The Rose Field, page 33
“There are four or five others who agree with us. But they’re afraid to become involved in any, you know, activity.”
He nodded. “I wonder if we’ll be able to speak afterwards. Better keep quiet now.”
As he spoke, there was a stir among the congregation and the first notes sounded on the great organ. Everyone got to their feet.
The service began. As usual when he was present at a service being conducted by someone else, Georges Parmentier found himself sinking, or possibly ascending, into a semi-hypnotic state where the words he knew so well, the rhythm of the changes between praying and singing, kneeling and standing up, listening and murmuring responses, all worked together to reassure him that the great virtues were as solid and true as they had been when he was a child. There was a heaven, and its sublime truth was made manifest in these sounds and rhythms and colors and scents. He was a prisoner of the love he felt for it. Once or twice in the hour and a half during which the service unhurriedly extended itself, he noticed that Professor Seidel was trying to whisper something to him, but he couldn’t listen, and eventually she stopped.
As the final prayer closed, a new kind of stir became present in the congregation, like the first breeze of the day moving stalks of wheat in a wide field. Wisps of somnolence were carried away; people sat up; an air of expectation, like an anbaric current, seemed to be generated as the figure of Marcel Delamare, elegant in his faultless dark blue suit and snowy shirt with a sober tie, stood up and climbed the steps to the pulpit.
“In the name of the Authority, from whom all grace, truth, and goodness proceed,” he said.
Not many of those present had actually heard him speak before. His face was familiar now from the newspaper photograms, but he seldom preached. The eyes that looked up at him were bright with curiosity. His voice was perfectly pitched, perfectly modulated; like an experienced actor in a familiar auditorium, he knew exactly how to make himself heard without distortion, without shouting, without being muffled or blurred by distance or echo. Parmentier listened with wary admiration.
Delamare grasped the pulpit rail with both hands and leaned slightly forward.
“I had a sister,” he began, “a sister whom I loved with boundless devotion from the day of my birth. She was three years older than I was, and all through my childhood she played with me, and guided me, and taught me the stories and rhymes that our mother had taught to her. She was the blessed companion of my joys, the kindly consolation in my childish sorrows, the wise teacher and the brave inspiration of my youth and young manhood. If we are very lucky, my friends, we do find someone like that when we are young; it may be a sibling, it may be a more distant relation, it may be a friend or a teacher. We look up to them, we are always glad to see them, we know that our hearts and our minds depend on their truth, their steadfastness, their kindness. So it was with me and my darling sister, Marisa.”
No one had been expecting anything like that. The President was a man of intellectual force, no doubt, and of moral probity, of course, but stern and distant, perhaps a little cold and over-formal. But now he was talking not as if to a large and anonymous audience but as if to a small group of close friends, and his voice, so clear and resonant, was warm with emotion.
“I thought that she was the guiding star of my life. I was proud when she had her academic triumphs, because no one was as clever or diligent as my Marisa; I rejoiced when she married a good man, Edward Coulter, and I looked forward to many happy days as a beloved guest in their household in the years to come. Everyone who knew them said what a happy marriage, what a blessed home they’d make, what a perfect illustration of the union between a man and a woman, both equal in goodness and kindness and swiftness of mind.
“But it did not last. Into her life, from some cruel corner of the darkness, came a temptation I had been sure her nature would hurl aside in contempt.
“A man, an Englishman, a scientist and explorer, a heretic and a sinner who had set himself against the Authority and the agents of his holy doctrine, set out to seduce her. She must have presented a new challenge to this sexual marauder. She was too pure for him to resist. In her mind, so ready to believe in the goodness of anyone who was interested in her, he probably represented something new and intriguing, something radically unlike anything she had experienced before. Something heady and intoxicating. She was a brilliant woman, trained as an experimental theologian; she had written important papers on fundamental physics; she was wise as well as learned; she knew human nature; she was well aware of the lesson of Holy Scripture, the story of the serpent and the woman in the garden; she knew what temptation was, what it looked like and sounded like; but she gave in.
“Yes, she gave in. My sister was no different from innumerable others who have listened to the gentle voice of the serpent, who have felt the gleaming coils encircling them and stroked those jeweled shining scales, that pretty head that wound itself gently along her cheek and under her chin and around her neck. She did not resist, my friends; it was the sorrow of my life that she did not resist. And as is the way of nature, before long she gave birth to a child that was not her husband’s.”
He paused a moment and looked around at the wide eyes, the still heads, the silent faces.
“The child was a girl to whom she and the Englishman gave the pagan name Lyra. Conceived in flagrant sin, born with evil joy, this fruit of the serpent and his intoxicated victim was concealed by the wicked pair from the good man who had married Marisa. How could he not know, you may ask: How can a man not know that his wife has borne a child, whether his own or not? Edward Coulter was a diplomat, a diligent and honest man sent abroad to represent his country. His life was one of high politics and grand foreign policy; he was rightly trusted by the King and the government of his nation to travel abroad, to undertake important discussions with national leaders and ministers about great questions of war and peace.
