The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Counterplot, by Hope Mirrlees

E-text prepared by
Mary Glenn Krause, Charlene Taylor,
University of Chicago, Shawna Milam,
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
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THE COUNTERPLOT

Miss Hope Mirrlees, when she wrote Madeleine, several years ago, was recognised to be one of the most promising of the younger school of women novelists.

The Counterplot is a study of the literary temperament. Teresa Lane, watching the slow movement of life manifesting itself in the changing inter-relations of her family, is teased by the complexity of the spectacle, and comes to realise that her mind will never know peace till, by transposing the problem into art, she has reduced it to its permanent essential factors. So, from the texture of the words, the emotions, the interactions of the life going on around her she weaves a play, the setting of which is a Spanish convent in the fourteenth century, and this play performs for her the function that Freud ascribes to dreams, for by it she is enabled to express subconscious desires, to vent repressed irritation, to say things that she is too proud and civilised ever to have said in any other way. This brief summary can give but little idea of the charm of style, the subtlety of characterisation, and the powerful intelligence which Miss Hope Mirrlees reveals. The play itself is a most brilliant, imaginative tour de force!

Plasencia was a square, medium-sized house of red brick, built some sixty years ago, in those days when architects knew a great deal about comfort, but cared so little about line that every house they designed, however spacious, was uncompromisingly a “villa.” Viewed from the front, it was substantial and home-like, and suggested, even in the height of summer, a “merry Christmas” and fire-light glinting off the leaves of holly; from the back, however, it had a look of instability, of somehow being not firmly rooted in the earth—a cumbersome Ark, awkwardly perched for a moment on Ararat, before plunging with its painted wooden crew into the flood, and sailing off to some fantastic port.

It is possible that this effect was not wholly due to the indifferent draughtsmanship of the Victorian architect, for there is a hint of the sea in a delicate and boundless view, and the back of Plasencia lay open to the Eastern counties.

Even the shadowy reticulation of a West-country valley, the spring bloom upon fields and woods, and red-brick villas that glorifies the tameness of Kent, are but poor things in comparison with the Eastern counties in September: yellow stripes of mustard, jade stripes of cabbage, stripes of old rose which is the earth, a suggestion of pattern given by the heaps of manure, and the innumerable shocks of corn, an ardent gravity given by the red-brown of wheat stubble,[2] such as the red-brown sails of a fishing boat give to the milky-blue of a summer sea; here and there a patch of green tarpaulin, and groups of thatched corn-ricks—shadowy, abstract, golden, and yet, withal, homely edifices, like the cottages of those villages of Paradise whose smoke Herrick used to see in the distance. An agricultural country has this advantage over heaths and commons and pastoral land that the seasons walk across it visibly.

On a particular afternoon in September, about three years ago, Teresa Lane sat in a deck-chair gazing at this view. She was a pallid, long-limbed young woman of twenty-eight, and her dark, closely-cropped hair emphasised her resemblance to that lad who, whether he be unfurling a map of Toledo, or assisting at the mysterious obsequies of the Conde de Orgas, is continually appearing in the pictures of El Greco.

As she gazed, she thought of the Spanish adjective pintado, painted, which the Spaniards use for anything that is bright and lovely—flowers, views; and certainly this view was pintado, even in the English sense, in that it looked like a fresco painted on a vast white wall, motionless and enchanted against the restless, vibrating foreground. Winds from the Ural mountains, winds from the Atlantic celebrated Walpurgis-night on the lawn of Plasencia; and, on such occasions, to look through the riven garden, the swaying flowers and grasses, the tossing birch saplings, at the tranced fields of the view was to experience the same æsthetic emotion as when one looks at the picture of a great painter.

But the back of Plasencia had another glory—its superb herbaceous border, which, waving banners of the same hues, only brighter, marched boldly into the view, and became one with it. Now in September[3] it was stiffened by annuals: dahlias, astors, snapdragon, sunflowers; Californian poppies whose whiteness—at any rate in the red poppyland of East Anglia—always seems exotic, miraculous, suggesting the paradoxical chemical action of the Blood of the Lamb. There were also great clumps of violas, with petals of so faint a shade of blue or yellow that every line of their black tracery stood out clear and distinct, and which might have been the handiwork of some delicate-minded and deft-fingered old maid, expressing her dreams and heart’s ease in a Cathedral city a hundred years ago. As to herbaceous things proper, there was St. John’s wort, catmint, borrage, sage; their stalks grown so long and thick, their blossoms so big and brave, that old Gerard would have been hard put to see in them his familiars—the herbs that, like guardian angels, drew down from the stars the virtue for the homely offices of easing the plough-boy’s toothache, the beldame’s ague.

A great lawn spread between the border and the house; it was still very threadbare owing to the patriotic pasturage that, during the last years of the War, it had afforded to half a dozen sheep, but it was darned in so many places by the rich, dark silk of clover leaves as almost to be turned into a new fabric.

Well, then, the view and border lay simmering in the late sunshine. A horse was dragging a plough against the sky-line, and here and there thin streams of smoke were rising from heaps of smouldering weeds. In the nearer fields, Teresa could discern small, moving objects of a dazzling whiteness—white leghorns gleaning the stubble; and from time to time there reached her the noise of a distant shot, heralding a supper of roast hare or partridge in some secluded farm-house. Then, like a Danish vessel bound for pillage in Mercia, white, swift, compact, a flock of wood pigeons would flash[4] through the air to alight in a far away field and rifle the corn.

But so pintado was the view, so under the notion of art, that these movements across its surface gave one an æsthetic shock such as one would experience before a mechanical device introduced into a painting, and, at the same time, thrilled the imagination, as if the door in a picture should suddenly open, or silver strains proceed from the painted shepherd’s pipe.

Teresa could hardly be said to take a pleasure in the view and its flowery foreground—indeed, like all lovely and complicated things, they teased her exceedingly; because the infinite variety which made up their whole defied expression. Until the invention of some machine, she was thinking, shows to literature what are its natural limits (as the camera and cinema have shown to painting) by expressing, in some unknown medium, say a spring wood in toto—appearance, smells, noises, associations—which will far outstrip in exact representation the combined qualities of Mozart, Spencer, Corot, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and yet remain dead and flat and vulgar,—so long shall we be teased by the importunities of detail and forget that such things as spring woods are best expressed lightly, delicately, in a little song, thus:

As she murmured the lines below her breath, two children came running down the grass path that divided the herbaceous border—Anna and Jasper Sinclair, the grandchildren of the house.

Teresa watched their progress, critically, through[5] half-closed lids. Yes, children are the right fauna for a garden—they turn it at once into a world that is miniature and Japanese. But perhaps a kitten prowling among flower-beds is better still—it is so amusing to watch man’s decorous arrangement of nature turning, under the gambols of the sinister little creature, into something primitive and tropical—bush, or jungle, or whatever they call it in Brazil and places; but Anna was getting too big.

Human beings too! Worse than the view, because more restless and more complicated, yet insisting on being dealt with; even Shelley could not keep out of his garden his somewhat Della Cruscan Lady.

“You don’t know what we’ve found, what we’ve found, what we’ve found!” “Let me say! a dead hare, and we’ve buried him and....” “And I’ve found a new fern; I’ve got ten and a half kinds now and I ought to get a Girl Guide’s badge for them, and the Doña promised me some more blotting-paper, but....”

Teresa stroked Jasper’s sticky little hand and listened indulgently to their chatter. Then they caught sight of Mrs. Lane coming out of the house, and rushed at her, shouting, “Doña! Doña!”

The Spaniards deal in a cavalier way with symbolism; for instance, they put together from the markets, and streets, and balconies of Andalusia a very human type of female loveliness; next, they express this type with uncompromising realism in painted wooden figures which they set up in churches, saying, “This is not Pepa, or Ana, or Carmen. Oh, no! It isn’t a woman at all: it’s a mysterious abstract doctrine of the Church called the Immaculate Conception.” They then proceed to fall physically in love with this abstract doctrine—serenading it with lyrics, organising pageants[6] in its honour, running their swords through those who deny its truth, storming the Vatican for its acceptance.

Hence, for those who are acquainted with Spain, it is hard to look on Spanish concrete things with a perfectly steady eye—they are apt to become transparent without losing their solidity.

However this may be, Mrs. Lane (the Doña, as her friends and family called her), standing there smiling and monumental, with the children clinging to her skirts, seemed to Teresa a symbol—of what she was not quite sure. Maternity? No, not exactly; but it was something connected with maternity.

The children, having said their say, made for the harbour of their own little town—to wit, the nursery—where, over buns, and honey, and chocolate cake, they would tell their traveller’s tales; and the Doña bore down slowly upon Teresa and sank heavily into a basket chair. She raised her lorgnette and gazed at her daughter critically.

“Teresa,” she said, in her slow, rather guttural voice, “why do you so love that old skirt? But I warn you, it is going to the very next jumble sale of Mrs. Moore.”

So toneless and muted was Teresa’s voice that it was generally impossible to deduce from it, as also from her rather weary impassive face, of what emotion her remarks were the expression.

“Rubbish! There is no reason why I shouldn’t have two elegant daughters,” retorted the Doña, wondering the while why exactly Teresa was jealous of Concha. “It must be a man; but who?” she asked herself. Aloud she said, “I wonder why tea is so late. By the way, I told you, didn’t I, that Arnold is coming for the[7] week-end and bringing Guy? And some young cousin of Guy’s—I think he said his name was Dundas.”

“I know—Rory Dundas. Guy often talks about him. He’s a soldier, so he’ll probably be even more tiresome than Guy.”

“Why, Teresa, a nice young officer, with beautiful blue eyes like Guy perhaps, only not slouching like Cambridge men, and you think that he will be tiresome!”

Again Teresa smiled amicably, and wished for the thousandth time that her mother would sometimes stop being ironical—or, at any rate, that her irony had a different flavour.

Then the butler and parlour-maid appeared with tea; and a few minutes later Concha, the other daughter, strolled up, her arm round the waist of a small, elderly lady.

Concha was a very beautiful girl of twenty-two. She was tall, and built delicately on a generous scale; her hair was that variety of auburn which, when found among women of the Latin races, never fails to give a thrill of unexpectedness, and a whiff of romance—hinting at old old rapes by Normans and Danes. As one looked at her one realised what a beautiful creature the Doña must once have been.

The elderly lady was governess emerita of the Lanes. They had grown so attached to her that she had stayed on as “odd woman”—arranging the flowers, superintending the servants, going up to London at the sales to shop for the family. They called her “Jollypot,” because “jolly” was the[8] adjective with which she qualified anything beautiful, kindly, picturesque, or quaint; “pot” was added as the essence of the æsthetic aspect of “jolliness,” typified in the activities of Arts and Crafts and Artificers’ Guilds—indeed she always, and never more than to-day, looked as if she had been dressed by one of these institutions; on her head was a hat of purple and green straw with a Paisley scarf twisted round the crown, round her shoulders was another scarf—handwoven, gray and purple—on her torso was an orange jumper into which were inserted squares of canvas wool-work done by a Belgian refugee with leanings to Cubism; and beads,—enormous, painted wooden ones. Once Harry Sinclair (the father of Anna and Jasper) had exploded a silence with the question, “Why is Jollypot like the Old Lady of Leeds? Because she’s ... er ... er ... INFESTED WITH BEADS!!!”

While on this subject let me add that it was characteristic of her relationship with her former pupils that they called her Jollypot to her face, and that she had never taken the trouble to find out why; that the great adventure of her life had been her conversion to Catholicism—a Catholicism, however, which retained a tinge of Anglicanism: to wit, a great deal of vague enthusiasm for “dear, lovely St. Francis of Assisi,” combined with a neglect of the crude and truly Catholic cult of that most potent of “medicine-men”—St. Anthony of Padua; and that taste for Dante studies so characteristic of middle-aged Anglican spinsters. Indeed, she was remarkably indiscriminating in her tastes, and loved equally Shakespeare, Dante, Mrs. Browning, the Psalms, Anne Thackeray, and W. J. Locke; but from time to time she surprised one by the poetry and truth of her observations.

The Doña, holding in mid-air a finger biscuit soaked[9] in chocolate, smiled and blinked a welcome; but her eyes flashed to her brain the irritated message, “If only the jumper were purple, or even green! And those beads—does she sleep in them?”

Partly from a Latin woman’s exaggerated sense of the ridiculous possibilities in raiment, partly from an Andalusian Schaden-freude, ever since she had known Jollypot she had tried to persuade her that a devout Catholic should dress mainly in black; but Jollypot would flush with indignation and cry, “Oh! Mrs. Lane, how can you? When God has given us all these jolly colours! Just look at your own garden! I remember a dear old lady when I was a girl who used to say she didn’t see why we should say grace for food because that was a necessity and God was bound to give it to us, but that we should say it for the luxuries—flowers and colours—that it was so good and fatherly of Him to think of.” Which silly, fanciful Protestantism would put the Doña into a frenzy of irritation.

But Jollypot—secure in her knowledge of her own consideration of the Sesame and Lilies of the field—had, as usual, a pleasant sense of being prettily dressed, and, quite unaware that she offended, she sat down to her tea with a little sigh of innocent pleasure. Concha, after having hugged the unresponsive Doña, and affectionately inquired after Teresa’s headache, wearily examined the contents of the tea-table, and having taken a small piece of bread and butter, muttered that she wished Rendall would cut it thinner.

“But how very kind of you! That poor Mrs. Moore must have been quite touched ... did I hear that Eben was home on leave?” and the Doña[10] scrutinised her with lazy amusement; Teresa, also, looked at her.

“Oh, yes, he’s back,” said Concha, lightly, but blushing crimson all the same. She loathed being teased. “How incredibly Victorian and Spanish it all is!” she thought.

She yawned, then poured some tea and cream into a saucer, added two lumps of sugar, and put it down on the lawn for the refreshment of ’Snice, the dachshund.

“Oh, he was in great form—really extraordinarily funny about getting drunk at Gibraltar,” drawled Concha; she always drawled when she was angry, embarrassed, or “feeling grand.”

“Oh! the English always get drunk at Gibraltar—it wasn’t at all original of Eben.”

“And I suppose Mrs. Moore said, ‘Ebenebeneben! Prenny guard!’ which meant that one of the Sunday school children was coming up the path and he must be careful what he said.”

Concha gurgled with laughter—pleasantly, like a child being tickled—at the Doña’s mimicry; and the atmosphere cleared.

Teresa remembered Guy Cust’s once saying that conversation among members of one family was a most uncomfortable thing. When one asks questions it is not for information (one knows the answers already) but to annoy. It is, he had said, as if four or five men, stranded for years on a desert island with a pack of cards, had got into the habit of playing poker all day long, and that, though the game has lost all savour and all possibilities of surprise; for each knowing so well the “play” of the other, no bluff ever succeeds, and however impassive their opponent’s features, they can each immediately, by the sixth sense of intimacy,[11] distinguish the smell of a “full house,” or a “straight,” from that of a “pair.”

For instance, the Doña and Teresa knew quite well where Concha had been that afternoon; and Concha had known that they would know and pretend that they did not, so she had arrived irritated in advance, and the Doña and Teresa had watched her approach, maliciously amused in advance.

“Well, and was Mrs. Moore hinting again that she would like to have her Women’s Institute in my garden?” asked the Doña.

“Oh, yes, and she wants Teresa to go down to the Institute one night and talk to them about Seville, but I was quite firm and said I was sure nothing would induce her.”

“You were wrong,” said Teresa, in an even voice, “I should like to talk to them about Seville.”

“Give them a description of a bull-fight, Teresa. It would amuse me to watch the face of Mrs. Moore and the Vicar,” said the Doña.

Teresa and Concha laughed, and Jollypot shuddered, muttering, “Those poor horses!”

The Doña looked at her severely. “Well, Jollypot and what about the poor foxes and hares in England?”

“Oh! look at the birds’ orchard ... all red with haws. Poor little fellows! They’ll have a good harvest,” cried Jollypot, pointing to the double hedge of hawthorn that led to the garage, and evidently glad to turn from man’s massacring of beasts to God’s catering for birds.

“Seville!” said Concha meditatively; and a silence fell upon them while the word went rummaging among the memories of the mother and her daughters.

Tittering with one’s friends behind one’s reja, while Mr. Lane down below (though then only twenty-three, already stout and intensely prosaic), self-consciously sang a Spanish serenade with an execrable English accent; gipsy girls hawking lottery tickets in the Sierpes; eating ices in the Pasaje del Oriente; the ladies in mantillas laughing shrilly at the queer English hats and clumsy shoes; the wall of the Alcazar patined with jessamine; long noisy evenings (rather like poems by Campoamor), of cards and acrostics and flirtation; roses growing round orange trees; exquisite horsemanship; snub-nosed, ill-shaven men looking with laughing eyes under one’s hat, and crying, Viva tu madre! Dark, winding, high-walled streets, called after Pedro the Cruel’s Jewish concubines; one’s milk and vegetables brought by donkeys, stepping as delicately as Queen Guinevere’s mule. One by one the candles of the Tenebrario extinguished to the moan of the miserere, till only the waxen thirteenth remains burning; goats, dozens of wooden Virgins in stiff brocade, every one of them sin pecado concebida, city of goats and Virgins ... yes, that’s it—city of goats and Virgins.

“By the way,” said Concha nonchalantly, “I’ve asked Eben to lunch on Sunday.”

The Doña bowed ironically and Concha blushed, and calling ’Snice got up and moved majestically towards the house.

“The dear fellow! That is jolly,” said Jollypot; then sharply drew in her breath, as if suddenly remembering something, and, with a worried expression, hurried away.

The thing she had suddenly remembered was that the billiard-table was at that moment strewn with rose[13] petals drying upon blotting-paper, and that Arnold would be furious if they were not removed before his arrival.

The Doña, by means of a quizzical look at Teresa, commented upon the last quarter of an hour, but Teresa’s expression was not responsive.

“Well,” said the Doña, regretfully hoisting her bulk from her basket-chair, “I must go and catch Rudge before he goes home and tell him to keep the sweet corn for Saturday—Arnold’s so fond of it. And there’s the border to be—oh, your father and his golf!”

The irritated tone of this exclamation ended on the last word in a note of scorn.

Teresa sat on alone by the deserted tea-table, idly watching the Doña standing by the border, in earnest talk with the gardener.

How comely and distinguished, and how beautifully modelled the Doña looked in the westering light! No one could model like late sunshine—she had seen it filtering through the leaves of a little wood and turning the smooth, gray trunk of a beech into an exquisite clay torso, not yet quite dry, fresh from the plastic thumb, faithfully maintaining the delusion that, though itself a pliable substance, the frame over which it was stretched was rigid and bony. The Doña and beech trees, however, were beautiful, even without the evening light; but she had also seen the portion of a rain-pipe that juts out at right angles from the wall before taking its long and graceless descent—she had seen the evening light turn its dirty yellow into creamy flesh-tints, its contour into the bent knee of a young Diana.

Forces that made things look beautiful were certainly part of a “Merciful Dispensation.” Memory was[14] one of these forces. How exquisite, probably, life at Plasencia would look some day!

It would take a lot of mellowing, she thought, with a little smile. Again it was a question of the swarm of tiny details: beauty, evidently, requiring their elimination.

But, for instance, the interplay of emotions at tea that afternoon—was it woven from the tiny brittle threads of unimportant details, or was it made of a more resisting stuff?

Why was the Doña equally irritated that she, Teresa, ignored young men, and that Concha ran after them—like a tabby-cat in perpetual season? No—that was disgusting, coarse, unkind. There was nothing ugly about Concha’s abundant youth: she was merely normal—following the laws of life, no more disgusting than a ripe apple ready to drop.

There came into Teresa’s head the beginning of one of Cervantes’s Novelas Exemplares, which tells of the impulse that drives young men, although they may love their parents dearly, to break away from their home and wander across the world, “... nor can meagre fare and poor lodging cause them to miss the abundance of their father’s house; nor does travelling on foot weary them, nor cold torment them, nor heat exhaust them.”

And, added Teresa, rich in the wisdom of a myriad songs and stories, they are probably fully aware, ere they shut behind them the door of their home, that some day they, too, will discover that freedom is nought but a lonely wind, howling for the past.

Il n’y a pour l’homme que trois événements: naître, vivre et mourir ... yes, but to realise that, personally, emotionally—to feel as one the three events—three simultaneous things making one thing that is perpetually repeated, three notes in a chord—and the[15] chord Life itself ... an agonising sense of speed ... yes, the old simile of the rushing river that carries one—where? But every life, or group of lives, is deaf to the chord, stands safe on the bank of the river, till a definite significant moment, which, looked back upon, seems to have announced its arrival with an actual noise—a knocking, or a rumbling. To Teresa, it seemed that that moment for them all at Plasencia had been Pepa’s death, two years ago—that had been what had plunged them into the river. Before, all of them (the Doña too) had lived in Eternity. Now, when Teresa awoke in the night, the minutes dripped, one by one, on to the same nerve, till the agony became almost unbearable; and it was the agony of listening to a tale which the narrator cannot gabble fast enough, because you know the end beforehand—yes, something which is at once a ball all tightly rolled up that you hold in your hand and a ball which you are slowly unwinding.

She looked towards the house—the old ark that had so long stood high and dry; now, it seemed to her, the water had reached the windows of the lowest story—soon it would be afloat, carrying them all ... no, not her father. He, she was sure, was still—would always be—outside of Time.

Why did she mind in Concha the same intellectual insincerities and pretensions, the same airs and graces, that she had loved in Pepa?

She smiled tenderly as she remembered how once at school she had opened Pepa’s Oxford Book of English Verse at the fly-leaf and found on it, in a “leggy,” unfledged hand, the following inscription: “To Josepha Lane, from her father,” and underneath, an extract from Cicero’s famous period in praise of letters—et haec studia adulescentiam alunt, senectutem oblectant,[16] and so on. (That term Pepa’s form had been reading the Pro Archia.)

Pepa had blushed, and then laughed, and said, “Well, you see I wanted Ursula Noble” (Ursula Noble’s father was a celebrated Hellenist) “to think that we had a brainy father too!”

Then, how bustling and important she had been when, shorty after her début, she had become engaged to Harry Sinclair—a brilliant Trinity Don, much older than herself, and already an eminent Mendelian—how quickly and superficially she had taken over all his views—liberalism, atheism, eugenics!

Oh, yes, there had been much that had been irritating in Pepa; but, though Teresa had recognised it mentally, she had never felt it in her nerves.

She was suddenly seized with a craving for Pepa’s presence—dear, innocent, complacent Pepa, so lovely, so loving, with her fantastic, yet, somehow or other, cheering plans for one’s pleasure or well-being—plans that she galvanised with her own generous vitality.

Yes, Pepa had certainly been very happy during her six or seven years of married life at Cambridge: cultured undergraduates pouring into tea on Sundays, and Pepa taking them as seriously as they took themselves, laughing delightedly at the latest epigram that was going the round of Trinity and Kings’—“Dogs are sentimental,” or “Shaw is so Edwardian”—trolling Spanish Ladies or the Morning Dew in chorus round the piano; footing it on the lawn—undergraduates, Newnham students, Cambridge matrons, young dons, eyeglasses and prominent teeth glittering in the sun, either a slightly patronising smile glued on the face, or an expression of strenuous endeavour—to the favourite[17] melodies of Charles II.; suffrage meetings without end, lectures on English literature, practising glees in the Choral Society; busy making cardboard armour for the Greek play, or bicycling off to Grantchester, or taking Anna to her dancing class, or off to Boots to change her novels—a Galsworthy for herself, a Phillips Oppenheim for Harry.

It had always seemed to Teresa that this life, in spite of its suffrage and girl’s clubs and “culture,” was both callous and frivolous in comparison with the tremendous adventures that were going on, all round, in laboratories and studies and College rooms: at any moment Professor —— might be able to resolve an atom, and blow up the whole of Cambridge in the process; and, in little plots of ground, flowers whose habitat was Peru or the Himalayas, were springing up with—say, purple pollen instead of golden, and that meant that a new species had been born; or else, Mr. —— of Christ’s, or John’s, or Caius, would suddenly feel the blood rush to his head as a blinding light was thrown on the verbal nouns of classical Arabic by a French article he had just been reading on the use of diminutives in the harems of Morocco.

Anyhow, whether callous or frivolous or both, it had given Pepa seven happy years.

What Harry Sinclair’s contribution—apart from the necessary background—had been to that happiness it would, perhaps, be difficult to determine. There could be no one in the world less sympathetic to the small emotional things—so important in married life—than Harry: homesickness, imagined slights when one was tired, fears that one’s son aged three summers might some twenty years ahead fall in love with little Angela Webb, and there was consumption in the family—he viewed them with the impatience of a young lady before the furniture of a drawing-room that she[18] wants to clear for a dance, the dance, in his case, being the sweeps, pirouettes, glides, of endless clever and abstract talk through the clear, wide spaces of an intellectual universe.

However, emotionally, Pepa had never quite grown up, so perhaps she had missed nothing.

All the same, when he had broken down at her death, there had been something touching and magnificent in his fine pity—not for himself, but for Pepa, so ruthlessly, foolishly, struck down in the hey-day of her splendid vigour. “It’s devilish! devilish!” he had sobbed.

During the last days of her life, Pepa had talked to Teresa a good deal about Anna and Jasper. “Make them want to be nice people,” she had said; and Teresa remembered that, even through her misery, she had wondered that Pepa had not used a favourite Cambridge cliché and said, “Make them want to be splendid people”; perhaps it was she, Teresa, who was undeveloped emotionally.

She had tried hard to do what Pepa had asked her; but in these latter days, when the outlines of the virtues have lost their firmness, it is difficult to give children that concrete sense of Goodness that had made the Victorian mothers’ simple homilies, in after years, glow in the memory of their children with the radiance of a Platonic Myth.

She walked into the house. In the hall, as if in illustration of her views on memory, the light was falling on, and beautifying a medley of objects, incongruous as the contents of one’s dreams: the engraving of Frith’s Margate that had hung in Mr. Lane’s nursery in the old Kensington house where he had been born; a large red and blue india-rubber ball dropt by[19] Anna or Jasper; the old Triana pottery, running in a frieze round the walls, among which an occasional Hispano-Mauresque plate yielded up to the touch of the sun the store of fire hidden in its lustre; a heap of dusty calling-cards in a flat dish on the table; Arnold’s old Rugby blazer, hanging, a brave patch of colour, among the sombre greatcoats.... Through the half-opened door of the drawing-room came a scent of roses; and through the green baize door that led to the kitchen the strange, lewd sounds of servants making merry over their tea. Probably Gladys, the under-housemaid, was reading cups.

Teresa mounted the wide, easy stairs, and, passing through another green baize door, entered the children’s quarters, and then the nursery itself. There, tea finished and cleared away, a feeling of vague dissatisfaction had fallen on the two children. Every minute bed-time was drawing nearer, and anxious eyes kept turning towards the door; would any one come before it was too late, and Jasper was already plunging and “being silly” in the bath, while Anna, clad in a pink flannel dressing-gown, her hair in two tight little plaits, was putting tidy her books and toys, and—so as to perform the daily good deed enjoined by the Girl Guides—Jasper’s too?

Their craving for the society of “grown-ups” was as touching and inexplicable, it seemed to Teresa, as that of dogs. She had noticed that they longed for it most between tea and bed-time—it was as if they needed, then, a viaticum against the tedium of going to bed and the terrors of the night. Nor, she had noticed, was Nanny, dearly though they loved her, capable of giving this viaticum, nor could any man provide it: it had to be given by a grandmother, or mother, or aunt.

So Teresa’s advent was very warmly welcomed;[20] and sitting down in the rocking-chair she tried to perform the difficult task of amusing Anna and Jasper at the same time. For between Anna of nine and Jasper of six there was very little in common.

Jasper, like the boy Froissart, “never yet had tired of children’s games as they are played before the age of twelve”: these meaningless hidings, and springings, and booings, and bouncings of balls. His mind, too, was all little leaps, and springs, and squeals, and queer little instincts running riot, with a tendency to baby cabotinage. “Don’t be silly, Jasper!” “Don’t show off!” were continually being said to him.

Anna’s mind, on the other hand, was completely occupied with solid problems and sensible interests, namely, “I hope that silly Meg will marry Mr. Brook (she was reading Louisa Alcott’s Little Women). I expect the balls were damp to-day, as they wouldn’t bounce ... it would be nice if I could get a badge for tennis next year. Ut with the subjunctive ... no, no, the accusative and infinitive ... wait a minute ... I’m not quite sure. Every square with a stamp in it—every single square. I wonder why grown-ups don’t spend all their money on stamps. I wonder if Daddy remembered to keep those Argentine ones for me ... little pictures of a man that looks like George—George—George IV., I think—anyhow, the one that didn’t wear a wig ... the Argentine ones are always like that ... that’ll make six Argentine stamps. Brazil ones are pretty, too ... what’s the capital of Brazil again?”

Teresa had found that a story—one that combined realism with the marvellous—was the best focus for these divergent interests; so she started a story.

The sun was setting; and the border and view, painted on the glass of the nursery windows, grew dim. Some one in the garden whistled the air of:

Nanny sat with her sewing, listening too, a pleased smile on her face, the expression of a vague and complex feeling of satisfaction: for one thing, it was all so suitable and what she had been used to in her other places—kind auntie telling the children a story after tea; then there was a sense of “moral uplift” as, doubtless, the story was allegorical; poor Mrs. Sinclair in heaven, too—she would be glad if she could see what a good aunt they had—then there was also a genuine interest in the actual story; for no nurse without a sense of narrative and the marvellous is fit for her post.

“Bed-time, I’m afraid. Kiss kind Auntie and say, ‘Thank you, Auntie, for the nice story.’”

Outside, the cowman was leading the cows home to the byre across the lawn. It was a good thing that Rudge, the head gardener, was safe in his cottage, eating his tea. Far away an express flashed across the view, whistling like a nightjar, giving a sudden whiff of London that evaporated as swiftly as its smoke.

“But we don’t call her ‘Auntie’; we call her ‘Teresa,’” said Anna for the thousandth time.

“Now, Anna dear, don’t be rude. Up you get, Jasper. I’m afraid, miss, it really is bed-time ... and they were late last night too.”

Teresa dressed and went down to the drawing-room, to find her father and Jollypot already there and chatting amicably.

“The place was full of salmon at four and sixpence a pound, and he said, ‘You’ll never get rid of that!’ and the fishmonger said, ‘Won’t I? It’ll go like winking,’ and the other chap said, ‘Who’ll buy it these hard times?’ and he said, ‘The miners, of course.’”

Dick Lane was a stockily-built man of middle height, with a round, rubicund face. A Frenchman had once described him as, Le type accompli du farmer-gentleman.

He was, however, a Londoner, born and bred, as his fathers had been before him for many a generation; but, as they had always had enough and to spare for beef and mutton and bacon, the heather of Wales and the pannage of the New Forest had helped to build their bones; besides, it was not so very long ago that cits could go a-maying without being late for ’Change; and then, there is the Cockney’s dream of catching, one day before he dies, the piscis rarus—a Thames trout—a dream which, though it never be realised, maketh him to lie down in green pastures and leadeth him beside the still waters.

As to Dick, he liked cricket, and the smell of manure and of freshly-cut hay, he liked pigs, and he liked wide, quiet vistas; but he liked them as a background to his prosaic and quietly regulated activities—much as a golfer, though mainly occupied with the progress of the game, subconsciously is not indifferent to the springy turf aromatic with thyme and scabious, nor to the pungent breezes from the sea, nor to the sweep of the downs.

He and Teresa exchanged friendly nods, and she, sinking into a chair, began to contemplate him—much as Blake may have contemplated the tiger, when he wondered:

There he sat, pink from his bath, pleasantly tired after his two rounds of golf, expounding to Jollypot his views on the threatened strike—the heir to all the ages.

For his body and soul were knit from strange old fragments: sack; fear of the plague; terror of the stars; a vision of the Virgin Queen borne, like a relic in a casket, on the shoulders of fantastically-dressed gentlemen; Walsingham; sailor’s tales of Spanish ladies; a very English association between the august word of Liberty and the homely monosyllable Wilkes; dynasties tottering to the tune of “Lillybolero”; Faith, Hope, and Charity, stimulated by cries of, “No Popery,” “Lavender, Sweet Lavender,” “Pity the poor prisoners of the Fleet”; Dr. Donne thundering Redemption at Paul’s Cross, the lawn at his wrist curiously edged with a bracelet of burnished hair; Hector of Troy, Alexander the Great, Pride, Lechery, Robin Hood, throbbing in ballads, or else, alive and kicking and bravely dressed beyond one’s dreams, floating in barges down the Thames; Death—grinning in stone from crevices of the churches, dancing in churchyards with bishops and kings and courtesans, forming the burden of a hundred songs, and at last, one day, catching one oneself; Death—but every death cancelled by a birth.

Without all this he would not have been sitting there, saying, “The English working man is at bottom a sensible chap, and if they would only appeal to his common sense it would be all right.”

Then the gong sounded. Dick looked at his watch and remarked, quite good-humouredly, “I wonder how many times your mother has been in time for dinner during the thirty years we have been married.”

“I have just been saying I wonder how many times you have been in time for dinner since we were married.”

The Doña ignored this remark, and busied herself in straightening Teresa’s fichu.

“By the way, Anna,” said Dick, looking across at the Doña and sucking the soup off his moustache, “I was playing golf with Crofts, and he says there’s going to be a wonderful new rose at the show this year—terra cotta coloured. It’s a Lyons one; he says it’s been got by a new way of hybridising. We must ask Harry about it.”

“Harry wouldn’t know—he knows nothing about gardening,” said the Doña scornfully.

“Not know? Why, he’ll know all about it. That fellow Worthington—you know who I mean, the chap that went on that commission to India—well, he’s a knowledgeable sort of chap, and he asked me the other day at the Club if Dr. Sinclair of Cambridge wasn’t a son-in-law of mine, and he said that he’d been making the most wonderful discoveries lately.”

“What’s the use of discoveries—of Harry’s, at any rate? They do no one any good,” said the Doña sullenly.

“Oh, I don’t know; there’s no knowing what these things mayn’t lead to—they may teach us to improve the human stock and all sorts of things”; and then Dick applied himself to the more interesting subject of his fried sole, oblivious, in spite of years of experience, that his remark had horrified his wife by its impious heresy.

“To learn to know people through flowers—what a lovely idea,” mused Jollypot, who was too absent-minded to be tactful. “I think it is his work among flowers that makes Dr. Sinclair so—so[25]——”

“So like a flower himself, eh?” grinned Dick, with a sudden vision of his large, massive, overbearing son-in-law.

“I’m sure flowers really irritate Harry horribly,” said Concha. “They’ve probably got the Oxford manner, or are not Old Liberals, or something.”

“You are quite right, Concha. Both flowers and children irritate him,” said the Doña bitterly.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Dick, with indifferent good humour. “By the way,” he added, “I’ve asked a young fellow called Munroe down for the week-end. He’s representing a South African sugar firm we have to do with ... it’ll be all right, won’t it?”

“Well, Arnold’s written to say he’s coming, and he doesn’t like strangers, you know,” said the Doña.

“Well, I’m blessed ... has it come to this ...” he spluttered, roused completely out of his habitual good humour.

“Well, all the same, it’s ...” he growled; and then subsided, slightly appeased.

The Doña, quite unmoved, continued placidly eating her sole. Then she remarked, “And where is your friend to sleep, may I ask? Arnold is bringing down Guy and a cousin of his. When the children are here you know how little room we have.”

“I suppose one of them—Arnold, as far as that goes—can sleep at Rudge’s,” said Dick sulkily.

“Oh, I can sleep in Dad’s dressing-room, if it comes to that,” said Teresa.

“Oh, no, you’re so much more dependent on your own dressing-table and your own things,” said Teresa; and Concha blushed. Innocent remarks of Teresa’s had a way of making her blush; but she was a fighter.

“What’s the good Colonial like?” she asked, her voice not quite natural—and thinking the while, “I will ask if I choose! It’s absolutely unbearable how self-conscious they’re making me—it’s like servants.”

“The Colonial—what Colonial? Oh, Monroe! He’s a Scot really, but he’s been out there some years; done jolly well, too. He’s a gallant fellow, too—V.C. in the war.”

“Oh, no-o-o!” drawled Concha, “how amusing! V.C.’s are so exotic—it’s like seeing a fox suddenly in a wood——” and then she blushed again, for she realised that this remark was not original, but Guy Cust’s, and that Teresa was looking at her.

“Oh, I don’t know ... he’s a great big chap,” and then he added cryptically, “pretty Scotch, I should say.”

When dinner was over, the Doña went up to the nursery to apologise, in case the children were still awake, for not having been up before to say good-night. She found they were asleep, however, but Nanny was sitting in the day-nursery darning a jersey of Jasper’s; so, partly to avoid having had the trouble of climbing the stairs for nothing, partly because she had been seeking for some time the occasion for a private chat, she sank into the rocking-chair—looking extremely distinguished in her black lace mantilla and velvet gown.

Her brown eyes, with the quizzical droop of the lids that Teresa had inherited, fixed Nanny in a disconcerting Spanish stare.

How thankful she was that she did not have to wear a gown of black serge fastening down her chest with buttons, and a starched white cap.

“Oh, yes, madam. There’s nowhere like Plasencia—and no one like Granny and Auntie!”

There was a definite matter upon which the Doña wanted information; but it required delicate handling. She was on the point of approaching it by asking if the children were not very lonely at Cambridge, but realising that this would be a reflection upon Nanny she immediately abandoned it—no one could deal more cavalierly, when she chose, with the feelings of others than the Doña; but she never inadvertently hurt a fly.

“Oh, yes—always working away at his stocks and his chickens,” said Nanny placidly, holding a small hole up to the light. “He’s managed to get that bit of ground behind the garden, and he’s planted it with nothing but stocks. He lets Anna help him with the chickens. She’s becoming quite a little companion to her Daddy.”

“That is delightful,” purred the Doña; then, after a pause, “He must be terribly lonely, poor man.”

“Oh, yes, he frets a lot, I’m sure; but, of course, gentlemen don’t show it so much.”

As dogs who live much with human beings develop an agonising sensitiveness, so servants are apt to develop from an intimacy with their masters a delicacy and refinement of feeling often much greater than that of the masters.

At the bottom of her heart, she resented Dr. Sinclair’s indifference to his children—at any rate, his indifference to Jasper—for Anna, who was a remarkably intelligent little girl, he rather liked. But with regard[28] to Jasper, he had once remarked to a crony at dinner that, with the exception of the late Lord —— (naming a famous man of science), his son was the greatest bore he had ever met; which remark had been repeated by the parlour-maid in a garbled version to the indignant Nanny.

Then, in decent mourning, a broken heart as well as a crape band must be worn on the sleeve; Dr. Sinclair’s sleeve was innocent of either, and it could not be denied that within eight months of his wife’s death his voice was as loud and cheerful, his eyes as bright, as ever before.

Yes; but it was quite another matter to be pumped, even by “Granny,” or to admit to any one but her own most secret heart that “Daddy” could, under any circumstances, behave otherwise than as the model of all the nursery virtues.

There was a short silence; then the Doña said, “Yes, poor man! It must be very dull for him. But I suppose he is beginning to see his friends?”

“Oh, yes, madam, the College gentlemen sometimes come to talk over his work with him,” and Nanny pursed up her lips, and accelerated the speed with which she was threading her needle through her warp. “It’s a blessing, I’m sure,” she added, “that he has his work to take off his thoughts sometimes.”

“Yes, indeed!”; then, after a slight pause, “What about that Miss—what was her name—the lady professor—Miss Fyles-Smith? Is she still working with Dr. Sinclair?”

“I couldn’t say, madam, I’m sure. She was very kind, taking the children on the river, and that—when Dr. Sinclair was away.”

The slight emphasis on the temporal clause did more credit to Nanny’s heart than her head—considering that the rapier she was parrying was wielded by the[29] Doña; for it caused the Doña to say to herself, “Aha! she knows what I mean, does she? There must be something in it then.”

However, this was loyal, faithful service, and the Doña had an innate respect for the first-rate; but, though honouring Nanny, she did not feel in the least ashamed of herself.

She changed the subject, and sat on, for a while, chatting on safe, innocent topics.

The Doña considered that no sand-dune, Turkish divan, bank whereon the wild thyme blows, or Patriarch’s bosom, could rival her own fragrant-sheeted, box-spring-mattressed, eiderdowned bed; therefore she went there early and lay there late. So on leaving the nursery, although it was barely half-past nine, she went straight to bed, and there she was soon established, her face smeared with Crême Simon, with a Spanish novel lying open on the quilt. But the comfort of beds, as of all other things—even though they be ponderable and made of wood and iron—is subject to the capricious tyranny of dreams; and for some time, in spite of the skill of Mr. Heal, the Doña’s bed had not been entirely compact of roses.

When, an hour or so later, Dick climbed into his bed, she said, “I suppose you realise that Harry has forgotten all about my Pepa?”

“Oh, nonsense, Anna! Poor chap, you don’t expect him to be always whimpering, do you? I tell you, the English aren’t demonstrative.”

“Nor are the Spaniards, but they have a great deal of heart all the same; and Harry has absolutely none—I don’t believe he has any soul either.”

This was an unusually acute and spiteful remark—for Dick. The Doña had never confided to him her vicarious terrors touching the apostasy of Pepa, who had not had her children baptised, and, during her last illness, had refused to the end the ministrations of Holy Church; but one cannot pass many years in close physical intimacy with another person without getting an inkling, though it be only subconsciously, of that person’s secret thoughts; and though Dick had never consciously registered his knowledge of the Doña’s, the above remark had been made with intention to wound.

His irritation at her criticism of Harry was caused by a sense of personal guilt: twice, perhaps, during the last year had his own thoughts dwelt spontaneously upon Pepa—certainly not oftener.

