1
By the middle of March, Concha’s engagement had become an accepted fact:
Dick and Rory’s uncle, Colonel Dundas of Drumsheugh, had exchanged
letters; the marriage was fixed for the beginning of July; wedding
presents had already begun to drift in.
Even the Doña began to be hypnotised by the inevitable, and to find a
little balm in the joys of the trousseau.
In Parker’s sewing-room little scenes like this would take place: “No,
Concha, I _won’t_ allow you to have them so low. You might as well be
stark naked.”
Then Parker would giggle, and Concha, after a good-natured “Good Lord!”
would say, “I tell you, Doña, they’re always _worn_ like that now.”
“That makes _no_ difference to me.”
“Oh, _darling_! I believe you’d like me to borrow one of Jollypot’s as a
pattern—they’re flannel and up to her ears, and the sleeves reach down to
her nails.”
“Oh, Miss Concha!” Parker would titter, both shocked and amused; and
the Doña, with a snort, would exclaim, “That poor Jollypot! To think
of her sleeping in flannel! But there are many degrees between the
nightgowns of Jollypot and those of a _demi-mondaine_, and you remember
what Father Vaughan ...” and then she would suddenly realise that the
views on _lingerie_ of the Roman hierarchy no longer carried any weight
with Concha, and in a chilly voice she would say, “Well, you and Parker
had better settle it in your own way; it has nothing to do with me ...
_now_,” and would sweep out of the room with a heavy heart.
One evening Dick, who had been in London for the day, said at dinner,
“By the way I met Munroe in the city. He caught flu in that beastly
cold seminary, and it turned into pneumonia. He looked very bad, poor
chap. He’s on sick leave at present, and I was wondering ...” and he
looked timidly at the Doña: (Since his escapade he had become a very
poor-spirited creature.) “I was wondering, Anna ... if you don’t mind, of
course, if we might ask him down for a few days.”
“Poor young man! Certainly,” said the Doña, with unusual warmth; for, as
a rule, she deplored her husband’s unbridled hospitality.
“I wonder ... a very odd thing ... he was getting on extraordinarily
well in business and everything.... He was asking about you, Concha, and
your engagement. Yon saw a good deal of him, didn’t you? Have you been
breaking his heart and turning him monk?”
Concha laughed; gratified, evidently, by the suggestion. But the Doña
said coldly, “Concha was probably merely one of the many tests to which
he was putting his vocation—and, evidently, not a very sweet one.... What
are you all laughing at? Oh, I see! I’ve used the wrong word—_Acid_ test,
if you like it better.”
But, though she laughed, Concha’s sensitive vanity flooded her cheeks.
That same night Dick wrote off to David Munroe telling him to come down
at once and spend his convalescence at Plasencia.
2
David Munroe arrived two days later. The Doña welcomed him very warmly,
and then, having got him some illustrated papers, left him alone in the
drawing-room, and hurried back to the sewing-room, where she was busy
with Parker over the trousseau.
Teresa, coming in to look for a book about a quarter of an hour later,
was surprised to find him already arrived, as she had not heard the car.
In a flash she took in the badly cut semi-clerical black suit hanging on
his strong well-knit body, and noticed how hollow-eyed and pale he had
become.
She greeted him kindly, coolly; slightly embarrassed by the intentness of
his gaze.
“We are so glad you were able to come. It’s so horrible to be ill in
an institution. But you ought to get well soon now, the weather’s so
heavenly, and you’ll soon be able to lie out in the garden,” she said,
and began to look for her book.
He watched her in silence for a few seconds, and then said, “Miss Lane,
when I was here last, I gave you to understand that I was the heir to
Munroe of Auchenballoch.... I’ll admit it was said as a sort of a joke
when I was angry, but it was a lie for all that. I come of quite plain
people.”
Clearly, he was “making his soul” against ordination. She tried to feel
irritated, and say in a cold and slightly surprised voice, “Really? I’m
afraid I don’t remember ... er ...” but what she actually said was: “It
doesn’t matter a bit; it was obviously, as you say, just a joke ... at
least ... er ... well, at any rate, I haven’t the slightest idea what
_our_ great-grandfather was—quite likely a fishmonger; at any rate, I’m
sure he was far from aristocratic.”
