THE HIGH SEA
527
where to begin, no common ground; their separation had begun, the
distance between them had widened suddenly. There is no moment
of peace, thought David, except in that split second of hope, of
belief, even, that now, now you have it.
If
we go on together, she
is going to be unfaithful to me, she is going to have "affairs" as she
did before. Why go to Spain? Why go anywhere together? ... Her
life, or what she had told him of it, had been a disordered history of
disconnected, apparently meaningless wanderings. "Oh no," Jenny
would protest, "it all meant something to me," but what it meant she
never said. She could never explain the real reasons for having been
in certain places, or what she was doing there. "Why, I was painting,
David." "Oh, I had a job there." A man, or men, always lurked
somewhere in the background. "Why no, David, of course, I never
married anybody." She would never admit that she had loved any
man but David, and, more curious' still, she would never admit that
any man, except perhaps David, had ever loved her. "None of it
meant anything at all, David," she would assure him with earnest
innocence, "nothing lasted. It was just for the pleasure, David. It
wasn't love." She could never understand why, for him, the whole
wrong lay precisely there. It should have been love; and, he told
himself with bitterness, it isn't love again, I suppose. Maybe it will
never be.
It was Sunday morning. At six o'clock Father Carillo was down
on the steerage deck, saying Mass before a portable altar adorned
with small lighted candles and limp paper flowers. The people knelt
and rose and knelt again, huddled shoulder to shoulder, with bowed
hearn and moving lips, their hands fluttering constantly in a com–
plicated series of the sign' of the Cross. 'Among them all, only six
women were in a state of grace. They crawled forward on their
knees, their heads shawled in black, to receive Holy Communion. Rais–
ing their chins and closing their eyes, they opened their mouths wide
and thrust forth their pallid tongues to inordinate lengths to partake
of the Angelic Bread. The priest went through the ceremony severely
and hastily, placing the wafers on the outstretched tongues expertly
and snatching back his hand. He ended the Mass in due form but at
top speed, and almost instantly began to pack up his altar as
if
he
were removing it from a place of pestilence.
At the farthest end of the deck from the altar, a considerable group
of men who had stood throughout the ritual with their backs to the
altar, now faced about and began to disperse. In silence, without any
other demonstration, they expressed contempt and anger even in the