With a sigh of relief he put out the light, shook himself into a comfortable position, and then got into the shadowy yacht in which every night he sailed towards his dreams. With that tenderness of males (which deserves the attention of the Freudians) towards any vehicle—be it horse, camel, motor-car, or ship—he knew and loved every detail of her equipment; and in the improvements which, from time to time, he made in her he observed a rigid realism—never, for instance, making them unless they were justified by the actual state of his bank-book. The only concession that he made to pure fancy was that there was no wife and children to be considered in making his budget. On the strength of an unexpected dividend, he had recently had her fitted out with a wireless installation. The only guests were his life-long friend, Hugh Mallam, and a pretty, though shadowy and somewhat Protean, young woman.

As to the Doña, she lay for hours staring with wide eyes at the darkness. Why, oh why, had she married a Protestant? Just to annoy her too vigilant aunts,[31] for the sake of novelty and excitement she had, in spite of her confessor, run off with a round-faced, unromantic young Englishman—really unromantic, but for her with the glamour that always hangs round hereditary enemies. Perhaps she deserved to be punished: but when they had been little she had been so sure of her children—how could they ever be anything but her own creatures, pliable to her touch? Even Arnold, brought up a Protestant (he had been born before the Bull exacting that all children of a mixed marriage should be Catholics), she had been certain that, once his own master, he would come over. She smiled as she remembered how he used to say when he was at school—as a joke—“Oh, yes, I’m going to be the Pope, and I’ll have a special issue of stamps to be used in the Vatican, then after a few days suppress ’em; so I’ll have a corner in them!” And though he had not come over to Rome, there was a certain relaxing of tension as she thought of him; somehow or other, it made it different his having been born before the Bull. But Pepa—that was another thing: a member of the Catholic fold from her infancy ... where could she be now but in that portion of Purgatory which is outside the sphere of influence of prayers and masses, and which will one day be known as Hell? Before her passed a series of realistic pictures of those torments, imprinted on her imagination during las semanas de los ejerjicios espirituales of her girlhood.

Could it be?... No, it was impossible.... Impossible? Pepa had died in mortal sin ... she was there.

Arnold Lane and Guy Cust had been great friends at Cambridge, in spite of having been at different colleges, and having cultivated different poses.

Guy, who was an Etonian, had gone in for intellectual and sartorial foppishness, for despising feminine society, for quoting “Mr. Pope” and “Mr. Gibbon,” and for frequenting unmarried dons.

Arnold had been less exclusive—had painted the town a “greenery-yellow” with discalceated Fabians, read papers on Masefield to the “Society of Pagans,” and frequently played tennis at the women’s colleges; he had also, rather shamefacedly, played a good deal of cricket and football.

Then, at the end of their last year, came the War, and they had both gone to the front.

The trenches had turned Arnold into an ordinary and rather Philistine young man.

As to Guy—he had undergone what he called a conversion to the “amazing beauty of modern life,” and, abandoning his idea of becoming a King’s don and leading that peculiar existence which, like Balzac’s novel, is a recherche de l’Absolu in a Dutch interior, when the War was over he had settled in London, where he tried to express in poetry what he called “the modern mysticism”—that sense, made possible by wireless and cables, of all the different doings of the world happening simultaneously: London, music-halls, Broad Street, Proust writing, people picking[33] oranges in California, mysterious processes of growth or decay taking place in the million trees of the myriad forests of the world, a Javanese wife creeping in and stabbing her Dutch rival. One gets the sense a little when at the end of The Garden of Cyrus Sir Thomas Browne says: “The huntsmen are up in America and they are already past their first sleep in Persia.” Its finest expression, he said, was to be found in the Daily Mirror.

But early training and tastes are tenacious. We used to be taught that, while we ought not to wish for the palm without the dust, we should, nevertheless, keep Apollo’s bays immaculate; and, in spite of their slang, anacoluthons, and lack of metre, Guy’s poems struck some people (Teresa, for instance) as being not the bays but the aspidistras of Apollo—dusted by the housemaid every morning.

Towards five o’clock, the next day, their arrival was announced by ’Snice excitably barking at the front door, and by Concha—well, the inarticulate and loud noises of welcome with which Concha always greeted the return of her father, brother, or friends, is also best described by the word “barking.”

“It’s a friendly gift; I’m sure no ‘true woman’ is without it,” thought Teresa.

Arnold had his father’s short, sturdy body and his mother’s handsome head; Guy was small and slight, with large, widely-opened, china-blue eyes and yellow hair; he was always exquisitely dressed; he talked in a shrill voice, always at a tremendous rate. They were both twenty-seven years old.

As usual, they had tea out on the lawn; the Doña plying Arnold with wistful questions, in the hopes of getting fresh material for that exact picture of his life in London that she longed to possess, that, by its[34] help, she might, in imagination, dog his every step, hear each word he uttered.

Up in the morning, say at eight (she hoped his landlady saw that his coffee was hot), then at his father’s office by nine, then ... but she never would be able to grasp the sort of things men did in offices, then luncheon—she hoped it was a good one (no one else had ever had any fears of Arnold’s not always doing himself well), then ... hazy outlines and details which she knew were all wrong, and, in spite of the many years she had spent in England, ridiculously like the life of a young Spaniard in her youth ... no, no, he would never begin his letters to young ladies ojos de mi corazon (eyes of my heart)—they would be more like this: Dear ——? Fed up. Have you read? Cheerio! Amazing performance! Quite. Allow me to remind you.... And then, perhaps, a Latin quotation to end up. No, it was no use, she would never be able to understand it all.

“A Scotch protégé of Dad’s is coming to-night,” said Concha; “he’ll probably travel down with Rory Dundas—I wonder if they’ll get on ... oh, Guy, I hadn’t noticed them before; what divine spats!”

“Oh, Lord!” groaned Arnold, “it’s that chap Munroe, I suppose. Look here, I don’t come down here so often, I think I might be left alone when I do, Mother,” and he turned angrily to the Doña. It was only in moments of irritation that he called her “mother.”

“Well, of course, it’s come to this, that I’ll give up coming home at all,” and he savagely hacked himself a large slice of cake.

A look of terror crept into the Doña’s eyes—her children vanishing slowly, steadily, over the brow of a[35] hill, while she stood rooted to the ground, was one of her nightmares.

Trying to keep the anger out of her voice, Teresa said, “The last time you were here there were no visitors at all, and the time before it was all your own friends.”

“Poor angel!” cried Concha, plumping down on his knee, “you’re like Harry, who used to say that he’d call his house Yarrow that it might be ‘unvisited.’”

Arnold grinned—the Boswellian possessive grin, automatically produced in every Trinity man when a sally of Dr. Sinclair’s was quoted.

“The glorious life he leads! ‘The apples fall about his head!’ He does lead an amazingly beautiful life.”

“‘Beautiful,’ Guy?” and the Doña turned on him the look of pitying wonder his remarks were apt to arouse in her.

“Yes, successful, middle-aged business men,” cried Guy excitedly, beginning to wave his hands up and down, “they’re the only happy people ... they’re like Keats’ Nightingale, ‘no hungry generations tread them down, singing of....’”

“I’m not so sure of that,” laughed Arnold. “We’re certainly hungry, and we often trample on him—if that’s what it means,” and, getting up, he yawned, stretched himself, and, seizing the Doña’s hand, said, “Come and show me the garden.”

The Doña flushed with pleasure, and they strolled off towards the border, whither they were shortly followed by Concha.

“I quite agree with you,” she said presently. “Dad’s life is pleasant to contemplate. Somehow, he belongs to this planet—he manages to be happy.”

“Yes, you see he doesn’t try to pretend that he belongs to a different scheme of evolution from beasts and trees and things, and he doesn’t dream. Do you think he ever thinks of his latter end?” and he gave a little squeak of laughter.

Teresa smiled absently, and for some seconds gazed in silence at the view. Then she said, “Think of all the things happening everywhere ... but there are such gaps that we can’t feel the process—even in ourselves; we can only register results and that isn’t living, and it’s frightfully unæsthetic.”

“But, my dear Teresa, that’s what I’m always preaching!” cried Guy indignantly. “It’s exactly this registering of results instead of living through processes that is so frightful. In a poem you shouldn’t say, ‘Hullo! There’s a lesser celandine!’ all ready-made, you know; and then start moralising about it: ‘In its unostentatious performance of its duty it reminds me of a Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman that I once knew’—you know the sort of thing. In your poem the lesser celandine should go through the whole process of growth—and then it should wither and die.”

Guy felt a sudden sinking in his stomach: had he not himself invented a technique to do this very thing? He must find out at all costs what Teresa thought of his poetry.

“Don’t you think ...” he began nervously, “that modern poetry is getting much nearer to—to—er—processes?”

Teresa gave a little smile. So that was what it was all leading up to? Was there no one with whom she[37] could discuss things simply and honestly for their own sake?

She felt tempted to add, “It reminded me a little bit of Frith,” but she refrained. It would be very unkind and really not true.

Her praise, faint though it was, made Guy tingle all over with pleasure, and he tumbled out, in one breath, “Well, you see, it’s really a sort of trick (everything is). Grammar and logic must be thrown overboard, and it’s not that it’s easier to write without them, it’s much more difficult; Monsieur Jourdain was quite wrong in calling logic rébarbative; as a matter of fact, it’s damnably easy and seductive—so’s grammar; the Song of the Sirens was probably sung in faultless grammar ... and anyhow, it spoils everything. Now, just think of the most ridiculous line in the Prelude:

Don’t you see it’s entirely the fault of the conjunction ‘and’? Try it this way. Oranges, churches, cabriolets, negro ladies in white muslin gowns.... It immediately becomes as significant and decorative as Manet’s negro lady is a white muslin gown in the Louvre—the one offering a bouquet to Olympia.”

He paused, and looked at her a little sheepishly, a smile lurking in the corner of his eyes.

“You’re too ridiculous,” laughed Teresa, “and theories about literature, you know, are rather dangerous, and allow me to point out that all the things that ... well, that one perhaps regrets in poor Wordsworth, whom you despise so much, that all these things are the result of his main theory, namely, that[38] everything is equally interesting and equally poetic. While the other things—the incomparable things—happened in spite of his theories.”

“Oh, yes ... trudging over the moors through the rain, and he’s sniffing because he’s lost his handkerchief, and he’s thinking of tea—sent him by that chap in India or China, what was his name? You know ... the friend of Lamb’s—and of hot tea cakes.”

Teresa gave her cool, superior smile. “Poor Guy! You’ve got a complex about Wordsworth.”

After a little pause, she went on, “Literature, I think, ought to transpose life ... turn it into a new thing. It has to come pushing up through all the endless labyrinths of one’s mind—like catechumens in the ancient Mysteries wandering through cave after cave of strange visions, and coming out at the other end new men. I mean ... oh, it’s so difficult to say what I mean ... but one looks at—say, that view, and the result is that one writes—well, the love story of King Alfred, or ... a sonnet on a sun-dial. I remember I once read a description by a psychologist of the process that went on in the mind of a certain Italian dramatist: he would be teased for months by some abstract philosophical idea and gradually it would turn itself into, and be completely lost in an action—living men and women doing things. It seems to me an extraordinarily beautiful process—really creative.... Transubstantiation, that’s what it is really; but the bad writers are like priests who haven’t proper Orders—they can scream hoc est corpus till they are hoarse, but nothing happens.”

Guy had wriggled impatiently during this monologue; and now he said, in a very small voice, “You ... you do like my poetry, don’t you, Teresa?”

She looked at him; of course, he deserved to be slapped for his egotism and vanity, but his eager,[39] babyish face was so ridiculous—like Jasper’s—and when Jasper climbed on to the chest of drawers and shouted, “Look at me, Teresa! Teresa! Look at me!” as if he had achieved the ascent of Mount Everest, she always feigned surprise and admiration.

So, getting up, she said with a smile, “I think you’re an amazingly brilliant creature, Guy—I do really. Now I must go.”

He felt literally intoxicated with gratification. “I think you’re an amazingly brilliant creature; I think you’re an amazingly brilliant creature; an amazingly brilliant creature”—he sucked each word as if it were a lollipop.

Then, the way she affectionately humoured him—that was the way women always treated geniuses: geniuses were apt to seem a trifle ridiculous; probably the impression he made on people was somewhat similar to Swinburne’s.

Yes; he had certainly been very brilliant with Teresa: the song of the sirens was, I am sure, in faultless grammar; the song of the sirens was, I am sure, in faultless grammar; the song of the ... and how witty he had been about the negro ladies!

He really must read a paper on his own views on poetry—to an audience mainly composed of women: The cultivated have, without knowing it, become the Philistines, and, scorning the rude yet lovely Saturnalia of modern life, have refused an angel the hospitality of their fig-tree; Tartuffe, his long, red nose pecksniffing—the day of the Puritans is over; but for the sake of the Lady of Christ’s, let them enjoy undisturbed their domestic paradise regained; then all these subjects locked up so long and now let loose by modern poetry ... yes, it would go like this: The harems have been thrown[40] open, and, though as good reactionaries we may deplore the fact, yet common humanity demands that we should lend a helping hand to the pretty lost creatures in their embroidered shoes; then, about anacoluthons and so on; surely one’s sentences need not hold water if they hold the milk of Paradise; oh, yes ... of course ... and he would end up by reading them a translation of Pindar’s first Olympian Ode, ... Ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ ..., and now, ladies and gentlemen, which of you will dare to subscribe to Malherbe’s ‘ce galimatias de Pindare’?

Loud applause; rows of indulgent, admiring, cultured smiles—like the Cambridge ladies when the giver of the Clark lectures makes a joke.

“Guy! I have told you before, I will not have you cracking the fuchsia buds.”

It was the Doña, calling out from the border where, deserted by Arnold but joined by Dick, she was examining and commenting upon each blossom separately, in the manner of La Bruyère’s amateur of tulips.

“All right,” he called back in a small, weak voice, and went up to say, “How d’ye do” to Dick.

Then he wandered off towards the house—a trifle crestfallen. “I think you’re an amazingly brilliant creature.” Yes; but wasn’t that begging the question, the direct question he had asked whether she liked his poetry? And one could be “an amazingly brilliant creature,” and, at the same time, but an indifferent writer. Marie Bashkirsteff, for instance, whose journal he had come upon in an attic at home, mouldering away between a yellow-backed John Strange Winter and a Who’s Who of the nineties; no one could deny that socially she must have been extremely brilliant, but, to him, it had seemed incredible that the world should[41] have failed to perceive that her “self-revelations” were to a large extent faked, and her imagination a tenth-rate one. And now, both as painter and writer, Time had shown her up, together with the other pompiers whose work had made such a brave show in the Salons of the eighties, or had received such panegyrics in the Mercure de France.

He felt sick as he thought of time, in fifteen years ... ten years ... having corroded the brilliant flakes of contemporary paint, faded the arabesque of strange words and unexpected thoughts, and revealed underneath the grains of pounce.

It was past seven o’clock when Captain Roderick Dundas and Mr. David Munroe drove up side by side to Plasencia.

If they did not find much to say to each other, the fault was not Rory’s; for he was a friendly creature, ready, as he put it, “to babble to any one at his grandmother’s funeral.”

In appearance he was rather like Guy, only much taller. They had both inherited considerable prettiness from their respective mothers—“the beautiful Miss Brabazons,” whose beauty and high spirits had made a great stir at their début in the eighties.

As to David Munroe; he was a huge man of swarthy complexion, slow of speech and of movement, and with large, rather melancholy brown eyes.

“Hullo! We must be arriving. Isn’t it terrifying[42] arriving at a new house? It’s like going to parties when one was a child—‘are you sure there’s a clean pocket handkerchief in your sporran, master Rory?’”

David, turning a puzzled, rather suspicious, look upon him, said slowly, “Are you Scotch?”

“Lord, yes! I never get my ‘wills and shalls’ right, and I talk about ‘table-maids’ and all sorts of things. Here we are.”

“Hullo, Rory!” said Guy, “you can’t have a bath before dinner because I’m going to have one.”

“You’ll have to have it with Concha then, Guy,” said Arnold, “she’s there regularly from seven till eight. I wish to God this house had more bathrooms. Hullo! You’ve got a paper, Dundas—I want to see the latest news about the Strike.”

In the meanwhile, David Munroe stood in the background, looking embarrassed and rather sulky, and Rendall, the butler, who secretly deplored “Mr. Arnold’s” manners, said soothingly, “I’ll have your bag taken up to your room, sir.” Whereupon Arnold looked up from the paper, greeted him with sullen excuses, took him up to his room, and hurriedly left him.

Half an hour later David walked into the drawing-room, forlorn and shy, in full evening dress. All the party, except Rory, were already assembled, and he felt still more uncomfortable when in a flash he realised that the other men were in dinner-jackets and black ties.

“Ah! How are you, Munroe?” cried Dick heartily, “very pleased to see you. So sorry I wasn’t there when you arrived—didn’t hear the car. Let me introduce you to my wife.”

“How do you do, Mr. Munroe. How clever of you[43] to be dressed in time!” said the Doña. There was always a note of irony in her voice, and it was confirmed by the myopic contraction of her eyes; so David imagined, quite erroneously, that she was “having a dig” at his tails and white waistcoat. Nor did Dick improve matters by saying, “I say, Munroe, you put us all to shame.”

Then Rory came in, so easily, chattering and laughing as if he had known them all his life—also in a dinner-jacket and a black tie; because, if poor David had only known, Arnold had told him it was “just a family party and he needn’t bother about tails.”

The moment Rory had entered the room, Teresa had felt a sudden little contraction of her throat, and had almost exclaimed aloud, “At last!”

In their childhood, she and Pepa had dreamed of, and craved for, a man doll, made of some supple material which would allow of its limbs being bent according to their will, its face modelled and painted with a realism unknown to the toy shops, a little fair moustache of real hair that could be twisted, and real clothes that, of course, came off and on: waistcoat, tie, collar, braces, and in a pocket a little gold watch.

Their longing for this object had, at one time, become an obsession, and had reached the point of their regarding living men entirely from the point of view of whether, shrunk to twelve inches high, they would make a good doll.

So Teresa, who had so often deplored the childishness of her friends and family, actually found herself gazing with gloating eyes at Rory Dundas—the perfect man doll, found at last.

Then they went into dinner. Guy took in Teresa; he was nervous, and more talkative than usual, and she was unusually distraite.

The room grew hot; every one seemed to be talking[44] at once—screaming about the Fifth Form at St. Dominics, or Black Beauty, or both. It seemed that Arnold, when he was at Rugby, had exchanged one or both with Concha for a Shakespeare, illustrated by photographs of leading actors and actresses, and that he wanted them back.

“Ah! he is thinking of his own children. Does it mean ... can he be going to ...?” thought the Doña, delighted at the thought of the children, frightened at the thought of the wife.

“You must certainly give them back to Arnold, Concha; they’re his,” she said firmly.

“I like that! When he got such an extremely good bargain, too! He always did in his deals with me.”

“Anna has a Black Beauty, you might wangle it out of her by offering to teach her carpentry or something ... something she could get a new badge for in the Girl Guides.”

And so on, what time Dick at the foot of the table shook like a jelly with delighted laughter.

Nothing makes parents—even detached ones like Dick—so happy as to see their grown-up offspring behaving like children.

“English hospitality is to make you at home—a pistol at your head; look at the poor Scot!” said Guy to Teresa.

She had been trying to hear what Rory was saying to Concha about the latest Revue, and, looking absently across at the silent, aloof David, said vaguely, “Oh, yes of course; he’s Scotch, isn’t he?”

“Inverness-shire, I should think. They’ve got a special accent there—not Scotch, but a sort of genteel English. It’s rather frightening, like suddenly coming upon a pure white tribe in the heart of Darkest Africa, it....”

Teresa heard no more, but yielded to the curious intoxication produced by half a glass of claret, the din of voices, and the hot and brightly lighted room.

By some mysterious anomaly, its action was definitely Apolline, as opposed to Dionysiac—suddenly lifting her from the Bacchic rout on the stage to the marble throne of spectator.

It seemed to him as if the oval mahogany table, on which the lights glinted and the glasses rattled, and all the people sitting round it, except himself, suddenly became an entity, which tore itself away from surrounding phenomena like the launching of a ship, perhaps....

And at that very moment, “the dark Miss Lane” was saying to herself, “It’s like the beginning of the Symposium, which seems at first clumsy and long-winded, but by which the real thing—the Feast—is shifted further and further, first to the near past, and then to years and years ago, when they were all children, in the days when Agathon was still in Athens and was making his sacrifice for his victory at the dramatic contest; pushing the rôle of eyewitness through a descending scale of remoteness—from Apollodorus to Phœnix, the son of Philip, from Phœnix to ‘one Aristodemus, a Cydathenæan,’ till finally It—the Feast, small, compact, and far-away—disentangles itself from Space and Time and floats off to the stars, like a fire-balloon, while Apollodorus and his friend, standing down there in the streets of Athens, stare up at it with dazzled eyes.”

“I say, Teresa, I was wondering ... I was thinking of writing an article on ‘the men of the nineties’—do you think I should be justified in calling Oscar Wilde ‘brilliant’?”

Teresa, still bemused, gazed at Guy with puzzled[46] eyes. Why on earth was he looking so odd and self-conscious?

Dick moved his chair beside David’s, and talked to him a little about the prospects of sugar, and whether the Cuban planters were going to “down” all the others; but, finding him unresponsive, he turned eagerly to Arnold, saying, “I say! I lunched with Paget-Clark the other day, and he told me this year’s Rugby fifteen will be one of the strongest we’ve ever had. There’s a chap called Girdlestone who, they say, is a perfect genius as half-back, and they’ve got a new beak who’s an international and a marvellous coach. He says....”

“Anyhow, their eleven was jolly good this year. They did extraordinary well at Lord’s.” There was a slightly reproving note in Arnold’s voice, as if it were sacrilege to talk about football when one might talk about cricket. As a matter of fact, he was much more interested in football, but he resented that his father should be able to give him any information about Rugby.

David smiled to himself as he thought of his own school—the Inverness Academy.

They had thought themselves very “genteel” with their school colours and their Latin song beginning:

And indeed this gentility had been rubbed into them every morning on their way to school by bare-footed laddies, who shouted after them:

“I doubt it wouldn’t seem very genteel to them,” he thought, without, however, a trace of bitterness.

They began to talk about the prospects of the Cambridge Boat, and Guy, who prided himself on being able to talk knowledgeably on such matters, eagerly joined in with aphorisms on “form.”

“I say, Munroe, we’re nowhere in this show, are we?” said Rory, with a friendly grin; then suddenly remembering that he had no legitimate cause for assuming that David was not a University man (Rory prided himself on his tact), he added hastily, “mere sodgers like you and me.”

“I—I understand that the late Dr. Arnold sent his son to Oxford instead of Cambridge, because—because at the latter University they didn’t study Aristotle,” said David.

He genuinely wanted to know about this, because recently his own thoughts—by way of St. Thomas Aquinas—had been very much occupied with Aristotle; but, being shy, his voice sounded aggressive.

A few years ago Dick would have had no hesitation in exclaiming indignantly, “A great man? I should just think he was!” Why, he had called his only son[48] after him, in spite of the Doña’s marked preference for Maria-José. But recently his children had insisted on his reading a small biography of Dr. Arnold that has since become a classic; very unwillingly had he complied, as he had expected it to be like Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero-Worship, which his sister, Joanna, had made him read in his youth, and which he had secretly loathed; but he had been pleasantly surprised, and had found himself at the end in complete agreement with the writer.

“Well, I think old Arnold was quite right,” laughed Rory. “I’m sure it’s most awfully important to read ... who did you say, Munroe? Aristotle? Fancy not reading Aristotle! Rotten hole, Cambridge!”

David grinned with such perfect good-nature at this chaff, that the atmosphere perceptibly warmed in his favour.

“Oh, well; I dare say there’s a good deal to be said for Oxford,” said Dick magnanimously.

“Oh, of course! Oxford shoes; Morris-Cowley cars, summing up the whole of the Oxford movement ... namely, Cowley Fathers and the Preraphaelites!” shrieked Guy.

There is a certain type of story with but little plot and the crudest psychology, to appreciate which—as in the case of the highest poetry—one must have a love of words—for their own sake.

“... and she thought the toast was ‘Church and Birmingham’!” ended Guy in a shrill scream.

Rory and Arnold chuckled; Dick shook convulsively, and a little sheepishly. After all, he was much older[49] than the others; besides, he was afraid that his plate might slip down. He was very fond of his plate, and much enjoyed clicking it into place, like the right piece in a jig-saw puzzle; nevertheless, he would die of humiliation if it slipped down before Arnold.

Story followed story; with each one, the laughter growing louder and more satyr-like (even David was smiling gravely); and it was on the best of terms that the five entered the billiard-room, where, if there were men, it was the custom at Plasencia to assemble after dinner.

Arnold immediately organised a game of Snooker between Dick, Concha, Rory, Guy, and himself; and the Doña, who was not completely free from a social conscience, invited David to come and sit beside her on the sofa.

What on earth was she going to talk to him about? It had been difficult enough at dinner. Ah, of course! There was always the War; though there were few subjects that bored her more.

Though she was as ignorant as the Australian aborigines of the world’s organisation and configuration, and of the natural and economic laws by which it is governed, yet, like an exceptionally gifted parrot, she was able to manipulate the current clichés, with considerable tact and dexterity.

For instance, on her annual visit to Wales, she would say, quite correctly, “Snowdon is very clear to-day, isn’t it?” And that, though she had not the slightest idea which of the many peaks on the horizon happened to be called Snowdon.

Nor did she ever talk about a barrage in connection with motor-cars, or a carboretto in connection with guns; though, if asked to define these two words, she would have been hard put.

So David talked about the War, and she purred or[50] sighed or smiled, as the occasion required, and did not listen to a word.

She noticed that Guy’s eyes kept wandering towards the chair where Teresa sat motionless. Well, he, at any rate, had always preferred Teresa to Concha. Why was she jealous of Concha? It must be Concha’s beauty that was the trouble.... Teresa, of course, was more distinguished looking, but Concha was like a Seville Purissima—infinitely more beautiful.

On and on went David’s voice; Concha, looking across from the billiard-table, whispered to Arnold, “No one talks so much really as a ‘strong, silent man.’”

“Yes; it was a queer time—the War. Things happened then that people had come to look upon as impossible—as old wives’ tales. But you’ll hardly meet a fellow who has been through the War who hasn’t either himself had some queer sort of experience, or else had a chum who has. It was a queer time ... there—there ... were things....”

“Oh, well, it’s only that at times like these ... things are more ... more naked, maybe,” and he[51] laughed apologetically. Then he added, as if to himself, “One sees the star.”

Jollypot murmured something inaudible, and her eyes filled with sympathetic tears; she was not certain of what he meant, but was sure it was something beautiful and mystical.

But Teresa turned in her chair and scrutinised him. What exactly did he mean? Not, she felt sure, what she herself would have meant, if she had used these words, namely, that, during the five years of the War, one had been continually, or so it seemed in retrospect, in that Apolline state of intoxication into which she had fallen that very night at dinner; no, not quite the same; for that had been purely Apolline, while during the War it had been at once Apolline and Dionysiac, in that it was oneself that one was looking at from these cool heights—oneself, a blind, deaf, dusty maniac, whirling in a dance.

And, if one liked, one might call such times “heliacal periods”—a time when the star is visible ... whatever the star may be.

“Now, then, Concha, cut that red and come back on the blue ... ve-e-ry pree ... oh, hard luck!”

“Now, then ... all eyes on Captain Dundas!... Captain Dundas pots the black. Well, a very good game.”

Whereupon the Snooker party broke up; the men wriggling into their dinner-jackets, and Concha standing by the gramophone and swaying up and down as she hummed the latest jazz tune.

Guy came up to Teresa. “About Oscar Wilde—I do want to have a talk to you about him. Do you think—well, brilliancy—it has a certain literary value, don’t you think?”

“Yes; I suppose so,” she answered absently; she was watching Concha and Rory giggling by the gramophone.

“Well, I am going to bed,” said the Doña, and, kissing her hand to Arnold, who was still knocking about the balls, she left the room, followed by Jollypot.

“Yes, another game. I’ve never seen a game of Snooker over so quickly ... owing to the amazing brilliance of our Captain Dundas,” cried Arnold.

So they started another game, this time including David; and as it had been decided that Rory was too good for parlour-billiards, he sat down on the sofa beside Teresa.

They began to talk—about the War, of course: all the old platitudes—the “team-spirit,” for instance. “It’s football, you know, that makes us good fighters. It’s about the only thing we learn at school—the team-spirit. It teaches us to sacrifice stunts and showy play and that sort of thing to the whole.”

Then there was the Horse. “It’s extraordinary how chivalry and ... and ... decent behaviour ... and everything should be taught us by that old creature with his funny, long face—but it’s true all the same. It’s only because we use horses so little in fighting now that ‘frightfulness’ has begun.”

“But it was a funny time—the old War. All these tunes—rag-times and Violet Lorraine’s songs—hearing them first at the Coliseum or Murray’s, and then on one’s gramophone in the trenches ... it gave one a feeling ... I don’t know!” and he broke off with a laugh.

It struck her with a stab of amusement that her tone of reverent sympathy was rather like Jollypot’s—always agog to encourage any expression of the pure and poetical spirit that she was sure was burning in every young male bosom.

“Yes, it was ... an extraordinary time—for all of us; but for you in the trenches! And all that death—I’ve often wondered about that; how did it strike you?”

“Oh, well, that was nothing new to me—I mean some people hadn’t realised till the War that there was such a thing; but my old Nanny died when I was nine—and then, there was my mother.”

“Did it used to scare you stiff when you were a child if you heard the clock strike midnight?”

“Rather. And could you scare yourself stiff by staring at your own reflection in a mirror?”

But Teresa felt the presence of the angel Intimacy—a presence which, when it comes between a man and a woman, shuffles the dreams and, so it seems, causes the future to stir in its sleep.

“I say! Isn’t this extraordinary? We are getting on well, aren’t we? One doesn’t often talk to a person about these sort of things the first time one meets them,” and Rory gave a light, mocking laugh.

Teresa felt absurdly, exaggeratedly disappointed; and why did he use such a strongly scented hair-wash?

“Well, Munroe, what about a ‘wee doch-an-doris’?” said Dick, opening the tantalus.

Concha stretched her soft, supple mouth in an enormous yawn, rubbed her head on Dick’s shoulder, and said, “Dad always talks to the Irish in a brogue and to the Scotch like Harry Lauder—it’s his joke.”

“And theirs, I suppose, is to answer in English,” said Rory, getting up from the sofa and merging at once into the atmosphere of the Snookerites.

Teresa wondered if it were consciously that Concha was always more affectionate to their father when she had strange men for an audience. Then, seeing in Guy’s eye that he wanted to continue his idiotic talk about Oscar Wilde and brilliance, she slipped away to bed.

The next morning Teresa dressed very carefully; she put on a lilac knitted gown, cut square and low at the neck, and a long necklace of jade.

She got down to breakfast to find Arnold, Jollypot, Rory, and Guy already settled.

Rory looked at her with unseeing eyes, and got her her tea and boiled egg with obviously perfunctory politeness.

He was clearly eager to get back to the conversation with Guy which she had interrupted by her arrival and needs.

“But you know, Guy, the only amusing relation we had was old Lionel Fane—he was a priceless old boy ... what was it he used to say again when he was introduced to a lady?”

“‘How d’ye do, how d’ye do, oh beautiful passionate body that never has ached with a heart!’ And then, do you remember how he used to turn down his sock and scratch his ankle, and then look round with a grin and say, ‘I don’t mean to be provocative.’ ...”

“For God’s sake stop talking about your beastly relations,” growled Arnold; but Guy went on, undaunted.

“But the person I should have liked to have been was my mother or yours when they were young—their portraits by Richmond hanging in the Academy with a special policeman and roped off from the crowd—and[56] that in the days of the Jersey Lily, too! Oh, it would have been glorious to have been a beauty of the eighties.”

“Yes; but one might as well have gone the whole hog, you know—been the Prince of Wales’s mistress, and that sort of thing. Your mother, of course, didn’t make such a very bad match, but mine—a miserable younger son of a Scotch laird! I mean, I think they might have done a lot better for themselves.”

“Oh, Lord! Let’s start a conversation about our relations, Teresa. Edward Lane, now ...” said Arnold.

But he could not down the shrill scream of Guy, once more taking up the tale: “Well, they weren’t, of course, so cinemaish as the Sisters Gunning, for instance ... but still, it was all rather amusing ... and all these queer Victorian stunts they invented....”

“Kicking off their shoes in the middle of a reel, and that sort of thing? Uncle Jimmy says there was quite a little war in Dublin as to which was the belle of the Royal Hospital Ball, then afterwards, too, in Scotland at the Northern Meeting....”

“I should have liked to have seen them driving with Ouida in Florence—the Italians saying, bella, bella, when they passed them, and Ouida graciously bowing and taking it as a tribute to herself.”

Then Concha strolled in, and Rory immediately broke off his sentence, jumped up eagerly, and cried, “Grant and Cockburn, please—four buttons, lilac.”

“Oh! I bet her a pair of spats last night that I’d be down to breakfast before her. Tea or coffee? I say, I suddenly remembered in the middle of the night the name of that priceless book I was telling you about;[57] it’s Strawberry Leaves, by A. Leaf—I’ll try to get it for you.”

Evidently the “angel Intimacy” had been very busy last night after Teresa had gone to bed.

Then the Doña appeared—to the surprise of her daughters, as she generally breakfasted in her room.

Her appearance was a protest. Dick had decided (most unnecessarily, she considered) to have a cold and a day in bed.

Her eye immediately fell on Teresa, and in a swift, humorous glance from top to toe she took in all the details of her toilette.

“Thank you very much, but I prefer helping myself,” she said curtly to Rory; his attentiveness seemed to her a direct reflection on Arnold, who never waited on any one. Nor did she encourage his attempts at conversation. “I have been telling Miss Concha....” “I do hope you’ll take me round the garden—I know all about that sort of thing, I do really.”

It was a superb day, and the sun was beating fiercely on the tightly-shut windows; the room smelt of sausages and bacon and tea and soap and hair-wash. Teresa felt that the sight of the pulpy eviscera of Arnold’s roll would soon make her sick.

“By the way, where’s the Scot?” said Concha. “Arnold, hadn’t you better go up and find him?”

A scuffling was heard behind the door, and in burst Anna and Jasper, having, in spite of Nanny, simply scrambled through their nursery breakfast, as thrilled as ’Snice himself by the smell of new people. Jasper was all wriggling and squeaking in his desire for attention; Anna, outwardly calmer, was wondering whether Rory had relations abroad, and whether they wrote to him, and what the stamps on the envelopes were like.

“Now then, gently, darlings, gently! Wait a[58] minute; here you are, Jasper,” and the Doña held out to him a spoonful of honey.

“The worst of going up to Cambridge is that one never goes down,” shouted Guy to Jollypot, for want of a better audience; whereupon, regardless of the fact that Guy was still talking, Jollypot began to repeat to herself in a low, emotional voice:

Jasper began to wriggle worse than ever, and, having first cast a furtive glance at his grandmother and aunts, said shrilly, “I dreamt of Mummie last night ... and she had ... she had ... such a funny nose....” and his voice tailed off in a little giggle, half proud, half guilty.

“Jasper!” exclaimed simultaneously the Doña, Teresa, Concha, and Anna, in tones of shocked reproval.

Shortly after her death, Jasper had genuinely dreamt that his mother was standing by his bed, and, on telling it next morning, had produced a most gratifying impression; but so often had he tried since to produce the same impression in the same way that to say he had “dreamt of Mummie” had become a recognised form of “naughtiness”; and, as one could attract attention by naughtiness as well as by pathos, he continued at intervals to announce that he had “dreamt of Mummie.”

“Concha, Teresa, Jollypot! We must hurry. The car will soon be here to take us to mass,” said the Doña.

Concha hesitated a moment—Teresa’s eye was on her—then said to herself, “I’ll not be downed by her,” and aloud, “I don’t think I’m coming this morning, Doña.”

He gravely faced the friendly sallies; and then he said, with an evident effort:

“Oh, Mr. Munroe, I’m so sorry!” cried the Doña, “you should have told me last night ... you see, I didn’t know you were a Catholic.”

“I bet you don’t know what ‘to sleep in’ means,” Rory whispered to Concha.

“Why didn’t you tell me Mr. Munroe was a Catholic?” said the Doña as she was putting on her things for mass.

“How could I have told you when I didn’t know myself?” answered Dick from his bed.

“Well, he is, anyhow ... and what we’re going to do with him to-day with you in bed ... it’s very odd, every time you invite any one down who isn’t your precious Hugh Mallam or one of your other cronies you seem to catch a cold. Poor Dick, you won’t be able to play golf to-morrow!” and with this parting thrust the Doña left the room.

There he lay: bathed, shaved, and wrapped in an old padded dressing-jacket of the Doña’s (sky-blue, embroidered in pink flowers), which he had surreptitiously rescued from a jumble sale, against his own colds.

At the foot of the bed snored ’Snice, at his elbow stood a siphon and a long glass into which four or five oranges had been squeezed, and before him lay a delicious day—no Church (“I say, Dick! That’s the treat that never palls!” Hugh Mallam used to say), an excellent luncheon brought up on a tray, then a sleep, then tea, then, say, a game of Bézique with little Anna ... but the best thing of all that awaited him was a romance of the Secret Service.

He put on his eyeglasses and glanced through the headings of the chapters: Mr. ?; A Little Dinner at the Savoy; The Freckled Gentleman Takes a Hand; Double Bluff.

Yes; it promised well. It was always a good sign if the chapters took their headings from the language of Poker.

With a little sigh of content he began to read. Had he but known it, it was a most suitable exercise for a Sunday morning; for, in the true sense of the word, it was a profoundly religious book.

The bedroom, unused to denizens at midday, seemed, in its exquisite orderliness, frozen into a sedate reserve. The tide of life had left it very clean and glistening and still: not a breath rustled the pink cretonne curtains; the autumn roses in a bowl on the dressing-table might have been made of alabaster; the ornaments on the mantelpiece stood shoulder to shoulder without a smile at their own incongruity—a small plaster cast of Montañes’ Jesùs del Gran Poder beside a green china pig with a slit in its back, which had once held the savings of the little Lanes; with an equal lack of[61] self-consciousness, an enlarged photograph of Arnold straddling in the pads of a wicket-keeper hung on the wall beside an engraving in which the Virgin, poised in mid-air, was squeezing from her breast a stream of luminous milk into the mouth of a kneeling monk; and everywhere—from among the scent-bottles on the dressing-table, beside a chromograph of Cadiz on the wall—everywhere smiled the lovely face of Pepa.

’Snice stirred at his feet, and, laying down his book, Dick dragged his smooth, brown, unresisting length to the top of the bed.

A member of his Club, who was an eminent physician was always talking about the importance of “relaxing.” “Pity he can’t see ’Snice,” thought Dick, as he lifted one of the limp paws, then, letting go, watched it heavily flop down on to the counterpane. “’Snice! ’Snice!” he repeated to himself; and then began to chuckle, as, for the thousandth time, he realised the humour of the name.

“’Snice,” meaning “it’s nice,” had been the catch-word at the Pantomime one year; and Arnold or Concha or some one had decided that that was what Fritz, as he was then called, was constantly trying to say; so, in time, ’Snice had become his name.

Yes, they certainly were very amusing, his children; he very much enjoyed their jokes. But recently it had been borne in upon him that they did not care so very much about his. He often felt de trop in the billiard-room—his own billiard-room; especially when Arnold was at home.

He suddenly remembered how bored he and Hugh Mallam used to be by his own father’s jokes—or, rather, puns; and those quotations of his! Certain words or situations would produce automatically certain quotations; for instance, if his austere and ill-favoured wife or daughter revoked at Whist, it would[62] be, “When lovely woman stoops to folly!” And, unfortunately, his partner’s surname was Hope; unfortunately, because every time one of them said, “Mr. Hope told me so,” it would be, “Hope told a flattering tale.”

But surely he, Dick, wasn’t as tedious as that? He rarely made a pun, and never a quotation; nevertheless, he did not seem to amuse his children.

Good Lord! He would be fifty-seven his next birthday—the age his father was when he died. It seemed incredible that he, “Little Dickie,” should be the age of his own father.

Damn them! Damn them! He didn’t feel old—and that was the only thing that mattered.

He stuck out his chin obstinately, put on his eyeglasses again, and, returning to his novel, was very soon identified, once more, with the hero, and hence—inviolate, immortal, taboo. Whether hiding in the bracken, or lurking, disguised, in low taverns of Berlin, what had he to fear? For how could revolvers, Delilahs, aeroplanes, all the cunning of Hell or the Wilhelm Strasse, prevail against one who is knit from the indestructible stuff of shadows and the dreams of a million generations? He belonged to that shadowy Brotherhood who, before Sir Walter had given them names and clothed them in flesh, had hunted the red deer, and followed green ladies, in the Borderland—not of England and Scotland, but of myth and poetry. As Hercules, he had fought the elements; as Mithras, he had hidden among the signs of the Zodiac; as Osiris, he had risen from the dead.

No; the hero of these romances cannot fall, for if he fell the stars would fall with him, the corn would not grow, the vines would wither, and the race of man would become extinct.

Rory Dundas, being a capricious young man, devoted himself, that morning, not to Concha, but to Anna and Jasper.

After he had been taken to scratch the backs of the pigs, and to eat plums in the orchard, Anna proposed a game of clock-golf.

“Are you coming to play?” they called out from the lawn to Concha, Arnold, and David, who were sitting in the loggia.

Concha would have liked very much to have gone; first, because it seemed a pity to have incurred for nothing Teresa’s stare and the Doña’s raised eyebrows; second, because she had been finding it uphill work to keep Arnold civil, and David in the conversation. But her childhood’s habit of docility to Arnold had become automatic, so she sat on in the loggia.

“I think, maybe, I’ll go and try my hand ... they seem nice wee kiddies,” said David, and he got up, in his slow, deliberate way, and strolled off towards the party on the lawn.

“Kiddies!” exclaimed Arnold in a voice of disgust, when he was out of ear-shot. “The Scotch always seem to use the wrong slang.”

