The Rainbow

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.