The Virgin in the Garden (26 page)

“In existence beyond Life, the existence is the Pattern, without interference from denying actuality. In G the existence is the Plan, not actualised in any form of matter. Life is response to an affirming Plan. But existence beyond Life is affirmation itself. The earth is what it affirms and the sun likewise. The difference between one supra-animate level and another consists qualitatively in the degree of freedom that resides in the power to create its own pattern and affirmation rather than receiving the imprint of a higher order.

“It is precisely because the sun is less actualised than the earth that it is freer in respect of affirmation. The galaxy in its turn is freer than the sun, but by far the greater part of its existence remains purely potential”.

When Marcus had got through these exhortations, and further similar ones, he pulled down the blind and curled up, knees to chin. He went into a heavy, deliberate dreamless sleep which, like the spreading, was something he had always been able to do. When he woke, Simmonds’s
writings had settled in a pattern in his mind, a harmless pattern of spheres and informing lines of protista and purposeful light. He decided, on balance, to do nothing. If Simmonds was right, nothing need be done.

This proved to be so. Three days later, slurring his feet through the cloisters, he caught sight of the familiar white hem. The grey legs paced and stopped. Marcus looked up. Simmonds, pinkly severe, beckoned and Marcus followed.

“We meet again,” Simmonds stated. “You have read my work.”

“Yes.”

“So you now have some inkling of the importance of the task that confronts us. We must be very intelligent. Part of our task is to discover the true nature of the task, the modes of consciousness we must explore. I have various pilot schemes in mind. I believe in being eclectic. We will undergo various traditional contemplative exercises. Also we will practise direct transmission of thought. From each to each, and through us maybe to the Noussphere direct. Sit down, boy, and I will explain. The first thing is to learn – which is hard, very hard – to
clear your mind
 …”

Marcus sat down. He folded his thin hands, one in the other, and bent his head submissively. Lucas’s words, increasing in speed and number, fell gratefully, disturbing the unruffled surface of a mental pool only too often clear and empty.

There was no one there to reflect on the irony involved in his protecting himself from vacancy with Simmonds’s endless discourse about clearing away the clutter and rubble of dead words and language, in his protecting himself from silence with Simmonds’s cheerful flow of talk about the silence they would achieve together.

The complex cycle of the calendar has brought Easter back to its natural and primeval place in the year; for the Gregorian fifth of April – March 25 of the unreformed chronology – is Old New Year’s Day, a feast now habitually held in honour only by Commissioners of Inland Revenue. It emphasizes the meaning of the first bank holiday of the year, which, even though the forecast speaks of cold winds, snow and thunder, marks for the Englishman the moment when he turns his back upon wintry thoughts. Alone among the recurring annual holidays, this makes a clean-cut break with what has gone before, contrasting most markedly with Christmas, which comes as the climax of weeks of mounting preparation. For the townsman at any rate Easter generally means the sudden discovery that the annual miracle of the spring has come upon him unawares. Emerging from city streets where the seasons have for months dragged so sluggishly as to seem unchangeable, he finds in the country that all the signs of rebirth have burst upon him together – the daffodils nodding in the breeze and the primroses glimmering by the roadside, new buds breaking, birds in full song. Life so long apparently suspended in darkness and stagnation is suddenly urgent, buoyant, burgeoning again. The signal has been given, and the human routine changes in time and tune with the revival of nature.

“Old” and “young” – they are terms taken from the measure of human life and inevitably so. There is no pathetic fallacy here for we are part of the order of eternal change that we observe and on which we moralize. There can have been no time, since the human mind became capable of compassing abstract ideas at all, when man did not see in the passing of the seasons an image of himself.

Assuredly Glaucus the son of Hippolochus beneath the walls of Troy was uttering no original thought in that most lovely simile of the falling of the autumn leaves and their rebirth in the spring, which
HOMER
bequeathed to
VIRGIL
from whom
DANTE
took it over to pass it on to
MILTON
. The more we pore over the half-deciphered runes of pre-history, the more we are forced to conclude that primitive man,
as he saw himself, not merely shared the destiny of the dry husk that fell into the earth, but mysteriously
was
that seed in its mortality and in its potency, and so was also the green shoot springing up again in the dawning of the year. Whole societies have been built upon the conception, for the parallel extends itself beyond and through the life of the individual to the life of the family and of the tribe and of the nation.

In this springtime above all the primeval imagery should have for us its richest meaning; for the Coronation is the nation’s feast of mystical renewal. We have passed through a grey and melancholy winter, dark with natural disaster, darkened also in the symbolical-personal orbit wherein our society revolves by the recent loss of a beloved
QUEEN
. But the spring comes with its annual message that all disasters and losses can be transcended by the unconquerable power of new life. As a nation, as a Commonwealth, we take as our supremely representative person our young
QUEEN
, and in her inauguration dedicating the future by the ancient forms, we declare our faith that life itself rises out of the shadow of death, that victory is wrested out of the appearances of failure, that the transfiguration of which our nature is capable is not a denial of our temporal evanescence but the revelation of its deepest meaning. It may be

Easter, in that year of extremes, was freakish, especially in the North. In the north-west there was heavy snow, in places, on Good Friday, and on Easter Monday there were hailstorms. In Calverley and Blesford black sleet alternated with glassy sun.

The play people temporarily vanished. Felicity Wells turned her attention from carnation ribbons to the decoration of the dear little Easter garden in the nave of St Bartholomew’s. Alexander bought and rode away in a second-hand silver grey Triumph. He also bought the
new gramophone record of T. S. Eliot reading the
Four Quartets
. Frederica managed by furious concentration and an assumption of pupil-to-master virtue to borrow this to play during the school holidays. She then played it repeatedly, in a talismanic manner, until everyone in that unmusical household was driven to a frenzy of irritation by the repeated rhythms.

