1
The night that Teresa and Concha spent so affectionately in the same bed
had no effect on their relationship: Concha continued flinging herself,
angrily, violently, against Teresa’s stony stare.
If they happened to be alone in the room when the post arrived and there
was a letter for Concha, she would read it through with knit brows,
exclaiming under her breath the while; then she would re-read it and,
laying it down, would gaze into the fire, apparently occupied with some
grave problem of conduct; finally, springing to her feet with an air of
having taken a final and irrevocable decision, she would violently tear
up the letter, and fling the fragments into the fire.
The letter would probably be from her friend, Elfrida Penn, and may have
contained some slight cause for anxiety, as Elfrida was an hysterical
young woman and one apt to mismanage her love-affairs; but Teresa,
sitting staring at the comedy through half-closed eyes with fascinated
irritation, would be certain that the letter contained nothing but an
announcement of Paris models, or the ticket for a charity ball.
Teresa felt like some one of presbyopic and astigmatic sight, doomed
to look fixedly all day long at a very small object at very close
quarters; and this feeling reached an unusual degree of exacerbation
on the day that Concha went up to London to dine with Rory Dundas. At
seven o’clock she began to follow every stage of her toilette; the bath
cloudy with salts, a bottle of which she was sure to have taken up in
her dressing-case; then the silk stockings drawn on—“oh _damn_ that
Parker! She’s sent me a pair with a ladder”; silk shift, stays, puffing
out her hair, mouth full of gilt hair-pins; again and again pressing
the bell till the chambermaid came to fasten up her gown; on with her
evening cloak and down into the hall where Rory would be standing waiting
in an overcoat, a folded-up opera hat in his hand, his hair very sleek
from that loathsome stuff of his—“Hulloooah!” “Hulloa! Hulloa! I say ...
_some_ frock!” and then all through dinner endless topical jokes.
Oh it was unbearably humiliating ... and how she longed for Pepa: “Teresa
darling! You must be mad. He really _isn’t_ good enough, you know. I’m
sure he never opens a book, and I expect he’s disgustingly bloodthirsty
about the Germans. But if you really like him we must arrange
something—what a pity May-Week is such a long way off.”
What _did_ she see in him? He was completely without intellectual
distinction; he had a certain amount of fancy, of course, but fancy was
nothing—
Tell me where is Fancy bred?
_Not_ in the heart
_Nor_ in the head
nearly all young Englishmen had fancy—a fancy fed by _Alice in
Wonderland_, and the goblin arabesques on the cover of _Punch_; a certain
romantic historical sense too that thrills to _Puck of Pook’s Hill_ and
the _Three Musketeers_—oh yes, and, unlike Frenchmen, they probably
all cherish a hope that never quite dies of one day playing Anthony to
some astonishingly provocative lady—foreign probably, passionate and
sophisticated as the heroine of _Three Weeks_, mysterious as Rider
Haggard’s _She_. But all that is just part of the average English
outfit—national, ubiquitous, undistinguished, like a sense of humour and
the proverbial love of fair play.
Yes; their minds were sterile, frivolous ... _un-Platonic_—that was the
word for expressing the lack she felt in the emotional life of the Rorys,
the Ebens, and all the rest of that crew; un-Platonic, _because they
could not make myths_. For them the shoemaker at his last, the potter at
his wheel, the fishwives of the market-place, new-born babies and dead
men, never suddenly grew transparent, allowing to glimmer through them
the contours of a stranger world. For them Dionysus, whirling in his
frantic dance, never suddenly froze into the still cold marble of Apollo.
Concha came back from her outing uncommunicative and rather cross. She
was evidently irritated by the unusual eagerness shown by the Doña with
regard to her coming dinner with David Munroe.
* * * * *
One day Anna tackled Teresa over the doctrine of Transubstantiation.
“I’ve never believed in fairies and things,” she said, “and this sounds
much more untruer—_is_ it true?”
Teresa looked at her square, sensible little face—though without the
humour, so ridiculously like Harry’s in shape and expression—and her
heart sank.
What _could_ she say?
Einstein—Bergson—Unamuno ... their theories were supposed to provide a
loophole.
She began to mutter idiotically:
“Una—muno—mena—mo,
Catch a nigger by his toe.”
“But is it true?” persisted Anna.
“Darling, just give me a minute to think,” pleaded Teresa; and she set
about reviewing her own attitude to her faith.
