The Thorn Birds Read online

  He was hungry; he tugged at her so hard his gummy little mouth hurt. Looking down on him, the closed eyes with their dark, gold-tipped lashes, the feathery brows, the tiny working cheeks, Meggie loved him so much the love hurt her more than his sucking ever could.

  He is enough; he has to be enough, I’ll not get any more. But by God, Ralph de Bricassart, by that God you love more than me, you’ll never know what I stole from you—and from Him. I’m never going to tell you about Dane. Oh, my baby! Shifting on the pillows to settle him more comfortably into the crook of her arm, to see more easily that perfect little face. My baby! You’re mine, and I’m never going to give you up to anyone else. Least of all to your father, who is a priest and can’t acknowledge you. Isn’t that wonderful?

  The boat docked in Genoa at the beginning of April. Archbishop Ralph landed in an Italy bursting into full, Mediterranean spring, and caught a train to Rome. Had he requested it he could have been met, chauffeured in a Vatican car to Rome, but he dreaded to feel the Church close around him again; he wanted to put the moment off as long as he could. The Eternal City. It was truly that, he thought, staring out of the taxi windows at the campaniles and domes, and pigeon-strewn plazas, the ambitious fountains, the Roman columns with their bases buried deep in the centuries. Well, to him they were all superfluities. What mattered to him was the part of Rome called the Vatican, its sumptuous public rooms, its anything but sumptuous private rooms.

  A black-and-cream-robed Dominican monk led him through high marble corridors, amid bronze and stone figures worthy of a museum, past great paintings in the styles of Giotto, Raphael, Botticelli, Fra Angelico. He was in the public rooms of a great cardinal, and no doubt the wealthy Contini-Verchese family had given much to enhance their august scion’s surroundings.

  In a room of ivory and gold, rich with color from tapestries and pictures, French carpeted and furnished, everywhere touches of crimson, sat Vittorio Scarbanza, Cardinal di Contini-Verchese. The small smooth hand, its ruby ring glowing, was extended to him in welcome; glad to fix his eyes downward, Archbishop Ralph crossed the room, knelt, took the hand to kiss the ring. And laid his cheek against the hand, knowing he couldn’t lie, though he had meant to right up until the moment his lips touched that symbol of spiritual power, temporal authority.

  Cardinal Vittorio put his other hand on the bent shoulder, nodding a dismissal to the monk, then as the door closed softly his hand went from shoulder to hair, rested in its dark thickness, smoothed it back tenderly from the half-averted forehead. It had changed; soon it would be no longer black, but the color of iron. The bent spine stiffened, the shoulders went back, and Archbishop Ralph looked directly up into his master’s face.

  Ah, there had been a change! The mouth had drawn in, knew pain and was more vulnerable; the eyes, so beautiful in color and shape and setting, were yet completely different from the eyes he still remembered as if bodily they had never left him. Cardinal Vittorio had always had a fancy that the eyes of Jesus were blue, and like Ralph’s: calm, removed from what He saw and therefore able to encompass all, understand all. But perhaps it had been a mistaken fancy. How could one feel for humanity and suffer oneself without its showing in the eyes?

  “Come, Ralph, sit down.”

  “Your Eminence, I wish to confess.”

  “Later, later! First we will talk, and in English. There are ears everywhere these days, but, thank our dear Jesus, not English-speaking ears. Sit down, Ralph, please. Oh, it is so good to see you! I have missed your wise counsel, your rationality, your perfect brand of companionship. They have not given me anyone I like half so well as you.”

  He could feel his brain clicking into the formality already, feel the very thoughts in his mind take on more stilted phrasing; more than most people, Ralph de Bricassart knew how everything about one changed with one’s company, even one’s speech. Not for these ears the easy fluency of colloquial English. So he sat down not far away, and directly opposite the slight figure in its scarlet moiré, the color changing yet not changing, of a quality which made its edges fuse with the surroundings rather than stand out from them.

