Free Such Is My Beloved by Morley Callaghan Page B

“Well, you’re going to pay her something, aren’t you? What do you think she does for a living?” but he faltered, his face reddened. “I was glad to meet you. That’s all, Father.”
    â€œThere wasn’t something else you wanted to say?”
    â€œThat’s all.”
    As Father Dowling went out he was thinking, “Lou’s a bad actor, a bad character, I can see that.” But he felt, too, that Ronnie loved Lou, and he did not want to say anything to him in front of her that might hurt her.

 
    NINE
    T he time when Father Dowling went to meet Charlie Stewart’s girl, he found that as soon as he got to the apartment house by the schoolyard he had become shy. As he looked up at the lighted apartment window and saw the shadow of a woman moving on the shade he remembered how he had at first been angry because a woman had become important in his young friend’s life. Now he knew he had dreaded to meet the girl. Walking away a little piece, he turned around and saw her form again passing the lighted window. In his own celibate life he had always been content, but now he wondered if that contentment had made him dry and wooden, so he could not understand Charlie’s longing for happiness with this girl. She was a Catholic. Perhaps it was his duty, he thought suddenly, to go in and tell her that she ought not to marry a man like Charlie who was without faith, no matter how much he loved her. But supposing he went in there and saw that they were both very much in love. “Perhaps through her influence Charlie might learn to think differently,” he thought.
    As he looked up at the lighted window, he was afraid it might be better to try and understand the happiness the young man and girl might be seeking so eagerly before he spoke against their marriage. “I won’t say anything to her to-night,” he thought. This was a compromise. He excused himself because he knew the girl would look at him shrewdly, maybe with dislike, and remember that he had advised Charlie not to marry her. In going in to meet them, when they loved each other in a way that he could not comprehend, because for him their marriage could hardly be sanctioned, he felt he might be going where he had no right to go. He felt the girl might look at him and hate him. “I’ll go in very cheerfully and pretend I’ve never thought about the matter at all,” he said.
    But when Father Dowling was in the apartment, shaking hands, with his face red and smiling, the girl, Pauline, who understood so well why Father Dowling did not want the marriage, smiled at him warmly as if she had been wanting to meet him for a long time; she could not believe from what she had heard about him that he would say Charlie ought not to marry her. She was a very tall, fair girl with an elegant manner, who wore fine expensive clothes.
    Charlie was talking to her now as if Father Dowling was not a priest but an old friend, and she kept turning her head and looking at the priest’s embarrassed face, hardly able to conceal a slight amusement. But as soon as Father Dowling looked at the girl’s blue eyes and saw her smile suddenly, he knew she had wondered maybe many nights whether she could get a priest to marry her to Charlie.
    As the priest sat opposite the two of them the girl’s face was radiant. They both seemed very much in love, and she said, “I’ve heard so much about you, Father. Charlie keeps saying hewants you to marry us.” The priest liked her and couldn’t help thinking she would make a fine wife. “If she’s a good Catholic, and if Charlie’s intuitions are so often traditionally Catholic, even if he thinks he’s Communistic, maybe it’s in the hands of God whether he has faith or not. Faith is the gift of God. It is in God’s hands, especially if they are determined to marry,” and after this thought he smiled as though he had suddenly freed