THE MORNING WATCH
1-47
have said, coldly, "Well look who's talking." Keep your mouth shut,
he kept whispering within himself intensely. Just keep your fool
mouth shut. And as they left the room he tried to exorcise the feel–
ings of injustice, self-pity and pain by crossing himself quickly and
surreptitiously. Fine time to go worrying about
yourself,
he sneered
at himself.
The nave replied to their timid noises with the threatening
resonance of a drumhead. Not even the sanctuary lamps were lighted,
but the night at the windows made just discernible the effigies and
the paintings and the crucifix, no longer purple veiled but choked
in black, and the naked ravagement of the High Altar. The tabernacle
gawped like a dead jaw. By this ruthless flaying and deracination only
the skeleton of the Church remained; it seemed at once the more
sacred in dishonor, and as brutally secular as a boxcar. To cross its
axis without the habitual genuflection felt as uneasy as to swim across
a sudden unimaginable depth, and as Richard turned and bowed
before the central devastation he realized: nothing there. Nothing at
all; and with the breath of the Outer Darkness upon
his
soul remem–
bered the words: And the Veil of the Temple was rent in twain.
But here in peace and victory before the adoration of
all
creatures past and breathing and uncreated, shrined and enthroned,
starred round with unabating light and with the stars of all the fields
of spring as well, exiled there yet abides throughout this night the
soul and substance of the everliving God Who shall, within these
few hours now, be restored to His High Altar and there devoured,
leaving His whole Church desecrate and unconsoled until the hour
of His glorious Resurrection from the Dead. Tied in its white veil,
stifled, a huge masked Head, a thinly clouded Sun, the monstrance
stood from the top of the tabernacle and broke at its center a dense
tissue of flowers and light: candles it seemed by thousands, spear-high
and merely tall, and short, and guttering, each an abiding upright
fiery piercing and, crisp and wearying, withering, dying, the frugal
harvest of the dawn of the year: from faint orchards the last apple
blossoms, still tenderly raveling their slow-borne blizzard; branches
of mild-starred dogwood and of the hairy wild azalea, pink and white,
from the mulled gray woods, and little fistfuls of those breathless
violets which break the floor of winter, even the rare may-apple, the
twinleaf, whose bloom stays just a day; and, of the first shivering
