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 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!”

6

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.

From the village to their right rang out the chimes for evensong.

“Would Mrs. Moore mind if you missed church, Eben?” asked Concha.

“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
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.”

Teresa said nothing; but her brows slightly contracted.

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?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said Teresa coldly.

They walked on in silence for a few minutes.

    As through the land at eve we went
      And plucked the ripened ears,
    My wife and I....

“My wife and I ... fell out ... how does it go?”

“Not like that, Guy,” said Teresa, with a short laugh.

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.

“Why? Because I venture to hint that your version doesn’t scan?”

“Oh, it’s not only that,” he almost screamed; “it’s 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.

She looked at him; he actually had tears in his eyes.

“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.”

This mollified him for the moment.

“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.

“What’s up?” said Guy.

“I seem to have annoyed Mr. Munroe, quite unintentionally,” answered Rory.

Slowly, painfully, David blushed under his dark skin.

“I beg your pardon,” he murmured.

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.

“I’m rather tired—do take me home, Mr. Munroe,” said Teresa.

He looked at her gratefully.

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?”

But she could not get them out.

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.

“But how do you mean exactly?”

“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.

“Were you?”

“Yes.”

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 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_.”

The last words were said scarcely above a whisper.

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 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_.

“That means rain,” said David.

“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.

“That’s offly good,” he cried.

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.

And _He_ shall _feed_ His _flock_ like a _she_-e-e-e-e-_perd_.

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.

And _He_ shall _feed_ His _flock_ like a _she_-e-e-e-e-_perd_....

“Is that—is that the wee lady?” asked David, gently.

Teresa nodded.

They stood still and listened; Teresa was smiling, a 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.

And _He_ shall _feed_ His _flock_ like a _she_-e-e-e-e-_perd_.

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 ... or at a school treat, standing tall and
smiling, her arms stretched out, her hands clasped in those of her twin
pillar, warbling:

    Oranges and lemons
    Sing the bells of St. Clement’s,

while under the roof of arms scampered the hot, excited children.

Anyway, it was an emotion that gave him a strange, sweet nausea.

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

    The ancient English dower of inward happiness.

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.

7

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_.”

Rory did not leave till after tea.

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.”

“Sheets? What sheets?” said Concha in a sleepy voice.

“In my room ... you know Captain Dundas has been sleeping there.”

“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.

That night they fell asleep holding each other’s hands.

CHAPTER IV

1

The night that Teresa and Concha spent so affectionately in the same bed
had no effect on their relationship: Concha continued flinging herself,
angrily, violently, against Teresa’s stony stare.

If they happened to be alone in the room when the post arrived and there
was a letter for Concha, she would read it through with knit brows,
exclaiming under her breath the while; then she would re-read it and,
laying it down, would gaze into the fire, apparently occupied with some
grave problem of conduct; finally, springing to her feet with an air of
having taken a final and irrevocable decision, she would violently tear
up the letter, and fling the fragments into the fire.

The letter would probably be from her friend, Elfrida Penn, and may have
contained some slight cause for anxiety, as Elfrida was an hysterical
young woman and one apt to mismanage her love-affairs; but Teresa,
sitting staring at the comedy through half-closed eyes with fascinated
irritation, would be certain that the letter contained nothing but an
announcement of Paris models, or the ticket for a charity ball.

Teresa felt like some one of presbyopic and astigmatic sight, doomed
to look fixedly all day long at a very small object at very close
quarters; and this feeling reached an unusual degree of exacerbation
on the day that Concha went up to London to dine with Rory Dundas. At
seven o’clock she began to follow every stage of her toilette; the bath
cloudy with salts, a bottle of which she was sure to have taken up in
her dressing-case; then the silk stockings drawn on—“oh _damn_ that
Parker! She’s sent me a pair with a ladder”; silk shift, stays, puffing
out her hair, mouth full of gilt hair-pins; again and again pressing
the bell till the chambermaid came to fasten up her gown; on with her
evening cloak and down into the hall where Rory would be standing waiting
in an overcoat, a folded-up opera hat in his hand, his hair very sleek
from that loathsome stuff of his—“Hulloooah!” “Hulloa! Hulloa! I say ...
_some_ frock!” and then all through dinner endless topical jokes.

Oh it was unbearably humiliating ... and how she longed for Pepa: “Teresa
darling! You must be mad. He really _isn’t_ good enough, you know. I’m
sure he never opens a book, and I expect he’s disgustingly bloodthirsty
about the Germans. But if you really like him we must arrange
something—what a pity May-Week is such a long way off.”

What _did_ she see in him? He was completely without intellectual
distinction; he had a certain amount of fancy, of course, but fancy was
nothing—

    Tell me where is Fancy bred?
        _Not_ in the heart
        _Nor_ in the head

nearly all young Englishmen had fancy—a fancy fed by _Alice in
Wonderland_, and the goblin arabesques on the cover of _Punch_; a certain
romantic historical sense too that thrills to _Puck of Pook’s Hill_ and
the _Three Musketeers_—oh yes, and, unlike Frenchmen, they probably
all cherish a hope that never quite dies of one day playing Anthony to
some astonishingly provocative lady—foreign probably, passionate and
sophisticated as the heroine of _Three Weeks_, mysterious as Rider
Haggard’s _She_. But all that is just part of the average English
outfit—national, ubiquitous, undistinguished, like a sense of humour and
the proverbial love of fair play.

Yes; their minds were sterile, frivolous ... _un-Platonic_—that was the
word for expressing the lack she felt in the emotional life of the Rorys,
the Ebens, and all the rest of that crew; un-Platonic, _because they
could not make myths_. For them the shoemaker at his last, the potter at
his wheel, the fishwives of the market-place, new-born babies and dead
men, never suddenly grew transparent, allowing to glimmer through them
the contours of a stranger world. For them Dionysus, whirling in his
frantic dance, never suddenly froze into the still cold marble of Apollo.

Concha came back from her outing uncommunicative and rather cross. She
was evidently irritated by the unusual eagerness shown by the Doña with
regard to her coming dinner with David Munroe.

One day Anna tackled Teresa over the doctrine of Transubstantiation.

“I’ve never believed in fairies and things,” she said, “and this sounds
much more untruer—_is_ it true?”

Teresa looked at her square, sensible little face—though without the
humour, so ridiculously like Harry’s in shape and expression—and her
heart sank.

What _could_ she say?

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

She began to mutter idiotically:

    “Una—muno—mena—mo,
    Catch a nigger by his toe.”

“But is it true?” persisted Anna.

“Darling, just give me a minute to think,” pleaded Teresa; and she set
about reviewing her own attitude to her faith.

