1

The night that Teresa and Concha spent so affectionately in the same bed had no effect on their relationship: Concha continued flinging herself, angrily, violently, against Teresa’s stony stare.

If they happened to be alone in the room when the post arrived and there was a letter for Concha, she would read it through with knit brows, exclaiming under her breath the while; then she would re-read it and, laying it down, would gaze into the fire, apparently occupied with some grave problem of conduct; finally, springing to her feet with an air of having taken a final and irrevocable decision, she would violently tear up the letter, and fling the fragments into the fire.

The letter would probably be from her friend, Elfrida Penn, and may have contained some slight cause for anxiety, as Elfrida was an hysterical young woman and one apt to mismanage her love-affairs; but Teresa, sitting staring at the comedy through half-closed eyes with fascinated irritation, would be certain that the letter contained nothing but an announcement of Paris models, or the ticket for a charity ball.

Teresa felt like some one of presbyopic and astigmatic sight, doomed to look fixedly all day long at a very small object at very close quarters; and this feeling reached an unusual degree of exacerbation on the day that Concha went up to London to dine with Rory Dundas. At seven o’clock she began to follow every stage of her toilette; the bath cloudy with salts, a bottle of which she was sure to have taken up in her dressing-case; then the silk stockings drawn on—“oh damn that Parker! She’s sent me a pair with a ladder”; silk shift, stays, puffing out her hair, mouth full of gilt hair-pins; again and again pressing the bell till the chambermaid came to fasten up her gown; on with her evening cloak and down into the hall where Rory would be standing waiting in an overcoat, a folded-up opera hat in his hand, his hair very sleek from that loathsome stuff of his—“Hulloooah!” “Hulloa! Hulloa! I say ... some frock!” and then all through dinner endless topical jokes.

Oh it was unbearably humiliating ... and how she longed for Pepa: “Teresa darling! You must be mad. He really isn’t good enough, you know. I’m sure he never opens a book, and I expect he’s disgustingly bloodthirsty about the Germans. But if you really like him we must arrange something—what a pity May-Week is such a long way off.”

What did she see in him? He was completely without intellectual distinction; he had a certain amount of fancy, of course, but fancy was nothing—

nearly all young Englishmen had fancy—a fancy fed by Alice in Wonderland, and the goblin arabesques on the cover of Punch; a certain romantic historical sense too that thrills to Puck of Pook’s Hill and the Three Musketeers—oh yes, and, unlike Frenchmen, they probably all cherish a hope that never quite dies of one day playing Anthony to some astonishingly provocative lady—foreign probably, passionate and sophisticated as the heroine of Three Weeks, mysterious as Rider Haggard’s She. But all that is just part of the average English outfit—national, ubiquitous, undistinguished, like a sense of humour and the proverbial love of fair play.

Yes; their minds were sterile, frivolous ... un-Platonic—that was the word for expressing the lack she felt in the emotional life of the Rorys, the Ebens, and all the rest of that crew; un-Platonic, because they could not make myths. For them the shoemaker at his last, the potter at his wheel, the fishwives of the market-place, new-born babies and dead men, never suddenly grew transparent, allowing to glimmer through them the contours of a stranger world. For them Dionysus, whirling in his frantic dance, never suddenly froze into the still cold marble of Apollo.

Concha came back from her outing uncommunicative and rather cross. She was evidently irritated by the unusual eagerness shown by the DoÑa with regard to her coming dinner with David Munroe.

One day Anna tackled Teresa over the doctrine of Transubstantiation.

“I’ve never believed in fairies and things,” she said, “and this sounds much more untruer—is it true?”

Teresa looked at her square, sensible little face—though without the humour, so ridiculously like Harry’s in shape and expression—and her heart sank.

What could she say?

Einstein—Bergson—Unamuno ... their theories were supposed to provide a loophole.

She began to mutter idiotically:

“But is it true?” persisted Anna.

“Darling, just give me a minute to think,” pleaded Teresa; and she set about reviewing her own attitude to her faith.