David gave a sort of grunt and began restlessly to pace up and down; this
fidgeted Teresa: “Do sit down, Mr. Munroe,” she said, “you must be so
tired. I can’t think where my sister is—she’ll come down soon, I expect,”
and added to herself, “I really don’t see why I should have to entertain
Concha’s discarded suitors.”
He sank slowly into an arm-chair. “Miss Lane,” he said, “is it true that
your sister is leaving the Catholic fold?”
“I believe so,” she answered; and there was a note of dryness in her
voice.
There was a pause; David leaning forward and staring at the Persian rug
at his feet with knitted brows, as if it were a document in a strange and
difficult script.
Suddenly he looked up and said; “Why is she doing that?”
“That you must ask _her_,” she answered coldly.
“I heard ... that ... that it was because Captain Dundas’s uncle wouldn’t
leave him Drumsheugh, if he married a Catholic, but ... that wouldn’t be
true, would it?”
“What? That Colonel Dundas has a prejudice against Catholics?”
“No, that that’s the reason she’s leaving the Church?”
She gave a little shrug: “Well, I suppose Paris makes up for a mass.”
For a few seconds he looked puzzled, and then said, “Oh yes, that was
Henry IV. of France—only the other way round.... That was a curious
case of Grace working through queer channels—a man finding the Church
and salvation through worldliness and treachery to his friends. But I
shouldn’t wonder if what I was saying wasn’t heresy—I’m not very learned
in the Fathers yet.”
He paused; and then, fixing her with his eyes, said—“Did it shock _you_
very much—her being perverted for such a reason?”
“Really, Mr. Munroe,” she said coldly, “my feelings about the matter are
nobody’s concern, I....”
“I beg your pardon,” he said gruffly, and blushed to the roots of his
hair.
“Oh these touchy Scots!” she thought impatiently.
There was an awkward silence for some seconds, and she decided the only
way to “save his face” was to ask _him_ a personal question, and give him
the chance of snubbing her in his turn; so she said, “We had no idea when
you stayed with us last autumn that you were thinking of being ordained
... but perhaps you weren’t thinking of it then?”
He did not answer at once, but seemed to be meditating: “It’s never quite
a matter of _thinking_,” he said finally, “it’s just a drifting ...
drawn on and on by the perfumes of the Church. What is it the Vulgate
says again? _In odore unguentorum tuorum curremus_ ...” he broke off,
and then after a few seconds, as if summing up, slightly humorously, the
situation, he added ruminatively, the monosyllable “úhu!” And the queer
Scots ejaculation seemed to give a friendly, homely turn to his statement.
“You were lucky being born in the Church,” he went on; “my father was an
Established Church minister up in Inverness-shire, and I was taught to
look upon the Church as the Scarlet Woman. I remember once at the Laird’s
I ... well, I came near to bringing up my tea because Lady Stewart
happened to say that her cook was a Catholic. And sometimes still,”
and he lowered his voice and looked at her with half frightened eyes,
“sometimes still I feel a wee bit sick at mass.”
It was indeed strange that he too should feel the _ambivalence_ of the
Holy Mother.
“I know what you mean,” she said; “I never exactly feel sick—but I know
what you mean.”
“Do you?” he cried eagerly, “and you brought up in it too!”
He got up, took a few restless paces up and down the room, and then stood
still before a sketch in water-colours of Seville Cathedral, staring at
it with unseeing eyes. Suddenly, he seemed to relax, and he returned to
his chair.
“Well,” he said, “when one comes to think of it, you know, it would be
hard to find a greater sin than ... feeling like that at mass.” Then a
slow smile crept over his face: “I remember my father telling me that his
father met a wee lad somewhere in the Highlands, and asked him what he’d
had to his breakfast, and he said, “brose,”—and then what he’d had to his
dinner, and he said “brose,” and then what he’d had to his tea, and it
was brose again; so my grandfather said, “D’you not get tired of nothing
but brose?” and the wee lad turned on him, quite indignant, and said,
“Wud ye hae me weary o’ ma meat?” ... It’s not just exactly the same,
I’ll admit—but it was a fine spirit the wee lad showed.”
