Gaudete (15 page)

In a straggly sparse village on the West Coast of Ireland, on a morning in May – a morning of gust and dazzle – three small girls came to the priest where he sat in his study gazing at an open page of St Ignatius.

They brought something wrapped in a black waterproof folder. A stranger, a man, who had gone off in a car, had left it on a boulder down by the sea-lough. The priest unwrapped the folder and discovered a tattered notebook. Looking closely at the densely corrected pages he saw it was full of verse. He became curious about the man. He asked the girls more.

They had been playing among the rocks, and there wasn’t a soul to be seen. Then they got a fright. One minute there was just rocks, and the next minute there was this man, right beside them, sitting on a rock, watching them.

Before they could run off, he spoke. He asked them the name of the lough. Then he wanted to know the name of that mountain across the lough. Then of that other mountain, and the mountain beyond it. So with all the mountains in sight, mountain beyond mountain, far away to North and to South, the girls had to name them or say they didn’t know. Finally the man asked them if they’d ever seen a miracle. They had not.

He made them sit down on the rocks beside him. They promised that whatever happened they would not move or speak or make the slightest sound. Then he put the back of his hand to his mouth. He pursed his lips against the back of his hand. The girls waited. Suddenly their nerves seemed to shrivel, like a hair held in fire. An uncanny noise was coming from the back of the man’s hand. A peculiar, warbling thin sound. It was like a tiny gentle screaming. A wavering, wringing, awful sound, that caught hold of their
heads and was nearly painful. It was like a fine bloody thread being pulled through their hearts.

The man stared at the lough and the sound went out over the water. On and on and on. And the girls sat, petrified, staring at the man. He was solemn-looking, long-faced, dark-faced, and his bald shiny head was lumped with scars.

He stopped his noise abruptly. The silence was even worse. The girls looked where he was looking. Something was standing up out of the water at the lough’s edge. It was a beast of some kind, gazing towards them.

Now the noise started again, but this time much more softly. The girls could feel it plucking at different places inside them. It made them want to cry. And the beast came up out of the water.

It was like nothing the girls had ever seen, unless it was like a big weasel. It came up the gravelly beach below the rocks with that merry, hump-backed, snake-headed gallop of weasels. It came on over the rocks. It disappeared and they thought it had gone. It reappeared much closer and bigger. And all the time the man kept on with his strange, soft, painful cry.

Till at last the creature was sitting there in front of them, the size of a big cat, its dark fur all clawed with wet, craning towards the man, sniffing and shivering, so he could have reached out his hand and touched it, and the girls could smell the wild smell of the fish of the lough.

Again the man was silent. He sat watching the beast. And the beast went on trembling and sniffing and craning towards him. It seemed to be getting ready to jump into his lap. One of the girls could stand it no longer. She jerked in her foot, and hunched herself tighter, and a whimper escaped her.

The beast stood erect and stared. It stood up on its hind legs, like a person, and stared at them, quite still, as if they were very far away. The girls saw its foreign eyes, its wide whiskers. They thought they were going to be attacked at last, and got ready to shriek. Instead, it turned away and dropped off the back of its rock, and went on down over
the rocks and over the beach and into the water. And all the time the man sat watching it without a word. The creature stood up again, in the shallow water, looking back. Then it had gone.

The priest listened to this story, and smiled at the excitement of the three girls.

‘If that is a miracle,’ he said finally, ‘To bring an otter up out of the lough, then what must that poor man think of the great world itself, this giant, shining beauty that God whistled up out of the waters of chaos?’

And as he spoke the priest was suddenly carried away by his words. His thoughts flew up into a great fiery space, and who knows what spark had jumped on to him from the flushed faces of the three girls? He seemed to be flying into an endless, blazing sunrise, and he described the first coming of Creation, as it rose from the abyss, an infinite creature of miracles, made of miracles and teeming miracles. And he went on, describing this creature, giving it more and more dazzlingly-shining eyes, and more and more glorious limbs, and heaping it with greater and more extraordinary beauties, till his heart was pounding and he was pacing the room talking about God himself, and the tears pouring from his eyes fell shattering and glittering down the front of his cassock.

The girls became dull, and the moment his words paused they vanished through the doorway. The priest hardly noticed, he was so astonished by his own emotion. He sat down, trembling and faint, as in a fever. He thought something supernatural had happened. Then he saw the notebook again, lying on the table, and he remembered the otter and the strange way it had come up out of the lough because a man whistled. He opened the notebook and began to decipher the words. He found a pen and clean paper and began to copy out the verses.