Whatever the confessors may say, Catholicism has nothing to do with dogma ... no, no, that’s not quite it, dogma is a very important element, but in spite of not accepting it one can still be a Catholic. Catholicism is a form of art; it arouses an Æsthetic emotion—an emotion of ambivalence; because like all great art it at once repels and attracts. When people confronted her with its intellectual absurdities, she felt as she did, when, at an exhibition of modern painting, they exclaimed: “but whoever saw hands like that?” or “why hasn’t he given her a nose?”

Of course, this peculiar Æsthetic emotion is not to be found in every manifestation of Catholicism—it has to be sought for; for instance, it is in the strange pages at the beginning of Newman’s Apologia, where, in his hushed emaciated English, he tells how, in his childhood in a remote village, never having seen any of the insignia of Rome, when dreaming over his lessons he would cover the pages of his copy-books with rosaries and sacred hearts. And, when sitting one evening in the cemetery at the bottom of the hill on which stands Siena, she had got the emotion very strongly from the contrast between the lovely Tuscan country, the magnificently poised city, the sinister black-cowled confraternitÉ that was winding down the hill, each member carrying a lighted torch—between all this and the cemetery itself where, among the wreaths of artificial flowers, there was stuck up on each grave a cheap photograph of the deceased in his or her horrible Sunday finery, with a maudlin motto inscribed upon the frame. In the contrast too in Seville between Holy Week, the pageantry of which is organised by the parish priests—a wooden platform, for instance, carried slowly through the streets on which stands the august JesÙs de la Muerte flanked by two huge lighted candles—and the Jesuit procession a few days later, in which Virgins looking like ballerinas and apostles holding guitars go simpering past all covered with paper flowers. One can get it, too, from reading the Song of Solomon in the terse Latin of the Vulgate.

It is an art steeped in a noble classical tradition which nevertheless makes unerringly for what, outside the vast tolerance of art, would be considered vulgar and hideous—chromo-lithographs, blood, mad nuns. This classical tradition and this taste for the tawdry are for ever pulling against each other, and it is just this conflict that gives it, as art, its peculiar cachet.

This was all very fine; but it would not do for Anna.

“Darling, do you think it matters about a thing being true, as long as it’s ... and, anyway, what exactly do we mean when we say a thing is true?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Anna fretfully, “do you believe that the clergyman turns that bread into Jesus Christ?”

After a second’s hesitation Teresa braced herself and answered, “Yes.”

“Well, anyway, Daddy doesn’t, I’m sure and,” Anna lowered her voice, “I’m sure Mummie didn’t either.”

“Well, darling, you know no one is going to force you to believe it—you can do exactly what you like about it.”

Then Anna trotted off into the garden and Teresa sat on, thinking.

How was she going to cope with Pepa’s children?

These counter-influences—Plasencia and Cambridge—one continually undoing the work of the other, were so very bad for them. Childhood was a difficult enough time without that.

She remembered the agony of her own struggle to free herself from the robe of Nessus, woven by suggestion, heredity, and imperfectly functioning faculties; was she yet free from the robe? Anyhow, it was better now than in that awful world of childhood—a world, as it were, at the bottom of the sea: airless, muted, pervaded by a dim blue light through which her eyes strained in vain to see the seaweeds and shells and skulls in their true shape and colour; a world to which noises from the bright windy land above would from time to time come floating down, muffled and indistinct—voices of newspaper boys shouting “Death of Mr. Gladstone! Death of Mr. Gladstone!” Snatches of tunes from San Toy; bells ringing for the relief of Mafeking.

2

September turned into October; the apples grew redder and the fields—the corn and barley gradually being carted away to be stacked in barns—grew plainer, severe expanses of a uniform buff colour, suggesting to Teresa the background of a portrait by Velasquez.

The children were going back to Cambridge; and their excitement at the prospect might have convinced the DoÑa, had she been open to conviction, that their life there was not an unhappy one.