A little wind blew in through one of the open windows, very balmy, fresh
from its initiation into the secret of its clan,—a secret not unlike
that of the Venetian glass-blowers, and whispered from wind to wind down
the ages—the secret of blowing the earth into the colours and shapes of
violets and daffodils. It made the summer cretonne curtains creak and
the Hispano-Mauresque plates knock against the wall on which they were
fastened and give out tiny ghostly chimes; as did also the pendent balls
on the Venetian glass. Teresa suddenly thought of the late Pope listening
to the chimes of St. Mark’s on a gramophone. All at once she became very
conscious of the furniture—it was a whiff of that strange experience she
had had in her Chelsea lodgings. Far away in the view a cock crowed. She
suddenly wondered if the piano-tuner were coming that morning.
“The Presbyterians, you know,” he was saying, “they’re not like the
Episcopalians; they feel things more ... well, more concretely ... for
instance, they picture themselves taking their Sabbath walk some day
down the golden streets ... they seem to ... well, it’s different.” He
paused, and then went on, “My people were very poor, you know; it was
just a wee parish and a very poor one, and it was just as much as my
mother could do to make both ends meet. But one day she came into my
father’s study—I remember, he was giving me my Latin lesson—and in her
hand she held one of these savings boxes for deep-sea fishermen, and she
said, “Donald”—that was my father’s name—“Donald, every cleric should go
to the Holy Land; there’s a hundred pound in here I’ve saved out of the
house-keeping money, so away with you as soon as you can get off.” How
she’d managed it goodness only knows, and she’d never let _us_ feel the
pinch anywhere. You’d not find an Episcopal minister’s wife doing that!”
and he looked at her defiantly.
“No; perhaps not ... that was very fine. Did your father like the Holy
Land when he got there?”
There was something at once pathetic and grotesque in the sudden vision
she had of the Presbyterian pilgrim, with a baggy umbrella for staff, and
a voluminous and shabby portmanteau for script, meticulously placing his
elastic-sided boots in his Master’s footprints.
“Oh yes, he liked it—he said it was a fine mountainous country with a
rare light atmosphere—though Jerusalem was not as ‘golden’ as he had been
led to understand! and he met some Russian pilgrims there, and he would
often talk of their wonderful child-like faith ... but I think he thought
it a pity, all the same, that Our Lord wasn’t born in Scotland,” and he
smiled.
Her fancy played for a few seconds round the life, the mind, of that dead
minister:
“... But to his lack-lustre eyes there appeared within the pages of
the ponderous, unwieldy, neglected tomes, the sacred name of JEHOVAH
in Hebrew capitals: pressed down by the weight of the style, worn to
the last fading thinness of the understanding, there were glimpses,
glimmering notions of the patriarchal wanderings, with palm trees
hovering in the horizon, and processions of camels at the distance
of three thousand years; there was Moses with the Burning Bush, the
number of the Twelve Tribes, types, shadows, glosses on the law and the
prophets ... the great lapses of time, the strange mutations of the
globe were unfolded with the voluminous leaf, as it turned over; and
though the soul might slumber with an hieroglyphic veil of inscrutable
mysteries drawn over it, yet it was a slumber ill exchanged for all the
sharpened realities of sense, wit, fancy, or reason. My father’s life was
comparatively a dream; but it was a dream of infinity and eternity, of
death, the resurrection, and a judgment to come!”
It was not that this passage word for word stalked through her head; it
was just a sudden whiff of memory of this passage. And on its wings it
wafted the perfume of all the melancholy eloquence of Hazlitt—the smell,
the vision, of noble autumn woods between Salisbury and Andover. If ever
a man had not walked dry-shod that man was Hazlitt; all his life he had
waded up to the waist in Time and Change and Birth and Death, and they
had been to him what he held green, blue, red, and yellow to have been
to Titian: “the pabulum to his sense, the precious darlings of his eye,”
which “sunk into his mind, and nourished and enriched it with the sense
of beauty,” so that his pages glow with green, blue, red, and yellow.
Time, Change, Birth, Death—she, too, was floating on their multi-coloured
waters.
“Do you think your father is in hell?” she asked suddenly.
He winced.
“I don’t think so,” he answered, after a pause: “It isn’t as if he’d seen
the light and turned away from it. I think he’ll be in Purgatory,” and he
looked at her questioningly.
She was touched—this young seminarist was still quite free from the
dogmatism and harshness of the priest.
