CHAPTER XIII
A WISE IGNORAMUS
‘God help me! I know nothing—can but pray.’
It was Father Concha’s custom to attend, at his church between the hours of nine and ten in the morning, to such wants spiritual or temporal as individual members of his flock chose to bring to him.
Thus it usually happened that the faithful found the old priest at nine o’clock sunning himself at the front door of the sacred edifice, smoking a reflective cigarette and exchanging the time of day with passers-by or such as had leisure to pause a moment.
‘Whether it is body or soul that is in trouble—come to me,’ he would say. ‘For the body I can do a little—a very little. I have twenty pounds a year, and it is not always paid to me, but I sometimes have a trifle for charity. For the soul I can do a little more.’ After a storm of wind and rain, such as come in the winter-time, it was no uncommon sight to see the priest sweeping the leaves and dust from the church steps and using the strongest language at the bootmaker over the way whose business this was supposed to be.
‘See!’ he would cry to some passer-by. ‘See!—it is thus that our sacristan does his work. It is for this that the Holy Church pays him fifteen—or is it twenty?—pesetas each year.’
And the bootmaker would growl and shake his head over his last; for, like most who have to do with leather, he was a man of small humour.
Here, too, mothers would bring their children—little girls cowering under their bright handkerchiefs, the mantilla of the poor, and speak with the Padre of the Confirmation and first Communion which had lately begun to hang like a cloud over the child’s life. Father Concha would take the child upon his knee as he sat on the low wall at the side of the steps, and when the mother had left them, would talk quietly with the lines of his face wonderfully softened, so that before long the little girl would run home quite happy in mind and no longer afraid of the great unknown. Here, in the spring time, came the young men with thoughts appropriate to the season, and sheepish exceedingly; for they knew that Father Concha knew all about them, and would take an unfair advantage of his opportunities, refusing probably to perform the ceremony until he was satisfied as to the ways and means and prudence of the contracting parties—which of course he had no right to do. Here came the halt, the lame, the blind, the poor, and also the rich. Here came the unhappy. They came naturally and often. Here, so the bootmaker tells, came one morning a ruined man, who after speaking a few words to the Padre, produced a revolver and tried to shoot himself. And the Padre fell on him like a wild beast. And they fought, and fell, and rolled down the steps together into the road, where they still fought till they were white like millers with dust. Then at last the Padre got the strong man under him and took the revolver away and threw it into the ditch. Then he fell to belabouring the would-be suicide with his fists, until the big man cried for mercy and received it not.
‘You saved his life,’ the people said.
‘It was his soul that I was caring for,’ replied the Padre with his grim smile.