They were sorry to leave the DoÑa and Teresa and ’Snice and the garden—that went without saying; but the prospect of a railway journey was sufficient to put Jasper, who never looked very far ahead, into a state of the wildest excitement, and the occasional nip in the air during the past week had given Anna an appetite for the almost forgotten joys of lessons, Girl-Guides, the “committee” organised by a very grand friend of twelve for collecting money for the Save the Children Fund (one was dubbed a member of the committee with the President’s tennis-racket and then took terrible oaths of secrecy), and soon Christmas drawing near, when Nanny would take them down to brilliantly lighted Boots, with its pleasant smell of leather and violet powder, to choose their Christmas cards.

Teresa knew what she was feeling; it was a pleasant thought, all the small creatures hurrying eagerly back from sea or hills or valleys all over the kingdom—tiny Esquimaux swarming back from their isolated summer fisheries to the civic life of winter with its endless small activities, so ridiculous to the outside world, so solemn, and so terribly important, to themselves.

Shortly after they had reached Cambridge Teresa got the following letter from Harry Sinclair:

It only made Teresa laugh; she knew how Harry must have enjoyed writing it—could see him jumping on to his bicycle and hurrying down to the University Library to verify in one of the books of the late Lord Acton the definition of Transubstantiation.

Unfortunately she left it lying about; and it fell into the hands of the DoÑa, whom Teresa found in the act of reading it, with set face and compressed lips.

At the bottom of her heart the DoÑa attached as little importance to it as Teresa had done: the fact of its having been written to Teresa and not to herself marked it as being nothing more than a harmless and half facetious means of relieving his feelings; besides, she knew that to sever all connection with Plasencia would be too drastic a step—involving too many complications, too many painful scenes—also, too dramatic a step to be taken by Harry in cold blood.

But there are very few people who have the strength and poise of intellect to resist, by an honest scrutiny of facts, the exquisite pleasure of thinking themselves despitefully used by their enemy—very few too who can resist the pleasure of avenging this despiteful usage on a third and, to the vulgar eye, quite innocent person.

The human soul requires for the play that is its hidden life but a tiny cast; and to provide parts for its enormous company it falls back upon the device of understudies, six or seven sometimes to one part. When this is properly understood the use of the scapegoat will seem less unjust.

Anyhow, the DoÑa chose to pretend to herself that she took Harry’s letter seriously; and Dick was chosen as the scapegoat.

There is prevalent in Spain a system of barter with the Deity, the contracts entered into being of the following nature: If God (or the Virgin or Saint ...) will make Fulano faithful to Fulana, Fulana will not enter a theatre for a month; or if God will bring little Juanito safely through his operation for adenoids, Fulano will try to love his mother-in-law.

As a result of Harry’s letter the DoÑa entered into such a contract: her Maker was to ensure the ultimate saving of her grandchildren’s souls; while her part of the bargain affected Dick and, incidentally, was extremely agreeable to herself.

In her bedroom an identical little comedy was enacted on two separate nights. On its being repeated a third time, Dick burst out angrily: “Oh, very well then ... it’s a bit ... no one could say I bothered you much nowadays.... I know—that damned priest has had the impertinence to interfere in my affairs.... I suppose ... I won’t ... very well, then!”

If it had not been dark he would have seen that the DoÑa’s eyes were bright and shining with pleasure.

For hours he lay awake; a hotch-potch of old grievances boiling and seething in his mind.

