Unknown (90 page)

“I hope Blimp will breathe her a bit before the end of the field,” whispered the Marquis to his daughter.

“Hush, Father!” rejoined the girl. “Do be quiet. The Passion Play is beginning.”

The girl was right. Not oblivious of the dramatic effect of allowing their sacred interlude to follow quickly on the heels of Geard's last words John Crow had taken upon himself—oblivious as to whether the Dubliners or Ned Athling or Paul Capporelli were ready—to give the sign to begin. And the beginning of their elaborately rehearsed “Mystery” was really a very impressive spectacle.

The Dye-Works strikers, however, saw nothing of it. Turning their backs to it altogether and this time followed instead of led, by the banner denouncing “Mummery,” they made their way hurriedly down the hill towards the big refreshment tent. Elphin and Steve—this latter delighted to play so prominent a part in the affairs of Mr. Geard—ran on in front of them to warn the Cantles of their arrival.

It was at this point that all eyes were concentrated upon the stage. And there entered upon it first a legion of Roman soldiers marching behind their centurion, then—issuing forth from the other pavilion—the chief priests and rulers of the Jewish people, and finally, approaching by himself, attended only by Momus, the comic Roman soldier who served as his bodyguard, the Procurator of Jerusalem, Pontius Pilate. The part of Pontius Pilate was played by the assistant schoolmaster in St. Benignus' church-school, a man who had been chosen for this part by the eloquent Dr. Sodbury largely on account of his imposing countenance, a countenance which in its juristic dignity might certainly have belonged to the supercilious Procurator of Judea. The Roman legionaries grouped themselves around Pilate who now, accompanied by his bodyguard Momus, ascended the wooden rostrum or judgment-seat.

“It's like a magnified Punch-andjudy show,” whispered Will Zoyland to Nell; nor were the Bastard's words without point, for in their mutual elevation above the soldiers, and above the group of Jewish Elders who stood apart from the soldiers, the liss figures of Pilate and Momus appeared to be isolated in a a tesque Punchinello-like proscenium.

IN ell made no reply. She was wondering what Sam was feeling at this moment while Momus-Capporelli was out-jesting Pontius Pilate in that ridiculous puppet-box, and players and audience alike were awaiting breathlessly the appearance of the condemned God-Man. If she had known what Sam was feeling her heart would have been less heavy than it was. For such was the contradictoriness of human emotion that the soldiers' Roman swords and the elders' turbans made the whole thing so fantastic and unreal to him that in his bitter coldness and deep melancholy his heart turned wistfully to Nell and her child. His father sitting by his side felt the same sort of distaste; only with him it was more positive. Both these big, bare-headed men —for though the sun was smiting them with that mid-afternoon heat which seems hotter than noon, they held their hats in their hands—had something in them that felt deep aversion for this Passion Play. Mat hated it as a silly, frivolous blasphemy. Sam hated it as a lifeless and ghastly parody upon the death of his God.

The two Dekkers had less aesthetic feeling in them for performances of this sort than Mr. Whitcombe of Queen's Camel or Mrs. Legge of Camelot! Such passionate naturalists were they that a profound realism, earthy, simple, almost barbarous, reduced any theatrical show to something flimsy and childish. They neither of them could go one psychic inch in sympathy for such things. What to the father ( seemed gross profanity, to the son seemed pure unqualified trifling. They neither of them could catch any stage-illusion in the whole thing. What they now bc» held was simply “old Sodbury's schoolmaster dressed up as a Roman Governor, and that wretched skipping Frenchman, bowing and scraping at his side, and making sacrilegious jokes.”

And when escorted by more Roman soldiers and with his hands tied behind him and an enormous crown of thorns upon his head, Mr. Evans was led slowly across the grass between the long-robed Jews and the heathen legionaries, Sam turned round lo his father with the words—“This is awful, isn't it, Dad? It's ”Ls than I expected. How can they all sit quiet and put up fieln such disgusting tomfoolery?"

But his father was watching a butterfly. “I believe that's a Clifton Blue,” he whispered. “Do look at that little fellow, son; there! over by that thistle!”

