Grandmother and the Priests (19 page)

“You have never forgotten,” said Benedict.

“No,” said Sir Joshua. “I have never forgotten the horror. Or the joy which God gave me there.”

On Sundays, even the slum seemed to die. The storehouse was silent, baking in the sun or running with black water, and the clay and gravel with it. The dreadful little houses were quiet; the slum children were washed for a change, and sat meekly and quietly on brushed doorsteps. The whole region stank of coal gas, smoke, dust and offal.

One Sunday, a Sunday as dank and gray as dead wet ashes, Joshua had walked there, along the high and endless brick wall that guarded the storehouse. The city rumbled at a distance. Here, everything was almost soundless. And it was empty. Joshua glanced across the road, and then away. It was then that he saw the young girl walking only a few steps ahead of him. He stopped, in surprise. She had not been there a moment ago, and now she was here. She must have stepped across the road at the moment he had glanced away.

He noticed a curious thing almost immediately. Only his own footsteps rang on the cobbles. The girl walked silently, as if drifting. She was slender, and a little taller than average, and beautifully formed, the shoulders straight, the waist small. She wore a long yellow dress of some material he had never seen before and which he could not identify, but it certainly was not cotton or linen or wool or even silk. It floated about her ankles, and her feet were shod in yellow slippers. It was a cold day, but she did not wear a mantle or a coat, and her head was uncovered. Her hair was extraordinary, of a shining silver-gilt, thick and smooth, and lay on her shoulders and dropped far below her waist.

Joshua was astonished by the silent walking of the girl, her clothing, and her hair. She moved easily and lightly, as if she were some princess walking in her secluded garden. Then he had the most powerful and urgent desire to see her face. As if he had called to her, she turned, smiling, and he was struck still.

He had never seen such a beautiful face, not even on the canvases of the Old Masters on the Continent.

“How can I describe it?” Sir Joshua asked of Benedict, and his voice was the voice of a jubilant young man. “There are really no words. When I tell you that she had eyes the color of lilacs, a nose as delicate as alabaster, a mouth like a rose, and a complexion like a lily, I am really telling you nothing. These are only words. It is like a blind man, blind from birth, who attempts to describe a sunrise. I could only stand and stare at her. I can only say that I fell in love with her at once, and that I never loved again, and will never love anyone but that girl.”

“But what was such a girl, dressed like that, on a cold dead Sunday, doing there in those quarters?” asked Benedict.

“She was waiting for me,” said Joshua.

“For you!”

“For me. My poor boy. Your eyes are popping. You must put aside your realism for a moment, and merely accept the fact that I was there, and that the girl smiled at me, and that she was waiting for me. She was so obviously waiting that I pulled up my clumsy feet and went to her, my mouth falling as wide open as yours is falling now.

“She was holding a long flower in her hand, the ancestor of those I have called C’est Egal. When I reached the girl I could smell the fragrance of the flower, and see its beautiful glowing heart. I was stupefied, of course. I looked down into her eyes, and she gently put the flower in my hands. Then she said, ‘Wait for me. Do not forget me.’

“I’ve never heard such a voice in my life, never before that day, never since. I have heard the greatest female singers, but they did not have such a voice. I heard what she said, and I was stupefied even more than before, and terribly in love. Then, as I held the flower, she walked about twenty feet ahead of me and touched the ugly brick wall, and for the first time I saw in it a small door. As yellow and shining as the flower I held. The door opened, the girl smiled at me again, then walked through the door and closed it after her.

“Then I could uproot my heavy feet and race to the door. But when I reached it, it was not there at all. There was nothing but the solid brick.”

Benedict was silent. His thoughts were confused. Of course, there was a rational explanation. A pretty young girl, walking for her own amusement in that awful place, carrying a flower —

“There was no door,” said Sir Joshua. “But I had seen it, and I had seen her walk through it.”

The poor old soul is mad, thought Benedict, uneasily, or he dreams.

As if he heard the dissenting thought, Sir Joshua smiled widely. “I am not mad,” he said. “I’m not senile, Benedict. I am considered very sensible and realistic. And, I am telling you the truth. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio —’ ”

“Yes, I know,” said Benedict, with some impatience. “Every — er — mystic or superstitious or sentimental person quotes that at some time in his life, and regularly, I’ve found.”

“You are a priest,” said Sir Joshua. “You are taught that the super natural is as close to us as breathing. You know that the angels are a cloud of witnesses. The Holy Bible speaks very often of these things. And we have Lourdes to remember — ”

“You are not saying — !” cried Benedict, shocked and outraged.

“Good heavens, no! How could you think such a thing, Benedict?”

