4
Easter was very late that year, and the Catholics at Plasencia were wakened very early on Easter morning to an exquisite, soft, scented day, almost like summer.
Teresa, looking out of her window as she dressed, saw that her parents were already walking in the garden. She gazed for some seconds at her father’s sturdy back, as he stood, as if rooted to the earth, gazing at some minute flower in the border.
St. Joseph of Arimathea, she thought, may have been just such a kindly self-indulgent person as he; dearly loving his garden. And if her father had been asked to allow the corpse of a young dissenter to lie in his garden, though he might have grumbled, he would have been far too good-natured to refuse. And, if that young dissenter had turned out to be God Almighty, her father would have turned into a Saint, and after his death his sturdy bones would have worked miracles. She smiled as she pictured the Doña’s indignant surprise at finding her husband chosen for canonisation—the College of Cardinals would have had no difficulty in obtaining an advocatus diaboli.
And as to the garden—surely the contact of Christ’s body would have fertilised it, a thousand times more than Lorenzo’s head the pot of basil, making it riot into a forest of fantastic symbolic blossoms: great racemes, perhaps, which, with their orange-pollened pistils protruding like flames from their seven long, white, waxy blossoms, would recall the seven-branched candlestick in the Temple; bell-flowers shaped like chalices and stained crimson inside as if with blood; monstrous veronicas, each blossom bearing the impress of the Holy Face.
What an unutterably ridiculous faith it was! But, for good or ill, her own imagination was steeped all through with the unfading dye of its traditions.
Then she went downstairs, and David drove them through the fresh morning to mass.
The nearest Catholic church was in a small market-town some ten miles distant. It was always a pleasure to Teresa to drive through that town—it had the completeness and finish of a small, beautifully made object that one could turn round and round in one’s hands and examine from every side. The cobbled market-place, where on Saturdays cheap-jacks turned somersaults and cracked jokes in praise of their wares, exactly as they had done in the days of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson; the flat Georgian houses of red brick picked out in white and grown over with ivy, in one of which the doctor’s daughters knitted jumpers and talked about the plays they had seen on their last visit to London—“a very weepie piece; playing on nothing but the black notes, don’t you know!” the heraldic lion on the sign of the old inn; the huge yellow poster advertising Colman’s Mustard—it was all absorbed into a small harmonious whole, an English story. All, that is to say, except the large Catholic church built in the hideous imitation Gothic of the last century, that remained ever outside of it all, a great unsightly excrescence, spoiling the harmony. It had been built with money left for the purpose by a pious lady, who had begun her career as a Belgian actress, and ended it as the widow of a rich manufacturer of dolls’ eyes, who had bought a big property in the neighbourhood.
“I used to think when I was a child,” said Teresa, who was sitting in front beside David, “that the relics under the altar were small wax skulls and glass eyes.”
He turned and looked at her with an indulgent smile.
“I believe he looks upon me as a little girl,” she said to herself; and she felt at once annoyed and strangely glad.
Then they went into the dank, dark, candle-lit church; and it was indeed as if they had suddenly stepped on to a different planet.
A few minutes of waiting—and then mass had begun.
Resurrexi, et adhuc tecum sum, alleluia; posuisti super me manum tuam, alleluia: mirabilis facta est scientia tua, alleluia, alleluia.
She sat beside David, dreamily telling her beads, and glancing from time to time at her Missal.
With signings, and genuflexions, and symbolic kisses, the chorus in their sexless vestments sang the amœbæan pre-Thespian drama—verses strung together from David and Isaiah that hinted at a plot, but did not even tell a story ... till suddenly in the Sequentia an actor broke loose from the chorus, and tragedy was born:
Victimæ Paschali laudes immolent Christiani. Agnus redemit oves: Christus innocens Patri reconciliavit peccatores. Mors et vita duello conflixere mirando: dux vitæ; mortuus regnat vivus.
Die nobis, Maria
Quid vidisti in via?
Sepulcrum Christi viventis
Et gloriam vidi resurgentis
Angelicos testes
Sudarium et vestes.
Surrexit Christus spes mea:
Præcedet vos in Galilæam.
Scimus Christum surrexisse a mortuis vere:
Tu nobis, victor Rex, miserere.
Amen. Alleluia.
Suddenly an idea came to her that this too was a play, in the particular sense that she wished her own reactions to be a play, that is to say a squeezing into a plot of the manifold manifestations of Life; and, if one chose to play on words, a plot against Life, as well: pruning, pruning, discarding, shaping, till the myriad dreams and aspirations of man, the ceaseless struggle, through chemists’ retorts, through the earth of gardens, through the human brain, of the Unknown to become the Known was reduced to an imaginary character called God; a nailing of the myriad ways by which man can become happy and free to a wooden cross a few cubits high; a reducing of his myriad forms of spiritual sustenance to a tiny wafer of flour; a tampering, too, with the past, saying “in the beginning was ...” but Life, noisy, tangible, resilient, supple, cunning Life, was laughing out there in the streets and fields at the makers of myths; for it knew that every plot against it was foredoomed to failure.
Then they went up to the altar; and, kneeling between the Doña and David, she received the host on her tongue.
The Holy Mother—Celestina, the old wise courtesan of Spain, skilled beyond all others in the distilling of perfumes, in the singing of spells—she was luring her back, she was luring her back ... in odore unguentorum tuorum curremus ... what cared Celestina that it was by the senses and the imagination that she held her victims instead of by the reason?
The Rock ... Peter’s Rock ... a Prometheus bound to it for ever, though the vulture should eat out her heart.