“Imagine a man in such a position, working in a foreign land, trusting in the love of his wife. Imagine him coming home from a diplomatic mission of great delicacy and consequence. Imagine him hearing—perhaps from a servant, perhaps from a friend, perhaps from some scurrilous rumor in the press—imagine him learning about how he has been betrayed.
“This good man did what any man would have done: he rushed to confront the man who had seduced his wife and fathered her illegitimate child. But all his diplomatic skill, all his experience of politics and statecraft, went for nothing when the two of them met. He was betrayed again, this time by his own honor. He could not believe, simply found it impossible to conceive that the villain would wait till his back was turned and then plunge a sword into his heart. Stabbed from behind by a seducer and a coward.
“The law proceeded, but the law found—astonishingly, you might think—in favor of the child’s father. A corrupt man saved by a corrupt law. My sister, my dear Marisa, whose brilliant nature had been so cruelly duped, was left alone with the burden of her sin.
“And what of the child? A baby not six months old. A babe in arms. She might—she should—have been put in the care of some good and holy Sisters of Obedience, but the villain snatched her away and placed her instead in the hands of a college of scholars—old men—dusty antiquaries with nothing in their minds but Greek verbs and arcane philosophy—who couldn’t possibly know what a child needed or how to care for her, how to bring her up in the ways of virtue and faith, to give her the benefit of a true moral education.
“The father vanished. He ran away, disgraced and out of favor with the society around him. A coward and a renegade.
“As for my sister, she came at last to see the disgrace and the misfortune she had brought to her own life, and with the help of spiritual guidance, she began to make amends, to become the mother she should be. She tried again and again to reach her child, to claim her from the shriveled and faithless society of the arrogant old scholars the law had appointed as her guardians. Again and again she pleaded with the courts, with officialdom in all its forms, with the stony-hearted judges who listened to her anguished pleas in a cold and hostile silence, and dismissed her without a word. Again and again she was refused.
“And what of the child, this lost and lonely little girl, this child born of corruption and weakness, carrying as we all do the stain of original sin but in herself so far innocent?
“She was told all manner of lies about her birth, and of course, as children do, she believed them. When she reached the age of eleven, desperate and unhappy, she ran away from the college she had been placed in, was kidnapped by a band of boat-dwelling criminals, and destined for some unspeakable fate in a foreign land. Her mother, my sister Marisa, hearing of this—and imagine the toils of anguish in her heart!—hearing of this, Marisa set off in desperation to rescue her, and bring her home to a mother who could love her with a truly repentant heart, and bring her up in the safety and purity of an Authority-fearing home, and make amends for the sin she had committed.”
He paused a moment, and when he spoke his tone had changed a little: instead of the suffering brother, now he seemed to be standing back a little way, commenting on a common human problem with patient wisdom.
“In a way, of course, this is an old story. It is one of the first stories we learn. The desire to know more, to look closer and closer, to tear aside the veils of matter and see into the deepest mysteries—the human impulse to do that, this vile and impertinent curiosity, was fixed in the human soul as a photogram is fixed on paper, since the woman gave in to the serpent’s temptation in the garden of Paradise.
“And the results we see in our own lives, the tendency of things to decay, for clocks to run down, for fires to go out, for the bright and shining vigor of youth to fade into the distracted anxiety of the middle years and the exhausted loneliness of old age—these are part of the consequence of that first fall.
“Because what she did, that mother of us all, was to make a breach in the perfect surface of the world that the Authority gave us to live in. Just a little scratch; just a tiny crack. But it was enough. We all know how once the integrity of a structure is flawed, the crack in a mirror, the patch of dry rot in the cellar, the leak in a water pipe—how it grows and spreads, silently, invisibly, until the whole structure is compromised, until it all inevitably falls apart. It happens in the physical world, it happens in the world of politics and business, it happens in the family and in the human heart.
“Now, my friends, I am going to tell you something very few people know. In this world there exist a number of mysterious places, secret places, that are much like these cracks, these flaws in the structure, these leaks. Because of that original sin, and because of the continuing and ineradicable wickedness of mankind, this beautiful world is vulnerable. Vulnerable to invasion, to poisonous influences from outside, to alien presences and philosophies, to ideas that kill, to moral disease and intellectual corruption.
“This is not a metaphor, my friends. Some of you may have been present at the lecture given here in Geneva not long ago by the celebrated philosopher and author Professor Gottfried Brande, the lecture that ended in tragic circumstances with the professor’s sudden death. The lecture, which we are publishing soon in its entirety, discusses with profound originality the dangers that lie in the careless and irresponsible use of language, and the need to police our speaking and writing with ceaseless vigilance.
“Professor Brande will be regarded by future ages as a prophet. He had much to teach us before his untimely death. So believe me, my friends, it’s in the spirit of Gottfried Brande that I stress this now: my words today are not a metaphor for something else. They are exactly and literally true. There are places such as the ones I have referred to. We are indebted to the pioneering work of the geographers who discovered several such places in various isolated corners of the earth, and to the skillful and dangerous work of the engineers of the Magisterial Guard for their continuing attempts to deal with them.
