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.