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Title: The mother
Author: Grazia Deledda
Translator: Mary G. Steegmann
Release date: October 22, 2025 [eBook #77111]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1923
Credits: Sean/IB@DP
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MOTHER ***
THE MOTHER
_by_
GRAZIA DELEDDA
_Translated from the Italian
by_
MARY G. STEEGMANN
GROSSET & DUNLAP, _Publishers_
_by arrangement with_
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Copyright, 1923,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1923.
Reprinted August, 1928.
Reprinted October, 1928.
[Contents]
Translator’s Note · Preface ·
Chapter I · Chapter II · Chapter III · Chapter IV · Chapter V ·
Chapter VI · Chapter VII · Chapter VIII · Chapter IX · Chapter X ·
Chapter XI · Chapter XII · Chapter XIII · Chapter XIV
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
_The Mother_[1] is an unusual book, both in its story and its setting
in a remote Sardinian hill village, half civilized and superstitious.
But the chief interest lies in the psychological study of the two chief
characters, and the action of the story takes place so rapidly (all
within the space of two days) and the actual drama is so interwoven
with the mental conflict, and all so forced by circumstances, that it
is almost Greek in its simple and inevitable tragedy.
The book is written without offence to any creed or opinions, and
touches on no questions of either doctrine or Church government. It
is just a human problem, the result of primitive human nature against
man-made laws it cannot understand.
[1] Translated from the Italian novel _La Madre_.
PREFACE
Novelists who have laid the scenes of their stories almost invariably
in one certain country or district, or amongst one certain class of
people, or who have dealt with one special topic or interest, are apt
to be called monotonous by a public which merely reads to kill time or
is always craving for new sensations in its literature. But to another
and more serious class of reader this very fidelity to scene and
steadfastness of outlook is one of the principal incentives to take up
each fresh work of such writers, for it is safe to assume that they are
writing about what they really know and understand and their work may
be expected to deepen and develop with each succeeding book.
Amongst such writers Grazia Deledda takes high rank. One of the
foremost women novelists of Italy, if not the very first, she has
been writing for some five and twenty years, and though almost always
utilizing the same setting for her novels, each succeeding one has
shown a different leading idea, a new variation upon the eternal theme
of more or less primitive human nature.
Madame Deledda is a Sardinian by birth and parentage. She was born at
Nuoro, the little inland town that figures so often in her books, and
there she spent her first youth amongst the shepherds and peasants
and small landed proprietors such as live again in her pages. On her
marriage to a young Lombard she left Sardinia and went with her husband
to Rome, where she still lives and works, with the steadfast aim of yet
further perfecting herself in her art.
As may be expected, the action of her numerous novels takes place
principally in her native island of Sardinia, with its wild and rugged
background of mountain, rock, and wide tracts of thicket and shrub. The
people of Sardinia, chiefly shepherds, agriculturists, and fishermen,
differ considerably from those of the mainland, and a graver and less
vivacious demeanour than most other Italians, a strict sense of honour,
and hospitality regarded as an actual duty, makes them more resemble
the ancient Spanish race with which indeed they are probably distantly
akin.
The life of the poorer islanders is usually one of great privation,
and ceaseless hard work is required to win a subsistence from the soil
in the mountain uplands, exposed alternately to the scorching summer
sun and the fierce gales and icy winds of winter. The native dress is
still worn, though the fashion is dying out, and the old traditional
superstitions and half pagan beliefs in witchcraft and the evil eye
survive side by side with a profound and simple religious faith, a
combination only possible in the islands, as in the remoter parts of
the mainland, where the people never go far from their native districts
and seldom come in contact with outside influences.
Nowhere, perhaps, has Grazia Deledda better portrayed this mingling of
inbred superstition with Church-directed religion than in _The Mother_.
Here the scene is laid in the remote and only half civilized hill
village of Aar, and while the action of the story is dramatic and swift
(it takes place all within the space of two days), the chief interest
lies in the psychological study of the two principal characters,
and the actual drama is so interwoven with the mental conflict, so
developed by outward circumstances, that it is almost Greek in its
simple and inevitable tragedy.
We meet here many of the inhabitants of the mountain district; the old
hunter who has turned solitary through dread of men, the domineering
keeper and his dog, the wholly delightful boy sacristan and his
friends. But the figures in whom the interest centres are, first and
foremost, the mother of the young parish priest of Aar (hence the title
“La Madre” in the original Italian), Paul, the priest himself, and
Agnes, the lonely woman who wrecks the lives of both mother and son.
The love story of Paul is doubtless common enough. As is generally the
case, especially with priests promoted from the humbler ranks of life,
he made his vows whilst still too young to understand all that he was
professing and renouncing. He had been taught that divine love was
all-sufficing, to the exclusion of any other kind, and when human love
overtook him he was too inexperienced and too weak to have any chance
in the struggle for victory—and he desperately trusted to the hazard
of events to save him when his own self-deception and cowardice had
failed—when confronted with the greater strength and moral honesty of
the woman.
It is the fine and consistently drawn character of Maria Maddalena,
however, that claims the reader’s whole sympathy. Poor, ignorant, able
neither to read nor write, she has brought up her boy by her own hard
work and has achieved the peasant’s ambition of seeing him admitted to
the priesthood and given charge of a parish. For a time all goes well,
until the inevitable woman appears on the scene, and then suddenly she
finds her son gone beyond her reach and exposed to perils she dare not
contemplate. In her unquestioning acceptance of the Church’s laws her
simple mind is only filled with terror lest Paul should break those
laws. But while she is inexorable with the priest her heart yearns over
the young man, tender with his grief, and, spurred on by a phantom,
a dream, her love and her intelligence begin for the first time to
regret the natural happiness he is denied and to question the Church’s
right to impose such a denial. And at last the struggle and the
suspense grow more than she can bear and live.
It should be stated emphatically that the book is written without the
least offence to any creed or opinion whatsoever, and touches on no
question of either doctrine or Church government. It is just a human
problem, the revolt of primitive human nature in distress against
man-made laws it suffers from and cannot understand.
M. G. S.
CHAPTER I
To-night again Paul was preparing to go out, it seemed.
From her room adjoining his the mother could hear him moving about
furtively, perhaps waiting to go out until she should have extinguished
her light and got into bed.
She put out her light, but she did not get into bed.
Seated close against the door, she clasped her hands tightly together,
those work-worn hands of a servant, pressing the thumbs one upon
the other to give herself courage; but every moment her uneasiness
increased and overcame her obstinate hope that her son would sit down
quietly, as he used to do, and begin to read, or else go to bed. For
a few minutes, indeed, the young priest’s cautious steps were silent.
She felt herself all alone. Outside, the noise of the wind mingled
with the murmuring of the trees which grew on the ridge of high
ground behind the little presbytery; not a high wind, but incessant,
monotonous, that sounded as though it were enveloping the house in some
creaking, invisible band, ever closer and closer, trying to uproot it
from its foundations and drag it to the ground.
The mother had already closed the house door and barricaded it with
two crossed bars, in order to prevent the devil, who on windy nights
roams abroad in search of souls, from penetrating into the house. As a
matter of fact, however, she put little faith in such things. And now
she reflected with bitterness, and a vague contempt of herself, that
the evil spirit was already inside the little presbytery, that it drank
from her Paul’s cup and hovered about the mirror he had hung on the
wall near his window.
Just then she heard Paul moving about again. Perhaps he was actually
standing in front of the mirror, although that was forbidden to
priests. But what had Paul not allowed himself for some considerable
time now?
The mother remembered that lately she had several times come upon him
gazing at himself in the glass like any woman, cleaning and polishing
his nails, or brushing his hair, which he had left to grow long and
then turned back over his head, as though trying to conceal the holy
mark of the tonsure. And then he made use of perfumes, he brushed his
teeth with scented powder, and even combed out his eyebrows.
She seemed to see him now as plainly as though the dividing wall did
not exist, a black figure against the white background of his room; a
tall, thin figure, almost too tall, going to and fro with the heedless
steps of a boy, often stumbling and slipping about, but always holding
himself erect. His head was a little too large for the thin neck, his
face pale and overshadowed by the prominent forehead that seemed to
force the brows to frown and the long eyes to droop with the burden of
it. But the powerful jaw, the wide, full mouth and the resolute chin
seemed in their turn to revolt with scorn against this oppression, yet
not be able to throw it off.
But now he halted before the mirror and his whole face lighted up, the
eyelids opened to the full and the pupils of his clear brown eyes shone
like diamonds.
