She glanced back over her shoulder. Mamma was there, just behind them, sitting on top of a pile of luggage, wearing a purple pork-pie hat with a grey feather in it, Old Nick beside her in his cage, and Nat was rolling delightedly round the deck, gazing up at the white wings overhead with a broad grin on his face, just as she had seen him so many times in Green Dolphin Country, and beside the sailor at the wheel stood an immensely tall old gentleman with a round, rosy face and a merry eye and lots of brass buttons down his bulging front, who was quite certainly Captain O’Hara.
“There’s Captain O’Hara,” she whispered to her father.
Papa swung round, glanced at the old gentleman, then looked down at her and smiled and nodded. “That’s him,” he said. “That’s the Skipper. One’s always safe, Véronique, with the Skipper at the wheel.”
Safe. Véronique heaved a great sigh of happiness. Safe was a word that Papa and Mamma were perpetually using to her nowadays. . . . There were hardly any Maoris where they were going, and they would be safe. There were no earthquakes where they were going and they would be safe. There was no fighting where they were going and they would be safe. . . . Yes, without doubt this was not the real world. She jigged up and down with delight and looked about her. The sea was turquoise blue, spread all over with diamond-crested ripples, and the sky overhead was blue, too, with small clouds like pink sea shells sailing along on it because it was so early in the morning. Wellington in the distance looked like a toy town, very tiny and pretty against a mountain background so clear and cold and beautiful that it gave her quite a pain in her middle. Funny to think that Aunt Susanna was still there. Véronique could no longer see her standing on the quay and waving at them, so perhaps she had gone home. What would she do today? Would she wash and iron the sheets that Véronique and Mamma had used, and would she cry as she did it, so that the tears falling on the hot iron made a funny sizzling sound, as they had done when she ironed the sheets that Uncle Samuel had used before he went away with Uncle Haruru?
A shadow fell upon Véronique’s joy, for that memory of Aunt Susanna crying sizzling tears on her iron was not a good one. The memory of Uncle Samuel and Uncle Haruru riding away was not a good one either. She had stood outside the front door of the Parsonage, with Mamma and Papa and Aunt Susanna, and she had watched them ride away and she had not liked it. Mamma and Papa and Aunt Susanna had been laughing and talking, but she had known all the same that they were not happy. Their unhappiness had been like ropes that she could not see, bound about her body so that she could not move.
Uncle Samuel and Uncle Haruru had not been unhappy, but they had been unlike themselves, odd, with eyes that looked very dark and deep in the lightness of faces that shone as though the sun was on them; which it wasn’t. And when they had sat upon their horses and looked down on the group by the door, they had seemed to look down from a great distance away, almost from a mountaintop. And then they had smiled, and raised their whips in a last greeting, and clattered away round the corner and disappeared into nowhere in a cloud of dust.
Véronique pulled at her father’s hand, for suddenly she did not want to look any more at that beautiful, cruel world that held people crying and people killing each other, and people riding away into nowhere, hidden in its folds. She wanted to look at the new land, where she had been assured that no unpleasant things would ever happen. She wanted to look at the coast line of Fairyland.
In the bows of the ship the wind was so strong that it pushed Véronique’s blue bonnet off, and lifted the short, fair curls that had taken the place of her lost ringlets right up from her head as though it had endowed each one with a joyful life of its own. She had never felt a wind like this, and she laughed in her joy. It blew so hard that she could feel it even on the skin of her body through her clothes. The strength and cleanliness of it thrilled her through and through. “I like wind,” she said to her father.
He gripped her small hand tightly, smiling down at her. Of course she liked wind. She was his daughter through and through, and the niece of Marguerite who had felt at home in her special country when the light was clear and the wind cold and there were no lies or subterfuges. He picked his little daughter up in his arms and pointed to the faint, lovely coast line ahead of them. “Look, Véronique,” he said. “There’s your country, your own special country where you will grow up to be a happy woman. It is called the Country of the Green Pastures.”
“Not Green Dolphin Country?” she asked.
“Green Dolphin Country is my country,” he said. “Though of course it’s yours too, just as Aunt Marguerite’s Island Country is yours too, because we love you and all that is ours is yours. But this country is your very own. You’ll like to have a country all your own, won’t you? Green Dolphin Country is a bit rough and adventurous for a little girl sometimes, but in the Country of the Green Pastures, where the sheep feed beside the waters of comfort, there is never any fear. It is the perfect country for little children.”
His words went over her head, but they struck a chord of memory. “It’s like the psalm Uncle Samuel taught me to say,” she said.
“King David wrote that psalm about this country,” said William. “You see, he knew all about it because he lived in it when he was a little shepherd boy.”
The new land ahead rose up sunlit out of the sea.
“Tell about what we’ll do when we get there,” cried Véronique excitedly. “Tell about where we’ll live. Tell about the sheep.”
