Tai Haruru went outside to wait until he should have finished his office, and sat down on the bench beside the broken door. The blues of the landscape had deepened and darkened since he had been within, but they were still translucent. The veil of evening had not so much hidden the exquisite details of the scene about him as gathered them up and brought them nearer. He felt as though he could have stretched out his hand and picked them up, the woods and the village and the harvest fields, like toys that had been brought for a child to play with at the evening hour.
A step sounded beside him, and he looked up into the face that he had as yet scarcely seen, a rugged, weather-beaten face where the bright, penetrating eyes reminded him at first sight uneasily of Samuel, but where the wide, humorous mouth and the strong, ugly jaw immediately set his unease to rest. For this was not a man likely to be martyred. So serious a thing as martyrdom was not likely to keep company with anything so comical as that wide gargoyle grin, and the fiercest of tuas would think twice about assaulting a man with a jaw like a steel trap and—Tai Haruru’s eyes traveled over the fantastic figure beside him—a fist like a sledge hammer, a breadth of shoulder and chest whose pugilistic strength not even the cassock could disguise, and long, lean flanks like a thoroughbred horse. The man was old, but age had had about as much effect upon his strength as the beating of the waves had had upon the walls of this stronghold at the world’s end out of which he had made his church.
“D’ye know anythin’ about carpenterin’?” asked the old man, indicating the broken door, and speaking as casually as though this sudden appearance of Tai Haruru upon the threshold of his church was expected by him.
“All there is to know,” said Tai Haruru. “I’ve been a carpenter in my day.”
“That’s fortunate, now,” said the old man. “My great fists come in handy for fellin’ trees, but they’re no use for delicate fool jobs like this. There were three of us here once. Brother Jonathan was handy with an awl, an’ Brother Elias could mend a broken leg and have it good as new next mornin’, but the body of your humble servant is a clumsy ass an’ my brothers in religion rightly named it Balaam; though Benedict was the name I took when I shaved my crown and gave my soul to God and the blasted Maoris.”
He had sat down beside Tai Haruru and was garrulous, as though it were long since he had spoken to his own kind.
“How long ago was it that Brother Jonathan and Brother Elias died?” asked Tai Haruru.
Brother Balaam hesitated. “Out here in the wilds a man loses track of time,” he said at last.
Years ago, decided Tai Haruru. “Murdered?”
Brother Balaam nodded. “Buried ’em under the flagstone of the church,” he said.
“You’re mad, you missionaries,” ejaculated Tai Haruru angrily. “What good do you think you do, crawling out to the extremities of all the different world’s ends and dying there like lizards spiked on sticks?”
Brother Balaam jabbed his thumb over his shoulder at the church behind him. “Ye’ll get no civilization worth havin’ in a new country unless ye lay down a few martyrs’ bones for a foundation,” he said. “They generate. Slow but sure.”
“English Evangelical and Irish Catholic, you’re all as crazy as each other,” growled Tai Haruru. And then, almost before he knew what he was doing, he had told Brother Balaam the whole story of Samuel.
Brother Balaam nodded sympathetically when the tale was done but made no immediate comment upon it other than the signing of the cross upon his immense chest. But a few moments later he said, “Ah, well, he’s bought ye. An’ now ye can stay here an’ lend me a hand.”
Tai Haruru opened his mouth to protest. Back again, yoked in harness with a crazy missionary? His protestations were so violent, they choked utterance, and Brother Balaam mistook his strangled silence for consent
“I’ll be off,” he said, heaving his great hulk up from the bench. “Ye’ll need a decent meal an’ a bed prepared. Ye can follow me on home in half an hour.”
His tall figure went striding off down the causeway, and Tai Haruru was left alone. Dumbfounded, he took out his old pipe, carved like a bird in flight, and filled it. Well, why not? A man could not remain in flight forever; permanent independence was apparently impossible of attainment; and this was as good a resting place, and the old priest probably as good company, as any other. . . . And he was getting old. . . . And there was that vow, “I believe in the Lord God Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.” A vow, by definition, demands fulfillment.
His tense figure relaxed suddenly, as the haze of the tobacco smoke added its own peculiar tincture of blue to the symphony of color that sang in silence all about him. The sea murmured against the rocks below, and that ghost of a wind that follows the sun around the world coaxed the ghost of a chime from the belfry over his head. “Home,” the old man had said. Certainly he felt astonishingly at home, more at home than he had ever felt since his boyhood in Cumberland. It was amazingly peaceful. He was half asleep and a trivial incident of his childhood, forgotten for a lifetime, came back to his dreaming mind. He had played truant from his nurse and gone off on a journey of exploration up into the fells behind his home. It had been the first time that he had gone exploring on his own, and his short, fat legs had ached as he climbed all alone into the great hills. But he had not been afraid. He had not even been afraid when he found himself completely lost in a wilderness of rock that looked like the end of the world, with no sound at all but the falling of a stream from the heights above, and nothing to be seen but the rocks, and the dusk falling about him in veils of lilac and grey and blue. He had just sat down on a rock and waited, and listened to that murmur of the water and the faraway sound of sheep bells up in the hills, and soaked up the lovely blueness of the dusk into himself . . . and waited . . . and presently a shepherd had come and taken him home. . . . Perhaps it was of that incident that he had been reminded when Samuel had lifted the kid to his shoulder.