Actually, in the depths of her maternal heart, his mother delighted to
see him so handsome and strong, and then the sound of his furtive steps
moving about again recalled her sharply to her anxiety.
He was going out, there could be no more doubt about that. He opened
the door of his room and stood still again. Perhaps he, too, was
listening to the sounds without, but there was nothing to be heard save
the encircling wind beating ever against the house.
The mother made an effort to rise from her chair, to cry out “My son,
Paul, child of God, stay here!” but a power stronger than her own will
kept her down. Her knees trembled as though trying to rebel against
that infernal power; her knees trembled, but her feet refused to move,
and it was as though two compelling hands were holding her down upon
her seat.
Thus Paul could steal noiselessly downstairs, open the door and go
out, and the wind seemed to engulf him and bear him away in a flash.
Only then was she able to rise and light her lamp again. But even this
was only achieved with difficulty, because, instead of igniting, the
matches left long violet streaks on the wall wherever she struck them.
But at last the little brass lamp threw a dim radiance over the small
room, bare and poor as that of a servant, and she opened the door and
stood there, listening. She was still trembling, yet she moved stiffly
and woodenly, and with her large head and her short, broad figure
clothed in rusty black she looked as though she had been hewn with an
axe, all of a piece, from the trunk of an oak.
From her threshold she looked down the slate stairs descending steeply
between whitewashed walls, at the bottom of which the door shook upon
its hinges with the violence of the wind. And when she saw the two bars
which Paul had unfastened and left leaning against the wall she was
filled with sudden wild anger.
Ah no, she must defeat the devil. Then she placed her light on the
floor at the top of the stairs, descended and went out, too.
The wind seized hold of her roughly, blowing out her skirts and the
handkerchief over her head, as though it were trying to force her
back into the house. But she knotted the handkerchief tightly under
her chin and pressed forward with bent head, as though butting aside
all obstacles in her path. She felt her way past the front of the
presbytery, along the wall of the kitchen garden and past the front of
the church, but at the corner of the church she paused. Paul had turned
there, and swiftly, like some great black bird, his cloak flapping
round him, he had almost flown across the field that extended in front
of an old house built close against the ridge of land that shut in the
horizon above the village.
The uncertain light, now blue, now yellow, as the moon’s face shone
clear or was traversed by big clouds, illumined the long grass of the
field, the little raised piazza in front of the church and presbytery,
and the two lines of cottages on either side of the steep road, which
wound on and downwards till it lost itself amidst the trees in the
valley. And in the centre of the valley, like another grey and winding
road, was the river that flowed on and in its turn lost itself amidst
the rivers and roads of the fantastic landscape that the wind-driven
clouds alternately revealed and concealed on that distant horizon that
lay beyond the valley’s edge.
In the village itself not a light was to be seen, nor even a thread of
smoke. They were all asleep by now in the poverty-stricken cottages,
which clung to the grassy hill-side like two rows of sheep, whilst the
church with its slender tower, itself protected by the ridge of land
behind it, might well represent the shepherd leaning upon his staff.
The elder trees which grew along the parapet of the piazza before
the church were bending and tossing furiously in the wind, black and
shapeless monsters in the gloom, and in answer to their rustling cry
came the lament of the poplars and reeds in the valley. And in all this
dolour of the night, the moaning wind and the moon drowning midst the
angry clouds, was merged the sorrow of the mother seeking for her son.
Until that moment she had tried to deceive herself with the hope that
she would see him going before her down into the village to visit some
sick parishioner, but instead, she beheld him running as though spurred
on by the devil towards the old house under the ridge.
And in that old house under the ridge there was no one save a woman,
young, healthy and alone....
Instead of approaching the principal entrance like an ordinary
visitor, he went straight to the little door in the orchard wall, and
immediately it opened and closed again behind him like a black mouth
that had swallowed him up.
Then she too ran across the meadow, treading in the path his feet had
made in the long grass; straight to the little door she ran, and she
put her open hands against it, pushing with all her strength. But the
little door remained closed, it even seemed to repulse her by an active
power of its own, and the woman felt she must strike it and cry aloud.
She looked at the wall and touched it as though to test its solidity,
and at last in despair she bent her head and listened intently. But
nothing could be heard save the creaking and rustling of the trees
inside the orchard, friends and accomplices of their mistress, trying
to cover with their own noises all other sounds there within.
But the mother would not be beaten, she must hear and know—or rather,
since in her inmost soul she already knew the truth, she wanted some
excuse for still deceiving herself.
Careless now whether she were seen or not, she walked the whole length
of the orchard wall, past the front of the house, and beyond it as
far as the big gate of the courtyard; and as she went she touched the
stones as though seeking one that would give way and leave a hole
whereby she might enter in. But everything was solid, compact, fast
shut—the big entrance gate, the hall door, the barred windows were like
the openings in a fortress.
At that moment the moon emerged from behind the clouds and shone
out clear in a lake of blue, illuminating the reddish frontage of
the house, which was partly overshadowed by the deep eaves of the
overhanging grass-grown roof; the inside shutters of the windows were
closed and the panes of glass shone like greenish mirrors, reflecting
the drifting clouds and the patches of blue sky and the tossing
branches of the trees upon the ridge.
Then she turned back, striking her head against the iron rings let into
the wall for tethering horses. Again she halted in front of the chief
entrance, and before that big door with its three granite steps, its
Gothic porch and iron gate, she felt suddenly humiliated, powerless to
succeed, smaller even than when, as a little girl, she had loitered
near with other poor children of the village, waiting till the master
of the house should come out and fling them a few pence.
It had happened sometimes in those far-off days that the door had been
left wide open and had afforded a view into a dark entrance hall, paved
with stone and furnished with stone seats. The children had shouted at
this and thrust themselves forward even to the threshold, their voices
re-echoing in the interior of the house as in a cave. Then a servant
had appeared to drive them away.
“What! You here, too, Maria Maddalena! Aren’t you ashamed to go running
about with those boys, a great girl like you?”
And she, the girl, had shrunk back abashed, but nevertheless she had
turned to stare curiously at the mysterious inside of the house. And
just so did she shrink back now and move away, wringing her hands in
despair and staring again at the little door which had swallowed up her
Paul like a trap. But as she retraced her steps and walked homeward
again she began to regret that she had not shouted, that she had not
thrown stones at the door and compelled those inside to open it and
let her try to rescue her son. She repented her weakness, stood still,
irresolute, turned back, then homewards again, drawn this way and that
by her tormenting anxiety, uncertain what to do: until at last the
instinct of self-preservation, the need of collecting her thoughts and
concentrating her strength for the decisive battle, drove her home as a
wounded animal takes refuge in its lair.
The instant she got inside the presbytery she shut the door and sat
down heavily on the bottom stair. From the top of the staircase came
the dim flickering light of the lamp, and everything within the little
house, up to now as steady and quiet as a nest built in some crevice of
the rocks, seemed to swing from side to side: the rock was shaken to
its foundations and the nest was falling to the ground.
Outside the wind moaned and whistled more loudly still; the devil was
destroying the presbytery, the church, the whole world of Christians.
“Oh Lord, oh Lord!” wailed the mother, and her voice sounded like the
voice of some other woman speaking.
Then she looked at her own shadow on the staircase wall and nodded to
it. Truly, she felt that she was not alone, and she began to talk as
though another person were there with her, listening and replying.
“What can I do to save him?”
“Wait here till he comes in, and then speak to him plainly and firmly
whilst you are still in time, Maria Maddalena.”
“But he would get angry and deny it all. It would be better to go to
the Bishop and beg him to send us away from this place of perdition.
