Away by Jane Urquhart Page A

supplement to it as well.
    They had recently completed the first half of their reading, had exchanged volumes, and were able now to discuss things together that appeared near the beginning or the end of the alphabet.
    A few weeks earlier they had talked about the excellent article on the term “Absentee,” pleased that it had singled out the English landlords of Ireland as the most fitting example of this condition, and pleased also that O’Malley’s own landlords, Osbert and Granville Sedgewick, flatly refused to leave Ireland at all. Tonight, as luck would have it, they had come to the long dissertation on “Beauty,” which they were examining with great enthusiasm, the first half of the alphabet being conveniently housed in the priest’s rooms.
    The ideas put forward in several texts on the subject were described in the article. O’Malley, who held with the assertions of a certain Mr. Knight, was shouting now, as he always did when in the heated pursuit of knowledge.
    “For God’s sake, Quinn, can’t you understand that there is a kind of beauty that is universal and cannot be caused by association? Singular beauty. It jumps out at you! You’ve never seen its like before! You gasp! You associate it with nothing. It thunders in on you. It is what it is. It’s like nothing else.”
    “That is heresy!” exclaimed the priest. “What you are talking about is sensuality and selfish gratification! Beauty should be a reflection of all that we have
learned
is good in the world. Not an independent assault on the senses. Are you telling me … would you say that a harlot can be beautiful? Can that which is wicked be beautiful? Ah no, my friend, it cannot. Can a lie be beautiful? No, of course not … only truth.”
    “So, then, if the truth be beautiful and if the truth about a beautiful woman be that she’s a harlot, does not her physical beauty combined with this truth create a larger beauty? This is where your theory leads, Quinn. And now answer me.”
    “Why is it that you’re always twisting my words so that I’m not certain where my sentences began?” Father Quinn thumped the calfskin cover of Volume One which lay on the table between them. “I said only that which is
good
can be beautiful. It’s only the Devil that makes us see a wicked woman as beautiful because the Devil clouds the truth, the Devil” – Father Quinn looked up at O’Malley from under bushy, rigid eyebrows – “the Devil clouds the truth through our selfish desire to have our senses gratified. He’s a man of the flesh is the Devil.”
    “What about power and danger, then … and the sublime? There is always power and danger in sublimity. And yet you would not call power beautiful. You would not call danger beautiful. I’ve stood on cliffs with you and looked across to other cliffs with you. How beautiful, you’ve said, how sublime.”
    “It’s only a manner of speaking.” The priest suddenly lookedold and tired. “And, of course,” he added, “they are God’s creations.”
    “So is the harlot God’s creation,” said O’Malley, softly, as if he were thinking of something else.
    “That’s where you’re wrong, Brian.” The priest rose to prepare for bed. “She is the creation of something else altogether. I’m not even certain that it’s evil, but it’s not of God’s world and it’s not of God’s creatures.”
    As they lay awake on their respective beds, thinking, neither of the men admitted to himself that he had been discussing the woman they visited each day.
    On his fourth, unanticipated morning on the island the schoolmaster woke before dawn, restless, and in no mood for further conversation. He had intended, when he planned the visit, to stay only a day, but the weather had turned rough the first night, causing the ferry to rest at the island, and again the second evening, lengthening the same vessel’s stay in Ballycastle. By the time the sea and air became serene, he was caught in the web of the