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MAUNDY THURSDAY

THE PROCESSES OF ALL CREATIVE FORCE ARE COMPLICATED, tortuous and arbitrary. They are also infinitely various. The simple notion of one single vital urge displaying itself in spontaneous generation from inorganic matter and then thrusting forth, in its chemical transmutations, all the astounding forms of evolutionary life, does not cover one-half of the dark continents of real creation. None knoweth the beginning of things; but under the anarchy of present existence are galaxies of warring minds; and the immense future depends upon the wills of multitudinous hosts of minds. But not, alas! upon well-meaning, tender, indulgent, generous, forgiving, considerate, man-loving minds! The mind of the First Cause was twofold, self-contradictory, divided against itself. The multifarious minds that stir up the chemistry of matter today are all descended from the First Cause and share its dualistic nature, its mingling of abominable cruelty with magnanimous consideration. Many of these minds have far more simple goodness in them, more simple pity, more simple tenderness, than the double-edged mind of the First Cause; but none are reliable, none can be trusted. While none of them are entirely evil, none are entirely good. There is no creative energy divorced from some level either high or low of what we call consciousness; and there is no consciousness, whether of demiurge, demon, angel, elf, elemental, planetary spirit, demigod, wraith, phantasm, sun, moon, earth, or star, which is not composed of both good and evil.

It was about seven o'clock in the evening of this same Maundy Thursday, when John had the vision—if such it were—of Arthur's sword at Pomparles Bridge, that a company of cheerful human beings were gathered together, snug and warm, full of chittering gossip, full of lively hummings and buzzings of released roguery, in the kitchen and scullery and museum of Glastonbury Vicarage. Mat Dekker's high-church doctrines had always been of a nature to admit large, generous, and even eccentric undertakings; and on this eve of the anniversary of his Man-God's cruel death he had seen fit to give to the inner circle of his parishioners what he was pleased to denominate as the choir-supper. This name was absurdly inappropriate; for most of the best actual singers in St. John's Church were uninvited to this homely and secular feast. They were uninvited because they would have refused to come. They were of the type of Anglican piety that regards fasting rather than feasting as appropriate to the eve of the Crucifixion. Mat Dekker, although fully as Catholic in his dogmas as his most austere parishioner, had the natural easy-going earthiness of an old-fashioned French cure. There was something in the deepest part of his spirit that the word “homely” could alone describe. He loved little, ordinary, negligible things: little, ordinary events, little, casual objects in Nature. This choir-supper on the eve of Good Friday would not interfere with the humble devotion with which he would labour, patiently and solemnly, through the long invocations and supplications of the morrow's services; but there was something about it that peculiarly satisfied Mat Dekker"s wThole personality. He took a profound, but perhaps quite unconscious delight in the various degrees of glowing idiosyncrasy which illuminated the physiognomies of his guests. It was indeed a scene worthy of Teniers or Jan Steen or Breughel, this choir-supper at Glastonbury Vicarage. The centre of it was the kitchen, where Penny Pitches, standing at her famous and ancient stove, played the part of the arch-sorceress of the occasion. On an old nursery chair, with a low wicker seat, was seated, next to the stove, the portly form of Mr. Weatherwax. The forehead of Mr. Weatherwax shone with amiability and heat. He had found a corner of the great stove—which was really like a world in itself —where he could deposit his glass of brandy. His enormous face at this low level—and exposed to periodic emissions of extreme heat from the oven—looked larger than human there. He looked like a colossal gnome or goblin present at the cooking of an ogre's meal. Indeed when Penny placed a special morsel from some dainty dish upon a plate on his lap he looked, it must be confessed, like the ogre himself. Moving about with the dishes in support of Penny was quite a phalanx of serving-maids, all of them with their Sunday clothes on, but covered up in big loose overalls. Sally Jones was here and Tossie Stickles. Lily and Louie Rogers were here. Even the redoubtable Emma Sly, as an especial honour to Mr. Dekker, who was her favourite official in the town, was among these amateur and yet these professional ministrants. Let no humorous adept in the whimsicalities of human manners think that there were any fewer exquisite morsels of class distinction, of character distinction, of distinction in social prestige, in this group of Glastonbury servants, than there would be when Tilly Crow, up at The Elms, gave her next grand tea-party to their mistresses. Emma, of course, was the grande dame of the occasion. Lily and Louie did their utmost to monopolise her attention; but this, by reason of Emma's long training in the diplomacy of parties, proved quite an impossible task. The little elderly woman was the only one of the servants there whose dress would have been appropriate if they had all been suddenly summoned to carry tea-trays into the drawing-room. And yet it was not her ordinary service-dress. Its quietness and modesty retained somewhere about it—perhaps in a tiny piece of dark-blue ribbon round Emma's neck—the impression that it was put on to do especial honour to somebody or something outside the routine of her diurnal labours. That touch of blue round Emma's neck wTas a delicate intimation that the great professional was an amateur that night. It had doubtless been put on partly in honour of tomorrow's being Good Friday and partly in honour of Mat Dekker's being Emma's Vicar. The roguish blue eyes of Sally Jones were always flinging furtive glances of mischievous girlish understanding into the soft, dark-brown, lethargic eyes, constantly growing misty with tender, self-conscious sentiment when her friend teased her about Mr. Barter, of Tossie Stickles. Tossie was undoubtedly the favourite amateur waitress, on this occasion, with the lively crowd of guests assembled round the big trestle-tables set up in the museum. Her plump figure, irradiated by her love for her gentleman-seducer, threw about her, wherever she went, a warm, amorous cloud of magnetic attraction; while her ready jests, as she carried the rabbit pasties and the pigeon pies and the great bowls of Irish stew—which were Penny's particular achievement and which filled the museum with a fragrant onion-heavy steam— from one to the other of the men and women seated round the table, were continually starting fresh guffaws of laughter and causing various old gossips to nudge each other and wink as she pushed her way among them.