The Bishop is a man of God and knows the world. I will kneel at his
feet; I can almost see him now, dressed all in white, sitting in his
red reception room, with his golden cross shining on his breast and two
fingers raised in benediction. He looks like our Lord Himself! I shall
say to him: Monsignore, you know that the parish of Aar, besides being
the poorest in the kingdom, lies under a curse. For nearly a hundred
years it was without a priest and the inhabitants forgot God entirely;
then at last a priest came here, but Monsignore knows what manner of
man he was. Good and holy till he was fifty years of age: he restored
the presbytery and the church, built a bridge across the river at his
own expense, and went out shooting and shared the common life of the
shepherds and hunters. Then suddenly he changed and became as evil as
the devil. He practised sorcery. He began to drink and grew overbearing
and passionate. He used to smoke a pipe and swear, and he would sit
on the ground playing cards with the worst ruffians of the place, who
liked him and protected him, however, and for this very reason the
others let him alone. Then, during his latter years, he shut himself
up in the presbytery all alone without even a servant, and he never
went outside the door except to say Mass, but he always said it before
dawn, so that nobody ever went. And they say he used to celebrate
when he was drunk. His parishioners were too frightened to bring any
accusation against him, because it was said that he was protected by
the devil in person. And then when he fell ill there was not a woman
who would go and nurse him. Neither woman nor man, of the decent sort,
went to help him through his last days, and yet at night every window
in the presbytery was lighted up; and the people said that during
those last nights the devil had dug an underground passage from this
house to the river, through which to carry away the mortal remains of
the priest. And by this passage the spirit of the priest used to come
back in the years that followed his death and haunt the presbytery,
so that no other priest would ever come to live here. A priest used
to come from another village every Sunday to say Mass and bury the
dead, but one night the spirit of the dead priest destroyed the
bridge, and after that for ten years the parish was without a priest,
until my Paul came. And I came with him. We found the village and its
inhabitants grown quite wild and uncivilized, without faith at all,
but everything revived again after my Paul came, like the earth at the
return of the spring. But the superstitious were right, disaster will
fall upon the new priest because the spirit of the old one still reigns
in the presbytery. Some say that he is not dead and that he lives in an
underground dwelling communicating with the river. I myself have never
believed in such tales, nor have I ever heard any noises. For seven
years we have lived here, my Paul and I, as in a little convent. Until
a short time ago Paul led the life of an innocent child, he studied
and prayed and lived only for the good of his parishioners. Sometimes
he used to play the flute. He was not merry by nature, but he was calm
and quiet. Seven years of peace and plenty have we had, like those in
the Bible. My Paul never drank, he did not go out shooting, he did not
smoke and he never looked at a woman. All the money he could save he
put aside to rebuild the bridge below the village. He is twenty-eight
years old, is my Paul, and now the curse has fallen upon him. A woman
has caught him in her net. Oh, my Lord Bishop, send us away from here;
save my Paul, for otherwise he will lose his soul as did the former
priest! And the woman must be saved, too. After all, she is a woman
living alone and she has her temptations also in that lonely house,
midst the desolation of this little village where there is nobody fit
to bear her company. My Lord Bishop, your Lordship knows that woman,
you were her guest with all your following when you came here on your
pastoral visitation. There is room and stuff to spare, in that house!
And the woman is rich, independent, alone, too much alone! She has
brothers and a sister, but they are all far away, married and living in
other countries. She remained here alone to look after the house and
the property, and she seldom goes out. And until a little while ago my
Paul did not even know her. Her father was a strange sort of man, half
gentleman, half peasant, a hunter and a heretic. He was a friend of
the old priest, and I need say no more. He never went to church, but
during his last illness he sent for my Paul, and my Paul stayed with
him till he died and gave him a funeral such as had never been seen in
these parts. Every single person in the village went to it, even the
babies were carried in their mothers’ arms. Then afterwards my Paul
went on visiting the only survivor of that household. And this orphan
girl lives alone with bad servants. Who directs her, who advises her?
Who is there to help her if we do not?”
Then the other woman asked her:
“Are you certain of this, Maria Maddalena? Are you really sure that
what you think is true? Can you actually go before the Bishop and speak
thus about your son and that other person, and prove it? And suppose it
should not be true?”
“Oh Lord, oh Lord!”
She buried her face in her hands, and immediately there rose before her
the vision of her Paul and the woman together in a ground-floor room in
the old house. It was a very large room looking out into the orchard,
with a domed ceiling, and the floor was of pounded cement with which
small sea-shells and pebbles had been mixed; on one side was an immense
fireplace, to right and left of which stood an arm-chair and in front
was an antique sofa. The whitewashed walls were adorned with arms,
stags’ heads and antlers, and paintings whose blackened canvases hung
in tatters, little of the subjects being distinguishable in the shadows
save here and there a dusky hand, some vestige of a face, of a woman’s
hair, or bunch of fruit.
Paul and the woman were seated in front of the fire, clasping each
other’s hands.
“Oh, my God!” came the mother’s moaning cry.
And in order to banish that diabolic vision she evoked another. It was
the same room again, but illumined now by the greenish light that came
through the barred window looking out over the meadow and the door
which opened direct from the room into the orchard, and through which
she saw the trees and foliage gleaming, still wet with the autumn dew.
Some fallen leaves were blown softly about the floor and the chains of
the antique brass lamp that stood upon the mantelshelf swung to and fro
in the draught. Through a half-open door on the other side she could
see other rooms, all somewhat dark and with closed windows.
She stood there waiting, with a present of fruit which her Paul had
sent to the mistress of the house. And then the mistress came, with
a quickened step and yet a little shy; she came from the dark rooms,
dressed in black, her pale face framed between two great knots of black
plaits, and her thin white hands emerging from the shadows like those
in the pictures on the wall.
And even when she came close and stood in the full light of the
room there was about her small slender figure something evanescent,
doubtful. Her large dark eyes fell instantly on the basket of fruit
standing on the table, then turned with a searching look upon the woman
who stood waiting, and a swift smile, half joy, half contempt, passed
over the sad and sensual curves of her lips.
And in that moment, though she knew not how or why, the first
suspicion stirred in the mother’s heart.
* * * * *
She could not have explained the reason why, but her memory dwelt on
the eagerness with which the girl had welcomed her, making her sit
down beside her and asking for news of Paul. She called him Paul as a
sister might have done, but she did not treat her as though she were
their common mother, but rather as a rival who must be flattered and
deceived. She ordered coffee for her, which was served on a large
silver tray by a barefoot maid whose face was swathed like an Arab’s.
She talked of her two brothers, both influential men living far away,
taking secret delight in picturing herself between these two, as
between columns supporting the fabric of her solitary life. And then
at last she led the visitor out to see the orchard, through the door
opening straight from the room.
Big purple figs covered with a silver sheen, pears, and great bunches
of golden grapes hung amidst the vivid green of the trees and vines.
Why should Paul send a gift of fruit to one who possessed so much
already?
Even now, sitting on the stairs in the dim light of the flickering
lamp, the mother could see again the look, at once ironical and tender,
which the girl had turned upon her as she bade her farewell, and the
manner in which she lowered her heavy eyelids as though she knew no
other way of hiding the feelings her eyes betrayed too plainly. And
those eyes, and that way of revealing her soul in a sudden flash
of truth and then instantly drawing back into herself again, was
extraordinarily like Paul. So much so that during the days following,
when because of his manner and his reserve her suspicions grew and
filled her heart with fear, she did not think with any hatred of the
woman who was leading him into sin, but she thought only of how she
might save her too, as though it had been the saving of a daughter of
her own.
CHAPTER II
Autumn and winter had passed without anything happening to confirm her
suspicions, but now with the return of the spring, with the blowing of
the March winds, the devil took up his work again.
Paul went out at night, and he went to the old house.
“What shall I do, how can I save him?”
But the wind only mocked at her in reply, shaking the house door with
its furious blasts.
She remembered their first coming to the village, immediately after
Paul had been appointed parish priest here. For twenty years she had
been in service and had resisted every temptation, every prompting and
instinct of nature, depriving herself of love, even of bread itself,
in order that she might bring up her boy rightly and set him a good
example. Then they came here, and just such a furious wind as this
had beset them on their journey. It had been springtime then, too,
but the whole valley seemed to have slipped back into the grip of
winter. Leaves were blown hither and thither, the trees bent before
the blast, leaning one against another, as though gazing fearfully at
the battalions of black clouds driving rapidly across the sky from
all parts of the horizon, while large hailstones fell and bruised the
tender green.
At the point where the road turns, overlooking the valley, and then
descends towards the river, there was such a sudden onslaught of wind
that the horses came to a dead stop, pricking their ears and neighing
with fear. The storm shook their bridles like some bandit who had
seized their heads to stop them that he might rob the travellers, and
even Paul, although apparently he was enjoying the adventure, had cried
out with vague superstition in his voice:
“It must be the evil spirit of the old priest trying to prevent us
coming here!”
But his words were lost in the shrill whistling of the wind, and
although he smiled a little ruefully, a one-sided smile that touched
but one corner of his lips, his eyes were sad as they rested on the
village which now came in sight, like a picture hanging on the green
hill-side on the opposite slope of the valley beyond the tumbling
stream.
