Monica was scarcely conscious of withdrawing her attention. As a child she had never listened to sermons, and now that she was a grown woman she had never re-considered her position; she was one of the many who feel that it is quite enough to be present while a sermon is being preached. If the Dean had been conscious of her state of mind, he would have recognized it sadly and without condemnation. He had never concurred in the opinion held by many of his brother clergy that learning and eloquence are forms of worldly indulgence to be eschewed; he tried to preach as well as he could. But he had not risen to a deanery without knowing how many people resent being asked to use their heads in church.
What should I tell him, thought Monica? He’ll let me have all the time I want, I know, but it isn’t fair to him to dawdle, as though I were the only person concerned. She began to run over Domdaniel’s letter in her head; it had come three days ago, and she had read and re-read it until she had it by heart:
I can’t think of any way of putting this gradually [it had begun] so I’ll say it at once, and not make two bites of the cherry: will you marry me?
Your immediate decision, I am certain, will be to say no. I understand how you felt about Giles, and I am not such a fool as to think that I would ever command love of that sort from you or anyone. Certainly this is the wrong time to write to you in this vein, but I have been quite unable to help it. Because I love you.
He wouldn’t say that unless he really meant it, thought Monica. He’s always terribly direct. The people who call him Brum Benny only see his formal, courteous manner, and they mistake it for palaver. But he’s never said a thing to me he didn’t mean. If he says he loves me, he does.
As she pondered this unaccustomed sensation of being loved, the Dean was getting into his sermon. —
Education is learning; and learning is apprehension — in the old sense of sympathetic perception. We cannot all perceive the facts of our experience in the same way. As we draw near to the sacred season of Christmas we may fitly turn our attention to the ways in which the birth of Our Lord was perceived by those who first knew of it. Much has been made of the splendour of the vision of the shepherds, as told by St Luke. But so far as I know, little has been said of the fact that it needed an angel and a multitude of the heavenly host to call it to the attention of these good men that something out of the ordinary had happened. Nothing short of a convulsion of nature (if I may so call it without irreverence) could impress them, and the Gospel tells us that they praised God “for all the things that they had heard and seen”. There are many now, as then and always, who learn — who apprehend — only by what they can hear and see, and the range of what they can hear and see is not extensive. And, alas, instructive interruptions of the natural order are as few today as they were two thousand years ago. . .
Nevertheless, no girl thinks very much about marrying a man seriously older than herself, and one whom she has respected as a being far above her, and a figure of world renown in his particular form of art. How had he written of that? —
I am old enough to be your father; nevertheless you must take my word for it that I am still young enough to be a lover. But I will not deceive you; at my age love is not, and never can be, the whole significance of life. I have known enough of love in my own experience, and seen enough of it in the lives of other people, to have some fear of it, as well as the awe and delight which it inspires. I cannot say, I will be young for you, because that would be folly; let me say that I will be the best that is in me for you. I do not ask you to love me as you might a young man, but to love me, if you can, for what I am.
If you say that this cannot be, I shall understand very well why; but do not suppose that I shall not be downcast. It would be dishonest to say, as a younger man might have every excuse for doing, that my love for you is the whole of my life. At my age, my work is bound to be the mainspring of my existence. But if you were with me, my work would have a sweeter savour. Because it is your work, too, I know that you will understand this, and not think that I am being either cool or pompous. You are the custodian of an important musical tradition — you know how Giles wanted his songs to be sung. I do not seek to intrude on that, but I think I could be helpful with it.
Your work, too! like being called a fellow-artist! Still, he was fifty-four — or was it fifty-five, now? And there was Giles’ voice, hatefully bawdy, as she had last heard it on the train to Venice —
I lay with an old man all the night —
How dare Giles! But what would people say? That she had done it to be Lady Domdaniel. What would Alice make of that? Oh, Alice! Family always knew where to dig the knife in! But Giles, Giles was not someone who could be put aside. Particularly not when she had failed him so disastrously.
But could she not admit, now, that when she found him seemingly dead on the floor, beneath her revulsion from his blackened face, her stunning loss, her self-accusation, there had been — perceptible for an instant and then banished as a blasphemy against her love — a pang of relief, of release? Should she not clarify her thought? No! Let others talk of clarity. It is a sautery too terrible to be applied to one’s own most secret wounds. Perhaps, working for a worthy perpetuation of his work, there might be atonement. And, after atonement, a recognition of what she had felt in that instant of naked truth.
Meanwhile the Dean was continuing with his sermon:
If the shepherds needed a prodigy to stir them, the Wise Men needed no more than a hint, a new star amid the host of heaven. In art, and especially the Christmas card art which will so soon be with us, that star is usually represented as a monstrous illumination which a mole might see. That is so that the shepherds among us may understand without a painful sense of insufficiency the legend of the Kings. For legend it is; the Gospel tells us but little of these men, but legend has set their number at three, and has given them melodious names. The legend calls them Kings, and Kings they were indeed in the realm of apprehension, of perception, for they were able to read a great message in a small portent. We dismiss great legends at our peril, for they are the riddling voices by means of which great truths buried deep in the spirit of man offer themselves to the world. Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar stand as models of those — few, but powerful at any time — who have prepared themselves by learning and dedication to know great mysteries when the time is ripe for them to be apprehended by man. . .
Of course a girl really wanted a lover who was hers alone, who had never loved anyone else — or at least not seriously — and who promised to give everything to love. That was what all the magazines which were dismissed as “cheap” said, and the cheap magazines were right; that was why cheap magazines sold in hundreds of thousands, instead of in tens, like Lantern. But even at twenty-four, one could see that sometimes these knights, when they appeared, had a way of dwindling into something like Chuck Proby, who was probably living for love if you gave him the benefit of every doubt, but who never mentioned it, and seemed to be making a hard struggle of it. Or a sobersides like George Medwall, who was so proud of the fact that Teresa would not have to work after their marriage, but who saw life in terms of accretion — get some money, get a wife, get a house, get some children, get a bigger house, get more money — all for love, but the world hopelessly lost somewhere along the line. Domdaniel made no pretence: