor they had put him in charge of the monastery cows. He had the sort of face you would expect to see advertising somebody’s tobacco: a big, innocent, contented face with a pair of blue eyes that were always twinkling. According to the Rule he was supposed to look sedate and go about in a composed and measured way, but he could not keep his eyes downcast for any length of time and wherever his eyes glanced they twinkled, and his hands slipped out of his long white sleeves and dropped some remark in sign language. Most of the monks were good at the deaf and dumb language; it was their way of getting round the Rule of Silence, and it was remarkable how much information they managed to pick up and pass on.

  Now, one day it happened that Brother Arnold was looking for a bottle of castor oil and he remembered that he had lent it to Brother Michael, who was in charge of the stables. Brother Michael was a man he did not get on too well with; a dour, dull sort of man who kept to himself. He was a man of no great appearance, with a mournful wizened little fac
e and a pair of weak red-rimmed eyes – for all the world the sort of man who, if you clapped a bowler hat on his head and a cigarette in his mouth, would need no other reference to get a job in a stable.

  There was no sign of him about the stable yard, but this was only natural because he would not be wanted till the other monks returned from the fields, so Brother Arnold pushed in the stable door to look for the bottle himself. He did not see the bottle, but he saw something which made him wish he had not come. Brother Michael was hiding in one of the horseboxes; standing against the partition with something hidden behind his back and wearing the look of a little boy who has been caught at the jam. Something told Brother Arnold that at that moment he was the most unwelcome man in the world. He grew red, waved his hand to indicate that he did not wish to be involved, and returned to his own quarters.

  It came as a shock to him. It was plain enough that Brother Michael was up to some shady business, and Brother Arnold could not help wondering what it was. It was funny, he had noticed the same thing when he was in the world, it was always the quiet, sneaky fellows who were up to mischief. In chapel he looked at Brother Michael and got the impression that Brother Michael was looking at him, a furtive look to make sure he would not be noticed. Next day when they met in the yard he caught Brother Michael glancing at him and gave back a cold look and a nod.

  The following day Brother Michael beckoned him to come over to the stables as though one of the horses was sick. Brother Arnold knew it wasn’t that; he knew he was about to be given some sort of explanation and was curious to know what it would be. He was an inquisitive man; he knew it, and blamed himself a lot for it.

  Brother Michael closed the door carefully after him and then leaned back against the jamb of the door with his legs crossed and his hands behind his back, a foxy pose. Then he nodded in the direction of the horse-box where Brother Arnold had almost caught him in the act, and raised his brows inquiringly. Brother Arnold nodded gravely. It was not an occasion he was likely to forget. Then Brother Michael put his hand up his sleeve and held out a folded newspaper. Brother Arnold shrugged his shoulders as though to say the matter had nothing to do with him, but the other man nodded and continued to press the newspaper on him.

  He opened it without any great curiosity, thinking it might be some local paper Brother Michael smuggled in for the sake of the news from home and was now offering as the explanation of his own furtive behaviour. He glanced at the name and then a great light broke on him. His whole face lit up as though an electric torch had been switched on behind, and finally he burst out laughing. He couldn’t help himself. Brother Michael did not laugh but gave a dry little cackle which was as near as he ever got to laughing. The name of the paper was the Irish Racing News.

  Now that the worst was over Brother Michael grew more relaxed. He pointed to a heading about the Curragh and then at himself. Brother Arnold shook his head, glancing at him expectantly as though he were hoping for another laugh. Brother Michael scratched his head for some indication of what he meant. He was a slow-witted man and had never been good at the sign talk. Then he picked up the sweeping brush and straddled it. He pulled up his skirts, stretched out his left hand holding the handle of the brush, and with his right began flogging the air behind him, a grim look on his leather little face. Inquiringly he looked again and Brother Arnold nodded excitedly and put his thumbs up to show he understood. He saw now that the real reason Brother Michael had behaved so queerly was that he read racing papers on the sly and he did so because in private life he had been a jockey on the Curragh.

  He was still laughing like mad, his blue eyes dancing, wishing only for an audience to tell it to, and then he suddenly remembered all the things he had thought about Brother Michael and bowed his head and beat his breast by way of asking pardon. Then he glanced at the paper again. A mischievous twinkle came into his eyes and he pointed the paper at himself. Brother Michael pointed back, a bit puzzled. Brother Arnold chuckled and stowed the paper up his sleeve. Then Brother Michael winked and gave the thumbs-up sign. In that slow cautious way of his he went down the stable and reached to the top of the wall where the roof sloped down on it. This, it seemed, was his hiding-hole. He took down several more papers and gave them to Brother Arnold.

  For the rest of the day Brother Arnold was in the highest spirits. He winked and smiled at everyone till they all wondered what the joke was. He still pined for an audience. All that evening and long after he had retired to his cubicle he rubbed his hands and giggled with delight whenever he thought of it; it was like a window let into his loneliness; it gave him a warm, mellow feeling, as though his heart had expanded to embrace all humanity.