“First, we shall go and stay with a friend of Aunt Susanna’s,” said William. “And it won’t seem very exciting at first, because we shall be staying in a town rather like Wellington, and the people there won’t know that you are the Queen of the Country of the Green Pastures, and so, though they will love you, I doubt if they’ll curtsey or kiss your hand. You will, of course, realize that it is just their ignorance and make allowances. And then, when we have been there for a little while, we will buy a wagon and horses and set out on a long, wonderful journey. I expect we shall get very tired on the journey, but the home we are going to is so lovely that it will be worth it. At first we shall travel through great plains where, because it is your own country, the rivers will be blue like your eyes and the blond grass the color of your hair, and the flax will bow to you because you are the queen, and the wind will kiss your hand. On one side of us, as we travel through the plains, there will be wonderful lagoons, and on the other side there will be a rampart of mountains that touch the sky. Then we shall leave the plains and travel up a rough track into the foothills of the mountains, and the grass will be green and there will be flowers, and you will hear the birds singing. Then the track will run into a narrow gorge with rocks on either side, and we shan’t see anything except the rocks until we get to the top, and then—”
William paused, slightly worried. A frightful thing it would be if the portrait of their future home which he was about to paint were not later to be substantiated.
“Yes?” prompted Véronique excitedly.
William took a deep breath and went on.
“And then, Véronique, we shall go in through a gateway of rock and find ourselves in what is about the loveliest thing God ever made, an upland valley ringed about by mountains. It will be rather like that valley that we came to when we left the forest, because as one journeys along through life the valleys of comfort perpetually recur, but it will be much more beautiful even than that. Stretching up the sides of the mountain you will see the Green Pastures with the sheep feeding on them; and the water in the streams that come down from the mountaintops will be so clear that you will see every pebble at the bottom, and the reflection of the mountains, and your own happy face. In summer the air will be warm, but it won’t be too hot like it used to be sometimes at our old home, for the Green Pastures are nearer to the mountaintops than the settlement was, and the lovely tang of the snow will always be with us. Véronique, in that lovely, safe valley in the hills the
re will be a house for us, for you and me and Mamma and Nat and Old Nick. In summer the door will stand always wide open, and through it you will see the sheep feeding on the mountainsides, but in winter, when it is snowing in the mountains and the sheep have been brought down to the valley, it will be closed and we shall light a large fire of blazing logs on the hearth, the sort of fire that you have never seen, and we shall sit before it and tell each other stories, and be the happiest four people and the happiest parrot in the whole wide world.”
With such dreams the time passed quickly, and there was a fair breeze. Véronique could never afterward remember what her country had looked like when they glided into harbor, because calmness of mind is necessary to accurate memory, and just before they got there she had completely boiled over with wild excitement caused by the sudden appearance of a laughing Green Dolphin on the starboard bow.
Part 2 Knights of God
I heard them in their sadness say,
“The earth rebukes the thought of God;
We are but embers wrapped in clay
A little nobler than the sod.”
But I have touched the lips of clay,
Mother, thy rudest sod to me
Is thrilled with fire of hidden day,
And haunted by all mystery.
GEORGE WILLIAM RUSSELL.
Chapter I
On some days it seemed to Marguerite, enclosed in the stone cell of her French convent on a hilltop, that those who live the life of prayer live it in a great void, a desert of emptiness where is nothing but one’s self and the winds of God; but on other days it seemed to her that they live it in a suffocating crowd of devils, so pressed upon and jostled that it is hard for the laboring lungs to catch enough of the foul air even to breathe.
“If I were a nun, I’d pray all the time for people to be happy,” she had said in her childhood. “I’d pray all day and all night for everyone, birds and animals and people and the whole world, just to be happy.” She’d not known in her childhood what that would mean. She’d not known that to fight with the weapon of prayer that which destroys happiness is to have it round upon yourself. “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” To pray for the diseased, the wicked, the insane, was to be bound with their chains and tortured with their fears, it was to stagger beneath a load as heavy as that of Atlas, and yet somehow find the strength not to be bowed down to the earth by it but to lift it up and up, to straighten one’s self with it, until again there came that sense of support. But it never seemed to come until it seemed that the last moment of endurance had been reached.
One could not have lived, surely, without those other experiences at the other end of the scale, that were homely and sweet and sometimes extremely funny, experiences bound up with specific prayer for those who companioned one’s everyday life, for the other nuns, for the peasants in the village at the bottom of the hill. It was sweet when a sick child recovered, a lost cow was found, after one had prayed; intense happiness to feel again that old sensation of being picked up as a tool and used. And if pride reared its head, it would immediately be laid low by some little happening of sheer comedy that reminded one how God laughed at the self-importance, the self-conscious business of his tools, mere dead things bereft of warmth or sentience without the hand that lifted and gave life.
