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.