Benedict colored brightly. “I am sorry, Sir Joshua. But you must admit that what you have told me is very extraordinary. Could it possibly have been a dream?”

“I have C’est Egal,” said Sir Joshua.

Benedict’s mind whirled with thoughts of flower-girls who were very mischievous, and fantasies, and daydreams. He said, “Of course, you never saw her again.”

Sir Joshua was amused. “I have seen her many times since then, times too many to count. And I have been inside the golden door.”

Benedict stared. His eye then flickered around the great warm and ugly room, at the crush of bric-a-brac, the too-vivid Indian rugs, the rose damask walls, the antlers and mirror over the mantel, the hideous Indian vases filled with gilt rushes and ostrich plumes, the looming furniture and footstools.

The young priest said, cautiously, “And what was inside that golden door, the door through the brick wall which surrounded a dead clay and gravel yard?”

Sir Joshua lit a cigar, after Benedict refused one. A coal appeared at the end, and the old man puffed vigorously. “Ah,” he said, “there is nothing as good as a good smoke.

“What was inside the door? I was not admitted for some time. I went every Sunday after that first one to that place. It was nearly a year before my love came to me again, a year of deep misery and longing and hope. She was there as suddenly as she had been there before, between one instant and the next. This time she called me by my name, and put her small white hand on my arm. Lovingly. And she told me her name, which I have never repeated to anyone else, and which I will not tell even you. Then, she went before me, while I was rooted on the flags, and she opened the golden door and closed it behind her.”

Benedict wildly thought of devils and demons and possession and wanted to bless himself.

“It was at least six months after that before I saw my love again, on that street, near the wall. She did not smile at me that time. She only said, ‘In God’s good time, Joshua. You must be patient. And you must pray.’

“Of course, I had never stopped praying. Sometimes it occurred to me to wonder why my love had ever come to me at all, a young man whose fortune came from soap and sachets, and other vulgar things. There was nothing remarkable about me, nothing exceptionally good or virtuous, nothing unusually pious. I attended Sunday Mass, to be sure, as my parents had taught me. It was a duty. I had never given it much thought, that Most Holy Sacrifice. It was just there, something I had accepted from my childhood. Do we not accept this mysterious and beautiful world, the air we breathe, the glories of the sky, the shine of water? These are all mysteries. We accept the sun and the moon and the stars as commonplaces — these majestic and miraculous things from the Hand of God. We are blind men, and deaf. The smallest field flower is a marvel; a bird is a revelation; a wind is tremendous beyond words. But, we accept them, casually and unthinkingly.”

As I have always done, thought Benedict, with new humility. But his parents had not accepted them so casually. They had greeted each day as a new miracle, fresh and joyous, and his father had written his stammering poems in pathetic celebration of what he had seen even in the shadow cast by a tree. His parents had had their own glimpses of the Beatific Vision. None had ever come to him. He had been a dutiful and hard-working and devoted priest, moving always among misery and trying to bring light into darkness. He had been obedient; he had prayed with all his heart, and had known peace. But — he had accepted everything as earthily as his aunt, Amanda, had accepted it. They were there. There was work to be done. He, Benedict Hughes, had been a male Martha, concerned with busy matters. He had worked so hard that he had not looked at the stars for years, and had never thought of them. He labored in God’s vineyard, but he never caught the fragrance of the grapes. He had suffered meekly, offering up his pain to God for the help of the living and the dead, but he had really never seen the face of God because of the dust of the earth and all the labors he had diligently performed. Yet Christ had paused to admire the lily of the field. He had gone to the Lake of Galilee, so beautiful, so calm, so holy and moving, to deliver the Sermon on the Mount. He had loved the sweet faces of children. He had spoken of the cheeping swallow. He had loved, beyond all imagined love, the charming garden which was the world, the lovely garden He had made. On the night before He had offered up His life for men He had prayed in Gethsemane, the place of olives and cypresses and flowers. His words had been filled with beauty and poetry, for He was Beauty, itself.

No wonder, thought Benedict, that Aunt Amanda had been a little malicious with him and had remarked that he should meet Sir Joshua, who was so like his father! Did she know, herself, how dull he had become, and was she rallying him on it? She had called Sir Joshua ‘my darling old fool’, but there had been a curious glint in her eye when she had said this.

And I have dared to be embarrassed by my father’s poetry! thought Benedict. I, who have no poetry at all. He had prided himself on his realism — and realism had closed his eyes with mud.

He looked at Sir Joshua. The old man may have been only dreaming, but what a dream he had had!