Always him, always him, giving in every time: that summer years ago when he had given up golf and Harlech to take them all to Cadiz instead—very few men would have done that! And if they were going to a play always letting one of the children choose what it was to be—and jolly little gratitude he got for it all! Jolly little! Snubbed here, ignored there ... glimpses he had had of other homes came into his head: “hush, dear, don’t worry father”; “now then, Smith, hurry! hurry! The master must not be kept waiting”; “all right, dear, all right, there’s plenty of time.... Gladys dear, just run and fetch your father’s pipe.... Now, Charlie, where’s father’s overcoat? Good-bye darling, I’ll go to the Stores myself this morning and see about it for you ... good-bye, dear, don’t tire yourself ...” whereas here it was: “Well, Dick; I really don’t see how you can have the car this morning—Arnold wants it and he’s so seldom here....” Arnold! Arnold! Arnold! Oh what endless injustice that name conjured up! Actually it was years since they had had Welsh rarebit as a savoury because Arnold had once said the smell made him feel sick ... and oh, the cruelty and injustice on that birthday when the DoÑa with an indulgent smile had asked him what he would like for dinner (damn her impertinence—as if it wasn’t his own house and his own food and his own money!), and he had chosen ox-tail soup, sole, partridge, roly-poly and marrow-bones—ox-tail soup had been “scrapped” because Arnold didn’t like it, sole because they’d had it the night before, roly-poly because Arnold said it wasn’t a dinner-sweet. As to the marrow-bones—they had not been “scrapped,” indeed, but as every one knows, a dish of marrow-bones is a lottery, and he, Dick, the Birthday King, had drawn a blank—a hollow mockery, in which a tiny Gulliver might have sat dry and safe, not a single drop of grease falling on his wig or his broadcloth. But Arnold’s had been a lordly bone, dropping at first without persuasion two or three great blobs of semi-coagulated amber, and then yielding to his proddings the coyer treasures of its chinks and crannies, what time he had cried triumphantly, “More toast, please, Rendall!” And the DoÑa had watched him with a touched and gratified smile, as if she were witnessing for the first time the incidence of merit and its deserts. And it was not merely that the unfilial Arnold had wallowed in grease, not offering out of his abundance one slim finger of sparsely besmeared toast to his dry and yearning father, but the DoÑa had not cast in his direction one glance of pity—and it was his birthday, too!... oh that Arnold! Who was it ... Harry or Guy ... anyway he had heard some one saying that every father feels like a Frankenstein before a grown-up son ... well, not many of them had as much cause as he had ... despised, snubbed whenever he opened his mouth. Oh damn that Arnold! In what did he consider his great superiority to lie? Curious thing how his luck had always been so bad: he had not got into the Fifteen at Rugby because he had put his knee out—so he said; he had failed to get a scholarship at Trinity because his coach had given him the wrong text-book on constitutional history—so he said; he had only got a second in his tripos, because the Cambridge school of history was beneath contempt—so he said. And then the War and all the appalling fuss about him—really, one would have thought he was fighting the Germans single-handed! And Dick, creeping about with his tail between his legs and being made to feel a criminal every time he smiled or forgot for a second that Arnold was in the trenches ... and, anyhow, if he had been so wonderful, why hadn’t he the V.C., or at least the Military Cross?

Arnold was a fraud ... and a damned impertinent one! Well, it was his mother’s fault ... mothers were Bolsheviks, yes, Bolsheviks—by secret propaganda begun in the nursery setting the members of a family against their head. He was nothing to his children—nothing.

Just for a second he got a whiff of the sweet, nauseating, vertiginous, emotion he had experienced at the birth of each of them in turn—an emotion rather like the combined odours of eau de Cologne and chloroform; an emotion which, like all the most poignant ones, had a strong flavouring of sadism; for it sprang from the strange fierce pleasure of knowing that the body he loved was being tortured to bear his children.

Yes, he had loved her ... there had been times ... well, was he going to put up with it for ever? Oh, how badly he had been used.

Then it would all begin over again.

Finally he came to a resolution, the daring of which (such is the force of habit) half frightened him, while it made his eyes in their turn bright and shining with pleasure.

3

The fire of October, which had first been kindled in a crimson semicircle of beeches burning through a blanket of mist on the outskirts of Plasencia, spread, a slow contagion, over all the land. The birch saplings in the garden became the colour of bracken. The border was gold and amethyst with chrysanthemums and Michaelmas daisies. And in the fields there lingered poppies, which of all flowers look the frailest, yet which are the last to go.

Imperceptibly, the breach widened between Teresa and Concha; Concha had now completely given up pretending that their relationship was an affectionate one, and they rarely spoke to each other.

It was evident, too, that the lack of harmony between their parents, noticeable since Pepa’s death, had recently become more pronounced.