Whatever the confessors may say, Catholicism has nothing to do with dogma
... no, no, that’s not quite it, dogma is a very important element, but
in spite of not accepting it one can still be a Catholic. Catholicism
is a form of art; it arouses an æsthetic emotion—an emotion of
_ambivalence_; because like all great art it at once repels and attracts.
When people confronted her with its intellectual absurdities, she felt as
she did, when, at an exhibition of modern painting, they exclaimed: “but
whoever saw hands like _that_?” or “why hasn’t he given her a nose?”
Of course, this peculiar æsthetic emotion is not to be found in every
manifestation of Catholicism—it has to be sought for; for instance, it is
in the strange pages at the beginning of Newman’s _Apologia_, where, in
his hushed emaciated English, he tells how, in his childhood in a remote
village, never having seen any of the insignia of Rome, when dreaming
over his lessons he would cover the pages of his copy-books with rosaries
and sacred hearts. And, when sitting one evening in the cemetery at
the bottom of the hill on which stands Siena, she had got the emotion
very strongly from the contrast between the lovely Tuscan country, the
magnificently poised city, the sinister black-cowled _confraternité_ that
was winding down the hill, each member carrying a lighted torch—between
all this and the cemetery itself where, among the wreaths of artificial
flowers, there was stuck up on each grave a cheap photograph of the
deceased in his or her horrible Sunday finery, with a maudlin motto
inscribed upon the frame. In the contrast too in Seville between Holy
Week, the pageantry of which is organised by the parish priests—a wooden
platform, for instance, carried slowly through the streets on which
stands the august _Jesùs de la Muerte_ flanked by two huge lighted
candles—and the Jesuit procession a few days later, in which Virgins
looking like _ballerinas_ and apostles holding guitars go simpering past
all covered with paper flowers. One can get it, too, from reading the
_Song of Solomon_ in the terse Latin of the Vulgate.
It is an art steeped in a noble classical tradition which nevertheless
makes unerringly for what, outside the vast tolerance of art, would be
considered vulgar and hideous—chromo-lithographs, blood, mad nuns. This
classical tradition and this taste for the tawdry are for ever pulling
against each other, and it is just this conflict that gives it, as art,
its peculiar _cachet_.
This was all very fine; but it would not do for Anna.
“Darling, do you think it matters about a thing being true, as long as
it’s ... and, anyway, what exactly do we mean when we say a thing is
true?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Anna fretfully, “do _you_ believe that
the clergyman turns that bread into Jesus Christ?”
After a second’s hesitation Teresa braced herself and answered, “Yes.”
“Well, anyway, Daddy doesn’t, I’m sure and,” Anna lowered her voice, “I’m
sure Mummie didn’t either.”
“Well, darling, you know no one is going to _force_ you to believe it—you
can do exactly what you like about it.”
Then Anna trotted off into the garden and Teresa sat on, thinking.
How was she going to cope with Pepa’s children?
These counter-influences—Plasencia and Cambridge—one continually undoing
the work of the other, were so very bad for them. Childhood was a
difficult enough time without that.
She remembered the agony of her own struggle to free herself from
the robe of Nessus, woven by suggestion, heredity, and imperfectly
functioning faculties; was she yet free from the robe? Anyhow, it was
better now than in that awful world of childhood—a world, as it were,
at the bottom of the sea: airless, muted, pervaded by a dim blue light
through which her eyes strained in vain to see the seaweeds and shells
and skulls in their true shape and colour; a world to which noises from
the bright windy land above would from time to time come floating down,
muffled and indistinct—voices of newspaper boys shouting “Death of Mr.
Gladstone! Death of Mr. Gladstone!” Snatches of tunes from _San Toy_;
bells ringing for the relief of Mafeking.
2
September turned into October; the apples grew redder and the fields—the
corn and barley gradually being carted away to be stacked in barns—grew
plainer, severe expanses of a uniform buff colour, suggesting to Teresa
the background of a portrait by Velasquez.
The children were going back to Cambridge; and their excitement at the
prospect might have convinced the Doña, had she been open to conviction,
that their life there was not an unhappy one.