The candles on the chimney-piece, as well as on the table, threw over all these faces a soft yellow glow that seemed to draw out something peculiarly individual from their folds and creases and wrinkles and heavy meaningless surfaces of flesh, all of which in daylight might have been inexpressive and insignificant. Every now and then Mat Dekker's eyes wandered to the old-fashionec pictures of his father and mother on the mantelpiece and to the faded, wistful picture of Sam's mother. These faces did not seem as alien to the scene that was going on as one would have suspected. But then all these Vicarage guests, however ugly and deformed, possessed a certain winnowed quality of sensitiveness which had come to them through their ancestors—common or gentle—down the long centuries of Glastonbury's life. Nowhere else indeed in the town that night—certainly not at the Pilgrims' Inn and not even in St. Michael's Inn—was there assembled such a characteristic group of Glastonbury people.

This accounted for the fact that towards the roof of Mat Dekker's house, through the hushed envelope of the earth's moonlit atmosphere, all manner of subhuman and superhuman influences were directed. Cold, mute, silent in the moonlight rose the Tower Arch of the ruined Abbey. From the fluted columns, from the foliated capitals, from the broken stone bases in the hushed grass, indestructible emanations of the wild liturgical calls of the old tune—“Save us from Eternal Death! Save us from Eternal Death!”—that these carved stones had known, vibrated forth over the smooth lawns, over the treetops, and then, floating away upon the moonlight, were attracted, as if by a lodestone composed of living souls, down into that hot, noisy, steamy, candlelighted room. “Save us from Eternal Death! Save us from Eternal Death!” This chant was wailed faintly above them all in that place, drifting through the high trees of King Edgar's lawn, from those myriads of dead, mediaeval throats! And mingled with this faint wailing, of which it was unlikely enough that any one among these revellers would catch the least echo, came a vast shadowy Image. Between the moonlight and the Vicarage roof it came, the Image of the Man-God of the West, the Image of the Being whose death by torture was to be celebrated that next day. It was as if this Image, with those unspeakable eye-sockets wherein quivered the death-cries of all the victims of the cruelty of Man and the cruelty of Life and the cruelty of the First Cause, had been itself created by the unpardonable suffering of all sentient nerves from the zenith to the nadir of the physical universe. It brought with it through that moonlit night, as it floated over the treetops, a terrible smell of pain; a smell that was sweet as burning sticks of cinnamon, a smell that was bitter as burning branches of laurel, a smell as of a sponge soaked in the hyssop of a dead sea of anguish! But as none in that room noticed that cry above the roof—“Save us from Eternal Death!”—none noticed that floating Image, none smelt that indescribable smell. In fact, the good, humble naturalist-priest, who was the entertainer of this noisy gathering and who, in the absence, for the next ten or eleven hours, of his enemy the sun-god, was so sturdily radiating around him his higb spirits that everyone was conscious of some especial reassurance, decided now, while Emma—for that was her task—was carrying round numerous little cups of coffee to the more epicurean of the guests, that it would be a good thing to have a little music.