Whatever the confessors may say, Catholicism has nothing to do with dogma
... no, no, that’s not quite it, dogma is a very important element, but
in spite of not accepting it one can still be a Catholic. Catholicism
is a form of art; it arouses an æsthetic emotion—an emotion of
_ambivalence_; because like all great art it at once repels and attracts.
When people confronted her with its intellectual absurdities, she felt as
she did, when, at an exhibition of modern painting, they exclaimed: “but
whoever saw hands like _that_?” or “why hasn’t he given her a nose?”

Of course, this peculiar æsthetic emotion is not to be found in every
manifestation of Catholicism—it has to be sought for; for instance, it is
in the strange pages at the beginning of Newman’s _Apologia_, where, in
his hushed emaciated English, he tells how, in his childhood in a remote
village, never having seen any of the insignia of Rome, when dreaming
over his lessons he would cover the pages of his copy-books with rosaries
and sacred hearts. And, when sitting one evening in the cemetery at
the bottom of the hill on which stands Siena, she had got the emotion
very strongly from the contrast between the lovely Tuscan country, the
magnificently poised city, the sinister black-cowled _confraternité_ that
was winding down the hill, each member carrying a lighted torch—between
all this and the cemetery itself where, among the wreaths of artificial
flowers, there was stuck up on each grave a cheap photograph of the
deceased in his or her horrible Sunday finery, with a maudlin motto
inscribed upon the frame. In the contrast too in Seville between Holy
Week, the pageantry of which is organised by the parish priests—a wooden
platform, for instance, carried slowly through the streets on which
stands the august _Jesùs de la Muerte_ flanked by two huge lighted
candles—and the Jesuit procession a few days later, in which Virgins
looking like _ballerinas_ and apostles holding guitars go simpering past
all covered with paper flowers. One can get it, too, from reading the
_Song of Solomon_ in the terse Latin of the Vulgate.

It is an art steeped in a noble classical tradition which nevertheless
makes unerringly for what, outside the vast tolerance of art, would be
considered vulgar and hideous—chromo-lithographs, blood, mad nuns. This
classical tradition and this taste for the tawdry are for ever pulling
against each other, and it is just this conflict that gives it, as art,
its peculiar _cachet_.

This was all very fine; but it would not do for Anna.

“Darling, do you think it matters about a thing being true, as long as
it’s ... and, anyway, what exactly do we mean when we say a thing is
true?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Anna fretfully, “do _you_ believe that
the clergyman turns that bread into Jesus Christ?”

After a second’s hesitation Teresa braced herself and answered, “Yes.”

“Well, anyway, Daddy doesn’t, I’m sure and,” Anna lowered her voice, “I’m
sure Mummie didn’t either.”

“Well, darling, you know no one is going to _force_ you to believe it—you
can do exactly what you like about it.”

Then Anna trotted off into the garden and Teresa sat on, thinking.

How was she going to cope with Pepa’s children?

These counter-influences—Plasencia and Cambridge—one continually undoing
the work of the other, were so very bad for them. Childhood was a
difficult enough time without that.

She remembered the agony of her own struggle to free herself from
the robe of Nessus, woven by suggestion, heredity, and imperfectly
functioning faculties; was she yet free from the robe? Anyhow, it was
better now than in that awful world of childhood—a world, as it were,
at the bottom of the sea: airless, muted, pervaded by a dim blue light
through which her eyes strained in vain to see the seaweeds and shells
and skulls in their true shape and colour; a world to which noises from
the bright windy land above would from time to time come floating down,
muffled and indistinct—voices of newspaper boys shouting “Death of Mr.
Gladstone! Death of Mr. Gladstone!” Snatches of tunes from _San Toy_;
bells ringing for the relief of Mafeking.

2

September turned into October; the apples grew redder and the fields—the
corn and barley gradually being carted away to be stacked in barns—grew
plainer, severe expanses of a uniform buff colour, suggesting to Teresa
the background of a portrait by Velasquez.

The children were going back to Cambridge; and their excitement at the
prospect might have convinced the Doña, had she been open to conviction,
that their life there was not an unhappy one.

They were sorry to leave the Doña and Teresa and ’Snice and the
garden—that went without saying; but the prospect of a railway journey
was sufficient to put Jasper, who never looked very far ahead, into a
state of the wildest excitement, and the occasional nip in the air during
the past week had given Anna an appetite for the almost forgotten joys of
lessons, Girl-Guides, the “committee” organised by a very grand friend
of twelve for collecting money for the _Save the Children_ Fund (one was
dubbed a member of the committee with the President’s tennis-racket and
then took terrible oaths of secrecy), and soon Christmas drawing near,
when Nanny would take them down to brilliantly lighted Boots, with its
pleasant smell of leather and violet powder, to choose their Christmas
cards.

Teresa knew what she was feeling; it was a pleasant thought, all the
small creatures hurrying eagerly back from sea or hills or valleys all
over the kingdom—tiny Esquimaux swarming back from their isolated summer
fisheries to the civic life of winter with its endless small activities,
so ridiculous to the outside world, so solemn, and so terribly important,
to themselves.

Shortly after they had reached Cambridge Teresa got the following letter
from Harry Sinclair:

    “DEAR TERESA,—Since his return from Plasencia Jasper has been
    demanding a cake that turns into a man.

    “At first I supposed I had told him about those gingerbread
    dragoons that old Positivist Jackson used to bring us when we
    were children at Hastings.

    “I was mistaken.

    “I discover from Anna what he wanted was ‘the true, real, and
    substantial presence of the Body of our Lord Jesus Christ,
    together with His Soul and Divinity, in the most holy sacrament
    of the Eucharist.’

    “Now, look here, Teresa, I won’t stand it. If I notice any
    further morbid cravings in Jasper for water, bread, wine, or
    oil, I shall stop his visits to Plasencia.

    “It really is insufferable—and you know quite well that Pepa
    would have objected as much as I do.

                               “Yrs.

                                                       “H. J. S.”

It only made Teresa laugh; she knew how Harry must have enjoyed writing
it—could see him jumping on to his bicycle and hurrying down to the
University Library to verify in one of the books of the late Lord Acton
the definition of Transubstantiation.

Unfortunately she left it lying about; and it fell into the hands of
the Doña, whom Teresa found in the act of reading it, with set face and
compressed lips.

At the bottom of her heart the Doña attached as little importance to it
as Teresa had done: the fact of its having been written to Teresa and
not to herself marked it as being nothing more than a harmless and half
facetious means of relieving his feelings; besides, she knew that to
sever all connection with Plasencia would be too drastic a step—involving
too many complications, too many painful scenes—also, too dramatic a step
to be taken by Harry in cold blood.

But there are very few people who have the strength and poise of
intellect to resist, by an honest scrutiny of facts, the exquisite
pleasure of thinking themselves despitefully used by their enemy—very few
too who can resist the pleasure of avenging this despiteful usage on a
third and, to the vulgar eye, quite innocent person.