“You know the legend, don’t you,” she said gently, “that the prayers of
St. Gregory the Great got the soul of the Emperor Trajan into Paradise?”
“Is that so?” he cried eagerly.
“Yes; he was the just pagan _par excellence_, and the prayers of St.
Gregory saved his soul.”
The door opened and Parker came in: “Excuse me, miss, but have you seen
Miss Concha? It’s about that old lace ... Madame wishes to see if it can
be draped without being cut.”
“No, Parker, I have not seen her.”
And Parker withdrew.
“I thought about that ... I mean my parents’ souls,” he went on, “when
I first felt a vocation. I thought, maybe, me being a priest might help
them—not that they weren’t a hundred times better than me—it’s all very
mysterious ...” he paused, and once again punctuated his sentence with
the ruminative “úhu.”
“My mother is terribly unhappy because my eldest sister died an atheist
... and now Concha’s having ratted ...” she found herself saying;
herself surprised at this abandoning of her wonted reserve.
“Poor lady!” he said very sympathetically; “yes, it’s a bad business for
a mother ... my aunt Jeannie, she was an elderly lady, a good bit older
than my mother. I lived with her in Inverness when I was going to the
Academy. Well, my mother told me she had several good offers when she
was young, but she would never marry, because she felt she just couldn’t
face the responsibility of maybe bringing a damned soul into the world
... yes, the Scotch think an awful lot about the ‘last things.’ ... And I
suppose your mother can’t do anything to stop her?”
“Have you ever heard of a mother being able to stop a child going its own
way?”
“Maybe not,” and he smiled: “I should think _you_ must have been most
awfully wilful when you were wee,” and he looked at her quizzically.
The moment when the conversation between a man and a woman changes from
the general to the personal is always a pungent one; Teresa gave him a
cool smile and said, “How do you know?”
“Well, weren’t you?”
“Perhaps ... in a very quiet way.”
“Oh, that’s always the worst.”
Then, almost as if it were a tedious duty, he harked back to Concha’s
perversion: “Yes, it’s a bad business for you all about Miss Concha.”
“Life absorbs everything—in time,” said Teresa, half to herself.
“What do you mean exactly by that, Miss Lane?”
“Heresy, probably,” and she smiled.
“Well, what do you mean?”
“It’s difficult to explain ... but I feel a sort of transubstantiation
always going on ... sin and mistakes and sorrows and joy slowly,
inevitably, turned into the bread that is life, and it’s no use worrying
and struggling and trying to prevent everything but fine flour from going
in ... all’s grist that comes to the mill.”
He looked at her intently for a few seconds: “Don’t you believe in the
teaching of the Church, Miss Lane?”
“Does it ... does it matter about believing?”
“Yes, it matters.”
“Well ... I haven’t quite made up my mind.”
Suddenly from the garden came Concha’s voice singing:
I’m so _jolly_ glad to meet you!
I’m so _jolly_ glad you’re glad!
Then one of the French-windows burst open, and in she came, all blown by
March winds, a bunch of early daffodils in her hand, and, behind her,
’Snice, his paws caked with mud.
She made Teresa think of the exquisite conceit in which Herrick describes
a wind-blown maiden:
She lookt as she’d been got with child
By young Favonius.
“Hallo! When did you arrive? It was such a divine morning I had to go
for a walk. You poor creature—you do look thin. Oh dear, I _must_ have a
cigarette.”
Her unnecessary heartiness probably concealed a little embarrassment; as
to him—he was perfectly calm, grave, and friendly.
Then Dick came in: “Hallo! How are you, Munroe? So sorry I wasn’t about
when you arrived—had to go down to the village to see the parson. We’ll
have to fatten you up while you’re here—shan’t we, Concha? I don’t know
whether we can rise to _haggis_, but we’ll do our best.”
Teresa felt a strange sensation of relief; here it was back again—old,
foolish, meaningless, Merry England. She realised that, during the last
half hour, she had been in another world—it was not exactly life; and
she remembered that sense of almost frightening incongruity when she had
first heard of David’s vocation.
3
Soon it was real spring: the trees became covered with golden buds, with
pale green tassels; the orchard was a mass of white blossom; the view
became streaked with the startling greenness of young wheat; and the long
grass of the wild acre beyond the orchard was penetrated with jonquils,
and daffodils, and narcissi, boldly pouting their corollas at birds and
insects and men. While very soon every one grew so accustomed to the
singing of the birds that one almost ceased to _hear_ it—it had entered
the domain of vision, and become a stippled background to the _velatura_
of trees and leaves and flowers.