They were sorry to leave the Doña and Teresa and ’Snice and the
garden—that went without saying; but the prospect of a railway journey
was sufficient to put Jasper, who never looked very far ahead, into a
state of the wildest excitement, and the occasional nip in the air during
the past week had given Anna an appetite for the almost forgotten joys of
lessons, Girl-Guides, the “committee” organised by a very grand friend
of twelve for collecting money for the _Save the Children_ Fund (one was
dubbed a member of the committee with the President’s tennis-racket and
then took terrible oaths of secrecy), and soon Christmas drawing near,
when Nanny would take them down to brilliantly lighted Boots, with its
pleasant smell of leather and violet powder, to choose their Christmas
cards.
Teresa knew what she was feeling; it was a pleasant thought, all the
small creatures hurrying eagerly back from sea or hills or valleys all
over the kingdom—tiny Esquimaux swarming back from their isolated summer
fisheries to the civic life of winter with its endless small activities,
so ridiculous to the outside world, so solemn, and so terribly important,
to themselves.
* * * * *
Shortly after they had reached Cambridge Teresa got the following letter
from Harry Sinclair:
“DEAR TERESA,—Since his return from Plasencia Jasper has been
demanding a cake that turns into a man.
“At first I supposed I had told him about those gingerbread
dragoons that old Positivist Jackson used to bring us when we
were children at Hastings.
“I was mistaken.
“I discover from Anna what he wanted was ‘the true, real, and
substantial presence of the Body of our Lord Jesus Christ,
together with His Soul and Divinity, in the most holy sacrament
of the Eucharist.’
“Now, look here, Teresa, I won’t stand it. If I notice any
further morbid cravings in Jasper for water, bread, wine, or
oil, I shall stop his visits to Plasencia.
“It really is insufferable—and you know quite well that Pepa
would have objected as much as I do.
“Yrs.
“H. J. S.”
It only made Teresa laugh; she knew how Harry must have enjoyed writing
it—could see him jumping on to his bicycle and hurrying down to the
University Library to verify in one of the books of the late Lord Acton
the definition of Transubstantiation.
Unfortunately she left it lying about; and it fell into the hands of
the Doña, whom Teresa found in the act of reading it, with set face and
compressed lips.
At the bottom of her heart the Doña attached as little importance to it
as Teresa had done: the fact of its having been written to Teresa and
not to herself marked it as being nothing more than a harmless and half
facetious means of relieving his feelings; besides, she knew that to
sever all connection with Plasencia would be too drastic a step—involving
too many complications, too many painful scenes—also, too dramatic a step
to be taken by Harry in cold blood.
But there are very few people who have the strength and poise of
intellect to resist, by an honest scrutiny of facts, the exquisite
pleasure of thinking themselves despitefully used by their enemy—very few
too who can resist the pleasure of avenging this despiteful usage on a
third and, to the vulgar eye, quite innocent person.
The human soul requires for the play that is its hidden life but a tiny
cast; and to provide parts for its enormous company it falls back upon
the device of understudies, six or seven sometimes to one part. When this
is properly understood the use of the scapegoat will seem less unjust.
Anyhow, the Doña chose to pretend to herself that she took Harry’s letter
seriously; and Dick was chosen as the scapegoat.
There is prevalent in Spain a system of barter with the Deity, the
contracts entered into being of the following nature: If God (or the
Virgin or Saint ...) will make _Fulano_ faithful to _Fulana_, _Fulana_
will not enter a theatre for a month; _or_ if God will bring little
Juanito safely through his operation for adenoids, _Fulano_ will try to
love his mother-in-law.
As a result of Harry’s letter the Doña entered into such a contract: her
Maker was to ensure the ultimate saving of her grandchildren’s souls;
while her part of the bargain affected Dick and, incidentally, was
extremely agreeable to herself.
In her bedroom an identical little comedy was enacted on two separate
nights. On its being repeated a third time, Dick burst out angrily:
“Oh, very well then ... it’s a bit ... no one could say I bothered you
much nowadays.... I know—that damned priest has had the impertinence to
interfere in my affairs.... I suppose ... I won’t ... _very_ well, then!”
If it had not been dark he would have seen that the Doña’s eyes were
bright and shining with pleasure.
For hours he lay awake; a hotch-potch of old grievances boiling and
seething in his mind.