The human soul requires for the play that is its hidden life but a tiny
cast; and to provide parts for its enormous company it falls back upon
the device of understudies, six or seven sometimes to one part. When this
is properly understood the use of the scapegoat will seem less unjust.

Anyhow, the Doña chose to pretend to herself that she took Harry’s letter
seriously; and Dick was chosen as the scapegoat.

There is prevalent in Spain a system of barter with the Deity, the
contracts entered into being of the following nature: If God (or the
Virgin or Saint ...) will make _Fulano_ faithful to _Fulana_, _Fulana_
will not enter a theatre for a month; _or_ if God will bring little
Juanito safely through his operation for adenoids, _Fulano_ will try to
love his mother-in-law.

As a result of Harry’s letter the Doña entered into such a contract: her
Maker was to ensure the ultimate saving of her grandchildren’s souls;
while her part of the bargain affected Dick and, incidentally, was
extremely agreeable to herself.

In her bedroom an identical little comedy was enacted on two separate
nights. On its being repeated a third time, Dick burst out angrily:
“Oh, very well then ... it’s a bit ... no one could say I bothered you
much nowadays.... I know—that damned priest has had the impertinence to
interfere in my affairs.... I suppose ... I won’t ... _very_ well, then!”

If it had not been dark he would have seen that the Doña’s eyes were
bright and shining with pleasure.

For hours he lay awake; a hotch-potch of old grievances boiling and
seething in his mind.

Always him, always him, giving in every time: that summer years ago when
he had given up golf and Harlech to take them all to Cadiz instead—_very_
few men would have done that! And if they were going to a play always
letting one of the children choose what it was to be—and jolly little
gratitude he got for it all! _Jolly_ little! Snubbed here, ignored there
... glimpses he had had of other homes came into his head: “hush, dear,
don’t worry father”; “now then, Smith, _hurry! hurry!_ The master must
not be kept waiting”; “all right, dear, all right, there’s _plenty_ of
time.... Gladys dear, just run and fetch your father’s pipe.... Now,
Charlie, where’s father’s overcoat? Good-bye darling, I’ll go to the
Stores myself this morning and see about it for you ... good-bye, dear,
don’t tire yourself ...” whereas here it was: “Well, Dick; I really don’t
see how you _can_ have the car this morning—Arnold wants it and he’s so
seldom here....” Arnold! Arnold! Arnold! Oh what endless injustice that
name conjured up! Actually it was years since they had had Welsh rarebit
as a savoury because Arnold had once said the smell made him feel sick
... and oh, the cruelty and injustice on that birthday when the Doña with
an indulgent smile had asked him what he would like for dinner (damn her
impertinence—as if it wasn’t his own house and his own food and his own
money!), and he had chosen ox-tail soup, sole, partridge, roly-poly and
marrow-bones—ox-tail soup had been “scrapped” because Arnold didn’t like
it, sole because they’d had it the night before, roly-poly because Arnold
said it wasn’t a dinner-sweet. As to the marrow-bones—they had not been
“scrapped,” indeed, but as every one knows, a dish of marrow-bones is
a lottery, and he, Dick, the Birthday King, had drawn a blank—a hollow
mockery, in which a tiny Gulliver might have sat dry and safe, not a
single drop of grease falling on his wig or his broadcloth. But Arnold’s
had been a lordly bone, dropping at first without persuasion two or three
great blobs of semi-coagulated amber, and then yielding to his proddings
the coyer treasures of its chinks and crannies, what time he had cried
triumphantly, “More toast, please, Rendall!” And the Doña had watched
him with a touched and gratified smile, as if she were witnessing for
the first time the incidence of merit and its deserts. And it was not
merely that the unfilial Arnold had wallowed in grease, not offering
out of his abundance one slim finger of sparsely besmeared toast to his
dry and yearning father, but the Doña had not cast in his direction one
glance of pity—and it was his birthday, too!... _oh_ that Arnold! Who was
it ... Harry or Guy ... anyway he had heard some one saying that every
father feels like a Frankenstein before a grown-up son ... well, not
many of them had as much cause as he had ... despised, snubbed whenever
he opened his mouth. Oh damn that Arnold! In what did he consider his
great superiority to lie? Curious thing how his luck had always been so
bad: he had not got into the Fifteen at Rugby because he had put his knee
out—so he _said_; he had failed to get a scholarship at Trinity because
his coach had given him the wrong text-book on constitutional history—so
he _said_; he had only got a second in his tripos, because the Cambridge
school of history was beneath contempt—so he _said_. And then the War
and all the appalling fuss about him—really, one would have thought he
was fighting the Germans single-handed! And Dick, creeping about with
his tail between his legs and being made to feel a criminal every time
he smiled or forgot for a second that Arnold was in the trenches ...
and, anyhow, if he had been so wonderful, why hadn’t he the V.C., or _at
least_ the Military Cross?

_Arnold was a fraud_ ... and a damned impertinent one! Well, it was his
mother’s fault ... mothers were Bolsheviks, yes, _Bolsheviks_—by secret
propaganda begun in the nursery setting the members of a family against
their head. He was nothing to his children—_nothing_.

Just for a second he got a whiff of the sweet, nauseating, vertiginous,
emotion he had experienced at the birth of each of them in turn—an
emotion rather like the combined odours of _eau de Cologne_ and
chloroform; an emotion which, like all the most poignant ones, had a
strong flavouring of sadism; for it sprang from the strange fierce
pleasure of knowing that the body he loved was being tortured to bear his
children.

Yes, he had loved her ... there had been times ... well, was he going to
put up with it for ever? _Oh_, how badly he had been used.

Then it would all begin over again.

Finally he came to a resolution, the daring of which (such is the force
of habit) half frightened him, while it made _his_ eyes in their turn
bright and shining with pleasure.

3

The fire of October, which had first been kindled in a crimson semicircle
of beeches burning through a blanket of mist on the outskirts of
Plasencia, spread, a slow contagion, over all the land. The birch
saplings in the garden became the colour of bracken. The border was gold
and amethyst with chrysanthemums and Michaelmas daisies. And in the
fields there lingered poppies, which of all flowers look the frailest,
yet which are the last to go.

Imperceptibly, the breach widened between Teresa and Concha; Concha
had now completely given up pretending that their relationship was an
affectionate one, and they rarely spoke to each other.

It was evident, too, that the lack of harmony between their parents,
noticeable since Pepa’s death, had recently become more pronounced.

Dick was often absent for days at a time; and one day Teresa happening
to go into the Doña’s morning-room found her sitting on the sofa looking
angry and troubled, a letter on her lap. Teresa took the letter—the Doña
offering no protest—and read it. I was a bill to Dick from a London
jeweller for a string of pearls. Puzzled, she looked questioningly at the
Doña, who merely shrugged her shoulders.