“Oh, if it comes to that, she needn’t think she’s the only person with a sense of language. What’s the matter with her? Each time I come down she seems more damned superior. Who does she think she is? She’s reached the point of being dumb with superiorness, next she’ll go blind with it, then she’ll die of it,” and, frowning heavily, he began to fill his pipe.

His bitterness against Teresa dated from the days[64] before the War when he used to write poetry. He had once read her some of his poems, and she, being younger and more brutal than she was now, had exclaimed, “But, Arnold, they’re absolutely dead! They’re decomposing with deadness.” He had never forgiven her.

“I suppose she gives you a pretty thin time, doesn’t she? She does hate you!”

Concha blushed. An unexpected trait in Concha was an inordinate vanity—the idea that any one, child, dog, boring old woman, could possibly dislike her was too humiliating to be admitted—and though one part of her was fully aware that she irritated, nay, jarred æsthetically upon Teresa, the other part of her obstinately, angrily, denied it.

“I don’t care if she does ... besides she doesn’t ... really,” she said hotly.

She then chose a cigarette, placed it in a very long amber holder, lit it, and began to smoke it with an air of intense sensuous enjoyment. Concha was still half playing at being grown up, and one of the things about her that irritated Teresa was that she was apt to walk and talk, to pour out tea, and smoke cigarettes, like an English actress in a drawing-room play, never quite losing her “stagyness.”

“Do you know where the shoe pinches?” asked Arnold. “It’s that you are six years younger than she is; if it were less or more it would be all right—but six years is jolly hard to forgive. You see, Teresa is still nominally a girl. By Jove!” and he gave a short, scornful laugh, “there she is, probably telling herself that you get on her nerves because you’re frivolous, and like rag-time, and all the rest of it, while all the time she, the immaculate, is just suffering from suppressed sex, like any other spinster.”

This explanation definitely jarred on Concha: she, too, suspected Teresa of being jealous of her, but deep[65] down she hoped that this jealousy was based on something less fortuitous and more flattering to herself than six years’ juniority; nor did she like being thought of as a mere frivolous “fox-trotter.” She had the tremendous pride of generation of the post-War adolescent; she and her friends she felt as a brilliant, insolent triumphant sodality, free, wise, invincible, who, having tasted of the fruit of the seven symbolic trees of Paradise, and having found their flavour insipid, had chosen, with their bold, rather weary eyes wide open, to expend their magnificent talents on fox-trots, revues, and dalliance, to turn life and its treacherous possibilities into a Platonic kermis—oh, it was maddening of Teresa not to see this, to persist in thinking of them as frivolous, commonplace, rather vulgar young mediocrities! She should just hear some of the midnight talks between Concha and her friend, Elfrida Penn ... the passion, the satire, the profundity!

As a matter of fact, these talks were mainly of young men, chiffons, the doings of their other schoolfellows, what their head mistress had said to them on such and such an occasion at school, with an occasional interjection of, “Oh, it’s all beastly!” or a wondering whether twenty years hence they would be very dull and stout, and whether they would still be friends.

But midnight talks are apt to acquire in retrospect a great profundity and significance.

Also, the crudeness of Arnold’s words—“suppressed sex, like any other spinster”—shocked her in spite of herself. Her old, child’s veneration for Teresa lived on side by side with her new conviction that she was passée, out-of-date, pre-War, and it made her wince that she should be explained by nasty, Freudian theories.

This time it was Arnold that winced; he could not yet bear to hear Pepa mentioned.

“It’s made the Doña a fanatic,” Concha continued, “and she never was that before, you know. Who was it? Teresa, or some one, said that English ivy had grown round Peter’s rock, and birds had made their nest in it ... before. But now she’s absolutely rampantly Catholic ... you know, she wants to dedicate the house to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and have little squares of stuff embroidered with it nailed on all the doors....”

“Well, I don’t quite see what it’s got to do with him—if it makes her happier,” and his voice became suddenly aggressive.

“And she’d do anything on earth to prevent either of us marrying a Protestant ... after all, what do-o-oes it all matter? Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

And Concha, who, for a few moments, had been completely natural, once more turned into an English actress in a drawing-room play.

“Um ... yes ...” said Arnold meditatively, sighing, and knocking out the ashes of his pipe.

“Hulloa!” she suddenly drawled, as a plump, grinning, round-faced, young man made his appearance on the loggia.

It was Eben Moore, son of the vicar and senior “snotty” on one of His Majesty’s ships.

As to his name—it was short for Ebenezer, which, as Mrs. Moore continually told one, “has always been[67] a name in my husband’s family.... My husband, you know, is the youngest son of a youngest son,” she would add with a humorously wry smile, as if there was something at once glorious and regrettable in belonging to the Tribe of Benjamin.

His face perceptibly fell as he caught sight of the two personable men playing clock-golf on the lawn.

“Aow lor’! You didn’t tell me as what there was company,” he said, imitating the local accent.

“Good God!” muttered Arnold, who found Eben’s humour nauseating; and he slouched off to join Guy, who was writing letters in the billiard-room.

“Got it?” said Concha, stretching out her hand and looking at him through her eyelashes.

Eben, grinning from ear to ear, took a sealed envelope out of his pocket and gave it to her, and having opened it, she began to read its contents with little squirts of laughter.

From time immemorial, young ladies have had a fancy for exercising their calligraphy and taste in copying elegant extracts into an album; for instance, there is a Chinese novel, translated by an abbé of the eighteenth century, which tells of ladies who, all day long, sat in pagodas, copying passages from the classics in hands like the flight of a dragon. Harriet Smith, too, had an album into which she and Emma copied acrostics.

Concha owned to the same harmless weakness; though the extracts copied into her album could perhaps scarcely be qualified as “elegant”: there was, among other things, an unpublished play by W. S. Gilbert—(“What I love about our English humour—Punch, and W. S. Gilbert—is that it never has anything ...[68] well, questionable,” Mrs. Moore would sometimes exclaim to the Doña), Wilke’s Essay on Woman, and Poor but Honest.

One day, Teresa, happening to come into Concha’s room, had caught sight of the album, and asked if she might look at it.

“Oh, do, by all means,” Concha had drawled, partly from defiance, partly from curiosity.

Impassively, Teresa had read it through; and then had said, “I’d advise you to ask Arnold the next time he’s in Cambridge to find you an old copy of Law’s Call to a Devout Life—that man in the market-place might have one—beautifully bound, if possible. Then take out the pages and bind this in the cover.”

Concha had done so; and if she had been as relentless an observer of Teresa as Teresa was of her, she might have detected in what had just transpired a touch on Teresa’s part of under-stated, nevertheless unmistakable, cabotinage.

The contents of the sealed envelope, which was causing her so much amusement, was a copy of the song, Clergymen’s Daughters that on his last leave she had persuaded Eben on his return to his ship to make for her from the gun-room collection, and which he had not on their previous meeting had an opportunity of giving her.

But she was not aware that there are three current versions of this song, corresponding to the X, the double X, and triple X on the labels of whisky bottles, and that it was only the double X strength that Eben had given her.

After luncheon most of them played Snooker, to the accompaniment of the gramophone, Anna and Jasper taking turns in changing the records.

It was a fact that had always both puzzled and annoyed her that he evidently enjoyed talking to her.

Why would every one persist in talking to her about books? And why did he not say, “the last Compton Mackenzie?” She decided that his diction had been influenced by frequenting his mother’s Women’s Institute and hearing continually of “little Ernest, Mrs. Brown’s second,” or “Mrs. Kett’s last.”

“I’ll lend it to you—I’m not sure if it’s as good as the others, though ... it’s funny, but I’m very fastidious about novels; the only thing I really care about is style—I’m a regular sensualist about fine English.”

“Are you? Perhaps you will like this, then—‘I remember Father Benson saying with his fascinating little stutter: He has such a g-g-gorgeously multitudinous mind’?”

But it wasn’t fair, she decided. Because she happened to date from the feeling of flatness and disgust aroused in her by this sentence, read in a magazine[70] years ago, the awakening in her of the power of distinguishing between literature and journalism, it did not follow that it was exceptionally frightful or that other people ought to react to it in the same way that she had. And yet, “gorgeous palaces,” “multitudinous, seas incarnadine”—the words themselves were beautiful enough in all conscience. Anyhow, it was not Eben’s fault; though “a regular sensualist for fine English....” Good God!

“Do you want Hee—hee—Heeweeine Melodies, or Way Down in Georgia, or Abide With Me? Arnold! Do you want Hee-wee-ween Melodies, or Way Down in Georgia, or Abide With Me? Do say!” yelled Anna from the gramophone.

“People are inclined to think that sailors don’t go in for reading, and that sort of thing, but as a matter of fact ... our Commander, for instance, has a topping library, and all really good books—history mostly.”

Rows upon rows of those volumes, the paper of which is so good, the margins so wide, but out of which, if opened, one of the illustrations is certain to fall—Lady Hamilton, or Ninon de l’Enclos, or Madame Récamier; now Teresa knew who read these books.

“Silly Billy! Silly Billy! Silly Billy!” yelled Anna and Jasper in chorus as Rory missed a straight pot on the blue; it was their way of expressing genuine friendliness to their playmate of the morning.

On and on went Eben’s voice; scratch, grate, scratch, grate, went the gramophone.

“Now then, you two, what are you up to? Anna,[71] you’re a hard-hearted little thing; why aren’t you crying that I didn’t win?”

They all seemed to be feeling the tedium of the period between luncheon and tea, and lolled listlessly in chairs, or sat on the edge of the billiard-table, swinging their legs.

“Anna, darling, put on one of the Hawaiian melodies—it’s among those there, I’m sure,” said Concha.

After several false starts, and some scratchings of the needle (it was Jasper’s turn to put on the record), the hot-scented tune began to pervade the room.

“That’s the sort of tune that on hot nights must have been played to Oberon by his little Indian catamite,” said Guy, sitting down on the sofa beside Teresa.

She smiled a little absently; the Hawaiian melody was like a frame, binding the room and its inmates into a picture. Concha, her eyes fixed and dreamy; Rory, intent on a puzzle—shaking little rolling pellets into holes or something; Arnold sitting on the edge of the billiard-table while Anna lit his pipe for him; Jasper motionless, for once, his eyes fixed intently on the needle of the gramophone; David standing by the door gazing gravely at Concha, looking not unlike a Spanish Knight who carries in his own veins more than a drop of the Moorish blood that it is his holy mission to spill; Eben standing by the fireplace, a broad grin on his face, his hands on his hips, swaying slightly, in time with the music ... what was it he was like? Teresa suddenly remembered that it was the principal boy in a little local pantomime they had all gone to one Christmas—she evidently could not sing, because during the choruses she would stand silent, grinning and swaying as Eben was doing now.

The view was painted on the windows—a pietà as[72] nobly coloured as that of Avignon; for, in spite of flowers and fruits and sunshine, on the knees of the earth the year lay dying.

Teresa was thinking, “The present frozen into the past—that is art. At this moment things are looking as if they were the past. That is why I am feeling as if I were having an adventure—because the present and the past have become one.”

“Très entraînant—as the deaf bourgeoise said after having listened to the Dead March in Saul,” said Guy; he had suddenly invented this Sam Wellerism in the middle of the tune, and had hardly been able to wait till the end to come out with it.

Then Anna put on a fox-trot, and Rory and Concha, Arnold and Guy, in the narrow space between the billiard-table and gramophone, hopped and wriggled and jumped—one could not call it dancing.

“Now then, Munroe,” cried Rory, when it was over, “You’re such hot stuff at billiards—let’s see what you can do on the light fantastic.”

“Yes, do, Mr. Munroe,” and Concha stood swaying before him, flushed and provocative.

“I’m afraid ... I don’t ... well, if you’ve got a tango here ... I used to try my hand at it in Africa.”

David hesitated a moment; then, as if coming to a sudden resolution, he clasped her, and stood waiting for the bar to end; then they began to dance, and their souls seemed to leave their bodies, leaving them empty to the tune, which gradually informed them till they and it were one; a few short steps, then a[73] breathless halt, a few more steps, another halt ... then letting themselves go a little, then another halt; their faces tense and mask-like ... truly a strange dance, the Tango, speaking the broken, taciturn, language of passion:

“Bravo!” cried the audience, clapping; while ’Snice began to bark, and the children to jump up and down and squeal.

“Hot stuff!” said Rory; and they settled down to desultory, frivolous, Anglo-Saxon chatter—not unlike fox-trots, thought Teresa.

She shut her eyes, half mesmerised by the din of all the voices talking together.

The talk, like a flight of birds, squeezed itself out into a long thin line, compressed itself into a compact phalanx, was now diagonal, now round, now square, now all three at once, according to the relative position of the talkers.

“Don’t you love Owen Nares? I love his English so—I love the way he says, ‘I’m so jolly glad to meet you.’” “I knew Middlesex would be first—it was only poetic justice to Plum Warner.” “I don’t care[74] a damn what the Nation or what the New Statesman says—I happen to know....” “Of course, with Jimmy Wilde it’s all grit and science—he ought to do him in every time.” “Is it true that Leslie Henson wears spectacles off the stage?” “How much do you think I gave for it? Thirty bob. A jeweller I showed it to in town said it was the very finest Baltic amber—you see, I got it out there.” “I know! My cousin, Guy’s brother, when he was going out to Tin-Sin thought it would be nice to brighten up China, so he took out an assortment of the merriest socks you ever saw in your life, and when he was killed my aunt handed them over to me, and I had ’em dyed black....” “Very nayce, too!” “What are you saying about socks? I wish to God some one would mend mine!” “Well, I got a bit of amber in an old shop in Norwich....” “He’s a priceless little man ... he came out and amused us at the front.”

“But look here, Miss Concha,” said Rory, “if you love Owen Nares so much, why not come up and see him? It’s quite a good show ... you’ll look at him and I’ll look at the lady—though you’ll probably have the best of it. What do you think, Arnold? We could dine first at the Berkeley or somewhere ... well, look here, that’s settled; we must fix up a night.”

Teresa felt a sudden and, to her, most unusual craving for the life that smells of lip-salve and powder, where in bright, noisy restaurants “every shepherd tells his tale ...” where “the beautiful Miss Brabazons” laugh and dance and triumph eternally.

After tea they decided to go a walk, and escort Eben part of his way home—a delightful plan, it seemed to Anna, Jasper, and ’Snice; but to Anna and Jasper the Doña said firmly, “No, my darlings; I want you.”

Their faces fell; they knew it meant what Nanny, who was a Protestant, called “a Bible lesson from kind Granny.”

Needless to say, the fact that these lessons were opposed to the wishes—nay, to the express command—of Dr. Sinclair, was powerless in deterring the Doña from attempting to save her grandchildren’s souls; and, even if she failed in the attempt, they should at any rate not be found in the condition of criminal ignorance of the children of one of Pepa’s friends who had asked why there were always “big plus-signs” on the tops of churches.

The Doña was not merely a Catholic; she was also a Christian—that is to say, though she did not always follow his precepts, she had an intense personal love of Christ.

Besides the shadowy figure struggling towards “projection” through the ritual of the Church’s year, there are more concrete representations on which the Catholic can feed his longings.

The Doña’s love of Christ dated from the first Seville Holy Week that she could remember.

She had sat with her mother and her little brother, Juanito, watching the pasos carried past on the shoulders of the cofradias ... many a beautiful Virgin, velvet-clad, pearl-hung, like Isabella the Catholic. Then had come a group of more than life-sized figures—a young, bearded man, his face as white as death and flecked with blood, the veins of his hands as knotted as the[76] cords that bound them, surrounded by half a dozen fiendish-looking men, fists clenched as if about to strike him, some clutching stones in their upraised hands, all with faces contorted with hatred.

Juanito, his little fists clenched, was all for flying at the plaster bullies; but the Doña was howling for pity of the pobre caballero.

Then, at Christmas time in every church there was a crèche in which lay the Infant Jesus, his small, waxen hands stretched out in welcome, his face angelically sweet.

Also; at different times, for instance, when the Gospel was read in Spanish, during her preparation for her first Communion, the abstract presentation of the Liturgy had been supplemented with stories from His life on earth, and quotations from His own words.

Indeed, the sources and nature of the Doña’s knowledge of Jesus was not unlike that of some old peasant woman of Palestine. The old woman, say, would, from time to time, ride into Nazareth on her donkey, carrying a basket of grapes and olives to sell in the market: and perhaps, if the basket should have fallen and scattered the fruit, or if she had a pitcher to fill at the fountain, she may have received a helping hand or a kindly word from the gentlest and strangest-spoken young man that had ever crossed her path.

Then one day she may have paid her first visit to Jerusalem—perhaps a lawsuit over a boundary taking her there, or the need to present her orphaned grandchild in the Temple—and have seen this same young man led through the streets, bound with cords, while[77] the populace shouted, “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!” and have returned to her remote little farm with an ache in her heart.

And, as the years would go by, from the tales of wayfarers, from rumours blown from afar, she might come to believe that somehow or other the young man had died for the poor—for her; had died and risen again. And gradually, as with the years his legend grew, she would come to look upon him as a fairy-being, akin to the old sanctities of the countryside, swelling her grapes, plumping her olives, and keeping away locusts and blight. But, towards the end of her life, business may have taken her again to Nazareth, where, hearing that the young man’s mother was still alive, something may have compelled her to go and visit her. And in the little room behind the carpenter’s shop, where the other sons and grandsons were planing and sawing, and singing to ancient melodies of the desert songs of plenty and vengeance and the Messiah, the two old women would talk together in hushed tones of Him who so many years ago had been crucified and buried. And through the mother’s anecdotes of His childhood and tearful encomiums, “He was ever a good kind son to me,”—the fairy-being would once more become human and ponderable—the gentlest young man that had ever crossed her path.

So far, the Doña had not been very successful in bringing Anna and Jasper to their Lord.

For instance, when she had told them the story of Christ among the doctors, Anna had merely remarked coldly and reprovingly, “He must have been a very goody-goody, grown-uppish sort of boy.”

This particular evening the Doña had decided to consecrate to an exegesis of the doctrine of Transsubstantiation.

When the Doña said that at a certain point of the[78] mass the bread turned to the actual flesh and blood and bones of Jesus, Anna’s face assumed an expression of dogged scepticism, and having decided that she must ask Teresa about it, continued her own thoughts: Mamselle, who gave her French lessons in Cambridge, had fired her imagination with accounts of the bouktis they used to have in the Surbiton family where she was once governess—“vraiment, c’était passionant; je me demande pourquoi Dr. Sinclair n’organise pas des bouktis à Trinité—ça serait très amusant pour les jeunes gens....” It was a good idea! All the people with buried names of books, and having to guess. Oh, yes!... one could go with a lot of little lambs’ tails sewed on one’s frock ... yes, but how was one going to get in the “of Shakespeare”.... Of course ... what a goose she was not to have realised it before ... bouktis was Mamselle’s way of saying “book-teas” ... that’s what the parties were called—“book-teas.”

Thus Anna; as to Jasper—if one could reduce the instantaneous and fantastic picture produced on his mind to a definite consecutive statement, it would read something like this: By the powerful spells of a clergyman, who was also a magician, pieces of bread were turned into tiny men—long-robed, bearded, and wearing golden straw hats of which nothing but the brim could be seen from in front. Then the clergyman distributed to every one at the party one of the tiny men, to be their very own. They each, forthwith, swallowed their tiny man, and he made himself a little nest in their stomachs, whence he could be summoned to be played with whenever they liked.

He began jumping up and down, his body trembling like that of an excited terrier.

“Oh, I want, I want, I want some of that bread,” he cried. “Oh, when can I have it, Doña? Oh, I can’t wait!”

Needless to say, the Doña was not in the least taken in—she did not take it for a sign of Grace, nor did it seem to her in the least touching; but she knew it would strike Jollypot as being both, and the picture she foresaw that the incident would produce on her—that of the innocent little pagan calling aloud to God for the spiritual food that was his birthright—was one that the Doña felt would be both soothing, and expressive of the way in which she would have liked the incident to have appeared to herself.

A perfect household of slaves would include a sentimentalist and a cynic by means of whom the lord, whatever his own temperament, could express vicariously whatever interpretation of events was the one that harmonised with his plans or mood of the moment.

It was as she expected; Jollypot’s eyes filled with tears, and she murmured, “Poor little man! poor little man!”

And she was long haunted by the starving cry of the innocent, “I want that bread! I want that bread!”

The walkers set out in the direction of the view, strolling in a bunch down the grass path between the border.

“You know, I don’t really like these herbaceous things—they aren’t tame. I like flowers you can make a pet of, roses and violets and that sort of thing,” said Rory, looking towards Teresa.

She did not meet his eye, feeling in no mood to feed his vanity by sympathising with his fancies.

“She would be grieved,” grinned Eben. “You see, Lady Norton wasn’t there this morning, but she always comes in the evening, and the mater wants her to see my manly beauty.”

This remark, thought Teresa, showed a certain acuteness and humour; but all Concha’s contemporaries seemed to have these qualities, and yet, it meant so little, existed side by side with such an absence of serious emotion, such an ignoring of intellectual beauty, such a—such a—such an un-Platonic turn of mind. Probably every one in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—country parsons, grocers’ apprentices, aldermen, fine ladies—had only to take up a goose’s quill and write as they talked to produce the most exquisite prose: witness the translation of the Bible by a body of obscure, and (considering the fatuity of some of their mistranslations) half-witted, old divines. Perhaps the collective consciousness of humanity was silently capturing, one after the other, the outposts of the intelligence, so that some day we should all share in a flat and savourless communism of apprehension.

But then the English, as a whole, had lost the power of writing automatically fine prose ... oh, it was not worth bothering about!

When they got out of the grounds of Plasencia, they broke up into couples and trios—Rory moving to one side of Concha, David, his back looking rather dogged, to the other. Arnold had forgotten his distaste for Eben in a heated discussion of the battle of Jutland. Teresa found herself walking with Guy.

To the right lay a field of stubble, ruddled with poppies, and to the right of that a little belt of trees. Teresa had long noticed how in autumn scarlet is the oriflamme of the spectrum; for round it the other[81] colours rally at their gayest and most gallant. For instance, the dull red roofs of the cluster of barns to the right glowed like rubies, if one’s glance, before resting on them, travelled through the poppy-shot stubble; and, following the same route, her eye could detect autumnal tints in the belt of trees, which otherwise would have been imperceptible.

“How lovely poppies would be if they weren’t so ubiquitous,” said Guy. “I always think of poppies when I see all the Renoirs in the Rue de la Boétie in Paris—every second shop’s a picture dealer, and they all have at least two Renoirs in their window—dreams of beauty if there weren’t so many of ’em. And yet, I don’t know—that very exuberance, the feeling of an exquisite, delicate, yet unexigeant flower springing up in profusion in the lightest and poorest soil may be a quality of their charm.”

Now they were walking past one of the few fields of barley that were still standing—all creamy and steaming ... oh, dear, that simile of Guy’s, in one of his poems, between a field of barley and a great bowl of some American patent cereal on a poster ... at any moment there might appear on the sky the gigantic, grinning face of the cereal-fiend, whose sole function was to grin with anticipative greed, and brandish a spoon on the point of being dipped into the foaming, smoking brew ... disgusting; and maddening that it should cling to her memory.

“Well, I suppose long ago the Danes and Saxons fought battles here; and the buried hatchet has turned the wild flowers red ... or does iron in the soil turn flowers blue?”

Guy blushed to the roots of his yellow hair; he had a secret handicap of which he was horribly ashamed—practically no ear for rhythm; and it was partly the lameness of his verses that had made him fall back on a poetry that had neither rhyme nor rhythm.

When he was absent from Teresa—even during a few hours—his idea of her would undergo a swift change; though remaining aloof, she would turn into a wonderfully sympathetic lady—remote, but not inaccessible; a lady eminently suited to moving gracefully among the Chippendale, coloured prints, and Queen Anne lacquer of his dining-room in St. James’s Street; quite at home, also, among the art nègre and modern French pictures of his drawing-room; receiving his mots with a whimsically affectionate smile; in society bringing out all that was most brilliant in him—existing, in short, merely for his own greater glory.

It took a very short absence from her—for instance, the interval between dinner and breakfast the next morning—for this idea of her to oust completely the real one. Then he would see her again, and would again be bruised and chilled by the haughty coldness masked by her low, gentle voice, her many silences; and the idea would be shattered; to come together again the minute he was out of her presence.

“Of course! You would be incapable of appreciating Tennyson,” he said angrily.

“Oh, it’s not only that,” he almost screamed; “it’s[83] really because you think it’s sentimental to quote Tennyson. Can’t you see that simple, trite words like these are the only ones suited to expressing the threadbare yet exquisite emotion that one feels when one walks through autumn fields on Sunday evening?”

“Yes; but why not make those simple, trite words scan?... and look here, Guy,” she added with unusual heat, “it seems to me perfectly absurd to admire Tennyson and crab Wordsworth. It makes one wonder if any of your literary tastes are sincere. Everything you dislike in Wordsworth is in Tennyson too—only in Tennyson the prosaicness and flatness, though it may be better expressed, is infinitely more ignoble. I simply don’t understand this attitude to Wordsworth—it makes me think that all you care about is verbal dexterity. I don’t believe you know what real poetry means.”

Poor Guy! How could he know that her irritation had really nothing to do with his attitude to Wordsworth, that, in fact, he and his poetics were merely a scapegoat?

Shattered and sick at heart, he felt that his fears of the previous evening about Oscar Wilde and brilliance had been ruthlessly confirmed.

“I ... I seem to have lost my temper,” she said apologetically, “but it was only ... I’ve got rather a headache, as a matter of fact, and what you said yesterday about Wordsworth has rankled—he’s my favourite poet. And you know I belong in taste to an older generation; I simply don’t understand modern things. But, as a matter of fact, I often like your poetry very much.”

“I say!” he exclaimed suddenly, walking more quickly, “other people seem to be quarrelling.”

Sure enough: the trio ahead was standing still; Concha’s lips were twitching and she was looking self-conscious; Rory’s eyebrows were arched in surprise; and David, glowering and thunderous, was standing with clenched fists. As Teresa and Guy came up to them he was saying fiercely: “... and I’m just sick to death of lairds and that ... and if you want to know, I’m heir-apparent to Munroe of Auchenballoch,” and he laughed angrily.

“You’re a lucky chap then ... Auchenballoch is a very fine place,” said Rory in an even voice.

Teresa felt a sudden wave of intense sympathy for David, and of equally intense annoyance against Rory; he had, doubtless, been again babbling about his relations—“old Lionel Fane,” “the beautiful Miss Brabazons,” and the rest of them—that was boring enough, in all conscience; but if, as was probably the case, David had been left pointedly out of the conversation, it would become, into the bargain, insulting.

And under his easy manners, Rory was so maddeningly patronising—especially to David, with his, “I say! Dashing fellah!” and, “Now then, Munroe, let’s see what you can do.” But ... it was possible that David’s irritation was primarily caused by far more vital things. ’Snice there, lying on his back, his tongue lolling out, his eyes glassy, completely unconscious of the emotional storm raging above him, would probably, if they could have been translated into his own language, have understood David’s feelings better than Teresa and sympathised with them warmly.

For some minutes they walked in silence, both embarrassed, Teresa turning over in her mind possible conversational openings. “You have been in South Africa, haven’t you?” “Do you play golf?”

What she said finally was, “What did you mean exactly last night when you said to my mother that in times like the War one sees the star?”

“I mean the Star of Bethlehem—they’re seasons of Epiphany,” he answered.

“Just that ... the Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles.” He said the words slowly, with gusto, as if to him they had not yet become threadbare. “There were a lot of chaps converted to Catholicism during the War,” he went on.

He paused, and again they were silent. Then he said, “I was brought up a Presbyterian, but I was never interested in that, I didn’t think of religion at all. But during the War there were several chaps that were Catholics in my regiment, and I used sometimes to go to mass with them, or benediction, because it was quieter in there than anywhere else. Then their padre began talking to me, and I saw that once you had taken the plunge it was all shipshape and logical. But the plunge was the thing—that seemed to me to take a lot of nerve and faith.”

Again he paused, then went on in a lower voice, “Well, it was a wee church, very old, in a village behind the lines, and one day mass was being celebrated there, and just after the Consecration the gas gong and klaxons[86] sounded—that meant we had all to retire in double quick time behind the gas zone. The priest wrapped up the Host in the corporals and hurried off with the rest of us. When the scare was over and he went back to the church—the corporals were soaked in blood.”

Well, there was no Protestant nonsense here; this was the Holy Mother herself in all her crudity.

Teresa had not the slightest idea what to say; and decided that she had better say nothing at all.

Yes, but it was not the bleeding corporals, really, that had done it. She remembered a curious experience she had once had when waiting to be fetched home in the car by her father from some Chelsea lodgings where she had been spending a fortnight. Her box was packed, she was all ready dressed for the drive; she had nothing to do but to wait in a little valley sheltered from Time, out of the beat of the Recording Angel, her old activities switched off, her new activities not yet switched on. Then the practical relation between her and the shabby familiar furniture suddenly snapped, and she looked at it with new eyes—the old basket-chair, the horse-hair sofa, the little table on which was an aspidistra in a pot—they were now merely arrangements of planes and lines, and, as such, startlingly significant. For the first time she was looking at them æsthetically, and so novel was the sensation that it felt like a mystical experience. The Beatific Vision ... may it not be this æsthetic vision turned on spiritual formula? A shabby threadbare creed suddenly seen as something simple, solid, monumental? Tolstoy must have been reared on the Gospels; but suddenly when he was already middle-aged he thought he had made a discovery which would revolutionise the world; and this was that one must love one’s neighbour as oneself. It was merely that he had, so to[87] speak for the first time seen the chairs and tables æsthetically. Yes ... heliacal periods, when the star becomes visible. Mr. Munroe had said that he had never before thought about religion at all; and it was a mere chance that the room in which he first saw the tables and chairs should be hung with crucifixes and Catholic prints.

The bells had stopped ringing for evensong, the sun was very near setting. Caroline, the donkey, gave tongue from the paddock of Plasencia—a long, drawn-out wail prefacing a series of ee-aws.

“Caroline sings nothing but Handel,” said Teresa, “a long recitative before the aria.”

For a few seconds David looked puzzled, and then threw back his head, and, for the first time since he had been at Plasencia, laughed aloud.

But Caroline was not the only singer of Handel. As they crossed the lawn, Jollypot could be heard singing to the cottage piano in the old schoolroom, For He shall feed His flock like a Shepherd.

Among the many traces of Protestantism that had clung to her was a craving for hymns at dusk on Sundays; but being debarred from Hymns Ancient and Modern she had to fall back upon Handel.

Her small, sweet voice, like the silver hammer of a gnome, beat out the words of the prophet, to which Handel’s sturdy melody—so square, so steady on its feet—lent an almost insolent confidence.

They stood still and listened; Teresa was smiling, a[88] little sadly: the old optimists, Isaiah and Handel, had certainly succeeded in cozening Jollypot’s papa; for on a living worth £200 a year and no private means he had begotten seven daughters. Nevertheless, the little voice went on unfalteringly.

David glanced at the slim, graceful young woman standing beside him, looking gentler than she usually did, but still very remote.

She, and Jollypot’s singing, and the scent of roses, and the great stretch behind them of Sabbath-hushed English fields, brought back, somehow or other, one of the emotions of his boyhood. Not being introspective, he had never analysed it, but he knew that it was somehow connected with a vague dissatisfaction with his lot, and with a yearning for the “gentry,” and hence, because when he was a boy he thought they were the same thing, a yearning also for the English. He remembered how badly he had had it one Sunday morning when he had played truant from the service in his father’s church, and had slunk into the “wee Episcopalian chapel” in the grounds of the laird. The castle had been let that summer to an English judge and his family, and the judge’s “high-English” voice, monotonous, refined, reading the lessons in a sort of chant, pronouncing when as wen, and poor as paw, had thrilled him as the dramatic reading of his father had never done. Then some years later he had slipped into evensong, and the glossy netted “bun” at the nape of the neck of Miss Stewart (the laird’s daughter), and her graceful genuflections at the name of Jesus had thrilled him in the same way. Finally the emotion had crystallised into dreams of a tall, kind, exquisitely tidy lady, with a “high-English” voice and a rippling laugh, sitting in a tent during the whole of a June afternoon scoring at the English game of cricket[89] ... or at a school treat, standing tall and smiling, her arms stretched out, her hands clasped in those of her twin pillar, warbling:

As to Teresa; as if her mind had caught a reflection from his, she was pondering the line:

Wordsworth mourned it as a thing of the past; but had it ever been? Did Jollypot possess it? Who could say. Certainly none of the rest of them did.

David left early the next morning. Evidently from him, too, Concha had received an invitation to a dinner and a play, for as they said good-bye she said, “Well then, Thursday, 16th, at the Savoy—it will be divine.”

Teresa’s offer of sleeping, owing to the shortage of rooms, in her father’s dressing-room during the week-end, had been accepted, and Rory had been put into her bedroom; when she went up to dress for dinner on Monday night she had noticed, on going near the bed, a smell which seemed familiar. Suddenly she realised that it was the smell of Rory’s hair-wash—the housemaid had actually forgotten to change the sheets.

Teresa had flushed, and her heart had begun to beat in an odd, fluttering way; but she went down to dinner without ringing for the housemaid.

When she came up for the night the smell was still there. She undressed, and stood for some seconds by the bed, her eyes shut, her hands clenched; and then, blushing crimson, all over her face and neck, and, flinging on her dressing-gown, driven by some strange instinct, she flew to Concha’s room.

Concha’s light was out. She walked up to the bed and gently shaking her said, “Concha! Concha! May I sleep with you? They’ve forgotten to change the sheets on my bed.”

“Poor darling, how filthy! Get in,” and Concha, so as to leave room for her, rolled over to one side.

Τὸ συγγενές τοι δεινόν, close physical kinship is a mysterious thing; for, however much they may think they dislike each other, it nearly always entails what can only be called a bodily affection between the members it unites.

For instance, since Pepa’s death, Concha’s was the only plate Teresa would not have shrunk from eating off, Concha’s the only clothes she would not have shrunk from wearing.

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[92] 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—

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[93] 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.

“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.

Einstein—Bergson—Unamuno ... their theories were supposed to provide a loophole.

“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[95] 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.

“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?”

“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.”

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.

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[97] 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:

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[99] 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[100] 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[101] 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.

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.

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,[103] 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[104] 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!”

“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[105] 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.

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.

“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.

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[107] 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[108] 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.

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[110] 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:—

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,[111] 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,[112] 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[113] 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.

Dr. Sinclair and the children, Guy, Rory, and, of course, Arnold, were to spend Christmas at Plasencia.

By tea-time on the twenty-third they had all arrived except Rory, who was motoring down from Aldershot in his little “two-seater.”

Harry Sinclair, a big massive brown man, his fine head covered with crisp curls, was standing on the hearth-rug devouring hunks of iced cake and, completely indifferent as to whether he had an audience or not, was, in his own peculiar style—hesitating attacks, gropings for the right word which, when found, were trumpeted, bellowed, rather than uttered—delivering a lecture of great wit and acumen.

The Doña and Arnold—he scowling heavily—were talking in low tones on the outskirts of the circle; while Dick would eye them from time to time uneasily from his arm-chair.

The children—to celebrate their arrival—were having tea in the drawing-room, and both were extremely excited.

Anna’s passion for stamps was on the wane, and she no longer dreamed of Lincoln’s album so bulgy that it would not shut. She was now collecting the Waverley Novels in a uniform edition of small volumes, bound in hard green board and printed upon India paper; and following some mysterious sequence of her own that had nothing to do with chronology, she had “only got as far as the Talisman.” She was wondering if there was[115] time before Christmas Day to convey to the Doña—very delicately of course—in what directions her desires now lay.

“The ... er ... chief merit of Shakespeare is that he is so ... er ... admirably ... er ... prosaic. The qualities we call prosaic exist only in verse, and vice versa....” (“How funny!” thought Anna, both pleased and puzzled, “Daddy is talking about Vice Versa.” She was herself just then in the middle of Anstey’s Vice Versa.) “For instance ... er ... the finest fragments of Sappho are ... er ... merely an ... er ... unadorned statement of facts! Don’t you agree, Cust?”

This purely rhetorical appeal elicited from Guy a shrieking summary of his own views on poetry; Harry’s eyes roving the while restlessly over the room, while now and then he gave an impatient grunt.

In the meantime tea and cake were going to Jasper’s head. He began to wriggle in his chair, and pretend to be a pig gobbling in a trough. As the grown-ups were too occupied to pay any attention, it was Anna who had to say: “Jasper! Don’t be silly.”

But he was not to be daunted by Anna; drawing one finger down the side of his nose he squealed out in the strange pronunciation he affected when over-excited: “Play Miss Fyles-Smith come down my nose!” (Miss Fyles-Smith, it may be remembered, was the “lady professor” who sometimes worked with Dr. Sinclair.)

The Doña stopped suddenly in the middle of something she was saying to Arnold, raised her lorgnette, and looked at Harry; he was frowning, and, with an impatient jerk of the head, turned again to Guy: “Well, as I was saying, Cust....”

It might, of course, be interpreted quite simply as merely momentarily irritation at the idiotic interruption.

“You see,” began Anna in laborious explanation, “he pretends that there’s a real Miss Fyles-Smith and a pretence one, and the pretence one is called ‘play Miss Fyles-Smith,’ and whenever he gets silly he wants people to come down his nose, and....”

“Well, guuurls, here we are again,” while the Beauty Chorus crowds round him and he chucks the prettiest one under the chin. Then—bang! squeak! pop! goes the orchestra and, running right up to the footlights, the smirking chorus massed behind him, he begins half singing, half speaking:

Well, at last it was over and he was sitting at a little table eating muffins and blackberry jam.

“What have I been doing, Mrs. Lane? Oh, I’ve been leading a blameless life,” and then he grinned and, Teresa was convinced, simultaneously caught her eye, the Doña’s, Concha’s, and Jollypot’s.

She remembered when they were children how on their visits to the National Portrait Gallery, Jollypot used to explain to them that the only test of a portrait’s having been painted by a great master was whether the eyes seemed simultaneously fixed upon every one in the room; and they would all rush off to different corners of the[117] gallery, and the eyes would certainly follow every one of them. The eyes of a male flirt have the same mysterious ubiquity.

“I do think it’s most extraordinary good of you to have me here for Christmas. I feel it’s frightful cheek for such a new friend, but I simply hadn’t the strength of mind to refuse—I did so want to come. I know I ought to have gone up to Scotland, but my uncle really much prefers having his goose to himself. He’s a sort of Old Father William, you know, can eat it up beak and all.... Yes, the shops are looking jolly. I got stuck with the little car in a queue in Regent Street the other day and I longed to jump out and smash the windows and loot everything I saw. I say, Guy, you ought to write a poem about Christmas shops....”

“Well, as a matter of fact, it is an amazing flora and fauna,” cried Guy, moving away from Harry and the fire: “Sucking pigs with oranges in their mouths, toy giraffes ... and all these frocks—Redfern mysteriously blossoming as though it were St. John’s Eve, the wassail-bowl of Revell crowned with imitation flowers....”

“Oh Rory, it was too priceless—do you remember that exquisite mannequin at Revell’s, a lovely thing with heavenly ankles? Well, the other day I was at the Berkeley with Frida and ...” and Concha successfully narrowed his attention into a channel of her own digging.

Much better, like Horace’s arena-wearied gladiator, to seek the rudis of dismissal.

The Doña made a little sign to Arnold, and they both got up and left the room, Dick suspiciously following them with his eyes.

Now Guy was turning frantic glances towards her and talking louder and more shrilly than usual—evidently he thought he was saying something particularly brilliant, and wanted her to hear it.

“Bergson seems to look upon the intellectuals as so many half-witted old colonels, living in a sort of Bath, at any rate a geometrical town—all squares and things, and each square built by a philosopher or school of thought: Berkeley Square, Russell Square, Oxford Crescent....”

“Well, the War did one good thing, at any rate, it silenced Bergson,” said Harry impatiently, “I don’t think he has any influence now, but not being er ... er ... a Fellow of King’s, I’m not well up in what ... er ... the young are thinking.”

“Oh well, here are the young—you’d better ask ’em,” chuckled Dick, since the departure of his wife and son, once more quite natural and genial: “Anna, do you read Bergson?”

“No!” she answered sulkily and a little scornfully—she liked the “grown-ups” to pay her attention, but not that sort of attention.

“There you are, Harry!” chuckled Dick triumphantly; though what his cause was for triumph must remain a mystery.

“Quite right, old thing! I don’t read him either—much too deep for you and me. What are you reading just now?” said Rory, beckoning her to his side.

She at once became friendly again: “I’m reading Vice Versa,” and she chuckled reminiscently, “And ... I’ve just finished the Talisman ... and I’d like to read Kenilworth.”

What a pity the Doña was not there to hear! But[119] perhaps one of them would tell her what she had said, and she would guess.

“Which do you like best, Richard Cœur de Lion or Richard Bultitude?” asked Guy.

“Richard Bultitude!” laughed Rory scornfully, “Do you hear that, Anna? He thinks the old buffer’s name was Richard! But we know better; we know it was Paul, don’t we?”

Anna would have liked to have shared with Rory an appearance of superior knowledge; but honesty forced her to say: “Oh but the little boy was Richard Bultitude—Dickie, you know; his real name was Richard.”

“Do you remember that girl’s—I can’t remember her name, that one that shoots a billet-doux at Mr. Bultitude in church—well, her papa, the old boy that gave the responses all wrong ‘in a loud confident voice,’ doesn’t he remind you rather of Uncle Jimmy?” said Rory to Guy.

“The best character in ... er ... that book is the German master, who ... er ...” began Harry.

“Oh yes, a heavenly creature—‘I veel make a leetle choke to agompany it’!” shrieked Concha.

“I hate Dulcie—I think she’s silly,” said Anna; but no one was listening to her, they were launched upon a “grown-up” discussion of Vice Versa that might last them till it was time to dress for dinner ... a rosy English company, red-mufflered, gaitered, bottle-green-coated, with shrieks of laughter keeping the slide “boiling” in the neighbourhood of Dingley Dell.

