After dinner Sir Joshua led Benedict through a series of big and gloomy rooms, flickering with firelight. Then they passed down a long corridor into an extremely large conservatory. The air was heavy and warm and damp, and Benedict thought of the jungles. Then he saw this was no ordinary greenhouse, full of cramped palms, forced roses, pale gardenias and orchids and other exotic flowers. He was familiar with all these, but he was not familiar with the flowers in this conservatory. He walked along the benches and examined them closely. The atmosphere was burdened with languorous scents. There were a number of fruit trees, darkly green and thick of leaf, gleaming with tropical and semi-tropical fruits, and there was a feeling of life here under the many gaslights.
“I searched the whole world for the flowers,” said Sir Joshua, and he named some. “Many of them were very small in their native state, but careful breeding and grafting — a new art in horticulture — resulted in these large blooms.” He stopped before a big single box filled with dark, rich earth, and Benedict stopped with him.
The box was crowded with blooms, and long stiff leaves. In the midst of these leaves stood the flowers, large and glowing as if with a life of their own, and yellow as gold. It seemed to Benedict that they emitted an aura, fainter than themselves, and quivering. The petals were as thick as those of a rose, clustered closely together. Not a single petal was withered or spotted; the stamens appeared smothering in gold-dust. And the scent of them was incredibly sweet, fresh, and pure.
“C’est Egal,” said Benedict, with awe. “My aunt told me.” He did not need to bend to sniff at the flowers, for they were tall. He looked at them lovingly, and — surely it was his imagination! — they seemed to bow towards him, as if acknowledging his love and returning it. And — what imagination could do! — they also seemed to glow brighter, as if smiling at him.
“C’est Egal,” repeated Sir Joshua.
“You found it in some far-off place?” asked Benedict.
“No,” said Sir Joshua. “In London, when I was twenty-six years old. A young girl gave me a single flower, on the street, and these are the progeny of that flower.”
“But, where could she have possibly gotten the flower, Sir Joshua?”
Sir Joshua looked at the flowers bending towards Benedict as if stirred by a breeze, and then he smiled and took the young priest’s arm. “Come back into the house and I shall tell you. I created the greenhouse to keep them company.” He turned off the lights. A dim green darkness immediately filled the greenhouse, but C’est Egal continued to shine as if illuminated, the brightest pure gold Benedict had ever seen in his life. As the two men passed through the corridor Sir Joshua said, “If the flowers had not — shall we say known you? — I’d not even have dreamed of telling you about them.”
What a fanciful old man, thought Benedict. But he glanced behind him, longing for another glimpse of the marvelous flower. When they were in the drawing-room again and sipping brandy, Sir Joshua became very silent and looked at the fire for several long minutes. It was as if he had forgotten Benedict.
Then he said, “I feel I must tell you. I’ve hardly had time to know you, but yet I feel I must tell you, and I’ve never told anyone before.” He turned his fine head and Benedict saw half of his face in the ruddy firelight, exalted and joyous.
“I was twenty-six,” said Sir Joshua. “My parents were dead, and I was very rich because of all their work. I was building this house at the time, this dear, ugly house, and living in rooms at Claridges. Yes, at Claridges. I had returned from France and Italy and Germany, and I had my tutor living with me in my rooms. Sometimes I would become very restless with my memories of my parents, and so I would often leave my hotel and take a tram and then walk the long distance to my old home where my parents and I had lived.”
The neighborhood was extremely dreary and deteriorating. It had been just above a slum when Sir Joshua’s parents had been there. Now it was a complete slum. Many of the rotting old houses had been demolished, and two streets from his old home a storehouse had been newly built. One could glimpse its gloomy tall outlines above a high brick wall, but only the higher outlines and the dun roof. The area within the wall could be reached only through an iron gate on the street behind. No grass grew within the area, not a tree or a shrub. It was hard-packed clay and gravel. Drays entered through the one gate with goods to be stored, and then sold to retailers.
“Very cheap goods,” said Sir Joshua. “Calicoes, ginghams, rattletrap furniture, bad china, pots and pans, utilities used in quantities by the very poor. The dinginess of the old-brick wall, its lifeless enclosed area, and the hideous storehouse made even the dying slum more depressing. It was a very busy street on weekdays, with the lorries and the horses coming and going, and the children playing on the flags, and the women screaming from littered doorways, and men shouting. It was an evil place, as all poverty and all commerce in those days were evil. It is often said, disdainfully, ‘the drunken poor’. But what makes a man drink? He wants to forget, and the poor must have their anodyne as well as the rich. They need it more; they will die to get it, for how can they bear their lives? A man can’t live without hope. There was no hope in those streets. I was not drawn there out of affection but only because I wanted to remember my parents and their neighbors, their friends, so that I should never forget misery and should understand it. I was rich now, but I was determined never to forget, for my soul’s sake.”
“You have never forgotten,” said Benedict.
“No,” said Sir Joshua. “I have never forgotten the horror. Or the joy which God gave me there.”
