THE CONVERSION

[‘The Conversion’ is based on a cycling trip in France with Stan
Stewart, 1950. Stewart, cast as Géronte, also appears in _Irish
Miles_.]

Géronte and I landed in Dieppe on the afternoon of Holy
Thursday. Géronte is the companion of all my cycling trips; we have
covered together most of Ireland and a lot of England, but this was
our first trip to France, and we were rather scared.

On the whole, we make a good mixture; I, in my late forties, tall,
gaunt and seedy; Géronte, in the neighbourhood of sixty, a pipe
smoker, small and stout, and with the digestion and temper necessary
to handle a chronic dyspeptic. He was brought up in an Irish
Protestant house where it was a sin to play on Sunday, I, in an Irish
Catholic one where I was encouraged to give the Infant Jesus in the
Christmas crib a clockwork engine as a present. In our cynical middle
age, the difference of upbringing still comes out. I, restive and
fiery, can be led a great part of the way by anyone who will talk
soothingly to me and pat me on the nose; Géronte, the most
good-natured of men, remains the complete individualist, and will
submit to dictation from nobody.

There was, for instance, the awful half-hour in Warwick Castle. While
the guard showed us the armour, Géronte discovered what he took to be
a Breughel; when the guide reached the Breughel, I found Géronte in
the castle chapel looking at the ceiling and muttering ‘Contra-Buhl’
between his teeth. In the great hall, when the guide showed the
furniture, Géronte affected interest in a gittern presented by Queen
Elizabeth to Leicester, and when the guide, noticing his apparent
interest, began to tell us about it, Géronte grabbed me by the arm and
hissed, “Tell the damn fellow we’re not going to look at any more of
his damn rubbish!’ Eventually I had to tell the guide that my friend
was ill.

Travelling with a man like Géronte has its advantages as well as its
embarrassments, for of all men he is the most completely unaffected by
propaganda. He can look at the most famous work of art in the world,
first through his spectacles and then over them, and finally sum it up
without self-consciousness, as though nobody in the world had ever
seen it before. It is the story of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’
eternally renewed.

Only two others on the ship had bicycles; we parted from them with
regret on the quay, and, full of suspicions of French traffic, pushed
our bicycles up the main street. We were so scared we even left the
parish church on our left unvisited. Géronte did buy himself a pair of
insoles for his shoes, and that struck me as great boldness, for even
in England I had found it hard to make myself understood when I wanted
insoles, and it wasn’t until afterwards that I realized the natives
call them ‘socks’. Instead, I bought a kilo of apples under the
mistaken impression that a kilo was a pound, and then wondered what I
was to do with them.

Even after we had walked into the open country, Géronte insisted on
cycling in single file, a most unsociable practice, and he didn’t
really relax till after our first meal in a wayside pub, when he, with
a French shakier even than mine, had boldly gone out and bought what
he called ‘a yard of bread’. That gave him confidence. In the evening
light the downland country we cycled through became magical, Sussex
with a slight accent. In the village churches there was a mass of
baroque and rococo statuary, second-rate work, but wonderful after the
bareness of Irish and English parish churches where Géronte’s
ancestors had smashed everything with a face. But none of the statues
were draped in purple. It was Holy Thursday, and I thought it strange
to find the statues undraped and the churches empty. It gave me the
feeling that something was wrong.

Next day, no longer feeling like foreigners, we cycled on in the
direction of Beauvais. It was Good Friday, but the story was the
same. We came to a beautiful church and found it locked. Through the
plain glass windows we saw that the woodwork and statues inside were
excellent. By this time I was becoming really inquisitive, and while
Géronte went off with two children from a near-by cottage to locate
the key of the church, I remained behind and questioned the children’s
mother.

“Tell me,’ I asked, ‘is there no service here today?’

‘No, sir.’

‘But surely you have Mass here?”

‘No. We only hear Mass occasionally. Once in six months, perhaps.’

‘But why?’

“We have no priest.’

So that was it! That was why the statues remained undraped. Here the
enemy of the churches was not puritanism, but something more deadly
because more logical, something which left them their beauty but
removed their significance.

At the next village we found the parish church open because the
organist was practising. He was a young man, good-looking, with a
slight moustache, and after a few minutes he got up and joined us. He
might have been the expression in the flesh of the logic we had seen
at work on the other churches. He proceeded politely to tell us the
life stories of the more unfamiliar saints, and by the time he was
finished there was little left of the saints. Yet we liked him, as we
shouldn’t have liked a puritan.

“You’re English, I suppose?’ he asked as we were leaving.

‘No, Irish.’

‘Ah,’ he said with a shrug, ‘of Ireland I know nothing but James
Joyce.’