The two dusks merged into one. The stream murmuring down an English hillside and the waves of the Pacific Ocean murmuring against the rocks of New Zealand spoke the same language. The music of the sheep bells and of the belfry was not distinguishable. The end was present in the beginning and the beginning in the end, so that there was neither beginning nor end but only the perfection of the whole. Life had come round full circle, and the aging man that he was admitted it not with weariness but with a welling up within him of refreshment that was like the welling up of youth.
“Then said I, Ah, Lord God! behold, I cannot speak, for I am a child.”
Chapter VI
1
The packet from St. Malo to the Islands had set sail in a stiff southerly breeze and was speeding like a gull before the wind. All the passengers except one were groaning down below, and that one had the deck to herself and was glad of it. A kindly sailor had found her a sheltered corner to sit in, but she was forever coming out of it again that she might feel the spindrift on her face and smell the salt and taste it on her lips, and feel the wind blowing right through her cloak and habit to her body, and the lift of the ship as she bounded forward. The sailors eyed her with amazement. In their experience nuns were usually timid creatures, unused to travel, who sat in corners and told their beads with frightened eyes, and shrank from passing the time of day with anything in trousers. But there was nothing timid about this one. She tramped the deck as though she were a man, smiling at them with easy friendliness, and when she spoke to them it was as one sailor to another with knowledge and experience of ships and the sea. Yet they took no liberties with her. Apart from the respect they felt for her habit, the shining ecstacy of her pale face awed them. They had not hitherto beheld quite such delight as this.
For how many years, wondered Marguerite, coming to a standstill at last in the bow of the ship, for how many years had she been exiled from the sea? For so many that it was surely a waste of time to count them. She would not count t
hem, she would look forward, not back. She was going home. It was not given to many of the knights of God after long wandering to turn homeward in this way. . . . The ship’s bell rang out like a call to prayer; Marguerite crossed herself and prayed for all those who were traveling now not homeward but out into the wilderness to plant the Cross of Christ in desert places. Some, now, were in danger. And many were afraid. Before the blackness of her closed eyes she saw a forest path and a man there who was turning back in terror from the appointed task. The scene was very dark, but she could see the hesitant figure and the turning back, and with all her heart and soul she prayed for him that he might turn again.
When she lifted her head and opened her eyes again, it was to see something that transformed her instantly from praying nun to excited child. A dim, grey shape was rising up out of the sea. She gave an exclamation of joy and leaned forward over the bulwarks, shading her eyes with her hand. A couple of seamen also turned to look, almost taken aback by what they saw, so swiftly had the ship sped before the wind.
The nun had been the first to sight the Island.
2
Her first few days at the convent passed bewilderingly for the new Reverend Mother. There was so much to see and do, so much to think of. It was not until the evening of her first Sunday, when she went to her study at the day’s end and shut the door behind her, that for the first time she felt alone and at peace.
She stood in the center of the room, her hands linked behind her back, and gazed about her, still incredulous and amazed. For it was all exactly the same. There was the desk, the two old oak chairs, the stool, the bookshelf, the strip of matting, the statue of the Virgin in the niche in the wall, and the prie-dieu with the crucifix of ebony and ivory hanging over it. It was a cold night, and a fire of vraic was burning in the grate, lighting the white-washed walls with a rosy glow, like the inside of a sea shell. Beyond the two narrow windows, set in the huge thickness of the wall, the Atlantic was restless in the darkness, lit only by the beam of light that shone from the west window of the tower. She could hear the booming of the waves on the rocks of La Baie des Petits Fleurs far below, the sound of the wind, the crying of the gulls. The years rolled back full circle and she was a child again, sitting on that stool before the fire with Mère Madeleine combing the tangles out of her hair. In that high-backed chair sat Reverend Mother with her holy face, erect, severe, chaste, and tempered like a sword. In this room, she thought, the seed of faith had been sown in her soul. She had been a happy child, but she was a happier woman. The child had been happy like a bird singing, trilling the first phrase of a symphony over and over, questioning to what end, subconsciously holding back from the consequences of that first utterance. But the woman had lived through the consequences and come out on the other side. The symphony had reached the last movement. The question had become a statement that was singing its way to the triumphant finale with depth and power.
She knelt at the prie-dieu and prayed for those without faith. She saw the faithless as a man of stark courage, fighting the evil things without hope of victory, worshipping the lovely things without hope of their endurance, a man whose aristocracy of soul was a thing both to marvel at and weep over, because he knew not whose was the imprint that was being set upon him and yet suffered the chiseling of the image in silence, scorning the vulgarity of complaint. Was he a grander figure without faith, she wondered? Was the peace of his stoicism a finer thing than the serenity of her own happy certainty? The doubt passed so quickly that it scarcely even halted her prayer. Between the marble image with its cold acceptance of finality and the living, breathing, growing flesh and blood, there can be no comparison. She prayed on and on as the night deepened and the flames of the vraic fire sank low. She was conscious at last of the chill of this ancient place gripping her body. She got up, shivering, and put fresh fuel on the fire. The winters could be very cold in these old, grey strongholds of the faith. As the flames leaped up again, she looked lovingly about her firelit room and thought how many of these strongholds there were girdling the earth, and she had a quick warm sense of comradeship with all the other fighters who lived within them and who cried out at the world’s end, as she did, “I believe.”