Always him, always him, giving in every time: that summer years ago when
he had given up golf and Harlech to take them all to Cadiz instead—_very_
few men would have done that! And if they were going to a play always
letting one of the children choose what it was to be—and jolly little
gratitude he got for it all! _Jolly_ little! Snubbed here, ignored there
... glimpses he had had of other homes came into his head: “hush, dear,
don’t worry father”; “now then, Smith, _hurry! hurry!_ The master must
not be kept waiting”; “all right, dear, all right, there’s _plenty_ of
time.... Gladys dear, just run and fetch your father’s pipe.... Now,
Charlie, where’s father’s overcoat? Good-bye darling, I’ll go to the
Stores myself this morning and see about it for you ... good-bye, dear,
don’t tire yourself ...” whereas here it was: “Well, Dick; I really don’t
see how you _can_ have the car this morning—Arnold wants it and he’s so
seldom here....” Arnold! Arnold! Arnold! Oh what endless injustice that
name conjured up! Actually it was years since they had had Welsh rarebit
as a savoury because Arnold had once said the smell made him feel sick
... and oh, the cruelty and injustice on that birthday when the Doña with
an indulgent smile had asked him what he would like for dinner (damn her
impertinence—as if it wasn’t his own house and his own food and his own
money!), and he had chosen ox-tail soup, sole, partridge, roly-poly and
marrow-bones—ox-tail soup had been “scrapped” because Arnold didn’t like
it, sole because they’d had it the night before, roly-poly because Arnold
said it wasn’t a dinner-sweet. As to the marrow-bones—they had not been
“scrapped,” indeed, but as every one knows, a dish of marrow-bones is
a lottery, and he, Dick, the Birthday King, had drawn a blank—a hollow
mockery, in which a tiny Gulliver might have sat dry and safe, not a
single drop of grease falling on his wig or his broadcloth. But Arnold’s
had been a lordly bone, dropping at first without persuasion two or three
great blobs of semi-coagulated amber, and then yielding to his proddings
the coyer treasures of its chinks and crannies, what time he had cried
triumphantly, “More toast, please, Rendall!” And the Doña had watched
him with a touched and gratified smile, as if she were witnessing for
the first time the incidence of merit and its deserts. And it was not
merely that the unfilial Arnold had wallowed in grease, not offering
out of his abundance one slim finger of sparsely besmeared toast to his
dry and yearning father, but the Doña had not cast in his direction one
glance of pity—and it was his birthday, too!... _oh_ that Arnold! Who was
it ... Harry or Guy ... anyway he had heard some one saying that every
father feels like a Frankenstein before a grown-up son ... well, not
many of them had as much cause as he had ... despised, snubbed whenever
he opened his mouth. Oh damn that Arnold! In what did he consider his
great superiority to lie? Curious thing how his luck had always been so
bad: he had not got into the Fifteen at Rugby because he had put his knee
out—so he _said_; he had failed to get a scholarship at Trinity because
his coach had given him the wrong text-book on constitutional history—so
he _said_; he had only got a second in his tripos, because the Cambridge
school of history was beneath contempt—so he _said_. And then the War
and all the appalling fuss about him—really, one would have thought he
was fighting the Germans single-handed! And Dick, creeping about with
his tail between his legs and being made to feel a criminal every time
he smiled or forgot for a second that Arnold was in the trenches ...
and, anyhow, if he had been so wonderful, why hadn’t he the V.C., or _at
least_ the Military Cross?
_Arnold was a fraud_ ... and a damned impertinent one! Well, it was his
mother’s fault ... mothers were Bolsheviks, yes, _Bolsheviks_—by secret
propaganda begun in the nursery setting the members of a family against
their head. He was nothing to his children—_nothing_.
Just for a second he got a whiff of the sweet, nauseating, vertiginous,
emotion he had experienced at the birth of each of them in turn—an
emotion rather like the combined odours of _eau de Cologne_ and
chloroform; an emotion which, like all the most poignant ones, had a
strong flavouring of sadism; for it sprang from the strange fierce
pleasure of knowing that the body he loved was being tortured to bear his
children.
Yes, he had loved her ... there had been times ... well, was he going to
put up with it for ever? _Oh_, how badly he had been used.
Then it would all begin over again.
Finally he came to a resolution, the daring of which (such is the force
of habit) half frightened him, while it made _his_ eyes in their turn
bright and shining with pleasure.
3
The fire of October, which had first been kindled in a crimson semicircle
of beeches burning through a blanket of mist on the outskirts of
Plasencia, spread, a slow contagion, over all the land. The birch
saplings in the garden became the colour of bracken. The border was gold
and amethyst with chrysanthemums and Michaelmas daisies. And in the
fields there lingered poppies, which of all flowers look the frailest,
yet which are the last to go.