Teresa, as usual, sitting apart, felt in despair—what could be done with such material? A ceaseless shower of insignificant un-co-related events, and casual, ephemeral talk ... she must not submit to the tyranny of detail, the gluttony that wanted everything ... she must mythologise, ruthlessly prune ... hacking away[120] through the thick foliage of words, chopping off the superfluous characters, so that at last the plot should become visible.

Anna, rather resenting that what she looked upon as a children’s book should be commandeered by the grown-ups for their own silly talk in which she could not share, went off to the billiard-room to play herself tunes on the gramophone.

Jasper had long since sneaked off with ’Snice for a second tea in the kitchen.

“Have you been reading anything?” he asked; and without waiting for an answer, and slightly colouring, he said eagerly: “I’ve been learning Spanish, you know.”

And that was all! How often had he rehearsed the conversation, or, rather, the disquisition, that ought at this point to have arisen: “Those who know the delicate sophistication of Lazarillo de Tormes feel less amazement when from an Amadis-pastoral Euphues-rotted Europe an urbane yet compelling voice begins very quietly: ‘In a village of la Mancha, the name of which I do not care to recollect, there lived not long ago a knight’....”

And surely she might have shown a little emotion—was it not just a little touching that entirely for her sake he should have taken the trouble to learn Spanish?

“Well, what have you been reading in Spanish—the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse?”

Though this was only a joke, he felt sore and nettled, and said sulkily: “What’s that? I’ve never heard of it.”

“You lie, Guy, you lie! You have heard of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and you have heard of[121] If Winter Comes; because from what you tell me of your parents they probably talk of both incessantly, and....”

“You’re quite right, as a matter of fact,” laughed Guy, delighted that she should remember what he had told her about the manners and customs of his parents, “they talked of nothing else at one time. It made them feel that at last they were able to understand and sympathise with what my generation was after. My father began one night at dinner, ‘Very interesting book that, Guy, If Winter Comes—very well written book, very clever; curious book—painful though, painful!’ And my mother tried to discuss some one called Mabel’s character with me. It was no good my saying I hadn’t read it—it only made them despise me and think I wasn’t dans le mouvement, after all.”

“There, you see!” laughed Teresa; “Well, what are you reading in Spanish?”

“Calderon’s Autos,” and then he launched into one of his excited breathless disquisitions: “As a matter of fact, I was rather disappointed at first. I knew, of course, that they were written in glorification of the Eucharist and that they were bound to be symbolic, and ‘flowery and starry,’ and all the rest of it—man very tiny in comparison with the sun and the moon and the stars and the Cross—but the unregenerate part of me—I suppose it’s some old childhood’s complex—has a secret craving for genre. Every fairy story I read when I was a child was a disappointment till I came upon Morris’s Prose Romances, and then at last I found three dimensional knights and princesses, and a whole fairy countryside where things went on happening even when Morris and I weren’t looking at them: cows being milked, horses being shod, lovers wandering in lanes; and one knew every hill and every tree, and could take the short cut from one village to another in the dark.[122] And I’d hoped, secretly, that the autos were going to be a little bit like that ... that the characters would be at once abstractions—Grace, the Mosaic Law, and so on—and at the same time real seventeenth century Spaniards, as solid as Sancho Panza, gossiping in taverns, and smelling of dung and garlic. But, of course, I came to see that the real thing was infinitely finer—the plays of a theologian, a priest who had listened in the confessional to disembodied voices whispering their sins, and who kept, like a bird in a cage, a poet’s soul among the scholastic traditions of his intellect, so that gothic decorations flower all round the figure of Theology, as in some Spanish Cathedral ...” he paused to take breath, and then added: “I say—I thought you wouldn’t mind—but I’ve brought you for Christmas an edition of the Autos—I think you’ll like them.”

“Thank you ever so much, I should love to read them,” said Teresa with unusual warmth.

She had been considerably excited by what he had said. An auto that was at once realistic and allegorical—there were possibilities in the idea.

She sat silent for a few seconds, thinking; and then she became conscious of Harry’s voice holding forth on some topic to the group round the fire: “... really ... er ... a ... er ... tragic conflict. The one thing that gave colour and ... er ... significance to her drab spinsterhood was the conviction that these experiences were supernatural. The spiritual communion ... the ... er ... er ... in fact the conversations with the invisible ‘Friend’ became more and more frequent, and more and more ... er ... satisfying, and indeed of nightly occurrence. Then she happened to read a book by Freud or some one and ... er ... the fat was in the fire—or, rather, something that undergoes a long period of smouldering before[123] it breaks into flames was in the fire. Remember, she was nearly fifty, and a Swiss Calvinist, but she had really remarkable intellectual pluck. Slowly she began to test her mystical experiences by the theories of Freud and Co., and was forced in time to admit that they sprang entirely from ... er ... suppressed ... er ... er ... erotic desires. I gather the modern school of psychologists hold all so-called mystical experiences do. Leuba said....”

Here Jollypot, who had been sitting in a corner with her crochet, a silent listener, got up, very white and wide-eyed, and left the room.

Teresa’s heart contracted. They were ruthless creatures, that English fire-lit band—tearing up Innocence, while its roots shrieked like those of a mandrake.

Then she too, left the room; as for once the talk had been pregnant, and she wanted to think.

Sexual desires concealed under mystical experiences ... a Eucharistic play. Unamuno said that the Eucharist owed its potency to the fact that it stood for immortality, for life. But it was also, she realised, the “bread not made of wheat,” therefore it must stand for the man-made things as well—these vain yet lovely yearnings that differentiate him from flowers and beasts, and which are apt to run counter to the life he shares with these. The Eucharist, then, could stand either for life, the blind biological force, or for the enemy of life—the dreams and shadows that haunt the soul of man; the enemy of that blind biological force, yes, but also its flower, because it grows out of it....

The days of Christmas week passed in walks, dancing, and talk in the billiard-room.

On Christmas Day Rory had given Concha a volume of the Harrow songs with music, and to the Doña an exquisite ivory hand-painted eighteenth-century fan with which she was extremely pleased; indeed, to Teresa’s surprise, he had managed to get into her good graces, and they had started a little relationship of their own consisting of mock gallantry on his side and good-natured irony on hers.

As to Concha, she had taken complete possession of him and seemed to know as much about his relations—“Uncle Jimmy,” “old Lionel Fane” and the rest of them—as he did himself; she knew, too, who had been his fag at Harrow and the names of all his brother officers; in fact, the sort of things that, hitherto, she had only known about Arnold; and Arnold evidently was not overpleased.

One day a little incident occurred in connection with Arnold that touched Teresa very much. Happening to want something out of her room she found its entry barred by him and the Doña, she superintending, while he was nailing on to the door a small piece of canvas embroidered with the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

“We won’t be a minute,” said the Doña serenely; and Arnold, scowling and rather red, silently finished his job. By the end of the morning there was not a room in the house that had not the Sacred Heart nailed on its door. Dick being by this time too cowed to protest.

Teresa knew how Arnold must have loathed it; but he evidently meant by his co-operation to make it clear once and for all that he was on his mother’s side in the present crisis as opposed to his father’s.

In connection with the undercurrent of life at Plasencia, another little scene is perhaps worth recording.

“By the way, Guy,” said Rory, one morning they were sitting in the billiard-room, “How are Uncle Roger and Aunt May getting on in Pau?”

“Oh, same old thing—mother plays croquet and goes to the English Church, and father plays golf and goes to the English Club. Sometimes they motor over to Biarritz to lunch with friends—and that’s about all!”

“Well, and a jolly good life too! That’s how I’ll spend the winter when I’m old, only I won’t go to Pau, I’ll go to Nice—there’s a better casino. And what’s more, I’ll drag you there, Guy. It would do him a lot of good, wouldn’t it, Miss Lane?” and Rory grinned at Teresa, who, staring at Guy critically through narrowed eyes, said: “I don’t think he’ll need any dragging. I can see him when he’s old—an extremely mondain figure in white spats, constantly drinking tea with duchesses, and writing his memoirs.”

Guy looked at her suspiciously—Mallock, certainly, drank tea with duchesses and wrote his memoirs; not a bad writer, Mallock! But probably Teresa despised him; Swinburne had been a dapper mondain figure in his youth—what did she mean exactly?

“Poor old Guy!” laughed Rory, “I can see him, too—a crusty old Tory, very severe on the young and their idiotic poetry.... I expect you’re a violent Socialist, Miss Lane, ain’t you?”

Foolish, conventional young man, going round sticking labels on every one! Well, so she was labelled “a Socialist,” and that meant “high-browed,” and undesirable; But why on earth did she mind?

Concha was looking at her with rather a curious little smile. She sometimes had an uncomfortable feeling that Concha was as good at reading her thoughts as she was as reading Concha’s.

“Well, I believe I’m a Bolshevik myself, a revolution would be my only chance of getting into the Guards. ‘Hell-for-leather Dundas of the Red Guards!’ It sounds like a hero by ... that mad woman our mothers knew in Florence, Guy—what was her name?... Yes, like a hero in a Ouida novel.”

“Do I hear you say, Dundas, that you think yourself like one of ... er ... Ouida’s heroes?” said Harry Sinclair, coming in at that moment with Dick.

“There used to be an aged don at Cambridge,” continued Harry, “half-blind, wholly deaf, and with an ... er ... game ... leg, and when he was asked to what character in history he felt most akin he answered ... er ... er ‘ALCIBIADES’!”

“That was old Potter, wasn’t it? I remember ...” began Dick, but Concha interrupted him by exclaiming eagerly: “What a good game! Let’s play it—history or fiction, but we mustn’t say our own, we must guess each other’s’—Rory is settled, he thinks himself like a Ouida hero ...” and she suddenly broke off, turned red, and looked at Teresa with that glazed opaque look in her eyes, that with her was a sign of mingled embarrassment and defiance.

Teresa’s heart began to beat a little faster; who would Concha say she, Teresa, thought herself like? And who would she say Concha thought herself like? It would perhaps be a relief to them both to say, for once, things that were definitely spiteful—a relief from this[127] continual X-raying of each other’s thoughts, and never a word said.

“Who does Guy think himself like? Some one very wicked and beautiful—don’t you, Guy?” said Rory.

“Shelley?” suggested Teresa; but she gave the little smile that always seemed scornful to Guy.

“Oh, Keats if you like—when he was in love with Fanny Brawne,” cried Guy furiously, and, seizing the book that lay nearest to him, he began to read it.

“I say, this is a lovely game—almost as good as cock-fighting!” said Rory: “What about Mr. Lane? I wonder who you think you are like, sir.”

Dick, who had been dreading this moment, looked sheepish. It seemed to him that the forehead of every one in the room slid sideways like a secret panel revealing a wall upon which in large and straggling characters were chalked up the words: DON JUAN. And Teresa was saying to herself: “Would it be vulgar ... should I dare to say Lydia Bennett? And who will she say? Hedda Gabler?”

She had forgotten what the game really was and had come to think it consisted of telling the victim the character that you yourself thought they resembled.

“A Drake somewhat ... er ... cramped in his legitimate activities through having ... er ... married an ... er ... SPANISH LADY,” said Harry.

What the devil did he mean exactly by that? Surely the Doña hadn’t been blabbing to him—Harry of all people! But she was capable of anything.

“Oh yes, the Doña would see to it he didn’t singe the King of Spain’s beard twice,” laughed Concha.

And then followed a discussion, which kept them busy till luncheon, as to whether it could be proved by Mendelism that the frequent singeing of Philip II.’s beard was the cause of his successors having only an imperial.

So here was another proof of the fundamental undramaticness of life as lived under civilised conditions—for ever shying away from an emotional crisis. As usual, the incident had been completely without point; and on and on went the frivolous process of a piece of thistle-down blown by a summer breeze hither, thither, nowhere, everywhere.

Before the party broke up there was a little dance at Plasencia. It was to be early and informal so as not to exclude “flappers”; for, as is apt to be the way with physically selfish men, Arnold found grown-up young ladies too exacting to enjoy their society and preferred teasing “flappers.” Fair play to him, he never flirted with them; but he certainly liked them.

So the drawing-room was cleared of furniture, a scratch meal of sandwiches substituted for dinner, and by eight o’clock they were fox-trotting to the music of a hired pianist and fiddler.

The bare drawing-room, robbed of all the accumulated accessories of everyday life, was the symbol of what was happening in the souls of the dancers—Dionysus had come to Thebes, and, at the touch of his thyrsus, the city had gone mad, had wound itself round with vine tendrils, was flowing with milk and honey; where were now the temples, where the market-place?

Teresa, steered backwards and forwards by Bob Norton, felt a sudden distaste for mediæval books—read always with an object; a sudden distaste, too, for that object itself, which was riding her like a hag. Why not yield to life, become part of it, instead of ever standing outside of it, trying to snatch with one’s hands fragments of it, as it went rushing by?

That was good sense; that was peace. But away from Plasencia ... yes, one must get away from Plasencia.

For once, they were all beset by the same desire—to slip off silently one night, leaving no trace.

“Why shouldn’t I really get that yacht and slip off with Hugh ... to Japan, say ... and no one know? It’s a free country and I’ve got the money—there’s nothing to prevent me doing what I want. To sail right away from Anna ... and ... and ... every one,” thought Dick, as, rather laboriously, he gambolled round with the young wife of a rich stockbroker who had a “cottage” near Plasencia.

As to Concha—she had sloughed her own past and present and got into Rory’s—she seemed to be Rory: lying in his study at Harrow after cricket sipping a water-ice, which his fag had just brought him from the tuck-shop ... “hoch!” and a tiny slipper shoots up into the air—“the beautiful Miss Brabazons,” the belles of the Northern Meeting!... “H.M. the King and the Prince of Wales motored over from Balmoral for the—Highland games. There were also present ...” flags flying, bands playing ... hunting before the War—zizz! Up one goes—over gates, over hedges ... no gates, no hedges, no twelve-barred gates of night and day, no seven-barred gates of weeks, just galloping for ever over the boundless prairie of eternity—far far away from Plasencia and them all.

Only the dowagers, watching the dancers from a little conservatory off the drawing-room, had their roots deep in time and space—a row of huge stone Buddhas set up against a background of orchids and bougainvillea and parroquet-streaked jungle, which were their teeming memories of the past; but set up immovably, and they would see to it that no one should escape.

“There!” said Rory, gently pushing Concha into a chair, “where’s your cloak?”

“Oh, by the way, I meant to ask you, why did you walk on ahead with Arnold this afternoon?”

“Of course you did. I had to walk with your sister—she scared me to death.”

He gave a little laugh, took her in his arms, and kissed her several times on the mouth.

“You’d better be careful—some one might come along, you know, at any moment.”

Rory began talking in a loud voice: “Well, as I was saying, Chislehurst golf is no good to me at all. I like a course where you have plenty of room to open your shoulders.”

“The Blue Danube! I’m so glad the waltz is coming into fashion again,” said Mrs. Moore, tapping her black-satin-slippered foot in time to the tune, and watching her sixteen-year old daughter Lettice whirl round with Arnold.

“Dear Mrs. Lane, these slangy expressions sound so deliciously quaint when you use them—don’t they, Lady Norton? And that reminds me, I’ve had such a killing letter from Eben....”

But no one listened, and soon she too was silent; for, at the strains of the Blue Danube, myriads of gold and blue butterflies had swarmed out of the jungle and settled on the Buddhas. They still stared in front of them impassively, they were still firm as rocks; but they were covered with butterflies.

“Waltzes are milestones of sentimentality,” said Guy shrilly to Teresa, as they made their way onto the loggia to sit out the remainder of the dance, “milestones of sentimentality, because a lady can be dated by the fact of whether it’s the Blue Danube, or the Sourire d’Avril, or the Merry Widow, that glazes her eye and parts her lips—taking her back to that charming period when the heels of Mallarmé’s débutantes go tap, tap, tap, when in a deliciously artificial atmosphere sex expands and, like some cunning hunted insect, makes itself look like a flower; I haven’t yet read A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleur, but I’m sure it’s an exquisite description of that period—débutantes, and waltzes, and camouflaged sex. Its very title is like the name of a French waltz—or scent.”

Teresa smiled vaguely.... Why had she scorned that period, barricading herself against it with books, and Bach and ... myths? When she was old and heard the strains of ... yes, the Chocolate Soldier ought to be her milestone ... well, when she hears the Chocolate Soldier, if her eyes glaze and her lips part it will be out of mere bravado.

“I never think of anything else but you ... you’re the only person whose mind I admire ... even if you don’t realise it you must see that you ought to.”

She saw herself established in St. James’s Street polishing his brasses, rub, rub, rub; polishing his verses perhaps too ... oh no, he didn’t like verses to be polished—roughening them, then, with emery-paper ... oh no, that polished too ... what was it, then, that roughened?

She began to giggle ... oh Lord, that had done it! Now he was furious—and with reason.

“... Your arrogance ... simply unbearable.... I don’t know what you think ... oh it’s damnable!” and he began to sob.

She took his hand and stroked it, murmuring: “Hush! old Guy ... I wasn’t laughing at you, it was just one of those sudden silly thoughts that have nothing to do with anything. Nothing seems real to-night. I’m really very very grateful.”

Then fresh sobs, and like a passionate, proud child he tore away his hands, and plunged into the dark garden. What could she do? She could only leave him to get over it.

Life was never still; though, like the earth, one did not feel it move ... one’s human relations were ever shifting, silently, like those of the constellations. Suddenly one night one looks up at the sky and realises[134] that Orion has reappeared and that the Great Bear is now standing on the tip of his tail, and one gasps at the vast spaces that have been silently traversed; and it was with the same sensation of awe that she looked back on the past year and realised the silent changes in the inter-relations of her little group: her parents’ relations, her own and Concha’s, her own and Guy’s.

A low voice came from the morning-room; it was the Doña’s: “Whatever Pepa’s opinions or wishes may have been during the latter part of her life, they are the same as mine now.”

“Upon my soul! You evidently ... er ... er have sources of ... er ... information closed to the rest of us—I really cannot ... er ... cope with such statements” and Harry came out on to the loggia, evidently irritated beyond endurance. He was followed by the Doña; but when she saw Teresa and realised that the opportunity for a tête-à-tête was over, having told her to get a wrap, she went in again.

Harry walked up and down for a few seconds, in silence, and then ejaculated ironically: “Remarkable woman, your mother!” “Very!” said Teresa coldly; she did not choose to discuss her with Harry.

“Of course, in the light of ... er ... modern psychology it’s as clear as a pike-staff,” he went on, as usual not reacting to the emotional atmosphere, “she ... er ... doesn’t ... er ... know it, of course, but she’s putting up this Catholicism as a barrier to your marriages—every mother is jealous of her daughters.”

Oh, these scientific people! Always right, and, yet, at the same time, always absurdly wrong! For the real sages, the people who live life, these ugly little treasures found by the excavators miles and miles and miles down into the human soul, are of absolutely no value ... horrid little flints that have long since[135] evolved into beautiful bronze axes ... it was only scientists that cared about that sort of thing. For all practical purposes it was an absolute libel on the Doña—but, dramatically, it might be of value; for dramatic values have nothing to do with truth.

“Our dance, I think, Miss Lane. I couldn’t find you anywhere”; it was Rory’s voice.

He led her into the drawing-room, and they began to move up and down, round and round, among the other solemn and concentrated couples, all engaged in too serious an exercise to indulge in any conversation beyond an occasional: “Sorry!” “Oh, sorry!”

When they passed Concha, she and Rory smiled at each other, and he said: “Telegrams: Oysters.”

That meant: “We are both rather hungry, but never mind, it won’t be long now till supper—Hurray!”

She looked at him; his eyes were stern, and fixed on some invisible point beyond her shoulder, his lips were slightly parted. She was no more to him than the compass with which Newton in Blake’s picture draws geometrical figures on the sand.

“It has been a lovely dance—I do think it’s so awfully good of you all to have me down for Christmas.”

How many times exactly had she heard that during the last week? Once before to herself, twice to the Doña, once to her father, once to Jollypot.

“Well, one couldn’t have a more Christmassy house. It always seems to me like the house one suddenly comes[136] upon in a wood in a fairy story. One expects the door to be opened by a badger in livery.”

Again that bastard Fancy! The same sort of thing had occurred to her herself—when she was a child; but the imagination of a man ought to be different from the fancy of a child.

“It’s the sort of house one can imagine a Barrie play happening in, don’t you think? Did you see Dear Brutus?”

“I didn’t like the girl much—what was her name? Margaret, wasn’t it? I’m sure her papa starved her—I longed to take her and give her a good square meal.” Pause.

She wondered what it would feel like to be the sort of young woman who could interest and allure him. And what were the qualities needed? It could not be brains, for she had plenty of brains; nor looks, for she was good-looking. But nothing about her stirred him; she knew it.

“Of course, it’s an extraordinary hard life, an actress’s,” he went on, “it’s a wonder that they keep their looks as they do. It’s a shame! Women seem handicapped all along the line,” and he looked at her expectantly, as if sure of her approval at last, “It can’t be much fun being a woman, unless one were a very beautiful one ... or a very clever one, of course,” he added hastily.

Suddenly, Dionysus and his rout vanished from Thebes; temples and market-place sprang up again, and she remembered joyfully that a fresh packet of books ought to arrive to-morrow from the London Library.

Most of the guests not staying in the house had left by midnight; but after that, when the party had dwindled down to four or five couples, the pianist and fiddler, mellowed by champagne and oysters, were persuaded to give first one “extra,” then another, then another.

The pianist, a very anæmic-looking young woman, with a touching absence of class-jealousy, was loath to disappoint them, and, as far as she was concerned, they might have gone on having extras till broad daylight; but the fiddler “turned stunt.”

“I’m a family man” he protested good-humouredly, but firmly (“You’ll have to wait till to-morrow night for that, old bean!” Rory whispered to Arnold, “your wife wouldn’t like it at two o’clock in the morning”), “But I don’t mind ending up with John Peel, as it’s Christmas time,” whereupon, with a wink to the pianist, he struck up with that most poetical of tunes, and, the men of the party bellowing the words, they all broke into a boisterous gallop.

She yielded with a smile; but her eye caught Arnold’s, and they both remembered that it had been Pepa who used always to play John Peel at the end of their dances.

The tune ended with what means to be a flourish, but really is a wail, and they stood still, laughing and breathless—a little haggard, a little dishevelled.

“He went up to bed; he had a headache,” said Arnold, glaring fiercely at Teresa.

Out in the view, from behind the two-ply curtains of silk and of night, a cock crew, and then another; and[138] what they said was just John Peel over again—that ghosts wander in dewy English glades, and that the Past is dead, dead, dead.

Concha came into Teresa’s room to have her gown unfastened: “You looked heavenly,” she said, “I love you in mauve.”

Teresa tugged at the hooks in silence; and then said: “Is it impossible to teach Parker to unsqueeze hooks when they come back from Pullar’s?”

Then outside there was a familiar muffled step, and a knock. In the mirror Teresa saw a look of annoyance pass over Concha’s face.

In came the Doña, in a white dressing-gown, her face illuminated by the flame of her candle, and looking not unlike one of Zurburán’s Carthusian monks.

“Well darling,” answered Concha, with exaggerated nonchalance, adding to Teresa, “won’t they undo?”

Then the hooks yielded at last to the leverage of the nail-scissors, and Concha kissed the Doña and Teresa and went back to her own room.

“Do I want him to be? What has that to do with it? I want to know if he is.”

“Marry her! Englishmen never think of marriage ... they just what you call ‘rag round’; they can’t even fall in love.”

Teresa scrutinised her for a few seconds, and then she said: “I believe you are furious with every man who doesn’t fall in love with one of your daughters;” and she suddenly remembered a remark of Concha’s made in a moment of intense irritation: “The Doña ought to keep a brothel—then she would be really happy.”

That year winter was so mild as to be almost indistinguishable from spring. Imperceptibly, the sparse patches of snow, the hyacinthine patches of blue light lying in hollows of the hills, in wrinkles of the land, turned into small waxen leafless flowers, watching, waiting, in the grass.

By the beginning of February the song of the birds had begun; a symbol that to most hearts is almost Chinese, the symbol and its idea being so indistinguishable that it seems that it is Hope herself who is perched out there on the top of the trees, singing.

One day one would suddenly realise that the mirabelle and purple prunus were actually out; but blossom is such a chilly thing, and it arrives so quietly, that it seemed to make no difference in that leafless world.

Then would come a day when the air was exquisitely soft and the sky very blue; and between the sky and earth there would seem to be a silent breathless conspiracy. Not a bud, only silence; but one knew that something would soon happen. But the next morning, there would be an east wind—skinning the bloom off the view, turning the sky to lead, and making the mirabelle and prunus look, in their leaflessness, so bleak that they might have been the flower (in its sense of essence, embodiment of), of the stern iron qualities of January. The singing of the birds, too, became a cold, cold sound, as if the east wind was, like the ether, a[141] medium through which we hear as well as see. But such days were rare.

Dick loved early spring. When the children were little they used to have “treasure-hunts” at their Christmas parties. They would patter through drawing-room, dining-room, hall, billiard-room, finding, say, an india-rubber duck in the crown of a hat, or a bag of sweets in a pocket of the billiard-table; and Dick’s walks through the grounds in these early spring days were like these “treasure-hunts”; for he would suddenly come upon a patch of violets under a wall, or track down a sudden waft of perfume to a leafless bush starred with the small white blossoms of winter-sweet, or—greatest prize of all—stand with throbbing heart by the hedges of yew, gazing into a nest with four white eggs, while he whispered: “Look Anna!”

To tell the truth, he was very tired of his liaison. The lady was expensive, and her conversation was insipid. Also ... perhaps ... his blood was not quite as hot as it had once been.

“Buck up, old bean! What’s the matter with you?” ... The fires within are waning ... where had he heard that expression? Oh yes, it was what Jollypot had said about that old Hun conductor, Richter, when, years ago, they had taken her to Covent Garden to hear Tristan—how they had laughed! It was such a ridiculous expression to use about such a stolid old Hun and, besides, it happened to be quite untrue, Pepa and Teresa had said.

“What’s the matter with you to-night, you juggins?” The fires within are waning ... it was all very well to laugh, but really it was rather a beautiful expression.... Good Lord! It wasn’t so many years before he[142] would be reaching his grand climacteric.... Peter Trevers died then, so did Jim Lane.

One morning he noticed the Doña standing stock-still in the middle of the lawn, staring at something through her lorgnette. She was smiling. “What a beautiful mouth she has!” he thought, as he drew nearer.

Softly he came up and stood beside her, and discovered that what she was watching was a thrush that was engaged, by means of a series of sharp rhythmic pecks, in hauling out of the ground the fat white coils of an enormous worm.

It reminded him of a Russian song that his lady had on her gramophone, the Volga Boat Song—the haulers on the Volga sang it as they hauled in the ropes.... I-i-sh-tscho-rass he began to hum; she looked up quickly: “You remember that?”

“What?” he asked nervously. In answer, she sang to the same tune: Ma-ri-nee-ro, and then said: “The sailors used to sing it at Cadiz, that autumn we spent there ... when the children were little.”

The thrush had now succeeded in hauling up almost the whole length of the worm; and it lay on the ground really very like the coils of a miniature rope. Then suddenly he lost the rhythm, changed his method to a series of little jerky, impatient, ineffectual desultory taps, pausing between each to look round with a bright distrait eye; and, finally, when a few more taps would have finished the job, off he hopped, as if he could bear it no longer.

Dick was racking his brain in the hopes of finding some link between thrushes and Pepa.... “Pepa was very fond of thrushes” ... but was she?...[143] “Pepa with the garden hose was rather like that thrush with the worm” ... and wasn’t there an infant malady called “thrush” ... had Pepa ever had it? no, no, it wouldn’t do; later on an apter occasion would arise for some tender little reconciliatory reminiscence.

“You know, I had little Anna and Jasper baptised into the Catholic Church at Christmas,” said the Doña suddenly, and, as it seemed to Dick, quite irrelevantly; but her voice was unmistakably friendly.

“I did. I arranged it with Father Dawson. The children enjoyed keeping it a secret from Harry.”

“Does she want to?” Dick had never noticed in his grand-daughter the slightest leanings to religion.

“Well, Dick,” she went on in a brisk, but still friendly voice, “we really must decide soon—are we going to have pillar-roses or clematis at the back of the borders? Rudge says....”

They spent a happy, amicable morning together; and at luncheon their daughters were conscious that the tension between them had considerably relaxed.

One sunny evening, walking in his pleasance, and weaving out of memories chaplets for a dear head, as, in the dead years, he had woven them out of those roses, white and damask, the Knight of La Tour-Landry resolved to compile, from the “matter of England, France and Rome,” a book for the guidance of his motherless daughters.

Towards the end of February Teresa heard excited voices coming from the Doña’s morning-room. She went in and found the Doña sitting on the sofa with a white face and blazing eyes, her father nervously shifting the ornaments on the chimneypiece, and Concha standing in the middle of the room and looking as obstinate as Caroline the donkey.

“Teresa!” the Doña said in a very quiet voice, “Concha tells us she is engaged to Captain Dundas.”

But of course!... had not Parker said that there was “the marriage likeness” between them—“both with such lovely blue eyes?”

“And he has written to your father—we have just received this letter,” and the Doña handed it to her: “From the letter and from her we learn that Captain Dundas has perverted her. She is going to become a Protestant.”

“The reason why she is going to do this is that Captain Dundas would be disinherited by his uncle if[146] he married a Catholic. What do you think of this conduct, Teresa?”

“I don’t ... I ... if Concha doesn’t believe in it all, I don’t see why she should sacrifice her happiness to something she doesn’t believe in,” she found herself saying.

Dick turned round from the chimneypiece: “Teresa’s quite right,” he said; “upon my soul, it would be madness, as she says, to sacrifice one’s happiness for ... for that sort of thing.”

And he turned from the cold severity of the Doña’s voice and eye to a re-examination of the ornaments.

As to Teresa, though his words had been but an echo and corroboration of her own, she was unreasonable enough to be shocked by them; coming, as they did, from a descendant of the men who had witnessed the magnificent gesture with which Ridley and Latimer had lit a candle in England.

“Well, Teresa, as you think the same as Concha ... I don’t know what I have done.... I seem to have failed very much as a mother. It must be my own fault,” and she laughed bitterly.

“I must ... it’s what Teresa said ... I mean ... it would be so mad not to!”

“I see—it would be mad not to sell Jesus for thirty[147] pieces of silver. Well, in that case, there is nothing more to be said ... and you have your father and sister as supporters,” and again she laughed bitterly.

There was silence for a few seconds, and Teresa glanced mechanically at the letter she held in her hand: “... won’t think it frightful cheek ... go rather gently while I’m at the Staff College ... my uncle ... Drumsheugh ... allowance ... will try so hard to make Concha happy ... my uncle ... Drumsheugh ... hope Mrs. Lane won’t mind frightfully ... the Scottish Episcopal Church ... very high, it doesn’t acknowledge the Pope, that’s the only difference.”

Suddenly the Doña began to sob convulsively: “She ... is ... my child, my baby! Oh, none of you understand ... none of you understand! It’s my fault ... I have sinned ... I ought never to have married a Protestant. My Pepa ... my poor Pepa ... she knows now ... she would stop it if she could. Oh, what have I done?”

Teresa kneeled down beside her, and took one of her cold hands in hers; she herself was cold and trembling—she had only once before, at Pepa’s death, seen her mother break down.

Dick came to her other side, and gently stroked her hair: “My dear, you’ve nothing to blame yourself for,” he said, “and there are really lots of good Protestants, you know. And I’ve met some very broad-minded Roman Catholics, too, who took a ... a ... sensible view of it all. These Spanish priests are apt....”

“Spanish priests!” she cried, sitting up in her chair and turning blazing eyes upon him, “what do you know of Spanish priests? You, an elderly Don Juan Tenorio!”

Dick flushed: “Well, I have heard you know ...[148] those priests of yours aren’t all so mighty immaculate,” he said sullenly.

“Dick! How—dare—you?” and having first frozen him with her stare, she got up and left the room.

Dick turned to Teresa: “For heaven’s sake,” he said, “do make your mother see that Protestants are Christians too, that they aren’t all blackguards.”

“It would be no good—that’s really got nothing to do with it,” said Teresa wearily.

“Nothing to do with it? Oh, well—you’re all too deep for me. Anyhow, it’s all a most awful storm in a teacup, and the thing that really makes her so angry is that she knows perfectly well she can do nothing to prevent it. Well, do go up to her now.... I daren’t show my face within a mile ... get her some eau-de-Cologne or something. ’Snice! ’Snice, old man! Come along then, and look at the crocuses,” and, followed by ’Snice, he went through the French window into the garden.

Yes; her father had been partly right—a very bitter element in it all was that the passionate dominant Doña could do nothing to prevent the creatures of her body from managing their lives in their own way. What help was it that behind her stood the convictions of the multitudinous dead, the “bishops, priests, deacons, sub-deacons, acolytes, exorcists, lectors, porters, confessors, virgins, widows, and all the holy people of God?” She and they were powerless to arrest the incoming tide of life; she had identified herself with the dead—with what was old, crazy, and impotent, and, therefore, she was pre-doomed to failure.

Teresa had a sudden vision of the sinful couch (according to the Doña’s views) of Concha and Rory, infested by the dead: “I say, Concha, what a frightful bore! They ought to have given us a mosquito-net.” “Oh Lord! Well, never mind—I’m simply dropping with[149] sleep.” And so to bed, comfortably mattressed by the shrouds of the “holy people of God.”

She went up and tried the Doña’s door, but found it locked. She felt that she ought next to go to Concha, upon whom, she told herself, all this was very hard—that she, who had merely set out upon the flowery path that had been made by the feet of myriads and myriads of other sane and happy people since the world began, should have her joy dimmed, her laughter arrested, by ghosts and other peoples’ delusions. But, though she told herself this, she could not feel any real pity; her heart was as cold as ice.

However, she went to Concha’s room, and found her sitting at her desk writing a letter—probably a long angry one to that other suffering sage, Elfrida Penn.

“Poor old Concha!” she said, “I’m sorry it should be like this for you.”

Concha—puffed up with the sense of being a symbol of a whole generation—scowled angrily: “Oh, it’s all too fantastic! Thank the Lord I’ll soon be out of all this!”

At times there was something both dour and ungracious about Concha—a complete identification of herself with the unbecoming rôles she chose to act.

Teresa found herself wondering if, after all, she herself had not more justification with regard to her than recently she had come to fear.

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.”

“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[151] 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.”

That same night Dick wrote off to David Munroe telling him to come down at once and spend his convalescence at Plasencia.

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?”

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.

“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?”

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[154] 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....”

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.”

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[156] 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[157] 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[158] “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.

“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?”

“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.”

“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[159] 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?”

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.”

“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[160] 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?”

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:

“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?[161] 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.

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[162] 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”:

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[163] 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:

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,[164] 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.

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,[166] 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.”

“I believe he looks upon me as a little girl,” she said[167] 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.

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:

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.

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?...”

“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[170] 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.

“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.”

Anna and Jasper came to Plasencia for their Easter holidays, and towards the end of April Concha and Rory got back from Scotland. It was the first time Teresa had seen them together since their engagement, and their relationship was so comfortable and intimate that, to her, it almost smacked of incest.

As to the Doña, the presence of Rory in the flesh seemed to undo all the reconciliatory work of the past two months, and her attitude once more became uncompromising, her heart bitter and heavy.

Harry and Arnold came down for the last “week-end” in April; so they were now quite a big party again, and Teresa did not see so much of David.

It was dear that Concha was bursting with the glories of Drumsheugh; but she had no one to tell them to; the Doña and Teresa were out of the question, and Arnold had sulked with her ever since her engagement. However, one afternoon when they were sitting in the loggia, she could keep it in no longer: “I simply love Drumsheugh,” she began; Arnold immediately started talking to Harry, but to her surprise she found Teresa clearly prepared to listen sympathetically. “It isn’t a ‘stately home of England’ sort of thing, you know, but square and plain and solid, and full of solid Victorian furniture; and the portraits aren’t ruffles and armour and that sort of thing, but eighteenth-century-judges-sort-of-people. There’s a perfectly divine Raeburn of Rory’s great-great-grandmother playing ring-o’-roses[172] with her children. It’s altogether very eighteenth century ... the sort of house one can imagine Dr. Johnson staying in, when he was in Scotland, and very much enjoying the claret and library. And there’s no ‘culture’ about it—it’s filled with cases of stuffed birds, and stuffed foxes and things....”

“What, Concha?” cried Arnold, breaking off in the middle of his sentence to Harry, “did you say stuffed foxes? I never thought much of the Scotch, but I didn’t think they were as bad as that. Do you really shoot foxes in Scotland, Dundas?”

Rory was speechless with laughter: “Oh, Concha! What are you talking about?” he spluttered, and poor Concha, who, since her engagement, had gone in for being a sporting character, blushed crimson.

For the first time Teresa saw something both pretty and touching in Concha’s attitude to life: as a little girl-guide, an Anna, in fact, passionately collects, badges for efficiency in heterogeneous activities—sewing, playing God Save the King on the piano, gardening, tennis, reciting Kipling’s If; so Concha collected the various manifestations of “grown-up-ness”—naughty stories, technical and sporting expressions, scandal about well-known people; and it was all, really, so innocent.

“You got on very well with Colonel Dundas, didn’t you?” she said, turning the subject to what she knew was a source of gratification.

“Oh, yes, she scored heavily with Uncle Jimmy,” said Rory proudly. “He’s in love with her—really in love with her. But I don’t know whether that’s much of a triumph—he’s the bore of ten clubs.”

Concha began to count on her fingers: “The Senior, the Travellers’, Hurlingham, ... er....”

“Oh, yes, of course, Royal and Ancient. Then the North Berwick one—that’s six. Then there’s....”

At that moment the Doña arrived for tea, cutting them off for the time from this grotesque source of pride; as in her presence there could be no talk of Drumsheugh and “Uncle Jimmy.”

“Yes, the garden is forging ahead. What I like is roses; do you think this will be a good year for them? But I do like them to have a smell.”

“Guy says that Shakespeare is wrong and that there is something in a name, and that the reason they don’t smell so sweet now is that they’re called by absurd names like ‘Hugh Dickson’ and ‘Frau Karl Druschke.’”

“Well, how does he explain that Frau Karl has been called ‘Snow Queen’ since the War and still hasn’t any smell?”

“By the way, where is Guy? We haven’t seen him since the dance at Christmas. Do you remember how queer he was the next morning?”

“He’s been in Spain, but he should be back soon,” said Arnold, with a resentful look at Teresa.

Then Anna and Jasper trotted across the lawn and on to the loggia, both very grubby; Jasper carrying a watering-can.

“That ... er ... is a ... er ... self-evident proposition that needs no demonstration, as the dogs’-meat man said to the cook when she ... er ... told him he wasn’t a gentleman,” quoted Harry.

“Darlings, isn’t it time for your own tea? And what would Nanny say? You really oughtn’t to come[174] to grown-up tea without washing your hands,” protested Teresa—in vain; for the Doña had already provided each of them with a large slice of cake.

Then Jasper’s roving eye perched upon David, meditatively stirring his tea. He began to snigger: “Silly billy! You can’t make flowers grow. Anna says so.”

“Oh, well,” and Anna blushed again, “You see, it was about holy water. I thought if it was really like that Mr. Munroe might bless the water in our watering-can, so that they’d all grow up in the night ... just to show whether it was true or not, you know.”

Harry looked round with an unmistakable expression of paternal pride; Dick, Arnold, Concha and Rory exploded into their several handkerchiefs; Jollypot murmured, “Dear little girl!” The Doña looked sphinx-like; and Teresa glanced nervously at David.

“I’m awfully sorry, Anna, but I fear I can’t do that for you—for one thing, I’m not yet a priest,” he answered, blushing crimson.

“By the way, Mr. Munroe, when are you going to be ordained?” asked the Doña suavely. “Let me see ... it could be in September, Our Lady’s birth month, couldn’t it? I read an article by a Jesuit Father the other day about the ‘Save the Vocations Fund,’ and he said there was no birthday gift so acceptable to Our Lady as the first mass of a young priest.”

The Doña rarely if ever spoke upon matters of faith[175] in public; so Teresa felt that her words had a definite purpose, and were spoken with concealed malice.

“Good God!” muttered Harry; then, turning to Arnold, he said—“it’s ... it’s ... astounding. Birthday presents of young priests! It’s like the Mountain Mother and her Kouretes!” He spoke in a very low voice; but Teresa overheard.

The smell of this half ridiculous, half sinister, little incident soon evaporated from the atmosphere, and the usual foolish, placid Plasencia talk gurgled happily on:

“Well, if this weather goes on we ought soon to be getting the tennis-court marked ... oh Lord! I wish it was easier to get exercise in this place.”

“Well, I’m sure Anna and Jasper would be only too delighted to race you round the lawn.”

“Oh, by the way, didn’t you say there was a real tennis court somewhere in this neighbourhood?”

“Yes, but it belongs to a noble lord ... oh, by the way, Dad, have you had that field rolled? If there’s to be hay in it this year, it really ought to be, you know.”

“Yes, yes, but a heifer’s far more valuable after she’s calved, far better wait.”

“It’s a curious thing that ... er ... a reference to ... er ... liquid in any form inevitably tickles an undergraduate: if I ... er ... er ... happen to remark in a lecture that ... er ... moisture is necessary to a plant, the room ... er ... rocks with laughter for five minutes!”

But for Teresa, the shadow of that other plot had fallen over the silver and china and tea-cups, over the healthy English faces, over the tulips and wallflowers in the garden; and over the quiet view, made by the sowing and growing and reaping of the sunbrowned rain-washed year; but it has a ghost—the other; shadowy Liturgical Year, whose fields are altars in dim churches and whose object, by means of inarticulate chants and hierophantic gestures, is to blow some cold life into a still-born Idea, then to let it die, then, by a febrile reiteration of psalms and prophecies, to galvanise it again into life.