“But the problem is growing. More and more of these places are being discovered; more and more our world, our way of life, the things we love and take for granted, are being invaded and poisoned by alien ideas, wrongful beliefs, and a bestial morality unfitted for the sons and daughters of the Authority.
“And now, my friends, we have found the source of this spiritual evil. The original breach in the surface of the Authority’s world lies in a desert in Central Asia, and it is towards that spot that our armies are marching, with our allies and our truehearted friends at our side. They will reach it; they will destroy it; they will heal the wound in the world forever.
“And…this is the hardest thing for me, my friends. The young girl I spoke to you about—the daughter of my dear sister. And really she is not a girl anymore; she is a young woman. Her name is Lyra Belacqua. And to my utmost sorrow, she has thrown in her lot with the enemy. She is working to prevent the great task we are all about to undertake. Like so many young people, unsure of their own minds, she has been persuaded that right is wrong and wickedness is right. Wherever she is now, I hope we can find her before it’s too late. In any other circumstances, no doubt there would be a large reward offered for any knowledge of her; but I am not offering that. I simply pray that she is found before…”
He shrugged as it were in helpless sorrow. Then he gathered himself again, and stood up tall, and let his voice ring passionately through the great space of the cathedral:
“May the Authority, in all his goodness and wisdom, guide our judgment as we strive to repair the damage done to his world. May he, in all his power and might, guide our arms as we strike a deadly blow at the invader. And finally, in all his love and justice, may the Authority strengthen us for the struggle ahead and bring us safely through to the calm and tranquility of a world restored.”
He reached out to where his owl dæmon was sitting on the pulpit rail, and lifted her up to his shoulder as he walked steadily down the steps and out of the nave towards the vestry. The congregation was perfectly still, as if no one wanted to breathe, or dared to. No one looked around, but those whose seats allowed a view of the whole interior were struck by the stillness, the silence, the air of…Was it fear? Was it awe? Whatever it was, it had thrown a pall of silence and apprehension over the entire crowd.
Even the representatives of the press, and the visiting politicians and diplomats, and the senior clergy, and the civic dignitaries of every kind were sitting still. Their faces were solemn, or full of fear or pale determination; some of their dæmons had crept up to their breasts and sought shelter in an embrace.
Professor Seidel leaned slightly towards Parmentier and whispered, “He is mad.”
It was a very quiet whisper. Parmentier whispered back: “But he has the congregation.”
He had. The atmosphere was like that of a theater held in the powerful spell of a great actor’s final speech.
After several seconds, gradually, people began to relax, to breathe deeply, to sit up and look around. The silence in the vast cathedral gave way to murmurs and coughs and the shuffling of chairs as people got to their feet and moved into the aisles.
Parmentier glanced at Professor Seidel. Her face was solemn. The man on his other side, the professor of classical ethics, stood up stiffly and fussed with his scarf. A faint smell of cloves came from his overcoat.
“What did you make of that?” Parmentier said quietly.
He stood up too so as to hear him more clearly. More and more people were talking now; there was even a sort of bustle in the atmosphere. Some of the journalists were hurrying towards the vestry, as if they could intercept the President before he left, and claim the first interview; but officials barred the way, and two members of the Magisterial Guard, armed with rifles, stood behind them.
The priest looked closely at the face of his fellow member of the High Council, and was surprised to see in it such doubt and anxiety. He didn’t know the man at all well, and had thought him rigidly conventional in his attitudes; perhaps he’d been wrong. The little priest suddenly remembered the man’s name: Duclos.
“Did you believe him?” Parmentier said.
“About the girl? It’s plausible. Even likely. Who can tell?”
“About the idea that evil comes from outside the world.”
“It’s a startling assertion to make, certainly. Something entirely new, this, how would one describe it—semi-Gnosticism?”
“I agree; it’s not something we’ve heard from this pulpit before.”
“Did it make sense to you?”
Duclos wasn’t making superficial conversation. He sounded as if he was asking about the truth.
“No,” said Parmentier carefully. “I don’t think the world is being invaded by the forces of evil.”
He thought of his old friend the General, standing in the forest listening with longing to the bells and the songs of fairyland. The noise from the congregation had risen; everyone seemed to be voicing a strong opinion, or asking an urgent question, or hurrying to get outside and tell this astonishing news to family or friends or a wide readership.
“I wonder if the Council will be summoned to discuss this business,” said Duclos. “It’s a declaration of war, but war against…who? What? Are we supposed to support it?”
“We don’t need to be summoned,” Parmentier pointed out. “All of us are here now, as far as I can see. But…”
He wasn’t sure what he could say next, and in any case the moment was lost. Around them the congregation was alive with voices, and movement, and small groups gathered in fierce discussion or anxious speculation were holding up those who simply wanted to get out. Parmentier tried to look along to the aisle, peering to both sides and standing on tiptoe in order to see what his fellow Council members were doing, but it was no good; the press was too great.
“What shall we do?” he whispered to his dæmon as she perched on his shoulder.
