Patrick Augustine Sheehan

THE KAMPANER THAL

Events are thickening around me these winter days; and much oftener than in past years am I compelled to lay aside my pet authors, when my lamp is lighted, and my fire is sparkling merrily, whilst the earth is waking up from its winter's sleep, and stretching out its hands in the feeble lengthening of the evenings towards the approaching spring. This evening I had an unexpected visitor,—no less a person than Reginald Ormsby, the betrothed of Bittra. He came in modestly and apologetically, with all that gentlemanly deference that is so characteristic of the British officer. He made a nice little speech, explaining his reasons for visiting me so late, and mildly deprecating the anger of such a potentate as the parish priest of Kilronan. I had pulled the bell in the mean time, and Hannah had brought in the "materials"; and in reply to his pretty eloquence, I merely pushed the decanter towards him, and said:—

"Go ahead!"

He filled his wine-glass with a firm hand, until the blessed liquor made an arc of a circle on the summit; then tilted it over into the tumbler, without spilling a drop, then filled the tumbler to the top with hot water, and I said in my own mind, "He'll do."

"Of course," I said, after this little ceremony had been proceeded with, "you smoke?"

"I shouldn't venture to think of smoking in your pretty parlor, sir," said he. "You know cigar smoke hangs around the curtains for days, and—"

"Never mind the curtains," I replied. "I don't keep Havanas here, though I suppose we must soon, as that appears to be a constituent in the new education to which we old fossils are being subjected. But if you have a cigar-case about you, light up, like a good fellow. You have to say something of importance, I think, and they say a cigar promotes easy and consecutive thought."

"Very many thanks, sir," he said. "Then, with your permission, I will."

He smoked quietly for a few seconds, and it was a good cigar, I can tell you. The fragrance filled the whole house. Then I broke the ice:—

"Now, my curate has had several conferences with you about religion, and he told me he was going to try the Kampaner Thal."

"Oh, yes! so he did, indeed. He has been very kind."

I should say here that my theological friend and neighbor had written me: "I have hunted up all my cyclopÆdias, and can find no trace whatever of that thing about which you were inquiring. From the word Kampaner, I suspect it has something to do with bells. Perhaps your curate wants a chime for your cathedral at Kilronan. When you get them, select C sharp, or B flat, and put it around his neck, that we may know where to find him. Yours truly—"

"Now," I said to Mr. Ormsby, "I do not know whether that Kampaner Thal is bird, beast, fish, or insect; whether it is a powerful drug or a new system of hypnotism."

"Oh, 't is none of these dreadful things," he said, laughing; "'t is only a little book. Here it is! I always carry it about with me. It is really very beautiful."

I handled the little duodecimo with suspicion; then gave it back.

"It has done you a lot of good, I suppose?" I said, I am afraid, with a certain amount of contempt.

"I can't say it has," he replied sadly; then lapsed into moody reflection.

Now, gloom is the one thing I cannot tolerate; so to rouse him from his reverie, and possibly from a slight, venial prompting of curiosity, I asked him to read some passages for me.

"My old sight cannot bear much of a strain," I said, "and the print is mighty small. Now, like a good fellow, pick out some good things, and read them slowly, for perhaps I may require to punctuate them."

So he read in a calm even monotone, without inflection, but with many pauses, whilst I watched every syllable and measured it.

"I have a strong objection to a voyage pittoresque through the planets; we bear in our own breasts a heaven full of constellations. There is in our hearts an inward, spiritual world, that breaks like a sun upon the clouds of the outward world. I mean that inward universe of goodness, beauty, and truth,—three worlds that are neither part, nor shoot, nor copy of the outward. We are less astonished at the incomprehensible existence of these transcendental heavens because they are always there, and we foolishly imagine that we create, when we merely perceive them. After what model, with what plastic power, and from what, could we create these same spiritual worlds? The atheist should ask himself how he received the giant idea of God, that he has neither opposed nor embodied. An idea that has not grown up by comparing different degrees of greatness, as it is the opposite of every measure and degree. In fact, the atheist speaks as others of prototype and original."

"Stop there," I cried; "why that is the ontological argument of St. Anselm, adopted afterwards by a soldier philosopher like yourself, called Descartes. There's nothing new under the sun. It is wonderful how modern artists can refurbish our old Masters and make wonderful pictures from them!"

"Quite so," he replied, "in lieu of yourselves. There, now, I am always too precipitate; pardon me, sir, if I am too bold; but you Catholics have a wonderful talent for burying your treasures in napkins. Have you any treatise on the immortality of the soul in English, and in such a style as this?"

"I am afraid," I replied, as I looked askance at the volume, "that just now I cannot mention one. But go on, if it does not tire you. Time is the cheapest thing we have in Ireland."

He continued:—

"Very good, indeed," I interrupted. "He knows how to put things in a virile way.'

I was listening with closed eyes to the reading, the quiet rhythm of the sentences, and the calm, deep music of his voice, sounding ineffably soothing, when a quaver, then a break in his voice, just as he repeated the last words, made me look toward him. The calm, strong man was weeping silently; and just then he broke into a paroxysm of sobs that shook his strong frame as by a palsy. Dear Lord! what hidden grief there is in the world! Who would ever dream that the calm exterior of this reasoning, cultivated atheist concealed such hidden fires? It was no time to talk; I let the poor fellow alone. After a few moments he dried his eyes, and said:—

"I am quite ashamed of this snivelling, Father. I shouldn't have attempted to read this. It always upsets me."

"Never mind, my poor boy," I said. "It is good for men sometimes to weep." I thought in my own mind, My little child will be in safe hands.