But the effect of the appearance of this Evans-Christ upon Sam's mind was to assail with one swift, terrible doubt the ascetic ideal of his whole present life and give him a craving for Nell that made his bones melt within him. That she should be sitting near him, now, within a few yards of him, so that by moving his head he could catch a glimpse of her, gave him a feeling of her identity that was as sharp as he had ever known. A new sensation began to lift up its rattlesnake head within him, a torture that he had hitherto been spared, by reason of his dull imagination and that “dead nerve” within him. But they were upon him now, those devil's pincers! They had got him now, by the umbilical cord in the pit of his stomach! Oh, to think that Will Zoyland could hear that voice day by day, and could see her as he had never seen her! For what was one blind, rapturous night of passion compared with what he had? “I have never,” Sam thought as he watched the Christ-Evans standing before Pilate, “seen her bare shoulders”

It often happens that when real love touches with its quivering dart the covetousness of desire, some aspect of a girl's body, not usually associated with amorous dalliance at all, hits her lover's consciousness with a pathos that is well-nigh intolerable. Thus although he had given her a child, there came over him, as the Trial of Christ began before his eyes, a craving that made him heartsick just once to touch her bare shoulders, just to trace with his fingertips the line of her bare spine. Though he had lain with her he had never thought of doing just that. Why hadn't he? Oh, why hadn't he?

The scene that meant so little to the two Dekkers and so little to the two Zoylands appeared to be of absorbing interest to Father Paleologue. Mary was thrilled at his quick, intense, piercing comments. Every movement that Mr. Evans made roused his keenest attention. Every word he caught—though he could catch but few—from Christ or Pilate or Momus or the Chief Priest, became a text for a rapid volley of hurried criticisms. Even Miss Drew grew calm under the compelling intellectual charm of the Byzantine priest and began to feel that there could not be anything very blasphemous going on.

“Has he yet said, 'What is Truth?' ” enquired Mary with shining eyes. She felt infinitely relieved at the triumphant success that John's labours seemed to be winning. She put everything down to John. Athling, the Dublin people, Capporelli, were completely discounted in her mind. They might have invented a few details, a few fancies; it was John's imagination that gave the whole thing that strange and curious unity which Father Paleo-logue was now talking about to Miss Drew.

“No, lady, not yet,” answered Father Paleologue, "but they soon will be. There! Didn't you catch tliatV*

And there came to her ears upon the warm June air, scented with honeysuckle, as the girl intently listened, those words that seem to come from some mysterious level of life where the laws of cause-and-effect have no place—"To this end was I born, and for tlus cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.9

“It's extraordinary,” whispered Father Paleologue, passionately, while a light gust of wind lifted Pilate's famous retort and carried it over the hill, “how that man acts I He can't be a local shop-man. I've seen every Passion Play in Europe worth seeing for the last twenty years. Oberammergau of course isn't the only one. And I tell you I've never seen anything so convincing as this man. And he's modern too. He's got that queer modern touch that's so hard to define. He's a strong, ugly Christ too; and that's a vast improvement. Do you remember Rembrandt's Christ in 'The Healing of the Sick?' I forget where it is. Rembrandt's idea of Him was just like this. And it's Biblical too!” And the Byzantine father quoted in an intense whisper in Mary's ears, “He hath no comeliness . . . that men should desire Him.”

Athling and the two Dubliners, working together, had managed this world-historical scene in such a way as to mingle Our Lord's trial before Pilate with His trial before the High Priest, and by dispensing with the Scourging and with the Stations of the Cross had made the Crucifixion to follow immediately upon this synthesised condemnation.

“What is that funny man doing. Robert, in the Judge's pulpit?” enquired Mr. Stilly's father of Mr. Stilly. Mr. Stilly hurriedly consulted the printed booklet which John had caused to be placed upon all the seats.

“It says he's Momus, Dad—'a Roman Soldier attending on the Procurator,5 who plays a part like that of the Fool in Shakes-pear's 'Lear.'”

Mr. Stilly's mother now lifted up her high-pitched, querulous voice, the voice of a woman who “didn't like servants messing about in her kitchen.” “But isn't this the simple Gospel story, Robert? We don't read of Mbmus, do we? Or is he in the Apocrypha?”

“Maria! how can you be so stupid!” whispered Mr. Stilly's father. “There's no New Testament Apocrypha.” Mr. Stilly vaguely recalled having once, in Old Jones' shop, been shown something extremely like a New Testament Apocrypha, but out of piety he kept this recollection sealed up in his heart.

“He's talking now, Robert. He's saying such funny things . . . only I can't hear them quite,” said old Mrs. Stilly.

Momus-Capporelli had scampered off now from the Procurator's side and was passing from group to group of the Roman soldiers, among whom he was venting monstrous Aristophanic jests. Some of these jests were improvised in a fantastical mixture of French argot and what might be called dog-English and they were accompanied by gestures of a kind more appropriate to the sawdust floor of a Montparnasse dancing-hall than to the greensward of Glastonbury Tor.

