One's eyes become riveted on the large globe of cut crystals that hangs from the ceiling near the centre of the church, and the hard white lights from it strike sharply on my eyeballs like dagger points. All the people are making reverences and placing something on their foreheads like oil, but it may be holy water. Know all men by these presents that I, even I, am the poor ignorant wife of a Protestant person, and understand not the meaning of these obeisances, nor of this beautiful fête to which all the Austrian folk of the countryside have come with not so much as one mouthful of bread to break their fast. Neither shall one drop of liquid moisten their parched lips for these three hours unless—Holy Mother and all the Blessed Saints, pray for our presumption—unless indeed, it might fall to the lot of a woman to take into her lips the sacred blood from the golden spoon which the priest dips into the chalice, the holy chalice that is surmounted with something dazzling like a star, so that no woman may even look thereon.
Feeling all the while like wild oats amid the wheat, I take my stand by a pillar close to the door and pretend not to stare. Ere long, a young girl touches me and tells me she is inquested to bring me to the sisters. I follow her through the church and into the vestry where a little nun presses my hands and calls me by name. Once, she was my escort through the Monastery at St. Albert, over by the Sturgeon River. Of course I remember her. She is the china shepherdess in black who says "Please" instead of "What?" and who comes from Mon'real. Also she lisps, but what odds? Plutarch tells us that Alcibiades lisped and that it gave a grace and persuasiveness to his discourse.
She presents me to the other sisters, none of whom speak English, and invites me out to the monastery to visit. All of the sisters look middling healthy, not having the parchment-like pallor of the city nuns.
The service, she explains, is the Finding of the Holy Cross. I must not think it idolatry when they do veneration, indeed, I must not. "Eet is what you call—Ah, Madame! I cannot find the word—eet is what you call—" "A Symbol," I ask. "Oui, Oui, a symbol!"
With many gesticulations and no small difficulty she tells me how the Empress Helena, mother of the great Constantine, once had a heavenly dream which enabled her to discover the very piece of ground wherein the holy cross was hidden away. It lay under two temples where heathens prayed to Jupiter and Venus instead of to Jehovah. She caused these temples to be torn down so as not one stone was left, and underneath were found three crosses. Being doubtful as to which was the cross of the Lord Christ, the Empress had all three applied to the body of a dying woman. The first two crosses had no effect (it was the good Bishop Macarius, you must know, who helped her), but, at the touch of the third, the dying woman rose up perfectly whole.
This is a story worth lingering on, and the little nun would tell me more about it, only the celebrant priest has come into the vestry and talks with us before he goes to the basement to change his vestments.
They are impressive garments which he wears, but one might imagine their proving correspondingly oppressive. Kryzanowski is the wretched name of him. He is a large, fair man, this priest, in the full force of life, with an unmistakable air of distinction. On a snap judgment, I should place to his credit the ability to deal with a supreme situation. He is a priest of the Uniat Church, which church, so far as I may understand, is a compromise between the Greek Orthodox and the Roman Catholic, the compromise consisting of a prayer for the Pope instead of for the Czar.
In our White Alberta much antipathy exists between the Orthodox Greek Church and the Uniats, and several years ago they had a lawsuit which they took to the Privy Council in England, and which drove to insanity one of our cleverest barristers. They are bonny fighters, these Ruthenians from Galicia, and if they cannot "have the law" on one another, they may always have the consolation of fisticuffs. And what, pray, are muscles hard for and skulls thick, except to fight? Riddle me that!
Presently, when we shall have tied down and diverted their tremendous fighting energy into what is usually described as civilization, we shall, of a surety, find a human voltage here which will send these Slavic peasants high up the scale where well-conceived and successful endeavour is weighed and appraised. At present, ah, well! they are young and positive and he is the best man who survives.
The little sister brings me back into the church, where she places a chair for me close beside the altar facing the congregation, an act and fact which cause me not a little amazement and considerable trepidation. Will the priest permit an unhallowed woman of lean and meagre accomplishments—and she a Protestant—to sit so close to the holy of holies? Will he?