by Evelyn Waugh
It took many days. The roof threatened to subside and they worked like miners propping it as they advanced. Basketful by basketful the rubbish was carried away, sifted and tipped. Helena sat on her little throne watching and praying. Two days before the end it became evident that there was nowhere now where the large timbers she sought could be concealed. But she showed no dismay. When at length the whole chamber was clear and swept and quite empty, Helena sat on, praying.
The nun said: “Don’t you think, ma’am, that perhaps we ought to go home?”
“Why? We have not found what we came for.”
“But, ma’am, it isn’t here. You can’t always trust dreams, you know. Some are sent by the devil.”
“My dream was all right.”
The clerk-of-the-works came to ask permission to dismiss the workmen. “It is already quite dark outside,” he said.
“That makes no difference down here.”
“But, ma’am, what is there for them to do?”
“Search.”
The old lady rose from her chair and attended by the linkman made a slow inspection of the vault. At the south-west corner she tapped with her cane on the wall.
“Look at this,” she said. “There’s been a door here and someone botched it up in a hurry.”
The clerk-of-the-works examined the corner. “Yes,” he said, “there certainly seems to have been something here.”
“I think I can guess whose work this was. After the stone had been rolled back from the tomb the High Priests made sure nothing else was going to escape. In my country we call that locking the stable door after the horse has been stolen.”
“Yes, ma’am. That is a most interesting speculation. Perhaps tomorrow…”
“I don’t leave this cellar until I’ve seen what’s the other side of that wall,” said Helena. “Call for volunteers. We only want a small gang on this job. And see that they’re all Christians. We don’t want any heathen around at a time like this.”
So Helena stayed in prayer while the wall was broken down. It was a simple task and when it fell the stones went rolling away down into the darkness out of sight. This passage was steep and quite clear of rubbish. The men stood back in hesitation.
“Go on,” said Helena. “You’ll find a cross in there. Perhaps more than one. Bring them up carefully. I will stay here. I’ve a few more prayers to say.”
The little torch-lit party disappeared. Helena heard their cautious stumbling steps descend, grow faint and presently return.
The leading torch-bearer appeared at the entrance, after him two men carrying a baulk of timber.
“There are several more bits, ma’am.”
“Bring them all up. Lay them here. The Bishop shall see them in the morning. Give these men a lot of money,” she said rather dizzily to the clerk-of-the-works. “Set a guard on the wood.” And taking the nun by the hand seeking support and guidance she said: “So it is finished.”
Next day, the 3rd of May, Bishop Macarius and Helena examined her finds. They were laid out on the pavement of the new basilica and comprised in order of importance the members of three crosses, detached but well preserved, a notice board split into two, four nails and a triangular block of wood. Half the notice board which bore, ill-scrawled in the three great tongues of the ancient world, the supreme title, was still attached to one of the taller posts.
“So we can be quite certain about that one,” said Helena briskly.
Now that her quest was at last accomplished all sentiment was dead and she was as practical about arrangements as though some new furniture had been delivered at her house.
“The nails go with the Holy Cross,” she decided, “and that I take to be a footrest.”
“Very likely, ma’am.”
“Now for the cross-beams. We must see which belongs to which. Get one of the carpenters. He ought to be able to help.”
But the carpenter said there was no way of knowing. It was a rough job anyway. Nothing fitted. “God alone knows,” he said, “which piece is supposed to fit where.”
“Then God will show us,” said Helena.
“Your highness, ma’am, dear lady,” said Macarius. “You really must not expect miracles every day.”
“Why not?” said Helena. “There wouldn’t be any point in God giving us the cross if he didn’t want us to recognize it. Find someone ill, very ill,” she said, “and try the cross-beams on him.”
It worked, as everything had worked for Helena on this remarkable tour. The beams were carried up to the room of a dying woman and laid one at a time beside her on the bed. Two made no difference. The third effected a complete recovery.
“So now we know,” said Helena.
Then she set about the division of the property. Half was for Macarius; half for the rest of the world. She took the cross-beam of the True Cross and left him the upright. She gave him the part of the Title which was inscribed in Hebrew. All four nails she set aside for Constantine. The triangular block of wood was of more doubtful value. It might be the suppedaneum if a suppedaneum had been used. On the other hand it might just be a block of wood. But she added it to her baggage and gave boundless pleasure later by presenting it to the uncritical Cypriots. The other crosses proved to be undistinguishable. One belonged to the repentant thief, one to his blaspheming fellow; but which was which? Patients less gravely afflicted, people even with minor nervous troubles, were successively paraded, touched with the wood and sent away quite unrelieved. Only a Briton could have solved the problem as Helena did. Calling to the carpenter she ordered him to split all four pieces and to construct a composite pair of crosses each of which should comprise a half of each original. When this was done she gave one to Macarius and retained the other.