“You know quite a lot if you know that,’ I replied, and again we fell
into talk, and he told us how he had read _Ulysses_ in the Ste Geneviéve
Library in the evenings and given up _Finnegans Wake_ as a bad job. He
was the sort of young man who makes France worth while, the sort who
takes naturally to culture and not because he doesn’t feel himself
capable of business or games. We parted from him with real regret.

But the parting was not complete. We had cycled some miles farther and
found yet another locked church, when he caught up on us. He, too, was
riding a bicycle, and he excused himself in terms that were familiar
enough to me from having heard them so often in rural Ireland from
young country priests and teachers. The poor devil was dying of
loneliness; there wasn’t a soul in the village he could talk to about
books or music except his uncle, the parish priest, a severe,
old-fashioned man who still looked on Flaubert and De Maupassant as
‘immoral writers’ and kept their books locked up. How well I knew that
old uncle! How often I had argued with him in the days when I was a
librarian, trying to get the hospitable, saintly, pig-headed old devil
to let me start a library in his godforsaken parish where the
unfortunate people were drinking themselves to death for want of
something to do!  And failed! It isn’t the bad priests who break your
heart, but the good ones.

‘Anyway,’ said the organist, ‘as if he couldn’t find all the vices of
Flaubert and De Maupassant among his own parishioners!’

‘Do you think so?’ I asked. ‘I’ve always wondered if there really were
people like De Maupassant’s Normans.’

“You needn’t,’ said the organist. ‘Look at me!’

I asked him about the locked churches and our chances of hearing
Tenebrae anywhere along the road.

‘You won’t hear Tenebrae anywhere outside Beauvais,’ he replied. “You
couldn’t get a choir together in this whole country. My uncle is
having the Stations of the Cross tonight. That was why I was
practising. I’m the one who has to carry the cross.’

He tried out his irreverent jokes on us just to see how we
responded. He was full of curiosity about us cycling round, looking at
statues, wanting to hear Tenebrae—obviously a pious pair and yet
laughing at his jokes about religion. It wasn’t right.

‘You Irish are all Catholics, aren’t you?’ he asked with mock
innocence.

‘Not all,’ I replied. ‘My friend is a Protestant.’

‘He has all my sympathy,’ the organist replied gravely. ‘That, I
suppose, explains his interest in statues?’

‘Except modern ones,’ said Géronte.

‘Bah!’ said the organist. ‘Iconoclast!’

Whatever else he may not have shared with De Maupassant’s Normans, he
certainly had all their inquisitiveness. He wasn’t satisfied with my
attempts at an explanation. He went on with his probing. As for him,
he was an atheist—with an uncle a parish priest, what else could he
be? He was a delightful young fellow and excellent company in a
strange country.

We cycled on for some miles till we came to a really attractive
village green where we halted for tea. It had a wall of trees round
it, and behind a hedge at the back rose a great parish church. This
was really only the choir of a large church begun by the English
during their occupation of Normandy and never completed. There were a
few labourers at work on the road. We rested our bicycles against the
hedge before the church and got out the coffee and rolls and Irish
whiskey. Géronte explained to the organist how he must drink the
whiskey to get the full effect of it, ‘without hitting his tonsils’,
and the organist compared it (I thought, without much conviction) to
_fine_. We sat on the grass enjoying the meal and the evening sunlight,
when suddenly the organist, who seemed to have been following up his
own train of thought all the time, began to chuckle.

‘I understand it all now,’ he explained. ‘_You_ are a very bad Catholic;
_he_ is a very bad Protestant, and so, you can be very good friends.’

At last the French intellect had found its formula, and there was
sufficient truth in it to make Géronte and myself laugh, too. We were
still laughing when one of the labourers hailed us.

‘Aren’t you fellows going to the flicks?’ he shouted.

‘Flicks?’ the organist shouted back, looking puzzled. ‘What flicks?”

‘In there,’ said the labourer, jerking his thumb in the direction of
the church.

‘Flicks,’ the organist repeated to us.

“The Stations of the Cross,’ shouted the labourer.

‘Ah,’ said the organist, beginning to laugh apologetically, ‘the
Stations of the Cross.’

We listened, but we could hear no organ or anything else from the
church.

‘Why don’t we go in?’ I asked, and we packed up our food and went into
the church.

It was a huge church, bigger even than it had appeared from outside,
and only a bay or two of the nave had been completed before the west
wall had been roughly put in to finish it off. It was as bare as it
was high, with no ornament but one excellent modern statue of the
Blessed Virgin on a crossing pier at the south side of the choir.