The wind dropped a little after they had crossed the river. The people
of the village, who were as ready to welcome the new priest as though
he were the Messiah, were all gathered together in the piazza before
the church, and on a sudden impulse a group of the younger men amongst
them had gone down to meet the travellers on the river bank. They
descended the hill like a flight of young eagles from the mountains,
and the air resounded with their merry shouts. When they reached their
parish priest they gathered round him and bore him up the hill in
triumph, every now and then firing their guns into the air as a mark of
rejoicing. The whole valley echoed with their cheering and firing, the
wind itself was pacified and the weather began to clear up.
Even in this present hour of anguish the mother’s heart swelled with
pride when she recalled that other hour of triumph. Again she seemed
to be living in a dream, to be borne as though on a cloud by those
noisy youths, while beside her walked her Paul, so boyish still, but
with a look half divine upon his face as those strong men bowed before
him with respect.
Up and up they climbed. Fireworks were being let off on the highest and
barest point of the ridge, the flames streaming out like red banners
against the background of black clouds and casting their reflections on
the grey village, the green hill-side and the tamarisks and elder trees
that bordered the path.
Up and still up they went. Over the parapet of the piazza leaned
another wall of human bodies and eager faces crowned with men’s caps
or framed in women’s kerchiefs with long fluttering fringes. The
children’s eyes danced with delight at the unwonted excitement, and on
the edge of the ridge the figures of the boys tending the fireworks
looked like slender black demons in the distance.
Through the wide-open door of the church the flames of the lighted
candles could be seen trembling like narcissi in the wind; the bells
were ringing loudly, and even the clouds in the pale silvery sky
seemed to have gathered round the tower to watch and wait.
Suddenly a cry rang out from the little crowd: “Here he is! Here he
is!... And he looks like a saint!”
There was nothing of a saint about him, however, except that air of
utter calm: he did not speak, he did not even acknowledge the people’s
greetings, he seemed in no way moved by that popular demonstration:
he only pressed his lips tightly together and bent his eyes upon the
ground with a slight frown, as though tired by the burden of that
heavy brow. Then suddenly, when they had reached the piazza and were
surrounded by the welcoming throng, the mother saw him falter as though
about to fall, a man supported him for an instant, then immediately he
recovered his balance and turning swiftly into the church he fell on
his knees before the altar and began to intone the evening prayer.
And the weeping women gave the responses.
* * * * *
The poor women wept, but their tears were the happy tears of love and
hope and the longing for a joy not of this world, and the mother felt
the balm of those tears falling on her heart even in this hour of her
grief. Her Paul! Her love, her hope, the embodiment of her desire for
unearthly joy! And now the spirit of evil was drawing him away, and she
sat there at the bottom of the staircase as at the bottom of a well,
and made no effort to rescue him.
She felt she was suffocating, her heart was heavy as a stone. She got
up in order to breathe more easily, and mounting the stairs she picked
up the lamp and held it aloft as she looked round her bare little room,
where a wooden bedstead and a worm-eaten wardrobe kept each other
company as the only furniture in the place. It was a room fit only for
a servant—she had never desired to better her lot, content to find her
only wealth in being the mother of her Paul.
Then she went into his room with its white walls and the narrow
virginal bed. This chamber had once been kept as simple and tidy as
that of a girl; he had loved quiet, silence, order, and always had
flowers upon his little writing-table in front of the window. But
latterly he had not cared about anything: he had left his drawers and
cupboards open and his books littered about on the chairs or even on
the floor.
The water in which he had washed before going out exhaled a strong
scent of roses: a coat had been flung off carelessly and lay on the
floor like a prostrate shadow of himself. That sight and that scent
roused the mother from her preoccupation: she picked up the coat and
thought scornfully that she would be strong enough even to pick up her
son himself. Then she tidied the room, clattering to and fro without
troubling now to deaden the sound of her heavy peasant shoes. She drew
up to the table the leather chair in which he sat to read, thumping it
down on the floor as though ordering it to remain in its place awaiting
the speedy return of its master. Then she turned to the little mirror
hanging beside the window....
Mirrors are forbidden in a priest’s house, he must forget that he has
a body. On this point, at least, the old priest had observed the law,
and from the road he could have been seen shaving himself by the open
window, behind the panes of which he had hung a black cloth to throw up
the reflection. But Paul, on the contrary, was attracted to the mirror
as to a well from whose depths a face smiled up at him, luring him down
to perish. But it was the mother’s own scornful face and threatening
eyes that the little mirror reflected now, and with rising anger she
put out her hand and tore it from its nail. Then she flung the window
wide open and let the wind blow in to purify the room: the books and
papers on the table seemed to come alive, twisting and circling into
every corner, the fringe of the bed-cover shook and waved and the flame
of the lamp flickered almost to extinction.
She gathered up the books and papers and replaced them on the table.
Then she noticed an open Bible, with a coloured picture that she
greatly admired, and she bent down to examine it more closely. There
was Jesus the Good Shepherd watering His sheep at a spring in the midst
of a forest. Between the trees, against the background of blue sky,
could be seen a distant city, red in the light of the setting sun, a
holy city, the City of Salvation.
There had been a time when he used to study far into the night; the
stars over the ridge looked in at his window and the nightingales sang
him their plaintive notes. For the first year after they came to the
village he often talked of leaving and going back into the world: then
he settled down into a sort of waking sleep, in the shadow of the ridge
and the murmur of the trees. Thus seven years passed, and his mother
never suggested they should move elsewhere, for they were so happy in
the little village that seemed to her the most beautiful in all the
world, because her Paul was its saviour and its king.
She closed the window and replaced the mirror, which showed her now
her own face grown white and drawn, her eyes dim with tears. Again she
asked herself if perhaps she were not mistaken. She turned towards a
crucifix which hung on the wall above a kneeling-stool, raising the
lamp above her head that she might see it better; and midst the shadows
that her movements threw on the wall it seemed as though the Christ,
thin and naked, stretched upon the Cross, bowed His head to hear her
prayer. And great tears coursed down her face and fell upon her dress,
heavy as tears of blood.
“Lord, save us all! Save Thou me, even me. Thou Who hangest there pale
and bloodless, Thou Whose Face beneath its crown of thorns is sweet as
a wild rose, Thou Who art above our wretched passions, save us all!”
Then she hurried out of the room and went downstairs. She passed
through the tiny dining-room, where drowsy flies, startled by the lamp,
buzzed heavily round and the howling wind and swaying trees outside
beat like rain upon the small, high window and thence into the kitchen,
where she sat down before the fire, already banked up with cinders for
the night. Even there the wind seemed to penetrate by every crack and
cranny, so that instead of being in the long low kitchen, whose uneven
ceiling was supported by smoke-blackened beams and rafters, she felt
as if she were in a rocking boat adrift on a stormy sea. And although
determined to wait up for her son and begin the battle at once, she
still fought against conviction and tried to persuade herself that she
was mistaken.
She felt it unjust that God should send her such sorrow, and she went
back over her past life, day by day, trying to find some reason for her
present unhappiness; but all her days had passed hard and clean as the
beads of the rosary she held in her shaking fingers. She had done no
wrong, unless perchance sometimes in her thoughts.
She saw herself again as an orphan in the house of poor relations, in
that same village, ill-treated by every one, toiling barefoot, bearing
heavy burdens on her head, washing clothes in the river, or carrying
corn to the mill. An elderly man, a relative of hers, was employed
by the miller, and each time she went down to the mill, if there
was nobody to see him, he followed her into the bushes and tufts of
tamarisk and kissed her by force, pricking her face with his bristly
beard and covering her with flour. When she told of this, the aunts
with whom she lived would not let her go to the mill again. Then one
day the man, who ordinarily never came up to the village, suddenly
appeared at the house and said he wished to marry the girl. The other
members of the family laughed at him, slapped him on the back and
brushed the flour off his coat with a broom. But he took no notice of
their jests and kept his eyes fixed on the girl. At last she consented
to marry him, but she continued to live with her relations and went
down each day to the mill to see her husband, who always gave her a
small measure of flour unknown to his master. Then one day as she was
going home with her apron full of flour she felt something move beneath
it. Startled, she dropped the corners of her apron and all the flour
was scattered, and she was so giddy that she had to sit down on the
ground. She thought it was an earthquake, the houses rocked before her
eyes, the path went up and down and she flung herself prone on the
floury grass. Then she got up and ran home laughing, yet afraid, for
she knew she was with child.
* * * * *
She was left a widow before her Paul was old enough to talk, but his
bright baby eyes followed her everywhere, and she had mourned for her
husband as for a good old man who had been kind to her, but nothing
more. She was soon consoled, however, for a cousin proposed that they
should go together to the town and there take service.