On Sundays, even the slum seemed to die. The storehouse was silent, baking in the sun or running with black water, and the clay and gravel with it. The dreadful little houses were quiet; the slum children were washed for a change, and sat meekly and quietly on brushed doorsteps. The whole region stank of coal gas, smoke, dust and offal.
One Sunday, a Sunday as dank and gray as dead wet ashes, Joshua had walked there, along the high and endless brick wall that guarded the storehouse. The city rumbled at a distance. Here, everything was almost soundless. And it was empty. Joshua glanced across the road, and then away. It was then that he saw the young girl walking only a few steps ahead of him. He stopped, in surprise. She had not been there a moment ago, and now she was here. She must have stepped across the road at the moment he had glanced away.
He noticed a curious thing almost immediately. Only his own footsteps rang on the cobbles. The girl walked silently, as if drifting. She was slender, and a little taller than average, and beautifully formed, the shoulders straight, the waist small. She wore a long yellow dress of some material he had never seen before and which he could not identify, but it certainly was not cotton or linen or wool or even silk. It floated about her ankles, and her feet were shod in yellow slippers. It was a cold day, but she did not wear a mantle or a coat, and her head was uncovered. Her hair was extraordinary, of a shining silver-gilt, thick and smooth, and lay on her shoulders and dropped far below her waist.
Joshua was astonished by the silent walking of the girl, her clothing, and her hair. She moved easily and lightly, as if she were some princess walking in her secluded garden. Then he had the most powerful and urgent desire to see her face. As if he had called to her, she turned, smiling, and he was struck still.
He had never seen such a beautiful face, not even on the canvases of the Old Masters on the Continent.
“How can I describe it?” Sir Joshua asked of Benedict, and his voice was the voice of a jubilant young man. “There are really no words. When I tell you that she had eyes the color of lilacs, a nose as delicate as alabaster, a mouth like a rose, and a complexion like a lily, I am really telling you nothing. These are only words. It is like a blind man, blind from birth, who attempts to describe a sunrise. I could only stand and stare at her. I can only say that I fell in love with her at once, and that I never loved again, and will never love anyone but that girl.”
“But what was such
a girl, dressed like that, on a cold dead Sunday, doing there in those quarters?” asked Benedict.
“She was waiting for me,” said Joshua.
“For you!”
“For me. My poor boy. Your eyes are popping. You must put aside your realism for a moment, and merely accept the fact that I was there, and that the girl smiled at me, and that she was waiting for me. She was so obviously waiting that I pulled up my clumsy feet and went to her, my mouth falling as wide open as yours is falling now.
“She was holding a long flower in her hand, the ancestor of those I have called C’est Egal. When I reached the girl I could smell the fragrance of the flower, and see its beautiful glowing heart. I was stupefied, of course. I looked down into her eyes, and she gently put the flower in my hands. Then she said, ‘Wait for me. Do not forget me.’
“I’ve never heard such a voice in my life, never before that day, never since. I have heard the greatest female singers, but they did not have such a voice. I heard what she said, and I was stupefied even more than before, and terribly in love. Then, as I held the flower, she walked about twenty feet ahead of me and touched the ugly brick wall, and for the first time I saw in it a small door. As yellow and shining as the flower I held. The door opened, the girl smiled at me again, then walked through the door and closed it after her.
“Then I could uproot my heavy feet and race to the door. But when I reached it, it was not there at all. There was nothing but the solid brick.”
Benedict was silent. His thoughts were confused. Of course, there was a rational explanation. A pretty young girl, walking for her own amusement in that awful place, carrying a flower —
“There was no door,” said Sir Joshua. “But I had seen it, and I had seen her walk through it.”
The poor old soul is mad, thought Benedict, uneasily, or he dreams.
As if he heard the dissenting thought, Sir Joshua smiled widely. “I am not mad,” he said. “I’m not senile, Benedict. I am considered very sensible and realistic. And, I am telling you the truth. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio —’ ”
“Yes, I know,” said Benedict, with some impatience. “Every — er — mystic or superstitious or sentimental person quotes that at some time in his life, and regularly, I’ve found.”
“You are a priest,” said Sir Joshua. “You are taught that the super natural is as close to us as breathing. You know that the angels are a cloud of witnesses. The Holy Bible speaks very often of these things. And we have Lourdes to remember — ”
“You are not saying — !” cried Benedict, shocked and outraged.
“Good heavens, no! How could you think such a thing, Benedict?”
Benedict colored brightly. “I am sorry, Sir Joshua. But you must admit that what you have told me is very extraordinary. Could it possibly have been a dream?”
“I have C’est Egal,” said Sir Joshua.
Benedict’s mind whirled with thoughts of flower-girls who were very mischievous, and fantasies, and daydreams. He said, “Of course, you never saw her again.”
Sir Joshua was amused. “I have seen her many times since then, times too many to count. And I have been inside the golden door.”
Benedict stared. His eye then flickered around the great warm and ugly room, at the crush of bric-a-brac, the too-vivid Indian rugs, the rose damask walls, the antlers and mirror over the mantel, the hideous Indian vases filled with gilt rushes and ostrich plumes, the looming furniture and footstools.
The young priest said, cautiously, “And what was inside that golden door, the door through the brick wall which surrounded a dead clay and gravel yard?”
Sir Joshua lit a cigar, after Benedict refused one. A coal appeared at the end, and the old man puffed vigorously. “Ah,” he said, “there is nothing as good as a good smoke.
“What was inside the door? I was not admitted for some time. I went every Sunday after that first one to that place. It was nearly a year before my love came to me again, a year of deep misery and longing and hope. She was there as suddenly as she had been there before, between one instant and the next. This time she called me by my name, and put her small white hand on my arm. Lovingly. And she told me her name, which I have never repeated to anyone else, and which I will not tell even you. Then, she went before me, while I was rooted on the flags, and she opened the golden door and closed it behind her.”
Benedict wildly thought of devils and demons and possession and wanted to bless himself.
“It was at least six months after that before I saw my love again, on that street, near the wall. She did not smile at me that time. She only said, ‘In God’s good time, Joshua. You must be patient. And you must pray.’
“Of course, I had never stopped praying. Sometimes it occurred to me to wonder why my love had ever come to me at all, a young man whose fortune came from soap and sachets, and other vulgar things. There was nothing remarkable about me, nothing exceptionally good or virtuous, nothing unusually pious. I attended Sunday Mass, to be sure, as my parents had taught me. It was a duty. I had never given it much thought, that Most Holy Sacrifice. It was just there, something I had accepted from my childhood. Do we not accept this mysterious and beautiful world, the air we breathe, the glories of the sky, the shine of water? These are all mysteries. We accept the sun and the moon and the stars as commonplaces — these majestic and miraculous things from the Hand of God. We are blind men, and deaf. The smallest field flower is a marvel; a bird is a revelation; a wind is tremendous beyond words. But, we accept them, casually and unthinkingly.”
As I have always done, thought Benedict, with new humility. But his parents had not accepted them so casually. They had greeted each day as a new miracle, fresh and joyous, and his father had written his stammering poems in pathetic celebration of what he had seen even in the shadow cast by a tree. His parents had had their own glimpses of the Beatific Vision. None had ever come to him. He had been a dutiful and hard-working and devoted priest, moving always among misery and trying to bring light into darkness. He had been obedient; he had prayed with all his heart, and had known peace. But — he had accepted everything as earthily as his aunt, Amanda, had accepted it. They were there. There was work to be done. He, Benedict Hughes, had been a male Martha, concerned with busy matters. He had worked so hard that he had not looked at the stars for years, and had never thought of them. He labored in God’s vineyard, but he never caught the fragrance of the grapes. He had suffered meekly, offering up his pain to God for the help of the living and the dead, but he had really never seen the face of God because of the dust of the earth and all the labors he had diligently performed. Yet Christ had paused to admire the lily of the field. He had gone to the Lake of Galilee, so beautiful, so calm, so holy and moving, to deliver the Sermon on the Mount. He had loved the sweet faces of children. He had spoken of the cheeping swallow. He had loved, beyond all imagined love, the charming garden which was the world, the lovely garden He had made. On the night before He had offered up His life for men He had prayed in Gethsemane, the place of olives and cypresses and flowers. His words had been filled with beauty and poetry, for He was Beauty, itself.
No wonder, thought Benedict, that Aunt Amanda had been a little malicious with him and had remarked that he should meet Sir Joshua, who was so like his father! Did she know, herself, how dull he had become, and was she rallying him on it? She had called Sir Joshua ‘my darling old fool’, but there had been a curious glint in her eye when she had said this.
And I have dared to be embarrassed by my father’s poetry! thought Benedict. I, who have no poetry at all. He had prided himself on his realism — and realism had closed his eyes with mud.
He looked at Sir Joshua. The old man may have been only dreaming, but what a dream he had had!
“After the second time I had seen my love,” said Sir Joshua, “I went to Mass every day and received Holy Communion. In some way it seemed to draw me nearer to her, to bring her closer to me, and to give me a mystical sense of joy
— a sense I should have known all my life before then if I had not been so engrossed with work and if I had only taken time. When we receive Holy Communion, we not only receive Our Divine Lord, and His love, but we love others more deeply for that indescribable Grace. We are not only joined to Him, but we are joined in love with those He loves also. I understood, for the very first time, what the Sacrifice of the Mass truly is. The spotless Victim is not only offered up for our sins, but He brings joy to us, and light, and the imminence of heaven. If we do not feel that, then we have felt nothing.
“I did not attend Mass after that as a mere Catholic duty, hardly realizing. I attended out of my love for Gotl, my new love for Him, my new understanding. And so I was peaceful and content to wait. In His good time, as the girl had told me —
“But why a man like me, an ordinary young man, ambitious for learning though I was, ambitious to be as my parents had wanted me to be? I was really nothing at all. My parents had poured a new fortune into my hands. I wanted to please them. But after I had seen my love the second time I knew that I needed to please but One — God.