Imperceptibly, the breach widened between Teresa and Concha; Concha
had now completely given up pretending that their relationship was an
affectionate one, and they rarely spoke to each other.
It was evident, too, that the lack of harmony between their parents,
noticeable since Pepa’s death, had recently become more pronounced.
Dick was often absent for days at a time; and one day Teresa happening
to go into the Doña’s morning-room found her sitting on the sofa looking
angry and troubled, a letter on her lap. Teresa took the letter—the Doña
offering no protest—and read it. I was a bill to Dick from a London
jeweller for a string of pearls. Puzzled, she looked questioningly at the
Doña, who merely shrugged her shoulders.
* * * * *
In the servant’s hall, too, there seemed to be discord, rumours of which
drifted upstairs _via_ Parker the maid, Parker had a way of beginning in
the middle, which made her plot difficult to follow, but which perhaps
had a certain value as a method of expressing such irrational things as
the entanglement of primitive emotions. Her stories were like this: “And
she said: ‘see you don’t get Minchin in the garden,’ and Mrs. Rudge said,
‘oh then some one else’s name would be Walker’; and I said, ‘if Dale
hadn’t been killed in the War _he_ would be in your cottage and that’s
what the War has done for _you_!’ and I said, ‘you’ve children, Mrs.
Rudge,’ I said, ‘and I hope it won’t come knocking at _your_ door some
day,’ and Lily said, ‘trust Parker to be after an unmarried man,’ and I
said, ‘don’t be so rude, Lily, it’s Nosey Parker yourself ... even though
I don’t go to chapel!’ That was one for Mrs. Rudge, you see: oh, they’re
a set of beauties!”
The previous head-gardener, Dale, for whom the middle-aged Parker had
had a _tendresse_, had been killed in the War. She looked askance
at his successor Rudge for wearing dead men’s shoes, and for being
that unpardonable thing—a married man; and into the bargain he was a
dissenter. Then there was Minchin, the handsome cowman, whom Dick was
thinking of putting into the garden....
It was all very complicated; but seeing that light is sometimes
thrown on the psychology of the hyper-civilised by the researches of
anthropologists among Bantus and Red Indians, perhaps these tales of
Parker deserved a certain attention—at any rate, behind them there loomed
three tremendous forces: sex, religion and the dead....
* * * * *
One day, to the surprise of every one but the Doña, there arrived in time
for dinner Dick’s dearest friend, Hugh Mallam.
He was a huge shaggy creature, if possible, more boyish than Dick.
He and Dick were delighted at seeing each other, for Hugh lived in
Devonshire and rarely came as far north as Plasencia, and all through
dinner plied each other with old jokes and old memories; and from the
roars of laughter that reached the drawing-room after they had been left
to themselves they were evidently enjoying themselves extremely over
their port wine.
The next morning Teresa coming into the morning-room, found the Doña and
Hugh standing before the fire, the Doña looking angry and scornful while
Hugh, in an instructive and slightly irritated voice, was saying: “Sorry,
Doña, but I _can’t_ help it ... I can’t help being the same sort of
person with Dick that I’ve always been ... it’s like that ... I know it’s
very wrong of him and all that, but I can’t help being the same sort of
person with him I’ve always been ... I....”
“Yes, yes, Hugh, you’ve said that before. But do you realise what a
serious thing it is for me and the children? You _seemed_ very shocked
and sympathetic in your letter—for one thing, a family man simply can’t
afford to spend these sums; then there’s the scandal—so bad for the
business and Arnold ... and you promised me yesterday....”
“I know, but I tell you, as soon as I saw old Dick I knew that I couldn’t
lecture him, one can’t change.... _I can’t help being the same sort of
person with him I’ve always been._ But I really am most awfully sorry
about it all—the old blackguard!”
“Well, if you hear that we are ruined, perhaps you’ll be sorrier still.”
“That won’t happen—no tragedies ever happen to any one who has anything
to do with me—ha! ha! They couldn’t, could they, Teresa? I’m much too——”
“Hush!” said the Doña sharply, suddenly noticing the presence of Teresa;
and, with a look of extreme relief, Hugh slunk through the French window
into the garden.
So the Doña had actually been trying to turn Hugh into their father’s
mentor! It was not like her; she was much too wise not to know that the
incorrigibly frivolous Hugh was quite unsuited to the part.