In the servant’s hall, too, there seemed to be discord, rumours of which
drifted upstairs _via_ Parker the maid, Parker had a way of beginning in
the middle, which made her plot difficult to follow, but which perhaps
had a certain value as a method of expressing such irrational things as
the entanglement of primitive emotions. Her stories were like this: “And
she said: ‘see you don’t get Minchin in the garden,’ and Mrs. Rudge said,
‘oh then some one else’s name would be Walker’; and I said, ‘if Dale
hadn’t been killed in the War _he_ would be in your cottage and that’s
what the War has done for _you_!’ and I said, ‘you’ve children, Mrs.
Rudge,’ I said, ‘and I hope it won’t come knocking at _your_ door some
day,’ and Lily said, ‘trust Parker to be after an unmarried man,’ and I
said, ‘don’t be so rude, Lily, it’s Nosey Parker yourself ... even though
I don’t go to chapel!’ That was one for Mrs. Rudge, you see: oh, they’re
a set of beauties!”

The previous head-gardener, Dale, for whom the middle-aged Parker had
had a _tendresse_, had been killed in the War. She looked askance
at his successor Rudge for wearing dead men’s shoes, and for being
that unpardonable thing—a married man; and into the bargain he was a
dissenter. Then there was Minchin, the handsome cowman, whom Dick was
thinking of putting into the garden....

It was all very complicated; but seeing that light is sometimes
thrown on the psychology of the hyper-civilised by the researches of
anthropologists among Bantus and Red Indians, perhaps these tales of
Parker deserved a certain attention—at any rate, behind them there loomed
three tremendous forces: sex, religion and the dead....

One day, to the surprise of every one but the Doña, there arrived in time
for dinner Dick’s dearest friend, Hugh Mallam.

He was a huge shaggy creature, if possible, more boyish than Dick.
He and Dick were delighted at seeing each other, for Hugh lived in
Devonshire and rarely came as far north as Plasencia, and all through
dinner plied each other with old jokes and old memories; and from the
roars of laughter that reached the drawing-room after they had been left
to themselves they were evidently enjoying themselves extremely over
their port wine.

The next morning Teresa coming into the morning-room, found the Doña and
Hugh standing before the fire, the Doña looking angry and scornful while
Hugh, in an instructive and slightly irritated voice, was saying: “Sorry,
Doña, but I _can’t_ help it ... I can’t help being the same sort of
person with Dick that I’ve always been ... it’s like that ... I know it’s
very wrong of him and all that, but I can’t help being the same sort of
person with him I’ve always been ... I....”

“Yes, yes, Hugh, you’ve said that before. But do you realise what a
serious thing it is for me and the children? You _seemed_ very shocked
and sympathetic in your letter—for one thing, a family man simply can’t
afford to spend these sums; then there’s the scandal—so bad for the
business and Arnold ... and you promised me yesterday....”

“I know, but I tell you, as soon as I saw old Dick I knew that I couldn’t
lecture him, one can’t change.... _I can’t help being the same sort of
person with him I’ve always been._ But I really am most awfully sorry
about it all—the old blackguard!”

“Well, if you hear that we are ruined, perhaps you’ll be sorrier still.”

“That won’t happen—no tragedies ever happen to any one who has anything
to do with me—ha! ha! They couldn’t, could they, Teresa? I’m much too——”

“Hush!” said the Doña sharply, suddenly noticing the presence of Teresa;
and, with a look of extreme relief, Hugh slunk through the French window
into the garden.

So the Doña had actually been trying to turn Hugh into their father’s
mentor! It was not like her; she was much too wise not to know that the
incorrigibly frivolous Hugh was quite unsuited to the part.

Parallel with the infallible wisdom that is the fruit of our own personal
experience, there lie the waste products of the world’s experience—facile
generalisations, _clichés_, and so on. Half the follies of mankind are
due to forming our actions along this line instead of along the other.
There, Dick and Hugh were not two human beings, therefore unique and
inimitable, but ‘old school friends’—and to whose gentle pressure back to
the narrow way is one more likely to yield than to that of an ‘old school
friend’?

But the very fact of the wise Doña acquiescing in such a stale fallacy,
told of desperation and the clutching at straws.

Of course, Hugh was perfectly right—the shape and colour of his
relationship with Dick had been fixed fifty years ago at the dame’s
school in Kensington, to spring up unchanged all through the years at
each fresh meeting. They could not change it; why, you might as well go
and tell an oak that _this_ spring it was to weave its leaves on the loom
of the elms.

He had been right, too, in saying there would be no catastrophe.
The fate of Pompeii—a sudden melodramatic blotting out of little
familiar things—would never, she felt sure, overtake Plasencia. Things
at Plasencia happened very slowly, by means of a long series of
anticlimaxes.

4

As they sat on the loggia that afternoon reading their letters after tea,
Concha suddenly exclaimed, “Well I’m _blessed_!” and laying down her
letter began to laugh.

“Well?” said the Doña.

“It’s that excellent David Munroe!”

“What about him?”

“He writes to say that he’s chucking business and everything, and is
going at once into a seminary to prepare for ordination—it seems too
comical!”

The Doña’s expression was one of mingled disappointment and interest;
while Jollypot’s cheeks went pink with excitement. They began to press
Concha for details.

As to Teresa—somehow or other it gave her a disagreeable shock.

Of course, every year hundreds of young men all over the world had a
vocation, went to a seminary, and, in due time, said their first mass—she
ought to be used to it; nevertheless, she felt there was something ...
something unnatural in the news: a young man who had business connections
with her father, and gave Concha dinner at the Savoy, and danced to
the gramophone—and then, suddenly hearing this ... she got the same
impression that she did in Paris from a sudden vision of the white
ghostly minarets of the Sacré-Cœur, doubtless beautiful in themselves,
but incongruous in design, and associations, and hence displeasing in
that gray-green, stucco, and admirably classical city.

The others drifted off to their various business, and Teresa sat on,
looking at the view.

It was one of these misty October days when every landscape looks so
magnificent, that, given pencil, brush, and the power of copying what
one sees, it almost seems that any one, without going through the
eclectic process of creation, could paint a great picture. The colours
were blurred as if the intervening atmosphere were a sheet of bad glass;
and the relationship between the old rose of ploughed fields, the yellow
strips of mustard, and the brighter gold and pink of the sunflowers,
chrysanthemums, and Michaelmas daisies in the border, made one think of
an oriental vase painted with dim blossoms and butterflies in which is
arranged a nosegay of bright and freshly plucked flowers—the paintings on
the porcelain melting into the flowers, the flowers vivifying the colours
on the porcelain.

That is what the relationship between life and art should be like, she
thought, art the nosegay, life the porcelain vase.

