“Yes.”
He paused, and again they were silent. Then he said, “I was brought up a Presbyterian, but I was never interested in that, I didn’t think of religion at all. But during the War there were several chaps that were Catholics in my regiment, and I used sometimes to go to mass with them, or benediction, because it was quieter in there than anywhere else. Then their padre began talking to me, and I saw that once you had taken the plunge it was all shipshape and logical. But the plunge was the thing—that seemed to me to take a lot of nerve and faith.”
Again he paused, then went on in a lower voice, “Well, it was a wee church, very old, in a village behind the lines, and one day mass was being celebrated there, and just after the Consecration the gas gong and klaxons sounded—that meant we had all to retire in double quick time behind the gas zone. The priest wrapped up the Host in the corporals and hurried off with the rest of us. When the scare was over and he went back to the church—the corporals were soaked in blood.”
The last words were said scarcely above a whisper.
Well, there was no Protestant nonsense here; this was the Holy Mother herself in all her crudity.
Teresa had not the slightest idea what to say; and decided that she had better say nothing at all.
Yes, but it was not the bleeding corporals, really, that had done it. She remembered a curious experience she had once had when waiting to be fetched home in the car by her father from some Chelsea lodgings where she had been spending a fortnight. Her box was packed, she was all ready dressed for the drive; she had nothing to do but to wait in a little valley sheltered from Time, out of the beat of the Recording Angel, her old activities switched off, her new activities not yet switched on. Then the practical relation between her and the shabby familiar furniture suddenly snapped, and she looked at it with new eyes—the old basket-chair, the horse-hair sofa, the little table on which was an aspidistra in a pot—they were now merely arrangements of planes and lines, and, as such, startlingly significant. For the first time she was looking at them æsthetically, and so novel was the sensation that it felt like a mystical experience. The Beatific Vision ... may it not be this æsthetic vision turned on spiritual formula? A shabby threadbare creed suddenly seen as something simple, solid, monumental? Tolstoy must have been reared on the Gospels; but suddenly when he was already middle-aged he thought he had made a discovery which would revolutionise the world; and this was that one must love one’s neighbour as oneself. It was merely that he had, so to speak for the first time seen the chairs and tables æsthetically. Yes ... heliacal periods, when the star becomes visible. Mr. Munroe had said that he had never before thought about religion at all; and it was a mere chance that the room in which he first saw the tables and chairs should be hung with crucifixes and Catholic prints.
The bells had stopped ringing for evensong, the sun was very near setting. Caroline, the donkey, gave tongue from the paddock of Plasencia—a long, drawn-out wail prefacing a series of ee-aws.
“That means rain,” said David.
“Caroline sings nothing but Handel,” said Teresa, “a long recitative before the aria.”