David had settled down very happily at Plasencia, and had proved himself
to be a highly domesticated creature—always ready to do odd jobs about
the house or garden.
Shortly after his arrival Concha had gone up to Scotland to stay with
Colonel Dundas, so it fell upon Teresa to entertain him.
They would go for long walks; and though they talked all the time, never,
after that first conversation, did they touch on religious matters.
Sometimes he would tell her of his childhood in Scotland, and it soon
became almost a part of her own memories: the small, dark, sturdy
creature in a shabby kilt, a “poke of sweeties” in his sporran, at play
with his brothers and sisters, dropping, say, a worm-baited bootlace
into the liquid amber of the burn—their chaff, as befitted children of
the Manse, with a biblical flavour, “Now then David, my man, no so much
lip—_Selah, change the tune_, d’ye hear?” And the hillsides tesselated
with heather and broom, and the sheep ruddled red as deer, and the beacon
of the rowans flashed from hill to hill; while down the bland and portly
Spey floated little dreams, like toy boats, making for big towns, and the
sea, and over the sea.... Then all would melt into the tune of the “Old
Hundred”:
Awl peeeople thaat own errrth dew dwell.
What time James Grant, the precentor with the trombone-voice, rocked
his Bible up and down, as though it were a baby whose slumbers he was
soothing with an ogre lullaby.
All this was a far cry from his Holiness, the Immaculate Conception,
the Sacred Heart of Jesus ... and yet ... it was not quite Plasencia;
there was something different about it all: again she remembered the
incongruity of the minarets of the Sacré-Cœur.
Sometimes, too, he would tell her of his years in South Africa—for
instance, how, after a long day of riding up and down the fields of
sugar-cane, he would lie out on the veranda of his little bungalow and
read Dumas’s novels, while the plangent songs of the indentured Indians,
celebrating some feast with a communal curry, would float up from their
barracks under the hill; or else the night would shiver to the uncanny
cry of a bush-baby: “It’s a wee beastie that wails at night. There’s no
other sound like it in the world—beside it the owl’s and the nightjar’s
cries are homely and barn-door like.”
“It must have been the sort of noise one would hear if one slept in
Cathy’s old room at Wuthering Heights,” she said, half to herself.
“You’re right there,” he answered, “I never thought of it, but you’re
quite right,” and then he added, “it’s a grand book, that.” And, after
another pause: “Do you realise that one never knows whether Cathy and
Heathcliff were sinners?”
“How do you mean? I must say they both struck me as very wild and violent
characters!”
“No, no, I mean _sinners_. One never knows ... whether they broke the
Seventh Commandment or not,” and suddenly he blushed violently.
* * * * *
After tea he would take her drives in the car; it was very peaceful
rushing past squat churches with faintly dog-toothed Norman towers, past
ruined windmills, and pollard willows, and the delicate diversity of
spring woods. Guy had once said that a motor drive in the evening through
the Eastern Counties was like Gray’s _Elegy_ cut up by a jig-saw.
Sometimes, as they sped along, he would sing—songs he had learned at the
front. There was one that the Canadians had taught him, with the chorus:
Be sure and check your chewing gum
With the darkie at the door,
And you’ll hear some Bible stories
That you never heard before.
There was the French waltz-song, _Sous les Ponts de Paris_, of which he
only knew a few words here and there, and these he pronounced abominably;
but its romantic wistful tune suited his voice. Sometimes, too, he would
sing Zulu songs that reminded Teresa of Spanish _coplas_ sung by Seville
gipsies; and sometimes the Scottish psalms and paraphrases in metre;
and their crude versification and rugged melodious airs struck her,
accustomed to the intoning of the Latin Psalter, as almost ridiculous.
They had lost all of what Sir Philip Sidney calls, “the psalmist’s
notable prosopopœias when he maketh you, as it were, see God coming in
His majesty”; and they made one see, instead, a very homely God, who,
in the cool of the evening, would stroll into the crofter’s cottage, as
though it had been the tent of Abraham, and praise the guidwife’s scones,
and resolve the crofter’s theological difficulties.
