"That's altogether a more difficult problem," Dr Galvan said, "but perhaps you have already said it. 'Bugger the bishop.' "
2
Father Quixote strictly obeyed the advice of Dr Galvan. He slept as much as he could, he drank soup at midday, he ate half his omelette in the evening. He thought how much better cheese had tasted in the open air with a bottle of manchegan wine.
He woke automatically in the morning at a quarter past five (for more than thirty years he had said Mass at six in the almost empty church). Now he lay in bed and listened for the sound of a door closing which would signal the departure of Father Herrera but it was nearly seven before the clap came. Father Herrera had obviously altered the time of Mass. The pain this gave him he knew was quite unreasonable. Father Herrera in doing that might even add two or three to the congregation.
Father Quixote waited five minutes (for Father Herrera might possibly have forgotten something -- a handkerchief perhaps) and then he stole on tiptoe to the living-room. A sheet had been neatly folded on the armchair underneath a pillow. Father Herrera certainly had the virtue of tidiness if tidiness be a virtue. Father Quixote looked along his bookshelves. Alas! He had left his favourite reading in the care of Rocinante. St Francis de Sales, his usual comforter, was off somewhere on the roads of Spain. He picked out the Confessions of St Augustine and the Spiritual Letters of the eighteenth-century Jesuit, Father Caussade, which he had sometimes found consoling when he was a seminarian, and returned to bed. Teresa had heard his movements and brought him a cup of tea with a roll and butter. She was in a very bad mood.
"Who does he think I am?" she demanded. "Tidy up while he is at Mass. Haven't I tidied up for you for twenty years and more? I don't need him or the bishop to teach me my duty."
"You really think the bishop is coming?"
"Oh, they are thick as thieves, those two. On the telephone morning, noon and night ever since you left. Always Excellency, Excellency, Excellency. You would think he was talking to God himself."
"My ancestor," Father Quixote said, "was at least spared the bishop when the priest brought him home. And I prefer Dr Galvan to that stupid barber who told my ancestor all those tales about madmen. How could such stories of madmen have cured him if he had been really mad, which I don't for a moment believe. Oh well, we must look on the bright side, Teresa. I don't think they will try to burn my books."
"Not burn them perhaps, but Father Herrera told me how I was to keep your study locked. He said he didn't want you tiring your head with books. Anyway, not till after the bishop had been."
"But you didn't lock the door, Teresa. You can see I have two books with me."
"Is it me who would lock you out of your own room, when it hurts me to see that young priest sit there as though it belonged to him? But better hide the books under the sheet when the bishop comes. They are two of a kind, those two."
He heard Father Herrera return from Mass: he heard the clatter of plates for the priest's breakfast -- Teresa was making twice the noise in the kitchen that she would have made for him. He turned to Father Caussade who was a more comforting presence to have at his bedside than Father Heribert Jone. He pretended to himself that Father Caussade was sitting beside his bed to hear his confession. Was it four days that had passed or five?
"Father, since my last confession ten days ago. . ." He was worried again by the laughter which had so nearly come to him, as he watched the film in Valladolid, and by the absence of any kind of desire which would prove him human and give him a sense of shame. Was it possible that he had even picked up in the cinema the vulgar phrase which he had used in talking of the bishop? But there had been no bishop in the film. The obscene words had caused Teresa to laugh and Dr Galvan had even repeated them. He said to Father Caussade: "If there was a sin in her laughter or in Dr Galvan's counsel, the sin was mine, mine only." There was a worse sin. Under the influence of wine he had minimized the importance of the Holy Ghost by comparing it to a half bottle of manchegan. It was certainly a black record with which he had to face the reprobation of the bishop, but it was not really the bishop he feared. He feared himself. He felt as though he had been touched by the wing-tip of the worst sin of all, despair.
He opened Father Caussade's Spiritual Letters at random. The first passage he read had no relevance at all as far as he could understand it. "In my opinion your too frequent contacts with your many relations and others in the world are a stumbling block to your advancement." Father Caussade, it was true, was writing to a nun, but all the same. . . A priest and a nun are closely allied. I never wanted to be advanced, he protested to the empty air, I never wanted to be a monsignor, and I have no relatives except a second cousin in Mexico.
Without much hope he opened the book a second time, but this time he was rewarded, although the paragraph he had fixed on began discouragingly. "Have I ever in my life made a good confession? Has God pardoned me? Am I in a good or a bad state?" He was tempted to close the book but he read on. "I at once reply: God wishes to conceal all that from me, so that I may blindly abandon myself to His mercies. I do not wish to know what He does not wish to show me and I wish to proceed in the midst of whatever darkness He may plunge me into. It is His business to know the state of my progress, mine to occupy myself with Him alone. He will take care of all the rest; I leave it to Him."
"I leave it to Him," Father Quixote repeated aloud and at that moment the door of his room opened and Father Herrera's voice announced, "His Excellency is here."
Father Quixote had for a moment the odd impression that Father Herrera had suddenly grown old -- the collar was the same blinding white, but the hair was white too and Father Herrera of course did not wear a bishop's ring or a big cross slung round his neck. But he would in time wear both, he certainly would in time, Father Quixote thought.
"I am sorry, Excellency. If you will give me a few minutes grace I will be with you in the study."
"Stay where you are, monsignor," the bishop said. (He rolled out the title monsignor with an obvious bitterness.) He took from his sleeve a white silk handkerchief and dusted the chair beside the bed, looked carefully at the handkerchief to see how far it might have been soiled, lowered himself into the chair and put his hand on the sheet. But as Father Quixote was not in a position in which he could genuflect he thought it was permissible to leave out the kiss and the bishop after a brief pause withdrew his hand. Then the bishop pursed his lips and following a moment's reflection blew out the monosyllable: "Well!"
Father Herrera was standing in the doorway like a bodyguard. The bishop told him, "You can leave me and the monsignor --" the word seemed to burn his tongue for he made a grimace -- "to have our little discussion alone." Father Herrera withdrew.
The bishop clutched the cross on his purple pechera as though he were seeking a higher than human wisdom. It seemed an anti-climax to Father Quixote when he said, "I trust you are feeling better."
"I am feeling perfectly well," Father Quixote replied. "My holiday has done me much good."