Life could not be shot on the wing—it must first be frozen.... Myths
that simplified and transposed so that things became as the chairs and
sofa had been that day in her Chelsea lodgings ... heliacal periods ...
Apollo and Dionysus ... it was all the same thing. If only she could find
it, life at Plasencia had some design, some plot ... yes, that was it—a
_plot_ that enlarged and simplified things so that they could be seen.

What was life at Plasencia like? A motley hostile company sailing
together in a ship as in Cervantes’s _Persiles_?

No; it still had roots; night and day it still stared at the same view;
externally, it was immobile. It was more like a convent than a ship, an
ill-matched company forced to live together under one roof, which one and
all they long to leave.

A sense of discomfort came over her at the word “convent”: long bare
corridors hung with hideous lithographs; hard cold beds; shrewish
vulgar-tongued bells summoning one to smoked fish; an insipid
calligraphy; “that by the intercession of Blessed Madeleine Sophie
Barat, Virgin, through her devotion to thy Sacred Heart” ... it certainly
had _ambivalence_—it was the great Catholic art she had tried to define
to herself when confronted with doubting Anna; but it was not Plasencia.

“Nunnery” was a better word, a compact warm word, suggesting hives and
the mysterious activities of bees ... it had an archaic ring too ... yes,
art always exists in the past (if not why is the present tense never
used?)—it is the present seen as the past.

A nunnery, then, long ago—Boccaccio’s Fiammetta, as a full-blown
carnation splits its calyx, her beauty bursting through her novice’s
habit, receiving in the nunnery parlour all the amorous youth of Naples.
And yet it was not the same as if she had received them in a boudoir
of the world. The nunnery’s rule might be lax but it remained a rule;
and that, artistically, was of very great value—vivid earthly passion
seen against the pale tracery of Laud, Nones, Vespers. And at Plasencia
too—out there in the view life was enacted against a background of Hours:
_ver_, _aetas_, _autumnus_, _hiems_—to call them by their Latin names
made them at once liturgical.

A nunnery, long ago ... where? Not in Italy; for that would be out of
harmony with the colour scheme of Plasencia—not so with Spain, from the
stuff of which they were knit, so many of them. A Spanish play (because
a play is the best vehicle for a plot) much more brightly coloured than
Plasencia, “Cherubimic,” as manuscripts illuminated in very bright
colours used to be called ... the action not merely in Spain, but in
their own Seville ... Moorish Seville ... hence a play, written like the
letters to Queen Elizabeth from eastern potentates, “on paper which doth
smell most fragrantly of camphor and ambergris, and the ink of perfect
musk.”

And the plot? Well, that was not yet visible; but the forces behind it
would be sex, religion, and the dead.

5

October turned into November. At first some belated chrysanthemums,
penstemmons, and gentians, kept the flag of the border gallantly flying;
then Rudge cut it down to the bare wood of stalks a few inches high,
which showed between them the brown of the earth.

Out in the country, for a time, a pink and gold spray of wild briar
garlanded here and there the thorny withered hedges; and then their only
ornament became the red breast of an occasional robin, his plump body
balanced on his thin hairy legs, which were like the stalks of the tiny
Cheshire pinks that one sees in rock gardens.

Everywhere the earth was becoming depalliated and self-coloured; and on
one of her walks Teresa came upon a pathetic heap of feathers.

In autumn the oriflamme of the spectrum had been red; now it was blue—a
corrugated iron roof, for instance. And soon the whole land was wintry
and blue; a blue not of vegetation but of light, light, which lay in
hollows like patches of blue-bells, which glinted along the wet surface
of the high road, turning it into an azure river upon which lay, like
yellow fritillaries, the golden dung dropped by calves led to market; and
through the golden birches the view, too, lay delicate and blue.

Then black and white days would come, when the sun looked like the moon,
and a group of trees like a sketch in charcoal of a distant city.

There was nothing new at Plasencia: Dick still sulked at meals; the
Doña’s face was cold and set; Concha was _distraite_ and went a great
deal to London; Parker complained of the Rudges; only Jollypot and ’Snice
went their ways in an apparently unclouded serenity.

Teresa was absorbed by a weekly parcel of books from the London Library;
charming mediæval books in that pretty state of decomposition when
literature is turning into history and has become self-coloured, the
words serving the double purpose of telling a tale and of illuminating
it with small brightly coloured pictures, like the toys in the pack of
Claudel’s Saint Nicholas:—

    Il suffit que j’y fasse un trou et j’y vois des choses vivantes et
      toutes petites
    Le Déluge, le Veau d’Or, et la punition des Israélites....

Of Seville she already knew enough to serve her purpose, having several
years before, during a winter she had spent there with her mother’s
sister, gone every morning to the University to read in the public
library; and, as it contains but few books of later date than the
eighteenth century, she had read there many a quaint work on the history
and customs of old Seville. And, fascinated by its persistent Moorish
past, she had dipped a little into the curious decorative grammar of the
Arabs, in which, so it seemed to her, infinitives, and participles, and
adjectives, are regarded as variations of an ever-recurring design of
leaf or scroll in a vast arabesque adorning the walls of a mosque.

Looking over the notes she had made at that time, under the heading
_Spanish Chestnuts_ she came upon two little fables she had written on
the model of the Arab apologues which were circulated during the Middle
Ages all over Spain; and, with the dislike of waste that is so often a
characteristic of the artist, she decided that, if it were possible, she
would make use of them in the unwritten play.

Like every other visitor to Seville she had been haunted by that strange
figure, more Moor than Christian, Pedro the Cruel; for, materially and
spiritually, his impress is everywhere on the city—there are streets that
still bear the names of his Jewish concubines, the popular ballads still
sing of his justice, his cruelty, and his tragic death; while his eternal
monument is the great Moorish palace of the Alcazar within whose walls
Charles-Quint himself, though his home was half of Europe, remained ever
an alien—it is still stained by his blood, and in its garden, through the
water of her marble bath, the limbs of his love, Maria Padilla, still
gleam white to the moon.

So it was natural that she should fix upon his reign as the period of
the play; and hence, though she read promiscuously the literature of the
Middle Ages, her focus was the fourteenth century.

All the same, she had qualms. Might she not “queer her pitch” by all
this reading? A sense of the Past could not be distilled from a mass of
antiquarian details; it was just because the Present was so rank with
details that, by putting it in the Past, she was trying to see it clean
and new. A sense of the Past is an emotion that is sudden, and swift,
and perishable—a flash of purple-red among dark trees and bracken as one
rushes past in a motor-car, and it is already half a mile behind before
one realises that it was rhododendrons in full flower, and had one had
time to explore the park one would have found its acres of shade all
riddled with them, saturated with them. An impression like this is not to
hold or to bind. And yet ... she had seen a picture by Monticelli, called
_François I. et les dames de sa cour_, of which the thick flakes of dark,
rich colour, if you but stood far enough away, glimmered into dim shapes
of ladies in flowered silks and brocades, against a background of boscage
clustering round a figure both brave and satyr-like—the king. Something
dim and gleaming; fragmentary as De Quincey’s dream.