Lily Rogers began to give expression to her discomfort under the tension of this tragical-comical fooling. “I wish those soldiers would arrest that fellow,” she murmured in the ear of her sister. “Our Glastonbury policeman would have arrested him before this, only the poor man be so deaf.”

“These Taunton officers have no more gumption than a lot of cassowaries,” replied Louie.

But the wise Emma Sly put forward a different point of view, worthy of the daughter of a Mendip shepherd. “That's the devil in disguise,” she explained. “He's telling all those Romans that if they don't crucify the Good Lord quick they won't be able to crucify Him at all.”

“This isn't like what Master tells we to say in Creed,” remarked Penny Pitches to Mr. Weatherwax, “when it says 'suffered under Pontius Pilate.' If ihere'd been a Zany like this on Green-Hill-Far-Away Master'd have spoken of it, wouldn't 'un, in the thirty years I've looked after he?”

“ 'Twere long agone,” remarked the wise gardener. “Maybe Bible itself have forgotten how 'twere. Them hefty lads be Romans, 'sknow, and Romans be heathens, and they heathens baint as reverend as your master, my good gurl. But 'tis queer, honey, and it do make a man's stomach queasy to see such things. 'Tis like Saturday afternoon in private bar and yet 'tis like Good Friday in Church. It makes a person feel sort o' wobbly in his innards.”

The opinion of the Marquis of P. upon the spectacle he was regarding was little different from that of the old gardener and the old servant. “I can't stand much more of this chap Momus,” whispered his Lordship to Lady Rachel. “I want to give the little brute a good caning and kick him out! What on earth possessed Geard to allow such a hodge-podge as this?”

“It's my young scaramouch nephew John, Lord P.,” said Miss Elizabeth Crow with an indulgent smile, “who is responsible for all this. Rachel knows more about it than I do, but it's the new idea, I believe—isn't it, Rachel?—to bring in, what do you call it? a sorl of classical chorus . . . only satirical of course instead of serious.” *

“I don't . . . know . . . quite . . . what I feel, Miss Crow,” whispered Rachel nervously. "I hope ... it was your nephew

. . . but I'm afraid . . . there are . . . others------" In her

heart, for she was torn between her romantic idealising of Ned Athling and her dislike of his new methods, she heartily wished that Paul Capporelli had been left in Paris!

“Isn't that young man who's jumping about and playing the giddy goat, Tewsy,” Mrs. Legge was now remarking to her aged henchman, “the same one that made fun of poor King Mark just now when he was following his lawful wife?”

“And at Lancelot too, Missus! 'A cocked some fine snooks at Lancelot when 'a seen *un try to cuddle up 'gainst Queen Gwen-derver's sweet shanks!”

“Hush Tewsy! Even though it be the same, as I think it be, haven't they what pulls the strings the right to choose the poppets? Old folk like you and me, Tewsy, don't have no idea what young folks have in their heads these days. Why I heard Mr. Tom Barter tell as how there weren't a wench in Wollop's— and that's who Queen Gwendy was—who wouldn't slip off her skirt if a fellow went the right way about it. 'Twill be bad for our trade, Tewsy, if this gets worse. Who'll give half a sovereign for a private room when every room can tell the same tale? That's what I say about such performances as this. 'Tis spoiling the trade, Tewsy; 'tis spoiling the trade.”

“You're one for keeping up the family, Mother, ain't you?” whispered Blackie wearily.

“Why sure I be, kid, sure I be!” cried the old lady with a wicked leer. “When all be for all without paying a penny what's to keep the market going?”

Blackie Morgan held her peace. Her enormous grey eyes fixed themselves upon the ubiquitous Momus and upon the thorn-crowned figure, to whose side the clown had now skipped, and the abysmal disillusionment of her gaze seemed to reduce the solid bulk of Glastonbury Tor to insubstantial vapour.

“Why is Pontius Pilate lolling like that now against the side of his ricketty platform?” enquired Tilly Crow of the curator of the museum.

“I hadn't noticed . , , there's so much going on at the same time ... I was watching that funny soldier wagging his head at Christ ... but yes, Pilate is lolling as you say. Oh, I see what he's doing, Mrs. Crow. He's reading! That's a roll of parchment he's got in his hands. Eh? What's that? He's soliloquising now, I think.”