And David, sitting there a little apart, though he could talk ably about business and economics and agriculture—he was merely a character in the Plot. He was like a ghost, but a ghost that dwarfed and unsubstantialised the living. He was a true son of that race—her race, too, through the “dark Iberians”—who, carrying their secret in their hearts, were driven by the Pagans into the fastnesses of the hills, the hills whence, during silent centuries, they drew the strength of young men’s dreams, the strength of old men’s visions, and within whose cup quietly, unceasingly, they plied their secret craft: turning bread into God. And though in time St. Patrick (so says one of the legends), betrayed the secret to Ireland, and St. Columba, his descendant in Christ, to England, and they, the men of the Scottish hills, lost all memory of it in harsh and homely heresies, yet once it had been theirs—theirs only.

Yes; but it was all nonsense—a myth, a plot. She was becoming hag-ridden again; she must be careful.

One afternoon in the beginning of May, when Teresa came on to the loggia at tea-time, she found no one there but David, sitting motionless. He looked at her gravely, and said:

“Well, you see, I’ve no right to stay a minute longer than I need. And so ... if it’s convenient ... well, really, I should be going to-morrow.”

“Should you?” And there was the minimum of conventional regret in her voice, “I’ll tell Rendall to pack for you.”

They were silent. His eyes absently swept over the view, then the border, and then lingered for a few seconds on the double row of ancient hawthorns, which, before the days of Plasencia and its garden, had stood on either side of a lane leading to a vanished village, and then fastened on the gibbous moon, pressed, like the petal of a white rose, against the blue sky, idly enjoying, as it were from the wings, the fragrance and tempered sunshine, while it waited for its cue to come on and play for the millionth millionth time its rôle of the amorous potent ghost.

“I’d like—if you could do with me—to come back[178] for a wee visit in the summer ... before I say my first mass.” Then he added, with a little smile, “but maybe your mother won’t want to have me.”

“Oh ... I’m sure ... she’d be delighted,” she said, with nervous little catch in her voice.

He looked at her, squarely, sombrely: “No, she wouldn’t be delighted ... but I’ll come all the same,” and he gave a short laugh.

“It will be the beginning of October, I think,” and again his eyes wandered absently over the view, the border, the hedge of hawthorn; and her eyes followed his.

The Plot ... the Popish Plot.... “Please to remember the fifth of November,” ... how many times Guy Fawkes must have been burned in that vanished village! On frosty nights when the lamp-light and fire-light glowed through the cosy red curtains of the inn parlour, and the boys wore red worsted mufflers, and stamped to keep their feet warm, and held their hands out to the flame of the bonfire. For they had been wise English people who had lived a hundred years ago in that vanished village; they had known what it all came to: that there was Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, then Spring again; that there was good ale to be had at the Saracen’s Head, for the paying; that Goody Green, who kept the shop, gave short measure, but this did not cause her to be pinched by elves, nor to come to a bad end; that the parson was a kind man, though a wheezy one, and liked his glass of ale, and that whatever he might say in his sermons, the daffodil, at any rate, died on Easter Day; that very few of the wives and mothers had gone to Church maids, but they were none the worse for that, while Marjory from the farm up by Hobbett’s Corner hadn’t gone to[179] Church at all, because she had been seduced by a fine young gentleman staying at the Saracen’s Head to shoot wild duck, and that, in consequence, she had gone away to London, where she had married a grocer’s apprentice, who became in time an alderman, and drove her about in a fine coach; that William Hobson ran away to sea, and was never heard of again; that Stan Huckle had emigrated to America, whence he wrote that he had become a Methodist, because they had strawberry festivals with lumps of frozen cream in their chapel; in fact, that it was no use seeking for meanings and morals, because there were none. And then, one Spring, Summer, Autumn or Winter, one took to one’s bed, and after a time one’s toes grew cold, and the room grew dark, and one heard a voice saying: “Paw ole man! The end’s near now. Well, it’ll be a blessed release—reely.” And that was all, except, before the dim eyes closed, a memory ... or was it the sudden scent of May? Once long ago, in that hawthorn lane, beneath the moon, migratory dreams had seemed to flock together from all quarters like homing birds, and the Future had suddenly sprung up, and all the stars snowed down on it, till it too was a hawthorn bush covered with a million small white blossoms, in which, next spring, the birds would build their nests.

“I have noticed,” she said, “the Scotch have a great sense of the ‘sinfulness of sin.’”

“St. Paul invent sin! You know that’s not true—it’s as old as apples,” and he smiled down on her with that tender, indulgent smile that made her feel like a little girl.

“And so I’ll not trespass any longer on your[180] hospitality, Mrs. Lane,” he added, with the laborious gentility probably learnt from his aunt in Inverness.

“Oh, well, it has been a great pleasure having you,” said the Doña, with more geniality than she had shown him for weeks, “I’m sure we shall all miss you—shan’t we, Teresa?”

“I’m sure we shall,” she answered, in a calm, cool voice; no tinge of colour touching her pale cheeks, but a sudden spark of hostility and triumph leaping into her eyes as she met those of the Doña.

“I should like to come and see you all again, before I say my first mass,” he said, looking the Doña squarely in the face.

“Oh, we’ll sure to be back by then,” cut in Dick, always on the alert to take the edge off his wife’s grudging invitations, “Yes, you come to us at the end of September; though, for the sake of the children’s garden, it’s a pity it couldn’t be after your ordination!”

The weather was so warm that after dinner they went and sat out upon the lawn; but about half-past nine the elders found it chilly and went indoors.

“Are you coming, darling?” she asked Teresa, going up to her and laying her soft cheek against hers.

“No, Puncher, I don’t think so,” she said, smiling up at her; and she was touched to see how she flushed[181] with pleasure at the old, childish pet-name, grown, these last years, so unfamiliar.

So Teresa and David sat on together, watching Concha and Rory glimmering down the border till they melted into the invisible view.

It was a glorious night. The lawns of the sky were dusty with the may of stars. The moon, no longer flower-like and idle, shone a cold masterpiece of metallurgy. The air was laden with the perfumes of shrubs and flowers. Teresa noticed that the perfumes did not come simultaneously, but one after another; like notes of a tune picked out with one finger—lilac, may, wallflower....

“I can smell sweetbriar!” cried David suddenly, a strange note of triumph in his voice, “it’s like a Scotch tune—‘Oh, my love is like a red red rose’!” and he laughed, a little wildly.

Teresa’s heart began to beat very fast, and seizing at random upon the first words that occurred to her, she said, “Concha’s like a red red rose,” and began to repeat mechanically:

“I wasn’t thinking of her ...” he said. “I wasn’t ... Oh, my love is like the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valley ... it’s all the same”; and then, abruptly: “Look! There’s the moon. She’s always the same—Scotland, Africa, in the trenches, here. She’s like books—Homer and the rest—in whatever land you open them, they just say the same thing that they did a hundred years ago.”

Far away a night-express flashed and shrieked through the view; then an owl hooted.

“Yes.... Hark! There’s the sweetbriar again,” and he began to sing triumphantly:

He turned and looked at her with strangely shining eyes: “I hear you through the wall, getting up and going to bed every night and every morning. It makes me feel sick sometimes, like the smell of iodoform at the front; that’s a nice way of putting it!” and again he laughed wildly: “like the smell of sweetbriar! like the smell of the mass! Good-night,” and he got up hurriedly and strode towards the house. Then he came back: “Get up and come in,” he said gently; “it’s getting cold and damp,” and he pulled her up with a cool, firm hand.

They went in, lit their candles in the hall and said good-night at their bedroom doors; quietly, distantly.

David left early next morning; a stiff, genteel little letter of thanks came from him to the Doña, and then, for most of them, he might never have been.

Each day life at Plasencia became more and more focused on the approaching wedding; and the Doña and Jollypot spent hours in the morning-room making lists of guests and writing invitations.

As soon as David had gone Teresa began to write—the mediæval books had done their work and were no longer needed.

St. Ignatius de Loyóla, in his esoteric instructions to his disciples, gives the following receipt for conjuring up a vision of Christ Crucified: to obtain a vision, he says, one must begin by visualising the background—first, then, conjure up before you a great expanse of intensely blue sky, such as the sky must be in Palestine, next, picture against this sky a range of harsh, deeply indented hills, red and green and black, then wait; and suddenly upon this background will flash a cross with Christ nailed to it.

But she was doubtful as to whether it was a vision of the Past such as De Quincey had had in his dream, or Monticelli shown in his picture; for one thing, she found an almost irresistible pleasure in intagliating her writing with antiquarian details, and indeed it[184] was more a vision of a situation, a situation adorned by the Past, than a vision of the Past itself.

She wrote all day; neither thinking nor reading, but closely guarding her mind from the contamination of outside ideas.

The play—the plot—was turning out very differently from what she had expected; and as well as being a transposing of life at Plasencia, it was, she realised with the clear-sightedness of her generation, performing the function assigned to dreams by Freud—namely, that of expressing in symbols the desires of which one is ashamed.... Though, for her own reasons, she shrank from it, she was keenly aware of Concha’s sympathy these days. It seemed that Concha had that rare, mysterious gift that Pepa had had too—the gift of loving.

Guy came down in June for a week-end; with Teresa he was like a sulky child, but she saw that his eyes were haggard, and she felt very sorry for him.

“What about that Papist—I mean Roman Catholic, the stolid Scot?” he asked at tea.

“Oh, I think he’s all right. He’s a dear thing ...” said Concha, hurriedly flinging herself into the breach.

Teresa saw the Doña fumbling for her lorgnette. She had found her tête-à-tête with Guy after his arrival—had she been saying anything to him?

“Uncomfortable, half-baked creature!” said Guy angrily; “he’s like a certain obscure type of undergraduate that used to lurk in the smaller colleges. They were so obscure that no one had ever so much as seen them, but their praises would be sung by even more obscure, though, unfortunately, less invisible admirers, who wore things which I’m sure they called pince-nez, and ran grubby societies, and they would stop one at lectures—simply sweating with enthusiasm—to tell one that Clarke, or Jones, or whatever the creature’s name was, had read a marvellous paper on Edward Carpenter[185] or Tagore at the Neolithic Pagans, or that it was Clarke that had made some disgusting little arts-and-crafts Madonna on the chimneypiece. And then years later you hear that Clarke is chief of a native tribe in one of the islands of the Pacific, or practising yoga in Burmah ... some mysterious will to adventure, I suppose, but all so inconceivably indiscriminating and obscure and half-baked! Well, at any rate, the veil of obscurity has been rent and at last I have seen “Clarke” in the flesh!” and he ended his shrill, gabbled complaint with a petulant laugh.

“He’s not in the least like that, Guy,” laughed Concha; “he’s more like some eighteenth-century highland shepherd teaching himself Greek out of a Greek Testament,” she added, rather prettily.

“Yes, and having religious doubts, which are resolved by an examination of the elaborate anatomy of a horse’s skull found on the moors—it’s all the same, only more picturesque.”

“And why are you so angry with our friend Mr. Munroe, Guy?” asked the Doña.

“Oh, I don’t know! I’m like Nietsche, I hate ‘women, cows, Scotsmen, and all democrats,’” and he gave an irritated little wriggle.

How waspish the little creature had become! But who can draw up a scale of suffering and say that an aching heart is easier to bear than a wounded vanity?

“Oh, there’s nothing to tell ... it’s a threadbare theme; Childe Harold has already been written.... Of course, the theme of Don Juan lends itself to perennial treatment....”

The Doña laughed softly: “But it is so unjust that Don Juan Tenorio is supposed only to be found in Spain!”

“That is really the comble to the insults we have put upon that unfortunate people.”

“Guy! I will not have you speaking like that in my house,” said the Doña very sternly.

“I beg your pardon,” he muttered, in some confusion; and then took up his shrill monologue: “As a matter of fact, Don Juan is the greatest glory of Spain; he is own brother to Sancho Panza—a superb pair; they are the true αὐτόχθων, made of the mud of this planet, and they understand life as it is meant to be lived down here. The rest of us shriek, like Coleridge, for a ‘bread not made of wheat’.... Yes, we behave idiotically, like creatures in some fable that has not yet been written, when we want cheese for supper, we take our bow and arrows and go and shoot at the moon—the moon, which is the cradle of the English race....” On and on went his voice, the others sitting round in silence, to conceal their embarrassment or boredom.

“To return to Don Juan, I see there is a new theory that he is an Eniautos Daimon—one of those year-spirits that die every winter and vegetation dies with them, and are born again in spring with the crops and things ... seeds, and crops and souls dying and springing up again with Don Juan. So there is hope for us all, sic itur ad astra—rakes during our life, manure afterwards; so horticultural! I wonder if our friend Mr. Munroe would make a good year-spirit?”

“I expect he would only be able to make oats grow—‘man’s food in Scotland,’” laughed Concha, as if it were merely the ordinary Plasencia bandying of conceits; “I think Dad would make a better one,” she[187] added; “he’s so good about flowers and crops and things, and the farmers and people say he has ‘green fingers,’ because everything he plants is sure to grow.”

Teresa felt sincerely grateful to her: she had cooled the situation, and, as well, had given the whole conversation about Don Juan an amazing significance; the play would have to be re-cast.

On Monday morning Teresa had a little talk with Guy before he went away—after all, he was but a fantastic little creature, powerless to hurt her; and he was suffering.

“Don’t be cross with me, Guy,” she said, laying her hand on his sleeve; “it’s so difficult to feel ... to feel as you want me to ... you see, it’s so difficult with some one one has known so many years; besides, you know, you can’t have it both ways,” and she smiled.

“Well, you see, you’re a poet. We take poetry seriously, but sometimes we ... well, we smile a little at poets. Sub specie æternitatis—isn’t that the expression? You are sub specie æternitatis, and the worst of being under that species is that both one’s value and one’s values are apt to be ... well, snowed over by the present. Milton’s daughters, at the actual moment that they were grumbling about having to have Paradise Lost dictated to them, were really quite justified—the darning of their fichus or ... or young Praise-the-Lord Simpkins waiting for them by the stile were much more important at that moment. It’s only afterwards, when all these things—the young man, the stile and the fichus—have turned long ago into dust, and Paradise Lost grows more glorious every year, that they[188] turn into frivolous, deplorable fools. You can’t have it both ways, old Guy.”

Now, at last, he knew what she really thought of him—she mentioned him in the same breath with Milton; she thought him a genius.

He felt wildly happy and excited, but, of course, he did not allow this to show in his face.

Then he looked at her: the pointed arch her mouth went into when she smiled; the beautiful oval teeth, the dark, rather weary eyes, for the moment a tender, slightly quizzical smile lurking in their corners ... oh! he wanted this creature for his own; he must get her.

“Concha said you were writing something. What is it ... a ‘strong’ novel?”

“Of course it must be acted; it’s much better than having to struggle with publishers, that’s the devil—cracking one’s knuckles against the Bodley Head, tilting with Mr. Heinemann’s Windmill, foundering in Mr. Murray’s Ship ... it’s....”

“But nothing would induce me to have it either published or acted. It’s just for myself.”

“Oh, but you’ll change your mind when it’s finished—it’s biological, one can’t help it; the act of parturition isn’t complete till the thing is published or produced—you’ll see. I was up at Cambridge with the chap who has started this company of strolling players—they’re very ‘cultured’ and ‘pure’ and all that sort of thing, but they don’t act badly. If you send it to him, I’ll tell him he must produce it. They might come and do it here—on the lawn.”

“No! no! no!” she cried in terror, “I couldn’t bear it. I don’t want it acted at all.”

He looked at her, a little impishly: “You mark my words, it will be acted ... here on the lawn.”

It was the eve of Concha’s wedding; the house was full, and overflowing into Rudge’s cottage, into Rendall’s cottage, and into the houses of neighbours: there were Guy and his parents, Sir Roger and Lady Cust, there was Colonel Dundas, there was “Crippin” Arbuthnot, Rory’s major who was to be best man, and Elfrida Penn, who was to be chief bridesmaid, and Harry Sinclair and his children, and Hugh Mallam and Dick’s cousin and partner, Edward Lane.

A wedding is a thing—as concrete and compact as a gold coin stamped with a date and a symbol; for, though of the substance of Time, it has the qualities of Matter; colour, shape, tangibleness. Or rather, perhaps it freezes Time into the semblance of Eternity, but does not rob it of its colours: these it keeps as Morris’s gods did theirs in the moonlight.

We have all awakened on a winter’s morning to the fantastic joke that during the night a heavy fall of snow has played on Space; just such a joke does a wedding play on Time.

And who can keep out the estantigua, the demon army of the restless dead, screaming in the wind and led by Hellequin?

Now Hellequin is the old romance form of Harlequin, and Harlequin leads the wedding revels. But it is in vain that, like Ophelia, he “turns life, death and fate into prettiness and favour”: we recognise the eyes behind the mask, we know of what army he is captain.

And the wedding guests themselves; though each, individually, was anodyne, even commonplace, yet, under that strange light, they were fantastic, sinister—they were folk.

In her childhood that word had always terrified Teresa—there was her old nightmare of the Canterbury Pilgrims, knight, franklin, wife of Bath, streaming down the chimney with strange mocking laughter to keep Walpurgis-night in a square tiled kitchen.... Bishops, priests, deacons, sub-deacons, acolytes, exorcists, lectors, confessors, virgins, widows, and all the holy people of God.

How pawky Edward Lane was looking—uncannily humorous and shrewd! What six-plied, cynical thing was he about to say to Jasper?

However, what he did say was: “You don’t get cake like that at school—do you, young man?”

And Lady Cust, with her light rippling laugh and her observant eyes—noticing the cut of one’s skirt and whether one asked her if she took sugar in her tea—when her face was in repose it was sad, like that of a Christian slave in the land of the Saracens.

“Oh yes, when we were in Pau we motored over to Lourdes, when one of the pilgrimages was on. Some of them ... well, really, they were like goblins, poor creatures ... appalling!” and she actually smiled reminiscently.

Teresa remembered Guy’s having told her that the favourite amusement of his Brabazon uncles when they were drunk had been potting with their revolvers at the village idiot.

She looked at Colonel Dundas: solemn, heavy, with a walrus moustache, and big, owl-like spectacles, each glass bisected with a straight line; at Sir Roger Cust,[192] a dapper “hard-bitten” little man, with small, sharp gray eyes—surely they were not sinister.

“Old Tommy Cunningham!” Sir Roger was saying; “that takes one a long way back. Wasn’t he Master at one time of the Linlithgowshire?”

“Yes ... from eighteen ... eighteen seventy-five, I think, to eighty ... eighty-six, I think. I couldn’t tell you for certain, off-hand, but I’ll look it up in my diary,” said Colonel Dundas; “he was a first-rate shot, too,” he added.

“Magnificent!” agreed Sir Roger, “Aye, úhu, aye, úhu. D’you remember how he used always to say that?”

“He was the coolest chap I’ve ever known. Do you remember his mare White Heather?”

“Yes, yes, that’s the one. Well, you know, he had thousands on her for the National, and I was standing near him, and when she came in ... third, I think it was....”

“Fourth, then. Well, old Tommy just shut up his glasses with a snap and said, ‘Aye, úhu, well, poor lassie, I thought she’d win somehow.’ Didn’t turn a hair, and he’d thousands on her!”

They were silent for a few seconds; then Sir Roger sighed and smiled: “Well, all that was a long time ago, Jimmy. Eheu fugaces, Posthume, Posthume.... Isn’t that how it goes, Guy? Funny how these old tags stick in one’s mind!” and he rubbed his chin and smiled complacently; and Teresa felt sure he would wake up in the night and chuckle with pride over the aptness of his Latin quotation.

Yes, but what was “old Tommy Cunningham” doing here? For he brought with him a rush of dreams and of old cold hopes, and a world as dead as the moon—dead men, dead horses, dead hounds.

“Don’t you adore albinos?” shrilled Elfrida Penn in her peacock scream, while that intensely conventional little man, “Crippin” Arbuthnot grew crimson to the top of his bald head, and Lady Cust’s face began to twitch—clearly, she was seized by a violent desire to giggle.

“Perhaps you would like to go up to your room, Lady Cust? You must be tired,” said the Doña.

“Well, thank you very much, perhaps it would be a good plan; though it’s difficult to tear oneself away from this lovely garden—How you must love it!” and she turned to Teresa; then again to the Doña: “I have been envying you your delphiniums—they’re much finer than ours, ain’t they, Roger? Do you cinder them in the spring?” and they began walking towards the house, talking about gardens; but all the time they were watching each other, wary, alert, hostile.

“What a delicious room! And such roses!” Lady Cust exclaimed when they reached her bedroom.

Her maid had already unpacked; and on her dressing-table was unfurled one of these folding series of leather photograph frames, and each one contained a photograph of Francis, her eldest son, who had been killed in the War. There were several of him in the uniform of the Rifle Brigade; one of him in cricket flannels, one on a horse, two or three in khaki; a little caricature of him had also been unpacked, done by a girl in their neighbourhood, when he was a Sandhurst cadet; at the bottom of it was scrawled in a large, unsophisticated feminine hand: Wishing you a ripping Xmas, and then two or three marks of exclamation.

It belonged, that little inscription, to the good old days of the reign of King Edward, when girls wore sailor hats in the country, and shirts with stiff collars and ties, when every one, or so it seemed to Lady Cust, was normal and simple and comfortable, and had the same ambitions, namely, to hit hard at tennis, and to ride straight to hounds.

“Were you at Ascot this year?” “Have you been much to the Opera this season?” “What do you think of the mallet for this year? Seems to me it would take a crane to lift it!”

Such, in those days, had been the sensible conversational openings; while, recently, the man who had taken her into dinner had begun by asking her the name of her butcher; another by asking her if she liked string. Mad! Quite mad!

Of course, there were cultured people in those days too, but they were just as easy to talk to as the others. “Do you sing Guy d’Hardelot’s ‘I know a Lovely Garden?’ There’s really nothing to touch his songs.” “Have you been to the Academy yet? And oh, did you see that picture next to Sargeant’s portrait of Lady ——? It’s of Androcles taking a thorn out of such a jolly lion’s paw.” “Oh yes, of course, that’s from dear old Omar, isn’t it? There’s no one like him, is there? You know, I like the Rubaiyat really better than Tennyson.”

And now—there were strikes, and nearly all their neighbours had either let or sold their places; and Guy had the most idiotic ideas and the most extraordinary friends; and Francis....

The Doña’s eyes rested for a moment on the photographs; she was too short-sighted to be able to distinguish any details; but she could see that they were of a young man, and guessed that he was the son who had been killed.

“It’s much better for her,” she thought bitterly, “she hasn’t the fear for his soul to keep her awake.”

Lady Cust saw that she had noticed the photographs, and a dozen invisible spears flew out to guard her grief. Then she remembered having heard that the Doña had lost a daughter: “But that’s not the same as one’s eldest son—besides, she has grandchildren.”

Aloud she said, “One good thing about having no daughter, I always feel, is that one is saved having a wedding in the house. It must mean such endless organising and worry, and what with servants being so difficult nowadays.... But this is such a perfect house for a wedding—so gay! We are so shut in with trees. Dear old Rory, I’m so fond of him; he’s my only nephew, and ... er ... Concha is such a pretty thing.”

It was clear that at this point the Doña was expected to praise Rory; but she merely gave a vague, courteous smile.

“I have heard so much about you all from my Guy,” continued Lady Cust; “he is so devoted to you all, and you have been so good to him.”

“Well, it’s very nice of you to say so—he’s a dear old thing,” she paused, “and your other daughter, Teresa, she’s tremendously clever, isn’t she? I should so love to get to know her, but I’m afraid she’d despise me—I’m such a fool!” and she gave her rippling laugh.

“Well, it’s all ...” and Lady Cust gave a little sigh. “You see, Rory was my only sister’s only child, and she died when he was seven, so he has been almost like my own son. I wonder ... don’t you think it’s ... it’s a little sudden?”

“Well, they haven’t known each other very long, have they? I don’t know ... marriage ... is so ...”

So this foolish, giggling, pink and white woman was not pleased about the marriage! She probably thought Concha was not good enough for her nephew.

And the Doña who, for the last few days, had been half hoping that the Immaculate Conception herself, star-crowned, blue-robed, would to-morrow step down from the clouds to forbid the banns and save her namesake from perdition—the Doña actually found herself saying with some heat: “They’ve known each other for nearly a year; that is surely a long time, these days. I see no reason why it shouldn’t be a most happy marriage.”

“Well, I must leave you to your rest. You have everything that you want?” and the Doña sailed out of the room.

Dear old Rory! And what would Mab, her dead sister, think of it all? Oh, why had it not been she that had died in those old, happy days?

She went to her dressing-table and took up the folding leather frame. They were the photographs of a very beautiful young man, a true Brabazon—a longer limbed, merrier eyed Rory, with a full, rather insolent mouth.

Yes, it was funny—she had been apt to call him by the names of her dead brothers: “Jack! Geoffrey! Desmond! Francis, I mean.” She had never had any difficulty in understanding Francis—how they used to laugh together!

She remembered how she used to dread his marriage; jealously watching him with his favourite partners at tennis and at dances, and suspiciously scanning the photographs of unknown and improperly pretty young[197] ladies in his bedroom: Best of luck! Rosie; Ever your chum, Vera—sick at the thought of perhaps having to welcome a musical-comedy actress as Francis’s wife.

If only she had known! For now, were she suddenly to wake up and find it was for Francis’s wedding that she was here—the bride Concha Lane, or that extraordinary Miss Penn, or, even, “Rosie” or “Vera,” her heart would burst, she would go mad with happiness.

And she had a friend who actually dared to be heartbroken because she had suddenly got a letter from her only son, telling her that he had been married at a registry to a war-widow, whom she knew to be a tenth-rate little minx with bobbed hair and the mind of a barmaid.

But Francis ... she would never be at his wedding. She would never hear his voice again—Francis was dead.

When, an hour later, Sir Roger looked in on his way to dress, he found her lying on the sofa, reading the Sketch, smiling and serene.

“Well, May,” he said, “I saw you! You were on the point of disgracing yourself just before you went upstairs. Extraordinary thing! Will you never get over this trick of giggling? You simply have no self-control, darling.”

“Oh, they seem all right. Rory’s girl’s extraordinary pretty—pretty manners, too.”

“Charming! ‘I should lo-o-ove to,’” and she reproduced admirably Concha’s company voice. “However,” she went on, “we have a great deal to be thankful for—it might have been Miss Penn. ‘Don’t you ado-o-ore albinos?’ Oh, I shall never forget it ... and Major Arbuthnot’s face! Still, if it had been she,[198] I must say I should have loved to see the sensation produced on Edinburgh by old Jimmy’s walking down Princes Street with her.”

As it was too large a party to get comfortably into the dining-room, a big tent had been pitched on the lawn, and several long narrow tables joined together, and there they dined, an ill-assorted company.

At one end Dr. Sinclair was shouting to Lady Cust, “Well, I’d send him to that co-education place, but, unfortunately, they don’t ... er ... learn anything there. They make the fourth form read Tolstoy’s Resurrection, which is not ... er ... only the most ... er ... trashy of all the works of genius, but the only ... er ... lesson to be learned from it is the ... er ... inadvisability of ... er ... seducing a Russian peasant girl, and ... er ... unfortunately, an ... er ... er ... English schoolboy hasn’t many opportunities of doing that ... er ... er....”

He looked at her, slightly puzzled—her face was pink with suppressed laughter; but, as she was meant to laugh, why suppress it?

Elfrida Penn was terrifying “Crippin” Arbuthnot by searching questions as to whether the erotic adventures of his schooldays had been similar to those described in a recent novel about life at a public school.

Edward Lane was saying to Jollypot, “Yes, before my niece—Olive Jackson, you know—went to school, I said to her, ‘my advice to you is: keep your hands clean.’ I always....”

But Dick and Hugh, at any rate, yelling at each other across the intervening forms of Concha and Rory, were in perfect harmony. “I say, Dick, do you remember old Bright, the butler at your father’s? And how angry he used to be when we asked him if he was any relation of John Bright?”

“Yes, rather; and do you remember how he used to say, ‘Port, claret, sherry, madeira, sir?’ always in that order.”

“Yes, and how he used to puff it down one’s neck? And the severe way your mother used to say, ‘Neither, thank you, Bright’!”

Then, from the other end, they would catch sight of the Doña glaring at them indignantly through her lorgnette, and Dick would turn hurriedly to Lady Cust.

As to Teresa, she was indulging in that form of intoxication that has been described before—that of æsthetically withdrawing herself from a large, chattering company. Once when she was doing it David had guessed, and had whispered to her, “The laird’s been deed these twa hoors, but I wisna for spoiling guid company,” in reference to a host who had inconspicuously died, sitting bolt upright at the head of his table, at about the third round of port.

A branch, or something, outside was casting a shadow on the tent’s canvas wall—as usual, it was in the form of Dante’s profile. She had seen it in patches of damp on ceilings, in burning coals, in the clouds, in shadows cast on the white walls of the bath-room.

Perhaps he had not really looked like that at all, and the famous fresco portrait had been originally merely a patch of damp, elaborated into the outline of[200] a human profile by some wag of the fourteenth century, and called Dante; and perhaps the Dante he meant was not the poet at all, but some popular buffoon, Pantaloon or Harlequin, in the comedies at street corners—the Charlie Chaplin, in fact, of his age....

But for some time Colonel Dundas had been booming away in her right ear, and it was high time she should listen.

“... always a note-book on the links, and every shot recorded—it’s a golden rule. I’ve advised more than one Amateur Champion to follow it. You see my point, don’t you? The next time you play on the same links you whip out your note-book and say, ‘Let me see—Muirfield, sixth hole, Sept. 5, 1920: hit apparently good drive down centre of the course, found almost impossible approach shot owing to cross bunkers. N.B. Keep to the left at the sixth hole.’ You see my point, don’t you?”

Opposite to them, Guy was screaming excitedly to Elfrida Penn, who seemed to be sucking in his words through her thick lips: “Of course, there’s nothing so beautiful and significant, from the point of view of composition, as a lot of people sitting at a narrow table—it’s the making of the Christian religion. Aubrey Beardsley ought to have done a Cena: the Apostles, in curly white wigs like these little tight clustering roses—Dorothy Perkins, or whatever they’re called—and black masks, sitting down one side of a narrow refectory table with plates piled up with round fruits, the wall behind them fluted and garlanded in stucco, St. John, his periwigged head on Jesus’ shoulder, leering up at him, and Judas, sitting a little apart, a white Pierrot, one finger pressed against his button mouth, his eyes round with horror and glee....”

“Yes, every year I was in India I read it through, from cover to cover,” boomed Colonel Dundas proudly.[201] (Oh yes, of course, Dobbin and the History of the Punjab!) “It’s a wonderful style. He comes next to Shakespeare, in my estimation.” (Not Dobbin and the History of the Punjab, then!) “Yes, every year I read the whole of the French Revolution through from cover to cover—a very great book. And when, by mistake, John Stuart Mill burned the manuscript, what do you think Carlyle did?”

“He sat down and read through all the works of Fenimore Cooper—read ’em through from beginning to end,” and he stared at her in solemn triumph.

“Really?” she gasped, “I don’t quite understand. Fenimore Cooper—he wrote about Red Indians, didn’t he? Why did he read him?”

“Why? To distract his mind, of course. Extraordinary pluck!” and he glared at her angrily.

At this point Sir Roger, who had not been making much way with the Doña, leaned across the table, and said, “I say, Jimmy, Mrs. Lane and I have been talking about Gib.—did I ever tell you about the time I dined with your old Mess there? Owing to my being a connection of yours the Colonel asked me to choose a tune for the pipes;” then, turning to the Doña, he said in parenthesis, “I don’t know whether you’ve ever heard the bagpipes, but—don’t tell Colonel Dundas—we don’t think much of ’em this side of the border.” Then again to Colonel Dundas, “Well, for the life of me, I couldn’t remember the name of a tune, and then suddenly the Deil amang the Tailors came into my head, so out I came with it, as pleased as Punch. Well, I thought the Colonel looked a bit grim, and I saw ’em all looking at each other, but the order was given to the piper, and he got going, and, by gad, it was a tune—nearly took the roof off the place! I thought I should be deaf for life—turned out to be the loudest tune they’d got;” then,[202] again to the extremely bored Doña, “but it’s a glorious place, old Gib. I remember in the eighties....”

Lady Cust, watching from the other end of the table, was much amused by the engouement her husband had developed, since arriving at Plasencia, for the society of Jimmy Dundas; it was clearly a case of “better the bore I know....”

“Yes, these were great days,” Colonel Dundas was saying; “we’re the oldest regiment of the line, you know—Pontius Pilate’s Bodyguard; that’s what we call ourselves—Pontius Pilate’s Bodyguard!” and he chuckled proudly.

And this from a pillar of the Scottish Episcopal Church!... Oh pale Galilean, hast thou conquered?

Then a loving-cup filled with punch began to go the round and they all drank from it in turn, rising to their feet as they did so, and saying, “Concha! Rory!”

“Ladies and Gentlemen!... (pause) ... I do think it’s extraordinary kind of you to drink our health in this very nice way. We are most awfully grateful ... (pause) ... I’m afraid I’m not a Cicero or a Lloyd George, or anything like that ... (Laughter) ... old Crippin there will tell you speeches ain’t much in my line....” Then he had a sudden brilliant idea: “But there’s one thing I should like to ask you all to do. You see, I’m awfully grateful to Mr. and Mrs. Lane for giving me Concha, and my uncle has always been most awfully good to me, and I’d like to ask you all to drink their health ... and if my mother is anywhere about ... and others ... I know they’ll join in the toast, in nectar, or whatever they drink up there,” and he ended with an apologetic little laugh.

The company was very much touched; Edward Lane[203] blew his nose violently, and muttered to Jollypot that young Dundas was evidently a very nice-feeling young fellow.

Colonel Dundas had a vision of Rory’s mother—lovely Mab Brabazon—as he had first seen her, radiant and laughing at the Northern Meeting of twenty-nine years ago; but then, ever since, he had so often had that vision: at Church Parade, at polo in India, playing golf in Scotland, playing Bridge in any of his ten clubs—anywhere, everywhere, he might see Mab Brabazon. And little had Teresa guessed that as Carlyle read Fenimore Cooper, so he had read the French Revolution—“to distract his mind.”

Sir Roger and Lady Cust thought of Francis; more than one of Pepa. But Dick thought of his sallow puritanic sister Joannah, who had been so much older than himself that their interests had never clashed, and all his memories of her were of petting and spoiling—“Little Dickie doesn’t take spoiling, his temper is so sweet,” she used to say—his eyes began to smart. And Hugh Mallam, too, thought of poor old Joannah Lane, and he remembered how, in the days when his ambition had been to be a painter, he used to wonder whether, if offered the certainty of becoming as great a one as Sir Frederick Leighton, on condition of marrying Joannah, he would be able to bring himself to do it.

After dinner they went into the garden; some of them sitting on the lawn, some of them wandering about among the flowers.

The border was in the summer prime of lilies and[204] peonies and anchusa and delphiniums; to its right was a great clump of lavender nearly ripe, and at the stage when it looks like veins of porphyry running through a rock of jade; a little to its left was a stiff row of hollyhocks.

“An amazingly distinguished flower, hollyhock!” said Guy, “it always gives a cachet to its surroundings, so different from sweetpeas, which look sordid in a dusty station garden, and fragrantly bourgeois beside the suburban lawn on which Miss Smith is playing tennis in lavender muslin....”

“Guy!” cried Lady Cust, looking round anxiously at the company, and laughing apologetically; Guy, however, went on undaunted; “but hollyhock is like the signature of a great painter, it testifies that any subject can be turned into art—or, rather, into that domain which lies between painting and poetry, where damoizelles, dressed in quaintly damasked brocades, talk of friendship and death and the stars in curious stiff conceits.”

“Well, here come some of these damoizelles in their quaint brocades—do you think they are talking about friendship and death and the stars?

“Do you think they are talking about friendship and death and the stars? Do you think they are talking about friendship and death and the stars?” said Hugh Mallam with his jolly laugh, and he nodded towards Concha and Elfrida Penn and Lettice Moore and Winifred Norton, who, dressed in a variety of pale colours, were walking arm in arm up the border.

Sainte-Beuve in a fine passage describes the moment in a journey south when “en descendant le fleuve, on a passé une de ces lignes par delà lesquelles le soleil et le ciel sont plus beaux.”

Such a line—beyond which “the sun and the sky are more beautiful”—cuts across the range of every one’s vision; and the group of flower-bordered girls were certainly beyond that line for all who were watching them. Once again Teresa felt as if she were suddenly seeing the present as the past; and as long as she lived it would always be as that picture that she would see Concha’s wedding.

“Vera incessu patuit dea,” murmured Hugh, and then he added, a little wistfully, “they do look jolly!”

“You’d look just as jolly far off, in that light, Hugh,” said Dick, who was sitting blinking at his flowers, like a large, contented tom-cat.

The younger men who, with the exception of Guy, had been walking up and down between the hawthorn hedge, smoking cigars and deep in talk—probably about the War—went and joined the four girls; and after a few moments of general chatter Arnold flung his arm round Concha’s shoulder and Teresa could hear him saying: “Come on, Conch,” and they wandered off by themselves. She was glad; for she knew that Concha had felt acutely the estrangement from Arnold caused by his jealousy at her engagement.

Then Rory came and joined the party on the lawn, and sat down on the grass at the feet of Lady Cust.

“Well, what about a little Bridge?” said Dick, and he, Hugh, Sir Roger, and Colonel Dundas, went indoors for a rubber.

Shortly afterwards Lady Cust and Rory wandered off together in the direction of the lavender.

“Yes, Aunt May, I’m in for it this time ... the great adventure!” and he laughed a little nervously, “Concha ... she ... don’t you think she’s pretty?”

They felt that there were many things they wanted to say to each other, these two; but, apart from reserve and false shame, they would have found it hard to express these things in words.

“Well, time does fly! It seems just the other day that I was scurrying up to Edinburgh for your christening ... and Fran ... Guy was only a year old.”

“Yes, ... I can hardly believe it myself,” and again he gave a little nervous laugh.

“Well, dear old thing,” and she laid a hand on his arm, “I’m your godmother, you know, and your mother and I ... I don’t believe we were ever away from each other till I married ... you’re sure ... it’s going to be all right, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Aunt May, it’s going to be all right.... I’m sure,” and again he laughed; and although he was very pale, his eyes were bright and happy.

“Shall we go and walk down the border and look beautiful too?” said Guy to Teresa.

“It’s finished at last ... so I can breathe again. While I was writing I felt rather like a sort of Thomas the Rhymer, a thrall to ghosts and fairies; and I got half to hate the whole thing, as one is always inclined to hate a master.”

She was trying to be friendly, and thought it would please him if she told him about such intimate things; but he was not pleased.

Though he had never written anything long enough to give him at first hand the feeling she had described, yet he realised it was what certainly would be felt by a genuine dramatist or novelist; and it was not in his[207] picture that Teresa should be either—Sophocles may have led his own choruses, but he did not lead those of Euripides.

“The play’s finished, and yet all this,” and she waved her arm vaguely in the direction of the house and garden and all the groups of people, “and yet all this goes on just the same.”

Next day came the queer dislocated morning—every one either at a loose end or frantically busy,—the arrival of Dr. Nigel Dundas, Bishop of Dunfermline, Colonel Dundas’s first cousin, who had travelled all night from Scotland, to be there to marry Rory; the hurried cold luncheon; the getting the Custs and people off to the church; then Parker’s and Teresa’s fingers fumbling with hooks and eyes and arranging the veil.

When the bride was dressed, and ready to go downstairs, the Doña, who had not appeared all morning, and was not, of course, going to the church ceremony, walked into the room, pale and heavy-eyed.

“Oh, Doña ... if only ... I couldn’t ... it’ll be all right,” Concha whispered between little sobs, “and anyway, your baby will always love you ... and ...”

“The Purissima and all the Saints bless you, my child,” said the Doña in a stifled voice, and she made the sign of the Cross on her forehead, “but you mustn’t cry on your wedding day. Come, let me put your veil straight.”

Teresa, watching this little scene, felt a sudden pang of remorse—why had she not more control over her imagination? Why had she allowed her mother to[208] turn, in the play, into such a sinister and shameless figure?

Then they went down to the hall, where Dick was contemplating in a pier-glass, with considerable complacency, the reflection of his stout morning-coated person.

“Well, it’s quite time we were starting, Concha,” he called out; and with that amazing ignoring of the emotional conventions by which men are continually hurting the feelings of women, it was not till he and Concha were well on their way to church, that he remembered to congratulate her on her appearance.

Teresa, Jollypot, and the children, had gone on ahead in the open car—past hens, past hedges, past motor-bicycles, past cottage gardens; past fields of light feathery oats, so thickly sown with poppies that they seemed to flicker together into one fabric; past fields of barley that had swallowed the wind, which bent and ruffled the ductile imprisoning substance that it informed; past fields of half-ripe wheat, around the stalks of which Teresa, who, since she had been writing, had fallen into an almost exhausting habit of automatic observation, noticed the light tightly twisting itself in strands of greenish lavender. And there was a field from which the hay had been carried long enough to have allowed a fresh crop of poppies to spring up; to see them thus alone and unhampered gave one such a stab of joyous relief that one could almost believe the hay to have been but a parasite scum drained away to reveal this red substratum of beauty. All these things, as they rushed past, were remarked by Teresa’s weary, active eyes till they had reached the church and deposited Anna and Jasper with the bridesmaids, waiting in the porch, and at last they were walking up the aisle and being ushered into their places by Bob Norton.

There stood Major Arbuthnot, whispering and giggling with Rory, who was looking very white and bright-eyed. After all, he was not lower than the birds—he, too, felt the thrill of mating-time.

Then the opening bars of the Voice that Breathed o’er Eden, and a stiffening to attention of Major Arbuthnot, and a sudden smile from Rory, and all eyes turning to the door—Concha was entering on her father’s arm, her train held up by Jasper.

