3
Soon it was real spring: the trees became covered with golden buds, with pale green tassels; the orchard was a mass of white blossom; the view became streaked with the startling greenness of young wheat; and the long grass of the wild acre beyond the orchard was penetrated with jonquils, and daffodils, and narcissi, boldly pouting their corollas at birds and insects and men. While very soon every one grew so accustomed to the singing of the birds that one almost ceased to hear it—it had entered the domain of vision, and become a stippled background to the velatura of trees and leaves and flowers.
David had settled down very happily at Plasencia, and had proved himself to be a highly domesticated creature—always ready to do odd jobs about the house or garden.
Shortly after his arrival Concha had gone up to Scotland to stay with Colonel Dundas, so it fell upon Teresa to entertain him.
They would go for long walks; and though they talked all the time, never, after that first conversation, did they touch on religious matters.
Sometimes he would tell her of his childhood in Scotland, and it soon became almost a part of her own memories: the small, dark, sturdy creature in a shabby kilt, a “poke of sweeties” in his sporran, at play with his brothers and sisters, dropping, say, a worm-baited bootlace into the liquid amber of the burn—their chaff, as befitted children of the Manse, with a biblical flavour, “Now then David, my man, no so much lip—Selah, change the tune, d’ye hear?” And the hillsides tesselated with heather and broom, and the sheep ruddled red as deer, and the beacon of the rowans flashed from hill to hill; while down the bland and portly Spey floated little dreams, like toy boats, making for big towns, and the sea, and over the sea.... Then all would melt into the tune of the “Old Hundred”:
Awl peeeople thaat own errrth dew dwell.
What time James Grant, the precentor with the trombone-voice, rocked his Bible up and down, as though it were a baby whose slumbers he was soothing with an ogre lullaby.
All this was a far cry from his Holiness, the Immaculate Conception, the Sacred Heart of Jesus ... and yet ... it was not quite Plasencia; there was something different about it all: again she remembered the incongruity of the minarets of the Sacré-Cœur.
Sometimes, too, he would tell her of his years in South Africa—for instance, how, after a long day of riding up and down the fields of sugar-cane, he would lie out on the veranda of his little bungalow and read Dumas’s novels, while the plangent songs of the indentured Indians, celebrating some feast with a communal curry, would float up from their barracks under the hill; or else the night would shiver to the uncanny cry of a bush-baby: “It’s a wee beastie that wails at night. There’s no other sound like it in the world—beside it the owl’s and the nightjar’s cries are homely and barn-door like.”
“It must have been the sort of noise one would hear if one slept in Cathy’s old room at Wuthering Heights,” she said, half to herself.
“You’re right there,” he answered, “I never thought of it, but you’re quite right,” and then he added, “it’s a grand book, that.” And, after another pause: “Do you realise that one never knows whether Cathy and Heathcliff were sinners?”
“How do you mean? I must say they both struck me as very wild and violent characters!”
“No, no, I mean sinners. One never knows ... whether they broke the Seventh Commandment or not,” and suddenly he blushed violently.
After tea he would take her drives in the car; it was very peaceful rushing past squat churches with faintly dog-toothed Norman towers, past ruined windmills, and pollard willows, and the delicate diversity of spring woods. Guy had once said that a motor drive in the evening through the Eastern Counties was like Gray’s Elegy cut up by a jig-saw.
Sometimes, as they sped along, he would sing—songs he had learned at the front. There was one that the Canadians had taught him, with the chorus:
Be sure and check your chewing gum
With the darkie at the door,
And you’ll hear some Bible stories
That you never heard before.
There was the French waltz-song, Sous les Ponts de Paris, of which he only knew a few words here and there, and these he pronounced abominably; but its romantic wistful tune suited his voice. Sometimes, too, he would sing Zulu songs that reminded Teresa of Spanish coplas sung by Seville gipsies; and sometimes the Scottish psalms and paraphrases in metre; and their crude versification and rugged melodious airs struck her, accustomed to the intoning of the Latin Psalter, as almost ridiculous. They had lost all of what Sir Philip Sidney calls, “the psalmist’s notable prosopopœias when he maketh you, as it were, see God coming in His majesty”; and they made one see, instead, a very homely God, who, in the cool of the evening, would stroll into the crofter’s cottage, as though it had been the tent of Abraham, and praise the guidwife’s scones, and resolve the crofter’s theological difficulties.
All this showed a robustness of conscience—he had none of the doctrinairism and queasiness of the ordinary convert; what mattered it to him that the songs he sang were often very secular, the version of the Psalms heavy with Presbyterianism?
But she was often conscious of the decades that lay between them, the leagues and leagues, of which the milestones were little cultured jokes at Chelsea tea-parties, and Cambridge epigrams, and endless novels and plays. The very language he spoke was twenty or thirty years behind her own; such expressions as “a very refined lady,” or “a regular earthly Paradise,” fell from his lips with all their pristine dignity. And yet she could talk to him simply and spontaneously as to no one else.
Since he had been there she had left off reading mediæval books, and her brain felt like a deserted hive.