Dick was often absent for days at a time; and one day Teresa happening to go into the DoÑa’s morning-room found her sitting on the sofa looking angry and troubled, a letter on her lap. Teresa took the letter—the DoÑa offering no protest—and read it. I was a bill to Dick from a London jeweller for a string of pearls. Puzzled, she looked questioningly at the DoÑa, who merely shrugged her shoulders.

In the servant’s hall, too, there seemed to be discord, rumours of which drifted upstairs via Parker the maid, Parker had a way of beginning in the middle, which made her plot difficult to follow, but which perhaps had a certain value as a method of expressing such irrational things as the entanglement of primitive emotions. Her stories were like this: “And she said: ‘see you don’t get Minchin in the garden,’ and Mrs. Rudge said, ‘oh then some one else’s name would be Walker’; and I said, ‘if Dale hadn’t been killed in the War he would be in your cottage and that’s what the War has done for you!’ and I said, ‘you’ve children, Mrs. Rudge,’ I said, ‘and I hope it won’t come knocking at your door some day,’ and Lily said, ‘trust Parker to be after an unmarried man,’ and I said, ‘don’t be so rude, Lily, it’s Nosey Parker yourself ... even though I don’t go to chapel!’ That was one for Mrs. Rudge, you see: oh, they’re a set of beauties!”

The previous head-gardener, Dale, for whom the middle-aged Parker had had a tendresse, had been killed in the War. She looked askance at his successor Rudge for wearing dead men’s shoes, and for being that unpardonable thing—a married man; and into the bargain he was a dissenter. Then there was Minchin, the handsome cowman, whom Dick was thinking of putting into the garden....

It was all very complicated; but seeing that light is sometimes thrown on the psychology of the hyper-civilised by the researches of anthropologists among Bantus and Red Indians, perhaps these tales of Parker deserved a certain attention—at any rate, behind them there loomed three tremendous forces: sex, religion and the dead....

One day, to the surprise of every one but the DoÑa, there arrived in time for dinner Dick’s dearest friend, Hugh Mallam.

He was a huge shaggy creature, if possible, more boyish than Dick. He and Dick were delighted at seeing each other, for Hugh lived in Devonshire and rarely came as far north as Plasencia, and all through dinner plied each other with old jokes and old memories; and from the roars of laughter that reached the drawing-room after they had been left to themselves they were evidently enjoying themselves extremely over their port wine.

The next morning Teresa coming into the morning-room, found the DoÑa and Hugh standing before the fire, the DoÑa looking angry and scornful while Hugh, in an instructive and slightly irritated voice, was saying: “Sorry, DoÑa, but I can’t help it ... I can’t help being the same sort of person with Dick that I’ve always been ... it’s like that ... I know it’s very wrong of him and all that, but I can’t help being the same sort of person with him I’ve always been ... I....”

“Yes, yes, Hugh, you’ve said that before. But do you realise what a serious thing it is for me and the children? You seemed very shocked and sympathetic in your letter—for one thing, a family man simply can’t afford to spend these sums; then there’s the scandal—so bad for the business and Arnold ... and you promised me yesterday....”

“I know, but I tell you, as soon as I saw old Dick I knew that I couldn’t lecture him, one can’t change.... I can’t help being the same sort of person with him I’ve always been. But I really am most awfully sorry about it all—the old blackguard!”

“Well, if you hear that we are ruined, perhaps you’ll be sorrier still.”

“That won’t happen—no tragedies ever happen to any one who has anything to do with me—ha! ha! They couldn’t, could they, Teresa? I’m much too——”

“Hush!” said the DoÑa sharply, suddenly noticing the presence of Teresa; and, with a look of extreme relief, Hugh slunk through the French window into the garden.

So the DoÑa had actually been trying to turn Hugh into their father’s mentor! It was not like her; she was much too wise not to know that the incorrigibly frivolous Hugh was quite unsuited to the part.

Parallel with the infallible wisdom that is the fruit of our own personal experience, there lie the waste products of the world’s experience—facile generalisations, clichÉs, and so on. Half the follies of mankind are due to forming our actions along this line instead of along the other. There, Dick and Hugh were not two human beings, therefore unique and inimitable, but ‘old school friends’—and to whose gentle pressure back to the narrow way is one more likely to yield than to that of an ‘old school friend’?

