That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
looking towards the High Altar and moved noiselessly away.
Turning her head to follow him with her eyes, Patrine saw that the large
dark church was not as empty as she had supposed. Kneeling or seated
figures of men and women were scattered here and there amongst the
wilderness of empty pews. The serried rows of rush-bottomed
kneeling-chairs in either side-aisle showed aggregations of people, ten
or a dozen together, chiefly in the neighbourhood of certain narrow
wooden doors appertaining to small structures that might be little
chapels or vestries, set between groups of pillars in regular sequence
down the length of the side-walls. Still following Sherbrand's figure
with her eyes she saw him knock at one of the doors, wait as though for
an answer, and enter. As the door swung towards her, she saw that it
bore a name in gilt letters within an oval on the upper panel. Each of
the doors, a questing glance satisfied her, bore a name.
Of course the little wooden chapels were confessionals. Was Confession
the important business that necessitated Sherbrand's losing a train and
foregoing the company of Patrine to the station, a favour so eagerly
sought and so ardently received? Her red lips curled a little at the
corners as she turned her face back towards the High Altar, rising
within the low barrier of the red and white marble Communion-rail. So
remote and pure and set apart with its tall, shining lights and gleaming
vases of pure white lilies, its snow-white silk frontal embroidered with
a golden ray-surrounded Chalice, its fair white linen Altar-cloth, with
a running border of Old English lettering in dark rusty red:
"He had borne our Infirmities and Carried out
Sorrows. He was Wounded for our Iniquities.
He was Bruised for our sins."
The words seemed to have a physical as well as mental force and
impressiveness. It was as though they swept from the high white Table
through the fragrant, wax-lit stillness of the Sanctuary, winnowing the
still, spicy air of the dark nave and the lighter side-aisles as with
wide, powerful, unseen wings. And despite the presence of nearly a
hundred people scattered about the great building, the stillness was
extraordinary. It got on the nerves.
Almost awfully upon the nerves. For a long way behind her, where the
shadowy dusk brooded thickest, and the white tortured Figure of the
Crucified hung drooping from the great Cross of black marble against the
background of the towering oak screen, it was as though the first great
drops of a thunder-shower were falling, _pat, pat, pat!_ upon the
pavement below.
Merely a trick of imagination--and yet it tortured. One knew by
sensations like these that one had been frightfully overstrained of
late. One had done lots of things one regretted--several things one
disliked to think of; one thing that made one hate oneself sometimes
with a very fury of intensity, when one wasn't too busy hating _him_.
But since he was drowned, one had felt it scarcely cricket to go on
expending fierce resentment and savage disgust and acute loathing in
that direction. One heaped it on the living of the two gross, sensual
offenders. Oh God! when Sherbrand had said in that tone of triumph:
"_I come to you clean!_"
How inexpressibly one had abominated oneself. How one had shrunk
against the side of the taxicab, pretending to look after wretched
little decadent Wyvenhoe and the unquenchable Mrs. Mallison--feigning
sudden absorption in the Piccadilly shop-windows, to escape those clear
undoubting eyes that pierced one to the very soul. To be thought good
when one was wicked, pure when one was the other thing; believed candid
when one was a living lie. Ah!--that not only pierced but scorched.
If anybody, a month or so back, had asked Patrine: "Are you a
Christian?" she would have retorted: "What are you playing at? Of
course I am--I suppose!" Of late that conjectural Being she had called
God had receded, faded, grown dimmer, and vanished. But here in the
stillness, looking towards the Altar, she was conscious as those
candle-flames went up like prayers from faithful souls, that Good and
Evil were living warring Forces. You chose White or Black deliberately,
and when Death came--it was anything but the end.
Her hair stiffened slightly on her scalp and a light shudder thrilled
through her. She felt with a growing awe, and sense of dreadful
certainty, that Someone was looking at her. And to relieve the
insupportable tension she stretched out her hand, and took a squat,
thick little book from the shelf below the seat in front of her. It was
a copy of the Douai translation from the Latin Vulgate of the Bible, and
there was a purple marker where she opened it, in the middle of the Book
of Job.
"_Power and terror are with Him...._"
That was the first line that caught her eye. A little lower on the page
came:
"_Was it not Him that made life? Hell is naked before Him and there is
no covering for destruction.... He stretched out the North over the
empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing._
"_He hath set bounds about the waters, till light and darkness come to
an end...._
"_The pillars of heaven tremble and dread at His beck. By His power the
seas are suddenly gathered together, and His Wisdom hath struck the
proud one._
"_His Spirit hath adorned the heavens ... and seeing we have heard
scarce a little drop of His Word, who shall be able to withstand the
thunder of His greatness?_"
It was like a Voice speaking--a Voice of inconceivable magnitude. It
made one go cold, asking oneself the question: What if sin were an
insult to Him? A scrap of filth flung in the Face of One who created
the atom, the protoplasm, the cell, and the bacillus, and built from
these in His own Image, Man.