Meanwhile the beacons blazed news of the discovery to the capital and post-horsemen carried it throughout Christendom. Te Deums were sung in the imperial basilicas. No one who watched that day, while the Empress calmly divided her treasure, could have discerned her joy. Her work was finished. She had done what only the saints succeed in doing; what indeed constitutes their patent of sanctity. She had completely conformed to the will of God. Others a few years back had done their duty gloriously in the arena. Hers was a gentler task, merely to gather wood. That was the particular, humble purpose for which she had been created. And now it was done. So with her precious cargo she sailed joyfully away.
She sailed away, out of authentic history. Fishermen in the Adriatic say that she came there and when her galley was threatened with wreck, calmed the raging sea by throwing into it one of the sacred nails, since when those waters have always been kind to sailors.
The fishermen of Cyprus say that she performed this act off their own dangerous shore in the gulf of Satalia. She then landed, all Cypriots agree, and found the island dying of a drought that had lasted seventeen years. Since Catherine was martyred it had not rained in Cyprus. The ground was all baked and bare; the enterprising had left and found new homes abroad. All who were left of that once teeming population had grown brutal with hardship and murdered travelers who were cast up there on the supposition that they were Jews. Demons haunted the island and possessed it during the hours of darkness so that it was impossible to bury the dead who, as soon as they were decently covered, were disinterred and thrown back putrefying on their old doorsteps.
For these people Helena set up one of the composite crosses of the thieves and at once the drought broke so that she was obliged to build a bridge, which may still be seen, in order to pass what, when she arrived, had been a dry gulley. She sawed up the suppedaneum, if suppedaneum it was, and made two little crosses of it, which she gave the islanders and at once the demons left, gyring up in a noisy flock until they dwindled to the size of starlings and were lost in the upper air. Then she summoned a new population from the neighboring islands, mainly from Telos, and settled them on the now fertile land. The cross which she left was put up in a church where it hovered, without support, for centuries, till the infidels took t
he island. She continued her voyage calling none knows where, for the people of those abandoned shores have taken her into their hearts and made her one with all great and beneficent ladies of myth and memory. In their poetry her cargo multiplied and was enriched with all the spoils of fairy-land.
At length she came to Constantine whom she found in his new city. Vast gimcrack ministries were rising about him with reckless speed. At the moment he was chiefly occupied with a monument to himself, a porphyry column of unprecedented height on a huge white pedestal. On the summit of this he purposed to erect the colossal bronze Apollo of Pheidias which he had lately imported from Athens. The holy nails arrived opportunely for Constantine had decapitated the great statue, poised a portrait of himself on the neck and was even at that moment supervising the construction of the halo which was to surmount the whole. One of the nails was set as a ray shining from the imperial cranium.
Constantine had lately become interested in relics. He had brought the Palladium itself from Rome and embedded it in the foundations of his monument.
“I’m glad you are starting with a part of Troy,” said Helena. “Your grandfather Coel will be pleased.”
“I’ve got plenty of other things just as important,” said Constantine. “Such a bit of luck. Just when I was laying the foundation-stone a dealer turned up from Palestine with a first-class collection. Really important stuff. I bought the lot, of course. It included Noah’s adze—the very one he used on the ark—and Mary Magdalen’s alabaster box and all sorts of things.”
“And what have you done with them, my son?”
“They’re all there, in the base of the column. Nothing will ever shake it now.”
He was delighted with his nails. The second he stuck in his hat. The third he put to a still more idiosyncratic use. He sent it to the smith and had it forged into a snaffle for his horse. When Helena heard this she was at first a little taken aback. But presently she smiled, giggled and was heard to utter the single, enigmatic word “stabularia.”
Her strength was failing fast, and soon it became necessary for her to make her will. She disposed of everything in great detail, sending the Holy Coat to her old home at Trèves, a great piece of the Cross and the Title to her new church in the Sessorian Palace, dividing and dispersing her treasury so that no friends were forgotten. The bodies of the Magi, which had somewhere somehow got into her luggage, she is thought to have sent to Cologne. At last she had emptied the whole cornucopia and there was nothing for her to leave except her own weary body. This Constantine wanted for his Church of the Apostles where the cenotaphs stood in a great circle, all empty and without worship. But Helena had decided where she would lie and her last act was to bequeath herself to Rome. She died on the 18th of August, 328. They carried her body to Rome and laid it in the sarcophagus Constantine had designed for himself, in the mausoleum he had built three miles out of the City on the road to Palestrina. There she lay undisturbed until the reign of Pope Urban VIII, when her bones were moved to the church of Ara Coeli where they lie today. Within a few yards of her, on the steps of that church, Edward Gibbon later sat and premeditated his history.
Helena’s many prayers received unequal answers. Constantine was at long last baptized and died in the expectation of an immediate, triumphal entry to Paradise. Britain for a time became Christian, and 136 parish churches, a great part of them in the old lands of the Trinovantes, were dedicated to Helena. The Holy Places have been alternately honored and desecrated, lost and won, bought and bargained for, throughout the centuries.
But the wood has endured. In splinters and shavings, gorgeously encased, it has traveled the world over and found a joyous welcome among every race.
For it states a fact.
Hounds are checked, hunting wild. A horn calls clear through the covert. Helena casts them back on the scent.