But the very fact of the wise DoÑa acquiescing in such a stale fallacy, told of desperation and the clutching at straws.

Of course, Hugh was perfectly right—the shape and colour of his relationship with Dick had been fixed fifty years ago at the dame’s school in Kensington, to spring up unchanged all through the years at each fresh meeting. They could not change it; why, you might as well go and tell an oak that this spring it was to weave its leaves on the loom of the elms.

He had been right, too, in saying there would be no catastrophe. The fate of Pompeii—a sudden melodramatic blotting out of little familiar things—would never, she felt sure, overtake Plasencia. Things at Plasencia happened very slowly, by means of a long series of anticlimaxes.

4

As they sat on the loggia that afternoon reading their letters after tea, Concha suddenly exclaimed, “Well I’m blessed!” and laying down her letter began to laugh.

“Well?” said the DoÑa.

“It’s that excellent David Munroe!”

“What about him?”

“He writes to say that he’s chucking business and everything, and is going at once into a seminary to prepare for ordination—it seems too comical!”

The DoÑa’s expression was one of mingled disappointment and interest; while Jollypot’s cheeks went pink with excitement. They began to press Concha for details.

As to Teresa—somehow or other it gave her a disagreeable shock.

Of course, every year hundreds of young men all over the world had a vocation, went to a seminary, and, in due time, said their first mass—she ought to be used to it; nevertheless, she felt there was something ... something unnatural in the news: a young man who had business connections with her father, and gave Concha dinner at the Savoy, and danced to the gramophone—and then, suddenly hearing this ... she got the same impression that she did in Paris from a sudden vision of the white ghostly minarets of the SacrÉ-Coeur, doubtless beautiful in themselves, but incongruous in design, and associations, and hence displeasing in that gray-green, stucco, and admirably classical city.

The others drifted off to their various business, and Teresa sat on, looking at the view.

It was one of these misty October days when every landscape looks so magnificent, that, given pencil, brush, and the power of copying what one sees, it almost seems that any one, without going through the eclectic process of creation, could paint a great picture. The colours were blurred as if the intervening atmosphere were a sheet of bad glass; and the relationship between the old rose of ploughed fields, the yellow strips of mustard, and the brighter gold and pink of the sunflowers, chrysanthemums, and Michaelmas daisies in the border, made one think of an oriental vase painted with dim blossoms and butterflies in which is arranged a nosegay of bright and freshly plucked flowers—the paintings on the porcelain melting into the flowers, the flowers vivifying the colours on the porcelain.

That is what the relationship between life and art should be like, she thought, art the nosegay, life the porcelain vase.

Life could not be shot on the wing—it must first be frozen.... Myths that simplified and transposed so that things became as the chairs and sofa had been that day in her Chelsea lodgings ... heliacal periods ... Apollo and Dionysus ... it was all the same thing. If only she could find it, life at Plasencia had some design, some plot ... yes, that was it—a plot that enlarged and simplified things so that they could be seen.

What was life at Plasencia like? A motley hostile company sailing together in a ship as in Cervantes’s Persiles?

No; it still had roots; night and day it still stared at the same view; externally, it was immobile. It was more like a convent than a ship, an ill-matched company forced to live together under one roof, which one and all they long to leave.

A sense of discomfort came over her at the word “convent”: long bare corridors hung with hideous lithographs; hard cold beds; shrewish vulgar-tongued bells summoning one to smoked fish; an insipid calligraphy; “that by the intercession of Blessed Madeleine Sophie Barat, Virgin, through her devotion to thy Sacred Heart” ... it certainly had ambivalence—it was the great Catholic art she had tried to define to herself when confronted with doubting Anna; but it was not Plasencia.

“Nunnery” was a better word, a compact warm word, suggesting hives and the mysterious activities of bees ... it had an archaic ring too ... yes, art always exists in the past (if not why is the present tense never used?)—it is the present seen as the past.