“After the second time I had seen my love,” said Sir Joshua, “I went to Mass every day and received Holy Communion. In some way it seemed to draw me nearer to her, to bring her closer to me, and to give me a mystical sense of joy — a sense I should have known all my life before then if I had not been so engrossed with work and if I had only taken time. When we receive Holy Communion, we not only receive Our Divine Lord, and His love, but we love others more deeply for that indescribable Grace. We are not only joined to Him, but we are joined in love with those He loves also. I understood, for the very first time, what the Sacrifice of the Mass truly is. The spotless Victim is not only offered up for our sins, but He brings joy to us, and light, and the imminence of heaven. If we do not feel that, then we have felt nothing.

“I did not attend Mass after that as a mere Catholic duty, hardly realizing. I attended out of my love for Gotl, my new love for Him, my new understanding. And so I was peaceful and content to wait. In His good time, as the girl had told me —

“But why a man like me, an ordinary young man, ambitious for learning though I was, ambitious to be as my parents had wanted me to be? I was really nothing at all. My parents had poured a new fortune into my hands. I wanted to please them. But after I had seen my love the second time I knew that I needed to please but One — God.

“And I knew that all my great fortune did not truly belong to me. It belonged to God. I held it in trust for Him; I was His steward. He had given it to me to use in His Name, for the relief of the wretched and despairing, for the enlightenment of those who live in darkness, to help those who spread Faith and courage and assistance. I was, to bring it all down to earth, only God’s banker, to pay out the funds which belonged to Him.”

He smoked peacefully for a moment or two. “Do you know, Benedict? When I realized these things, and the realization did not come all at once, my very appearance changed. Oh, nothing radical, of course. I had always had some handsomeness, but it was a coarse and common handsomeness. I am not being vain, but only factual. My features did not actually become other features; they merely lost their lustiness, and lightened and quickened. I have, in my long lifetime, seen that change take place in the faces of rosy-cheeked and hearty young girls when they became nuns. I have seen the change take place in the faces of strong and burly young men when they became priests. Not all nuns, not all priests. But so many that it has been remarked upon by others besides myself. Of course, they are holy people, and I am not. But I share a revelation with them, I who was nothing at all. And that is a great mystery.”

“You look like an Italian Cardinal I met a few years ago,” said Benedict.

“You are very kind, my dear boy.

“But I must tell you the rest. My love came to me more often on that street as I came closer to God. Two years went by, then three. My house was completed. I furnished it. I lived two lives, one concerned only with brief meetings with my love, the other concerned with increasing my fortune, so I could help the Church more and more. Yet, they were a single life; they were like two leaves on a stem.

“Then one Sunday my love said to me, ‘Today, you may come with me through the door.’

“She gave me her hand, and I had never touched it before, for she seemed too precious for my touch. It was warm and soft and firm. I had had vague thoughts that if I touched her my hand would touch nothing but air. But her hand seemed as fleshly as my own. She led me to the door, pressed against its golden gleam, and it fell aside and we stepped within together.

“I don’t know what I had expected to see, my mind half filled with the memory of the clay and gravel and the storehouse. Strange, but I had not really thought much about it, except that I imagined that in stepping through that door she had simply disappeared from my sight. You can understand, then, with what awe I looked at what was beyond that door.

“Imagine, if you can, an exquisite garden, but a garden that had no boundaries, no walls, no real horizon. It was as wide as the earth, and as endless. It was Eden, before the Fall. Grass was there, and uncountable flowers, among them my C’est Egal, and mighty trees I had never seen before, and fountains and arbors and glens and knolls. The place was full of birdsong, and the wind sounded like a thousand soft harps. But more than anything else was the light, the immutable light, not exactly like the sun, but deeper and more intense. And what peace, what sense of joy, what radiance! And there was no mar anywhere, no blight, no spot, no small ugliness, no dying, not even of the smallest or fullest flower. And, there seemed to be no time at all, but only eternity.

“I don’t know how long I stayed. We walked together, serenely, hand in hand. Fragrance was all about us, and sweetness and the tenderest warmth. I have never told you what we had said on the street. I will not tell you what we said to each other in the garden. I will tell you this only: we spoke of our love for each other, but all the rest is my own, except that we also talked of God and His love. There was no lust between us.

“Then time had to take me again, and we went to the door. Before she pushed it she said, ‘We will not meet again until you come here to stay. But remember me, and be patient.’ Was I sorrowful? A little, perhaps. But how long is a man’s life? A few years, a few years of delusion, of waiting. It is a waiting full of peace and faith and joy. I knew, even when I was alone on the street again, that my love was in the garden, waiting for me, and that the waiting would not last forever. But when I go again into that garden, there will be the end of waiting, and only eternity will be there.”