The Shadow of the Cathedral Part 17

"It is his heart," said the Tato--who was usually very well informed about things in the palace--"Dona Visita is weeping like a Magdalen and cursing the canons, seeing Don Sebastian so ill."

As Wooden Staff sat down to table with his family he began to speak of the decadence of the feast of Corpus, which had been so famous in Toledo in former times. In his desire to complain he forgot the bitter silence he had imposed on himself in his daughter's presence.

"You will hardly recognise our Corpus," he said to Gabriel. "Of all that we remember nothing remains but the famous tapestries that are hung outside the Cathedral. The giants are not drawn up before the Puerta del Perdon, and the procession is shorn of its glory."

The Chapel-master also complained bitterly.

"And the ma.s.s, Senor Esteban? Just think what a ma.s.s for such a solemn festivity! Four instruments from outside the house, and a Rossini ma.s.s of the lightest description so as not to cost much. It would have been far better for this to have played the organ alone."

According to an ancient custom, on the vesper before the feast, the band of the Academy of Infantry played in the evening before the Cathedral. All Toledo came to hear the serenade, which was an event in the monotonous life of the town, and from the province of Madrid many strangers came for the bull-fight on the following day.

Mariano, the bell-ringer, invited his friends to listen to the serenade from the Greco-Roman gallery on the princ.i.p.al front. At the hour when the lights were usually extinguished in the Claverias and Don Antolin locked the street door, Gabriel and his friends glided cautiously to the bell-ringer's "habitacion." Sagrario was also persuaded to come by her uncle, who in this way managed to tear her from her machine. She really must enjoy some little amus.e.m.e.nt; she ought to appear in the world now and then; she was killing herself with all that tiresome work.

They all sat in the gallery. The shoemaker had brought his wife, always with a small baby at her flabby breast. The Tato was talking delightedly to the organ-blower and the verger about the bull-fight on the following day, and Mariano stood by his adored comrade, while his wife, a woman as rough as himself, spoke with Sagrario.

The men were deploring the absence of Don Martin. Probably he had gone down below among the people who filled the square, doubtless dreading that he must be up before daybreak to say ma.s.s to the nuns.

The palace of the Ayuntamiento was decorated with strings of light, which were reflected on to the facade of the Cathedral, giving the stones a rosy flush as of fire.

Among the trees walked groups of girls with flowers and white blouses, like the first appearances of spring. The cadets followed them, their hands on the pommels of their swords, walking along with their pinched-in waists and their full pantaloons _a la Turc_. The archiepiscopal palace remained entirely closed. Above the rosy light in the piazza, spread the beautiful summer sky, clear and deep, spangled with innumerable brilliant stars.

When the music ceased, and the lights began to fade, the inhabitants of the Cathedral felt unwilling to leave their seats. They were very comfortable there, the night was warm, and they, accustomed to the confinement and the silence of the Claverias, felt the joy of freedom, sitting on that balcony with Toledo at their feet and the immensity of s.p.a.ce above them.

Sagrario, who had never been out of the upper cloister since her return to the paternal roof, looked at the stars with delight.

"How many stars!" she murmured dreamily.

"There are more than usual to-night," said the bell-ringer. "The summer sky seems a field of stars in which the harvest increases with the fine weather."

Gabriel smiled at the simplicity of his companions. They all wondered at G.o.d, so foreseeing and so thoughtful, who had made the moon to give light to men by night, and the stars so that the darkness should not be complete.

"Well, then," inquired Gabriel, "why is there not a moon always if it was made to give us light?"

There was a long silence. They were all thinking over Gabriel's question. The bell-ringer, being most intimate with the master, ventured to put the question about which they were all thinking. "What were the heavens, and what was there beyond the blue?"

The square was now deserted and in darkness, there was no light but the gentle s.h.i.+mmering of the stars scattered in s.p.a.ce like golden dust. From the immense vault there seemed to fall a religious calm, an overwhelming majesty that stirred the souls of those simple people.

The infinite seemed to bewilder them with its vast grandeur.