“Often I used to see a crowd of ladies, and perhaps a festival and
dances. And I heard it said, or I said to myself, ‘These are English
ladies from the unhappy time of Charles I.’ The ladies danced and looked
as lovely as the Court of George IV., yet I knew, even in my dream, that
they had been in the grave for nearly two centuries.”

_Yet I knew, even in my dream, that they had been in the grave for nearly
two centuries_—yes, that was it. You must make your readers feel that
they are having a waking vision; and your words must be “lonely,” like
Virgil’s; they must be halting and fragmentary and whispered.

Nevertheless she went on with her reading, and, as though from among the
many brasses of knights with which is inset the aisle of some church,
their thinly traced outlines blurred and rubbed by time and countless
feet, one particular one were slowly to thicken to a bas-relief, then
swell into a statue in the round, then come to life—gray eyes glittering
through the vizor, delicately chased armour clanking, the church echoing
to oaths in Norman-French,—so gradually from among the flat, uniform,
sleeping years of the Middle Ages did the fourteenth century come to life
in Teresa’s mind.

Beyond the Pyrenees it was a period of transition—faith was on the wane.
She found a symbol of the age in Boccaccio’s vow made not at the shrine
of a saint, but at Virgil’s grave; not a vow to wear a hair-shirt or to
die fighting the Saracens, but to dedicate all his life to the art of
letters. And, when terrified by the message from the death-bed of Blessed
Pietro Pietroni, he came near to breaking his vow and falling backwards
into the shadows, in the humane sanity of Petrarch’s letter—making
rhetoric harsh and mysticism vulgar—she heard the unmistakable note of
the Renaissance.

And in France, too, the writer of the second part of the _Roman de la
Rose_ has earned the title of “le Voltaire du moyen age.”

But on the other side of the Pyrenees the echo of this new spirit was but
very faint.

Shut in between the rock of Gibraltar and by these same Pyrenees sits Our
Lady of the Rocks, Faith ... alone; for heresies (Calvinism being the
great exception) are, Teresa came to see, but the turning away of the
frailer sisters, Hope and Charity, from the petrifying stare of their
Gorgon but most beautiful sister.

But in those days, though as stern, she was a plainer Faith. It was not
till after the Council of Trent that she developed the repellent beauty
of a great picture: the tortured conversion of St. Ignatius de Loyóla,
the Greco-esque visions of Santa Teresa de Jesùs, the gloating grinning
crowd in the _Zocodover_ of Toledo lit up by the flames of an auto-da-fé
into one of the goblin visions of Goya, were still but tiny seeds,
broadcast and sleeping. Catholicism had not yet lost the monumental
austerity of the primitive Church; its blazon was still the Tree of the
Fall and the Redemption springing from Peter’s rock.

But, all the time, the doctrine of Transubstantiation, woven by the
“angelic doctor” round the Sacrifice of the Mass, was slowly, surely
coming to its own, and Jehovah was turning into the Lord God of the Host.

CHAPTER V

1

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 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....”

Then there was a laugh in the hall, discreetly echoed by Rendall the
butler.

“Hallo! That’s Rory,” said Concha, and ran out into the hall.

Teresa felt herself stiffening into an attitude of hostile criticism.

“Here he is!”

First entry of the _jeune premier_ in a musical play:

“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:

    When I came back from sea
    The guuurls were waiting for me.

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 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....”

“Go it! Go it!” laughed Rory.

“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.

What energy to dig channels, to be continually on the alert, to fight!

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.

The talk and laughter like waves went on beating round Teresa.

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 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.”

“There, Rory! There!” shouted Guy triumphantly.

“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 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.

Then Guy left the group of Anstey amateurs and came and sat down beside
Teresa.

“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.”

“Have you? Do you like it?”

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 _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. 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 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.

But she had got a sudden glimpse into the inner life of Jollypot.

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....

2

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.

“She is a Socialist like you, isn’t she, Guy?” persisted Rory.

“He means an intellectual character,” explained Guy, not ill-pleased.

“No, but you do want to blow us all up, don’t you?”

“Do I?” said Teresa coldly.

“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.

“Well, sir, modesty forbids me to say so in so many _words_,” grinned
Rory.

“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 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.

“Dorian Gray!” said Arnold, looking up from his book with a meaning grin.

“Oh no, no, I’m sure it’s some very literary character,” said Concha.

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

“Percy Bysshe ... is she right, Guy?”

“No,” said Guy sulkily.

“Shakespeare—Tennyson—Burns? Who, then?”

“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.”

Tactful young man, so anxious to make his host feel at home!

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.

“Who does Mr. Lane think he’s like?” repeated Rory.

“Drake, I should think,” said Guy, who never sulked for long.

Dick felt unutterably relieved.

“Is that right, sir?”

“That will do—Drake if you like,” said Dick, with a laugh.

“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.

Oh yes, of course, _that_ was it! He laughed aloud with relief.

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.

3

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?

    Whirled round in life’s diurnal course
    With rocks and stones and trees.

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?”

“Don’t want one.”

“Oh, you’d better. Which is your room? Let me go and fetch you one.”

“But I tell you I don’t _want_ one!”

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

“Did I?”

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

Then there was a pause.

“Concha!”

“Hallo!”

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

“You didn’t kiss me back.”

“Why should I?”

“I don’t believe you know how to!”

“_Don’t_ I?”

He kissed her again.

“What a funny mouth you’ve got—it’s soft like a baby’s.”

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

“Would they be angry?... You _are_ a baby!”

“Rory! The music’s stopping.”

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.”

“You _are_ a fool!” laughed Concha.

The next dance was a waltz.

“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.

“Yes,” said the Doña, “I’m fed up with rag-time.”

“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.

    Mais le vert paradis des amours enfantines
    Les courses, les chansons, les baisers, les bouquets
    Les violons vibrant derrière les collines,
    Avec les brocs de vin le soir dans les bosquets
    —Mais le vert paradis des amours enfantines,

    L’innocent paradis, plein de plaisirs furtifs,
    Est-il déjà plus loin que l’Inde ou que la Chine?
    Peut-on le rappeler avec des cris plaintifs,
    Et l’animer encore d’une voix argentine,
    L’innocent paradis plein de plaisirs furtifs?

“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.

But something was happening ... what was it Guy was saying?

“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.”

“Oh, Guy, what do you want? What is it all about?” she gasped helplessly.

“Well then, could you? You see, it seems to me so obvious and....”

“Marry you?”

“Yes.”

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.”

“Will you then?” and his face brightened.

