“Anybody can go into any church.”
“Yes, I suppose so. What I mean is that these old Catholic churches seem different. In our own churches you have a feeling of being—what do you say?—personally conducted. As if you were a visitor being shown children’s trinkets. There is something impersonal—something boundless—in churches like this one here. The silence makes you think that there is nobody in them—or that perhaps ... God isn’t far away.”
He frowned. “But this is just where the trinkets are—in these churches: the images, the painted figures, the robes, the whole mysterious paraphernalia.”
“Yes ... but when there isn’t anything going on. You feel an influence. I remember going into a church in San Antonio once—a Protestant chapel, and the only thing I could recall afterward was a Yankee clock that ticked too fast and too loud. I never heard of anything so horribly inappropriate. Time was what you thought of. Not eternity. You felt that the people would be afraid of wasting a minute too much—as if their real concerns were elsewhere.”
Harboro was instinctively combating the thought that was in her mind, so far as there was a definite thought, and as far as he understood it. “But why shouldn’t there be a clock?” he asked. “If people feel that they ought to give a certain length of time to worship, and then go back to their work again, why shouldn’t they have a clock?”
“I suppose it’s all right,” she conceded; and then, with a faint smile: “Yes, if it didn’t tick too loud.”
She lowered her voice abruptly on the last word. They had passed across the doorless portal and were in the presence of a group of silent, kneeling figures: wretched women whose heads were covered with black cotton rebozos, who knelt and faced the distant altar. They weren’t in rows. They had settled down just anywhere. And there were men: swarthy, ill-shapen, dejected. Their lips moved noiselessly.
Harboro observed her a little uneasily. Her sympathy for this sort of thing was new to him. But she made none of the customary signs of fellowship, and after a brief interval she turned and led the way back into the sunshine.
He was still regarding her strangely when she paused, just outside the door, and opened a little hand-bag which depended from her arm. She was quite intently devoted to a search for something. Presently she produced a coin, and then Harboro observed for the first time that the tortured figure of a beggar sat in the sun outside the church door.
Sylvia leaned over with an impassive face and dropped the coin into the beggar’s cup.