"You," said Gabriel, "have your eyes closed to immensity, you cannot understand it. You have been taught a wretched and rudimentary origin of the world, imagined by a few ragged and ignorant Jews in a corner of Asia, which, having been written in a book, has been accepted down to our days. This personal G.o.d, like to ourselves in His shape and pa.s.sions, is an artificer of gigantic capacity, who worked six days and made everything existing. On the first day He created light, and on the fourth the sun and stars; from whence then came that light if the sun had not then been created? Is there any distinction between one and the other? It seems impossible that such absurdities should have been credited for centuries."

The listeners nodded their heads in a.s.sent; the absurdity appeared to them palpable--as it always did when Gabriel spoke.

"If you wish to penetrate the heavens," continued Luna, "you must get rid of the human conception of distance. Man measures everything by his own stature, and he conceives dimensions by the distance his eyes can reach. This Cathedral seems to us enormous because underneath its naves we seem like ants; but, nevertheless, the Cathedral seen from far is only an insignificant wart; compared with the piece of land we call Spain it is less than a grain of sand, and on the face of the earth it is a mere atom--nothing. Our sight makes us consider thirty or forty yards a dizzy height. At this moment we think we are very high because we are near the roof of the Cathedral, but compared to the infinite this height is as small as when an ant balances on the top of a pebble not knowing how to come down. Our sight is short, and we who can only measure by yards, and apprehend short distances, must make an immense effort of imagination to realise infinity. Even then it escapes us and we speak of it very often as of a thing that has no meaning. How shall I make you understand the immensity of the world?

You must not believe, as our ancestors did, that the earth is flat and stationary and that the heaven is a crystal dome on which G.o.d has fastened the stars like golden nails, and in which the sun and moon move to give us light, you must understand that the earth is round, and whirls round in s.p.a.ce."

"Yes, we do know a little about that," said the bell-ringer doubtfully, "for we were taught so at school. But, really, do you think it moves?"

"Because in your littleness as human beings, because to our microscopic mole-like sight the immense mechanism of the world is lost, do not for a moment doubt it. The earth turns. Without moving from where you are, in twenty-four hours you will have made the complete circuit with the globe. Without moving our feet we rush along at the rate of four hundred leagues an hour, a velocity that the fastest trains cannot attain. You are astonished? We rush along without knowing it. Our planet does not only turn on itself, but at the same time it turns round the sun at the rate of nearly a hundred thousand miles an hour. Every second we cover thirty thousand miles.

Men have never invented a cannon ball that could fly so quickly. You move through s.p.a.ce fixed to a projectile which whirls with dizzy speed, and, deceived by your smallness, you think you are living immovable in a dead cathedral. And this velocity is as nothing compared with others. The sun round which we turn, flies and flies through s.p.a.ce, carrying on by its attraction the earth and the other planets. It goes through immensity, dragging us along, travelling towards the unknown, without ever striking other bodies, finding always sufficient s.p.a.ce to move in with a rapidity which makes one giddy; and this has gone on for thousands and millions of centuries without either it or the earth who follows it in its flight ever pa.s.sing twice over the same spot."

They all listened to Gabriel open-mouthed with astonishment, and their bright eyes seemed dazed and bewildered.

"It is enough to drive one mad," murmured the bell-ringer. "What then is man, Gabriel?"

"Nothing; even as this earth, which seems so large, and that we have peopled with religions, kingdoms and revelations from G.o.d, is nothing.

Dreams of ants! even less! This same sun which seems so enormous compared to our globe is nothing more than an atom in immensity. What you call stars are other suns like ours, surrounded by planets like our earth, but which are invisible on account of their small size. How many are they? Man brings his optical instruments to perfection and is able to pierce further into the fields of heaven, discovering ever more and more. Those which are scarcely visible in the infinite appear much nearer when a new telescope is invented, and beyond them in the depths of s.p.a.ce others and again others appear, and so on everlastingly. They are unaccountable. Some are worlds inhabited like ours; others were so, and revolve solitary in s.p.a.ce, waiting for a fresh evolution of life; many are still forming; and yet all these worlds are no more than corpuscles of the luminous mist of the infinite. s.p.a.ce is peopled by fires that have burnt for millions, trillions and quadrillions of centuries, throwing out heat and light.