Then the Oxford voice of Dr. Nigel Dundas, droning on, droning on, till it reached the low antiphon with Rory:

Then Concha’s turn and then more prayers; and[210] before long they were all laughing and chattering and wiping away tears in the vestry; while in the church the band was playing shamelessly secular tunes, though Mr. Moore had stipulated that there should be “no vaudeville music.”

“Why are people crying? A wedding isn’t a sad thing,” said Anna, in a loud and argumentative voice.

Then down the aisle and down the path between a double hedge of Girl Guides, and whirling back to the Plasencia garden and masses and masses of people.

Teresa was immediately sucked into a vortex of activities—elbowing her way through the crowd with a cup of tea for one old lady and an ice for another; steering a third to one of the tents, to choose for herself what she wanted; making suitable rejoinders to such questions and exclamations as: “How charming dear Concha looks, I really think she’s the prettiest bride I’ve ever seen.” “Do tell me what the red ribbon is that Captain Dundas is wearing—the one that isn’t the M.C.? Some one said they thought it was a Belgian order.” “Tell me dear; it was the Scottish Church Service, wasn’t it? I mean, the Scotch Church that’s like ours? I did so like it ... so much more ... well, delicate than ours.” “Oh, just look at those masses of white butterflies on the lavender! What a splendid crop you’ll have! Do you send it up to London?”

Then, as in a nightmare, she heard Anna proclaiming proudly that she had eaten eight ices, and Jasper ten; well, it was too late now to take any measures.

Also, she had time to be amused at noticing that Mrs. Moore had managed to get introduced to Lady Cust, and was talking to her eagerly.

Later on she heard Lettice Moore saying to another bridesmaid, “Poor old Eben! He was frightfully cut up when he heard about the engagement,” and, in the[211] foolish way one has of moving indifferently among the world’s great tragedies—earthquakes, famines, wars—and suddenly feeling a tightening of the throat, and a smarting of the eyes as one realises that at that moment a bullfinch is probably dying in China, Teresa suddenly felt a wave of pity and tenderness sweep over her for Eben, sitting in his cabin (did senior “snotties” have a cabin to themselves? Well, it didn’t really matter), so poorly furnished in comparison with the gramophones and silver photograph frames, and gorgeous cushions of his mates, his arms, with the red hands whose fingers had never recovered their shape from the chilblains of the Baltic, dangling limply down at either side of him, and perhaps tears in his round china-blue eyes.

Then at last Concha and Rory were running and ducking and laughing under a shower of rice, and rose leaves. They looked very young and frail, both of them, blown out into the world, where God knew what awaited them.

“They are like Paulo and Francesca—two leaves clinging together, blown by the wind,” said Jollypot dreamily to Teresa.

We have already likened a wedding to a fall of snow; and as rapidly as a fall of snow it melts, disclosing underneath it just such a dingy world.

One by one the motley company drifted off in trains, and motors, their exit producing on Teresa the same impression that she always got from the end of Twelfth Night—that of a troupe of fairy mimes, laden with their tiffany, their pasteboard yew hedges, their stucco peacocks, slowly sailing away in a cloud out of sight, while the clown whom they have forgotten, sits down[212] here on the earth singing the rain it raineth every day.

But, in spite of a dismantled drawing-room, a billiard-table covered with presents, a trampled lawn and a furious Parker and Rudge, life quickly re-adjusted itself.

The next day but one there was a rose show in the county town, and Rudge went to see it.

After dinner, Dick had him summoned to the drawing-room to discuss the roses with himself and the Doña.

His leathery cheeks were flushed, his hard eyes shone: “Oh ... it was grand, ma’am. I was saying to Mrs. Rudge, ‘Well, I said, one doesn’t often see a sight like that!’ I said. There was a new white rose, sir, well, I’ve never seen anything to beat it....”

“Well, sir, a very fine rose, certainly, but I’m not sure if it would do with us ... but that white rose, sir, I said to Mrs. Rudge, ‘you could almost say it was like the moon,’ I said.”

And what was Time but a gigantic rose, shedding, one by one, its petals? And then Jollypot gathered them up and made them into pot-pourri; but still the petals went on falling, silently, ceaselessly.

That year there was a marvellous harvest, and by the end of July the sun had burned the wheat into the very quintessence of gold, and every evening for a few moments the reflection of its dying rays transfigured it into a vision, so glorious, so radiant, that Dick, looking up from his fish, would exclaim to the dinner-table, “Good God! Look at the wheat!”

Thus must the memory of the corn of Cana, sown with symbols, heavy with memories and legends, radiant with gleams caught from the Golden City in the skies, have appeared to St. John dying in the desert.

Teresa, having, during her walks in the view, noticed a field of wheat from which a segment had already been cut, so that, with the foil of the flat earth beside it, she was able to see the whole depth of the crop, carried away an impression of the greater thickness of wheat-fields as compared to those containing the other crops; and this impression—strengthened by the stronger colouring of the wheat, for to the memory quality is often indistinguishable from quantity—lingering with her after she had got back to Plasencia, whence the view always appeared pintado, a picture, gave her the delusion of appreciating the actual paint, not merely as a medium of representation, but as a beautiful substance in itself; as one appreciates it in a Monet or a Monticelli.

And all the time, silently, imperceptibly, like the processes of nature, the work of harvest was transforming the picture, till by the end of the first week in August many of the planes of unbroken colour had been dotted into shocks or garnered into ricks. The only visible agent of this transformation was an occasional desultory wain with a green tarpaulin tilt, meandering through the silent fields. Its progress through, and its relation to, or, rather, its lack of relation to, the motionless view gave Teresa an almost eerie sense of incongruity, and made her think of a vase of crimson roses she had sat gazing at one night in the drawing-room. The light of the lamp behind it had changed the substance of the roses into something so translucent that they seemed to be made of a fluid or of light. A tiny insect was creeping in and out among their petals, and as she watched it she had a sense of being mentally out of gear in that she could see simultaneously phenomena belonging to such different planes of consciousness as these static phantom flames and that restless creature of the earth—they themselves, at any rate, could neither feel or see each other.

Then they all went away—the Doña and Dick to join Hugh Mallam at Harlech, Jollypot to a sister in Devonshire, and Teresa to Cambridge to stay with Harry Sinclair.

The year began to pay the penalty of its magnificence; for “violent fires soon burn out themselves”; and Teresa, walking down the Backs, or punting up to Byron’s pool, or bicycling among the lovely Cambridgeshire villages, saw everywhere signs of the approach of autumn in reddening leaves and reddening fruits, and there kept running in her head lines from a poem of Herrick’s on Lovers How They Come and Part.

While she was there she met Haines (the man who ran the pastoral players). He had heard of her play from Guy, and was so importunate in his requests to be allowed to read it that she finally gave it to him.

Guy had been right—the need to publish or produce was biological: useless to fight against.

As one hypnotised, she agreed to all of his suggestions: “Cust says you have a lawn with a view which would make an excellent natural background ... I believe it would be the very thing. It’s a piece that needs very few properties—some cardboard trees for the orchard, a few bottles and phials for Trotaconventos’s house, and an altar to give the effect of a chapel in the last scene ... yes, it should be very nice on your lawn, I think folk will like it.”

Did he say folk? But, of course, it would obviously be a favourite word of his.

So, Folk were to take a hand—Folk were to spring up like mushrooms on the lawn of Plasencia, and embody her dreams!

The Doña received the plan of the play’s being acted on her lawn with indulgent indifference; ever since they had been quite little her children had periodically organised dramatic performances. “Mrs. Moore can bring her Women’s Institute to watch it, and that should leave me in peace for this year, at any rate. I suppose we’d better have the county too, though we did give them cakes and ices enough at Concha’s wedding to last them their lifetime. What is this play of yours about, Teresa?”

“Oh ... old Seville,” she answered nervously, “a nunnery ... and ... and ... there’s a knight ... and there’s an old sort of ... sort of witch.”

“Aha! an old gipsy. And does she give the girls love potions?” And the Doña, her head a little on one side, contemplated her, idly quizzical.

“Yes, I daresay she does,” and Teresa gave a nervous laugh, “it’s an auto sacramentál,” she added.

The Doña looked interested: “An auto sacramentál? That’s what they used to play in the old days in the Seville streets at Corpus Christi. Your great-grandmother de La Torre saw one of the last they ever did,” then she began to chuckle, “an auto sacramentál on an English lawn! Poor Mrs. Moore and her Women’s Institute! Still, it will be very good for them, I’m sure.”

Would she guess? She was horribly intelligent; but not literary, so there was hope—and yet ... that affective sensitiveness that, having taken the place for centuries of education and intellection, has developed[217] in the women of Spain into what is almost a sixth sense....

Well, if she did guess it would be only what she knew already, and if she chose to draw false conclusions—let her!

But would she recognise herself? The mere possibility of this made Teresa blush crimson. But it was not her fault; she had not meant to draw her like that—it had grown on her hands.

And then she thought no more about it, but wandered through the garden and ripening orchard, muttering absently:

After what seemed an interminable correspondence with Haines, it was settled that he should bring his company to act the play at the end of September. Teresa had tried hard to make the date an earlier or a later one; but it was not to be ... and perhaps ... who could tell?

Mrs. Moore was delighted that her Institute was to see a play about old Spain, and was sure that it would be most educative.

The idea of its being played before Mrs. Moore and a Women’s Institute amused Teresa; after all it was none of her doing, and she liked watching life when it was left free to arrange its own humorous combinations.

Concha and Rory, Arnold, Harry Sinclair, and Guy, all came to stay at Plasencia to see it; and two[218] days before the performance a telegram came from David, asking if they could put him up for a few nights.

The Doña frowned as she read it, and Guy looked at Teresa; but Concha and Rory begged that room might be made for him, “It will be his last beano, poor creature,” they said.

Well, if it was to be, it was to be. Once one ceases to strain against the chain of events, the peace of numbness creeps over one’s weary limbs, and anyway ... perhaps....

All morning Teresa was busy with preparations; she could not help being amused by the tremendous importance that everything concerning it had for Haines—it was like Parker, who seemed to think the world should stop moving during the fitting-on in the sewing-room of a new blouse.

No one had time to go in the car to meet David; and they had already begun luncheon when he arrived. All the actors were there, so it was a large party, and he sat down on the Doña’s left hand, far away from Teresa. She noticed that he ate practically nothing. He looked much stronger than in the spring, and his expression was almost buoyant.

Before the audience arrived, and when the actors were dressing in the two tents pitched on the lawn, they got a few words together.

“So you’ve been writing a play—‘a chiel amang us takin’ notes’!” and he smiled down on her.

Then Mrs. Moore came bustling across the lawn, shepherding her Institute, a score of working women[219] in their Sunday finery, many of them carrying babies.

“How do you do, Teresa, what a glorious day! I saw dear Concha in church on Sunday; looking so bonny. It must be delightful having her back again. Well, this is a great surprise; we didn’t know you were an author; did we, Mrs. Bolton? We didn’t know Miss Lane wrote; did we? Well, we’re all very much looking forward to it; aren’t we, Mrs. Hedges? I don’t expect you’ve seen many plays before.”

“I saw East Lynne when I was in service in Bedford,” said one woman proudly.

Then the “gentry” began to arrive: “What a day for your play!” “Oh, what a sight your Michaelmas daisies are! It really is a perfect setting for a pastoral play,” “Are there to be any country dances?” “Ah! you have that single rose too ... it certainly is very decorative, but I thought Mr. Lane said ... ah! there he is, in flannels, wise man!” “Ah, there’s Mistress Concha, looking about sixteen, dear thing!—” “I do think it’s a splendid idea having the Institute women—it’s so good for them, this sort of thing.”

Then fantastic figures began to dart in and out of the two tents: a knight in pasteboard armour, a red cross painted on his shield, a friar with glimpses of scarlet hose under his habit—all of them “holy people of God,” all of them dead hundreds of years ago ... Folk, unmistakably Folk.

THE KEY
AN AUTO SACRAMENTÁL

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

ACT I

SCENE I

Sister Assumcion (reads): The hand then drew her in, and she was as joyful as though the whole world had been given her, not so much for the prize of beauty, which had been won, as that she had thus proved herself the worthy mate of Amadis, having, like him, entered the forbidden chamber, and deprived all others of the hope of that glory.

First Nun (with a giggle): Has any one yet put this reading of Amadis into their confession?

Sister Assumcion: More fool they then if they have; we may confess it now that we have reached the colophon. Better absolution for a sheep than a lamb. (They laugh).

Third Nun: Ay, praise be to heaven for the humours that swell old abbesses’ legs and make them keep a-bed!

First Nun: Truly, since she took to her bed, there[222] have been fine doings in this house—it was but yesterday that we were reckoning that it must be close on five months since the Prioress has kept frater.

Third Nun: And Zuleica there, sent all through Lent to the Morería[1] or the Jews’ butcher for red meat ... and she was swearing it was all for her ape Gerinaldo!

First Nun: Yes, and the other night I could have sworn I heard the strains of a Moorish zither coming from her room and the tapping heels of a juglaresa.

Fourth Nun (with a sigh): This house has never been the same since the sad fall of Sister Isabel.

Third Nun: Ah, well, as the common folk, and (with rather a spiteful smile) our dear Sister Assumcion would say: Who sleeps with dogs rises with fleas—and if we sin venially, why, the only wonder is that ’tis not mortally.

Second Nun: Be that as it may, if rumours reach the ears of the Archbishop there’ll be a rare shower of penances at the next visitation. Why, the house will echo for weeks to the mournful strains of Placebo and Dirige, and there will be few of us, I fear, who will not forfeit our black veils for a season.

Fourth Nun: There is one will keep her black veil for the honour of the house.

Sister Assumcion (scornfully): Aye, winds strong enough to level the Giralda could not blow off the black veil of Sister Pilar.

Third Nun: And yet ... she is a Guzman, and the streets are bloody from their swords; they are a wild crew.

Sister Assumcion (mockingly): St. Martin! To the rescue of your little bird!... as the common folk and (with an ironical bow to the third nun) Sister Assumcion would say.

Sister Assumcion: Why, it is but a little story that I sometimes think of when I look at Sister Pilar.

Sister Assumcion: Well, they say that one hot day a little martin perched on the ground under a tree, and, spreading out his wings and ruffling his little feathers, as proud as any canon’s lady at a procession in Holy Week, he piped out: Were the sky to fall I could hold it up on my wings! And at that very moment a leaf from the tree dropped on to his head, and so scared the poor little bird that he was all of a tremble, and he spread his wings and away he flew, crying: St. Martin! To the rescue of your little bird! And that is what we say in the country when folks carry their heads higher than their neighbours. (They laugh.)

Second Nun: And yet has she kindly motions. Do you remember when the little novice Ines was crying her eyes out because she had not the wherewithal to buy her habit, and thought to die with shame in that she would need have to make her profession by pittances? Well, and what must Sister Pilar do but go to the friend of Ines, little Maria Desquivel, whose father, they say, is one of the richest merchants in Seville, feigning that for the good of her soul she would fain consecrate a purse of money, and some sundries bequeathed her by an aunt, to the profession of two[224] novices, and said that she would take it very kind if Maria and Ines would be these two. And so little Ines was furnished out with habit, and feather-bed, and quilt all powdered with stags’ heads and roses, and a coffer of painted leather, and a dozen spoons, and a Dominican friar to preach the sermon at her profession, without expending one blush of shame; in that she shared the debt with her rich friend. And then, too, with children she is wonderfully tender.

Fourth Nun (with a little shiver): But that cold gray eye like glass! I verily believe her thoughts are all ... for the last things.

Fourth Nun (musing): And yet, that book, by a monk long dead, about the miracles of Our Lady ... it shows her wondrous lenient to sin, let but the sinners be loud enough in her praise ... there was the thief she saved from the gallows because he had said so many Aves.

Sister Assumcion (a note of nervousness perceptible through the insolence of her voice): And are those in religion to have, forsooth, a smaller share in the spiritual treasure of the Church than thieves?

Sister Pilar: They say there was once a giant, so strong that he could have lifted the Sierra Morena and placed them on the Pyrenees, but one day he happened on a little stone no bigger than my nail, but so firmly was it embedded in the ground that all his mighty strength availed him nothing to make it budge an inch.

Sister Pilar (with a shrug): Give it whatever meaning tallies with your humour. (She opens a book and begins to read it.)

Sister Assumcion (yawning): I’m hungry. Shall I send Zuleica to beg some marzipan from the Cellaress, or shall I possess my soul and belly in patience until dinner-time?

First Nun (jocosely): For shame! Gluttony is one of the deadly sins, is it not, Sister Pilar?

Jaime Rodriguez: Christ and His Mother be with you, my daughters. (Sits down and mops his brow.) ’Tis wondrous cool and pleasant in your court. (He gives a shy glance at Sister Pilar, but she continues to keep her eyes on her book. Turns to fourth nun.) Well, daughter, and what of the cope you promised me?

Second Nun (holding up her embroidery): See! It wants but three more roses and one swan.

Jaime Rodriguez (with another glance in the direction of Sister Pilar): And do you know of what the swan is the figure? In that, flying from man, it makes its[226] dwelling in wild, solitary haunts, St. Gregory of Nazianus holds that it figures the anchorite, and truly....

Sister Pilar (suddenly looking up, and smiling a little): But what of its love of the lyre and all secular songs, by which it is wont to be lured to its destruction from its most secret glens? I have read that this same failing has led some learned doctors to look upon it as a figure of the soul of man, drawn hither and thither by the love of vain things.

Jaime Rodriguez (up to now he has spoken in a mincing, self-conscious voice, but from this point on his voice is shrill and excited): Yes, yes, but that can also be interpreted as the love of godly men for sermons and edification and grave seemly discourse on the beautitudes of eternal life, and the holy deeds of men and women long since departed....

Sister Assumcion: The love, in short, of such discourse as yours, father? (She tries in vain to catch Sister Pilar’s eye and wink at her.)

Jaime Rodriguez (pouting like a cross child, sotto voce): Honey is not for the mouth of the ass.

Sister Assumcion: Well, when you joined us, we were in the midst of just such a discourse. ’Twas touching the sin of a religious, which Sister Pilar was likening to a stone of small dimensions, but so heavy that a mighty giant could not move it.

Jaime Rodriguez (turning eagerly to Sister Pilar): Where did you read that exemplum, daughter? I have not come upon it.

Sister Pilar: Sister Assumcion has drawn her own meaning from a little foolish tale. She must surely be fresh from pondering the Fathers that she is so quick to find spiritual significations. Is that volume lying by you (pointing to “Amadis”) one of the works of the Fathers, sister?

Jaime Rodriguez: Well, ’tis doubtless true that a little sin shows blacker on the soul of a religious than a great sin on a layman’s soul ... but when it comes to the weighing in the ghostly scales, a religious has very heavy things to throw into the balance—Aves and Paters, though made of nought but air, are heavy things. Then, there is the nourishment of Christ’s body every day, making our souls wax fat, and—and—(impatiently) oh, all the benefits of a religious weigh heavily. The religious, like a peasant, has a treasure hid ’neath his bed that will for ever keep the wolf from the door. (Looks round to see if his conceit is appreciated.) In Bestiaries, the wolf, you know, is a figure of the devil.

Trotaconventos (in unctuous, mocking voice): Six hens to one cock! I verily believe that was the sight that made Adam weary in Eden. Holy hens and reverend cock, I bid you good morrow. (She catches Sister Assumcion’s eye and gives a little nod.)

First Nun: For shame! You have sorely neglected San Miguel these last days. What news in the town?

Third Nun: I hear the Ponces gave a tournament and bull-fight to celebrate a daughter’s wedding, and that the bridegroom was gored by the bull and the leeches despair of his recovery—is’t true?

First Nun: Have you been of late to the Alcazar? You promised to note for me if Doña Maria wore her gown cut square or in a peak?

Trotaconventos (covering her ears with her hands): Good ladies, you’ll have me deaf. And do you not think shame to ask about such worldly matters before your confessor, there ... and before Sister Pilar? (turning to Sister Pilar). Well, lady, and have the wings sprouted yet? But bear in mind the proverb that says, the ant grew wings to its hurt; and why? Because it took to flying and fell a prey to the birds.

Sister Pilar: Truly, you are as well stocked with proverbs and fables as our sister Assumcion. You, doubtless, collect them at fairs and peasants’ weddings, but ... (she breaks off suddenly, bites her lip, colours, and takes up her book).

Trotaconventos: Ah, well, wisdom can walk in a homespun jerkin as well as in the purple of King Solomon, eh, Don priest? And as to Sister Assumcion, what if her speech be freckled with a few wholesome, sun-ripened proverbs? They will not show on her pretty face when the nuns of Seville meet the nuns of Toledo in the contest of beauty, eh, my pretty? (Sister Assumcion laughs and tosses her head.) But the reverend chaplain is looking sourly! It is rare for Trotaconventos to meet with sour looks from the cloth. Why, there is not a canon’s house in los Abades that does not sweetly stink of my perfumes: storax, benjamin, gum, amber, civet, musk, mosqueta. For do they not say that holiness and sweet odours are the same? It was Don Miguel de Caceres—that stout, well-liking canon, God rest his soul, who lived in the house the choir-master[229] has now—and I used to keep his old shaven face as soft for him as a ripe fig, and I saw to it that he could drink his pig-skin a day without souring his breath; well, he used to call me ‘the panther’ of Seville; for it seems the panther is as many-hued as the peacock, and the other beasts follow it to their destruction because of the sweet odours it exudes. And there were words from Holy Writ he would quote about me—in odorcur or words to that effect. Nor were the other branches....

Jaime Rodriguez (who had been fidgeting with impatience at Trotaconventos’s verbosity, as usual shrilly and excitedly): Doubtless the words quoted by the late canon were, in odore unguentorum tuorum curremus—in the track of thy perfumes shall we run. They come in the Song of Songs, the holy redondilla wherewith Christ Jesus serenades Holy Church, and truly....

Trotaconventos (calmly ironical): Truly, Don Jaime, you are a learned clerk. But as I was saying, it is not only for my perfumes that they seek me in los Abades. Don Canon is wont to have a large paunch, and Trotaconventos was not always as stout as she is now ... there were doors through which I could glide, while Don Canon’s bulk, for all his puffing and squeezing, must stand outside in the street. So in would go Trotaconventos, as easily as though it were your convent, ladies, her wallet stuffed with redondillas and coplas, and all the other learned ballads wherein clerks are wont to rhyme their sighs and tears and winks and leers, and thrown in with these were toys of my own devising—tiring-pins of silver-gilt, barred belts, slashed shoes, kirtles laced with silk, lotions against freckles and warts and women’s colics....

Jaime Rodriguez: Er—er—the Roman dame, Cleopatra, the leman of Mark Antony, was also learned in such matters; she wrote a book on freckles and their cure and....

Trotaconventos: I do not doubt it, Don Jaime. Well, in would go Trotaconventos, and round her would flock the pretty little uncoiffed maids, like the doves in the Cathedral garden when one has crumbs in one’s wallet. And I would feed them with marzipan and deck them out with my trinkets, and then they would sigh and say it was poor cheer going always with eyes cast on the ground and dressed as soberly as a nun (she winks at the Nuns) when they had chest upon chest packed as close as pears in a basket with scarlet clothes from Bruges and Malines, and gowns of Segovian cloth and Persian samite, and bandequins from Bagdad, all stiff with gold and pearls and broidered stories, rich as the shroud of St. Ferdinand or the banners of the King of Granada, lying there to fatten the moths till their parents should get them a husband. And I would say, ‘Well, when the dog put on velvet breeches he was as good as his master. There’s none to see but old Trotaconventos, and she won’t blab. I’d like to see how this becomes you, and this ... and this.’ And I would have them decked out as gay and fine as a fairy, and they strutting before the mirror and laughing and blushing and taking heart of grace. Then my hand would go up their petticoats, and they would scream, ‘Ai! ai! Trotaconventos, you are tickling me!’ and laugh like a child of seven. And I would say, ‘Ah, my sweeting, there is one could tickle you better than me.’ And so I would begin Don Canon’s suit. Ay, and I would keep him posted in her doings,[231] telling him at what procession she would be at, or in what church she would hear ‘cock’s mass.’ Or, if it was to a pretty widow his fancy roved, it was I that could tell him which days she was due at the church-yard to pray at her husband’s grave ... aye, as the proverb says, when the broom sprouts the ass is born to eat it.

Sister Assumcion (with a malicious glance at Jaime Rodriguez): But another proverb says: Honey is not for the mouth of the ass.

Trotaconventos (with a wink): And yet another says: Honey lies hid in rocks; and it was not only to the houses of lords and merchants that I went on Don Canon’s business. How did I win my name of Trotaconventos? It was not given me by my gossips at the font. I was not taught in my catechism that on the seventh day God created man and woman, and on the eighth day He created monks and nuns ... were you so taught, Sister Pilar?

Sister Pilar (looking up from her book, her eye sparkling and her cheek flushing): As to that ... I have seen a painted Bible wherein the Serpent of Eden is depicted with a wicked old woman’s face.

Trotaconventos (chuckling): A good, honest blow, Sister Pilar! But as the proverb says, the abbot dines off his singing, and of its own accord the pot does not fill itself with stew. Howbeit, Sister Pilar, who laughs last laughs on the right side of his mouth. Well, ladies, shall we to the parlour? A ship from Tunis has lately come in, and one from Alexandria, and one[232] from Genoa, and they tell me I was born under Liber with the moon in the ascendant, and that draws me ever to the water’s edge, and sailors have merry kind hearts and bring me toys, and, it may be, there will be that among them that will take your fancy.

Jaime Rodriguez (in a constrained voice): I am to read mass to the pilgrims before they start for Guadalupe.

Sister Pilar (smiling a little sadly): Because I want to keep my own dream of a pilgrimage—nothing but mountains and rivers and seas and visions and hymns to Our Lady.

Jaime Rodriguez: I fear there are other things as well: fleas and dust, and tumblers and singers, and unseemly talk.

Sister Pilar: Hence I’d liefer go on pilgrimage by the road of my own dreams. (Passionately) Oh, these other things, small and pullulating and fertile, and all of them the spawn of sin! One cannot be rid of them. Why, even in the Books of Hours, round the grave Latin psalms the monks must needs draw garlands and butterflies and hawks and hounds; and we nuns powder our handiwork—the copes and vestments for[233] the mass—not with such meet signs as crosses and emmies, but with swans and true-love knots and birds and butterflies ... (she breaks off, half laughing). I would have things plain and grave.

Jaime Rodriguez (impatiently): Yes, yes, but you are forgetting that Nature is the mirror in which is reflected the thoughts of God; hence, to the discerning eye, there is nothing mean and trivial, but everything, everything, is a page in the great book of the Passion and the Redemption. For him who has learned to read that book, the Martyrs bleed in roses and in amethysts, the Confessors keep their council in violets, and in lilies the Virgins are spotless—not a spray of eglantine, not a little ant, but is a character in the book of Nature. Why, without first reading it, the holy fathers could not crack a little nut; it is the figure of Christ, said Adam of Saint-Victor—its green husk is His humanity, its shell the wood of the Cross, its kernel the heavenly nourishment of the Host. Nay, daughter, I tell you....

Sister Pilar: Yes, yes, but do you verily believe the nun with her needle, the clerk with his brush, wots anything of these hidden matters? Nay, it is nought but vanity. Oh! these multitudinous seeds of vanity that lie broadcast in every soul, in every mote of sunshine, in every acre of the earth! There is no soul built of a substance so closely knit but that it has crannies wherein these seeds find lodging; and, ere you can say a pater, lo! they are bourgeoning! ’Tis like some church that stands four-square to the winds and sun so long as folk flock there to pray; then comes a rumour that the Moors are near, and the folks leave their homes and fly; and then, some day, they may return, and they will find the stout walls of their church all starred with jessamine, intagliated with ivy, that eat and eat until it crumbles to the ground. So many[234] little things ... everywhere! And our thoughts ... say it be the Passion of Our Lord we choose for contemplation; at first, all is well, the tears flow, ’tis almost as if we smelled the sweat and dust of the road to Calvary ... and then, after a little space, we stare around bewildered, and know that our minds have broken into scores of little bright thoughts, like the margins of the Hours, and then ...

Jaime Rodriguez: Yes, daughter, but I tell you you should obtain the key to the Creation; read St. Ambrose’s Hexæmeron, and thus school your mind by figures for the naked types of Heaven; there every house will be a church, its hearth an altar on which, no longer hid under the species of bread and wine, Jesus Christ will be for ever enthroned. And its roof will be supported not by pillars carved into the semblance of the Patriarchs and Apostles, but by the Patriarchs ... oh, yes, and the housewife’s store of linen will all be corporals, and her plate ... you are smiling!

Sister Pilar: How happy you must have been playing with your toys when you were a child! I can see you with an old wine-keg for an altar, a Moor’s skull for a chalice, and a mule’s discarded shoe for a pyx, chanting meaningless words, and rating the other children if their wits wandered ... but ... you are angry?

Jaime Rodriguez (rising in high dudgeon): Aye, ever mocking! Methinks ... I cannot call to mind ever reading that holy women of old mocked their confessors.

Trotaconventos: As to hell-fire, my dear, you’ll meet with many a procuress and bawd in Paradise, for we have a mighty advocate in St. Mary Magdalene, who was of our craft. And as to the holy life, why, when your hams begin to wither and your breasts to sag, then cast up your eyes and draw as long an upper lip as a prioress at a bishop’s visitation. A sinful youth and a holy old age—thus do we both enjoy the earth and win to Paradise hereafter. Well, my sweeting, all is in train—I’d eat some honey, it softens the voice; and repeat the in Temerate and the De Profundis, for old wives say they are wonderful lucky prayers in all such business, and ... well, I think that is all. Be down at the orchard wall at nine o’clock to-night, and trust the rest to what the Moors call the ‘great procuress’—Night.

SCENE II

Sister Pilar: Juanito, dear, you must not look upon this exercise as a game. It is the doctrine of Holy Mother Church. It is your pilgrim’s staff and not a light matter. Let us begin again.

Juanita: Oh, I am so weary! The sun’s so hot. My head seems as if to-day it could not hold Creeds and such matters. Prithee, Sister Pilar, will you not read to us?

Sister Pilar: Oh, children, you have been at your tasks scarce quarter of an hour.

Sister Pilar: I fear I am a fond and foolish master. Well, so be it. (She opens a large folio.) Let me see....

Sister Pilar: This is the place. “Now one of the keys was of so pure a silver that it seemed to be white, and in places it was gilded, and it was of a very notable and exquisite workmanship. In length it was the third of a cubit. Its stem was hollow and delicately turned, and it ended in a ball inlaid with divers metals. Round its guards in curious characters was engraved: God will open, the King will enter. The circle of its ring contained an engraved plaque like to a medal, embossed with flowers and leaves. And in the centre of the hole was a little plaque threaded with a delicately twisted cord, and the ring was joined to the stem by a cube of gold on the four sides of which were embossed alternately lions and castles. And on the edge of its bulk, between delicately inlaid arabesques, there was written, in Hebrew words and Hebrew characters, the same motto as that on the guards, which is in Latin—‘Rex Regium aperiet: Rex universæ terræ introibit’—the King of Kings will open, the King of all the earth will enter. Some say the key and the whole incident is a symbol of the Host being lain in the custodia.”

Juanito: Oooh! It must have been a rare fine key. When I’m a man, may I have such a key?

Sister Pilar: I sadly fear, Juanito, that ’tis only to saints that such keys are given. Think you, you’ll be a saint some day?

Juanito: Not I! They live on lentils and dried peas. I’ll be a tumbler at the fairs. Already I can stand on my head ... (catching Pepita’s eye) nearly.

Juanito (crestfallen and anxious to change the subject): Could St. Ferdinand stand on his head?

Pepita (much shocked): For shame, Juanito! Sister Pilar has told us he was a great saint!

Sister Pilar: Well, he had a great devotion for Our Lady and the Eucharist. He founded many convents and monasteries....

Sister Pilar: More than a hundred years ... when your great-great-grandfather was living.

Juanito: All those nuns, and when they die new ones coming! Why, it’s like Don Juan Tenorio springing up again in our game!

Juanito: Well, and so it is! And old Domingo says that his ghost tries o’ nights to steal the live nuns, but the dead ones beat him back.

Pepita: Yes, and it’s Don Juan that makes the flowers and the corn grow, and that’s what the game is that Domingo taught us.

Sister Pilar: Children! Children! This is all foolish and evil talk. It is God, as you know well, that makes the corn grow. You should not listen to old Domingo.

Juanito: Oh, but he tells us fine tales of Roland and Belermo and the Moorish king that rode on a zebra.... I like them better than the lives of the Saints. Come, Pepita, let’s go and play.

Sister Pilar (musing): They too ... they too ... pretty flowers and butterflies upon the margin of the hours that catch one’s eye and fancy.... Pretty brats of darkness ... and yet Juanito is only five and is floating still, a little Moses, on the waters of Baptism. Soft wax ... but where is the impress of the seal of the King of Kings? He is a pigmy sinner, and albeit the vanities pursued by him are tiny things—balls and sweetmeats and pagan stories—still are they vanities,[240] and with his growth will they grow. Jesus! My nightmare vision! Sin, sin, sin everywhere! Babes turn hideous. Dead birds caught by the fowler and turned into his deadliest snares. The fiends of hell shrink to their stature and ape their innocence and serious eyes; and how many virgins that the love of no man could have lured, have, through longing for children, been caught in concupiscence? Oh, sin and works of darkness, I am so weary of you!

Dennys: Christ, and His Mother, and all the Saints be with you, daughter. Whew! Your porter’s a lusty-sinewed rogue, and he was loath to let me enter, saying that he and the maid he’s courting were locked up in a church by one of my order and not let out till he had paid toll of all that he had in his purse (throws[241] back his head and laughs), and I asked him if the maid lost something too, but....

Dennys: My pleasure? Need you ask that of a mendicant friar? Why, my pleasure is the grease of St. John of the golden beard, the good sweat of gold coins—that is my pleasure. “Nothing for myself, yet drop it into the sack,” as your proverb has it. And, in truth, ’tis by the sweat of our brow that we, too, live; oh, we are most learned and diligent advocates, and, though we may skin our clients’ purses, down to robbing them of their mule and stripping them of their cloak, yet we are tireless in their cause, appealing from court to court till we reach the Supreme Judge and move Him to set free our poor clients, moaning in the dungeons of Purgatory. There is no cause too feeble for my pleading; by my prayers a hundred stepmothers, fifty money-lenders, eighty monks, and twenty-five apostate nuns have won to Paradise; so, daughter if you will but ... (catches sight of Pepita and Juanito who have stolen up, and are listening to him open-mouthed) Godmorrow, lord and lady! I wonder ... has this poor friar any toy or sugar-plum to please little lords and ladies? (Pepita and Juanito exchange shy, excited looks, laugh and hang their heads.) Now, my hidalgo, tell me would you liefer have a couple of ripe figs or two hundred years off Purgatory? (He winks at Sister Pilar, who has been staring at him with a cold surprise.)

Dennys (with a loud laugh): Well answered, Doña Doubting Thomas (turning to Sister Pilar). You Spaniards pass at once for the most doubting and the most credulous of the nations. You believe every[242] word of your priest and doubt every word of your neighbour. Why, I remember ... may I sit down, daughter?... I remember once at Avila....

Dennys: No, nor I have! As your poor folk say, “One ‘take’ is worth a score of ‘I’ll gives.’” Give me your balls. (He makes cabalistic signs over them.) There now, they are figs, and brebas at that! What, you don’t believe me? (noticing their disappointed faces.) It must be at the next meeting, little lord and lady. Half a dozen for each of you, my word as a tr—— as a friar. But you must not let me keep you from your business ... I think you have business with a ball, over at that wall yonder?

Dennys: No, no, it would not suit my frock. Another day, maybe. Listen, get you to your game of ball, but watch for the Moor who may come swooping down on you like this (He catches them up in his arms, they laughing and struggling): fling them over his shoulders as it were a bag of chestnuts. Then hie for the ovens of Granada! (He trots them back to the wall, one perched on either shoulder.) Now, my beauties, you busy yourselves with your ball and expect the Moor. But mind! He’ll not come if you call out to him. (He returns to the bewildered Sister Pilar.) I think that will keep them quiet and occupied a little space. Well, I suppose your sisters are having their siesta and dreaming of ... I’ll sit here a little space if I may, your court is cool and pleasant.

Dennys (looking at her quizzically): So all day long you sit and dream and sing the Hours.

Sister Pilar (coldly): And is that not the life of a religious in your country?

Dennys: And so my tongue has betrayed my birth? Well, it is the Judas of our members. But I am not ashamed of coming from beyond the Pyrenees. And as to the life of a religious in France—what with these roving knaves that call themselves “companions” and make war on every man, and every woman, too, and the ungracious Jacquerie that roast good knights in the sight of their lady wife and children, and sack nunneries and rape the nuns, why the Hours are apt to be sung to an un-gregorian tune. And then the followers of the Regent slaying the followers of the Provost of Paris in the streets....

Sister Pilar: Oh, the hate of kings and dukes and desperate wicked men! Were such as they but chained, there might be room for peace and contemplation.

Dennys: The hate of kings and dukes and desperate wicked men! But, daughter, the next best thing to love is hate. ’Tis the love and hate of dead kings and lovely dead Infantas has filled the garden-closes with lilies and roses, and set men dipping cloths in crimson dye, and broidering them in gold, and breaking spears in jousts and tourneys ... that love and hate that never dies, but is embalmed in songs and ballads, and....

Dennys: It has no need of my pleading, lady. Why, I know most of the cots and castles between here and the good town of Paris. I have caught great, proud ladies at rere-supper in their closets, drinking and jesting and playing on the lute with clerks and valets, and one of them with his hand beneath her breast, while her lord snored an echo to the hunter’s horn that[244] rang through the woods of his dreams; and in roadside inns I have met little, laughing nuns, who....

Sister Pilar (rising): You speak exceeding strangely for a friar, nor is it meet I should hear you out.

Dennys: Nay, daughter, pardon my wild tongue; the tongue plays ever ape to the ear, and if the ear is wont to hear more ribald jests than paters, why then the tongue betrays its company ... nay, daughter, before you go, resolve me this: what is sin? To my thinking ’tis the twin-sister of virtue, and none but their foster-mother knows one from t’other. Are horses and tourneys and battles sin? Your own St. James rides a great white charger and leads your chivalry against the Moors. (With a sly wink) I have met many an hidalgo who has seen him do it! And we are told there was once an angelic war in Heaven, and I ween the lists are ever set before God’s throne, and the twelve Champions, each with an azure scarf, break lances for a smile from Our Lady. And as to rich, strange cloths and jewels, the raiment of your painted wooden Seville virgins would make the Queen of France herself look like a beggar maid. And is love sin? The priests affirm that God is love. Tell me then, daughter, what is the birth-mark of the twin-sister sin that we may know and shun her?

Dennys: Death? (half to himself). Yes, I have seen it at its work ... that flaunting, wanton page at Valladolid, taunting the old Jew doctor because ere long all his knowledge of herbs and precious stones would not keep him sweet from the worm, and ere the week was done the pretty page himself cold and blue and stiff, and all the ladies weeping. And the burgher’s young wife at Arras, a baby at each breast, and her good man, his merry blue eyes twinkling, crying, “Oh, my wife is a provident woman, Dennys,[245] and has laid up two pairs of eyes and four hands and four strong legs and two warm hearts against her old age and mine” ... then how he laughed! And ere the babies had cut their first tooth it was violets and wind-flowers she was nourishing.... Ay, Death ... when I was a child I mind me, and still sometimes, as I grow drowsy in my bed, my fancies that have been hived all day begin to swarm—buzzing, stinging, here, there, everywhere ... then they take shape, and start marching soberly two and two, bishops and monks, and yellow-haired squires, and little pert clerks, and oh, so many lovely ladies—those ladies that we spoke of, who being dead have yet a thousand lives in the dreams of folk alive—Dame Venus, Dame Helena, the slave-girl Briseis, Queen Iseult, Queen Guinevere, the Infanta Polyzene; and, although they weep sorely and beat with their hands, a herald Moor shepherds them to the dance of the grisly King, who, having danced a round with each of them, hurls them down into a black pit ... down which I, too, shortly fall ... to come up at the other side, like figures on Flemish water-clocks, at the birds matins.

Sister Pilar (in an awed voice): Why ... ’tis strange ... but I, too, fall asleep thus!

Dennys (shaking his finger at her): For shame, daughter, for the avowal! It tells of rere-suppers of lentils and manjar-blanca in the dorter, or, at least, of faring too fatly in the frater ... what if I blab on you to the Archbishop? Well, this is a piteous grave discourse! I had meant to talk to you of Life, and lo! I have talked of Death.

Dennys (gazing at them in bewilderment): The Moor? What Moor ... Don Death’s trumpeter? Why, to be sure! Beshrew me for a wool-gatherer! It was this way: as he was riding forth from the gate of Elvira he was stricken down with colic by Mahound, because in an olla made him by his Christian slave he had unwittingly eaten of the flesh of swine.

Juanito: Oh, you are such a funny man! Isn’t he, Sister Pilar? But you must come and play with us now.

Juanito: We’ll play it three. When we reach the word “grave” we all fall down flop. Come!

Juanito: But we have none to sing the last copla for us that we may spring up again. Dear Sister Pilar, couldn’t you once?

SCENE III

Don Manuel de Lara (who all through this scene is at the other side of the wall and hence invisible): Whist! Muza! Whist, my beauty! (sings):

Don Manuel de Lara (quickly and tonelessly, as if repeating a lesson): Oh, disembodied voice! Like the cuckoo’s, you tell of enamelled meads watered by fertile streams and of a myriad small hidden beauties that in woods and mountains the spring keeps sheltered from men’s eyes.

Sister Assumcion (laughing softly): Sir knight, howbeit I have never till this moment heard your voice, yet I can tell ’tis not an instrument tuned to these words.

