custom of the Roman Church which sends its officers to fetch the Dead from their earthly home. We looked at one another ruefully, and the more vulgar of the two said: 'The village is minute, but they can hardly be back under five minutes. Let us, at all events, make an attempt on the crypt.' So we went hurriedly down the steps to the arch and under it into the darkness. One of us smoked, and remembered a match-box, and the match revealed that we were in a cement tunnel, the cement blackened and the whole thing gross. We crept forward by the light of a second match, and at the end of the tunnel was a bare stone altar, and to one side of it, on a stone slab, a large reliquary which contained, no doubt, the bones of Sara. The match went out. We turned back towards the twilit arch. Would it ever happen that we should return here in the May of some year to come, to see this altar lighted and illuminating the faces of kneeling gipsies, to see the gipsies crowding beyond the tunnel, filling the huge nave, packing the wooden galleries, while from the roof chapel, on ropes made of flowers, were lowered the reliquaries which contained the bones of the Holy Maries themselves? To climb to the chapel and see the reliquaries now was, even if taste could have been violated, an impossibility. The stairway to it was behind locked doors, and the sacristan was up there on the roof tolling the deep-toned bell. We gained the light and the air again owning to defeat. A charming alley faced us. Teetotal Street, St. Ives, of a late afternoon, and with an east wind blowing, is one of the beautiful smaller streets of the world; and there are other streets of memory and now this alley in Les Saintes is added to them. We had been taught that we should find the French version of an Irish village at its worst, but here was a pavé in perfect repair, and not a single heap of garbage from end to end of it, while gaily coloured shutters lay against or projected from cream-coloured walls under low red roofs, and the perspective ended in the gleam of a lagoon. For, while the sea was insistent on the ear, it was out of sight, while the lagoons were not; their uncertain margins could be glimpsed here and there. But when we reached the end of the alley, M. Lenthéric, after all, prevailed, for here was something horrible here was the cemetery, to take its place for evermore among nightmares. The noxious-looking sand, strewn with tamarisk bushes, sloped upwards to the stone barrier of a dyke, and one of the walls of the cemetery was contiguous with it, and huddled together on the sand within the battered iron gateway were French memorials (at all times shocking to English taste) in their most pitiable form. Leaning impudently was one dwarf ilex tree, dying imperviously while the waves reiterated their thumping moan. It was a sunless day, and the Mediterranean Sea, viewed from the dyke of Saintes-Maries, was neither the blue lake of schoolroom imagination, nor the racing, purging ocean of Northern latitudes. It was of a foul yellow, heaving viciously and resultlessly, for it neither withdrew along the belt of pallid sand with a cool swish, nor lashed it in conquest. Was it, perhaps, on a day such as this that the elderly emigrants from Palestine were landed on this unhealthy strand? If their spirits did not shrink within them it could only be because they had reached that limit of endurance where nothing matters. As we stood on the dyke with our backs to the sea there lay before us an infinity of flatness, an immensity of vacuousness, limpid, sombre, without visible horizon. It made one realise why mountains have been worshipped. It made the heart ache for the exiles gazing hopelessly nineteen centuries ago. And then came the practical reminder that sensitiveness to landscape is a modern disease. Very likely the party was only filled with pure thanksgiving to have reached terra firma at last. The details and the emotions of that vanished hour were not to be recaptured. We did not re-enter the alley to the church, for we feared that we might encounter the funeral procession. We took a detour to the right, and so realised Saintes-Maries to be, after all, a place not only of the dead, but of the living. For here were workmen employed in re-roofing a house; here was the little Palais de Justice, with a tower and a clock; here, round a corner where grappling irons and fishing nets were piled, a child of four years came hurtling-a French child, all charm, in a faded red pinafore; here there walked entwined two maidens of the South in striped skirts, and when he had passed them by, a young man, wheeling a bicycle, and with a gun slung over his shoulder, turned his head. Life was here. And as we neared the station we noticed that two or three villas had been recently erected, and were doubtless occupied by the families of the wireless operators. The wireless! From the station platform we gazed at it dumbly. It was impossible to arrange one's thoughts about it, to find thoughts that would not be, after all, trite. For too obvious was the contrast between the physical difficulties which attended the broadcasting of the Greatest Story in the world nineteen centuries ago from this very spot, and the magic ease with which these skeleton towers were distributing tidings of pathetic fatuousness. What will be the computation of wireless nineteen centuries hence? Will pilgrimages be made to the sites of wireless stations? One should not utter these commonplaces which are such riddles. The sky was of a pure cobalt, with little floating clouds of deeper blue, heralding the twilight, which came suddenly, and passed swiftly as we creaked our way among the lagoons. One small, rosy cloud hung suspended, and deepened to flame colour in the intensified blackness which finally blotted it out. There was one light twinkling on the plain far away, and that presently had gone too. Monotonously, one after another, the cement station houses were reached and left behind again. We were obviously taking cargo on board all along the line, and when we reached Arles in the pouring rain, we stood for a few moments to watch the unloading from the roomy vans of the baskets and cases which contained the produce of the Carmargue. Why is efficiency uninteresting, and perfection a thing without a soul? SUSAN HICKS BEACH. THE VOICE OF THE FLAME THERE is a voice, a spirit of unrest, That like a conscience ever murmurs low, Deep in the heart. The seasons come and go Urges us on from shore to frantic shore: From lovers' arms, from wealth and fame, we fly Till on the bed where we are laid to die It whispers mocking, 'There is something more.' Lead on, thou restless shade; we follow yet By that far dwelling of the ΧΑΡΙΤΕΣ, The gracious Spirits of Fulfilled Desire. G. H. BONNER. The Editor of THE NINETEENTH CENTURY cannot undertake to return unaccepted MSS. |