--I wish I need say nothing about it. My mind, my
heart, my soul, have all been wrenched and twisted with such emotion as
is not pleasant to feel nor expedient to speak about. It was too real,
too heart-rending, too awful. I hate, I abhor myself for feeling things
so acutely. I wish I were a skeptic, a scoffer, an atheist. I wish I
could put my mind on the mechanism of the play. I wish I could believe
that it all took place two thousand years ago. I wish I didn't know that
this suffering on the stage was all actual. I wish I thought these
people were really Tyrolese peasants, wood-carvers and potters, and that
all this agony was only a play. I hate the women who are weeping all
around me. I hate the men who let the tears run down their cheeks, and
whose shoulders heave with their sobs. It is so awful to see a man cry.

But no, it is all true. It is taking place now. I am one of the women
at the foot of the cross. The anguish, the cries, the sobs are all
actual. They pierce my heart. The cross with its piteous burden is
outlined against the real sky. The green hill beyond is Calvary. Doves
flutter in and out, and butterflies dart across the shafts of sunlight.
The expression of Christ's face is one of anguish, forgiveness, and pity
unspeakable. Then his head drops forward on his breast. It grows dark.
The weeping becomes lamentation, and as they approach to thrust the
spear into His side, from which I have been told the blood and water
really may be seen to pour forth, I turn faint and sick and close my
eyes. It has gone too far. I no longer am myself, but a disorganised
heap of racked nerves and hysterical weeping, and not even the descent
from the cross, the rising from the dead, nor the triumphant ascension
can console me nor restore my balance.

The Passion Play but once in a lifetime!

CHAPTER VI

MUNICH TO THE ACHENSEE

If there were a country where the crowned heads of Europe in ball
costume sat in a magnificent hall, drinking nothing less than champagne,
while the court band discoursed bewitching music, and the electric
lights flashed on myriads of jewels, Bee and Mrs. Jimmie would declare
that sort of Bohemia to be quite in their line. And because that kind of
refined stupidity would bore Jimmie and me to the verge of extinction,
and because we really prefer an open-air concert-garden with beer, where
the people are likely to be any sort of cattle whom nobody would want to
know, yet who are interest