At that, several townsfolk summoned to mind their sexton, considered what he might know about bells in general, and how contrive toward setting this particular one to rights again; then, on second consideration, that he'd likely had something ingenious to do with its getting into this state in the first place, they pursed their lips and tried, with admirable Puritan fortitude, to put him out of mind until that time when he should be delivered from the extravagant snarl of his mortal coils, reckoning it, in all logic, a time not too far off, hoping it, in all charity, a race which he should win (for arrival at that glorious goal before him meant interment at his hands), and even now, in all good faith, quite unaware that that rescue had already been accomplished with all the intrepid serenity implicit in the Rescuer's reputation for order, quietly and in darkness: never in fact suspecting such a thing, what with the industrious hammering and clatter from inside the church since 'dawn of the day before, as they stood now, listening, drawn-lipped at the windows, and here and there leveled their eyes upon the still unilluminaled bulk of Mount Lamentation, and the still-to-be-fulfilled landscape of Christmas.
Here and there they turned, to quietly ascertain that celebrated rubric on the calendar.
It is true, when that red-letter day was done, and its wealth of bits and pieces pruned and grafted, embellished, and laid gilded and gelded to rest in those private rotting-roorns called memories where, after rearranging things and tidying up a bit, the townsfolk sat down again among the corpses of the past, inhaling, and waiting; true that, when peace was restored that evening, and no more opportunities likely for the vigorous intervention of what was, with consentaneous relief, referred to as the hand of God; true, that is, that by about eight that evening, when even the hand of God inclined to decorous retirement, a number of the more exotic accounts of the day's main event, harried reports on the various epiphenomena, and exhibitions from among the souvenirs of the more dilapidated rotting-rooms, had shed their sources, and in currency gained credence.
Concerning the Reverend himself, for instance, by noon it was rumored that he had once traveled in Italy, and by one accepted that he had stopped in Rome; by two, rumored that he had in Spain entered a Carthusian monastery as a novice, and by three confirmed; by four, that he had once dressed himself in rags, rented three pitiful children, and attended in a state of mendicant collapse before the steps of the Ritz hotel in Madrid; by five, that he had stood the entire town of Malaga to drinks, conducted the male population on an experimental hike out on the sea toward Africa, seeking One who should manage it dry-shod; by six, that he had indeed married himself to a hoary crone with bangles in her ears, proclaimed himself heir to the throne of Abd-er-Rahman, and led an insurrection of the Moors on Cordoba; by seven, a score of people were to be found who had seen him on the roof of the church mid-morning of the day before; and by eight, even the tale told by an unpalatable fellow (whose general attitude toward life was sketched in a tattoo on his right forearm, and who had never been seen at any community-supported center but the police station, much less the church), a tale in which that very morning the Reverend had been seen abroad without a stitch on, albeit within the confines of his own lawns and pasture, a tale which might have ended that night under the twelve-point antlers of the buck in the Depot Tavern but for the main event of the day, or, again, if the buck had survived, or, indeed, even the Depot Tavern been left standing, by eight even this tale had made its way into a number of respectable parlors, a rococo affair, adorned, by this time, with elements which many now suspected might be the truth.
This fellow said that he was returning home (and a few suspected it right here at the outset, since he was known from the police blotter to reside at "no fixed address") from work, as he referred to the nightly periods he spent in the abandoned bridge works sleeping off drink, when, as he did every morning, he passed the parsonage, where he had become used to the reassuring spectacle of the Reverend greeting the dawn from the front porch, with increasing vehemence, it seemed, as recent dawns coincided with the end of the working day. This morning, however, and in spite of the fine sunrise, the Reverend was not to be seen at his station. The night watchman went on to relate how, glancing back over his shoulder as he descended the hill, he discerned what appeared to be an impressively large and white figure in the branches of a tree, down near the barn, the carriage barn at the foot of the back lawn. He paused, understandably, to await the next development, as the figure in the tree appeared to be doing also; and within a minute's time, the black bull appeared in the field below. The bull was readily enough identified; but it was here that the fellow's story assumed such proportions that credulity was strained, even among those enough offended by subsequent events, or injured in the trial of strength which ensued before the morning was out, to cherish every word, for he detailed a chase, and a capture, of such heroic dimensions, that only a few here and there, whom the pagan curiosity of youth had led into traffic with myths, could summon images to approximate his description, and none could match it. For once caught round the neck, at which point the captor's feet did, he admitted, leave the ground, he said that the bull was dow;ned; and the more the time of the day passed, and the more he was given to drink, the more vociferously this fellow swore that he had seen the bull carried shoulder-high, and then dragged, by its hind legs, out of his sight, up the lawn toward the parsonage.
With contumely masked as charity on the one hand, and charity proffered as indifference by the other, the church-going and the Depot Tavern's public suffered one another at a distance, mutually exclusive, not, until that day, to say aloof (for by noon a few had crossed the line in both directions). And so, though a few gathered before the church that morning wore expressions of anxiety, on edge because of the bell which had been ringing the hour in irresolute sevenths since dawn, and even now called them to worship in the same breathless fashion, none was prepared for anything out of what, in extraordinary times, is called the ordinary. Of all the knot of soberly dressed children and somberly dressed adults, with here and there in the bright sunshine a voice like a tinkling cymbal, and another sounding brass, none even noticed from outside that the lozenge-shaped panes were boarded up from within; and none was prepared, upon entering, for the appearance of the interior of the church, though within a few minutes it was difficult to tell who was going in and who was coming out as they blocked the doorway describing the darkened place, the arrangement of the benches (for it proved later that a number of the pews had been hewn down to these modest proportions), the altar brought closer down with a gold bull figure mounted just out of a shaft of sunlight which struck from above. Still outside, a pale woman who never used scent, and so was highly responsive to such things, believed she smelled incense. And someone even noted the disappearance of the bronze tablet put up in loving memory of John H. — (an item never recovered, and, as far as that goes, never replaced).
— Natalis Invicti Sous. .
A burly man (he proved later, in daylight, to be commander of the local American Legion post) had climbed up and commenced to tear a board from a window, but he lost balance at the sound of this stern and still gentle voice.
— The birth of the Unconquered Sun. . We are gathered here in the world cave before him born of the Rock, the one Rock hewn without human hands, in the sight of the shepherds who witnessed his birth, whose name signifies friend, and mediator, who comes with rest from sin, and hope beyond the grave. . and offers the revival of the Sun in promise and pledge of his own.,