Yet the words continued to have a meaning that was untouched
either by the knowledge of gateways or hyperboles. The
historical, or local, or psychological interest in the words was
another thing. There remained unaltered the inexplicable value
of the saying. What was this relation between a needle's eye, a
rich man, and heaven? What sort of a needle's eye, what sort of
a rich man, what sort of heaven? Who knows? It means the
Absolute World, and can never be more than half interpreted in
terms of the relative world.
But must one apply the speech literally? Was her father a
rich man? Couldn't he get to heaven? Or was he only a half-rich
man? Or was he merely a poor man? At any rate, unless he gave
everything away to the poor, he would find it much harder to get
to heaven. The needle's eye would be too tight for him. She
almost wished he were penniless poor. If one were coming to the
base of it, any man was rich who was not as poor as the
poorest.
She had her qualms, when in imagination she saw her father
giving away their piano and the two cows, and the capital at the
bank, to the labourers of the district, so that they, the
Brangwens, should be as poor as the Wherrys. And she did not
want it. She was impatient.
"Very well," she thought, "we'll forego that heaven, that's
all--at any rate the needle's eye sort." And she dismissed
the problem. She was not going to be as poor as the Wherrys, not
for all the sayings on earth--the miserable squalid
Wherrys.
So she reverted to the non-literal application of the
scriptures. Her father very rarely read, but he had collected
many books of reproductions, and he would sit and look at these,
curiously intent, like a child, yet with a passion that was not
childish. He loved the early Italian painters, but particularly
Giotto and Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi. The great
compositions cast a spell over him. How many times had he turned
to Raphael's "Dispute of the Sacrament" or Fra Angelico's "Last
Judgment" or the beautiful, complicated renderings of the
Adoration of the Magi, and always, each time, he received the
same gradual fulfilment of delight. It had to do with the
establishment of a whole mystical, architectural conception
which used the human figure as a unit. Sometimes he had to hurry
home, and go to the Fra Angelico "Last Judgment". The pathway of
open graves, the huddled earth on either side, the seemly heaven
arranged above, the singing process to paradise on the one hand,
the stuttering descent to hell on the other, completed and
satisfied him. He did not care whether or not he believed in
devils or angels. The whole conception gave him the deepest
satisfaction, and he wanted nothing more.