That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
it and bared her breast to the eager mouth, a strange thrill went
through Franky. A dimness came before his vision, and it was as though
those dimpled hands plucked at his heart. He suffered a sudden
revulsion strange in a young man so modern, up-to-date, and beautifully
tailored. He knew that he longed for a son most desperately. And the
devil of it was--Margot did not.
*CHAPTER VII*
*THE CONSOLATRIX*
Thus, Franky got up and moved away, driven by the stinging cloud of
thoughts that pursued and battened on him, and presently found himself
following a stream of people up a flight of marble steps, and under an
imposing portico that ended in a turnstile and a National Collection of
Paintings and Sculptures.
Wandering through a maze of long skylighted galleries where the
master-works of Modern Art are conserved and cherished, he was to
encounter the thought that haunted him in a myriad of images, wrought by
the chisel, the brush, the burin, and the graving-tool in marble or
bronze, upon canvas or panel, in ivory, or silver, or enamel, or gold.
A sculptured Hagar mourning by the side of her dying Ishmael caught his
eye as he entered the first gallery. Farther on, Eve after the Fall
lifted the infant Cain to receive the kiss of Adam, homing to his shack
of green branches at the end of the labouring day. And a shag-thighed,
curly-horned Pan romped with a litter of sturdy bear-cubs, and
medallions and panels of childhood were everywhere.
It was the same in the galleries devoted to painting. A Breton
christening-party, depicted with the roughness that hides consummate
mastery of technique, trudged along a snowy coast-road towards a little
chapel near the seashore. The young mother in her winged starched cap
and bodice of black velvet, yet pale from the ordeal of anguish, walked
between her smiling gossips, carrying her new-born infant,
chrysalis-like in its linen swaddlings, to be made into a good Christian
by M. le Cure. And seated on a broken throne of red granite beneath the
towering propylaeum of a ruined Egyptian temple, whose colonnades of
lotus columns, and walls painted with processions of hierophants
offering incense to bird or beast-headed deities, and bewigged dancers
and musicians ministering to the pleasures of long-eyed kings, receded
down long perspectives into distance, a Woman, young and slender and
draped in a long blue cloak over a white robe, gazed downwards at a
naked Child sleeping upon her knees. And about the downy temples of the
Child shone a slender ring of mystic brightness, and another, more
faint, haloed the chastely beautiful head of the Mother bending above.
Another canvas, austere and gorgeous, with the marvellous blues and
emeralds and rich deep crimsons of old Byzantine ornament in relief
against a background of dull tawny gold, showed the same maternal
figure, far older and in darker draperies, seated upon a chair of
wrought ivory upon a dais, looking outward and upward with deep eyes of
unfathomable tenderness and sorrow, and pale hands lifted in
supplication to that Heaven whither Her Son ascended after His Victory
over Death. Across the knees of the Consolatrix Afflictorum a mourning
mother lay prone and tearless. And at the feet of the Virgin,
outstretched amidst the scattered petals of some fallen roses, you saw
the nude, beautiful body of a male child of some three years old.
But little of the inner meaning of Bouguereau's great picture filtered
through Franky's honest brown eyes to the mind that lay somewhere behind
them. But he realised that for the grieving woman who had borne a son
and lost him there was no more joy in the world.
The Child of that Woman upon whose knees she leaned her breaking heart
had lived to attain to the perfect ripeness of glorious Manhood. But
then.... Franky followed the lines of the dark, downward-drifting veil
up to the rapt Mother-face with the sorrowful, close-folded mouth and
the deep, fathomless eyes, and remembered what had happened to Her Son.
"Beg pardon!" he found himself muttering between his teeth. His hand
went up, and he had bared his sleek brown head before he knew. This
wasn't a Roman Catholic Church, anyway ... there was no obligation even
to appear respectful; France had long ago kicked over the traces of
Religion--all French people were Freethinkers in these days. Telling
himself this, Franky did not replace the shiny topper. One rapid glance
to right and left had shown him that the gallery was nearly empty; the
few visitors it contained were too far distant to have observed the
action. Except, possibly, one person, a lean, short, elderly man in
shabby black, who stood some paces behind, a little to the left of
Franky, holding a shovel-brimmed round-crowned beaver with both hands
against his sunken chest as he gazed with bright, absorbed eyes at the
wonderful rapt face of the Consoler; his lips moving rapidly as he
whispered to himself, not breaking off or twitching a muscle because
Franky had glanced round:
Franky glanced round again, and this time encountered the oddly young
eyes of his neighbour, looking from a brown, deeply wrinkled visage
framed in thickly growing, straight black hair, heavily streaked with
white.
"Monsieur is a lover of Art?"
Undoubtedly a Frenchman, he addressed Franky in cultured English, with a
tone and manner excellently graced. The vivid clearness of his
amber-coloured eyes, set in the now smiling mask of walnut-brown
wrinkles, was attractive. And Franky answered, unconsciously warming to
the look and smile:
"Must say I hardly know. Things that clever, intellectual people go
into raptures over, bore me simply stiff. Other things--things they
howl down--go straight to the spot, you see. And all I can say when I'm
hauled over the coals for liking rubbish is, that the rubbish is good
enough for this child."