Parallel with the infallible wisdom that is the fruit of our own personal
experience, there lie the waste products of the world’s experience—facile
generalisations, _clichés_, and so on. Half the follies of mankind are
due to forming our actions along this line instead of along the other.
There, Dick and Hugh were not two human beings, therefore unique and
inimitable, but ‘old school friends’—and to whose gentle pressure back to
the narrow way is one more likely to yield than to that of an ‘old school
friend’?
But the very fact of the wise Doña acquiescing in such a stale fallacy,
told of desperation and the clutching at straws.
Of course, Hugh was perfectly right—the shape and colour of his
relationship with Dick had been fixed fifty years ago at the dame’s
school in Kensington, to spring up unchanged all through the years at
each fresh meeting. They could not change it; why, you might as well go
and tell an oak that _this_ spring it was to weave its leaves on the loom
of the elms.
He had been right, too, in saying there would be no catastrophe.
The fate of Pompeii—a sudden melodramatic blotting out of little
familiar things—would never, she felt sure, overtake Plasencia. Things
at Plasencia happened very slowly, by means of a long series of
anticlimaxes.
4
As they sat on the loggia that afternoon reading their letters after tea,
Concha suddenly exclaimed, “Well I’m _blessed_!” and laying down her
letter began to laugh.
“Well?” said the Doña.
“It’s that excellent David Munroe!”
“What about him?”
“He writes to say that he’s chucking business and everything, and is
going at once into a seminary to prepare for ordination—it seems too
comical!”
The Doña’s expression was one of mingled disappointment and interest;
while Jollypot’s cheeks went pink with excitement. They began to press
Concha for details.
As to Teresa—somehow or other it gave her a disagreeable shock.
Of course, every year hundreds of young men all over the world had a
vocation, went to a seminary, and, in due time, said their first mass—she
ought to be used to it; nevertheless, she felt there was something ...
something unnatural in the news: a young man who had business connections
with her father, and gave Concha dinner at the Savoy, and danced to
the gramophone—and then, suddenly hearing this ... she got the same
impression that she did in Paris from a sudden vision of the white
ghostly minarets of the Sacré-Cœur, doubtless beautiful in themselves,
but incongruous in design, and associations, and hence displeasing in
that gray-green, stucco, and admirably classical city.
The others drifted off to their various business, and Teresa sat on,
looking at the view.
It was one of these misty October days when every landscape looks so
magnificent, that, given pencil, brush, and the power of copying what
one sees, it almost seems that any one, without going through the
eclectic process of creation, could paint a great picture. The colours
were blurred as if the intervening atmosphere were a sheet of bad glass;
and the relationship between the old rose of ploughed fields, the yellow
strips of mustard, and the brighter gold and pink of the sunflowers,
chrysanthemums, and Michaelmas daisies in the border, made one think of
an oriental vase painted with dim blossoms and butterflies in which is
arranged a nosegay of bright and freshly plucked flowers—the paintings on
the porcelain melting into the flowers, the flowers vivifying the colours
on the porcelain.
That is what the relationship between life and art should be like, she
thought, art the nosegay, life the porcelain vase.
Life could not be shot on the wing—it must first be frozen.... Myths
that simplified and transposed so that things became as the chairs and
sofa had been that day in her Chelsea lodgings ... heliacal periods ...
Apollo and Dionysus ... it was all the same thing. If only she could find
it, life at Plasencia had some design, some plot ... yes, that was it—a
_plot_ that enlarged and simplified things so that they could be seen.
What was life at Plasencia like? A motley hostile company sailing
together in a ship as in Cervantes’s _Persiles_?
No; it still had roots; night and day it still stared at the same view;
externally, it was immobile. It was more like a convent than a ship, an
ill-matched company forced to live together under one roof, which one and
all they long to leave.
A sense of discomfort came over her at the word “convent”: long bare
corridors hung with hideous lithographs; hard cold beds; shrewish
vulgar-tongued bells summoning one to smoked fish; an insipid
calligraphy; “that by the intercession of Blessed Madeleine Sophie
Barat, Virgin, through her devotion to thy Sacred Heart” ... it certainly
had _ambivalence_—it was the great Catholic art she had tried to define
to herself when confronted with doubting Anna; but it was not Plasencia.
“Nunnery” was a better word, a compact warm word, suggesting hives and
the mysterious activities of bees ... it had an archaic ring too ... yes,
art always exists in the past (if not why is the present tense never
used?)—it is the present seen as the past.