The milky way is nothing but a cloud of stars that seem to us as one ma.s.s, but which in reality are so far apart that thousands of suns like ours with all their planets could revolve among them without ever coming into collision."

Gabriel remembered the travelling of sound and light. "Their velocity is insignificant compared with the distances in s.p.a.ce. The sun, which is the nearest to us, is still so far that for a sound to go from us to it would take three millions of years. Poor human beings will never be able to travel with the rapidity of sound.

"These suns travel like ours towards the unknown with giddy flight, but they are so distant that three or four thousand years may pa.s.s without man being aware that they have moved more than a finger's breadth. The distances of infinity are maddening. The sun is a nebula of inflammatory gas, and the earth an imperceptible molecule of sand.

"The luminous ray of the Polar star requires half a century to reach our eyes; it might have disappeared forty-nine years ago, and still we should see it in s.p.a.ce.

"And all these worlds are created, grow and die like human beings.

In s.p.a.ce there is no more rest than on earth. Some stars are extinguished, others vary, and others s.h.i.+ne with all the power of their young life. The dead planets dissolved by fires furnish the material for new worlds; it is a perpetual renewal of forms, throughout millions and millions of centuries, that represent in their lives what the few dozen years to which we are limited, are in our own. And beyond all those incalculable distances there is s.p.a.ce, and more s.p.a.ce on every side, with fresh conglomerations of worlds without limit or end."

Gabriel spoke in the midst of solemn silence. The listeners closed their eyes as if such immensity stunned them. They followed in imagination Gabriel's description, but their narrowed minds wished to place a term to the infinite, and in their simplicity they imagined beyond these incalculable distances a vault of firm matter millions of leagues thick. Surely all that strange and fantastic work must have a limit. What was at the back of it? And the barrier created by their imagination fell suddenly; and again they flew through s.p.a.ce, always infinite, with ever new worlds.

Gabriel spoke of them and of their life with absolute certainty.

Spectral a.n.a.lysis showed the same composition in the stars as on the earth, consequently if life had arisen in our atom, most certainly it must exist in other celestial bodies, though probably in different forms; in many planets it had already ended, in many it was still to come; but surely all those millions of worlds had had, or would have, life.

Religions, wis.h.i.+ng to explain the origin of the world, paled and trembled before the infinite. It was like the Cathedral tower, which covered with its bulk a great part of the heavens, hiding millions of worlds, but which was of insignificant size compared to the immensity it hid, less than an infinitesimal part of a molecule--nothing. It seemed very great because it was close to men, concealing immensity, but when men looked above it, getting a full grasp of the infinite, they laughed at its Lilliputian pride.

"Then," inquired timidly the old organ-blower, pointing to the Cathedral, "what is it they teach us in there?"

"Nothing," replied Gabriel.

"And what are we--men?" asked the Perrero.

"Nothing."

"And the governments, the laws, and the customs of society?" inquired the bell-ringer.

"Nothing. Nothing."

Sagrario fixed her eyes, grown larger by her earnest contemplation of the heavens, on her uncle.

"And G.o.d," she asked in a soft voice; "where is G.o.d?"

Gabriel stood up, leaning on the bal.u.s.trade of the gallery; his figure stood out dark and clear against the starry s.p.a.ce.

"We are G.o.d ourselves, and everything that surrounds us. It is life with its astonis.h.i.+ng transformations, always apparently dying, yet always being infinitely renewed. It is this immensity that astounds us with its greatness, and that cannot be realised in our minds. It is matter that lives, animated by the force that dwells in it, with absolute unity, without separation or duality. Man is G.o.d, and the world is G.o.d also."

He was silent for a moment and then added with energy:

"But if you ask me for that personal G.o.d invented by religions, in the likeness of a man, who brought the world out of nothing, who directs our actions, who cla.s.sifies souls according to their merits, and commissions Sons to descend into the world to redeem it, I say seek for Him in that immensity, see where He hides His littleness. But even if you were immortal you might spend millions of years pa.s.sing from one star to another without ever finding the corner where He hides His deposed despotic majesty. This vindictive and capricious G.o.d arose in men's brains, and the brain is a human being's most recent organ, the last to develop itself. When man invented G.o.d the world had existed millions of years."