"I comprehend. Monsieur has the courage of his convictions. It is a
quality rare in these days. And--this painting particularly appeals to
Monsieur? May one be pardoned for asking why?"
The voice was suave, but it somehow compelled an answer. Franky, with an
indistinct remembrance of _viva voce_ examinations awakening in him,
cleared his throat and fell back a pace or two.... Well set up and
well-bred, well-groomed and well-dressed, his figure, beside that other
in the priestly soutane of rusty alpaca, short enough to reveal coarse
ribbed stockings of black yarn, and cracked prunella shoes with worn
steel buckles, made a contrast sufficiently quaint to provoke a stare of
curiosity, had any observer passed just then. But standing together on
the beeswaxed floor at the upper end of the long, bright, skylighted
gallery, the Guardsman and his temporary acquaintance were as private as
it is possible to be in a public place.
Thus, at the cost of a heightened complexion and an occasional stammer,
Franky explained himself. The painting appealed to him because it
recalled a Bible story--made familiar to Franky by reason of having
swotted it at School for Sunday Ques. with other fellows of the Fifth in
Greyshott's time. Also, on the wind-up Sunday of his, Franky's, Last
Term, having passed for the Army with the dev--hem!--of a lot of
trouble--a beastly epidemic of diphtheria and scarlet fever having
broken out among the children of the Windsor poor, the Head had preached
from the text in Big Chapel. And the text went something like this:
"_A Voice in Rama was heard, of lamentation and mourning: Rachel
bewailing her children: and would not be comforted because they are
not._"
The haggard, beautiful, tearless Rachel of the picture hadn't bucked at
the disfigurement and the pain and the danger of child-bearing. She had
welcomed them for the sake of the kid.... It was a thundering pity he
hadn't lived--in Franky's opinion; "woman jolly well deserved to have
been let keep that clinking fine boy to rear."
"I comprehend." The clear eyes flashed into Franky's, the withered
brown mask was alight with sympathetic intelligence. "To Monsieur, an
English officer and a member of the Protestant Church of England, that
woman who leans her bursting heart upon the knees of the Mother of
Consolation is Rachel." He quoted:
"'_Vox in Rama audita est, ploratus el ululatus: Rachel plorans filios
suos: et noluit consolari, quia non sunt._'"
"That's it!" Franky nodded, admitting candidly: "Though I always was a
duffer at Latin, and we weren't taught at School to pronounce it--quite
in that way."
Said the clear-eyed old man, whose dark wrinkled throat displayed no
edge of linen above the plain circular collar of the soutane, only a
significant border of purple from which two widish lappets of the same
colour depended beneath the peaked and mobile chin, and who might have
been a prelate of sorts, had it not been understood of simple Franky
that the State had abolished the Catholic religion and banished all
priests, monks, and nuns from France.
"The Italianate Latin puzzles you.... It is--slightly different to the
Latin they taught you at Eton? _Hein_? When I lived in England--not so
long ago--I counted several brave Eton fellows among my acquaintances.
And their mental attitude with regard to the language of Virgil, Horace,
and Tacitus was precisely that of Monsieur."
He chuckled, and his oddly young eyes twinkled quite gaily as he pulled
out a battered little silver snuff-box and helped himself, wrinkling his
thin hooked nose with evident enjoyment. As he dusted the pungent brown
grains from his lappets with a coarse blue-checked cotton handkerchief,
an amethyst ring on the wrinkled hand flashed pink and violet in the
light.
"To Monsieur who is doubtless familiar with the Scriptures in Tyndall's
translation, I might suggest that the Latin of the Ancient Romans should
be pronounced in the Roman style! But Monsieur will pardon this tone of
the pedagogue. I will not 'bore you stiff' with a classical
disquisition. Permit me to thank you for your amiable compliance with
the request of an old man, and to wish you good-day."
He combined apology, farewell, and dismissal in a courtly little bow,
and as though undoubting that the other would pass on, plunged again
into the picture. But Franky lingered to say, awkwardly:
"Perhaps ... If you don't mind...."
"_Hein_? ..."
The keen eyes reverted to his embarrassed face instantly.
"What if I do not mind? ... There is something you desire to ask me?"
"Well, yes!" Franky admitted. "Don't quite pipe why, but I rather
cotton to hearing your version.... Of the meaning of that picture, you
know! ..."
"Yes--yes! I understand! ..." The vivid eyes flashed piercingly into
Franky's, and leaped back to the great glorious canvas within the
stately frame. "To you who were once a boy at Eton that woman who has
no more tears to shed is Rachel of Rama.... To me, once Seminarist of
the Institut Catholique, as to others of my holy faith and sacred
calling--she is France--our beloved France, who leans upon the knees and
against the bosom of the Catholic Church in her bereavement--mourning
with anguish unutterable her children who are dead.... Dead to Faith,
dead to the Spiritual Life--members separated from the Body of Christ by
their own choice as by the act of Government. Lost!--unless the ray of
Divine Grace find and touch them in their self-made darkness, and they
repent, and turn themselves to Christ again!"
Franky said, with wholly lovable banality:
"Rather sweepin', but natural conclusion, from a religious point o'
view. Still, when a whole nation gets up like one man and bally well
chucks a Religion, there must be something jolly off-colour and
thundering rotten about that Religion, don't you know?"