“You lie, Guy, you lie! You have heard of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and you have heard of If Winter Comes; because from what you tell me of your parents they probably talk of both incessantly, and....”
“You’re quite right, as a matter of fact,” laughed Guy, delighted that she should remember what he had told her about the manners and customs of his parents, “they talked of nothing else at one time. It made them feel that at last they were able to understand and sympathise with what my generation was after. My father began one night at dinner, ‘Very interesting book that, Guy, If Winter Comes—very well written book, very clever; curious book—painful though, painful!’ And my mother tried to discuss some one called Mabel’s character with me. It was no good my saying I hadn’t read it—it only made them despise me and think I wasn’t dans le mouvement, after all.”
“There, you see!” laughed Teresa; “Well, what are you reading in Spanish?”
“Calderon’s Autos,” and then he launched into one of his excited breathless disquisitions: “As a matter of fact, I was rather disappointed at first. I knew, of course, that they were written in glorification of the Eucharist and that they were bound to be symbolic, and ‘flowery and starry,’ and all the rest of it—man very tiny in comparison with the sun and the moon and the stars and the Cross—but the unregenerate part of me—I suppose it’s some old childhood’s complex—has a secret craving for genre. Every fairy story I read when I was a child was a disappointment till I came upon Morris’s Prose Romances, and then at last I found three dimensional knights and princesses, and a whole fairy countryside where things went on happening even when Morris and I weren’t looking at them: cows being milked, horses being shod, lovers wandering in lanes; and one knew every hill and every tree, and could take the short cut from one village to another in the dark. And I’d hoped, secretly, that the autos were going to be a little bit like that ... that the characters would be at once abstractions—Grace, the Mosaic Law, and so on—and at the same time real seventeenth century Spaniards, as solid as Sancho Panza, gossiping in taverns, and smelling of dung and garlic. But, of course, I came to see that the real thing was infinitely finer—the plays of a theologian, a priest who had listened in the confessional to disembodied voices whispering their sins, and who kept, like a bird in a cage, a poet’s soul among the scholastic traditions of his intellect, so that gothic decorations flower all round the figure of Theology, as in some Spanish Cathedral ...” he paused to take breath, and then added: “I say—I thought you wouldn’t mind—but I’ve brought you for Christmas an edition of the Autos—I think you’ll like them.”
“Thank you ever so much, I should love to read them,” said Teresa with unusual warmth.
She had been considerably excited by what he had said. An auto that was at once realistic and allegorical—there were possibilities in the idea.
She sat silent for a few seconds, thinking; and then she became conscious of Harry’s voice holding forth on some topic to the group round the fire: “... really ... er ... a ... er ... tragic conflict. The one thing that gave colour and ... er ... significance to her drab spinsterhood was the conviction that these experiences were supernatural. The spiritual communion ... the ... er ... er ... in fact the conversations with the invisible ‘Friend’ became more and more frequent, and more and more ... er ... satisfying, and indeed of nightly occurrence. Then she happened to read a book by Freud or some one and ... er ... the fat was in the fire—or, rather, something that undergoes a long period of smouldering before it breaks into flames was in the fire. Remember, she was nearly fifty, and a Swiss Calvinist, but she had really remarkable intellectual pluck. Slowly she began to test her mystical experiences by the theories of Freud and Co., and was forced in time to admit that they sprang entirely from ... er ... suppressed ... er ... er ... erotic desires. I gather the modern school of psychologists hold all so-called mystical experiences do. Leuba said....”
Here Jollypot, who had been sitting in a corner with her crochet, a silent listener, got up, very white and wide-eyed, and left the room.
Teresa’s heart contracted. They were ruthless creatures, that English fire-lit band—tearing up Innocence, while its roots shrieked like those of a mandrake.
But she had got a sudden glimpse into the inner life of Jollypot.