Don Manuel de Lara: A pox on trovares and clerks, and the French Courts of Love.... I’ll trust to the union of the moon and my own hot blood to find me words!

Sister Assumcion (mockingly): The moon’s a cold dead mare, is your blood a lusty enough stallion to beget ought on her?

Don Manuel de Lara (with an impatient exclamation): I’ve not come to weave fantastic talk like serenading Moors. All I would say can be said in the Old Christians’ Castilian.

Don Manuel de Lara (slowly and deliberately): So you have come to the tryst.

Don Manuel de Lara (as if having come to a sudden resolution): Listen, lady. I am no carpet knight, dubbed with a jester’s bladder at a rere-supper of infantas. I won my spurs when I was fourteen at the Battle of Salado. Since then I have been in sieges and skirmishes and night-alarms, enough to dint ten coats of mail. And because there is great merit in fighting the Moors, I have permitted myself to sin lustily. I have even lain with the daughters of Moors and Jews, for which I went on foot to Compostella and did sore penance, for it is a heavy sin, and the one that brought in days gone by the flood upon the earth. But never have I sinned with the wife or daughter or kinswoman of my over-lord, or with one of the brides of Christ. I am from Old Castille, and I cannot forget my immortal soul. But I verily believe that old witch Trotaconventos has laid a spell upon me; for she has so inflamed my blood with her talk of your eyes, your lashes, your small white teeth, your scarlet lips and gums, your breasts, your flanks, your ankles ... oh, I know well the tune to which old bawds trumpet their wares; and man is so fashioned as to be swayed by certain words that act on him like charms—such as “breasts,” “hips,” “lips”—and must as surely burn at the naming of them as a hound must prick his ears[250] and bay at the sound of a distant horn, but it is but with a small, wavering flame, soon quenched, with a “no, no, gutter-crone, none of your scurvy, worm-eaten goods for me!” But when the old witch talked of you, ’twas with the honeyed tongue of Pandar himself, the same that stole from the good Knight, Troilus, all manliness and pride of arms. And she has strangely stirred my dreams ... they are ever of scaling towers and mining walls; but, although dreaming, I know well the towers are not of stone, nor the mines dug in earth ... lady ... I think I am sick ... I——

Sister Assumcion (frightened): What ails the man? ... but ... Trotaconventos ... I had not thought ... ’tis all so strange....

Don Manuel de Lara (solemnly): Why did you come to the postern to-night, Sister Assumcion?

Sister Assumcion (angrily): Why did I come? A pretty question! I came because of the exceeding importunities of Trotaconventos, who said you lay sick for love of me.

Don Manuel de Lara (low, sternly): You are the bride of Christ. Is your profession a light thing?

Sister Assumcion (shrilly): Profession? Much wish I had to be professed! I do not know who my mother was nor who my father. I was reared by the priest of a little village near the Moorish frontier. He was good-natured enough so long as the parishioners were regular with their capons and sucking-pigs laid on the altar for the souls of the dead, but all he cared for was sport with his greyhound and ferret, and they said he hadn’t enough Latin to say the Consecration aright, and that the souls of his parishioners were in dire peril through his tongue tripping and stumbling over the office of Baptism, so ’twas little respect for religion that I learned in his house. And so little did I dream of being professed a nun that though the fear of the Moors lay[251] black over the village, and the other maids could not go to fill their pitchers at the well or take the goatherds their midday bread and garlic without their hearts trembling like a bird, yet as to me I never tired of hearing the tale of the Infanta Proserpine, who, as she was weaving garlands in her father’s garden, was stolen by the Moorish king, Pluton; and I would pray, yes, pray at the shrine of Our Lady on the hill to lull my guardian-angel asleep and sheath his sword, and on that very day to send a fine Moorish knight in a crimson marlota and armour glittering in the sun, clattering down the bridle-path to carry me off to Granada, where, if it had meant a life of ease and pleasure, I would gladly have bowed down before the gold and marble Mahound.

Sister Assumcion (bitterly): Through no choice of my own. When I was twelve, the priest said he had law business in Seville, and asked me if I’d like to go with him. If I’d like to go with him! It was my dream to see Seville, and I had made in my fancy a silly, simple picture—a town which was always a great fair, stall upon stall of bright, glittering merchandise, and laughter and merriment, and tumblers and dancers, threaded with a blue river upon which ships with silken sails and figureheads of heathen gods, laden with lords and ladies, and painted birds that talked, were ever sailing up and down, and all small and very brightly coloured, like the pictures in a merry lewd book of fables by an old Spanish trovar, Ovid, for which my priest cared more than for his breviary. And oh, the adventures that were to wait me there! Well, we set out, I riding behind him on his mule ... if I shut my eyes it all comes back as if it were but yesterday.... I jolted and sore and squeamish from my nearness to him, as[252] his linen was as foul as were the corporals in his Church ... then the band of merchants and their varlets we travelled with for greater safety on the road.... It was bicker, bicker all the time between them and my priest ... each time we came to a bridge it was, “Nay, sir priest, we’ll not let you across for you and your cloth pay naught to their building and upkeep,” and then.... Oh, ’twas a tedious journey, and took the heart out of me. Well, we reached Seville towards dusk ... a close, frowning, dirty town, in truth, nought but a Morisco settlement such as we had at home—the houses all blank and grim like dead faces, and oh! the stink of dogs’ corpses! And not a soul to be seen for fear of the Guzmans and the Ponces.... And yet I’d catch the whiff of orange-flowers across the walls, and I heard a voice singing the ballad, Count Arnaldo, to the lute ... ’tis strange, these two things, whiffs of orange-flower at night and the Count Arnaldo ... it has ever been the same with me, they turn the years to come to music and perfume ... or, rather, ’tis as if the years had come and gone, and already I was old and dreaming them back again. Well, albeit like a pious little maid, I had said a Pater and Ave for the parents of St. Julian that he might send me a good lodging, ’twas to the house of Trotaconventos the priest took me that night, and it seemed to me indeed an evil house and she a witch, and I never closed my eyes all night. Next morning she brought me here, and after that night, what with its cool dorter and frater, and its patio and gardens, it seemed like the castle of Rocafrida—the fairy houses in ballads; and whether I would or not I became a novice ... a dowerless novice without clothes or furniture, and never a coin even to give the servants at Christmas ... and then ... what would you? Once a novice ’tis wellnigh impossible to ’scape the black veil (her tone once more bantering). And that’s[253] the end of the story, and may the good things that come be for all the shire. Did the daughters of the Moors and Jews tell you such prosy tales?

Don Manuel de Lara: You have not yet told me why you came to the postern to-night.

Sister Assumcion (in a voice where archness tries to conceal embarrassment): Why, you must be one of the monkish knights of Santiago! I feel like a penitent in the Confessional ... mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, aha! aha!

Don Manuel de Lara (very solemnly): I will know. Did that old witch in mandragora or henbane, or whatever be the hellish filters that hold the poison of love, pour me hurtling and burning through your veins as you were poured through mine?

Sister Assumcion: Jesus!... I ... she did indeed please my fancy with the picture that she drew of you ... but come, sir knight! You forget I have not yet seen your face, much less....

Don Manuel de Lara (slowly): So on a cold stomach, through caprice and a little accidia you were ready to forfeit eternal bliss and ... I will not mince my words ... make Our Lord Jesus Christ a cuckold?

Sister Assumcion: Well, of all the strange talk! I vow, Sir Knight, it is as if you blamed me for coming to the tryst. Have you forgotten how for weeks you did importune that old witch with prayers and vows and tears and groans that she should at least contrive I should hold speech with you to give you a little ease of your great torment? And what’s more, ’tis full six weeks since you began plaguing me by proxy; at least, I have not failed in coyness.

Don Manuel de Lara: True, lady, I ask your pardon.[254] Why should I blame you for my dreams? (half to himself) a phantom fire laying waste a land of ghosts and shadows ... then a little wind wafting the smell of earthly things ... wet flowers and woods ... its wings dropping wholesome rain and lo! the fantastic flames with dying hisses vanish in the smoke that kindled them.... Lips? Lashes? Haunches? I spoke foolishly; they are not enough. How can I tell my dreams? (his voice grows wild). Lips straining towards lips against the pulling back of all the hosts of Heaven ... a sin so grave as to be own sister to virtue ... oh! sweetness coming out of horror ... once my horse’s hoofs crushed a seven years’ old Moorish maid ... ooh!

Sister Assumcion: Indeed! And in the interval have you been made prioress or sub-prioress?

Sister Pilar: Sister Assumcion, this is not the time for idle taunts. I cannot say I love you, and in this I know I err, for no religious house can flourish except Sisters Charity, Meekness, and Peace are professed among its nuns. But I came for the honour of this house.... God knows its scutcheon is blotted enough ... have you forgotten Sister Isabel?... believe me I must speak; it would go ill with me were I to see a sister take horse for hell and not catch hold of the bridle, nay, fling my body underneath the hoofs, if that could stop the progress.

Sister Assumcion: And what is all this tedious prose? Because, forsooth, feeling faint at Compline, I crept out to take the evening air.

Sister Pilar: You lie, sister. Think you I am deaf?[255] As I drew near a man’s voice reached me from the other side of the wall. (Raising her voice.) Most impious of all would-be adulterers, know that your banns will be forbidden by the myriad voices of the Church Militant, the Church Triumphant, and the Church in Torment. For she (and all nuns do so), who through the watches of the night prays for the dead, raises up a ghostly bodyguard to fight for her virginity. Beware of the dead! They hedge this sister round.

Sister Assumcion (shrilly): You canting, white-lipped, sneering witch! You whose breasts are no bigger than a maid of twelve! You ... you ... this talk comes ill from you ... do you think me blind? Oh, Sister Vanity, what of your veil drawn down so modestly to your eyes in frater or in chapter, but when there are lay visitors in the parlour, or even Don Jaime gossiping in the patio, have I not seen that same veil creep up and up, till it reveals the broad, white brow? Oh, and the smile hoarded like a miser’s gold that when at last it is disclosed all may the more marvel at the treasure of small, white teeth! Oh, swan who loves solitude but who, of all birds, is the most swayed by the music of ... mendicant friars!

Sister Assumcion: Aha! That shaft went home! What of the Deadly Sins grimacing behind the masks of the virtues? Why do you hate me so? Well, I will tell you. ’Tis the work of our old friend of the Catechism—Envy, the jaundiced, sour-breathed Don. Remember, Sister Pilar: Thou shalt not envy thy sister’s flanks, nor her merry tongue, nor her red lips, nor any of her body’s members. Over my shoulder to-day, I saw the look with which you followed the friar and me.

Sister Pilar (in a voice choked with passion): Silence! you peasant’s bastard! You who have crept into a[256] house of high born ladies and made it stink with as rank a smell as though a goat had laid down among Don Pedro’s Arab mares. Poor mummer! From a little, red-cheeked, round-eyed peasant girl, I have seen you moulding yourself to the pattern of our high-born visitors—from one the shrill laugh, from another the eyes blackened with kohl, from a third the speech flowery from Amadis and other profane books—but all the civet and musk your fancy pours on your image of yourself cannot drown the peasant’s garlic. You flatter yourself, Sister Assumcion; I, a Guzman, whose mother was a Perez, and grandame a Padilla, how could I for a second envy you?

Sister Assumcion (laughing): But peasant’s blood can show red in the lips and gums, and a bastard’s breasts can be as full and firm, her limbs as long and slender as those of a Guzman or a Padilla. Your rage betrays you, Sister Pilar. I bid you good-night.

Sister Pilar: My God! Envy! It has a sour smell. And rage and pride—two other deadly sins whose smell is ranker than that of any peasant. (Shrilly) Sloth! Avarice! Gluttony! Lust! Why do you linger? Your brothers wait for you to begin the feast.

Oh, heavenly advocate! Sweet Virgin of compassion, by your seven joys and seven sorrows I beseech you to intercede for me. I have sinned, I have sinned, my soul has become loathsome to me. Oh, Blessed Virgin, a boon, a boon! That either by day or in the watches of the night, though it be but for a second of time I may behold the woof of things without the[257] warp of sin ... a still, quiet, awful world, and all the winds asleep.

ACT II

SCENE I

Trotaconventos: A fig for a father’s love! To seek for it is, as the proverb has it, to seek pears on an elm tree.

Don Salomon: Pardon me, oh pearl of wisdom. Our Law has shown that a mother’s love is as dross to a father’s. In the book called Genesis we are told that when there was the flood of water in the time of Noah, the fathers fled with their sons to the mountains, and bore them on their heads that the waters might not reach them, while the mothers took thought only of their own safety, and climbed up on the shoulders of their sons. And at the siege of Jerusalem....

Trotaconventos: Oh, a pox on you and your devil’s lore! It is proverbs and songs that catch truth on the[258] wing, and they tell ever of a mother’s love. Would you have me believe in your love to Pepita and Juanito when I saw new hopes and schemes spring up as quickly in your heart as the flowers on Isabel’s grave.... I never yet have met a man who could mourn the dead; for them ’tis but the drawing of a rotten molar, a moment’s sharp pain, and then albeit their gums may ache a day, they will already be rejoicing in the ease and freedom won by its removal.

Don Salomon: There was once a young caliph, and though he had many and great possessions, the only one he valued a fig was one of his young wives. She died, and night descended on the soul of the caliph. One evening her spirit came to him, as firm and tangible as had been her body, and after much sweet and refreshing discourse between them, beneath which his grief melted like dew, she told him that he might at will evoke her presence, but that each time he did so he would forfeit a year of life.... He invoked her the next night, and the next, and the next ... but he was close on eighty when he died.

Trotaconventos (triumphantly): Just so! The caliph was a man; you do but confirm my words.

Don Salomon: Well, let us consider, then, your love to your children. First, there was Isabel, and next, that exceeding handsome damsel, Sister Assumcion ... nay, nay, it is vain protesting; the whole town knows she was a cunning brat that all your forty summers and draughts and chirurgy were powerless to keep out of the world ... well, these two maids, both lusty and vegetal, and made for the bearing of fine children, what must you do but have them both professed in one of these nunneries ... nunneries! Your ballads tell of a Moorish king who was wont to exact a yearly tribute of sixty virgins from your race; what of your God who exacts more like a thousand?

Trotaconventos: Out on you, you foul-mouthed blaspheming Jew! I’d have you bear in mind that you are in the house of an Old Christian.[2]

Don Salomon: Ay, an Old Christian who recked so little of her law and faith that, just because they paid a little more, has suckled the brats of the Moriscos![3]

Trotaconventos: Pooh! An old dog does not bark at a tree-stump; you’ll not scare me with those old, spiteful whispers of los Abades. Come, drag me before the alcalde and his court, and I’ll disprove your words with this old withered breast ... besides, as says the proverb, He whose father is a judge goes safe to trial—Trotaconventos walks safe beneath the cloak of Doña Maria de Padilla, for Queen Blanche dies a virgin-wife, if there be any virtue in my brews.

Don Salomon: You took it for a threat? Come, come, you are growing suspicious with advancing years. But we were talking of your love to your daughters. Resolve me this: why did you make them nuns?

Trotaconventos: Why did I make them nuns? Because of all professions, it is the most pleasing to God and His Saints.

Don Salomon: So that was your reason? Well, I read your action somewhat differently. Of all the diverse flames that burn and corrode the heart of man, there is none so fierce as the flames of a mother’s jealousy of her growing daughters. You have known that flame—the years that withered your charms were ripening theirs, and, that you might not endure the bitterness of seeing them wooed and kissed and bedded, you gave them—to your God. Wait! I have not yet said my say. Rumours have reached me of the flame you have kindled in the breast of an exceeding rich[260] and noble knight for Sister Assumcion, and that, albeit, you knew a score of other maids would have been as good fuel, and brought as good a price; just as some eight years since, you chose Isabel to kindle the fire in me. Why? Of all your so-called learned doctors—the most of them but peasants, trembling, as they roast the chestnuts on winter nights, at their grandame’s tales—there is one I do revere, Thomas Aquinas, for he is deeply read in the divine Aristotle, and, to boot, he knows the human heart. Well, your Thomas Aquinas tells of a sin which he calls ‘morose delectation,’ which is the sour pleasure—a dried olive to palates too jaded now for sweet figs—that monks and nuns and women past their prime find in the viewing of, or the hearing of, or the thinking of the bodily joys of the young and lusty. And ‘morose delectation’ is never so bitter-sweet as when aroused in a mother by the amours of her daughter, and this it was that got in your bosom the upper hand of jealousy and made you choose your own daughters to inflame the love of this knight and me.

Trotaconventos: Well ... by Our Lady ... you ... (bursts out laughing). Why, Don Salomon, in spite of all your rabbis and rubbish, you have more good common sense than I had given you credit for! (laughs again).

Don Salomon: Laughter is the best physic; I am glad to have been able to administer it. But to return to the real purport of my visit. I tell you, you are making the convent of San Miguel to stink both far and wide, and I look upon it as no meet nursery for Moses and Rebecca.

Trotaconventos: Moses and Rebecca! Truly most pretty apt names for Christian children! But think you not that Judas and Jezebel would ring yet sweeter on the ear? Then, without doubt, their Christian playmates would pelt them through the streets with dung and dead mice—Moses and Rebecca, forsooth! In the city of Seville they will ever be Pepita and Juanito.

Don Salomon: Pepita and Juanito ... foolish, tripping names to suit the lewd comic imps of hell in one of your miracle plays. The Talmud teaches there is great virtue in names, and when they come with me to Granada they will be Moses and Rebecca.

Don Salomon: ’Tis no wild tale. You rated me for indifference to my children, but I am not so indifferent as to wish to see them reared in ignorance and superstition by a flock of empty-headed, vicious nuns who have become like Aholah and Aholibah, they who committed whoredoms in Egypt.

Trotaconventos: Once more, an old dog does not bark at a tree-stump. You’ll never go to Granada.

Trotaconventos: Because you are of the race of Judas that sold our Lord for a few sueldos. There are many leeches more learned than you in Granada, but none in Castille, therefore....

Don Salomon (indignantly): Whence this knowledge of the leeches of Granada? Name me one more learned than I.

Trotaconventos (ignoring the interruption): Therefore, in that in Castille you earn three times what you would do in Granada, you will continue following the court from Valladolid to Toledo, from Toledo to Seville, until the day when you are unable to save Don Pedro’s[262] favourite slave, and he rifles your treasure and has you bound with chains and cast into a dungeon to rot slowly into hell.

Don Salomon (quite unmoved): Howbeit, you will see that to one of my race his children are dearer than his coffers. Unless this convent gets in better odour, Moses and Rebecca will soon be playing in Granada round the Elvira gate, and sailing their boats upon the Darro ... have you that balsam for me?

Don Salomon (taking out two coins from his purse): Are you, indeed, an Old Christian? Had you no grandam, who, like your own daughter, was not averse to a circumcised lover? Methinks you love gold as much as any Jew.

Trotaconventos (drops the coins on the table and listens to their ring): Yes, they sing in tune; a good Catholic doremi, I’d not be surprised to hear coins from your purse whine ‘alleluia’ falsely through their nose—the thin noise of alloy and a false mint. (Goes and rummages in a coffer, and with her back turned to him, says nonchalantly): Neither your ointment nor the Goa stones powdered in milk have reduced the swelling.

Trotaconventos: Here is your balsam. As touching sickness, I have ever hearkened to you; you may speak.

Don Salomon: The ointment ... I hoped it might[263] give you some relief of your pain; but as to the swelling....

Trotaconventos: But ... surely ... the Table of Spain, Don Pedro’s carbuncle ... I verily believe Doña Maria could get me it for a night ... ’tis the most potent stone in the world.

Don Salomon: Dame, you have ever liked plain speaking. Neither in the belly of the stag, nor in the womb of the earth, nor in God’s throne, is there a precious stone that can decrease that swelling.

Don Salomon (gravely): Old friend, from my heart I envy you. A wise man who had travelled over all the earth came to the court of a certain caliph, and the caliph asked him whom of all the men he had met on his wanderings he envied most; and the wise man answered: ‘Oh, Caliph, ’twas an old blind pauper whose wife and children were all dead.’ And when the caliph asked him why he envied one in such sorry plight, he answered, ‘because the only evil thing is fear, and he had nought to fear.’ You, too, have nothing to fear, except you fear the greatest gift of God—sleep.

Trotaconventos (wildly): Nothing to fear! Oh, my poor black soul ... hell-fire ... the devil hiding like a bug in my shroud ... oh, Blessed Virgin, save me from hell-fire!

Don Juan Tenorio: I am the broad path that leads to salvation; I am the bread made of wheat; I am the burgeoning of buds and the fall of the leaf; I am the little white wine of Toro and the red wine of Madrigal; I am the bronze on the cheek of the labourer and his dreamless, midday sleep beneath the chestnut tree; I am the mirth at wedding-wakes; I am the dance of the Hours whose rhythm lulls kings and beggars, nuns, and goatherds on the hills, giving them peace, and freeing them from dreams; I am innocence; I am immortality; I am Don Juan Tenorio.

Don Juan Tenorio: I have spoken: there is no hell. There is no hell and there is no heaven; there is nought but the green earth. But men are arrogant and full of shame, and they hide truth in dreams.

Don Juan Tenorio: Every death is cancelled by a birth; hence there is no death.

Don Juan Tenorio: But if others live? Prisoners! Prisoners! Locked up inside yourselves; like children[265] born in a dark tower, as their parents were before them. And round and round they run, and beat their little hands against the wall, or stare at the old faded arras upon which fingers, dead a hundred years ago, have pictured quaint shapes that hint at flowers and birds and ships. And all the time the creaking door is on the jar, the gaolers long since dead.

Sister Isabel: To bid you save my little son from circumcision, my daughter from concubinage to the infidels.

Don Juan Tenorio: That part of me that was he, was sucked bloodless by the insatiable dreams of man.

Don Juan Tenorio: Remember that they fight to lose who fight the Spirit of Life.

Trotaconventos: I have been dreaming ... life ... death ... my head turns. And what is this knocking?

Voice outside: Old stinking bird-lime! Heart-hammer! Magpie! Bumble-bee! Street trailer! Cuirass of rotten wood! Curry-comb! Corpus dragon! I bid you open, d’ye hear?

Trotaconventos: Why, I do believe ’tis that ardent lover, Don Manuel de Lara. Can the baggage have shied from the tryst?

Voice from outside: Gutter crone! Gutter crone! The fiends of hell gnaw your marrow! I want in!

Trotaconventos: Anon, good knight, anon! Well ... shall I throw cold water on his hopes and save my soul? Nay, Isabel, ’tis too late; one cannot make[267] shepherds’ pipes out of this old barley straw ... and yet ... visions of sleep! Nay, through my living daughter will I taste again the old joys and snap my fingers at ... ghosts.

Don Manuel de Lara: Old hag, what have you done to me? You have been riding among the signs of the Zodiac ... I know ... and tampering with the Scales, putting sweetness in each, then throwing in the moon to turn the balance. Oh, you have given me philtres ... I know, I know ... some varlet bribed with a scarlet cloak, then strange liquid dreams curdling the rough juice of the Spanish grape ... and you all the while jeering and cackling at me! (seizes her roughly by the shoulders.) How dare you meddle with my dreams? You play with loaded dice.

Trotaconventos (soothingly): Wo! ass! Let me rub thee down, ass of my wife’s brother! You must have got an ague; the water of the Guadalquivir and Seville figs play strange tricks with Castilian stomachs in May. A little prayer to St. Bartholomew ... or better still, a very soothing draught I learnt to brew long since from a Jew doctor. Why, sir knight, what is this talk of love philtres? The only receipt I know for such is a gill of neat ankle or merry eye to three gills of hot young blood. And have you no thanks for your old witch? I cannot, let evil tongues wag as they will, drum the moon from the heavens, but trust old Trotaconventos to draw a nun from her cloister!

Don Manuel de Lara (who has been standing as if stunned): Aye, there’s the rub ... I’d have the moon dragged from the heavens (laughs wildly, then turns upon her violently). Oh, I’ll shake your black[268] soul out of its prison of rotted bones. I am encompassed all around with your spells.

Trotaconventos: Don Manuel, you are sick. Lie down on this couch and take a cool draught of reason, for it, at least, is a medicinal stream. You have engendered your own dreams, there have been no philtres or spells. The abbot dines off his singing, and a procuress must suit all tastes, and if a silly serving-wench comes to me a-sighing and a-sobbing for some pert groom with a heron’s feather in his cap, or trembling lest Pedro in her distant village is giving his garlic-scented kisses to another maid, why, then I know nothing will salve her red eyes but sunflower seeds culled when Venus is in the house of the Ram, or a mumbling backwards of the psalms, on a waxen heart to melt over the fire. But these are but foolish toys for the vulgar, and the devil does not reveal his secrets to an Old Christian who goes to mass every Sunday and on feast-days too. You are not bewitched, Don Manuel, except it be by a pair of gray eyes smiling beneath a nun’s veil. Was she coy, perchance? Why, coyness in a maid....

Don Manuel de Lara (laughing bitterly): Coy? (impatiently.) I came here all hot with projects and decision, but now it is all flowing out of me like wine from a leaking pig-skin, and I seem bereft of will and desire, as sometimes on the field of battle when I fight in a dream, regardless if the issue be life or death. (Shaking himself.) The fault lies not with you, good dame; what you set out to do you have done, the which I shall bear in mind. As to spells and philtres, they say I was born under Saturn with the moon in the ascendant, and, whether it be true or no, some evil star distills dark, poisonous vapours round the nettles and rank roots that grow in the dark places of my soul, the which some chance word will draw from their[269] hiding-place and ... in plain words, your nun is all your words painted her, but falls far short of the lineaments lent her by my fancy; for which it is not you but that same unbridled fancy, that is to blame. In that you compassed the meeting, you shall have rich cloths and a well-filled purse, but....

Trotaconventos (her indignation boiling over): Jesus! Here is a dainty Don! Comes far short of the linen lent her by your fancy! Was then her linen foul? Or rather, are you like Alfonso the Wise, and had you had the making of her would you have fashioned her better than God? I know your breed; as the proverb says, it is but a fool that wants a bread not made with wheat. In truth, the girl is well-formed, sprightly and hot-blooded. I know no damsel can so well....

Don Manuel de Lara: I have told you dame, you shall be well paid for your pains. But ... but ... there is another matter with regard to which I would fain....

Trotaconventos: And so you deem old Trotaconventos cares for naught but cloths and purses! And what of the pride in my craft? Upon my soul! My daintiest morsel sniffed at all round, and then Don Cat, with a hump of his back, his tail arched, and his lips drawn back in disdain....

Don Manuel de Lara: Come, dame, I am pressed for time. I ask your pardon if I have been over nice, and you have no need to take umbrage for your craft. I ... would ... would ask your help ... (sinks into a chair and covers his face with his hands) ... my God, I cannot. The words choke me.

Voice from outside: Hola! Hecate! Goddess of the cross-roads! Open in your graciousness.

Trotaconventos: ’Tis a stranger’s voice. (Aside) This time ’tis a case of better the devil one does not know.

Dennys: Hail! Medea of Castille! Your fame has drawn me all the way from France. Why, ’twill soon rival the fame of your St. James, and from every corner of Christendom love-sick wights and ladies will come to you on pilgrimage.

Trotaconventos (laughing and eyeing him with evident favour): A pox on your flowery tongue! I know you French of old ... hot tongues and cold, hard hearts. Oh, you saucy knave; you! But see, your cloak is wet with dew. Come, I will shake it for you. (Draws off his cloak and at the same time slips her hand down his neck and tickles him).

Dennys: A truce! A truce! Thus you could unman me to yield you all my gold and tell you all my secrets. (Wriggles out of the cloak, leaving it in her hands.) Do you know the ballad of the Roman knight, Joseph, and Doña Potiphar?

Trotaconventos: Ay, that I do; and a poor puling ballad it is too! But you are no Sir Joseph, my pretty lad ... while others that I know ... (glances resentfully at Don Manuel de Lara, who is still sitting with his head buried in his hands. Dennys, following her glance, catches sight of him.)

Dennys: Some poor, love-sick wight? Why, then, are we guild brothers, and of that guild you are the virgin, fairer and more potent than she of the kings or of the waters; as with fists and cudgels we will maintain against all other guilds at Holy Week. Oh! I have heard of your miracles. That pious young widow with a virtue as unyielding as her body was soft, how....

Trotaconventos: Out on you, you saucy Frenchman! It would take a French tongue to call Trotaconventos a virgin. Why, before you were born ... come, I’ll tell you a secret. (She whispers something in his ear. He bursts out laughing.)

Dennys: Holy Mother of God! You should have given suck to Don Ovid. Why, that beats all the French fabliaux. Well, now as to my business. You must know I had a wager that, disguised as a mendicant friar, I would visit undiscovered twenty of the convents of Seville....

Dennys: Ay, but that is but the prelude. In one of these convents (Don Manuel drops his hands from his face and sits up straight in his chair) I fell into an ambush laid by Don Cupid himself.

Trotaconventos (bitterly): To be sure! And so you come to old Trotaconventos. To be a procuress is to be the cow at the wedding, for ever sacrificed to the junketings of others. ’Tis other folks’ burdens killed the ass. Well, the time is short, the time is short, if you want Trotaconventos’s aid.

Dennys: Why, despite her habit, ’twas the fairest maid I have seen this side the Pyrenees, and I swear ’tis a sin she should live a nun. I fell to talking and laughing with her; but though she is a ripe plum, I warrant, ’tis for another hand to shake the branch. Now you, mother, I know, go in and out of every convent in Seville.... So will you be my most cunning and subtle ambassador?

Trotaconventos: Ay, but ambassadors are given services of gold, and sumpter-mules laden with crimson cloths, and retinues of servants, and apes and tumblers and dancers, and purses of gold. How will you equip your ambassador?

Dennys: A trovar’s fortune is his tongue and lips; so with my lips I pay. (He gives her three smacking kisses.)

Trotaconventos: Oh, you French jackanapes! Oh, you saucy ballad-monger! So you hold your kisses weigh like maravedis, do you? Well, well, I have ever said that the lips of a fine lad hold the sweetest wine in Spain. Now you must acquaint me more fully with your business, if you would have me speed it.

Dennys: Why! You know it all. I love a nun of the Convent of San Miguel, and....

Don Manuel de Lara: You scurvy, whoreson, lily-livered, shameless son of France! France! The teeming dam of whores and ballad-mongers, whose king flies from his foes shaking a banner broidered with the lilies of a frail woman’s garden-close. You are in Castille, where lions guard our virgins in strong towers, and e’er you tamper with the virtue of a professed virgin of Spain, I will hew you into little pieces to feed my hounds. (He shakes him violently.)

Trotaconventos (pulling him back by his cloak): Let go, you solemn, long-jowled, finicky Judas! You fox in priest’s habit on the silver centre-piece of a king’s table! Don Cat turned monk that he might the better catch the monastery mice! Foul Templar escaped from Sodom and Gomorrah! Who are you to take up the glove for Seville nuns?

Don Manuel de Lara: Now, blackbird of St. Bénoit, you’ll tell me the name of the nun you would seduce. D’ye hear? The name of the nun you would seduce!

Don Manuel de Lara (to himself): Strange! Passing strange! That Moorish knight who gave me the head wound at Gibraltar ... then years later both serenading ’neath the same balcony, in Granada ... and then again, last year, of a sudden coming on his carved, olive face staring at the moon from a ditch in Albarrota. And I convinced, till then, that our lives were being twisted in one rope to some end.... Chance meetings, chance partings, chance meetings again. And this trovar, coming to-night, on business ... why am I so beset by dreams?

Dennys: Thanks, mother, the fiery don shook all the humours to my head (gets up). Well, knight, more kicks than ha’pence—that’s the lot of a trovar in Spain. I know well, necessity makes one embrace poverty and obedience, like the Franciscans, but I never learnt till now that a trovar must take the third vow of chastity.

Trotaconventos: Pooh! A rare champion of chastity and the vows of nuns you see before you! Why, my sweet lad, this same Don Manuel de Lara has been importuning me with prayers and tears and strange fantastical ravings, that I should devise a meeting between him ... and whom, think you? Why, this same Sister Assumcion.

Trotaconventos: Ay, Sister Assumcion. But, as I tell him, he is one of these fools that seek a bread not made of wheat. He’ll not to bed unless I rifle hell for him and bring him Queen Helena. He comes to me to-night with a “comely, yes, but comeliness, what of comeliness?” and “a tempting enough for Pedro and Juan and the rest of the workaday world, but as to me!” And she the prettiest nun that ever took the veil, and certain to bear off the prize for Seville in the contest of beauty with the nuns of Toledo ... but not good enough for him, oh no!

Don Manuel de Lara: Of my thirty years, I have spent sixteen in fighting the Moors, and if I choose to squander some of the spiritual treasures I have thus acquired by my sword in ... (he brings the words out with difficulty) dallying with nuns, who knows, maybe I can afford it. But think you I’ll allow a sinewless French jongleur to rifle the spiritual treasury of Spain? For Spain is the poorer by every nun that falls. (Impatiently) Pooh! If two whistling false blackbirds choose to mate, what care I or Spain? Dame, settle this fellow’s business with him, then ... I would claim a hearing for my own.

Dennys: Well, mother, will you be my advocate? Tell her I am master of arts in the university of Love, and have learnt most cunning and pleasant gymnastics in Italy, unknown to Pyramus and Troilus ... nay, not that, for maidens want the moon, to wit, a Joseph with all the cunning in love’s arts of Naso. Tell her rather, that having been born when Venus was in the[275] house of Saturn, and the scorpion ... you know the kind of jargon ... I came into the world already endowed with knowledge of love’s secrets ... nay ... tell her (his voice catches fire from his words) the years, like village lads when the Feast of St. John draws near, have built up in my soul a heap of lusty green branches, and old dry sticks, and frails of dried rose-petals, and many a garland of rosemary and maiden-hair and ivy and rue, and there it has lain until one glance from those eyes of hers has been the spark to turn it into a crackling, flaming, fragrant-smoked bonfire, a beacon to a thousand farms and hamlets. Tell her I can touch the lute, the vihuela, the guitar, the psalter, Don Tristram’s harp ... ay, and most delicately touch her breasts. And if she wishes a little respite from our love, tell her I can wring tears from her eyes with the Matter of Britain or the Matter of Rome—sad tales (for sadness turns sweet when it is dead) of Dido and Iseult and Guinevere, or make her laugh and laugh again with tales from the clerk Boccaccio. Tell her....

Trotaconventos: Enough, French rogue! You have little need, it seems, of an ambassador. Well, I have seen worse-favoured lads and (with a scowl in the direction of Don Manuel) less honey-tongued. (She rummages in a cupboard and brings out a key.) What will you give me for this, Don Nightingale? I’ll tell you a secret; I have a duplicate key to the postern of near every convent in Seville, but they are not for all my clients, oh no! This opens the postern of San Miguel ... well, well, take it then. And be there to-morrow night at nine o’clock, and I can promise you your nun will not fail you.

Dennys: Oh, dearer than a mother! oh, most bountiful dame! A key! A key! (holds up the key), I have ever loved a key and held it the prettiest toy in Christendom. I vow ’twas a key and not an apple that Eve[276] gave to Adam in Paradise, a key and not an apple the goddesses strove for on Mount Ida, a key into which the Roman smith, Vulcan, put all his amorous cunning when he was minded to fashion a gift well pleasing to his mistress, Venus. May you dream to-night that you are young again, mother, and hold the keys of heaven. And you, sir knight, what dreams shall I wish you? (Eyes Don Manuel quizzically.) Adieu.

Trotaconventos: Ay! May his key bring him joy! A very sweet rogue! Well, Don Manuel, has your brain cooled enough to talk with me?

Don Manuel de Lara (hoarsely): I, too, would have a key ... for the convent of San Miguel.

Trotaconventos: And would you in truth? (suspiciously). Has the convent some fairer nun than Sister Assumcion?

Don Manuel de Lara: How can I say? I have never seen any of the nuns. All I ask you, dame, is for a key.

Don Manuel de Lara: I will pay for it all you ask ... even to my immortal soul.

Trotaconventos: And what do I want with your immortal soul? I’d as lief have a wild cat in the house, any market day.

Don Manuel de Lara (clenching his fists and glaring at her fiercely): A key, a key, old hag! Give me a key.

Trotaconventos: Come, come, brave bull! And has Love, the bandillero, maddened you with his darts? Old Trotaconventos must turn bull-fighter! Ah! I know the human heart! Dog in the manger, like all men! Too nice yourself for Sister Assumcion, but too greedy to let another enjoy her!

Trotaconventos: No, no, Sir knight. You are not St. Ferdinand and I am not the Moorish king that I should yield up the keys of Seville to you without a parley. Why do you want the key?

Don Manuel de Lara (suddenly growing quiet and eyeing her ironically): What if I have been on pilgrimage to Jerusalem and found the sun too hot? I have strange fancies. They say the founder of our house wed with a heathen witch who danced on the hills. (Persuasively) Hearken, I know you love rich fabrics; I have silk coverlets from Malaga that are ballads for the eye instead of for the ear, silk-threaded heathen ballads of Mahound and the doves and Almanzor and his Christian concubine. I have curtains from Almeric—Doña Maria has none to rival them in the Alcazar—and so fresh-coloured are the flowers that are embroidered on them, that when I was a child I thought that I could smell them, and my mother, to coax me to eat when a dry, hot wind was parching the Vega, would tell me the bees had culled the honey spread on my bread from the flowers embroidered on these curtains. I have necklets of gold, beaten thin like autumn beech-leaves, taken by my grandsire from the harems of Cordova when he stormed the city with St. Ferdinand; ere they were necklets they were ciboriums of the Goths, rifled by impious Tarik. Precious stones? I have[278] rubies like beakers with the red wine trembling to their very lip ... one almost fears to lift them except with a steady hand for fear they spill and stain one’s garments red, and like to wine, the gifts they bring are health and a merry heart. I have Scythian sapphires that once lay in the bed of the river of Paradise, while to win them Arimaspians were fighting Gryphons; they are the gage of the life to come, they are blue and cold like English ladies’ eyes who go on pilgrimage. And I have emeralds to catch from them a blue shadow like that of a kingfisher on green waters. He who has store of precious stones need fear neither plague nor fever, nor fiends, nor the terrors by night, and with that store I will endow you if you but give me the key. The key, good mother, the key!

Trotaconventos: Very pretty ... but ... well ... I know a certain king, a mighty ugly one, who laughs at the virtues of precious stones.... Aye ... but come, Don Manuel, we are but playing with each other. With your own eyes you saw me give the key of the Convent of San Miguel to the French trovar. Think you I have two?

Don Manuel de Lara (in great excitement): My cloak? Where is my cloak? Away! the key!

SCENE II

Sister Assumcion: Good evening, friar trovar ... and can you not come forward to meet me? I can tell you, sir, it needed all Trotaconventos’s eloquence to send me to the tryst. Never before has her pleading been so honeyed.... Why....

Sister Assumcion (starting back): Holy saints defend me! Who, then, are you?... And yet your voice....

Don Manuel de Lara: His words were these: ‘Tell her the dead grudge us our joys.’

Sister Assumcion (crossing herself): Strange words! Where was it that you met him?

Don Manuel de Lara: He was standing by a niche in which was an image of Our Lady with a lamp burning before it, and by its light he was examining a key. And he was laughing.

Sister Assumcion: All? (Shrilly): Who are you? (Plucks at his cloak which he allows to fall.)

Sister Assumcion: And yet, your voice ... by Our Lady, you are an ominous, louring man. And this strange tale of the trovar ... why am I to credit it?

Sister Assumcion: And he was standing under a shrine laughing, and you approached, and he said, “Tell her the dead grudge us our joys”.... Pooh! It rings like a foolish ballad.

Don Manuel de Lara (nonchalantly): The key? (holding it out in front of him and smiling teasingly). It is delicately wrought.

Don Manuel de Lara: So many have said. But now, in that I have borne a message to you, will you return the grace and bear one for me? I have a kinswoman in this sisterhood and I would fain speak with her.

Sister Assumcion (insolently): Have you in truth? We have no demon’s kinswomen here ... well, and what is her name?

Sister Assumcion: Aye, she might be ... sprung from the same still-born, white-blooded grandame.

Don Manuel de Lara: Ah! (with suppressed eagerness). You know Sister Pilar well?

Sister Assumcion: Without doubt, a madman! I have told you that I know her but too well.

Sister Assumcion: For the most part on our shortcomings. But her words are few.

Don Manuel de Lara (pulling himself together): Well, you would put me much in your debt if you would carry her this letter. It bears my credentials as her kinsman. I would speak with her at once, as I bear weighty news for her from her home.

Sister Assumcion: And why could you not come knocking at the porter’s lodge, as others do, and at some hour, too, before Compline, when ends the day of a religious?

Don Manuel de Lara: As to the porter’s lodge, I have my own key. And the news, I tell you, will not keep till morning. Handle that letter gingerly; it bears the king’s seal.

Sister Assumcion: Well ... as you will. I’ll take your message. Good-night ... Sir demon; are you not of Hell’s chivalry?

Sister Pilar: Not since I was professed.... I obey the bull of Pope Boniface, that nuns should keep their cloister.

Sister Pilar (eagerly): Little Violante? She was but a child when I took the black veil. Whom has she wedded?

Don Manuel de Lara: Er ... er ... a comrade in arms of mine. A knight of Old Castille ... one Don Manuel de Lara.

Sister Pilar: And what manner of man is he? I should wish little Violante to be happy.

Don Manuel de Lara: He passes for a brave soldier. He has brought her the skulls of many Moors. She has filled them with earth and planted them with bulbs. Daffodils grow out of their eyes and nose.

Don Manuel de Lara: ’Twas Don Manuel showed her it; such are the whimsies of Old Castille. In that country we like to play with death.

Don Manuel de Lara: Ah! yes. His soul snatched the torch of love from his body, then gave it back again, then again snatched it. She is all twined round with his dreams; she smiles at him with his mother’s eyes; she is Belerma the Fair and Doña Alda of his childhood’s ballads. She is a fair ship charged with spices, she is all the flowers that have blossomed since the Third Day of the Creation, she is the bread not made with wheat, she ... she ... she is a key, like this one (holding up the key), but wrought in silver and ivory.

