Such Is My Beloved Read Online Free Page A

the end of the purple stole around his neck, that there had been something very beautiful and real about their regret that night in the hotel room, with Midge biting her lip and crying and Ronnie’s face full of dogged despair. It seemed astonishing yet consoling that human beings so fettered in degradation could rise so swiftly when moved by simple friendliness. Father Dowling was suddenly eager to see them again.
    After waiting twenty minutes longer, he went out to the aisle and looked up and down at the almost empty church, where a few women were saying their penance up at the front by the altar rail. No one was sitting on the penitent’s bench waiting to go into the confessional. He walked rapidly up the aisle and across the altar, genuflecting before the tabernacle, and then crossed through to the sacristy.
    When he was dressed and out on the street, he felt a peculiar exhilaration and joy in life and his work in the parish. It was a very clear, cold night, with a brilliantly starred, faraway winter sky. His feet scrunched on the snow. All of his work since his ordination, as he thought of it, seemed groping and incomplete unless the way he had helped Midge and Ronnie was included, too. It seemed to him now, going along the street with a long swinging stride and his hands in hispockets, that his prayers for these girls would never be unheeded. He smiled very happily to himself.
    He was on the other side of the block, walking more slowly and wondering if it would be better to pull his scarf up high around his neck so he would not be recognized as a priest when he came in sight of the hotel. In one way he hated any such deception. Yet he knew that he ought to avoid giving scandal in the presence of ignorant stupid people, who were ever anxious to sneer at the Church. For a moment he stopped on the other side of the street, opposite the barber shop, giving himself a little more time to decide whether he would conceal his collar, while he looked at the dimly lighted hotel entrance. Then he saw a girl coming up the street and when she passed under the light he knew it was Ronnie with her red coat and the bit of gray fur on the collar, but he stood there without moving because he noticed her glancing over her shoulder twice at a short, wide-shouldered man in a peak cap who was following her, and when she got to the hotel, she made a slight motion with her head toward the door, waited till he got closer, and then went in with the man in the peak cap right behind her. This happened so very quickly, so furtively, that Father Dowling, who was across the street, did not seem to understand its meaning. “That was the tall girl, Ronnie, all right,” he thought, while his heart beat heavily and he grew dreadfully uneasy. “God help her for her shamelessness,” he thought, growing angry. Up and down and back and forth he paced, feeling a rage within him. It seemed terrible that a mortal soul that he had loved and prayed for was being degraded almost within reach of him while he stood helpless on the street. It was this helplessness, so much deeper within him than his anger, that he could not understand, and bit by bit this helplessness possessed him till soon his anger was completely submerged.
    In a surprisingly short time there was a shadow in the hotel door across the road. The man with the peak cap came out, looked up and down very carefully, stood long enough to light a cigarette and then began to loaf down the street with a slow contented rolling gait and an air of complete well-being. Father Dowling hated him, feeling big and strong enough to beat him. All his mixed-up anger and disappointment grew into a steady hatred of this man who loafed along lazily till out of sight. Father Dowling thought of rushing into the hotel and speaking to Ronnie, but the notion of going into the room so shortly after such a man had glutted himself and left disgusted him. “I’ll wait just a little longer. I’ll