A nunnery, then, long ago—Boccaccio’s Fiammetta, as a full-blown
carnation splits its calyx, her beauty bursting through her novice’s
habit, receiving in the nunnery parlour all the amorous youth of Naples.
And yet it was not the same as if she had received them in a boudoir
of the world. The nunnery’s rule might be lax but it remained a rule;
and that, artistically, was of very great value—vivid earthly passion
seen against the pale tracery of Laud, Nones, Vespers. And at Plasencia
too—out there in the view life was enacted against a background of Hours:
_ver_, _aetas_, _autumnus_, _hiems_—to call them by their Latin names
made them at once liturgical.
A nunnery, long ago ... where? Not in Italy; for that would be out of
harmony with the colour scheme of Plasencia—not so with Spain, from the
stuff of which they were knit, so many of them. A Spanish play (because
a play is the best vehicle for a plot) much more brightly coloured than
Plasencia, “Cherubimic,” as manuscripts illuminated in very bright
colours used to be called ... the action not merely in Spain, but in
their own Seville ... Moorish Seville ... hence a play, written like the
letters to Queen Elizabeth from eastern potentates, “on paper which doth
smell most fragrantly of camphor and ambergris, and the ink of perfect
musk.”
And the plot? Well, that was not yet visible; but the forces behind it
would be sex, religion, and the dead.
5
October turned into November. At first some belated chrysanthemums,
penstemmons, and gentians, kept the flag of the border gallantly flying;
then Rudge cut it down to the bare wood of stalks a few inches high,
which showed between them the brown of the earth.
Out in the country, for a time, a pink and gold spray of wild briar
garlanded here and there the thorny withered hedges; and then their only
ornament became the red breast of an occasional robin, his plump body
balanced on his thin hairy legs, which were like the stalks of the tiny
Cheshire pinks that one sees in rock gardens.
Everywhere the earth was becoming depalliated and self-coloured; and on
one of her walks Teresa came upon a pathetic heap of feathers.
In autumn the oriflamme of the spectrum had been red; now it was blue—a
corrugated iron roof, for instance. And soon the whole land was wintry
and blue; a blue not of vegetation but of light, light, which lay in
hollows like patches of blue-bells, which glinted along the wet surface
of the high road, turning it into an azure river upon which lay, like
yellow fritillaries, the golden dung dropped by calves led to market; and
through the golden birches the view, too, lay delicate and blue.
Then black and white days would come, when the sun looked like the moon,
and a group of trees like a sketch in charcoal of a distant city.
* * * * *
There was nothing new at Plasencia: Dick still sulked at meals; the
Doña’s face was cold and set; Concha was _distraite_ and went a great
deal to London; Parker complained of the Rudges; only Jollypot and ’Snice
went their ways in an apparently unclouded serenity.
Teresa was absorbed by a weekly parcel of books from the London Library;
charming mediæval books in that pretty state of decomposition when
literature is turning into history and has become self-coloured, the
words serving the double purpose of telling a tale and of illuminating
it with small brightly coloured pictures, like the toys in the pack of
Claudel’s Saint Nicholas:—
Il suffit que j’y fasse un trou et j’y vois des choses vivantes et
toutes petites
Le Déluge, le Veau d’Or, et la punition des Israélites....
Of Seville she already knew enough to serve her purpose, having several
years before, during a winter she had spent there with her mother’s
sister, gone every morning to the University to read in the public
library; and, as it contains but few books of later date than the
eighteenth century, she had read there many a quaint work on the history
and customs of old Seville. And, fascinated by its persistent Moorish
past, she had dipped a little into the curious decorative grammar of the
Arabs, in which, so it seemed to her, infinitives, and participles, and
adjectives, are regarded as variations of an ever-recurring design of
leaf or scroll in a vast arabesque adorning the walls of a mosque.
Looking over the notes she had made at that time, under the heading
_Spanish Chestnuts_ she came upon two little fables she had written on
the model of the Arab apologues which were circulated during the Middle
Ages all over Spain; and, with the dislike of waste that is so often a
characteristic of the artist, she decided that, if it were possible, she
would make use of them in the unwritten play.