She had prayed once for comfort for a little lay sister, inconsolably homesick, and could only dissolve into hopeless laughter when next day a stray kitten scaled the convent walls and jumped through the refectory window straight into the outstretched arms of the little sister. . . . But surely they must keep the kitten, she had said later through gales of mirth to their Reverend Mother, who did not like cats and was all for putting it out; for, as it had come in answer to prayer, surely it was here as divinely appointed mouser, and to cast it out would be to run directly counter to the will of God? . . . Reverend Mother had yielded, meanwhile eyeing Sister Clare with that slight uneasiness with which her laughter always inspired her superiors. For was it right that so spiritually gifted a nun should be at times so extremely flippant? Was it right that she should enjoy the little things of life, the taste of a ripe apple, a beam of sunlight, a kitten, a bird’s song, with such abandonment? Quite right, Sister Clare had once said in answer to this question. It was her opinion that the compensatory intensification of delight in little things that comes when larger things have been renounced is God-given. Why should He have scattered such playthings as sunbeams and kittens along the thorny way if they were not to be exclaimed over and enjoyed?
And between the terrible and the comic there came that prayer for those one loved but from whom one was parted; for William and Marianne and little Véronique. There, as so many times, the prayer life had to be lived by faith, for no word ever came back to her that God in His mercy had let her share in their lives. William never wrote to her at all, and Marianne’s duty letters were so stereotyped as to be almost completely noninformative, and Véronique’s exquisitely written little epistles, occasionally blotted with tears and always obviously dictated by her mother, told her nothing whatever about the child except that she must be obedient and good, or she’d not have consented to be kept from play to trace so carefully, and with tears, those ridiculous, laborious, stilted phrases to an unknown aunt. Poor little Véronique! If that was the kind of letter that Marianne dictated to her, then she doubted if Véronique had quite the right kind of mother. And William, who was no doubt a most indulgent father, must be away from Véronique through the greater part of every day. Surely the little thing was frightened sometimes, playing alone in a garden that Marguerite pictured as entirely surrounded by dark forests full of prowling beasts and marauding savages? Through many hours did she pray for the child that she might not be afraid, trying to send that little girl Marguerite Le Patourel to play with her in the lonely garden. She felt sometimes emptied of all joy, old and weary beyond words, as though the little girl in her who so scandalized her superiors had gone away. But she could not see her running up and down the garden paths with Véronique, or sitting on her bed when she was frightened in the night. She could only have faith that her emptiness and weariness were endured to some purpose for this child with whom she felt so curiously at one.
She knew, though she had never been told, how greatly William loved Véronique, and she imagined sometimes that she felt the intensity of his love reaching out through the child to herself. Though he never wrote to her at all, she had never lost her sense of union with him, only now she felt it not directly but through the child. That was as it should be, she thought, for she had never ceased to pray, as she imagined he had commanded her, that his marriage to Marianne should be blest; and the right recipe for a happy marriage was surely the fruit of a loving and beloved child. She found no cause for jealousy in the thought that she reached him now through the child. As day by day and night by night she held him in her consciousness, following his doings, saying, “Now it is morning on the other side of the world and he will be going out to the forest. Now it is midday and he will be felling his trees. Now it is evening and he will be turning homeward,” it was hand in hand with Véronique that she was with him, and it is not possible to be jealous of a child whose hand has been put trustingly into one’s own. . . . But sometimes she felt she would have given years of her life to have known that life was the easier for him because she lived and prayed, that sometimes in his thoughts of Véronique she had a part, that just now and then, when the stars were bright as they had been that night on the Orion, he remembered that night. . . . But this latter wish was not seemly, and when it thrust itself into Marguerite’s mind, Sister Clare resolutely put it from her.
And turned with considerable effort to think lovingly of Marianne. The thinking of Marianne did not require effort, but the thinking lovingly. It was disgraceful that effort shou
ld be required after all these years, and when she did most truly love her sister, but thoughts of the Orion always touched up that sore place that Marianne’s behavior that night had left in her heart. . . . If Marianne had just not turned up at that particular juncture, that moment of perfect union that she had had with William would not have been torn off in the middle, leaving this sore that had never quite healed. . . . Poor Marianne, how could she possibly have known that she was interrupting something that ought not to have been interrupted?
Marguerite was praying in her cell one winter’s day, conscious that though it was daytime and winter in France, it was a summer night in New Zealand, when there slid before the dark curtain of her closed eyelids one of those strange little pictures that often came to her when she was praying, or when she was lying on her bed in the darkness between sleeping and waking. They were puzzling pictures of some unknown scene, some unknown face, and seemed to have no sense in them and no connection with anything or anybody she knew. Generally she dismissed them as mere fanciful images, but just occasionally she wondered if perhaps they were not quite so senseless as they seemed.
Today the picture that sprang up as she prayed was that of a snow-covered mountain peak crowned by moon and stars. She stood upon this peak and the air was cold and rarefied, the air that she loved, and the austerity of the snows was the austerity of her own special country. From this height she looked down upon the darkness of a great forest, a darkness that she felt to be full of danger. Far down at the foot of her mountain there was a sort of chimney in the forest roof, and inside it, lit by the moonlight, she could see a conical hill crowned by some queer fortification of fences and ditches, and at the foot of the hill was a village of thatched huts. As she watched dark figures came out of the huts, running toward the hill. . . . Marianne. Marianne. . . . The little picture faded as quickly as it had come but it left the thought of danger coupled in her mind with the thought of her sister for whom she was praying. With all the strength that she had, her whole being reaching out toward Marianne in love, she prayed that she might be preserved from harm.