“No, no, Guy—I _can’t_. It would be so ... so ... meaningless.”

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
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 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!”

How humiliating it was to be so familiar with their jargon!

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.

Then the music stopped.

“Shall we sit here?”

He had become human again.

“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.

“Oh, we liked having you. We generally have lots of people for Christmas.”

“Well, one couldn’t have a more Christmassy house. It always seems to me
like the house one suddenly comes 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_?”

“Yes; I did.”

“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.

Well, the cat was out of the bag: she was plain as well as undesirable.

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.

4

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.

Rory went up to the Doña: “You _must_ dance this with me, please!”

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.

“Where’s Guy?” said some one.

“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 what they said was just _John Peel_
over again—that ghosts wander in dewy English glades, and that the Past
is dead, dead, dead.

5

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?”

“Quite. I nearly died with the effort of getting them to fasten.”

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?” she said.

“Well darling,” answered Concha, with exaggerated nonchalance, adding to
Teresa, “_won’t_ they undo?”

The Doña put down her candle, and seated herself heavily on the bed.

“Oh, damn them! Won’t they undo? Haven’t you any scissors?”

“That young Dundas seemed to enjoy himself,” said the Doña.

No answer.

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.

The Doña sat on.

“Do you think he is attracted by Concha?”

“Who?”

“That young Dundas.”

“I really don’t know ... do you want him to be?”

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

“Do you mean does he want to marry her?”

“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.”

CHAPTER VI

1

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
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!”

For this was the first year that he had gone on these hunts alone.

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
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.”

“By Jove, yes, so they did!” he answered with a self-deprecatory laugh.

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.

“Silly fellow!” said the Doña.

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?... “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.

“By Jove ... did you really?”

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

Dick chuckled; the Doña smiled.

“Next year little Anna will make her first Communion.”

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

“I don’t know. There are compensations,” and again the Doña smiled.

“What? a new Girl-Guide kit?”

“No; the complete works of Scott.”

“My dear Anna—you ought to have been the General of the Jesuits!”

The Doña looked flattered.

“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.

2

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.

In that book Teresa read the following _exemplum_:—

    “It is contained in the story of Constantinople, there was
    an Emperor had two daughters, and the youngest had good
    conditions, for she loved well God, and prayed him, at all
    times that she awaked, for the dead. And as she and her sister
    lay a-bed, her sister awoke and heard her at her prayers, and
    scorned and mocked her, and said, ‘hold your peace, for I may
    not sleep for you.’ And so it happened that youth constrained
    them both to love two brethren, that were knights, and were
    goodly men. And so the sisters told their council each to
    other. And at the last they gave the Knights tryst that they
    should come to lie by them by night privily at certain hour.
    And that one came to the youngest sister, but him thought he
    saw a thousand dead bodies about her in sheets; and he was so
    sore afraid and afeard, that he ran away as he had been out of
    himself, and caught the fevers and great sickness through the
    fear that he had, and laid him in his bed, and might not stir
    for sickness. But that other Knight came into that other sister
    without letting, and begat her with child. And when her father
    wist she was with child, he made cast her into the river, and
    drench her and her child, and he made to scorch the Knight
    quick. Thus, for that delight, they were both dead; but that
    other sister was saved. And I shall tell you on the morrow it
    was in all the house, how that one Knight was sick in his bed;
    and the youngest sister went to see him and asked him whereof
    he was sick. ‘As I went to have entered between the curtains of
    your bed, I saw so great number of dead men, that I was nigh
    mad for fear, and yet I am afeard and afraid of the sight.’
    And when she heard that, she thanked God humbly that had kept
    her from shame and destruction.... And therefore, daughters,
    bethink you on this example when ye wake, and sleep not till ye
    have prayed for the dead, as did the youngest daughter.”

3

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.”

There was a pause; Concha’s face did not move a muscle.

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

Concha looked at her defiantly.

“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.

Concha’s face relaxed for a second, and she flashed her a look of
gratitude.

“Teresa!” cried the Doña, and her voice was inexpressibly reproachful.

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.”

“Dick!”

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.

Concha’s face softened: “Doña!” she said appealingly.

“Concha! Are you really going to do this terrible thing?”

“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 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.

Concha’s face again hardened; and, with a shrug, she left the room.

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 ... 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 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.

CHAPTER VII

1

By the middle of March, Concha’s engagement had become an accepted fact:
Dick and Rory’s uncle, Colonel Dundas of Drumsheugh, had exchanged
letters; the marriage was fixed for the beginning of July; wedding
presents had already begun to drift in.

Even the Doña began to be hypnotised by the inevitable, and to find a
little balm in the joys of the trousseau.

In Parker’s sewing-room little scenes like this would take place: “No,
Concha, I _won’t_ allow you to have them so low. You might as well be
stark naked.”

Then Parker would giggle, and Concha, after a good-natured “Good Lord!”
would say, “I tell you, Doña, they’re always _worn_ like that now.”

“That makes _no_ difference to me.”

“Oh, _darling_! I believe you’d like me to borrow one of Jollypot’s as a
pattern—they’re flannel and up to her ears, and the sleeves reach down to
her nails.”

“Oh, Miss Concha!” Parker would titter, both shocked and amused; and
the Doña, with a snort, would exclaim, “That poor Jollypot! To think
of her sleeping in flannel! But there are many degrees between the
nightgowns of Jollypot and those of a _demi-mondaine_, and you remember
what Father Vaughan ...” and then she would suddenly realise that the
views on _lingerie_ of the Roman hierarchy no longer carried any weight
with Concha, and in a chilly voice she would say, “Well, you and Parker
had better settle it in your own way; it has nothing to do with me ...
_now_,” and would sweep out of the room with a heavy heart.

One evening Dick, who had been in London for the day, said at dinner,
“By the way I met Munroe in the city. He caught flu in that beastly
cold seminary, and it turned into pneumonia. He looked very bad, poor
chap. He’s on sick leave at present, and I was wondering ...” and he
looked timidly at the Doña: (Since his escapade he had become a very
poor-spirited creature.) “I was wondering, Anna ... if you don’t mind, of
course, if we might ask him down for a few days.”

“Poor young man! Certainly,” said the Doña, with unusual warmth; for, as
a rule, she deplored her husband’s unbridled hospitality.

“I wonder ... a very odd thing ... he was getting on extraordinarily
well in business and everything.... He was asking about you, Concha, and
your engagement. Yon saw a good deal of him, didn’t you? Have you been
breaking his heart and turning him monk?”

Concha laughed; gratified, evidently, by the suggestion. But the Doña
said coldly, “Concha was probably merely one of the many tests to which
he was putting his vocation—and, evidently, not a very sweet one.... What
are you all laughing at? Oh, I see! I’ve used the wrong word—_Acid_ test,
if you like it better.”

