redemption, he had ever found its greatest day least evocative of
proportionate sympathy. The sudden gaieties of Easter morning, the
congratulations to the Divine Mother, the sharpness of the recoil
from one extreme of feeling to the other, for him never cleared away
the Lenten pre-occupation with Christ's death and passion: the empty
tomb, with the white clothes lying, was still a tomb: there was no
human warmth in the "spiritual body": the white flowers, after all,
were those of a funeral, with a mortal coldness, amid the loud
Alleluias, which refused to melt at the startling summons, any more
than the earth will do in the March morning because we call it
Spring. It was altogether different with that other festival which
celebrates the Descent of the Spirit, the tongues, the nameless
impulses gone all abroad, to soften slowly, to penetrate, all things,
as with the winning subtlety of nature, or of human genius. The
gracious Pentecostal fire seemed to be in alliance with the sweet,
warm, relaxing winds of that later, securer, season, bringing their
spicy burden from unseen sources. Into the close world, like a
walled garden, about him, influences from remotest time and space
found their way, travelling unerringly on their long journeys, as
[135] if straight to him, with the assurance that things were not
wholly left to themselves; yet so unobtrusively that, a little later,
the transforming spiritual agency would be discernible at most in the
grateful cry of an innocent child, in some good deed of a bad man, or
unlooked-for gentleness of a rough one, in the occasional turning to
music of a rude voice. Through the course of years during which
Gaston was to remain in Paris, very close to other people's sins,
interested, all but entangled, in a world of corruption in flower
(pleasantly enough to the eye), those influences never failed him.
At times it was as if a legion of spirits besieged his door: "Open
unto me! Open unto me! My sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled!"