Sitting against the ranger’s palings, listening to the birds, he had a dreamy feeling about it all. Queer creatures, human beings! So damned uncritical! Had he not been like that himself for years and years? The power of a label—that was what struck him, sitting there. Label a thing decently, and it was decent! Ah! but, ‘Rue by any other name would smell as sour!’ Conscience!—it was the deuce!
1922.
SALTA PRO NOBIS
(A Variation)
“The dancer, my Mother, is very sad. She sits with her head on her hands. She looks into the emptiness. It is frightful to watch. I have tried to make her pray, my Mother, but the poor girl does not know how; she has no belief. She refuses even to confess herself. She is pagan—but quite pagan. What could one do for her, my Mother—to cheer her a little during these hours? I have tried to make her tell me of her life. She does not answer. She sits and looks always into the emptiness. It does me harm in the heart to see her. Is there nothing one can do to comfort her a little before she dies? To die so young—so full of life; for her who has no faith! To be shot—so young, so beautiful; but it is frightful, my Mother!”
The little elderly Sister raised her hands and crossed them on her grey-clothed breast. Her eyes, brown and mild, looked up, questioning the face before her, wax-pale under its coif and smooth grey hair. Straight, thin, as it were bodiless, beneath her grey and white garb, the Mother Superior stood pondering. The spy-woman in her charge, a dancer with gipsy blood they said—or was it Moorish?—who had wormed secrets from her French naval lover and sold them to the Germans in Spain. At the trial they said there was no doubt. And they had brought her to the convent saying: “Keep her for us till the fifteenth. She will be better with you than in prison.” To be shot—a woman! It made one shiver! And yet—it was war! It was for France!
And, looking down at the little elderly Sister, the Mother Superior answered:
“One must see, my daughter. Take me to her cell.”