Above all the babble of her age and ours, she makes one blunt assertion. And there alone lies Hope.
Reading Group Guide
Helena
A novel by
EVELYN WAUGH
A conversation with Evelyn Waugh
In 1960, Evelyn Waugh was interviewed by John Freeman for the BBC series Face to Face. Following is an edited portion of their conversation, focusing on Helena and Waugh’s religious beliefs.
Were you rather strictly brought up in the Edwardian manner?
No. No, I had an absolutely lyrically happy childhood—I think that’s why I have so few memories of it. Until I went to prep school I was taught by my mother, and very well taught, I think, in the ordinary rudiments. My father was usually out of the house most of the day, and I remember him largely as appearing about bedtime, you know.
Your parents, of course, were not Catholics.
Oh, no.
Did your mother give you religious instruction?
Yes.
Of a simple Anglican—
Yes.
—broad-church view of the world?
They were both pious, churchgoing Anglicans.
Did you accept that, when you first remember?
Oh, yes, rather.
And, continuously, have you taken a religious view of the world?
Certainly up to the age of about sixteen.
Were you a conformist at school?
Do you mean, did I obey the rules?
Did you obey the rules and generally toe the line of school conventions?
No, I wouldn’t say that, but you see we were rather strictly brought up and severely punished. In fact, with all this talk now whether beating is a deterrent, the one thing which one could do at school which one wasn’t beaten for was Corps offenses. They could only impose military punishments which were very negligible, like Defaulters Parade, so that all our high spirits used to be concentrated on making the Corps ridiculous. But we had to take jolly good care we didn’t play the fool in school or in chapel or in the football field or anywhere else.
Talking about chapel, apart from the physical appearance of Lancing Chapel, was the Anglican influence extremely strong in those days?
Yes.
And did you at that time have any doubts about your religious faith?
You’ll think it absurd—my doubts began through reading Pope’s Essay on Man at the age of about sixteen, although as you know he was a Catholic.
What form did they take?
Well, it was the first time I began to speculate at all metaphysically; through the notes on Pope’s Essay on Man I was turned onto Leibniz and so on, through that the general eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and not in any sophisticated way, but I began then to question the truths of religion.
And did you in fact lose such faith as you had?
Yes, indeed. I remember I was sacristan. And I and a fellow sacristan who is now a member of your party, quite prominent, were folding up some sort of surplice or vestment or something, and I revealed to him in secret while I was doing this the fact that there was no God. And he was much shocked and he said, “If you think that you’ve got no business to touch this chasuble”—or whatever it was—“you must go and tell the chaplain.” And so I went off and told the chaplain that there wasn’t a God, and he wasn’t the least impressed and didn’t really, I think, do anything much to convince me that there was. He was a very nice man.
Now, how old were you when you were converted to the Catholic faith?
I think thirty, or just rising thirty.
Had you studied for a long time before your conversion?
I was under instruction, literally under instruction, for about three months, but of course I’d interested myself in it before, reading books independently and so on.
I am quite interested to ask you, because it isn’t clear from the book, whether you were almost a Catholic at the time you were writing Vile Bodies?
Not at all. No, no, no, I was as near an atheist as one could be, I think, at that time.
Is there—I hope not an impertinent question—is there any connection in your own mind betwee
n Father Rothschild in that book and Father D’Arcy, who afterwards received you into the church?
No, no, no, no, it’s pure literary convention. I mean, the sly Jesuit has been going on in English novels for two hundred years.
Nevertheless, what is a little unexpected perhaps in Vile Bodies is what appears to be your obvious sympathy with the sly Jesuit.
I’m surprised you’d find that; I hadn’t any such feeling at the time.
Did you have a sudden revelation which led you to this conversion, or was it a very gradual process?
Well, I think I had always—I say “always,” from the age of sixteen or so—realized that Catholicism was Christianity, that all other forms of Christianity were only good in so far as they chipped little bits off the main block. It was a conversion to Christianity rather than a conversion to Catholicism as such.
Well, this is the point I wanted to bring out. This came after a period when you had lost your faith and you regained it in the Catholic Church. It wasn’t that you had been continuously a devout and practicing Christian who moved over to Rome.
Oh, no, I think from the age of sixteen to the age of twenty-eight I didn’t go to church at all, as far as I remember.
Since you were received into the Catholic Church, have you ever seriously doubted?
No.
Never been through a period when things have been difficult for you? Looking back now—
Oh, it’s very difficult. I mean, exasperation at the extraordinary behavior of individual—
Ah, yes, but you’ve never had any at the central canon of your faith?
No.
Looking back now, what would you say is the greatest gift in terms of tranquility or peace of mind or whatever, that your faith has given you?
Well, it isn’t a sort of lucky dip that you get something out of, you know. It’s hard without using pietistic language to explain, but it’s simply admitting the existence of God or dependence on God, your contact with God, the fact that everything in the world that’s good depends on Him. It isn’t a sort of added amenity of the Welfare State that you say, “Well, to all this, having made a good income, now I’ll have a little icing on top of religion.” It’s the essence of the whole thing.