Sister Pilar: So you know my home? You have heard our slaves crooning Moorish melodies from their quarters on moonlight nights, perchance you have handled my father’s chessmen and the Portuguese pennon he won from a French count at Tables ... oh! he was so proud of that pennon! How is the Cid?

Sister Pilar: No, no, my father’s greyhound ... the one that has one eye blue and the other brown.

Don Manuel de Lara: Ah! He still sleeps by day and bays at the moon o’ nights.

Sister Pilar: Ah, surely they cannot have forgot to[284] show it you! It was the height of a daffodil when I took the veil. When we were children, you know, we were told an exemplum of a wise Moor who planted trees that under their shade his children’s children might call him blessed, so we—Sancho and Rodrigo and little Violante and me—we took acorns from the pigs’ trough and planted them beyond the orchard, near my mother’s bed of gillyflowers, and mine was the only one that sent forth shoots. Oh! And the bush of Granada roses ... they must have shown you them?

Sister Pilar: You know, they were planted from seeds my grandsire got in the Alhambra when he was jousting in Granada. My father was wont to call them his harem of Moorish beauties, and there was a nightingale that would serenade them every evening from the Judas tree that shadows them. It was always to them he sang, he cared not a jot for the other roses in the garden.

Don Manuel de Lara: The rose-tree died of blight and the nightingale of a broken heart the year you took the veil.

Don Manuel de Lara: And so it is of roses and nightingales that you ask tidings, and not of mother and father or brothers! Well, it is always thus with exiles. When I have lain fevered with my wounds very far from Old Castille, it has been for the river that flows at the foot of our orchard I have yearned, or for the green Vega dotted with brown villages and stretching away towards the Sierra.

Don Manuel de Lara (smiling a little): I fear it is mightily like what the trovares—not the monks—tell us of hell.

Sister Pilar (severely): Then it must be a dream sent you by a fiend of the Moorish Paradise, which is indeed hell.

Sister Pilar: A great, cool, columned, empty hall, and I feel at once small and vast and shod with the wind. And all the while I am aware that the coolness and vastness and spaciousness of the hall and my body’s lightness is because there is no sin.

Sister Pilar: You must know ... ’tis the scandal of Christendom ... the empty vows of the religious. Yet when all’s said, ’tis better here than out in the[286] world; we do live under rule, and mark the day by singing the Hours (gazing in front of her as if at some vision). Just over there, perhaps across that hill, or round that bend of the road, a cool, rain-washed world, trees, oxen, men, women, children, thin and transparent, as if made of crystal.... I always held I would suddenly come upon it. (Passionately) Oh, I am so weary of the glare and dust of sin! Everything is heavy and savourless and confined.

Don Manuel de Lara: That must be a nun’s communion. When I eat Our Lord I am filled with a great pity for His sufferings on Calvary which the Mass commemorates. There have been times when having eaten Him on the field of battle, my comrades and I, the tears have rained down our cheeks, and from our pity has sprung an exceeding great rage against the infidel dogs who deny His divinity, and in that day’s battle it goes ill with them. And when I eat Him in times of peace, I am filled with a longing to fall upon the Morería, a sword in one hand, a burning brand in the other.

Sister Pilar: It is already very late ... for nuns. What is the weighty news you bring me?

Don Manuel de Lara: I had sworn to acquaint you with the news ... and to-morrow I leave Seville.

Sister Pilar (relenting): And you are well acquainted with Don Manuel de Lara?

Don Manuel de Lara (gives a start): Don Manuel de Lara? Ah, yes ... we are of the same country and the same age. We were suckled by one foster-mother, we yawned over one Latin primer, and gloated over the same tales of chivalry. We learned to ride the same horse, to fly the same hawk; we were dubbed knight by the same stroke of the sword—we love the same lady.

Don Manuel de Lara: Yes, I love your sister Violante ... and your mother that carried you in her womb, and your father that begat you. (Violently) By the rood, I am sick of mummery! I am Don Manuel de Lara.

Don Manuel de Lara: I will make it clear. On Tuesday night I heard your talk with Sister Assumcion.

Don Manuel de Lara: I was the man behind the wall whom you justly named the worst kind of would-be adulterer, and....

Don Manuel de Lara: I am not Sister Assumcion’s lover. The moon has already set and risen, the sun risen and set on his dead body.

Sister Pilar (haughtily): I am not an old peasant woman that you should seek to please me with riddles.

Don Manuel de Lara: I will read you the riddle.[288] Some weeks ago I had business—sent from the Alcazar on a matter pertaining to some herbs—with that old hag Trotaconventos. And through what motive I cannot say, she waxed exceeding eloquent on the charms of Sister Assumcion. We are taught in the Catechism that the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the ears, are gates by which either fiends or angels may enter.... Well, her words entered my ears and set fire to a great, dry heap of old dreams, old memories, old hopes ... (strange! these are the trovar’s words!) piled high on my heart. I became a flame.... You are of the South, you have never seen a fire consuming a sun-parched vega in the North. Well, a fire must work its will, and, devouring all that blocks its path—flowers, towers, men—drive forward to its secret bourne. Who knows the bourne of fire? I obtained speech with Sister Assumcion; it takes many waters to quench a great fire, but the wind can alter its course. I heard a voice and strange, passionate words ... the course of the fire was altered, but still it drives on, still it consumes.

Don Manuel de Lara: Well? And is it well? My God! Well, a trovar from France who had entered your convent disguised as a friar obtained from Trotaconventos this key, which I likewise desired, first because it opens this postern, secondly because ... toys are apt to take for me a vast significance and swell out with all the potencies of my happiness in this world, my salvation in the next, and thus it happened with this key; the fire rushed on, I killed the trovar and took the key!

Don Manuel de Lara: Yes ... and would have killed a thousand such for the key ... a low, French jongleur! The world is all the better for his loss. The[289] dog! Daring to think he could seduce the nuns of Spain!

Don Manuel de Lara: The rest is told in few words. My madness over (for that night I was mad) the key in my hands, counsel returned to me, and showed me that it was not only through the key I could win to your convent ... it is dreams that open only to this key; strange dreams I only know in fragments ... and I minded me of an exemplum told by the king Don Sancho, in his book, of a knight that craved to talk with a nun, and to affect the same, feigned to be her kinsman. The night I was the other side this wall and you were taunting Sister Assumcion, you named yourself a Guzman whose mother was a Perez. I had but to go to a herald and learn from him all the particulars pertaining to the family of Perez y Guzman.

Sister Pilar (scornfully): The bourne of fire! The bourne rather of ... I’ll not soil my lips with the word. Let me reduce your “fires,” and “lyres,” and “moons” to plain, cold words; having wearied of Sister Assumcion, you thought you’d sample another nun—one maybe taking a greater stretch of arm to reach; like children with figs—a bite out of one, then flung away, then scrambling for another on a higher branch, that in its turn it, too, may be bitten and thrown. Or, maybe, Sister Assumcion found the trovar more to her taste than you ... yes, I have it! I am to bring a little balm to Sister Assumcion’s discarded lover!

Don Manuel de Lara (eagerly): Oh, lady, very light of ... lady, it is not so. Maybe thus it shows, but[290] in your heart of hearts you know right well it is not so. I am a grievous sinner, but my soul is not light nor is my heart shallow ... and I think already you know ’tis so. Listen; I could have continued feigning to be your kinsman and thus I could have come again to speak with you, and all would have gone well; but your presence gave me a loathing of my deceit, so I stripped me of my lies and stand naked at your mercy. As to Sister Assumcion ... the old hag’s words, when she spoke of her, mated with my dreams and engendered you in my heart, yes, you; and I had but to hear the other’s voice and hearken to her words to know that I had been duped and that she was not you. I swear by God Almighty, by the duty I owe to my liege-lord, by my order of chivalry, that I speak the truth.

Don Manuel de Lara: What then? I have burned my boats and I shall go ... where? And you will to your dorter and be summoned by the cock to matins, and it will all be as a dream (in a voice of agony). No! No! By all the height and depth of God’s mercy it cannot be thus! The stars have never said that of all men I should be the most miserable. Can you see no pattern traced behind all this? Sin? Aye, sin.... But I verily believe that God loves sinners. But why do I speak of sin? You say sin is everywhere; tell me, do you see sin’s shadow lying between us two to-night? Speak! You do not answer. Who knows? It may be that for the first time we have stumbled on the track that leads to Paradise. Angels are abroad ... fiends, too, it may be ... but I am not a light man. Ex utero ante luciferum amavi te ... ’tis not thus the words run, but they came.

Don Manuel de Lara: What do I want?... Magna[291] opera Domini ... why does the psalter run in my head?... Great are the works of the Lord ... the sun is a great work, but so is shade from the sun; and the moon is a great work, giving coolness and dreams, and air to breathe is a great work, and so is water to lave our wounds and slake our throats ... I believe all the works of the Lord are found in you.... I could ... oh, God!... Where? Lady, remember I have the key, and every evening at sundown I shall be here ... waiting. It is a vow.

Don Manuel de Lara: Yes, that is she, Sister Pilar. Listen: receive absolution; communicate; be very instant in prayer; make deep obeisance to the images of Our Lady. Say many Paters and Aves, and through the watches of the night, pray for the dead.

Sister Pilar (very coldly): All this has ever been my custom, as a nun, without your admonition.

ACT III

SCENE I

Sister Assumcion: I ask your blessing, father. I confess to Almighty God, and to you, father....

Jaime Rodriguez: Well, daughter—Ten Commandments, Seven Deadly Sins. What of the Second Commandment, which we break whensoever we follow after vanities?

Sister Assumcion: Yes, father. I have not foregone blackening my eyes with kohl ... and I have procured me a crimson scarf the dye of which comes off on the lips ... and ... the pittance I got at Easter I have expended upon perfumes.

Jaime Rodriguez: Ever the same tale, daughter! As I have told you many a time before, civet and musk make the angels hold their noses, as though they were passing an open grave, and a painted woman makes them turn aside their eyes; but ’tis God Himself that turns away His eyes when the painted woman is a nun. The Second Commandment is ever a stumbling-block to you, daughter, and so is the Sixth, for in God’s sight he who commits the deadly sin of Rage breaks that commandment; admit, daughter!

Sister Assumcion: Yes, father; during the singing of None, I did loudly rate Sister Ines and boxed her ears.

Sister Assumcion: Because she had spewed out on my seat the sage she had been chewing to clean her teeth after dinner, and, unwittingly, I sat on it.

Jaime Rodriguez: And do you not know that a stained habit is less ungracious in the eyes of God than a soul stained with rage against a sister and with irreverence of His holy service?

Jaime Rodriguez: Well, for your concupiscence, rage, and unmannerliness: seven penitential psalms with the Litany on Fridays, and a fare of bread and water on the Fridays of this month. There still remains the Tenth Commandment and the deadly sin of Envy; I mind me in the past you have been guilty of Envy ... towards more virtuous and richer sisters.

Sister Assumcion: I have envied her, father, but ... the matter touches her more than me.

Jaime Rodriguez: You have envied her. Envy is a deadly sin; if I’m to give you Absolution I must know more of the matter.

Sister Assumcion: I have envied her in that ...[294] well, in that she was a Guzman ... and ... and has a room to herself, and a handsome dowry....

Jaime Rodriguez: Doubtless you envy her for these things; but ... I seem to detect a particular behind these generals. Touching what particular matter during these past days have you envied Sister Pilar?

Sister Assumcion: There was a man ... it was Trotaconventos ... all he asked was a few words with me, no more ... nothing ... nothing unseemly passed between us ... and then he flouted me ... and then he came bearing a letter and saying he was a kinsman of Sister Pilar.

Jaime Rodriguez: Come, daughter, your confession is like a peasant’s tale—it begins in the middle and has no end. Why should you envy Sister Pilar this kinship?

Jaime Rodriguez: Daughter, it is a dire and awful thing to keep back aught in the Confessional; admit.

Sister Assumcion: He was not her kinsman, as it happens, and ... even had he been....

Jaime Rodriguez: I begin to understand; your foolish, vain, envious heart was sore that this knight treated you coldly, and you have dared to dream that that most virtuous and holy lady, Sister Pilar....

Sister Assumcion (hotly): Dreaming? Had you been in the orchard last evening, and seen what I saw, you would not speak of dreaming!

Jaime Rodriguez: You have gone too far, daughter, to turn back now. I must hear all.

Sister Assumcion: Well, last evening, just before Compline, I went down to the orchard to breathe the cool air; and there I came upon Sister Pilar and this knight; but they were so deep in talk they did not perceive me, so I hid behind a tree and listened.

Sister Assumcion: Well, he is, I think, clean mad, and she, too, is of a most fantastical conceit; and sometimes their words seemed empty of all sense and meaning, but sometimes it was as clear as day—little loving harping upon foolishness and little tricks of speech or manner, as it might be a country lad and lass wooing at a saints’ shrine: “there again!” “what?” “You burred your R like a child whose mouth is full of chestnuts.” “Nay, I did not!” “Why, yes, I say you did!” And then a great silence fell on them, she with her eyes downcast, he devouring her with his, and the air seemed too heavy for them even to draw their breath; then up she started, and trembled from head to foot, and fled to the house.

Jaime Rodriguez: But ... but ... yes; thank you, daughter ... I mean, six paters daily for a fortnight. (Gabbles mechanically): Dominus noster Jesus Christus te absolvat: et ego auctoritate ipsius te absolvo ab omni vinculo excommunicationis et interdicti in quantum possum, et tu indiges. Deinde ego te[296] absolvo a peccatis tuis, in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.

Sister Pilar: I ask your blessing, father. I confess to Almighty God, and to you, father....

Sister Pilar: I unwittingly omitted the dipsalma between two verses in choir, father.

Sister Pilar: Last Sunday I chewed the Host with my back teeth instead of with my front.

Jaime Rodriguez: Yes, yes, yes; small sins of omission and negligence ... what else?

Jaime Rodriguez: But ... but ... this is ... daughter, you dare to come to me with a Saint’s confession? Bethink you of your week’s ride, ten stone walls to be cleared clean, seven pits from which to keep your horse’s hoofs ... not one of the Ten Commandments broken, daughter? Not one of the Seven Deadly Sins upon your conscience?

Jaime Rodriguez: But ... beware ... most solemnly do I conjure you to beware of withholding aught in the Confessional.

Jaime Rodriguez: Well, I shall question you. On what have you meditated by day?

Sister Pilar: Of a monk dwelling in the same community who has sometimes knelt at the altar by my side to receive the Lord.

Sister Pilar: Sometimes they were the features of my father ... one night of an old Basque gardener we had in my home when I was a child.

Jaime Rodriguez: Pooh! Daughter, you are holding something back.... Beware! What of your allegory of the little stone the giant could not move?

Trotaconventos: Your business can wait, but not my words. They touch Sister Pilar. (He starts violently and looks at her expectantly.) You see, you will not to your business till I am done with you ... just one little word to bind you to my will! And in that I ever know the little word that will make men hurrying to church or market stand still as you are doing now, or else if they be standing still to run like zebras: they call me a witch.

Jaime Rodriguez: Yes, yes, but you said you had ... a word ... touching ... for my ear.

Trotaconventos: And so I have, Don Jaime; I am making my soul. A hard job, your eyes say. Well, with my brushes and ointments I can make the complexion of a brown witch as fair as a lily, I can make an old face slough its wrinkles like a snake its skin in spring; and who knows what true penitence will not do to my soul?

Jaime Rodriguez: Yes, your confessor’s ... in truth, dame, I am much pressed for time.

Trotaconventos: And yet, though time, or the lack of him, expresses all the marrow from your bones, because of that little name you cannot move till I have said my say. Is it true that St. Mary Magdalene was once a bawd and a maker of cosmetics?

Trotaconventos: And did you ever hear that she sold her daughter to a Jew, and that daughter a nun?

Trotaconventos: But if she had, would her tears of penitence have washed it out?

Trotaconventos: And what is more, become herself a scourge of sinners and saved the souls of two innocent babes for the Church?

Trotaconventos: Well, I have brought as many maids to bed that multiplied by ten you will have baptised and buried when you are three score years and ten.... Why! it is no more to me than it was to my old father, who owned some land Carmona way, to take a heifer to bull. In truth, if Don Love still reigned in heaven and had not fallen with Satan into hell, your children’s children would be praying to Saint Trotaconventos that she would send them kisses and ribbons and moonless nights; my bones would be lying under the altar of some parish church, and two of my teeth in a fine golden reliquary would cure maids of pimples, lads of warts. All that lies very lightly on my soul ... but there are other things ... and ... (looking round furtively) these nights I’ve sometimes wished for a dog that I might hear his snore.... What if before she died Trotaconventos should be re-christened Convent-Scourge? I have learned ... oh, one of my trade needs must have as many eyes as the cow-herd of the Roman dame, I forget what the trovares call her, and as many ears as eyes ... that a certain nun of this convent ... you grow restive? Why, then, once more I must whisper the magic name and root you to the ground.[300] Sister Pilar is deep in an amour with a knight of the Court ... an overbearing, vain, foolish man against whom I bear a grudge. And Trotaconventos means, before she dies, on one nun at least in place of opening, to shut the convent gate; nay, to bring her to her knees and penitence. Well, what think you?

Jaime Rodriguez: There is some dark thought brooding in your heart, and, unlike the crow, I deem it will hatch out acts black as itself,[4] but the whiteness of her virtue will not be soiled.

Trotaconventos: And is Sister Pilar too firmly settled in her niche to topple down? Yet how she laughs at you! Why, I have heard her say that you are neither man nor priest, but just a bundle of hay dressed up in a soutane, whose head is a hollow pumpkin holding a burning candle, to frighten boors and children with death and judgment on the eve of All Souls.

Trotaconventos: Why, I cannot mind me of the date; she has used you so often as a strop for sharpening her tongue. But let me unfold my plan. Maybe you know I am ever in and out of the Alcazar with draughts and oils and unguents ... and other toys that shall be nameless ... for Doña Maria. Poor soul! The fiends torment her, too, and she clutches at aught that may serve as atonement. I told her the story, and she was all agog to be the instrument for restoring the good name to the convents of Seville. She thanked me kindly for my communication, and sent her camarero to fetch me a roll of Malaga silk, and then she went to Don Pedro feigning ignorance of the knight’s name—for, next to his carbuncle, Don Pedro puts his faith in the strong right arm of Don Manuel de Lara—told him the tale, and wheedled from him a writ signed with the royal seal, the name to be filled in when she had learned[301] it, for he is very jealous of the right which it seems alone among the Kings of Christendom is his—to punish infringements of canon, as well as of civil law. I have the writ, and towards sundown I shall come to the convent orchard with three alguaciles[5] to tear the canting Judas from his lady’s arms.

Trotaconventos: Why, yes; her arms and lips. Come, come, Sir Priest, think you it is with the feet and nose lovers embrace?

Trotaconventos (chuckling): Oh, well I know the clerks of your kidney! Your talk would bring a blush to a bawd, and you’ll hold your sides and smack your lips over French fables and the like; but when it comes to flesh and hot blood and doing, you’ll draw down your upper lip, turn up your eyes, and cry, “But it’s not true. It cannot be!” Come, pull yourself together—’tis you must be the fowler of the nun.

Trotaconventos: Yes, yes, but, ’tis the common talk of Seville that the Prioress here is too busy with little hounds and apes and flutings and silk veils to care for discipline ... you’ll not get her wetting her slashed shoes in the orchard dew. You, the chaplain of this house, must meet me to-night outside the orchard’s postern to catch the nun red-handed and drag her before the Prioress.... Ah![302] to-night you’ll see whether it be only in songs and tales and little lewd painted pictures that folks know how to kiss!

Trotaconventos: Not there? Why, Sister Pilar spoke truly: “neither man nor priest”—not man enough to take vengeance on his spurner, not priest enough to chastise a sinner.

Trotaconventos: Aha! my little pigeon, how goes the world? Has my lotion cured that little roughness on your cheek? Come, my beauty, let me feel (she draws her hand down her cheek). Why, yes, it’s as smooth and satiny as a queen-apple (makes a scornful exclamation). And so that lantern-jawed Knight prefers Sister Whey to Sister Cream! Well, he’ll get well churned for his pains. Oh, the nasty Templar come to life ... oh, the pompous fool, marching with solemn gait like a lord abbot frowning over a great paunch because, forsooth, he has swallowed the moon and she has dissolved into humours in his belly! Oh ... oh ... with “good dame, do this,” and “good dame, do that,” as though I were his slave ... ’tis sweet when duty and vengeance chime together. (Looking maliciously at Sister Assumcion.) Spurned, too, by the pretty French trovar! Why, it is indeed a deserted damsel! Oh, you needn’t blush and toss your head; when I was of your age and your complexion, I could land a fish as well as throw a line. (Melting.) Never mind, poor[303] poppet, you were wise in that you came to me with your tale of Don Joseph and my lady Susannah for once caught napping ... and that in each other’s arms. I have devised a pretty vengeance which I will unfold to you. Aye! you’ll see that proud white Guzman without her black veil, last in choir for the rest of her days, and every week going barefoot round the cloister while the Prioress drubs her! And the sallow knight who thought my cream had turned when it was but his own sour stomach ... he’ll have to sell his Moorish loot to buy waxen tapers, and be beaten round all the churches of Seville ... may I live to see the day! Never was there a sweeter medicine whereby to save one’s soul, than vengeance on one’s foes. (She pauses for a few seconds, and a strange light comes into her eyes.) Don Juan Tenorio, I have made my choice—I fight with the dead. (shakes her fist at the audience) Arrogant, flaunting youth! Beauty! Hot blood! From the brink of the grave Trotaconventos threatens you.

SCENE II

Don Manuel de Lara (triumphantly): Yes, eyes of my heart; I have unlocked your sweet body.

Sister Pilar: That night you were the other side of the wall, I prayed that I might behold the woof without the warp of sin, a still, quiet, awful world, and all the winds asleep. (Very low.) IT was like that. (Springing to her feet.) Christ Jesus! Blessed Virgin! Guardian angel, where was your sword? I, a nun, a bride of Christ, I have been ravished. I am fallen lower than the lowest woman of the town, I have forfeited my immortal soul. (Sobbing, she sinks down again beside Don Manuel, and lays her head on his shoulder.) Beloved! Why have you brought me to this? Why, my beloved?

Don Manuel de Lara (caressing her): Hush, little love, hush! Your body is small and thin ... hush!

Don Manuel de Lara: Because there was something stronger than the angels, than all the hosts of the dead.

Don Manuel de Lara: I cannot say ... something ... I feel it—yet, where are these words? They have suddenly come to me: amor morte fortior—against love the dead whose aid you, and I, too, invoked, cannot prevail.

Sister Pilar (shuddering): Yet the dead kept Sister Assumcion from her trovar.

Don Manuel de Lara: Their souls were barques too light to be freighted with love; for it is very heavy.

Don Manuel de Lara: Who can tell if lightness of soul be not the greatest sin of all? And as to us ... the proverb says the paths that lead to God are infinite[305] ... beloved, I feel.... Something holy is with us to-day.

Don Manuel de Lara: Rest, small love ... there, I’ll put my cloak for your head. Why is your body so thin and small?

Sister Pilar (her eyes fixed in horror): I cannot believe that it is really so. A week since, yesterday, an hour since, I ... was ... a ... a ... virgin, and now ... can God wipe out the past?

Don Manuel de Lara: What is sin? I would seem to have forgotten. What is sin, beloved? Be my herald and read me his arms.

Sister Pilar: Death ... I have said that before ... ah, yes, to the trovar ... death, death....

Don Manuel de Lara: With us is neither sin nor death. You yourself said that during IT sin vanished.

Sister Pilar: Yes ... so it seemed ... (almost inaudibly) ’twas what I feel, only ten times multiplied, when I eat Christ in the Eucharist.

Sister Pilar: Do you know, we are in the octave of the Feast of Corpus Christi? I seem to have fallen from the wheel of the Calendar to which I have been tied all my life ... saints, apostles, virgins, martyrs, rolled round, rolled round, year after year ... like[306] the Kings and Popes and beggars on the Wheel of Fortune in my mother’s book of Hours. Yes, beloved, we have fallen off the wheel and are lying stunned in its shadow among the nettles and deadly night-shade; but above us, creaking, creaking, the old wheel turns. It may be we are dead ... are we dead, beloved?

Sister Assumcion (breathlessly): Quick! Quick! Not a moment ... they’ll be here! I cannot ... quick! (She presses her hand to her side in great agitation).

Don Manuel de Lara: Take your time, lady. When you have recovered your breath you will tell us what all this portends.

Sister Assumcion: Away! Away! Trotaconventos has been to Don Pedro ... she has a writ against you ... the alguaciles will take you to prison ... and Don Jaime comes to catch Sister Pilar ... fly! fly! ere ’tis too late.

Sister Pilar (dully): Caught up again on the wheel ... death’s wheel, and it will crush us.

Sister Assumcion: Mad, both of them! I tell you, they come with the alguaciles.

Don Manuel de Lara: And if they came with all the hosts of Christendom and Barbary, yet should you see what you will see. I have a key, and I could lock the postern, but I’ll not do so. (He picks up his sword, girds it on, and draws it.) Why ... all the Spring flows in my veins to-day.... I am the Spring. What man can fight the Spring?

Trotaconventos: There, my brave lads, I told you! Caught in the act ... the new Don Juan Tenorio and his veiled concubine!

Don Manuel de Lara: Silence, you filthy, bawdy hag! (glares at her.) Here stand I, Don Manuel de Lara, and here stands a very noble lady of Spain and a bride of Christ, and here is my sword. Who will lay hands on us? You, Don Priest, pallid and gibbering? You, vile old woman, whose rotten bones need but a touch to crumble to dust and free your black soul for hell? You ... (his eyes rest on the alguaciles). Why! By the rood ... ’tis Sancho and Domingo and Pedro! Old comrades, you and I, beneath the rain of heaven and of Moorish arrows have buried our dead; we have sat by the camp-fire thrumming our lutes or capping riddles (laughs). How does it go? “I am both hot and cold, and fish swim in me without my being a river,” and the answer is a frying-pan ... and in the cold dawn of battle we have kneeled side by side and eaten God’s Body.

Trotaconventos: At him! At him, good lads! What is his sword to your three knives and cudgels? Remember, you carry a warrant with Don Pedro’s seal.

Sancho (dubiously): ’Tis true, captain, we carry a royal warrant for your apprehension.

Don Manuel de Lara: At me then! Air! Fire! Water! A million million banners of green leaves! A mighty army of all the lovers who have ever loved! Come, then, and fight them in me! You, too, were there that day when the whole army saw the awful ærial warrior before whom the Moors melted like snow ... what earthly arrows could pierce his star-forged mail? I, too, have been a journey to the stars. I wait! At me!

Trotaconventos: Rouse yourselves, you fools! Oh, he’s a wonder with his stars and his leaves. Why, on his own showing, he is but a tumbler at a fair in a suit of motley covered with spangles, or a Jack-in-the-green at a village May-day. Come to your senses, good fellows; we can’t stay here all night.

Don Manuel de Lara: Sir Priest! I see you carry quill and ink-horn.... I fain would borrow them of you.

Don Manuel de Lara (handing the warrant to Sancho): There, Sancho, I have made a little change ... you’ll not go home with an empty bag, after all. (Pointing to Jaime Rodriguez.) There stands your quarry, looking like a sleep-walker ... to gaol with him ... until his arch-priest gets him out ... ’twill make a good fable, “which tells of a Prying Clerk and how he cut himself on his own sharpness.”

Trotaconventos (stamping): You fools! You fools! And you (turning to Don Manuel) ... you’ll lose your frenzied head for tampering with Don Pedro’s seal.

Don Manuel de Lara: Nay, I’d not lose it if I tampered with his carbuncle ... he is menaced by shadows and I fight them for him. Nor, on my honour as a Knight, shall one hair of the head of Sancho and Pedro and Domingo there suffer for this. But you ... you heap of dung outside the city’s wall, you stench of dogs’ corpses, devastating plague ... you shall die ... not by my sword, however (draws his dagger and stabs Trotaconventos). Away with her and your other quarry, Sancho ... good-day, old comrades ... here’s to drink my health (throws them a purse).

Don Manuel de Lara (loudly and triumphantly): His truth shall compass thee with a shield: thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by the night. For the arrow that flieth in the day, for the plague that walketh in the darkness: for the assault of the evil one in the noon-day. A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee. The dead, the dead ... they melted like snow before the Spring ... my beloved!

Sister Pilar: Yes ... Corpus Christi ... and then Ascension ... and then Pentecost ... round and round ... Hours ... el Señor wins in His Octave.... Is He the living or the dead, Don Manuel?

Sister Pilar: What am I saying? Something has had a victory ... maybe the dead ... but the[311] victory is not to you. (Her eyes softening as she looks at him.) Beloved! (makes a little movement as if shaking something off). First, I must finish my confession ... the one I made this morning was sacrilege ... something had blinded me. They say that in the Primitive Church the penitents confessed one to other, so will I.

Sister Pilar: I confess to Almighty God, and to you, little sister, because I have sinned against you exceedingly, in thought, word and deed (she strikes her breast three times), through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault. You were wiser than I, little sister, and knew me better than I knew myself. I deemed my soul to be set on heavenly things, but therein was I grievously mistaken. When I chid you for wantonness, thinking it was zeal for the honour of the house, it was naught, as you most truly said, but envy of you, in that you gave free rein to your tongue and your desires. And, though little did I wot of it, I craved for the love of man as much as ever did you, nay, more. Even that poor wretch, Don Jaime ... it was as if I came more alive when I talked with him than when I was in frater or in dorter with naught but women. Then that poor trovar ... he gave me a longing for the very things I did most condemn in talk with him ... the merry rout of life, all noise and laughter and busyness and perfumed women. Then when he gazed at you as does a prisoner set free gaze at the earth, my heart seemed to contract, my blood to dry up, and I hated you. And then ... and then ... there came Don Manuel, and time seemed to cease, eternity to begin. All my far-flown dreams came[312] crowding back to me like homing birds; envy, rage, pride dropped suddenly dead, like winds in a great calm at sea ... and that great calm was ... Lust.

Sister Pilar: Yes ... Lust. Little sister, I verily believe that in spite of foolishness and vanity, all the sins of this community are venial ... excepting mine. For I am Christ’s adulteress (Don Manuel starts forward with a stifled cry, but she checks him with upraised hand), a thing that Jezebel would have the right to spurn with her foot ... yes, little sister, I, a bride of Christ, have been ravished. (Seizing her hands.) Poor little sister ... just a wild bird beating its wings against a cage through venial longings for air and sun! I am not worthy to loose the latchet of your shoe.

Sister Assumcion: Oh ... Sister ... ’tis I ... I envied you first your fine furniture and sheets and ... things ... and then the knight there ... spurning me for you ... and I told Trotaconventos ... and Don Jaime ... and it is all my doing ... and ’tis I that crave forgiveness.

Sister Pilar: Hush, little sister, hush! (Strokes her hands.) Sit quiet a little while and rest ... you have been sadly shaken.

Don Manuel de Lara: Oh, very soul of my soul! White heart of hell wherein I must burn for all eternity! I see it now ... we have been asleep and we have wakened ... or, maybe, we have been awake and now we have fallen asleep. Look! look at the evening star caught in the white blossom—the tree’s cold, virginal fruition (springs to his feet). Vespers ... the Evening Star ... bells and stars and Hours, they are leagued against me ... and yet I thought ... is it the living or the dead? I cannot fight stars ... wheels ... the Host ... Beloved, will you sometimes dream of me? No need to answer, because I know you will. Our dreams ... God exacts no levy on our dreams ... the angels dare not touch them ... they are ours. First, heavy penance, then, maybe, if I win forgiveness, the white habit of St. Bruno. When you are singing Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline, I, too, shall be singing them—through the long years. God is merciful and the Church is the full granery of His Grace ... maybe He will pardon us; but it will be for your soul that I shall pray, not mine.

Sister Pilar (almost inaudibly): And I for yours ... beloved. (Turns towards Sister Assumcion): Come, little sister.

SCENE III

For He hath strengthened the bars of thy gates; he hath blessed thy children within thee.

He sendeth His crystal like morsels: who shall stand before the face of His cold?

He shall send out His word and shall melt them: His wind shall blow, and the waters shall run.

He hath not done in like manner to every nation: and His judgement He hath not made manifest to them.

The Lord, who putteth peace on the borders of the Church, filleth us with the fat of wheat.

Brethren: For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, that the Lord Jesus, the same night in which He was betrayed, took bread, and giving thanks, broke, and said: “Take ye and eat: this is my body, which shall be delivered for you: this do for the commemoration of me.”

For a few seconds there was silence; and Teresa saw several ladies exchanging amused, embarrassed glances.

Then Harry could be heard saying, “Er ... er ... er ... a piece ... er ... amazingly well adapted to its audience ... er ... er....” All turned round in the direction of his voice, and some smiled. Then again there was a little silence, till a gallant lady, evidently finding the situation unbearable, came up to Teresa and said, “Thrilling, my dear, thrilling! But I’m afraid in places it’s rather too deep for me.”

Then others followed her example. “What is an auto-sacramentál, exactly?” “Oh, really! A knight of the time of Pedro the Cruel? I always connected Don Juan ... or how is it one ought to pronounce it? Don Huan, is it? I always connected him with the time of Byron, but I suppose that was absurd.” “I liked the troubadour’s jolly red boots; are they what are called Cossack boots? Oh, no, of course, that’s Russian.”

The babies and children had, for some time, been getting fretful; and now the babies were giving their nerve-rending catcalls, the children their heart-rending keening.

In one of her moments of insight, Jollypot had said that there is nothing that brings home to one so forcibly the suffering involved in merely being alive as the change that takes place in the cry of a child between its first and its fourth year.

But the children were soon being comforted with buns; the babies with great, veined, brown-nippled breasts, while Mrs. Moore, markedly avoiding any member of the Lane family, moved about among her women with pursed mouth.

Then the actors appeared, still in their costumes, and mingled with the other guests, drinking tea and[317] chatting. The Doña, eyebrows quizzically arched, came up to Teresa.

“My dear child, what were you thinking of? Just look at Mrs. Moore’s face! That, of course, makes up for a lot ... but, still! And I do hope they won’t think Spanish convents are like that nowadays.”

Then she saw Guy coming towards her; for some reason or other, he looked relieved.

“I wish to God Haines would make his people stylisize their acting more—make them talk in more artificial voices in that sort of play. They ought to speak like the Shades in Homer; that would preserve the sense of the Past. There’s nothing that can be so modern as a voice.” He looked at her. “It’s funny ... you know, it’s not the sort of thing one would have expected you to write. It has a certain gush and exuberance, but it’s disgustingly pretty ... it really is, Teresa! Of course, one does get thrills every now and then, but I’m not sure if they’re legitimate ones—for instance, in the last scene but one, when Don Manuel becomes identified with the Year-Spirit.”

So that was it! He had feared that, according to his own canons, it would be much better than it was; hence his look of relief. She had a sudden vision of what he had feared a thing written by her would be like—something black and white, and slightly mathematical; dominoes, perhaps, which, given that the simple rule is observed that like numbers must be placed beside like, can follow as eccentric a course as the players choose, now in a straight line, now zigzagging, now going off at right angles, now again in a straight line; a sort of visible music. And, indeed, that line of ivory deeply indentured with the strong, black dots would be like the design, only stronger and clearer, made[318] by an actual page of music; like that in a portrait she had once seen by Degas of a lady standing by a piano.

But she felt genuinely glad that her play should have achieved this, at least, that one person should feel happier because of it; and she was quite sincere when she said, “Well, Guy, it’s an ill wind, you know.”

He grew very red. “I haven’t the least idea what you mean,” he said angrily.

After that, Concha came up, and was very warm in her congratulations. Did she guess? If she did, she would rather die than show that she did. Teresa began to blush, and it struck her how amused Concha must be feeling, if she had guessed, at the collapse of Sister Assumcion’s love affairs, and at the final scene between Pilar and Assumcion—Pilar’s noble self-abasement, Assumcion’s confession of her own inferiority.

And David? He kept away from her, and she noticed that he was very white, and that his expression was no longer buoyant.

The next morning at breakfast it was proposed that Dick, Concha and Rory, and Arnold, should motor to the nearest links, play a round or two, and have luncheon at the clubhouse; and David asked if he might go with them to “caddy.”

The day wore on; and Teresa noticed that the Doña kept looking at her anxiously, in a way that she used to look at her when she was a child and had a bad cold.

In the afternoon she took a book and went down to the orchard; but she could not read. The bloom was on the plums; the apples were reddening.

At about four o’clock there was the sound of footsteps behind her, and looking round she saw David. He was very white.

“No ... I doubt I must be getting back. I told Mrs. Lane last night, I’m going by the five-thirty.”

He gazed at her in silence for a few seconds, and then said, “I’m not so sure if I had any ... well, any[320] plans, so to speak, to change ... at least, I hope ... but, anyway, I’m going ... now,” and he paused.

She felt as if she were losing hold of things, as in the last few seconds of chloroform, before one goes off.

“After ... he’d had what he wanted. That’s a nice sort of repentance!” and he laughed harshly.

From far away a cock, then another, gave its strange, double-edged cry—a cry, which, like Hermes, is at once the herald of the morning and all its radiant denizens, and the marshaller to their dim abode of the light troupe of passionate ghosts: Clerk Saunders and Maid Margaret, Cathy and Heathcliff.

He laughed again, this time a little wildly: “Hark to the voice of one in the wilderness crying, ‘repent ye!’ Do you remember Newman’s translation of the Æterne Rerum Conditor? How does it go again? Wait ...

Its rhythm, when his voice stopped, continued rumbling dully along the surface of her mind.... Once it wrought a great repenting in that flood of Peter’s tears.... Once it wrought a.... Funny![321] It was the same rhythm as a Toccata of Galuppi’s....

It would have to be “in that flood of Peter’s mind....” Not very good.... What was he saying now?

“I remember your saying once that the Scotch thought an awful lot about the sinfulness of sin.... I firmly believe that the power of remitting sin has been given to the priests of God ... but are we, like that knight, going to ... well to exploit, that grand expression of God’s mercy to His creatures, the Sacrament of Penance? Well? So you don’t think that knight was a bad man?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said wearily. “Good, bad ... what does it all mean?”

“You know fine what it all means. You wrote that play,” a ghost of a smile came into his eyes. “Well ... I suppose ... it’s getting late ...” he sighed drearily, and then held out his hand.

For a few seconds she stood as if hypnotised, staring at him. Then in a rush, the waste, the foolishness of it all swept over her.

“David! David!” she cried convulsively, seizing his arm. “David! What is it all about? Don’t you see?... there’s you, here’s me. Plasencia’s up there where we’ll all soon be having tea and smoking cigarettes. Oh, it’s a plot! it’s a plot! Don’t be taken in ... why, it’s mad! You’re not going to become a priest!” Then her words were stifled by hysterical gasps.

He took hold firmly of both of her wrists. “Hush, you wee thing, hush! You’re havering, you know, just havering. You—Sister Pilar—you’re not going to try and wreck a vocation! You’d never do that![322] You know fine that there’s nothing so grand as sacrifice—to offer up youth and love to God. It’s not a sacrifice if it doesn’t cost us dear. I don’t think, somehow, that a bread made of wheat would satisfy you and me long. Remember, my dear, this isn’t everything—there’s another life. Hush now! Haven’t you a handkerchief? Here’s mine, then.”

With a wistful smile he watched her wipe her eyes, and then he said, “Well, I doubt ... I must be going. The motor will be there. God bless you ... Pilar,” he looked at her, then turned slowly and walked away in the direction of the house.

She made as if to run after him, and then, with a gesture of despair, sank down upon the ground.

Well, it was over. She had shut up Life into a plot, and there had been a counterplot, the liturgical plot into which Rome compresses life’s vast psychic stratification; and, somehow or other, her plot and the counterplot had become one.

Why had he looked so happy when he arrived—only yesterday? Was it joy at the thought of so soon saying his first mass? She would never know. The dead, plotting through a plot, had silenced him for ever.

Oh, foolish race of myth-makers! Starving, though the plain is golden with wheat; though their tent is pitched between two rivers, dying of thirst; calling for the sun when it is dark, and for the moon when it is midday.

The sun was setting, and the shadows were growing long. Some one was coming. It was the Doña, looking, in the evening light, unusually monumental, and, as on that September afternoon last year when the children were clinging round her skirts, symbolic. But now Teresa knew of what she was the symbol.

She came up to her and laid her hand on her head. “Come in, my child; it’s getting chilly. I’ve had a fire lit in your room.”

FOOTNOTES

[1] The Morería was the quarter in Spanish towns assigned to Moorish colonists.

[2] A Spaniard who could prove that his ancestry was free from any taint of Jewish or Moorish blood, was known as an “Old Christian.”

[3] It was looked upon as a grave crime for a Christian to do this.

[4] It was a superstition of the Middle Ages that crows were born pure white.

[5] Alguaciles: the Spanish equivalent in the Middle Ages to policemen.

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HOPE MIRRLEES

The Groote Park Murder

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Sister Pilar	⎞	Nuns of the Convent of San Miguel.
Sister Assumcion	⎠	Nuns of the Convent of San Miguel.
Four other Nuns of the Convent of San Miguel.
Trotaconventos		a Procuress.
Don Manuel de Lara		a Knight.
Dennys		a French “Trovar.”
Jaime Rodriguez		Confessor to the Nuns of San Miguel.
Don Salomon		a Jewish Doctor.
Pepita	⎞	Two Children.
Juanito	⎠	Two Children.
Sancho	⎞	Alguaciles.
Domingo	⎟
Pedro	⎠
Ghost of Don Juan Tenorio.
Ghost of Sister Isabel.
Zuleica		a Moorish Slave.

First	Impression,	December, 1923
Second	”	February, 1924
Third	”	April, 1924