Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн
70 страница из 1457
He was in a void above the world—the ensemble, everything called him now. He could not pray. Over and over again he said senselessly, meaninglessly, “God have mercy, God have mercy.” For a minute, an eternity, he trembled in the void and then—something snapped. They were still there, but the girl’s eyes were all wrong; the lines around her mouth were cold and chiselled and her passion seemed dead and earthy.
He prayed, and gradually the cloud grew clearer; the images appeared vague and shadowy. His heart seemed to stop for an instant and then—he was standing by the bank and a bell was tolling five. The reverend superior came down the steps and toward him.
“It is time to go in.”
The man turned instantly.
“Yes, Father, I am coming.”
II.
The novices filed silently into the chapel and knelt in prayer. The blessed sacrament in the gleaming monstrance was exposed among the flaming candles on the altar. The air was rich and heavy with incense. The man knelt with the others. A first chord of the Magnificat, sung by the concealed choir above, startled him; he looked up. The late afternoon sun shone through the stained glass window of St. Francis Xavier on his left and fell in red tracery on the cassock of the man in front of him. Three ordained priests knelt on the altar. Above them a huge candle burned. He watched it abstractedly. To the right of him a novice was telling his beads with trembling fingers. The man looked at him. He was about twenty-six with fair hair and green-grey eyes that darted nervously around the chapel. They caught each other’s eye, and the elder glanced quickly at the altar candle as if to draw attention to it. The man followed his eye, and as he looked he felt his scalp creep and tingle. The same unsummoned instinct filled him that had frightened him half an hour ago on the bank. His breath came quicker. How hot the chapel was. It was too hot, and the candle was wrong—wrong—everything suddenly blurred. The man on his left caught him.