A nunnery, then, long ago—Boccaccio’s Fiammetta, as a full-blown carnation splits its calyx, her beauty bursting through her novice’s habit, receiving in the nunnery parlour all the amorous youth of Naples. And yet it was not the same as if she had received them in a boudoir of the world. The nunnery’s rule might be lax but it remained a rule; and that, artistically, was of very great value—vivid earthly passion seen against the pale tracery of Laud, Nones, Vespers. And at Plasencia too—out there in the view life was enacted against a background of Hours: ver, aetas, autumnus, hiems—to call them by their Latin names made them at once liturgical.

A nunnery, long ago ... where? Not in Italy; for that would be out of harmony with the colour scheme of Plasencia—not so with Spain, from the stuff of which they were knit, so many of them. A Spanish play (because a play is the best vehicle for a plot) much more brightly coloured than Plasencia, “Cherubimic,” as manuscripts illuminated in very bright colours used to be called ... the action not merely in Spain, but in their own Seville ... Moorish Seville ... hence a play, written like the letters to Queen Elizabeth from eastern potentates, “on paper which doth smell most fragrantly of camphor and ambergris, and the ink of perfect musk.”

And the plot? Well, that was not yet visible; but the forces behind it would be sex, religion, and the dead.

5

October turned into November. At first some belated chrysanthemums, penstemmons, and gentians, kept the flag of the border gallantly flying; then Rudge cut it down to the bare wood of stalks a few inches high, which showed between them the brown of the earth.

Out in the country, for a time, a pink and gold spray of wild briar garlanded here and there the thorny withered hedges; and then their only ornament became the red breast of an occasional robin, his plump body balanced on his thin hairy legs, which were like the stalks of the tiny Cheshire pinks that one sees in rock gardens.

Everywhere the earth was becoming depalliated and self-coloured; and on one of her walks Teresa came upon a pathetic heap of feathers.

In autumn the oriflamme of the spectrum had been red; now it was blue—a corrugated iron roof, for instance. And soon the whole land was wintry and blue; a blue not of vegetation but of light, light, which lay in hollows like patches of blue-bells, which glinted along the wet surface of the high road, turning it into an azure river upon which lay, like yellow fritillaries, the golden dung dropped by calves led to market; and through the golden birches the view, too, lay delicate and blue.

Then black and white days would come, when the sun looked like the moon, and a group of trees like a sketch in charcoal of a distant city.

There was nothing new at Plasencia: Dick still sulked at meals; the DoÑa’s face was cold and set; Concha was distraite and went a great deal to London; Parker complained of the Rudges; only Jollypot and ’Snice went their ways in an apparently unclouded serenity.

Teresa was absorbed by a weekly parcel of books from the London Library; charming mediÆval books in that pretty state of decomposition when literature is turning into history and has become self-coloured, the words serving the double purpose of telling a tale and of illuminating it with small brightly coloured pictures, like the toys in the pack of Claudel’s Saint Nicholas:—

Of Seville she already knew enough to serve her purpose, having several years before, during a winter she had spent there with her mother’s sister, gone every morning to the University to read in the public library; and, as it contains but few books of later date than the eighteenth century, she had read there many a quaint work on the history and customs of old Seville. And, fascinated by its persistent Moorish past, she had dipped a little into the curious decorative grammar of the Arabs, in which, so it seemed to her, infinitives, and participles, and adjectives, are regarded as variations of an ever-recurring design of leaf or scroll in a vast arabesque adorning the walls of a mosque.

Looking over the notes she had made at that time, under the heading Spanish Chestnuts she came upon two little fables she had written on the model of the Arab apologues which were circulated during the Middle Ages all over Spain; and, with the dislike of waste that is so often a characteristic of the artist, she decided that, if it were possible, she would make use of them in the unwritten play.

Like every other visitor to Seville she had been haunted by that strange figure, more Moor than Christian, Pedro the Cruel; for, materially and spiritually, his impress is everywhere on the city—there are streets that still bear the names of his Jewish concubines, the popular ballads still sing of his justice, his cruelty, and his tragic death; while his eternal monument is the great Moorish palace of the Alcazar within whose walls Charles-Quint himself, though his home was half of Europe, remained ever an alien—it is still stained by his blood, and in its garden, through the water of her marble bath, the limbs of his love, Maria Padilla, still gleam white to the moon.