  The desperate weariness he had known for weeks seemed to be easing a little from his shoulders; he wondered why he had dreaded this meeting so, when he had surely known in his heart he would be understood, forgiven. But that wasn’t it, not it at all. It was his own guilt at having failed, at being less than he had aspired to be, at disappointing a man who had been interested, tremendously kind, a true friend. His guilt at walking into this pure presence no longer pure himself.

  “Ralph, we are priests, but we are something else before that; something we were before we became priests, and which we cannot escape in spite of our exclusiveness. We are men, with the weaknesses and failings of men. There is nothing you can tell me which could alter the impressions I formed of you during our years together, nothing you could tell me which will make me think less of you, or like you less. For many years I have known that you had escaped this realization of our intrinsic weakness, of our humanity, but I knew you must come to it, for we all do. Even the Holy Father, who is the most humble and human of us all.”

  “I broke my vows, Your Eminence. That isn’t easily forgiven. It’s sacrilege.”

  “Poverty you broke years ago, when you accepted the bequest of Mrs. Mary Carson. Which leaves chastity and obedience, does it not?”

  “Then all three were broken, Your Eminence.”

  “I wish you would call me Vittorio, as you used to! I am not shocked, Ralph, nor disappointed. It is as Our Lord Jesus Christ wills, and I think perhaps you had a great lesson to learn which could not be learned in any way less destructive. God is mysterious, His reasons beyond our poor comprehension. But I think what you did was not done lightly, your vows thrown away as having no value. I know you very well. I know you to be proud, very much in love with the idea of being a priest, very conscious of your exclusiveness. It is possible that you needed this particular lesson to reduce that pride, make you understand that you are first a man, and therefore not as exclusive as you think. Is it not so?”

  “Yes. I lacked humility, and I believe in a way I aspired to be God Himself. I’ve sinned most grievously and inexcusably. I can’t forgive myself, so how can I hope for divine forgiveness?”

  “The pride, Ralph, the pride! It is not your place to forgive, do you not understand that yet? Only God can forgive. Only God! And He will forgive if the sincere repentance is there. He has forgiven greater sins from far greater saints, you know, as well as from far greater villains. Do you think Prince Lucifer is not forgiven? He was forgiven in the very moment of his rebellion. His fate as ruler of Hell is his own, not God’s doing. Did he not say it? ‘Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven!’ For he could not overcome his pride, he could not bear to subjugate his will to the Will of Someone else, even though that Someone was God Himself. I do not want to see you make the same mistake, my dearest friend. Humility was the one quality you lacked, and it is the very quality which makes a great saint—or a great man. Until you can leave the matter of forgiveness to God, you will not have acquired true humility.”

  The strong face twisted. “Yes, I know you’re right. I must accept what I am without question, only strive to be better without having pride in what I am. I repent, therefore I shall confess and await forgiveness. I do repent, bitterly.” He sighed; his eyes betrayed the conflict his measured words couldn’t, not in this room.

  “And yet, Vittorio, in a way there was nothing else I could do. Either I ruined her, or I took the ruin upon myself. At the time there didn’t seem to be a choice, because I do love her. It wasn’t her fault that I’ve never wanted the love to extend to a physical plane. Her fate became more important than my own, you see. Until that moment I had always considered myself first, as more important than she, because I was a priest, and she was a lesser being. But I saw that I was responsible for what she is…. I should have let her go when she was a child, but I didn’t. I kept her in my hea
rt and she knew it. If I had truly plucked her out she would have known that, too, and she would have become someone I couldn’t influence.” He smiled. “You see that I have much to repent. I tried a little creating of my own.”

  “It was the Rose?”

  The head went back; Archbishop Ralph looked at the elaborate ceiling with its gilded moldings and baroque Murano chandelier. “Could it have been anyone else? She’s my only attempt at creation.”

  “And will she be all right, the Rose? Did you do her more harm by this than in denying her?”

  “I don’t know, Vittorio. I wish I did! At the time it just seemed the only thing to do. I’m not gifted with Promethean foresight, and emotional involvement makes one a poor judge. Besides, it simply…happened! But I think perhaps she needed most what I gave her, the recognition of her identity as a woman. I don’t mean that she didn’t know she was a woman. I mean I didn’t know. If I had first met her as a woman it might have been different, but I knew her as a child for many years.”