  It was not until the following day that he had a chance of looking at the papers himself. He spread them on a rough desk under a feeble electric light bulb high in the roof. It was four years since he had seen a paper of any sort, and then it was only a scrap of local newspaper which one of the carters had brought wrapped about a bit of bread and butter. But Brother Arnold had palmed it, hidden it in his desk, and studied it as if it were a bit of a lost Greek play. He had never known until then the modern appetite for words – printed words, regardless of their meaning. This was merely a County Council wrangle about the appointment of seven warble-fly inspectors, but by the time he was done with it he knew it by heart.

  So he did not just glance at the racing papers as a man would in the train to pass the time. He nearly ate them. Blessed words like fragments of tunes coming to him out of a past life; paddocks and point-to-points and two-year-olds, and again he was in the middle of a race-course crowd on a spring day, with silver streamers of light floating down the sky like heavenly bunting. He had only to close his eyes and he could see the refreshment tent again with the golden light leaking like split honey through the rents in the canvas, and the girl he had been in love with sitting on an upturned lemonade box. ‘Ah, Paddy,’ she had said, ‘sure there’s bound to be racing in heaven!’ She was fast, too fast for Brother Arnold, who was a steady-going fellow and had never got over the shock of discovering that all the time she had been running another man. But now all he could remember of her was her smile and the tone of her voice as she spoke the words which kept running through his head, and afterwards whenever his eyes met Brother Michael’s he longed to give him a hearty slap on the back and say: ‘Michael, boy, there’s bound to be racing in heaven.’ Then he grinned and Brother Michael, though he didn’t hear the words or the tone of voice, without once losing his casual melancholy air, replied with a wall-faced flicker of the horny eyelid, a tick-tack man’s signal, a real, expressionless, horsey look of complete understanding.

  One day Brother Michael brought in a few papers. On one he pointed to the horses he had marked, on the other to the horses who had won. He showed no signs of his jubilation. He just winked, a leathery sort of wink, and Brother Arnold gaped as he saw the list of winners. It filled him with wonder and pride to think that when so many rich and clever people had lost, a simple little monk living hundreds of miles away could work it all out. The more he thought of it the more excited he grew. For one wild moment he felt it might be his duty to tell the Abbot, so that the monastery could have the full advantage of Brother Michael’s intellect, but he realised that it wouldn’t do. Even if Brother Michael could restore the whole abbey from top to bottom with his winnings, the ecclesiastical authorities would disapprove of it. But more than ever he felt the need of an audience.

  He went to the door, reached up his long arm, and took down a loose stone from the wall above it. Brother Michael shook his head several times to indicate how impressed he was by Brother Arnold’s ingenuity. Brother Arnold grinned. Then he took down a bottle and handed it to Brother Michael. The ex-jockey gave him a questioning look as though he were wondering if this wasn’t cattle-medicine; his face did not change but he took out the cork and sniffed. Still his face did not change. All at once he went to the door, gave a quick glance up and a quick glance down and then raised the bott
le to his lips. He reddened and coughed; it was good beer and he wasn’t used to it. A shudder as of delight went through him and his little eyes grew moist as he watched Brother Arnold’s throttle working on well-oiled hinges. The big man put the bottle back in its hiding-place and indicated by signs that Brother Michael could go there himself whenever he wanted and have a drink. Brother Michael shook his head doubtfully, but Brother Arnold nodded earnestly. His fingers moved like lightning while he explained how a farmer whose cow he had cured had it left in for him every week.

  The two men were now fast friends. They no longer had any secrets from one another. Each knew the full extent of the other’s little weaknesses and liked him the more for it. Though they couldn’t speak to one another they sought out one another’s company and whenever other things failed they merely smiled. Brother Arnold felt happier than he had felt for years. Brother Michael’s successes made him want to try his hand, and whenever Brother Michael gave him a racing paper with his own selections marked, Brother Arnold gave it back with his, and they waited impatiently till the results turned up three or four days late. It was also a new lease of life to Brother Michael, for what comfort is it to a man if he has all the winners when not a soul in the world can ever know whether he has or not. He felt now that if only he could have a bob each way on a horse he would ask no more of life.

  It was Brother Arnold, the more resourceful of the pair, who solved that difficulty. He made out dockets, each valued for so many Hail Marys, and the loser had to pay up in prayers for the other man’s intention. It was an ingenious scheme and it worked admirably. At first Brother Arnold had a run of luck. But it wasn’t for nothing that Brother Michael had had the experience; he was too tough to make a fool of himself even over a few Hail Marys, and everything he did was carefully planned. Brother Arnold began by imitating him, but the moment he struck it lucky he began to gamble wildly. Brother Michael had often seen it happen on the Curragh and remembered the fate of those it had happened to. Men he had known with big houses and cars were now cadging drinks in the streets of Dublin. It struck him that God had been very good to Brother Arnold in calling him to a monastic life where he could do no harm to himself or to his family.