The Outcast and the Rite, page 13
Terraemotum, pestem, bellum,
Procul pelle, et flagellum
Appropinquet civitatis
Quae tuae fidit pietatis.
The tune paused and leapt forward to where the women were standing; it became thinner, more vague; she could only catch a word here and there:
… o virgo gloriosa
… laudens …
… audi vota …
While they sang, they began to walk up the hill again, and the men with the two images followed.
Elizabeth was delighted. She was filled with selfish joy because she was alone, the only strange witness of their childish but impressive rite. In the hope that there might be more to follow, she rose from her doorstep—rather stiffly, for the warmth of the long climb had gone out of her—and went after the procession, walking to the quick rhythm of the hymn. By the time she reached the top of the hill half the people were already inside the church, whose great west arch was wide enough to admit the marchers in their ranks of four. The church gathered the voices and lent them sonority, so that when the men had crowded in and took up their verse in turn the sound was terrifying, and the candle flames on the altar could be seen training this way and that as though to escape. There was no seat for Elizabeth, or for anyone else, not even a straw-bottomed chair. Most of the women knelt on the floor, while the men stood or leant against the walls. Elizabeth took her pack from her shoulders, mounted it, and from that elevation, the pillar solid at her back, she was able to watch the doings of the priests and ignore the curiosity of her neighbours.
Three of the priests were kneeling before the altar, motionless for once, so that the blood-red brocade of their copes was piled on the steps in stiff folds like stuff in a picture. He in the centre was reading from a card which the others held for him, fluently and loudly, all on one note; occasionally his voice dropped a semitone, and then his assistants would quickly slip in an Amen, which at once set him off again. Elizabeth could not hear. She was interested, but tired; moreover, though she kept her eyes above their level, she was conscious that the men were finding her worthy of attention. She examined the smiling, gesturing saints in their niches, the little bunches of lights before each, the flattish Romanesque arches. When at last, her exploration finished, she glanced at the altar, the reading priest had ascended the steps and was holding out towards the people a little square gold box, rough with gems. He displayed this, set it on the altar, knelt, and called three times in a voice which exacted response, ‘Sancta Canidia!’
To which all the kneeling, standing, suddenly attentive congregation answered, ‘Ora pro nobis.’
Only Elizabeth said nothing, not because she disapproved, but because she was feeling ill; or perhaps not ill, but completely tired and indifferent and weak. And she could not take her eyes from the gold box on the altar. She wanted to sit down, for she felt as if she must very soon faint. All the candles stooped towards her; she heard sounds that should have been meaningless, while her excellent common sense remembered with anxiety the heat of the noon road.
The priests paraded away with the gold box and hid it somewhere. Elizabeth found that she could move, and reminded herself how she had always heard that people could be hypnotised by staring at a shining object. She felt some relief, took up her pack and blundered away to the door. Just outside the church she came to a halt, with a white wrinkled face of disgust and fear; the people coming out found her standing, looking down at one of the torches, thrown on the ground still smoking. By good fortune the first woman to reach her was the landlady of the inn, who led her away and paid no attention to the voice that said, a dozen times over in English, ‘My God, the stench! What is it?’
The landlady put her to bed, and gave her some warmish nasty liquor to take, which cleared her head so that she found her Italian and was able to explain about the sunstroke. The landlady was sympathetic. Elizabeth asked her about the saint in the gold chair.
‘Ah, the saint,’ said the landlady, nodding in a very expressive way, ‘she has enough to do, getting the people of this town to live like Christians. It would puzzle the good Jesus himself. It is too much for one woman alone.’
‘Who was she?’ Elizabeth asked.
‘She was of this country,’ said the landlady proudly, ‘and a great prince from Rome married her. All the girls in these parts are pretty; good-for-nothing too, but a lot the men care for that. Not that I grudge them. I like to see them happy while they’re young; it doesn’t last long.’
But Elizabeth wanted to find out about the saint.