  “You sound rather priggish, Ralph, and not yet ready for forgiveness. It hurts, does it not? That you could have been human enough to yield to human weakness. Was it really done in such a spirit of noble self-sacrifice?”

  Startled, he looked into the liquid dark eyes, saw himself reflected in them as two tiny manikins of insignificant proportion. “No,” he said. “I’m a man, and as a man I found a pleasure in her I didn’t dream existed. I didn’t know a woman felt like that, or could be the source of such profound joy. I wanted never to leave her, not only because of her body, but because I just loved to be with her—talk to her, not talk to her, eat the meals she cooked, smile at her, share her thoughts. I shall miss her as long as I live.”

  There was something in the sallow ascetic visage which unaccountably reminded him of Meggie’s face in that moment of parting; the sight of a spiritual burden being taken up, the resoluteness of a character well able to go forward in spite of its loads, its griefs, its pain. What had he known, the red silk cardinal whose only human addiction seemed to be his languid Abyssinian cat?

  “I can’t repent of what I had with her in that way,” Ralph went on when His Eminence didn’t speak. “I repent the breaking of vows as solemn and binding as my life. I can never again approach my priestly duties in the same light, with the same zeal. I repent that bitterly. But Meggie?” The look on his face when he uttered her name made Cardinal Vittorio turn away to do battle with his own thoughts.

  “To repent of Meggie would be to murder her.” He passed his hand tiredly across his eyes. “I don’t know if that’s very clear, or even if it gets close to saying what I mean. I can’t for the life of me ever seem to express what I feel for Meggie adequately.” He leaned forward in his chair as the Cardinal turned back, and watched his twin images grow a little larger. Vittorio’s eyes were like mirrors; they threw back what they saw and didn’t permit one a glimpse of what went on behind them. Meggie’s eyes were exactly the opposite; they went down and down and down, all the way to her soul. “Meggie is a benediction,” he said. “She’s a holy thing to me, a different kind of sacrament.”

  “Yes, I understand,” sighed the Cardinal. “It is well you feel so. In Our Lord’s eyes I think it will mitigate the great sin. For your own sake you had better confess to Father Giorgio, not to Father Guillermo. Father Giorgio will not misinterpret your feelings and your reasoning. He will see the truth. Father Guillermo is less perceptive, and might deem your true repentance debatable.” A faint smile crossed his thin mouth like a wispy shadow. “They, too, are men, my Ralph, those who hear the confessions of the great. Never forget it as long as you live. Only in their priesthood do they act as vessels containing God. In all else they are men. And the forgiveness they mete out comes from God, but the ears which listen and judge belong to men.”

  There was a discreet knock on the door; Cardinal Vittorio sat silently and watched the tea tray being carried to a buhl table.

  “You see, Ralph? Since my days in Australia I have become addicted to the afternoon tea habit. They make it quite well in my kitchen, though they used not to at first.” He held up his hand as Archbishop Ralph started to move toward the teapot. “Ah, no! I shall pour it myself. It amuses me to be ‘mother.’”

  “I saw a great many black shirts in the streets of Genoa and Rome,” said Archbishop Ralph, watching Cardinal Vittorio pour.

  “The special cohorts of Il Duce. We have a very difficult time ahead of us, my Ralph. The Holy Father is adamant that there be no fracture between the Church and the secular government of Italy, and he is right in this as in all things. No matter what happens, we must remain free to minister to all our children, even should a war mean our children will be divided, fighting each other in the name of a Catholic God. Wherever our hearts and our emotions might lie, we must endeavor always to keep the Church removed from political ideologies and international squabbles. I wanted you to come to me because I can trust your face not to give away what your brain is thinking no matter what your eyes might be seeing, and because you have the best diplomatic turn of mind I have ever encountered.”

  Archbishop Ralph smiled ruefully. “You’ll further my career in spite of me, won’t you! I wonder what would have happened to me if I hadn’t met you?”

