The Greater Trumps

  “And what,” Mr. Coningsby said, as if this riddle were entirely unanswerable, “what do you call the hypothesis of Christianity?”

  “The Deity of Love and the Incarnation of Love?” Sybil suggested, adding, “Of course, whether you agree with it is another thing.”

  “Certainly I agree with Christianity,” Mr. Coningsby said. “Perhaps I shouldn’t put it quite like that. It’s a difficult thing to define. But I don’t see how the damnatory clauses——”

  However, there they reached the church, Nancy thought, as she looked at the old small stone building, that if Henry was right about the dance, then this member of it must be sitting out some part of the time on some starry stair. Nothing less mobile had ever been imagined. But her intelligence reminded her, even as she entered, that the apparent quiescence, the solidity, the attributed peace of the arched doorway was one aspect of what, in another aspect, was a violent and riotous conflict of … whatever the latest scientific word was. Strain and stress were everywhere; the very arch held itself together by extreme force; the latest name for matter was Force, wasn’t it? Electrical nuclei or something of that sort. If this antique beauty was all made of electrical nuclei, there might be—there must be—a dance going on somewhere in which even that running figure with the balls flying over it in curves would be outpaced. She herself outpaced Sybil by a step and entered the pew first.

  And she then, as she knelt decorously down, was part of the dance; she was the flying feet passing and re-passing; she was the conjunction of the images whose movements the cards symbolized and from which they formed the prophecy of her future. “A man shall owe you everything”—everything? Did she really want Henry to owe her everything, or did she—against her own quick personal desire—desire rather that there should be something in him to which she owed everything? “And a woman shall govern you”—that was the most distasteful of all; she had no use at all for women governing her; anyhow, she would like to see the woman who would do it. “And you shall die very rich”—by this time she had got up from her knees and had sat down again—well, that was very fortunate. If it meant what it said—“You shall die very rich”—but the forms of Death and the Devil and the Queen of Chalices had danced round her, and the words shook her with threat, with promise, with obscure terror. But what could even that do to harm her while Henry and she together dared it? While that went on, it was true in its highest and most perfect meaning; if that went on, she would die very rich.

  A door opened; the congregation stirred; a voice from the vestry said, “Hymn 61. ‘Christians, awake,’ Hymn 61.” Everyone awoke, found the place, and stood up. The choir started at once on the hymn and the procession. Nancy docilely sent her voice along with them.

  Christians, awake, salute the happy morn,

  Whereon the Saviour of the world was born:

  Rise to a——

  Her voice ceased; the words stared up at her. The choir and the congregation finished the line——

  adore the mystery of love.

  “The mystery of love.” But what else was in her heart? The Christmas associations of the verse had fallen away; there was the direct detached cry, bidding her do precisely and only what she was burning to do. “Rise to adore the mystery of love.” What on earth were they doing, singing about the mystery of love in church? They couldn’t possibly be meaning it. Or were they meaning it and had she misunderstood the whole thing?

  The church was no longer a defense; it was itself an attack. From another side the waves of some impetuous and greater life swept in upon her. She turned her head abruptly towards Sybil, who felt the movement and looked back, her own voice pausing on “the praises of redeeming love.” Nancy, her finger pointing to the first of those great verses, whispered a question, “Is it true?” Sybil looked at the line, looked back at Nancy, and answered in a voice both aspirant and triumphant, “Try it, darling.” The tall figure, the wise mature face, the dark ineffable eyes, challenged, exhorted, and encouraged. Nancy throbbed to the voice that broke into the next couplet—“God’s highest glory was their anthem still.”

  She looked back at the hymn and hastily read it—it was really a very commonplace hymn, a very poor copy of verses. Only that one commanding rhythm still surged through her surrendered soul—“Rise to adore the mystery of love.” But now everyone else was shutting up hymn books and turning to prayer books; she took one more glance at the words, and did the same.

  The two lovers had run straight on—not straight on; they had been divided. Separately they had run up the second part of the way, separately each had danced with the skeleton. She could see them now, but more clearly even than them she remembered the Juggler—“neither God nor not God,” Henry had said—running to meet the unknown Fool. “Amen,” they were singing all round her; this wasn’t getting very far from the dance. It hadn’t occurred to her that there was so much singing, so much exchanging of voices, so much summoning and crying out in an ordinary church service. Sybil’s voice rose again—“As it was in the beginning, is now——” What was in the beginning and was now? Glory, glory.

  Nancy sat down for the Proper Psalms, though she was aware her father had looked at her disapprovingly behind Sybil’s back. It couldn’t be helped; her legs wouldn’t hold her up in the midst of these dim floods of power and adoration that answered so greatly to the power and adoration which abode in her heart, among these songs and flights of dancing words which wheeled in her mind and seemed themselves to become part of the light of the glorious originals of the Tarots.