All this showed a robustness of conscience—he had none of the
doctrinairism and queasiness of the ordinary convert; what mattered it to
him that the songs he sang were often _very_ secular, the version of the
Psalms heavy with Presbyterianism?
But she was often conscious of the decades that lay between them, the
leagues and leagues, of which the milestones were little cultured jokes
at Chelsea tea-parties, and Cambridge epigrams, and endless novels and
plays. The very language he spoke was twenty or thirty years behind her
own; such expressions as “a very refined lady,” or “a regular earthly
Paradise,” fell from his lips with all their pristine dignity. And yet
she could talk to him simply and spontaneously as to no one else.
Since he had been there she had left off reading mediæval books, and her
brain felt like a deserted hive.
4
Easter was very late that year, and the Catholics at Plasencia were
wakened very early on Easter morning to an exquisite, soft, scented day,
almost like summer.
Teresa, looking out of her window as she dressed, saw that her parents
were already walking in the garden. She gazed for some seconds at her
father’s sturdy back, as he stood, as if rooted to the earth, gazing at
some minute flower in the border.
St. Joseph of Arimathea, she thought, may have been just such a kindly
self-indulgent person as he; dearly loving his garden. And if her father
had been asked to allow the corpse of a young dissenter to lie in _his_
garden, though he might have grumbled, he would have been far too
good-natured to refuse. And, if that young dissenter had turned out to
be God Almighty, her father would have turned into a Saint, and after
his death his sturdy bones would have worked miracles. She smiled as she
pictured the Doña’s indignant surprise at finding her husband chosen for
canonisation—the College of Cardinals would have had no difficulty in
obtaining an _advocatus diaboli_.
And as to the garden—surely the contact of Christ’s body would have
fertilised it, a thousand times more than Lorenzo’s head the pot of
basil, making it riot into a forest of fantastic symbolic blossoms: great
racemes, perhaps, which, with their orange-pollened pistils protruding
like flames from their seven long, white, waxy blossoms, would recall
the seven-branched candlestick in the Temple; bell-flowers shaped
like chalices and stained crimson inside as if with blood; monstrous
veronicas, each blossom bearing the impress of the Holy Face.
What an unutterably ridiculous faith it was! But, for good or ill, her
own imagination was steeped all through with the unfading dye of its
traditions.
Then she went downstairs, and David drove them through the fresh morning
to mass.
The nearest Catholic church was in a small market-town some ten miles
distant. It was always a pleasure to Teresa to drive through that town—it
had the completeness and finish of a small, beautifully made object
that one could turn round and round in one’s hands and examine from
every side. The cobbled market-place, where on Saturdays cheap-jacks
turned somersaults and cracked jokes in praise of their wares, exactly
as they had done in the days of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson; the flat
Georgian houses of red brick picked out in white and grown over with
ivy, in one of which the doctor’s daughters knitted jumpers and talked
about the plays they had seen on their last visit to London—“a very
weepie piece; playing on nothing but the black notes, don’t you know!”
the heraldic lion on the sign of the old inn; the huge yellow poster
advertising Colman’s Mustard—it was all absorbed into a small harmonious
whole, an English story. All, that is to say, except the large Catholic
church built in the hideous imitation Gothic of the last century, _that_
remained ever outside of it all, a great unsightly excrescence, spoiling
the harmony. It had been built with money left for the purpose by a pious
lady, who had begun her career as a Belgian actress, and ended it as
the widow of a rich manufacturer of dolls’ eyes, who had bought a big
property in the neighbourhood.
“I used to think when I was a child,” said Teresa, who was sitting in
front beside David, “that the relics under the altar were small wax
skulls and glass eyes.”
He turned and looked at her with an indulgent smile.
“I believe he looks upon me as a little girl,” she said to herself; and
she felt at once annoyed and strangely glad.
Then they went into the dank, dark, candle-lit church; and it was indeed
as if they had suddenly stepped on to a different planet.
A few minutes of waiting—and then mass had begun.
Resurrexi, et adhuc tecum sum, alleluia; posuisti super me
manum tuam, alleluia: mirabilis facta est scientia tua,
alleluia, alleluia.
She sat beside David, dreamily telling her beads, and glancing from time
to time at her Missal.