“In that way you will be able to support your boy, and later on you can
send for him and put him to school.”
And so she worked and lived only for him.
She had lacked neither the occasion nor the inclination to indulge in
pleasures, if not in sin. Master and servants, peasant and townsman,
all had tried to catch her as once the old kinsman had caught her
amongst the tamarisks. Man is a hunter and woman his prey, but she had
succeeded in evading all pitfalls and keeping herself pure and good,
since she already looked on herself as the mother of a priest. Then
wherefore now this chastisement, O Lord?
She bowed her weary head and the tears rolled down her face and fell on
the rosary in her lap.
Gradually she grew drowsy, and confused memories floated through her
mind. She thought she was in the big warm kitchen of the Seminary,
where she had been servant for ten years and where she had succeeded
in getting her Paul admitted as student. Black figures went silently
to and fro, and in the passage outside she could hear the smothered
laughter and larking the boys indulged in when there was nobody to
reprove them. Tired to death, she sat beside a window opening on to
a dark yard, a duster on her lap, but too weary to move so much as a
finger towards her work. In the dream, too, she was waiting for Paul,
who had slipped out of the Seminary secretly without telling her where
he was going.
“If they find out they will expel him at once,” she thought, and she
waited anxiously till the house was quite quiet that she might let him
in without being observed.
Suddenly she awoke and found herself back in the narrow presbytery
kitchen, shaken by the wind like a ship at sea, but the impression of
the dream was so strong that she felt on her lap for the duster and
listened for the smothered laughter of the boys knocking each other
about in the passage. Then in a moment reality gripped her again,
and she thought Paul must have come in while she was fast asleep and
thus succeeded in escaping her notice. And actually, midst all the
creakings and shaking caused by the wind, she could hear steps inside
the house: some one was coming downstairs, crossing the ground-floor
rooms, entering the kitchen. She thought she was still dreaming when a
short, stout priest, with a week’s growth of beard upon his chin, stood
before her and looked her in the face with a smile. The few teeth he
had left were blackened with too much smoking, his light-coloured eyes
pretended to be fierce, but she could tell that he was really laughing,
and immediately she knew him for the former priest—but still she did
not feel afraid.
“It is only a dream,” she told herself, but in reality she knew she
only said that to give herself courage and that it was no phantom, but
a fact.
“Sit down,” she said, moving her stool aside to make room for him
in front of the fire. He sat down and drew up his cassock a little,
exhibiting a pair of discoloured and worn blue stockings.
“Since you are sitting here doing nothing, you might mend my stockings
for me, Maria Maddalena: I have no woman to look after me,” he said
simply. And she thought to herself:
“Can this be the terrible priest? That shows I am still dreaming.”
And then she tried to make him betray himself.
“If you are dead you have no need of stockings,” she said.
“How do you know I am dead? I am very much alive, on the contrary, and
sitting here. And before long I am going to drive both you and your
son out of my parish. It was a bad thing for you, coming here, you had
better have brought him up to follow his father’s trade. But you are an
ambitious woman, and you wanted to come back as mistress where you had
lived as a servant: so now you will see what you have gained by it!”
“We will go away,” she answered humbly and sadly. “Indeed, I want to
go. Man or ghost, whatever you are, have patience for a few days and
we shall be gone.”
“And where can you go?” said the old priest. “Wherever you go it will
be the same thing. Take rather the advice of one who knows what he is
talking about and let your Paul follow his destiny. Let him know the
woman, otherwise the same thing will befall him that befell me. When
I was young I would have nothing to do with women, nor with any other
kind of pleasure. I only thought of winning Paradise, and I failed to
perceive that Paradise is here on earth. When I did perceive it, it
was too late: my arm could no longer reach up to gather the fruit of
the tree and my knees would not bend that I might quench my thirst at
the spring. So then I began to drink wine, to smoke a pipe and to play
cards with all the rascals of the place. You call them rascals, but I
call them honest lads who enjoy life as they find it. It does one good
to be in their company, it diffuses a little warmth and merriment, like
the company of boys on a holiday. The only difference is that it is
always holiday for them, and therefore they are even merrier and more
careless than the boys, who cannot forget that they must soon go back
to school.”
While he was talking thus the mother thought to herself:
“He is only saying these things in order to persuade me to leave my
Paul alone and let him be damned. He has been sent by his friend and
master, the Devil, and I must be on my guard.”
Yet, in spite of herself, she listened to him readily and found herself
almost agreeing with what he said. She reflected that, in spite of all
her efforts, Paul too might “take a holiday,” and instinctively her
mother’s heart instantly sought excuses for him.
“You may be right,” she said with increased sadness and humility, which
now, however, was partly pretence. “I am only a poor, ignorant woman
and don’t understand very much: but one thing I am sure of, that God
sent us into the world to suffer.”
“God sent us into the world to enjoy it. He sends suffering to punish
us for not having understood how to enjoy, and that is the truth, you
fool of a woman! God created the world with all its beauty and gave
it to man for his pleasure: so much the worse for him if he does not
understand! But why should I trouble to explain this to you—all I mind
about is turning you out of this place, you and your Paul, and so much
the worse for you if you want to stop!”
“We are going, never fear, we are going very soon. That I can promise
you, for it’s my wish, too.”
“You only say that because you are afraid of me. But you are wrong to
be afraid. You think that it was I who prevented your feet from walking
and your matches from striking: and perhaps it was I, but that is not
to say that I mean any harm to you or your Paul. I only want you to go
away. And mind, if you do not keep your word you will be sorry! Well,
you will see me again and I shall remind you of this conversation.
Meanwhile, I will leave you my stockings to mend.”
“Very well, I will mend them.”
“Then shut your eyes, for I don’t choose that you should see my bare
legs. Ha, ha!” he laughed, pulling off one shoe with the toe of the
other and bending down to draw off his stockings, “no woman has ever
seen my bare flesh, however much they have slandered me, and you are
too old and ugly to be the first. Here is one stocking, and here is the
other; I shall come and fetch them soon....”
* * * * *
She opened her eyes with a start. She was alone again, in the kitchen
with the wind howling round it.
“O Lord, what a dream!” she murmured with a sigh. Nevertheless, she
stooped to look for the stockings, and she thought she heard the faint
footfall of the ghost as it passed out of the kitchen, vanishing
through the closed door.
CHAPTER III
When Paul left the woman’s house and found himself out in the meadow
again he too had the sensation that there was something alive,
something ghostly, undefinable in the wind. It buffeted him about and
chilled him through and through after his ardent dream of love, and as
it twisted and flattened his coat against his body he thought with a
quiver of the woman clinging to him in a passionate embrace.
When he turned the corner by the church the fury of the wind forced him
to stop for a moment, with head bent before the blast, one hand holding
on his hat and the other clutching his coat together. He had no breath
left, and giddiness overcame him as it had overcome his young mother
that far-off day on the way from the mill.
And with mingled excitement and loathing he felt that something
terrible and great was born in him at that moment: for the first time
he realized clearly and unmistakably that he loved Agnes with an
earthly love, and that he gloried in this love.
Until a few hours ago he had been under a delusion, persuading both
himself and her that his love was purely spiritual. But he had to
admit that it was she who had first let her gaze linger upon him, that
from their earliest meeting her eyes had sought his with a look that
implored his help and his love. And little by little he had yielded to
the fascination of that appeal, had been drawn to her by pity, and the
solitude that surrounded her had brought them together.
And after their eyes had met their hands had sought and found each
other, and that night they had kissed. And now his blood, which had
flowed quietly so many years, rushed through his veins like liquid fire
and the weak flesh yielded, at once the vanquished and the victor.
The woman had proposed that they two should secretly leave the village
and live or die together. In the intoxication of the moment he had
agreed to the proposal and they were to meet again the following night
to settle their plans. But now the reality of the outside world, and
that wind that seemed trying to strip him bare, tore away the veil of
self-deception. Breathless, he stood before the church door; he was icy
cold, and felt as though he were standing naked there in the midst of
the little village, and that all his poor parishioners, sleeping the
sleep of the weary, were beholding him thus in their dreams, naked, and
black with sin.
Yet all the time he was thinking how best to plan his flight with the
woman. She had told him that she possessed much money.... Then suddenly
he felt impelled to go back to her that instant and dissuade her; he
actually walked a few steps beside the wall where his mother had passed
shortly before, then turned back in despair and fell on his knees in
front of the church door and leaned his head against it, crying low,
“O God, save me!” and his black cloak was blown flapping about his
shoulders as he knelt there, like a vulture nailed alive upon the door.
