“Very well, Mr. Conroy,” the president said, “we’ll make alternative arrangements. Will you be good enough to find Mr... ah, Peter Mahon, and ask him to come to me? At once!”

*

Conroy’s refusal to go to Maynooth won him a peculiar place in the life of the college. It added to the apprehension with which the students regarded him. “A hard man,” they called him, half-admiringly. What would he do next? They awaited his fate with pleasurable dread.

To the faculty, Maynooth men all, teaching for their sins in a provincial establishment from which all the intellectual cream had been skimmed, his refusal was insolent, a slap in the face for them and for those abiding values by which they judged St. Declan’s. How were they to handle him?

Nothing, of course, was discussed officially, because it was not admitted that there was any situation to discuss. For want of a better policy, he was ignored. And so, during his years at Declan’s, he got away unreproved with certain remarks, with a general attitude of prickly independence for which a man less in evidence than he would have been expelled.

How had he endured it for six years? He remembered it as a drafty place of long green corridors and cold rooms where he had studied always, it seemed, with frozen fingers and blankets wrapped around his legs. Yes, it was cold: the chill spread outward from the staff, inhibiting even the most innocent of friendships.

Had he never thought of leaving? Once, a group of students was standing in the handball alley, talking about one of their fellows who had just “chucked.” As Conroy joined them, a wag turned to him and said, “Hey, Tom, any hope of your chucking?”

While they waited for his answer, he held out his hands and examined the palms carefully. “Where else could I go now?” he asked. “What else could I do? To dig I am not able, to beg I am ashamed.”

No, he had never thought of leaving. In fact, he rather got to like the place. He discovered that he had a mind. He crammed everything into it – he thought that was what his mind was for, and he was never told otherwise. Knowledge gave him power. Even parodied, as he delighted in parodying it, he used it to win the applause of his fellows. They discovered in him how much they wanted relief, even the relief of being scourged by laughter. And he, more than anyone, knew how to scourge the lazy-minded and the prig.

About his own spiritual life, it was felt that he had great, dark depths to hide. His silence on the subject was regarded as significant. So too were the occasional remarks he passed, however offhand, even crude, like the answer he gave the pious young first-year student who accosted him one morning with the remark, “Tom, I had a really wonderful meditation this morning, thanks be to God.”