Such Is My Beloved by Morley Callaghan Page B

with curiosity at the bundles and smiled up at him, for she liked him more than any of the other priests. She was a little, fat, gray-haired, Italian woman, who always smiled and was very pious. “Can’t I help you with those boxes, Father?”
    â€œOh no,” he said anxiously. “I’ll look after them myself, thank you.”
    After carrying the boxes upstairs to his bedroom he looked at them for a long time, full of eagerness, but knowing really that he would not permit himself to open these boxes of young women’s clothing in the house. They must remain there on his bed till he took them away early in the evening. Furthermore, he would not permit himself to indulge in too much anticipation, either, of the pleasure that would be his when he saw the startled surprise on the girls’ faces. All these thoughts and resolutions occurred to him as reasons why heshould not want to open the boxes there in the room, when some one was apt to come upstairs and see him, or call him, and force him to make very embarrassing explanations. The other young priest in the house, Father Jolly, knew that he had no nieces. Besides, there was always a kind of good-natured malice between Father Dowling and Father Jolly. It had begun when Father Dowling had wanted the other young priest’s room because it had a set of bookshelves and his own had none. Father Jolly had immediately decided to go in for literature himself, and he would read Tolstoy, or Conrad, or anybody else that Father Dowling recommended and come back in a few days, drink two or three bottles of beer, and say, “My, isn’t that author carnal? Do you really like him?” and at the dinner table, with old Father Anglin turning down his lip contemptuously, he would force Father Dowling to defend a carnality in Tolstoy that didn’t really exist. Sometimes these arguments about literature became so impassioned that old Father Anglin was drawn into them and he gave it as his opinion that all art, being sensual, tended to detract from man’s one primal instinct, his need of the faith and his desire to worship God. Father Jolly, his head bobbing up and down enthusiastically, readily agreed with the old priest. But he kept his room with the bookshelves, teased Father Dowling, accused him of scheming to get it, gave up his interest in literature unless the books were on the Cardinal’s white list, and remained gravely suspicious of Father Dowling’s respect for modern carnal authors. If Father Jolly saw these boxes he would at once associate them with unorthodox notions. “Ah, I must not have such thoughts,” Father Dowling said to himself, going out of the room.
    In the evening, almost as soon as it was dark enough so that he thought he would not be noticed, Father Dowlingtook his two boxes and the smaller bundle and set out for the hotel on the other side of the block. It was a clear mild evening. The snow had nearly all gone from the streets. There was a freshness in the air that made him think of approaching spring. He passed a young man and a girl walking very close together and the girl’s face was so full of eagerness and love Father Dowling smiled. As soon as the mild weather came the young people began to walk slowly around the Cathedral in the early evening, laughing out loud or whispering and never noticing anybody who smiled at them. The next time Father Dowling, walking slowly, passed two young people, he smiled openly, they looked at him in surprise and the young man touched his hat with respect. Father Dowling felt suddenly that he loved the whole neighborhood, all the murmuring city noises, the street cries of newsboys, the purring of automobiles and rumble of heavy vehicles, the thousand separate sounds of everlasting motion, the low, steady and mysterious hum that was always in the air, the lights in windows, doors opening, rows of street lights and fiery flash of signs, the cry of night birds darting