  She was still rather overwhelmed when they came to the Athanasian Creed, and it may have been because of her own general chaos that even that despised formulary took part in the general break-up which seemed to be proceeding within her. All the first part went on in its usual way; she knew nothing about musical setting of creeds, so she couldn’t tell what to think of this one. The men and boys of the choir exchanged metaphysical confidences; they dared each other, in a kind of rapture—which, she supposed, was the setting—to deny the Trinity or the Unity; they pointed out, almost mischievously, that though they were compelled to say one thing, yet they were forbidden to say something else exactly like it; they went into particulars about an entirely impossible relationship, and concluded with an explanation that something wasn’t true which the wildest dream of any man but the compiler of the creed could hardly have begun to imagine. All this Nancy half ignored.

  But the second part—and it was of course the setting—for one verse held her. It was of course the setting, the chance that sent one boy’s voice sounding exquisitely through the church. But the words which conveyed that beauty sounded to her full of sudden significance. The mingled voices of men and boys were proclaiming the nature of Christ—“God and man is one Christ”; then the boys fell silent, and the men went on, “One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the manhood into God.” On the assertion they ceased, and the boys rushed joyously in, “One altogether, not”—they looked at the idea and tossed it airily away—“not by confusion of substance, but by unity”—they rose, they danced, they triumphed—“by unity, by unity”—they were silent, all but one, and that one fresh perfection proclaimed the full consummation, each syllable rounded, prolonged, exact—“by unity of person.”

  It caught the young listening creature; the enigmatic phrase quivered with beautiful significance. Sybil at her side somehow answered to it; she herself perhaps—she herself in love. Something beyond understanding but not beyond achievement showed itself, and then the choir were plunging through the swift record of the Christhood on earth, and once more the attribution of eternal glory rose and fell—“is now,” “is now—and ever shall be.” Then they were all kneeling down and the vicar was praying in ritual utterance of imperial titles for “our sovereign lord King George.”

  For the rest of the service Nancy moved and rose and sat and knelt according to the ritual, without being very conscious of what was going on. She felt two modes of
being alternating within her—now the swift rush of her journey in the car, of her own passion, of the images seen in the night, of the voices roaring upward in the ceremonies of Christmas; now again the pause, the silence and full restraint of the Emperor, of Sybil, of her own expectation, of that single voice declaring unity, of the Fool amid the dance of the night. She flew with the one; she was suspended with the other; and, with downcast eyes and parted lips, she sought to control her youth till one should disappear or till both should come together. Everything was different from what it had so lately seemed; even the two who sat beside her. Her respect for her aunt had become something much more like awe. “Try it, darling,” was a summons to her from one who was a sibyl indeed. Her father was different too. He seemed no more the absurd, slightly despicable, affected and pompous and irritating elderly man whom she had known; all that was unimportant. He walked alone, a genie from some other world, demanding of her something which she had not troubled to give. If she would not find out what that was, it was no good blaming him for the failure of their proper relation. She, she only, was to blame; the sin lay in her heart whenever that heart set itself against any other. He might be funny sometimes, but she herself was very funny sometimes. Aunt Sybil had told her she didn’t love anyone; and she had been slightly shocked at the suggestion. The color swept into her cheeks as she thought of it, sitting still during the sermon. But everything would be different now. She would purify herself before she dared offer herself to Henry for the great work he contemplated.

  At lunch it appeared that his ordinary work, however, was going to occupy him for the afternoon as well as the morning. He apologized to her for this in a rather troubled way, and she mocked him gently.

  “Father’s going,” she said, “and you’ll be shut up. It’ll be perfect heaven to look at the furniture or read a murder story—only your grandfather doesn’t seem to have many murder stories, does he, darling? All his literature seems so very serious, and quite a lot of it’s in foreign languages. But there’s yesterday’s newspaper, if I’m driven to it.”

  “I must do it,” Henry said, rather incoherently. “There’s no other way.”

  “Where there’s a will there’s a way,” she said. “You haven’t got the will, Henry. You don’t think the world’s well lost for me.”

  “I’ve a will for what’s useful,” he said, so seriously that she was startled.

  “I know you have, dearest,” she said. “I’m not annoying you, am I? You sounded as if you were going to do something frightfully important, that I hadn’t a notion of.”

  He found no answer to that, but wandered off and stood looking out of the window into the frosty clearness of the day. He dared not embrace her lest she should feel his heart beating more intensely than ever it had beaten for his love; nor speak lest his voice should alarm her sensitive attention to wonder what he purposed. It was one thing to see what had to be done, and if it had not been for Nancy he could have done it easily enough, he thought. But to sit at lunch with her and “the murdered man.” If she ever knew, would she understand? She must, she must! If she didn’t, then he had told his grandfather rightly that all his intention was already doomed. But if she did, if she could see clearly that her father’s life was little compared to the restoration of the Tarots, so that in future there might be a way into the mystical dance, and from within their eyes might see it, from within they—more successful than Joanna—might govern the lesser elements, and perhaps send an heir to all their knowledge out into the world. If they perished, they perished in an immense effort, and no lesser creature, though it were Nancy’s father or his own—though it were Nancy herself, should she shrink—must be allowed to stand in the way. She would understand when she knew; but till she had learned more he dared not tell her. It would be, he told himself, cruel to her; the decision for both of them must be his.