‘Oh, yes, she lived here,’ the landlady went on, ‘before she was married, if you can call it married. She ran away on her wedding night, and never slept with her husband at all; he was a pagan, so she’s not to be blamed. Ah, she had spirit, like all these girls. So ran she away into the desert, one of these deserts near Rome that was full of Christians like herself; but the soldiers came after her, and took her away to be martyred. Virgin and martyr, she was.’
She described at unnecessary length the torments which the saint had endured, and her final throes.
‘And what does the ceremony mean?’ Elizabeth persisted. ‘The statues meeting?’
Apparently it meant the saint’s search for Christ in the desert, and her triumphant ascension with him into heaven.
‘And the birds?’
The landlady did not know. They were pretty. They always hung like that for a moment above the lights; according to the direction in which they flew away the faithful might make a guess at the weather that was likely to prevail during the ensuing year.
Ordinarily Elizabeth would have triumphed, thinking with disdain of the tourists with their Easter week ceremonies and the sophisticated pageants of Rome. To-night, however, she could not triumph. She was too busily explaining to herself more personal things, attempting to reason away that horror which had overtaken her outside the church, when the smell of the burning resin, which hitherto she had savoured with pleasure, had seemed to her nostrils bitter and threatening. Her common sense was baffled. She was apprehensive, aware of something approaching, unhurried, to which her common sense could oppose no barrier, and which rejected all sensible explanations such as sun, and fatigue, and the crowded air of the church.
When the landlady left her, Elizabeth lay awake above the cheerful noises of cooking and drinking, quietly, in the dark. The noises grew less, were finally still. A patch of moonlight climbed onto the bed, and began to creep across it, making icy valleys and dark crests on the coverlet, beneath which her limbs lay at ease. As she watched it, Elizabeth had a pang of fear; hesitated; was sure. She sat up with a quick start that convulsed and re-shaped the moonlit ranges, and said aloud, ‘Who are you? What do you want?’
She heard the answer, and felt suddenly like a person drowning, sinking quick into unimagined space. She was herself, but dwindled to a speck, a mere pin-point of consciousness about which great shining worlds revolved, alone, and naked to the suns that flared above her. The strong light was terrifying, unbearable. She thought to escape from it by abandoning herself to the darkness that lay somewhere below, and began, of her own will, to fall. The suns rushed upwards from her, trailing their fires; they circled above her like coloured birds, wheeling as they swung to and fro in their orbits. They grew smaller and vanished; the clear torturing light remained. She felt herself screaming soundlessly, powerless to trouble the luminous infinite silences that gathered round her as she fell.
The terror withdrew, or rather she twisted away from it as a diver turns his hands to the surface and comes slowly up through the yielding pressure of water. She lay face downwards on the bed, her mouth writhed open, feeling her heart thud against the mattress. After a time she had breath to think of other matters, and to remember moments of fear, of insistence, of acquiescence, of possession. Vaguely understanding the impossible thing that had happened, she fell asleep at last as from a high tower and did not wake until the day noises were in full swing about the house.
She had planned to stay in this place for a day or two, but now that was out of the question. The landlady, to whom strangers were like manna, did what she could to scare her guest, reminding her of last night’s seizure, and declaring that only a mad person would choose to walk who might, for a nothing or so, sit all day under an ample pergola of vines. Elizabeth was firm, and in the end was allowed to go, with the landlady watching under her hand from the door.
It was a pleasant morning into which she stepped, no longer alone; and since the hills fan high she was conscious of the air standing cold about her. Further hills lay ahead, the lower slopes of them misted, so that they seemed to be floating. To Elizabeth’s mind, which since waking had shrunk from any contemplation of the future, came the thought that perhaps, since she had to go through with it, it might not be so bad. She had been surprised out of her ordinary prudence. She knew neither what to expect nor what to fear.