"Now, put it aside," I said gently, "and let us talk."

"One sentence more, Father, just to get over this weakness."

"And that, sir," said Ormsby, closing the book and putting it into his side pocket, "is just where I am. My heart is with you; if only my head would follow. Put Bittra for Gione, and you will understand my emotion."

"Even that won't do," I said; "the head might follow, and you might be as far from us as ever."

"I don't understand," he said in a bewildered way. "Surely all that's wanting now is a conviction of the truth of your teaching?"

"There's your grave mistake," I replied; "conviction is not faith. There are thousands of your countrymen filled with conviction of the truths of Catholicity; but they are as far outside the Church as a Confucian or a Buddhist. Faith is not a matter to be acquired by reading or knowledge. It is a gift, like the natural talent of a great painter or musician—a sixth sense, and the pure gratuity of the All-Wise and the All-Good."

This appeared to him to be a revelation which he could not comprehend; it seemed to be such an inevitable logical sequence—conviction and profession.

"I am attracted by everything," he said, "in your Church. The whole thing appears to be such a well-connected scheme, so unlike the religion in which I was born and educated, where you had to be forever searching after a missing link. And then your Church seems to be founded on love—love of a supernal kind, of course, and almost unintelligible; but it is the golden chain in the string of pearls. You will have noticed how rapidly sometimes the mind makes comparisons. Well, often, at our station over there, I have thought, as I searched the sea, that we Protestants look at God through the large end of a telescope and throw Him afar off, and make Him very small and insignificant; whilst you look at Him through the narrower end, and magnify Him and bring Him near. Our God—that is, the God in whom I was taught to believe—is the God of Sinai, and our Christ is the historic Christ; but that won't do for a humanity that is ever querulous for God, and you have found the secret."

I was quite astonished at the solemn, thoughtful manner in which this young fellow spoke, and his words were so full of feeling and self-sympathy for his great privation. He was silent for a long time, smoking freely, whilst I was pondering many things, mostly in humility for our slow appreciation of the great gift of divine faith. At last, he said:—

"I do not quite follow you, sir, in your remark about a sixth sense; for this is not a question of sense, but of the soul."

We were now getting into deep water, and when an old gentleman hasn't opened a book of philosophy for nearly thirty years, he may be well excused for a certain timidity in approaching these deep questions. But, "keep to the metaphorical" has always been a great rule of mine, which never failed me.

"Let me explain," I said. "Have you ever been to an ophthalmic hospital or a blind asylum?"

"Yes," he replied, "principally abroad."

"Well," I continued, "you might have noticed various forms of the dread disease of blindness. Some are cases of cataract; in some the entire ball is removed; some have partial sight behind the ugly film. But the most pathetic case to my mind is that of the young boy or girl who comes toward you, looking steadily at you with large, luminous eyes, the iris perfectly clear, the pupil normally distended, and even the white of the eye tinged with that delicate blue that denotes perfect health in the organ; but in one moment the truth flashes upon you—that poor patient is stone-blind. Now, where's the disease?"

"The optic nerve is destroyed," he answered promptly.

"Precisely. And now, if you were to pour in through the dark canal of the pupil the strongest sunlight, or even the flash of your electric searchlight, would it make any difference, do you think?"

"None," he said, "so far as sight was concerned; but it might possibly paralyze the brain."

"Precisely. And if you, my dear young friend, were pouring, till the crack of doom, every kind of human light—philosophical, dogmatic, controversial—upon the retina of the soul without the optic nerve of faith, you will be blind, and go blind to your grave."

Somehow this appeared to be a relief, though it looked like discouragement.

"It is something to know," he said, "that the fault is not altogether my own. But," after a pause, "this demands a miracle."

"Quite so. A pure light from God. And that is the reason that my excellent curate is storming the citadels of heaven for you by that terrible artillery—the prayers of little children. And if you want to capture this grace of God by one tremendous coup, search out the most stricken and afflicted of my flock (Bittra has a pretty good catalogue of them), and get him or her to pray for you, and very soon the sense of faith will awaken within you, and you will wonder that you were ever blind."

"Ten thousand thanks," he said, rising; "I had no anticipations of so pleasant and instructive an evening."

"You were told to expect to meet a funny old fellow," I said, "with as many quips, and cranks, and jests, as old Jack Falstaff?"

"Well," he said, pulling his mustache nervously, "I should not like to put it so brusquely."

"Of course not. But there lies a big mistake, my dear boy. Democritus was as much a philosopher as Heraclitus, and he lived fifty years longer. There is a good deal of philosophy behind a laugh, and we put our gargoyles on the outside of our churches."

"Indeed, I must say, from a long experience," he replied, "and a grateful experience, that your men are the most cheerful class I have met,—if I except our own sailors,—although the comparison sounds grotesque. And," he said hesitatingly, "that just reminds me; if I may take the freedom of showing my gratitude in a small way, permit me to say to you as pastor, what I have already hinted to himself, that your most excellent curate will involve himself in a great deal of trouble and possible expense if he perseveres in that matter of the fishing-boat. Indeed, I have been working the matter for him, because his heart is set on it; but I have misgivings. I'm not sure that I am quite right in mentioning the matter to you, sir; but I am really anxious, and I speak from long experience."

He lighted another cigar at the door, and I returned to think somewhat anxiously whether I had done credit to Catholic philosophy. But my thoughts would revert to these last words of Ormsby's. What if Father Letheby should get into a bad mess, and everything so promising? How little these young men reflect what a trouble they are to their old pastors!