So it was natural that she should fix upon his reign as the period of the play; and hence, though she read promiscuously the literature of the Middle Ages, her focus was the fourteenth century.

All the same, she had qualms. Might she not “queer her pitch” by all this reading? A sense of the Past could not be distilled from a mass of antiquarian details; it was just because the Present was so rank with details that, by putting it in the Past, she was trying to see it clean and new. A sense of the Past is an emotion that is sudden, and swift, and perishable—a flash of purple-red among dark trees and bracken as one rushes past in a motor-car, and it is already half a mile behind before one realises that it was rhododendrons in full flower, and had one had time to explore the park one would have found its acres of shade all riddled with them, saturated with them. An impression like this is not to hold or to bind. And yet ... she had seen a picture by Monticelli, called FranÇois I. et les dames de sa cour, of which the thick flakes of dark, rich colour, if you but stood far enough away, glimmered into dim shapes of ladies in flowered silks and brocades, against a background of boscage clustering round a figure both brave and satyr-like—the king. Something dim and gleaming; fragmentary as De Quincey’s dream.

“Often I used to see a crowd of ladies, and perhaps a festival and dances. And I heard it said, or I said to myself, ‘These are English ladies from the unhappy time of Charles I.’ The ladies danced and looked as lovely as the Court of George IV., yet I knew, even in my dream, that they had been in the grave for nearly two centuries.”

Yet I knew, even in my dream, that they had been in the grave for nearly two centuries—yes, that was it. You must make your readers feel that they are having a waking vision; and your words must be “lonely,” like Virgil’s; they must be halting and fragmentary and whispered.

Nevertheless she went on with her reading, and, as though from among the many brasses of knights with which is inset the aisle of some church, their thinly traced outlines blurred and rubbed by time and countless feet, one particular one were slowly to thicken to a bas-relief, then swell into a statue in the round, then come to life—gray eyes glittering through the vizor, delicately chased armour clanking, the church echoing to oaths in Norman-French,—so gradually from among the flat, uniform, sleeping years of the Middle Ages did the fourteenth century come to life in Teresa’s mind.

Beyond the Pyrenees it was a period of transition—faith was on the wane. She found a symbol of the age in Boccaccio’s vow made not at the shrine of a saint, but at Virgil’s grave; not a vow to wear a hair-shirt or to die fighting the Saracens, but to dedicate all his life to the art of letters. And, when terrified by the message from the death-bed of Blessed Pietro Pietroni, he came near to breaking his vow and falling backwards into the shadows, in the humane sanity of Petrarch’s letter—making rhetoric harsh and mysticism vulgar—she heard the unmistakable note of the Renaissance.

And in France, too, the writer of the second part of the Roman de la Rose has earned the title of “le Voltaire du moyen age.”

But on the other side of the Pyrenees the echo of this new spirit was but very faint.

Shut in between the rock of Gibraltar and by these same Pyrenees sits Our Lady of the Rocks, Faith ... alone; for heresies (Calvinism being the great exception) are, Teresa came to see, but the turning away of the frailer sisters, Hope and Charity, from the petrifying stare of their Gorgon but most beautiful sister.

But in those days, though as stern, she was a plainer Faith. It was not till after the Council of Trent that she developed the repellent beauty of a great picture: the tortured conversion of St. Ignatius de LoyÓla, the Greco-esque visions of Santa Teresa de JesÙs, the gloating grinning crowd in the Zocodover of Toledo lit up by the flames of an auto-da-fÉ into one of the goblin visions of Goya, were still but tiny seeds, broadcast and sleeping. Catholicism had not yet lost the monumental austerity of the primitive Church; its blazon was still the Tree of the Fall and the Redemption springing from Peter’s rock.

But, all the time, the doctrine of Transubstantiation, woven by the “angelic doctor” round the Sacrifice of the Mass, was slowly, surely coming to its own, and Jehovah was turning into the Lord God of the Host.