Like every other visitor to Seville she had been haunted by that strange
figure, more Moor than Christian, Pedro the Cruel; for, materially and
spiritually, his impress is everywhere on the city—there are streets that
still bear the names of his Jewish concubines, the popular ballads still
sing of his justice, his cruelty, and his tragic death; while his eternal
monument is the great Moorish palace of the Alcazar within whose walls
Charles-Quint himself, though his home was half of Europe, remained ever
an alien—it is still stained by his blood, and in its garden, through the
water of her marble bath, the limbs of his love, Maria Padilla, still
gleam white to the moon.
So it was natural that she should fix upon his reign as the period of
the play; and hence, though she read promiscuously the literature of the
Middle Ages, her focus was the fourteenth century.
All the same, she had qualms. Might she not “queer her pitch” by all
this reading? A sense of the Past could not be distilled from a mass of
antiquarian details; it was just because the Present was so rank with
details that, by putting it in the Past, she was trying to see it clean
and new. A sense of the Past is an emotion that is sudden, and swift,
and perishable—a flash of purple-red among dark trees and bracken as one
rushes past in a motor-car, and it is already half a mile behind before
one realises that it was rhododendrons in full flower, and had one had
time to explore the park one would have found its acres of shade all
riddled with them, saturated with them. An impression like this is not to
hold or to bind. And yet ... she had seen a picture by Monticelli, called
_François I. et les dames de sa cour_, of which the thick flakes of dark,
rich colour, if you but stood far enough away, glimmered into dim shapes
of ladies in flowered silks and brocades, against a background of boscage
clustering round a figure both brave and satyr-like—the king. Something
dim and gleaming; fragmentary as De Quincey’s dream.
“Often I used to see a crowd of ladies, and perhaps a festival and
dances. And I heard it said, or I said to myself, ‘These are English
ladies from the unhappy time of Charles I.’ The ladies danced and looked
as lovely as the Court of George IV., yet I knew, even in my dream, that
they had been in the grave for nearly two centuries.”
_Yet I knew, even in my dream, that they had been in the grave for nearly
two centuries_—yes, that was it. You must make your readers feel that
they are having a waking vision; and your words must be “lonely,” like
Virgil’s; they must be halting and fragmentary and whispered.
Nevertheless she went on with her reading, and, as though from among the
many brasses of knights with which is inset the aisle of some church,
their thinly traced outlines blurred and rubbed by time and countless
feet, one particular one were slowly to thicken to a bas-relief, then
swell into a statue in the round, then come to life—gray eyes glittering
through the vizor, delicately chased armour clanking, the church echoing
to oaths in Norman-French,—so gradually from among the flat, uniform,
sleeping years of the Middle Ages did the fourteenth century come to life
in Teresa’s mind.
Beyond the Pyrenees it was a period of transition—faith was on the wane.
She found a symbol of the age in Boccaccio’s vow made not at the shrine
of a saint, but at Virgil’s grave; not a vow to wear a hair-shirt or to
die fighting the Saracens, but to dedicate all his life to the art of
letters. And, when terrified by the message from the death-bed of Blessed
Pietro Pietroni, he came near to breaking his vow and falling backwards
into the shadows, in the humane sanity of Petrarch’s letter—making
rhetoric harsh and mysticism vulgar—she heard the unmistakable note of
the Renaissance.
And in France, too, the writer of the second part of the _Roman de la
Rose_ has earned the title of “le Voltaire du moyen age.”
But on the other side of the Pyrenees the echo of this new spirit was but
very faint.
Shut in between the rock of Gibraltar and by these same Pyrenees sits Our
Lady of the Rocks, Faith ... alone; for heresies (Calvinism being the
great exception) are, Teresa came to see, but the turning away of the
frailer sisters, Hope and Charity, from the petrifying stare of their
Gorgon but most beautiful sister.
But in those days, though as stern, she was a plainer Faith. It was not
till after the Council of Trent that she developed the repellent beauty
of a great picture: the tortured conversion of St. Ignatius de Loyóla,
the Greco-esque visions of Santa Teresa de Jesùs, the gloating grinning
crowd in the _Zocodover_ of Toledo lit up by the flames of an auto-da-fé
into one of the goblin visions of Goya, were still but tiny seeds,
broadcast and sleeping. Catholicism had not yet lost the monumental
austerity of the primitive Church; its blazon was still the Tree of the
Fall and the Redemption springing from Peter’s rock.
But, all the time, the doctrine of Transubstantiation, woven by the
“angelic doctor” round the Sacrifice of the Mass, was slowly, surely
coming to its own, and Jehovah was turning into the Lord God of the Host.