She began to consider the whole thing in the impartial manner made possible by movement and the morning light. She knew, in some inexplicable way, that she was possessed, and by whom; but she did not understand the terms of agreement. She supposed that it would be made clear to her as they went along, two persons crowded into one body, drawing as they walked great breaths of high sweet air. There was the question of communication, too; but this began, almost immediately, to answer itself.
The saint had something to tell, evidently. During the hours of marching she assailed Elizabeth with words and fragments of Latin, passionately explaining something; but Elizabeth was familiar only with the dog-Latin of the Church, and this dead lion of a tongue baffled her. Still, there was a friendly intention in those phrases she could understand, and the saint, aware of her difficulty, was beginning to shift into another medium, the coarse Italian of the south, when they came unexpectedly upon a village that clung like lichen about their downward sloping road. It was a poor place, but it afforded wine and bread which they ate gladly, and afterwards climbed to the church which stood a little apart from the houses, not from motives of curiosity or piety, but simply because it was sure to be cool inside. The priest was there, taking down the crucifix from above the tabernacle, and preparing for the Friday evening Benediction. He was happy to see a stranger, and at once came forward to talk. He showed his treasures, a fragment from the cross of the Good Thief set in a round crystal reliquary; an old silver censer with the beasts of the Apocalypse twisting upon it, cut so that the smoke must come pouring from their mouths and nostrils; finally, two bones of Saint Apollodonis himself, to whom the church was dedicated. He told the history of the saint, from his conversion as a young officer of the Twentieth Legion—the ‘Victorious Valerian’—to his death in the arena; spoke with awe of his patron’s steadfastness and with confidence of his influence in Heaven. As the anecdotes succeeded each other, Elizabeth began to feel tears prickling her eyes. They were not her own tears; she was prepared to consider Saint Apollodonis with reverence, but without emotion, and the impulse surprised her. She resisted, but that other will was too strong for her, and the puppet they shared began to jerk with inexplicable sobs that relieved an inner burning feeling of shame. The surprise of the priest was very evident; he was too experienced to suppose that such sensibility could be due to any but physical causes, and made the hysterical Elizabeth sit down while he fetched a glass of water from the sacristy. She obeyed him without protest; that part of her mind which remained her own property at once set to work to scold her for the imbecility she had displayed on the previous night; not to have insisted, not to have bargained, not to have realised the immense advantage which had been hers, that working dependable body which she had abdicated. She was too angry with herself and too much ashamed of the tears to enquire their reason.
When she had drunk the water the priest made her lie down on the flat top of a stone tomb that stood at the west end of the church, and left her to make his own siesta. She would have been glad to sleep, but Canidia was restless; she began to murmur, and to invade Elizabeth’s consciousness with disconnected phrases; the word fire came very often. Elizabeth could not understand it, for the martyrdom had been stated by the landlady in terms of wild horses. And there was that feeling of sinking, of utter abasement; strange sensations to come, second-hand, from the eternity of the blessed. She wondered if the saint had known Saint Apollodonis, and why she had elected to come wandering out of her parish in the body of a perfect stranger. A verse of the hymn came to her mind, something about the lilies and roses of Paradise that were the virgin martyr’s crown:
Nunc te lilis, nunc te rosis
Sponsus ornat odorosis.
She could not remember it all, and while she was searching for the words that had escaped her the saint, with a gesture like the outflung hand of a man in agony, struck their minds apart. There was no more to be done; she would not respond. Elizabeth went out of the church and towards the road again. They walked on, dissociate, and held no other communication during the afternoon journey.
The village to which they came just after sundown had a sea smell in its air, and by the map the Adriatic was not far away, due east. Looking from her window in the morning Elizabeth could see a blue distant line, and was glad, for she loved the sea. As she stepped out on the road striped with long early shadows, going towards it, she was happy.
