TEMPLES

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 851, 20 December 1929, Page 3 (Supplement)

TEMPLES

By ROBIN HYDE

'll!' -371 lisht . wa ® like a broken golden lance, gleaming down from the tall Pointed window which had been !>jO_U3rCi t ‘ eslgned by a man of Italy. This i©j ,' va ? in t con iPlinient to Lucia. David’s . A —* , e . ,ta^au wife, who leaned now the short veil of her hat like a little grey cloud about her eyes, against the smooth wood of the pew.

The broken lance was appropriate enough, when one looked - as David Western never dared to do—at the fare of the young knight who watched them from the stained glass window That had been Lucia’s choosing, and there was nothing Italian about it—rather the clean grave simplicity of a knight of Arthur’s court.- not Galahad, w ho was a little too high and far’away from the world to have that look of the morntng on his brow. Gareth, perhaps, when he first saw the blue mists wreathed about Camelot and the slim bright rivers lacing England’s green gown. A young knight, very full of faith in his king and iu some legendary lady, and in the fairness of earth.

He didn’t think, if he had seen that window before Lucia had finalised her choice, that he could have borne to put it here, in this place which was his remembrance to Colin, his son and. a long way after Colin, to those other New Zealand boys who had gone away laughing and adventurous from this sleepy little town, and who had never come back. The young knight was too much like moments of Colin—it hurt, to see steadfast eyes that were familiar, yet to know that they would never sparkle into the smile that he loved.

He was troubled for Lucia. She came every year to this memorial service, but every year, though he had never seen her weep, or heard a word .from her lips, he wondered whether she could go through with it. These Italian women were made to be wives and mothers —Raphael’s calm, round-breasted young madonnas, the serenity of perfect fulfilment in their eyes, could have happened in no other countries. Lucia had been a charming wife—yet he knew that the grace and the happiness of her marriage was nothing compared with her motherhood. Colin was her only son. He had seen hpr fail in her duty toward his England only once. That was the night before Colin went away. She had come into his room, a wild-eyed distraught little shadow of a woman, racked with great sobs that tore to pieces all the comfort he had to give her. She could only gasp, “No—No—-don’t let him go away . . .” and what could he do but hold her very close, shutting the door of that tragic room, so that Colin could not hear? It was all over in the morning, and she had been the composed, smiling little Lucia that even the news of Colin’s death had not shaken. That night of parting was. as far as she was concerned, Colin’s death, ft had frozen her, drugged her, so that she walked courageously as befitted an Englishman’s wife, but in a dream. If Colin had come back, anil put his young arms round her neck, the spell would have been broken. 'Well. Colin never came back, and David's household now was a young knight in a stained-glass window, and the painting of a bereaved Madonna. Sometimes he was a little afraid of Lucia. He felt something of the debt that men, good and peaceful men who accept war, owe to the mothers of their sons.

Thirteen years—and his thoughts went back to the bewildered time, a few days before he had heard of Colin’s death. He wondered if that news would have made any difference to his interview with that odd, gipsyish little person. Gay Reynolds, Colin’s war bride! He remembered, on the day when she had come into his library, wearing funny scarlet shoes and a short, cheap frock, what immense irritation had risen in him against the young women who had somehow got their incongruous artificial silks tangled up with the stately tapestry of gallantry and sacrifice which was War. •

He knew something about Gay Reynolds's parentage for his position as the almost feudal ruler of the sleepy little town necessitated that he should know every man by name, keep track of illnesses and deaths, send gifts to marriages and christenings, help families to make the best of the very bad jobs that their young people sometimes decided to become.

Gay’s father had been a remittance nmn—and the remittances, it seemed, were rather slow of arrival in these days: but the Reynolds house was not a case, deserving or undeserving, for charity. The sale ot sly grog to the Maoris of a dry district meant money, even when one deducted the occasional fines with which the police fondly believed they upheld their morel. Gay’s mother was a washed-out little person, with a tendency toward gaudiness in colours. And Gay herself—nobody could deny the child looks, of the *ort that fray thin after two or three years on a dairy farm Just then, at eighteen, she was impertinently pretty,' the mouth sweet and f-esh beneath its strange disguise of paint, the nose tilted in a manner which David, used to English women and Italian madonnas, had learned to dislike.

He had never discouraged Colin’s attendants, at those queer little town dances. In point o: fact liis money had built the hall, and if he hac been younger, or less absorbed in the cooi sweetness of his own home, he would have gone himself. He had an English picture ol’ jollity, occasional wildflower grace among cheery red faces and workmanly hands, village romances ending in the happy-ever-after style belonging to fairy tales. It was all like a folksong to him — his possession of the little town which had been left stranded and poverty-stricken after a gold boom in the early days, the allotments of farm and orchard on which he had settled, free, most of the stranded, the pride which the people had learned to take in him. But he had left modern youth out of his calculations, and most of all, ht had completely failed to keep proper track of his own son, Colin.

Qn the day Gay had come to his library, self-assured, yet, as 'his memory uncomfortably whispered, rather white about the mouth, he had been looking through the window at Lucia. Below was a little green jewel of garden, very secret, because of the tall hedges of plumbago, the blue flowers so deeply sapphire that they seemed to belong to the meadows of the sky. Lucia was sitting there among the flowers, and in front of lier, dangling from a silver tree with a friendly, crooked arm, was an empty swing. Colin had particularly enjoyed holding his little mother on that swing, pushing it high up into the gold and green world of leaves and filtered light. She sat there now, no doubt watching the laughter and hearing the nonsense of a boyish ghost. He turned from this, to see Gay Reynolds: and she was telling him that she and Colin were married. Just why she bothered to tell him, he couldn't quite grasp. But he grasped the picture of Gay. red sandals and cheap frock and cheaper earrings; -and behind her, in the very same doorway, stood the shadow of Colin as David had seen him last —such a gallant shadow, grave only for one

moment of fared-ell, that David could hardly bea to think of him. He had looked at Gay with eyes that did not see her, and told her what lie thought about modern woman. It made things different, of course, when one had lived with a woman who understood the meaning of beauty. The young girls—girls of today—were supposed to he self-sacrificing. Need they, need Gay, have sacrificed quite so much—thtir dignity, their womanhood, the comeliness of modesty? And weren’t they asking something of a price for these precious gifts? She was Colin’s bride, she said. Would she be kind enough to come to the window, and consider whether Colin’s son, if he ever had one, would he quite so fortunate in his mother as Colin had been? And she had stood looking at Lucia, not saying B word: her defiant little back turned to him. “Colin’s mother,” he said. “You’ve sacrificed her, too. She thinks of him as something you couldn’t possibly understand—a peer of the young men who’ve done the things that make history, and life, a little better than sickening. As far as

she’s concerned, he’s in white armour. J. suppose you'll laugh at that. If he should die” —that was the knife in his own heart—“he’ll be in a shrine to her. At least, he would have been. You’ve made him as cheap as yourself—one of the sensual young fools who dance to forget, and drink to forget, and marry for the same reason: to forget their own unmanliness. And he wasn’t like that. I don’t know how you got him. You must have caught hold of his loneliness. Youth, of course, going away from the garden of youth, and we old people didn't know how to comfort him ”

"It doesn’t occur to you that he might have loved me.” she had said. And then, without another word, she had walked out of the room. He had never seen her again. He had known, for years now. that he had been a brute; but he was not really sorry. Lucia had her knight of the steadfast face. If such an accursed thing as War had to be, at least, thank God that he had saved so much for Lucia. The service was over, and people went past, quietly, down the aisle. A woman passed him. slim, dressed in black, her arm held by a lad of about thirteen years. From Lucia, at his side, he heard a queer little gasp, like the cry of a wounded hird.

His arm caught her. “Lucia, little one—Lucia, what is it? You shouldn’t have come today.” Her hand was pressed against the bosom of* her dress. Her voice was strange, but the really terrible thing was that her eyes were alive. They had never been alive; never, since Colin went a wav.

“That. . . . boy . . .” she whispered, “that boy. going out. He has Colin’s eyes.” “You’re dreaming, dear. You’ve been looking too long at the knight.” “Knight!” she laughed. “Those weren’t a knight’s eyes: just a little boy's—’’And suddenly, she fell on her knees, and was weeping as he had not known any woman could weep. And then a memory came back to him, as he watched the slim, black-cloaked figure of the strange woman, walking slowly down the path. It was absurd, but it had a likeness to a memory; it was like that defiantly straight little back of Gay Reynolds. She had carried herself like a soldier.

Very late that night, he lay awake. And lie knew that Lucia -would be waking too. her mind saying over and over that dreadful refrain that at last he had silenced on her lip3—“Just a little boy.”