His whole soul was fighting savagely, with a violence greater even
than that of the wind on those high hills; it was the supreme struggle
of the blind instinct of the flesh against the dominion of the spirit.
After a few moments he rose to his feet, uncertain still which of the
two had conquered. But his mind was clearer and he recognized the real
nature of his motives, confessing to himself that what swayed him
most, more than the fear and the love of God, more than the desire for
promotion and the hatred of sin, was his terror of the consequences of
an open scandal.
The realization that he judged himself so mercilessly encouraged him to
hope still for salvation. But at the bottom of his heart he knew he was
henceforth bound to that woman as to life itself, that her image would
be with him in his house, that he would walk at her side by day and at
night sleep entangled in the inextricable meshes of her long dark hair.
And beneath his sorrow and remorse, deeper and stronger still, he felt
a tumult of joy glow through his inmost being as a subterranean fire
burns within the earth.
Directly he opened the presbytery door he perceived the streak
of light that issued from the kitchen and shone across the little
dining-room into the entrance hall. Then he saw his mother sitting by
the dead ashes, as though watching by a corpse, and with a pang of
grief, a grief that never left him again, he instantly knew the whole
truth.
He followed the streak of light through the little dining-room,
faltered a second at the kitchen door, and then advanced to the hearth
with hands outstretched as though to save himself from falling.
“Why have you not gone to bed?” he asked curtly.
His mother turned to look at him, her dream-haunted face still deathly
pale; yet she was steady and quiet, almost stern, and while her eyes
sought those of her son, his tried to evade her gaze.
“I was waiting up for you, Paul. Where have you been?”
He knew instinctively that every word that was not strictly true would
be only a useless farce between them; yet he was forced to lie to her.
“I have been with a sick person,” he replied quickly.
For an instant his deep voice seemed to disperse the evil dream; for an
instant only, and the mother’s face was transfigured with joy. Then the
shadow fell again on face and heart.
“Paul,” she said gently, lowering her eyes with a feeling of shame,
but with no hesitation in her speech, “Paul, come nearer to me, I have
something to say to you.”
And although he moved no nearer to her, she went on speaking in a low
voice, as though close to his ear:
“I know where you have been. For many nights now I have heard you go
out, and to-night I followed you and saw where you went. Paul, think of
what you are doing!”
He did not answer, made no sign that he had heard. His mother raised
her eyes and beheld him standing tall and straight above her, pale as
death, his shadow cast by the lamp upon the wall behind him, motionless
as though transfixed upon a cross. And she longed for him to cry out
and reproach her, to protest his innocence.
But he was remembering his soul’s appeal as he knelt before the
church door, and now God had heard his cry and had sent his own
mother to him to save him. He wanted to bow before her, to fall at
her knee and implore her to lead him away from the village, then and
there, immediately; and at the same time he was shaking with rage and
humiliation, humiliation at finding his weakness exposed, rage at
having been watched and followed. Yet he grieved for the sorrow he was
causing her. Then suddenly he remembered that he had not only to save
himself, but to save appearances also.
“Mother,” he said, going close to her and placing his hand on her head,
“I tell you that I have been with some one who is ill.”
“There is nobody ill in that house.”
“Not all sick persons are in bed.”
“Then in that case you yourself are more ill than the woman you went to
see, and you must take care of yourself. Paul, I am only an ignorant
woman, but I am your mother, and I tell you that sin is an illness
worse than any other, because it attacks the soul. Moreover,” she
added, taking his hand and drawing him down towards her that he might
hear her better, “it is not yourself only that you have to save, O
child of God... remember that you must not destroy her soul... nor
bring her to harm in this life either.”
He was bending over her, but at these words he shot upright again like
a steel spring. His mother had cut him to the quick. Yes, it was true;
during all that hour of perturbation since he had quitted the woman he
had thought only of himself.
He tried to withdraw his hand from his mother’s, so hard and cold,
but she grasped it so imperatively that he felt as though he had been
arrested and were being led bound to prison. Then his thoughts turned
again to God; it was God who had bound him, therefore he must submit to
be led, but nevertheless he felt the rebellion and desperation of the
guilty prisoner who sees no way of escape.
“Leave me alone,” he said roughly, dragging his hand away by force, “I
am no longer a boy and know myself what is good or bad for me!”
Then the mother felt as though she were turned to stone, for he had
practically confessed his fault.
“No, Paul, you don’t see the wrong you have done. If you did see it you
would not speak like that.”
“Then how should I speak?”
“You would not shout like that, but you would assure me there is
nothing wrong between you and that woman. But that is just what you
don’t tell me, because you cannot do so conscientiously, and therefore
it is better you should say nothing at all. Don’t speak! I don’t ask it
of you now, but think well what you are about, Paul.”
Paul made no reply, but moved slowly from his mother’s side and stood
in the middle of the kitchen waiting for her to go on speaking.
“Paul, I have nothing more to say to you, and I have no wish to say
anything more. But I shall talk with God about you.”
Then he sprang back to her side with blazing eyes as though he were
about to strike her.
“Enough!” he cried, “you will be wise never to speak of this again,
neither to me nor to anyone else; and keep your fancies to yourself!”
She rose to her feet, stern and resolute, seized him by the arms and
forced him to look her straight in the eyes; then she let him go and
sat down again, her hands gripping each other tightly in her lap.
Paul moved towards the door, then turned and began to walk up and down
the kitchen. The moaning of the wind outside made an accompaniment
to the rustle of his clothes, which was like the rustle of a woman’s
dress, for he wore a cassock made of silk and his cloak was of the very
finest material. And in that moment of indecision, when he felt himself
caught in a whirlpool of conflicting emotions, even that silken rustle
seemed to speak and warn him that henceforth his life would be but a
maze of errors and light things and vileness. Everything spoke to him;
the wind outside, that recalled the long loneliness of his youth, and
inside the house the mournful figure of his mother, the sound of his
own steps, the sight of his own shadow on the floor. To and fro he
walked, to and fro, treading on his shadow as he sought to overcome
and stamp down his own self. He thought with pride that he had no need
of any supernatural aid, such as he had invoked to save him, and then
immediately this pride filled him with terror.
“Get up and go to bed,” he said, coming back to his mother’s side; and
then, seeing that she did not move but sat with head bowed as though
asleep, he bent down to look more closely in her face and perceived
that she was weeping silently.
“Mother!”
“No,” she said, without moving, “I shall never mention this thing to
you again, neither to you nor to anyone else. But I shall not stir
from this place except to leave the presbytery and the village, never
to return, unless you swear to me that you will never set foot in that
house again.”
He raised himself from his bending position, overtaken again by that
feeling of giddiness, and again superstition took hold of him, urging
him to promise whatever his mother asked of him, since it was God
Himself who was speaking by her mouth. And simultaneously a flood
of bitter words rose to his lips, and he wanted to cry out upon his
mother, to throw the blame on her and reproach her for having brought
him from his native village and set his feet upon a way that was not
his. But what would be the use? She would not even understand. Well,
well!... With one hand he made a gesture as though brushing away the
shadows from before his eyes, then suddenly he stretched out this hand
over his mother’s head, and in his imagination saw his opened fingers
extend in luminous rays above her:
“Mother, I swear to you that I will never enter that house again.”
And immediately he left the kitchen, feeling that here was the end of
everything. He was saved. But as he crossed the adjoining dining-room
he heard his mother weeping unrestrainedly, as though she were weeping
for the dead.
* * * * *
Back in his room, the scent of roses and the sight of the various
objects strewn about which were associated with his passion,
impregnated and coloured by it, as it were, shook him afresh. He
moved here and there without any reason, opened the window and thrust
his head out into the wind, feeling as helpless as one of the million
leaves whirled about in space, now in the dark shadow, now in the
bright light of the moon, playthings of the winds and clouds. At last
he drew himself up and closed the window, saying aloud as he did so:
“Let us be men!”
He stood erect to his full height, numb as though all his body were
cold and hard and enclosed in an armour of pride. He desired no more
to feel the sensations of the flesh, nor the sorrow nor the joy of
sacrifice, nor the sadness of his loneliness; he had no wish even
to kneel before God and receive the word of approval granted to the
willing servant. He asked nothing from anyone; he wanted only to go
forward in the straight way, alone and hopeless. Yet he was afraid of
going to bed and putting out the light, and instead he sat down and
began to read St. Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians: but the printed
words fled his gaze, they swelled and shrank and danced up and down
before his eyes. Why had his mother wept so bitterly, after he had
sworn an oath to her? What could she have understood? Ah, yes, she
understood; the mother’s heart understood only too well the mortal
anguish of her son, his renunciation of life itself.
