They passed up the steep hill, he eager as a pilgrim arriving
at the shrine. As they came near the precincts, with castle on
one side and cathedral on the other, his veins seemed to break
into fiery blossom, he was transported.
They had passed through the gate, and the great west front
was before them, with all its breadth and ornament.
"It is a false front," he said, looking at the golden stone
and the twin towers, and loving them just the same. In a little
ecstasy he found himself in the porch, on the brink of the
unrevealed. He looked up to the lovely unfolding of the stone.
He was to pass within to the perfect womb.
Then he pushed open the door, and the great, pillared gloom
was before him, in which his soul shuddered and rose from her
nest. His soul leapt, soared up into the great church. His body
stood still, absorbed by the height. His soul leapt up into the
gloom, into possession, it reeled, it swooned with a great
escape, it quivered in the womb, in the hush and the gloom of
fecundity, like seed of procreation in ecstasy.
She too was overcome with wonder and awe. She followed him in
his progress. Here, the twilight was the very essence of life,
the coloured darkness was the embryo of all light, and the day.
Here, the very first dawn was breaking, the very last sunset
sinking, and the immemorial darkness, whereof life's day would
blossom and fall away again, re-echoed peace and profound
immemorial silence.
Away from time, always outside of time! Between east and
west, between dawn and sunset, the church lay like a seed in
silence, dark before germination, silenced after death.
Containing birth and death, potential with all the noise and
transition of life, the cathedral remained hushed, a great,
involved seed, whereof the flower would be radiant life
inconceivable, but whose beginning and whose end were the circle
of silence. Spanned round with the rainbow, the jewelled gloom
folded music upon silence, light upon darkness, fecundity upon
death, as a seed folds leaf upon leaf and silence upon the root
and the flower, hushing up the secret of all between its parts,
the death out of which it fell, the life into which it has
dropped, the immortality it involves, and the death it will
embrace again.
Here in the church, "before" and "after" were folded
together, all was contained in oneness. Brangwen came to his
consummation. Out of the doors of the womb he had come, putting
aside the wings of the womb, and proceeding into the light.
Through daylight and day-after-day he had come, knowledge after
knowledge, and experience after experience, remembering the
darkness of the womb, having prescience of the darkness after
death. Then between--while he had pushed open the doors of
the cathedral, and entered the twilight of both darkness, the
hush of the two-fold silence where dawn was sunset, and the
beginning and the end were one.