BOOK IV: The Country of the Green Pastures
Part 1 Arcadia
Right against the Eastern gate,
Where the great Sun begins his state,
Rob’d in flames, and Amber light,
The clouds in thousand Liveries dight.
Russet Lawns and Fallows Gray,
Where the nibbling flocks do stray,
Mountains on whose barren breast
The labouring clouds do often rest:
Meadows trim with Daisies pide,
Shallow Brooks and Rivers wide.
JOHN MILTON.
Chapter I
1
A cock crowed, and William woke up. It was still dark, but he was a farmer now and as punctual to the crowing of the cock as the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Not that there was anything ghostlike about William at this period. In the last ten years he had put on weight to such an extent that the price of a new suit was nearly doubled and his bill for shoe leather would have kept him awake at night had he not been so rich a man.
But these were minor trials. The real difficulty for a man of great weight is how to come and go unobserved by his wife when his footfall is one that can be heard half a mile off. William considered himself nowadays a happily married man, but nevertheless there were occasions when he still wished to come or go unobserved by Marianne, and this was one of them. He sat slowly up in bed, yawning, while he wondered how to get out of bed and out of the room without waking her. Everything was against him; his breathing, slightly stertorous nowadays when he moved; the exquisite brocade curtains of the huge fourposter, whose brass rings rattled when they were pulled aside; the little flight of steps leading from fourposter to floor, which creaked when stepped on; the door, which squeaked; and his wife’s preternaturally sharp hearing, which functioned even when she was asleep. Nevertheless the problems must be surmounted or his early morning ride up into the mountains to watch the sunrise with Véronique, an expedition planned to greet the first official day of spring, would be discovered by Marianne and she would be jealous. . . . Poor Marianne. Poor girl. . . . She did not nowadays visit her jealousy of her husband’s and child’s great love for each other upon their heads in temper, as she had done ten years ago; she’d progressed beyond that; but her hurt silences were just as hard to put up with, and William and Véronique avoided them at all costs short of abandoning their mountain rides together. These rides could not be given up, for they were the modern equivalent of the old adventures in Green Dolphin Country. Up in the Arcadia of the mountains they escaped into some timeless place not of this world as completely as they had once done in that earlier country, and they knew instinctively that for some reason or other it was necessary for the happiness of both of them that they should keep their footing there.
Holding his breath, William edged himself little by little toward his side of the bed, pulled aside the curtain cautiously, and lowered himself down the steps to the floor. Here he stood upright, listening intently. But there was no sound from the bed. The curtain rings had refrained from rattling, and the steps had not creaked. He grinned. He had been in luck. He had fancied there had been an extra note of triumph in the crowing of the cock.
Reassured, he stole rather too quickly across the floor in the darkness and stubbed his bare toe against the corner of the chest of drawers. “Damn!” The exclamation was out before he could stop himself, and a sharp voice spoke suddenly from within the curtains of the bed.
“William!”
“Yes, dear,” said William miserably, shivering in the cold draft that blew under the door.
“What on earth are you doing, getting up at this hour? It’s the middle of the night.”
“No, dear,” said Will
iam gently. “Nearly morning now. I’m anxious about that cow that calved yesterday. She felt bad last night.”
“My dear William, Nat understands far more about the cows than you do, and he’s sitting up with her. And James and Mack will be about soon. When one considers the number of responsible men we employ on this farm, it is merely foolish for you to be perpetually poking your nose into petty details in the way you do. If you were to pay as much attention to the fluctuations of market prices as you do to the fluctuations of the animals’ emotions, we should be a great deal more prosperous than we are.”
“You’re a marvel, Marianne,” said William admiringly. “The minute you wake up you’re as voluble and alert as though it were three o’clock in the afternoon.”
“And a good thing, too,” retorted Marianne. “A poor thing it would be if both of us wandered about all day in a half dream. Come back to bed, William.”
“No, dear,” said William, “I’m going to see about that cow,” and he opened the door and went out. He had left his clothes the night before in the kitchen downstairs, not in the dressing room that led out of their bedroom, so that he could dress without disturbing Marianne. As he lit the candles in the kitchen, and struggled into his clothes, he said to himself suddenly that he was sick of deceiving Marianne, even though it was for her own peace of mind. Their marriage, becoming progressively satisfactory as they accommodated themselves to each other’s failings and increasingly admired each other’s virtues, was surely now worthy of the truth. . . . But all his lies were the offspring of that first great, whopping falsehood that had been the foundation stone of their married life, and he would never be able to tell Marianne the truth about that. . . . Poor girl, it would kill her.
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