Sitting in the stilly duskiness the woman He had made shut her eyes and
tried to envisage Him. He was not the God of the Curate's
Confirmation-class, nor the God the Anglican Vicar of the West End
Church preached about, but a Being the hem of whose garment extends
beyond the confines of Space, and in whose lap lies Eternity. Infinite
Goodness, infinite Love, infinite Purity, infinite Beauty, He could
stoop to care for the little beings of His Workmanship so much, that for
them He did not hesitate to sacrifice Himself in the Person of His Only
Son. Did not love such as this make wilful sin an insult to Him in that
Son's Person? Wasn't it--pretty rough on Our Saviour--to have poured out
His Blood upon the Cross of Calvary as an atonement for the sins of men
like dead von Herrnung, and women like Patrine Saxham, and know them
still so beastly, so prurient, so base, so vile? ... It began to dawn
upon Patrine, still possessed by that strange hallucination of the Blood
that dripped heavily from the tortured Body on the great black Cross
behind her, how it might be that evil wilfully committed, opened its
Wounds afresh. Drove the thorns anew into the drooping Head of the
Crucified, pierced once more the Heart, that inexhaustible fountain of
love....
"_O! all you that pass by ... attend and see if there be any sorrow like
unto My Sorrow._"
The words came cropping up through layers of sentences heard and
forgotten, clearly as though a voice had spoken them at her side.
This afternoon the headlines of papers had shrieked of horrors. You
remember that at seven o'clock in the morning two German Army Corps had
poured into Belgium by the eleven strategic railways that provided for
The Day. The vast grey-green flood of marching men, the huge python-like
columns of machine-guns, the splendidly-horsed batteries of field
artillery, the Brobdingnagian siege howitzers thundering behind their
traction-engines, the miles of motor- and horse-drawn transport-waggons,
carts, and lorries, blotted out the familiar features of the landscape,
as, preceded by massed brigades of cavalry, with squadrons of Field
Flying Service aeroplanes reconnoitring three thousand feet overhead,
the hosts of Germany rolled down towards the banks of the Meuse.
Directly in line of them rose the fortified City of Liege, termed "the
Birmingham of Belgium," holding in the suburb of Seraign, five miles
distant from the city, the huge Cockerill machine-plant and foundry, one
of the largest ironworks in the world. They had stayed three hours at
the frontier station of Vise, a Belgium Custom House town of less than
4,000 inhabitants, where a few squadrons of Belgian Cavalry and the
Belgian 12th Line Regiment, aided by some heroic peasants, farmers, and
townspeople had risen up with desperate gallantry to oppose their
inevitable advance.
They had written the sign-manual of the Hun upon the ashes of Vise in
the blood of its massacred inhabitants. Frightfulness, the many-headed
hydra, was uncaged and let loose ere they rolled on to Liege peeved by
their three hours' intolerable delay. While I who write and you who
read far from the sound of fusillades, or the crash of shells or the
yells of peasants dying amongst the flames of burning houses, learned of
these deeds from the shrilly clamorous headlines, and asked one another
with raised eyebrows, in incredulous voices: "_Can these hideous things
possibly have been done?_"
Patrine had no doubt that they had been done!--were being done even
while she sat waiting in Sherbrand's church for Sherbrand. Did she not
know von Herrnung? Were not his fellow-officers and the soldiers he and
they commanded, lustful, brutal, cruel, rapacious, arrogant, and
pitiless even as he? He was a Type--not the isolated example of a new
species. It would not be easily stamped out; its dominating
characteristics would write themselves upon a conquered race. Those
outraged wives, those violated daughters of Belgium would live to see it
reproduced in the living fruit of their humiliation. What honest man
could bear to stoop over his wife's bedside and meet the eyes of the
Enemy looking at him--from the face of a new-born child!
A rigor of horror seized upon her body and shook it. Her jaw dropped,
her eyes closed as though they shrank and withered under their
contracting lids. She slid from her seat and fell upon her knees
helplessly. Her head sank forwards upon the hands that rose
instinctively to hide her face. In the same instant Sherbrand's low
voice speaking behind her turned the heart in her bosom to ice.
"Dearest--I am ready, that is if you are? My keeping you was
unavoidable. I am going to Communion with my mother, before the Funeral
Mass to-morrow, and I wanted to make my Confession first. Has the time
seemed long?"
"Not long. Shall we go now?"
He bent the knee to the High Altar and moved with Patrine down the nave
towards an altar dedicated to the Virgin Mother, that was on the south
side of the church near the great west door. Wax tapers of several
sizes burned in a brass stand beside the tiny altar-rail. Sherbrand
lighted three tapers and placed them, felt in his waistcoat-pocket for a
bit of silver and balanced it on the slotted top of the money-box too
gorged with pennies to admit of the slender sixpenny bit. Then with a
beautiful, devotional simplicity he knelt upon the narrow blue
golden-starred cushion for a moment, looking up at the gracious veiled
head that bent above.
But for the modernity of the tweed clothes, the pose of the athletic,
lightly-built body would, with the mellowed light from the great rose
window falling on the keen bronzed face and thick fair hair, have
suggested a knight at prayer. In a moment he rose. They returned as
they had come, passed through the chapter-house of the Sodality, and
issued through the door into the garden. She said, as he triumphantly
possessed himself of the dear white hand: