“Because,” the stranger went on—and Spandrell noticed that he was never still, but must always be smiling, frowning, lifting eyebrows, cocking his head on one side or another, writhing his body in a perpetual ecstasy of self-consciousness—“because a man shall cleave unto his wife and they shall be one flesh. One flesh,” he repeated, and accompanied the words by a more than ordinary writhe of the body and a titter. He caught Spandrell’s eye, blushed and, to keep himself in countenance, hastily emptied his glass.
“What do you think, Mr. Spandrell?” asked the barmaid as she turned to reach for the brandy bottle.
“Of what? Of being one flesh?” The barmaid nodded. “H’m. As a matter of fact I was just envying the Governor General of South Melanesia and Lady Ethelberta Todhunter for being so unequivocally two fleshes. If you were called the Governor General of South Melanesia,” he went on, addressing himself to the withered choirboy, “and your wife was Lady Ethelberta Todhunter, do you imagine you’d be one flesh?” The stranger wriggled like a worm on a hook. “Obviously not. It would be shocking if you were.”
The stranger ordered another whiskey. “But joking apart,” he said, “the sacrament of marriage …”
“But why should two people be unhappy?” persisted the barmaid, “when it isn’t necessary.”
“Why shouldn’t they be unhappy?” Spandrell enquired. “Perhaps it’s what they’re here for. How do you know that the earth isn’t some other planet’s hell.”
A positivist, the barmaid laughed. “What rot!”
“But the Anglicans don’t regard it as a sacrament,” Spandrell continued.
The choirboy writhed indignantly. “Do you take me for an Anglican?”
The working day was over; the bar began to fill up with men in quest of spiritual relaxation. Beer flowed, spirits were measured out in little noggins, preciously. In stout, in bitter, in whiskey they bought the equivalents of foreign travel and mystical ecstasy; of poetry and weekend with Cleopatra, of big game-hunting and music. The choirboy ordered another drink.
“What an age we live in!” he said, shaking his head. “Barbarous. Such abysmal ignorance of the most rudimentary religious truths.”
“Not to mention hygienic truths,” said Spandrell. “These damp clothes! And not a window.” He pulled out his handkerchief and held it to his nose.
The choirboy shuddered and held up his hands. “But what a handkerchief!” he exclaimed, “what a horror!”
Spandrell held it out for inspection. “It seems to me a very nice handkerchief,” he said. It was a silk bandana, red, with bold patterns in black and pink. “Extremely expensive, I may add.”
“But the colour, my dear sir. The colour!”
“I like it.”
“But not at this season of the year. Not between Easter and Whitsun. Impossible! The liturgical colour is white.” He pulled out his own handkerchief. It was snowy. “And my socks.” He lifted a foot.
“I wondered why you looked as though you were going to play tennis.”
“White, white,” said the choirboy. “It’s prescribed. Between Easter and Pentecost the chasuble must be predominantly white. Not to mention the fact that today’s the feast of St. Natalia the Virgin. And white’s the colour for all virgins who aren’t also martyrs.”
“I should have thought they were all martyrs,” said Spandrell. “That is, if they’d been virgins long enough.”
The swing door opened and shut, opened and shut. Outside was loneliness and damp twilight; within, the happiness of being many, of being close and in contact. The choirboy began to talk of little St. Hugh of Lincoln and St. Piran of Perranzabuloe, the patron saint of Cornish tin miners. He drank another whiskey and confided to Spandrell that he was writing the lives of the English saints, in verse.
“Another wet Derby,” prophesied a group of pessimists at the bar, and were happy because they could prophesy in company and with fine weather in their bellies and beery sunshine in their souls. The wet clothes steamed more suffocatingly than ever—a steam of felicity; the sound of talk and laughter was deafening. Into Spandrell’s face the withered choirboy breathed alcohol and poetry.
“To and fro, to and fro,
Piran of Perranzabuloe,”
he intoned. Four whiskeys had almost cured him of writhing and grimacing. He had lost his self-consciousness. The onlooker who was conscious of the self had gone to sleep. A few more whiskeys and there would be no more self to be conscious of.
“Walked weightless,”
he continued,
“Walked weightless on the heaving seas
Among the Cassiterides.”
“That was Piran’s chief miracle,” he explained; “walking from Land’s End to the Scilly Islands.”
“Pretty nearly the world’s record, I should think,” said Spandrell.
The other shook his head. “There was an Irish saint who walked to Wales. But I can’t remember his name. Miss!” he called. “Here! Another whiskey, please.”
“I must say,” said Spandrell, “you seem to make the best of both worlds. Six whiskeys …”
“Only five,” the choirboy protested. “This is only the fifth.”
“Five whiskeys, then, and the liturgical colours. Not to mention St. Piran of Perranzabuloe. Do you really believe in that walk to the Scillies?”
“Absolutely.”
“And here’s for young Sacramento,” said the barmaid, pushing his glass across the counter.
The choirboy shook his head as he paid. “Blasphemies all round,” he said. “Every word another wound in the Sacred Heart.” He drank. “Another bleeding, agonizing wound.”
“What fun you have with your Sacred Heart!”
“Fun?” said the choirboy indignantly.
“Staggering from the bar to the altar rails. And from the confessional to the bawdy house. It’s the ideal life. Never a dull moment. I envy you.”
“Mock on, mock on!” He spoke like a dying martyr. “And if you knew what a tragedy my life has been, you wouldn’t say you envied me.”
The swing door opened and shut, opened and shut. God-thirsty from the spiritual deserts of the workshop and the office, men came as to a temple. Bottled and barrelled by Clyde and Liffey, by Thames, Douro and Trent, the mysterious divinity revealed itself to them. For the Brahmins who pressed and drank the soma, its name was Indra; for the hemp-eating yogis,