With signings, and genuflexions, and symbolic kisses, the chorus in their
sexless vestments sang the amœbæan pre-Thespian drama—verses strung
together from David and Isaiah that hinted at a plot, but did not even
_tell_ a story ... till suddenly in the _Sequentia_ an actor broke loose
from the chorus, and tragedy was born:
Victimæ Paschali laudes immolent Christiani. Agnus redemit
oves: Christus innocens Patri reconciliavit peccatores. Mors et
vita duello conflixere mirando: dux vitæ; mortuus regnat vivus.
Die nobis, Maria
Quid vidisti in via?
Sepulcrum Christi viventis
Et gloriam vidi resurgentis
Angelicos testes
Sudarium et vestes.
Surrexit Christus spes mea:
Præcedet vos in Galilæam.
Scimus Christum surrexisse a mortuis vere:
Tu nobis, victor Rex, miserere.
Amen. Alleluia.
Suddenly an idea came to her that this too was a play, in the particular
sense that she wished her own reactions to be a play, that is to say a
squeezing into a plot of the manifold manifestations of Life; and, if
one chose to play on words, a plot _against_ Life, as well: pruning,
pruning, discarding, shaping, till the myriad dreams and aspirations
of man, the ceaseless struggle, through chemists’ retorts, through the
earth of gardens, through the human brain, of the Unknown to become the
Known was reduced to an imaginary character called God; a nailing of the
myriad ways by which man can become happy and free to a wooden cross a
few cubits high; a reducing of his myriad forms of spiritual sustenance
to a tiny wafer of flour; a tampering, too, with the past, saying “in
the beginning _was_ ...” but Life, noisy, tangible, resilient, supple,
cunning Life, was laughing out there in the streets and fields at the
makers of myths; for it knew that every plot against it was foredoomed to
failure.
Then they went up to the altar; and, kneeling between the Doña and David,
she received the host on her tongue.
The Holy Mother—Celestina, the old wise courtesan of Spain, skilled
beyond all others in the distilling of perfumes, in the singing of
spells—she was luring her back, she was luring her back ... in odore
unguentorum tuorum curremus ... what cared Celestina that it was by the
senses and the imagination that she held her victims instead of by the
reason?
The Rock ... Peter’s Rock ... a Prometheus bound to it for ever, though
the vulture should eat out her heart.
5
On the drive home Jollypot, who was sitting behind beside the Doña,
remarked meditatively, “How lovely the Easter _Sequentia_ is!... so
sudden and dramatic!”
“Yes, yes,” said the Doña, who never failed to be irritated by Jollypot’s
enthusiasm over the literary aspect of the Liturgy. “Oh, look at these
trees! Everything is so very early.”
“I was following in my Missal,” Jollypot went on, “and I was suddenly
struck by the words: Agnus redemit oves—the lamb redeems the sheep—they
seemed to me _so_ lovely: and I wondered ... I wondered if it weren’t
always so ... the lamb redeeming the sheep, I mean ... ‘and a little
child shall lead them,’ if ...” and she lowered her voice, “if little
Jasper with his devotion to the Blessed Sacrament should redeem ... dear
Pepa’s lamb ... do you think?...”
“What _do_ you mean, Jollypot?” said the Doña severely.
“Well, I was wondering, dear Mrs. Lane ... if his wonderful child piety
...; if it ... if it mightn’t help dear Pepa.”
The Doña gave a snort: “The words in the _Sequentia_, Jollypot, refer to
Christ and the Church—what _could_ they have to do with Jasper and Pepa?”
and she gave an involuntary sigh.
“What do you think of our seminarist?” she asked after a pause, in a low
voice.
Jollypot, though she had lived with the Doña for years, had not yet
learned to know when her voice was ironical:
“Oh, I think he’s a _dear_ fellow,” she said enthusiastically, “so _big_
and _simple_, and _child-like_ and _rugged_, and such a jolly voice! And
sometimes, too, he’s so _pawky_—oh, I think he’s a _delightful_ fellow.”
The Doña gave a tiny shrug: “He seems to like staying with us very much,”
she said drily.
“But how could he help it? You are all so jolly to him.”
“Yes; some of us are very hospitable,” and the Doña’s eyes rested for a
moment on Teresa’s back; “still, one would have thought he might have
recovered from his influenza by now.”