He had given her a young knight, liis armoui stainless, no love less stately than England’s in his heart. Painted Madonna and shadow of a

stained glass -window, they had kept a brave love between them. But what had he taken from his living wife? “Their sons—their The words drifted back to him from a book written by a man who was killed in the War. And then there were jumbled shadowy pictures of Colin in the library, Colin swinging his mother up into the green leaf-world under that silver tree, Colin, only a little boy, with blue eyes laughing in such a fat, merry face. And there were words from an old poem—poems and music and ghosts, there should be some charm for the exorcism of these! Yet he couldn’t forget the words— But I think, in the lives oj most men and women, All things would be smooth and even — If only—the dead could find out when To come back, and be forgiven. Suddenly he buried his face in the pillows. He was like Lucia. He didn’t want a saint. He wanted a son. * * * David started liis inquiries after Gay quietly

enough. Finding her wouldn’t be everything. How did he know if, for Lucia's sake, she would turn that straight little back of hers, and show them the young son who walked by her side? In Lucia’s name, he had denied her any part in Colin. Why should she allow them a share in Colin’s boy? And he couldn’t bear that Lucia should be disappointed. She must think the boy’s blue eyes a chance likeness until he had found Gay and spoken with her. He found her, after a brief enough search. For she had come back to the village. Her gaudylittle mother was dead, it appeared, and the ex-remittance man, a red-faced, white-haired giant with a voice like a sea-captain's lay on a bed from which he would never get up. David furrowed his brow over this. The nursing of a paralysed father, a red-faced old bully who still, it was said, stormed and shouted like a wild animal if a fair percentage of his own moonshine whisky w-as kept from him, seemed womanly enough. But, woman or chit or virago. Gay was nothing to him: he wanted to- see the boy Yet he asked her informative neighbour: “Why did the girl come home? That, old fury eould have gone to the hospital.” The gossip sniffed. “Lucky- enough she is to get a home,” she stated. “There’s no sign of a lather Cor that boy of hers. She wears a wedding ring, ’deed, but when I asked her her married name, she drew herself up, pertly as you like. ‘Reynolds is my name, Mrs. Wicks,’ she says, and walks off.” David also walked off, his teeth set. Loyalty and pride—and perhaps love, since she still wore his boy’s ring—these were queer qualities to find in a cheap little girl who wore vulgar frocks and painted her mouth. He'd honestly never thought of the position in which his interview had placed her. Well, if he found her again . . . perhaps . . .

And then he had no need to find her, for she was there, a white-faced, distracted little thing, running, in spite of her clumsy black frock. She caught at his sleeve not seeing who he was. “Ob, please—Colin—”

Then she did see, and looked at him, her eyes blazing. “You’ve come to see us out of the road, haven’t you?” she asked. “I was expecting you. You wanted things all to yourself—well, now you’ve got them.” She was crying, little breathless sobs.

"What do you mean, got them?’’ he asked harshly. “Where’s the hoy?”

“Some children said he went down the old mine.”, she said. "He’s always hearing, from my l’ather in there, how people used to make fortunes, and when he went out today, he waved his hand and said ‘l’ll bring back a fortune for you,

Mother.* I thought it was just play —but they say he’s gone down—oh, you know how dangerous it is! I looked everywhere and I can’t find him. I came for help—oh, why am I wasting time with you? I want a man who’ll help—” “Come on,” he said. And when she put her hand to her side, her breath gone, his arm Went round her shoulders, and he helped her on.

The mouth of the old shaft was fenced around, and weeds and grasses choked it. A desolate He couldn’t bear to think of Colin in that grim darkness. “.Wait here.’* he said. But a few paces farther, he noticed that she was following, and smiled at her. “Little Briton,” he said, and the startled look in her eyes hurt him like a blow. Then there was darkness and the winding of a passage where moistures oozed cold and evil, and his heart was torn, to think of Colin lost in this place. Just a little boy . . . then his foot stumbled against something, and the strangest feeling in the world came over him. On a dark night, ever so many years ago, he had carried Colin home, just like this.

“The air's poisoned,” he called, “but 1 don’t think lie’s hurt. “And a clean wind was blowing against their faces, a sky almost unreally blue and bright overhead, when, a few minutes later, he saw that funny little smile of Colin’s —a smile lost for thirteen years. She had turned her face toward him, and he saw how life had made it soft, yet strong—such a face as may found this country’s galleries, giving it a beauty as proud as any of England or Italy. Darid’s eyes were wet, knowing at last the wisdom of the eyes of youth. “Thank you,” she said, quietlj r . But David could not let her turn away again. “My dear,” he said, “if you’d only come home.”