But, though she laughed, Concha’s sensitive vanity flooded her cheeks.

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

2

David Munroe arrived two days later. The Doña welcomed him very warmly,
and then, having got him some illustrated papers, left him alone in the
drawing-room, and hurried back to the sewing-room, where she was busy
with Parker over the trousseau.

Teresa, coming in to look for a book about a quarter of an hour later,
was surprised to find him already arrived, as she had not heard the car.
In a flash she took in the badly cut semi-clerical black suit hanging on
his strong well-knit body, and noticed how hollow-eyed and pale he had
become.

She greeted him kindly, coolly; slightly embarrassed by the intentness of
his gaze.

“We are so glad you were able to come. It’s so horrible to be ill in
an institution. But you ought to get well soon now, the weather’s so
heavenly, and you’ll soon be able to lie out in the garden,” she said,
and began to look for her book.

He watched her in silence for a few seconds, and then said, “Miss Lane,
when I was here last, I gave you to understand that I was the heir to
Munroe of Auchenballoch.... I’ll admit it was said as a sort of a joke
when I was angry, but it was a lie for all that. I come of quite plain
people.”

Clearly, he was “making his soul” against ordination. She tried to feel
irritated, and say in a cold and slightly surprised voice, “Really? I’m
afraid I don’t remember ... er ...” but what she actually said was: “It
doesn’t matter a bit; it was obviously, as you say, just a joke ... at
least ... er ... well, at any rate, I haven’t the slightest idea what
_our_ great-grandfather was—quite likely a fishmonger; at any rate, I’m
sure he was far from aristocratic.”

David gave a sort of grunt and began restlessly to pace up and down; this
fidgeted Teresa: “Do sit down, Mr. Munroe,” she said, “you must be so
tired. I can’t think where my sister is—she’ll come down soon, I expect,”
and added to herself, “I really don’t see why I should have to entertain
Concha’s discarded suitors.”

He sank slowly into an arm-chair. “Miss Lane,” he said, “is it true that
your sister is leaving the Catholic fold?”

“I believe so,” she answered; and there was a note of dryness in her
voice.

There was a pause; David leaning forward and staring at the Persian rug
at his feet with knitted brows, as if it were a document in a strange and
difficult script.

Suddenly he looked up and said; “Why is she doing that?”

“That you must ask _her_,” she answered coldly.

“I heard ... that ... that it was because Captain Dundas’s uncle wouldn’t
leave him Drumsheugh, if he married a Catholic, but ... that wouldn’t be
true, would it?”

“What? That Colonel Dundas has a prejudice against Catholics?”

“No, that that’s the reason she’s leaving the Church?”

She gave a little shrug: “Well, I suppose Paris makes up for a mass.”

For a few seconds he looked puzzled, and then said, “Oh yes, that was
Henry IV. of France—only the other way round.... That was a curious
case of Grace working through queer channels—a man finding the Church
and salvation through worldliness and treachery to his friends. But I
shouldn’t wonder if what I was saying wasn’t heresy—I’m not very learned
in the Fathers yet.”

He paused; and then, fixing her with his eyes, said—“Did it shock _you_
very much—her being perverted for such a reason?”

“Really, Mr. Munroe,” she said coldly, “my feelings about the matter are
nobody’s concern, I....”

“I beg your pardon,” he said gruffly, and blushed to the roots of his
hair.

“Oh these touchy Scots!” she thought impatiently.

There was an awkward silence for some seconds, and she decided the only
way to “save his face” was to ask _him_ a personal question, and give him
the chance of snubbing her in his turn; so she said, “We had no idea when
you stayed with us last autumn that you were thinking of being ordained
... but perhaps you weren’t thinking of it then?”

He did not answer at once, but seemed to be meditating: “It’s never quite
a matter of _thinking_,” he said finally, “it’s just a drifting ...
drawn on and on by the perfumes of the Church. What is it the Vulgate
says again? _In odore unguentorum tuorum curremus_ ...” he broke off,
and then after a few seconds, as if summing up, slightly humorously, the
situation, he added ruminatively, the monosyllable “úhu!” And the queer
Scots ejaculation seemed to give a friendly, homely turn to his statement.

“You were lucky being born in the Church,” he went on; “my father was an
Established Church minister up in Inverness-shire, and I was taught to
look upon the Church as the Scarlet Woman. I remember once at the Laird’s
I ... well, I came near to bringing up my tea because Lady Stewart
happened to say that her cook was a Catholic. And sometimes still,”
and he lowered his voice and looked at her with half frightened eyes,
“sometimes still I feel a wee bit sick at mass.”

It was indeed strange that he too should feel the _ambivalence_ of the
Holy Mother.

“I know what you mean,” she said; “I never exactly feel sick—but I know
what you mean.”

“Do you?” he cried eagerly, “and you brought up in it too!”

He got up, took a few restless paces up and down the room, and then stood
still before a sketch in water-colours of Seville Cathedral, staring at
it with unseeing eyes. Suddenly, he seemed to relax, and he returned to
his chair.

“Well,” he said, “when one comes to think of it, you know, it would be
hard to find a greater sin than ... feeling like that at mass.” Then a
slow smile crept over his face: “I remember my father telling me that his
father met a wee lad somewhere in the Highlands, and asked him what he’d
had to his breakfast, and he said, “brose,”—and then what he’d had to his
dinner, and he said “brose,” and then what he’d had to his tea, and it
was brose again; so my grandfather said, “D’you not get tired of nothing
but brose?” and the wee lad turned on him, quite indignant, and said,
“Wud ye hae me weary o’ ma meat?” ... It’s not just exactly the same,
I’ll admit—but it was a fine spirit the wee lad showed.”

A little wind blew in through one of the open windows, very balmy, fresh
from its initiation into the secret of its clan,—a secret not unlike
that of the Venetian glass-blowers, and whispered from wind to wind down
the ages—the secret of blowing the earth into the colours and shapes of
violets and daffodils. It made the summer cretonne curtains creak and
the Hispano-Mauresque plates knock against the wall on which they were
fastened and give out tiny ghostly chimes; as did also the pendent balls
on the Venetian glass. Teresa suddenly thought of the late Pope listening
to the chimes of St. Mark’s on a gramophone. All at once she became very
conscious of the furniture—it was a whiff of that strange experience she
had had in her Chelsea lodgings. Far away in the view a cock crowed. She
suddenly wondered if the piano-tuner were coming that morning.

“The Presbyterians, you know,” he was saying, “they’re not like the
Episcopalians; they feel things more ... well, more concretely ... for
instance, they picture themselves taking their Sabbath walk some day
down the golden streets ... they seem to ... well, it’s different.” He
paused, and then went on, “My people were very poor, you know; it was
just a wee parish and a very poor one, and it was just as much as my
mother could do to make both ends meet. But one day she came into my