His first thought was of Tossie Stickles who possessed a mandolin upon which she often played various little tunes. Tossie had been so gay and lively during the first part of the evening that it was a shock to the good host when he learned from Sally Jones, whose blue eyes as she came to confess it were themselves blubbered with crying, that Tossie had been “taken funny-like,” and been carried upstairs “to rest.”

Mr. Dekker's ruddy countenance lost its complacency and an extremely anxious frown gathered about his eyes. Tossie Stickles would never be “taken funny” at choir-supper if there weren't something seriously amiss. “That girl's in trouble,” he said to himself, "as sure as I'm a priest.

“Listen, Sally,” he said gravely, “tell Tossie from me, when you're alone with her, that I'm not angry with her and I'll talk to her before she goes.” He still kept the young woman by his side with a penetrating stare from beneath his bushy eyebrows; but though he had spoken to her in a low whisper their colloquy had not passed unobserved. Several of the older women had stopped sipping their coffee and were watching them intently. “Run off to her now, Sal; there's a good girl; and stay with her, will you? And pack all the others out of the room, won't you?”'

But as soon as the girl had left the room he shut his eyes tight and rubbed his face with the palms of his hands, uttering a faint husky sound, that was not exactly a groan, but which was near a groan. When he took his fingers away he sighed heavily, drawing up this long breath from the depths of his broad chest, as if it had been a bucket of water out of a garden well. '

Sam Dekker, who had been all this while silently and gravely carving a large joint of hot bacon—fragrant slices of which he placed upon the edges of various people's plates, already well-filled, while Crummie, seated beside him, added to the same plates certain quotas of pickled walnuts and roast chestnuts— was the only person at the long table w'ho received the real significance of this deep sigh of his father's. He caught his father^ eye as soon as he could. “Aren't we going to have any music, Father?” he said. Mat Dekker regarded his son tenderly from the end of the table and with an affectionate narrowing of his great eyebrows answered that he had just sent their mandolin-player on a mission that he feared would prevent her from performing. “But if you think it would be all right, Sam, my boy, we could get old Weatherwax in from the kitchen to sing us one of his catches. I suppose it would be no use trying to persuade Miss Geard”—he smiled at Crummie as he spoke—“to help us out with a song or anything?”

This word from the head of the table attracted the general attention to poor Crummie—who had already taken a certain risk of publicity by assenting to Sam's courteous request that she should sit by his side—and now she could not stop herself from blushing scarlet. It was one of the most charming signs of Crummie's essential innocence, amid all her flirtations, that when she was embarrassed she got as red as a little girl of ten.

“I'm afraid I couldn't possibly—Mr. Dekker; oh, no, I couldn't possibly,” Crummie murmured. “There! a few more pickles for this one, Lily. Who is it? Oh, Jackie Cole! Yes, Fm sure Jackie likes pickles”; and the girl did her best to distract the public attention away from herself.

“Perhaps you wouldn't mind, Louie,” said Mat Dekker, “asking Weatherwax to come in and give us a song. Hell do it if a pretty girl like you asks him.” This remark was greeted with guffaws of laughter from many in the company; for the goatish disposition of the Vicarage gardener had become a popular byword. The silence following Louie's exit was now interrupted by the opening of the kitchen door at the end of the passage. From that portion of the room came a hubbub of voices, Penny's witchlike tones rising above the rest and mounting up in shrill spirals of sound above the murmuring growls of Mr. Weatherwax. The old rogue hesitated not to precede Louie into the museum—Louie following after him with an expression of self-conscious pride, as if he'd been a puppet whose strings she was pulling from behind.

Sam, who had cut by now the last slice of bacon that anyone could possibly call for, turned to Crummie and whispered in the girl's ear, “Isn't that just like my father? He knows perfectly well that the old villain will shock half the people here and yet he persists in lugging him out from where he's as happy as a cricket, and where Penny's there to look after him.”