On Easter Day Stephanie decided to go to church. She found herself a hat, to observe the proprieties, a half-melon of navy velvet with a wisp of veiling. Under this, preceded by a wavering circle of scarlet umbrella, she fought her way across tombstones and wet grass.

She might have come to church anyway without the problem of Daniel. She might have come to please Felicity. She might have come because she liked to take part in the ceremonies of the year. At other Easters she had dyed eggs, cochineal crimson, onion-skin gold, and had travelled to mining villages to see eggs on trestle tables in the upper rooms of pubs, tie-dyed, boiled with ferns and lace doileys, boiled with lurid socks and old club ties, beetroot, wax and gentians. Bill liked the eggs, but never went near Easter in Church. Stephanie had taken both as they came. This year was different. She was angry with Daniel. She had come to take a look at him, there, in the Church. Where he belonged.

He had upset her. He had pushed his consecrated huge face between her knees and trembled. He had declared passion and told her to go home and disregard it. He had involved her in his jumble of tea-party politeness, dead stories and ceremonial: he had made her feel like a professional cock-teaser. When he saw her in Church he would see she was sorry and respectful. When she saw him in Church she would know for certain it was all ridiculous; she could wipe her feet of it, after, in the Church porch.

One of her own Fourth form handed her a prayer-book: she sat down at the back, against a pillar, and watched Miss Wells come in, fluttering chiffon scarves in various pinks, depending from a dish-shaped hat and bursting like bedraggled butterflies out at the neck and between the buttons of her rat-coloured gabardine. The next people to come in were her brother Marcus, and a young man she vaguely recognised, and then placed, as the curious biology chap who had once, at a school Christmas do, repeatedly asked her to dance, and had left large sweaty hand-prints on the back of a pale evening dress. Simmonds bowed and smiled to everyone and then ushered Marcus into a pew, like a hen with a chicken, a chamberlain with a prince.

Stephanie was profoundly shocked to see them both genuflect and cross themselves. What was this? How long had it been going on? Marcus had not seemed to see her, but then he never did.

The organ wheezed, raised itself, crashed. The choir marched and shuffled in, singing with a shrill effect that was damped by the weight of unstirred air in the arches of the roof. With them, a heavy shepherd, came Daniel, in a surplice. These were followed by Mr Ellenby, who was to speak for his Easter offering. Daniel’s expression did not match the jubilee of the music. His black brows met across his nose: he looked as though he was about to embark on the commination service. She could pick out his voice, a rough bass, in tune but not harmonious. His exertions seemed directed to making a heavy beat to align other singers. She did not attempt to sing herself.

He did not look, as she had supposed, perhaps feared, he might, silly. Nor did he seem, as she had also imagined he might, to burn with spiritual energy. She had come to see that energy directed: she had come to watch him pray. But he looked as he always did, black, fleshy, solid, with the white cambric a flimsy and extraneous bib. She smiled to herself at this thought. And whilst she was smiling, he saw her. He looked at her and frowned deeper, with the electric rigidity of shock: he turned away. Then slowly, above dog-collar and snowy pleats he flushed red and hot, blood flaming through the dark jowl to cheekbone and brow. She felt caught out in a lapse of taste. More hailstones rattled on stained glass.

They sang, rose, kneeled, chanted, murmured, confessed. Her dislike of Christianity hardened like ice. She realised she had half-hoped to share what was ancient and inherited. Christmas moved her. O Come All Ye Faithful, especially in Latin, left her with real regret at her exclusion from faith and community. The difficult birth in bad weather, the golden angels singing in snow, the word within a word unable to speak a word, this she would have liked to have, feeling excluded from the heat and light in the stable by redundant rationalism. But the dead man walking in the new morning in the garden left her cold. The congregation rendered psalms in that combination of speech and song, grutching and sharp as chalk skidding on blackboard, wailing, toneless, patient, dismal, English. She was repelled.

Perhaps there was something particularly unpleasant about English Easter. It had not been possible to graft Eastern blood rites and dismembered God on to English Spring as it had been possible to bring together Northern celebrations of the winter solstice, moving star, evergreen tree, ox, ass, shining messenger and stone-frozen land. There was a hot, barbaric quality about the lessons for Easter Day which had nothing at all to do with pussy-willow and lemony floss chickens, although it might possibly have related to forgotten druidic atrocities. The lesson from Exodus was about the Paschal lamb and the god who flew over in the night and slaughtered the first-born men and beasts. It
gave instructions for smearing blood on doorposts and for slaughtering and broiling the immaculate offering. The second lesson, from Apocalypse, presented Alpha and Omega, first and last, the Son of Man white like wool, white like snow, with flaming eyes like fire and feet like fine brass burned in a furnace. The scarlet and white woolliness of the souls washed in blood had mystified and appalled generations of men, and Englishmen. But it was alien. Birth was a real miracle, Stephanie’s cold mind ran on, and resurrection would be a greater one, if believed, but the blood we drink, the shadowy, temporary Form outside the spiced tomb, are neither believed nor needed as the song of the heavens at the Birth is believed and needed. Our Green Knights sprouted new heads on riven shoulders, their startled veins ran new blood, Langland’s Christ harrowed Hell like any hero visiting the underworld and returning scatheless. But those were Christmas again. English Easter tried to graft to the imagery of cleansing ritual slaughter the renewal of sap, the bounding of Wordsworthian lambs, the emergence from smooth sealed eggs of fluffy chicks, living gold from stone. But the English mind was secretly horrified by glassy sea, crystal walls, white wool, brass feet and throne of the New Jerusalem where Spring would never come again because there was neither grass nor winter.