I went into the pew farthest from the altar and was followed by
Géronte and the organist. It was only then I realized why we had heard
no sound from outside. There was no organ. A young priest was
celebrating the Stations of the Cross accompanied by two acolytes, and
the whole congregation in that great church consisted of three women
and two little girls—mothers, aunts and sisters of the acolytes—who
had obviously come not to join in the service but to see Jean and
Louis perform. I hope they enjoyed them more than I did. There is a
frustrated acolyte somewhere in me, and it rose within me like a wave
of fury at the incompetence and silliness of those two horrible
children. The young priest had to steer them. They didn’t know where
to go, didn’t know what to do, didn’t know when to genuflect and when
not. Louis was just a plain born idiot; Jean was a show box who knew
the music of two whole bars of the canticles, and whenever they turned
up joined in in a lusty ‘la-la-la’ and then looked round to his family
for approval.

What made the flightiness of the acolytes more striking was the
recollection of the young priest. I watched him and found myself
falling under a spell. He looked small and lost in that great bare
barrack of a church. His voice was weak and toneless. His face wasn’t
the face of a priest, and it took me some minutes to remember where
and when I had seen faces like his before. Then I remembered. It was
among young airmen during the war.

But the really extraordinary thing was that he was creating a
congregation for himself out of his head. He was not celebrating a
service for three reluctant women and two small girls who had merely
been dragged in to see members of their family perform in a
countryside where God was dead. He was celebrating it in a crowded
church in some cathedral town of the Middle Ages. The hypnotic
influence he exerted came from the fact that he had hypnotized
himself. You saw it in his extraordinary recollection, in the way he
managed to push those acolytes about without once letting go the
spell. I wondered if I wasn’t imagining it all. I looked at Géronte to
see how he was taking it. He, whose usual response to a church service
is like his response to a conducted tour, was half-kneeling, his eyes
fixed on the priest as though he were some work of art which had to be
sized up.

‘This is one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever seen,’ he
whispered without looking round.

The organist heard the whisper without understanding it. He was
sitting back gloomily, his hand over his face. He bent across
Géronte’s arched back to whisper to me.

‘I must apologize.’

‘Apologize for what?’ I asked.

‘This,’ he said with a wave of the hand. ‘I’m ashamed. Really, I’m
ashamed.’

‘But of what?’ I asked. ‘The Church of the Catacombs?”

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘The Church of the Catacombs.’

He said nothing to that, and the service went on, disorderly,
disconnected, ridiculous, but for the young priest who held it all
together by some sort of inner power. What I felt then I have felt on
other occasions, but it is hard to describe. I have felt it about a
picture of a nun which has been standing before me for some days. I
felt it about another picture, which I took in a Fever Hospital when a
family whose child had died asked me to photograph the little body for
them one summer morning in the mortuary chapel. The photographs I took
were beautiful, but I could not live with them. In a peculiar way the
positions had been reversed; the object had become the subject; the
dead child had photographed the camera. It is the sudden reversal of
situation which is familiar in dreams and which sooner or later
happens to all of us and to the civilizations to which we
belong. Bethlehem itself was merely an interesting object which the
Roman Empire had studied with amusement, till suddenly it opened its
eyes and the Roman Empire was no more.

The priest finished, went up to the altar, came down again with the
cross in his arms and stood there patiently. It was only then that I
realized that none of the congregation had attended the Stations of
the Cross before, and that the only two people in the church who had
were an Irish agnostic and a French atheist. ‘I can’t stand this,’ I
said to Géronte and pushed hastily out past him and the organist. As I
went up the nave the priest signalled to the three women. While I
stood aside and waited for them to kiss the cross, I suddenly heard
the steps behind me. ‘Iconoclast!’ I thought. ‘Whatever would they say
of us in Ireland.’ But when I turned, I saw that the man behind me was
not Géronte but the organist. “So all De Maupassant’s people are not
like that!’ I thought.

After the service we chatted for a while with the young priest. There
was nothing remarkable about him; we hadn’t expected it. The young
organist was the bigger man. To him we said goodbye outside the
church: it was getting late and we wanted to reach Beauvais before
dark.

“You know,’ he said with sudden emotion as we shook hands, ‘I thought
that service hideous till I suddenly saw it through the eyes of you
and your friend. Then I realized how beautiful it was. Perhaps that is
conversion.’

‘Let’s be honest,’ I said. ‘It’s not conversion for me.” My French
would not rise to an explanation of what it really was.

‘I’m younger than you,’ he replied gravely. ‘For me, perhaps, it is
complete conversion.’

‘I hope so,’ I said, and Géronte and I plugged on our way to
Beauvais.


(1951)
Source: The Best of Frank O’Connor, 2009