“Would Mrs. Moore mind if you missed church, Eben?” asked Concha.
“She would be grieved,” grinned Eben. “You see, Lady Norton wasn’t there this morning, but she always comes in the evening, and the mater wants her to see my manly beauty.”
This remark, thought Teresa, showed a certain acuteness and humour; but all Concha’s contemporaries seemed to have these qualities, and yet, it meant so little, existed side by side with such an absence of serious emotion, such an ignoring of intellectual beauty, such a—such a—such an un-Platonic turn of mind. Probably every one in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—country parsons, grocers’ apprentices, aldermen, fine ladies—had only to take up a goose’s quill and write as they talked to produce the most exquisite prose: witness the translation of the Bible by a body of obscure, and (considering the fatuity of some of their mistranslations) half-witted, old divines. Perhaps the collective consciousness of humanity was silently capturing, one after the other, the outposts of the intelligence, so that some day we should all share in a flat and savourless communism of apprehension.
But then the English, as a whole, had lost the power of writing automatically fine prose ... oh, it was not worth bothering about!
When they got out of the grounds of Plasencia, they broke up into couples and trios—Rory moving to one side of Concha, David, his back looking rather dogged, to the other. Arnold had forgotten his distaste for Eben in a heated discussion of the battle of Jutland. Teresa found herself walking with Guy.
To the right lay a field of stubble, ruddled with poppies, and to the right of that a little belt of trees. Teresa had long noticed how in autumn scarlet is the oriflamme of the spectrum; for round it the other colours rally at their gayest and most gallant. For instance, the dull red roofs of the cluster of barns to the right glowed like rubies, if one’s glance, before resting on them, travelled through the poppy-shot stubble; and, following the same route, her eye could detect autumnal tints in the belt of trees, which otherwise would have been imperceptible.
“How lovely poppies would be if they weren’t so ubiquitous,” said Guy. “I always think of poppies when I see all the Renoirs in the Rue de la Boétie in Paris—every second shop’s a picture dealer, and they all have at least two Renoirs in their window—dreams of beauty if there weren’t so many of ’em. And yet, I don’t know—that very exuberance, the feeling of an exquisite, delicate, yet unexigeant flower springing up in profusion in the lightest and poorest soil may be a quality of their charm.”
Teresa said nothing; but her brows slightly contracted.
Now they were walking past one of the few fields of barley that were still standing—all creamy and steaming ... oh, dear, that simile of Guy’s, in one of his poems, between a field of barley and a great bowl of some American patent cereal on a poster ... at any moment there might appear on the sky the gigantic, grinning face of the cereal-fiend, whose sole function was to grin with anticipative greed, and brandish a spoon on the point of being dipped into the foaming, smoking brew ... disgusting; and maddening that it should cling to her memory.
“Well, I suppose long ago the Danes and Saxons fought battles here; and the buried hatchet has turned the wild flowers red ... or does iron in the soil turn flowers blue?”