Suddenly a wave of red overspread his face, and he raised his head,
listening to the wind.
“There was no need to have sworn,” he said to himself with a doubtful
smile, “the really strong man never swears. Whoever takes an oath, as I
did, is also ready to break his oath, even as I am ready.”
And instantly he knew that the struggle was only really beginning, and
so great was his consternation that he rose from his seat and went to
look at himself in the mirror.
“Here thou standest, the man appointed by God, and if thou wilt
not give thyself wholly to Him, then the spirit of evil will take
possession of thee for ever.”
Then he staggered to his narrow bed and, dressed as he was, flung
himself down upon it and burst into tears. He wept silently that his
mother might not hear him, and that he might not hear his own crying,
but his heart within him cried aloud and he was wrung with inward grief.
“O God, take me, bring me out of this!”
And the uttered words brought him real relief, as though he had found a
plank of salvation in the midst of that sea of sorrow.
* * * * *
The crisis over he began to reflect. Everything seemed clear to him
now, like a landscape seen from a window in the full light of the sun.
He was a priest, he believed in God, he had wedded the Church and was
vowed to chastity, he was like a married man and had no right to betray
his wife. Why he had fallen in love with that woman and still loved
her he did not exactly know. Perhaps he had reached a sort of physical
crisis, when the youth and strength of his twenty-eight years awoke
suddenly from its prolonged sleep and yearned towards Agnes because she
had the closest affinity with him, and because she too, no longer very
young, had like him been deprived of life and love, shut up in her
house as in a convent.
Thus from the very first it had been love masquerading as friendship.
They had been caught in a net of smiles and glances, and the very
impossibility of there being any question of love between them drew
them together: nobody entertained the faintest suspicion of their
relationship to each other, and they met without emotion, without fear
and without desire. Yet little by little desire crept into that love of
theirs, chaste and pure as a pool of still water beneath a wall that
suddenly crumbles and falls in ruins.
All these things passed through his mind as he probed deep into his
conscience and found the truth. He knew that from the first glance he
had desired the woman, from the first glance he had possessed her in
his heart, and all the rest had been only self-deception whereby he had
sought to justify himself in his own eyes.
Thus it was, and he was forced to acknowledge the truth. Thus it was,
because it is man’s nature to suffer, to love, to find his mate and
have her and to suffer again; to do good and receive it, to do evil
and receive it, this is the life of man. Yet all his reflections lifted
not one iota of the anguish that weighed upon his heart; and now he
comprehended the true meaning of that anguish: it was the bitterness of
death, for to renounce love and the possession of Agnes was to renounce
life itself. Then his thoughts went further: “Was not even this vain
and futile? When the momentary pleasure of love is past, the spirit
resumes mastery over itself, and, with a more intense longing for
solitude than before, it takes refuge again within its prison-house,
the mortal body that clothes it. Why, therefore, should he be made
unhappy by this loneliness? Had he not accepted and endured it for so
many years, all the best years of his life? Even supposing he could
really escape with Agnes and marry her, would he not always be alone
within himself just the same...?”
Yet the mere fact of pronouncing her name, the bare idea of the
possibility of living with her, made him spring up in a fever of
excitement. In imagination again he saw her stretched beside him, in
imagination he held out his arms to draw her close to him, slender
and supple as a reed in the stream; he whispered sweet words into the
little hollow behind her ear, covered his face with her loosened hair,
warm and scented like the flowers of the wild saffron. And biting hard
into his pillow, he repeated to her all the Song of Songs, and when
this was ended he told her he would come back to her the next day, that
he was glad to grieve his mother and his God, glad that he had sworn an
oath and given himself over to remorse, to superstition and to fear,
for now he could break loose from everything and return to her.
CHAPTER IV
Then he grew calmer and began to reflect again.
As a sick man is relieved to know at least the nature of his malady, so
Paul would have been relieved to know at least why all these things had
befallen him, and like his mother, he went over all the story of his
past life.
The moaning of the wind outside mingled with his earliest memories,
faint and indistinct. He saw himself in a courtyard, where, he did not
know, but perhaps the courtyard of the house where his mother was a
servant, and he was climbing on the wall with other boys. The top of
the wall was edged with pieces of glass as sharp as knives, but this
did not prevent the boys from scrambling up to look over, even though
they cut their hands. As a matter of fact, there was a certain daring
pleasure in wounding themselves, and they showed each other their blood
and then dried it beneath their armpits, under the delusion that
nobody would notice their cut hands. From the top of the wall they
could see nothing except the street, into which they were perfectly
free to go; but they preferred climbing on to the wall because that was
forbidden, and they amused themselves by throwing stones at the few
people who passed and then hiding, their sensations divided between
delight in their own boldness and their fear of being discovered. A
deaf and dumb girl, who was also a cripple, used to sit by the wood
pile at the bottom of the courtyard, and from there she used to watch
them with an expression at once imploring and severe in her large dark
eyes. The boys were afraid of her, but they did not dare to molest her;
on the contrary, they lowered their voices as though she could hear
them and sometimes they even invited her to play with them. Then the
crippled child used to laugh with an almost insane delight, but she
never moved from her corner.
In imagination he saw again those dark eyes, in whose depths the light
of sorrow and desire already shone; he saw them far off at the bottom
of his memory as at the bottom of that mysterious courtyard, and it
seemed to him that they resembled the eyes of Agnes.
* * * * *
Then he saw himself again in that same street where he had thrown
stones at the passers-by, but farther down, at the turning of a little
lane shut in by a group of dilapidated old houses. His home lay just
between the street and the lane, in the house of well-to-do people, all
women and all fat and serious; they used to close all doors and windows
at dusk and they received no visitors except other women and priests,
with whom they used to joke and laugh, but always in a decorous,
guarded manner.
It had been one of these priests who had caught him by the shoulders
one day, and gripping him firmly between his bony knees and raising his
timid face with a vigorous hand, had asked him:
“Is it true that you want to be a priest?”
The boy had nodded yes, and having been given a sacred picture and a
friendly slap he had remained in a corner of the room listening to the
conversation between the priests and the women. They were discussing
the parish priest of Aar and describing how he went out hunting and
smoked a pipe and let his beard grow, yet how nevertheless the Bishop
hesitated to interdict him because he would have great difficulty in
finding another priest willing to bury himself in that remote village.
Moreover, the easygoing priest in possession threatened to tie up and
fling into the river anyone who ventured to try and oust him from his
place.
“The worst of it is that the simpletons of Aar are attached to the man,
although they are frightened of him and his sorceries. Some of them
actually believe he is the Antichrist, and the women all declare that
they will help him to truss up his successor and throw him into the
river.”
“Do you hear that, Paul? If you become a priest and have any idea of
going back to your mother’s village, you must look out for a lively
time!”
It was a woman who flung this joke at him, Marielena; she was the one
who had charge of him, and when she drew him towards her to comb his
hair her fat stomach and her soft breast used to make him think she
was made of cushions. He was very fond of Marielena; in spite of her
corpulent body she had a refined and pretty face, with cheeks softly
tinted with pink and gentle brown eyes. He used to look up at her as
one looks at the ripe fruit hanging on the tree, and perhaps she had
been his first love.
Then came his life at the Seminary. His mother had taken him there
one October morning, when the sky was blue and everything smelt of
new wine. The road mounted steeply and at the top of the hill was the
archway which connected the Seminary with the Bishop’s house, curved
like a vast frame over the sunny landscape of cottages, trees and
granite steps, with the cathedral tower at the bottom of the picture.
The grass was springing up between the cobblestones in front of the
Bishop’s house, several men rode past on horseback and the horses
had long legs with hairy fetlocks and were shod with gleaming iron
shoes. He noticed all these things because he kept his eyes shyly
on the ground, a little ashamed of himself, a little ashamed of his
mother. Yes, why not confess it once for all? He had always been more
or less ashamed of his mother, because she was a servant and came from
that village of poor simpletons. Only later, very much later, had he
overcome this ignoble feeling by sheer force of pride and will, and
the more he had been unreasonably ashamed of his origin, all the more
did he subsequently glory in it to himself and before God choosing
voluntarily to live in this miserable hamlet, subjecting himself to his
mother, and respecting her most trifling wishes and conforming to her
humblest ways.