  “Oh, you would have become Archbishop of Sydney, a nice post and an important one,” said His Eminence with a golden smile. “But the ways of our lives lie not in our hands. We met because it was meant to be, just as it is meant that we work together now for the Holy Father.”

  “I can’t see success at the end of the road,” said Archbishop Ralph. “I think the result will be what the result of impartiality always is. No one will like us, and everyone will condemn us.”

  “I know that, so does His Holiness. But we can do nothing else. And there is nothing to prevent our praying in private for the speedy downfall of Il Duce and Der Führer, is there?”

  “Do you really think there will be war?”

  “I cannot see any possibility of avoiding it.”

  His Eminence’s cat stalked out of the sunny corner where it had been sleeping, and jumped upon the scarlet shimmering lap a little awkwardly, for it was old.

  “Ah, Sheba! Say hello to your old friend Ralph, whom you used to prefer to me.”

  The satanic yellow eyes regarded Archbishop Ralph haughtily, and closed. Both men laughed.

  15

  Drogheda had a wireless set. Progress had finally come to Gillanbone in the shape of an Australian Broadcasting Commission radio station, and at long last there was something to rival the party line for mass entertainment. The wireless itself was a rather ugly object in a walnut case which sat on a small exquisite cabinet in the drawing room, its car-battery power source hidden in the cupboard underneath.

  Every morning Mrs. Smith, Fee and Meggie turned it on to listen to the Gillanbone district news and weather, and every evening Fee and Meggie turned it on to listen to the ABC national news. How strange it was to be instantaneously connected with Outside; to hear of floods, fires, rainfall in every part of the nation, an uneasy Europe, Australian politics, without benefit of Bluey Williams and his aged newspapers.

  When the national news on Friday, September 1st, announced that Hitler had invaded Poland, only Fee and Meggie were home to hear it, and neither of them paid any attention. There had been speculation for months; besides, Europe was half a world away. Nothing to do with Drogheda, which was the center of the universe. But on Sunday, September 3rd all the men were in from the paddocks to hear Father Watty Thomas say Mass, and the men were interested in Europe. Neither Fee nor Meggie thought to tell them of Friday’s news, and Father Watty, who might have, left in a hurry for Narrengang.

  As usual, the wireless set was switched on that evening for the national news. But instead of the crisp, absolutely Oxford tones of the announcer, there came the genteel, unmistakably Australian voice of the Prime Minister, Robert Gordon Menzies.

  “Fellow Australians. It is my melan
choly duty to inform you officially that in consequence of the persistence by Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her, and that, as a result, Australia is also at war….

  “It may be taken that Hitler’s ambition is not to unite all the German people under one rule, but to bring under that rule as many countries as can be subdued by force. If this is to go on, there can be no security in Europe and no peace in the world…. There can be no doubt that where Great Britain stands, there stand the people of the entire British world….

  “Our staying power, and that of the Mother Country, will be best assisted by keeping our production going, continuing our avocations and business, maintaining employment, and with it, our strength. I know that in spite of the emotions we are feeling, Australia is ready to see it through.

  “May God, in His mercy and compassion, grant that the world may soon be delivered from this agony.”

  There was a long silence in the drawing room, broken by the megaphonal tones of a short-wave Neville Chamberlain speaking to the British people; Fee and Meggie looked at their men.

  “If we count Frank, there are six of us,” said Bob into the silence. “All of us except Frank are on the land, which means they won’t want to let us serve. Of our present stockmen, I reckon six will want to go and two will want to stay.”

  “I want to go!” said Jack, eyes shining.

  “And me,” said Hughie eagerly.

  “And us,” said Jims on behalf of himself and the inarticulate Patsy.

  But they all looked at Bob, who was the boss.

  “We’ve got to be sensible,’ he said. “Wool is a staple of war, and not only for clothes. It’s used as packing in ammunition and explosives, for all sorts of funny things we don’t hear of, I’m sure. Plus we have beef cattle for food, and the old wethers and ewes go for hides, glue, tallow, lanolin—all war staples.