  The somber determination brooded over the meal. As if a gray cloud had overcast the day and the room, those sitting at the table were dimmed and oppressed by the purpose which two of them cherished. Aaron’s eyes fixed themselves, spasmodically and anxiously, on the women whom his business was to amuse; Henry once or twice, in a sudden sharp decision, looked up at Mr. Coningsby, who went on conversing about Christmas lunches he had known, about lunches in general, the ideal lunch, the discovery of cooking, fire, gas-fires, air, space, modern science, science in the Press, the present state of newspapers, and other things. Sybil assisted him, more talkative than usual, because the other three were more silent. Nancy felt unexpectedly tired and chilly, though the room was warm enough. A natural reaction of discouragement took her, a natural—yet to her unnatural—disappointment with Henry. Her eyes went to him at intervals, ready to be placated and delighted, but no answering eyes met hers. She saw him, once, staring at his own hands, and she looked at them too, without joy, as if they were two strange instruments working at a little-understood experiment. The dark skin, the long fingers, the narrow wrists—the hands that had struck and caressed hers, to which she had given her free kisses, which she had pressed and stroked and teased—they were so strange that they made her union with them strange; they were inhuman, and their inhumanity crept deeper into the chill of her being. Her glance swept the table; five pairs of hands were moving there, all alien and incomprehensible. Prehensile … monkeys swaying in the trees, not monkeys … something more than monkeys. She felt Sybil looking at her and refused to look back. Her father’s voice maddened her; he was still talking—stupid, insane talk. He a Warden in Lunacy! He was a lunatic himself, the worse for being uncertifiable. Oh, why didn’t he die?

  A fork and spoon tinkled. Mr. Coningsby was saying that forks came in with Queen Elizabeth. She said, quite unexpectedly, “In Swift’s time people used to say ‘Queen Elizabeth’s dead’ instead of ‘Queen Anne’s dead.’”

  Henry’s hand jerked on the cloth, like some reptile just crawled up from below the table. She went on perversely, “Did you know that, Henry?”

  He answered abruptly, “No,” and so sharp was the syllable that it left all five of them in silence, a silence in which either Elizabeth or Anne might have passed from a world she knew to a world she could not imagine. Sybil broke it by saying, “It was the change of dynasty that made their ends so important, I suppose? No one ever said ‘George II is dead,’ did they?”

  “Aren’t we being rather morbid?” Aaron asked, in a kind of high croak, almost as if the reptile Nancy had imagined had begun to speak. Cold … cold … and cold things making discordant noises. Oh, this wouldn’t do; she was being silly She made an effort and reminded herself that this was Mr. Lee speaking—and it was a gloomy conversation; not so much gloomy as horrid. Everyone was unnatural—at least, Henry was unnatural, and her father was overwhelmingly natural, and Mr. Lee … He was saying something else. She bent her attention to it.

  “There are some manuscripts,” he was saying, “you might like to look at this afternoon. Some poems, parts of a diary, a few letters.”

  “I should like to very much,” Sybil said. “What sort of a man does he seem to have been?”

  “I’m afraid I’ve not read them carefully enough to know,” Aaron replied. “He was, of course, disappointed; the cause had been ruined, and his career with it.”

  Sybil smiled. “He believed that?” she asked. “But how foolish of him!”

  Henry said, “Is it foolish to give oneself to a purpose and die if it perishes?”

  “Disproportioned, don’t you think?” Sybil suggested. “One might die rather than forsake a cause, but if the cause forsakes you——? They’re pathetic creatures, your lonely romantics. They can’t bear to be mistaken.”

  Nancy shivered again. Even Sybil’s lovely voice couldn’t help giving the word “mistaken” rather a heavy and fatal sound. “Mistaken”—utterly mistaken. To mistake everything life had concentrated in, to be wrong, just wrong.… Oh, at last the meal was ending. She got up and followed her aunt and Aaron to the drawing-room, loathing herself and every
body else, and especially the manuscript relics of the unfortunate peer.

  Henry saw Mr. Coningsby off. “Which way shall you go?” he asked.

  “I shall walk as far as the village and back,” his guest said. “If I see the vicar I shall congratulate him on the service this morning—bright, short, and appropriate. A very neat little sermon too. Quiet and convincing.”

  “What was it about?” Henry said, against his will trying to delay the other. He looked at him curiously: “bright, short, and appropriate” were hardly the words for the thing that was gathering round him who had spoken. The reared tower of his life was already shaking; and it was Henry whose hand pushed it.

  “Oh, behaving kindly—and justly,” Mr. Coningsby said. “Very suitable to the villagers who go. Well, I mustn’t delay. I’ll be off.”

  “Take care you take the left path at the division as you come back,” Henry said.