it is eleven o'clock now, and the bells of france and spain mingle above the frontier their religious festival vibrations.
bathed, rested, and in sunday dress, ramuntcho was going with his mother to the high mass of all-saints' day. on the path, strewn with reddish leaves, they descended toward their parish, under a warm sun which gave to them the illusion of summer.
he, dressed in a manner almost elegant and like a city denizen, save for the traditional basque cap, which he wore on the side and pulled down like a visor over his childish eyes. she, straight and proud, her head high, her demeanor distinguished, in a gown of new form; having the air of a society woman, except for the mantilla; made of black cloth, which covered her hair and her shoulders. in the great city formerly she had learned how to dress—and anyway, in the basque country, where so many ancient traditions have been preserved, the women and the girls of the least important villages have all taken the habit of dressing in the fashion of the day, with an elegance unknown to the peasants of the other french provinces.
they separated, as etiquette ordains, in the yard of the church, where the immense cypress trees smelled of the south and the orient. it resembled a mosque from the exterior, their parish, with its tall, old, ferocious walls, pierced at the top only by diminutive windows, with its warm color of antiquity, of dust and of sun.
while franchita entered by one of the lower doors, ramuntcho went up a venerable stone stairway which led one from the exterior wall to the high tribunes reserved for men.
the extremity of the sombre church was of dazzling old gold, with a profusion of twisted columns, of complicated entablements, of statues with excessive convolutions and with draperies in the style of the spanish renaissance. and this magnificence of the tabernacle was in contrast with the simplicity of the lateral walls, simply kalsomined. but an air of extreme old age harmonized these things, which one felt were accustomed for centuries to endure in the face of one another.
it was early still, and people were hardly arriving for this high mass. leaning on the railing of his tribune, ramuntcho looked at the women entering, all like black phantoms, their heads and dress concealed under the mourning cashmere which it is usual to wear at church. silent and collected, they glided on the funereal pavement of mortuary slabs, where one could read still, in spite of the effacing of ages, inscriptions in euskarian tongue, names of extinguished families and dates of past centuries.
gracieuse, whose coming preoccupied ramuntcho, was late. but, to distract his mind for a moment, a “convoy” advanced slowly; a convoy, that is a parade of parents and nearest neighbors of one who had died during the week, the men still draped in the long cape which is worn at funerals, the women under the mantle and the traditional hood of full mourning.
above, in the two immense tribunes superposed along the sides of the nave, the men came one by one to take their places, grave and with rosaries in their hands: farmers, laborers, cowboys, poachers or smugglers, all pious and ready to kneel when the sacred bell rang. each one of them, before taking his seat, hooked behind him, to a nail on the wall, his woolen cap, and little by little, on the white background of the kalsomine, came into line rows of innumerable basque headgear.
below, the little girls of the school entered at last, in good order, escorted by the sisters of saint mary of the rosary. and, among these nuns, wrapped in black, ramuntcho recognized gracieuse. she, too, had her head enveloped with black; her blonde hair, which to-night would be flurried in the breeze of the fandango, was hidden for the moment under the austere mantilla of the ceremony. gracieuse had not been a scholar for two years, but was none the less the intimate friend of the sisters, her teachers, ever in their company for songs, novenas, or decorations of white flowers around the statues of the holy virgin.—then, the priests, in their most sumptuous costumes, appeared in front of the magnificent gold of the tabernacle, on a platform elevated and theatrical, and the mass began, celebrated, in this distant village, with excessive pomp as in a great city. there were choirs of small boys chanting in infantile voices with a savage ardor. then choruses of little girls, whom a sister accompanied at the harmonium and which the clear and fresh voice of gracieuse guided. from time to time a clamor came, like a storm, from the tribunes above where the men were, a formidable response animated the old vaults, the old sonorous wainscoting, which for centuries have vibrated with the same song.—
to do the same things which for numberless ages the ancestors have done and to tell blindly the same words of faith, are indications of supreme wisdom, are a supreme force. for all the faithful who sang there came from this immutable ceremony of the mass a sort of peace, a confused but soft resignation to coming destruction. living of the present hour, they lost a little of their ephemeral personality to attach themselves better to the dead lying under the slabs and to continue them more exactly, to form with them and their future descendants only one of these resisting entireties, of almost infinite duration, which is called a race.