But the road was long. After an hour of delicate air, the coolness withdrew; the road became hot, unshaded, and straight, and as the day drew towards noon, and there appeared no place in which she could possibly rest, Elizabeth began to be impatient. A dozen miracles occurred to her memory, practical miracles such as fill the Golden Legend; springs of water, cooling showers, the scent of unearthly roses—little tender gifts from God to his chosen. What use was a saint, she thought, who could not command such graces? And again she wondered why Canidia had quitted her tall church to come tramping in the heat. The other disregarded these hints and queries; no streams appeared; but, as though it had been spoken at her ear, Elizabeth heard a sentence.
‘I have been exalted on men’s shoulders; now I sink low, that God may be tempted to raise me.’ And then two fragments—‘No crown yet,’ and ‘The same journey’.
Elizabeth could make nothing of it; for how can a saint be raised, unless it be to some other heaven? And what need could there be, after so triumphant a death, for further humility? As for the crown, it was fantastic to suppose that the saint was no saint at all. And yet the word fire remained without explanation, and the tears in church, and indeed the whole pilgrimage. Elizabeth listened, hoping to hear more. Nothing came, and she walked on, distracted by guesses and elusive improbable truths, through the throbbing day.
The road was straight now as the pike of a legionary, the sort of road that could only lead to Rome; it stood up before her to the horizon and dipped to the horizon behind her. A quarter of a mile away, to the left, she could see a clump of trees and men working, moving about in the shadow; so oppressed was she by the interminable promise of the road that she had deliberately renounced all her walking principles, quitted the direct way, and made for the wood.
The men greeted her without surprise. There were two of them engaged in stripping leaves from the young trees and cramming them into bags to serve as fodder. Along the branches of the trees vines grew, which had been grafted on to the trunks, and the men as they packed the leaves away took care that the clusters of young grapes should be laid open to the sun. They said, civilly, that she was welcome to sit in the shade, and took no further notice of her. They looked decent, elderly men. She wondered if it would be safe to sleep, and while she sat thinking, propped against a tree with her pack making a cushion behind her, the decision made itself. Sleep tempted her, lay before her as a depth, a cool chasm; she could feel in imagination the quiet tides advancing in which herself with that other petulant half-self might sink and for a time be one. She allowed the tides to approach until she could feel the light spray, the wind; told herself that she must be careful; and was out of her depth before she knew. She woke to find the pack missing and the men gone.
At first she did not understand. She thought that she had made a mistake, and that the pack had never been at her back but beside her, behind the tree, somewhere else. She did not want to admit that she knew it had been taken for fear of the panic which would come upon her. She searched the vineyard tree by tree, and was rewarded by finding the pack itself cast aside, gaping, and holding only two crumpled handkerchiefs. Stockings gone, shoes, the rest of her money, the map, gone all of them. Her passport she always carried in the breast pocket of her coat. That was safe, and a comb, and a couple of lire, and a little notebook in which she was always meaning to write her impressions. These were all that remained.
Elizabeth had never contemplated anything like this. She was accustomed to use her money frugally, but it was always there, or some means of getting at it, and she had never before been stranded so far from headquarters. She had nothing about her that could be turned into cash, not even a wristwatch. She despised walkers who wore stealable things, and considered that they were asking for trouble; she had not bargained for trouble which comes unasked. She approached the saint for advice, but Canidia was distant, unwilling to be disturbed, and remained tranquilly meditating in the very middle of Elizabeth’s own mind, like the blind spot of calm at a tornado’s centre. Elizabeth quitted the hope of her intervention with a shrug and began angrily to make plans.
She trifled for a time with the idea of following the thieves and demanding the return of her possessions. This, however, could hardly take rank as a plan. It was a wish, the momentary solace which she permitted to her outraged self-confidence. After she had allowed moral force to prevail, and had looked with her mind’s eye, a stern one, upon the humiliation of the thieves, she returned to her practical self. This country was wild, of which her despoilers were natives; they would probably find it a very simple matter, if she made a fuss, to despatch her in spite of her passport and her nationality; and in the diplomatic incident which might ensue she could have no interest. She abandoned the hope of restitution in its turn and began to consider her real course of action.