But the remembrance of his mother as a servant, aye, even less than
a servant, a mere drudge in the Seminary kitchen, brought back with
it the most humiliating memories of his youth. And yet she worked as
a servant for his sake. On the days when he went to confession and
communion his Superior obliged him to go and kiss his mother’s hand
and ask her pardon for the faults he had committed. The hand which
she dried hurriedly with a dishcloth smelt of soapsuds and was chapped
and wrinkled like an old wall, and he was filled with shame and rage
at being forced to kiss it; but he asked forgiveness of God for his
inability to ask forgiveness of her.
Thus God had revealed Himself to Paul, as hidden behind his mother in
the damp and smoky kitchen of the Seminary: God Who is in every place,
in heaven and on earth and in all things created.
And in his hours of exaltation, when he lay in his little room staring
with wide-open eyes into the darkness, he had dwelt with wonder on the
thought, “I shall be a priest, I shall be able to consecrate the host
and change it into God.” And at those times he thought also of his
mother, and when he was away from her and could not see her, he loved
her and realized that his own greatness was all due to her, for instead
of sending him to herd goats or carry sacks of grain to the mill, as
his father had done, she was making him into a priest, one who had
power to consecrate the host and change it into God.
It was thus he conceived his mission in life. He knew nothing of the
world; his brightest and most emotional memories were the ceremonies
of the great religious festivals, and recalling these memories now, in
all the bitterness of his present anguish, they awoke in him a sense
of light and joy and presented themselves to his mind’s eye as great
living pictures. And the remembered music of the cathedral organ and
the sense of mystery in the ceremonies of Holy Week became part of his
present sorrow, of that anguish of life and death which seemed to weigh
him down upon his bed as the burden of man’s sin had lain upon Christ
in the sepulchre.
It was during one of these periods of mystical agitation that for the
first time he had come into intimate relations with a woman. When he
thought of it now it seemed like a dream, neither good nor evil, but
only strange.
Every holiday he went to visit the women with whom he had lived during
his boyhood, and they welcomed him as though he were already a priest,
with familiar friendliness and cheerfulness, but always with a certain
dignity. When he looked at Marielena he used to blush, and then
scorned himself for blushing, because though he still liked her, he now
saw her in all her crude realism, fat, soft and shapeless; nevertheless
her presence and her gentle eyes still roused little tremors in him.
Marielena and her sisters used often to invite him to dinner on feast
days. On one occasion, Palm Sunday, he happened to arrive early, and
whilst his hostesses were busy laying the table and awaiting their
other guests, Paul went out into their little garden and began to walk
up and down the path which ran beside the outer wall, beneath the
aspens covered with little golden leaves. The sky was all a milky blue,
the air soft and warm with the light wind from the eastern hills, and
the cuckoo could already be heard calling in the distance.
Just as he was standing on tiptoe childishly to pick a drop of resin
off an almond tree, he suddenly saw a pair of large greenish eyes
fixed upon him from the lane on the other side of the garden wall.
They looked like the eyes of a cat, and the whole personality of the
woman, who was sitting crouched upon the steps of a dark doorway at
the end of the lane, had something feline about it. He could conjure up
her image again so clearly that he even felt as if he still held the
drop of soft resin between his finger and thumb, whilst his fascinated
eyes could not withdraw themselves from hers! And over the doorway he
remembered a little window surrounded by a white line with a small
cross over it. He had known that doorway and that window very well
ever since he was a boy, and the cross placed there as a charm against
temptation had always amused him, because the woman who lived in the
cottage, Maria Paska, was a lost woman. He could see her now before
him, with her fringed kerchief showing her white neck, and her long
coral ear-rings, like two long drops of blood. With her elbows resting
on her knees and her pale, delicate face supported between her hands,
Maria Paska looked at him steadily, and at last she smiled at him, but
without moving. Her white even teeth and the somewhat cruel expression
of her eyes only served to accentuate the feline look about her face.
Suddenly, however, she dropped her hands into her lap, raised her head
and assumed a grave and sad expression. A big man, with his cap drawn
down to hide his face, was coming cautiously down the lane and keeping
close in the shadow of the wall.
Then Maria Paska got up quickly and went into the house, and the big
man followed her and shut the door.
* * * * *
Paul never forgot his terrible agitation as he walked about in the
little garden and thought of those two shut up in that squalid house
in the lane. It was a sort of uneasy sadness, a sense of discomfort
that made him want to be alone and to hide himself like a sick animal,
and during dinner he was unusually silent amidst the cheerful talk of
the other guests. Directly dinner was over he returned to the garden:
the woman was there, on the look-out again and in the same position
as before. The sun never reached the damp corner where her door was,
and she looked as if she were so white and delicate because she always
lived in the shade.
When she saw the seminarist she did not move, but she smiled at him,
and then her face became grave as on the arrival of the big man. She
called out to Paul, speaking as one would speak to a young boy:
“I say, will you come and bless my house on Saturday? Last year the
priest who was going round blessing the houses refused to come into
mine. May he go to hell, he and all his bag of tricks!”
Paul made no answer, he felt inclined to throw a stone at the woman,
in fact he did pick one up from the wall, but then put it back and
wiped his hand on his handkerchief. But all through Holy Week, whilst
he was hearing Mass, or taking part in the sacred function, or, taper
in hand, escorting the Bishop with all the other seminarists, he
always seemed to see the woman’s eyes staring at him till it became a
veritable obsession. He had wanted to exorcize her, as one possessed
of the Devil, yet at the same time he felt somehow that the spirit of
evil was within himself. During the ceremony of feet-washing, when the
Bishop stooped before the twelve beggars (who looked as though they
might really have been the twelve apostles), Paul’s heart was moved by
the thought that on the Saturday before Easter of the previous year the
priest had refused to bless the house of the lost woman. And yet Christ
had pardoned Mary Magdalene. Perhaps if the priest had blessed the lost
woman’s house she might have amended her ways. This last reflection
presently began to take hold of him to the exclusion of all other
thoughts, but on examining it now at this distance of time he perceived
that here his instinct had played him false, for at that period he had
not yet learnt to know himself. And yet perhaps, even if he had known
himself, he would still have gone back on the Saturday to see the lost
woman in the lane.
* * * * *
When he turned the corner he saw that Maria Paska was not sitting on
her doorstep, but the door was open, a sign that she had no visitor.
Involuntarily he imitated the big man and went down the lane in the
shadow of the wall, but he wished she had been there on the look-out
and that she had risen up with a grave, sad face at his approach. When
he reached the end of the lane he saw her drawing water from a well at
the side of the house, and his heart gave a jump, for she looked just
like the pictures of Mary Magdalene; and she turned and saw him as
she was drawing up the bucket, and blushed. Never in his life had he
seen a more beautiful woman. Then he was seized with a desire to run
away, but he was too shy, and as she re-entered the house carrying the
jug of water in her hand she said something to him which he did not
understand, but he followed her inside and she shut the door. A little
wooden staircase ending in a trapdoor gave access to the upper room,
the one with the window over which hung a cross as a protection against
temptation, and she led him up, snatching his cap from his head and
tossing it aside with a laugh.
* * * * *
Paul went to see her again several times, but after he had been
ordained and had taken the vow of chastity he had kept away from all
women. His senses seemed to have grown petrified within the frozen
armour of his vow, and when he heard scandalous tales of other priests
he felt a pride in his own purity, and only thought of his adventure
with the woman in the lane as an illness from which he had completely
recovered.
During the first years passed in the little village he thought of
himself as having already lived his life, as having known all it could
offer, misery, humiliation, love, pleasure, sin and expiation; as
having withdrawn from the world like some old hermit and waiting only
for the Kingdom of God. And now suddenly he beheld the earthly life
again in a woman’s eyes, and at first he had been so deceived as to
mistake it for the life eternal.
To love and be loved, is not this the Kingdom of God upon earth?
And his heart swelled within him at the remembrance. O Lord, are we
so blind? Where shall we find the light? Paul knew himself to be
ignorant: his knowledge was made up of fragments of books of which he
only imperfectly understood the meaning, but above all the Bible had
impressed him with its romanticism and its realistic pictures of past
ages. Wherefore he could place no reliance even on himself nor on his
own inward searchings: he realized that he had no self-knowledge, that
he was not master of himself and that he deceived himself ever and
always.
His feet had been set upon the wrong road. He was a man of strong
natural instincts, like his forbears, the millers and shepherds, and
he suffered because he was not allowed to obey his instincts. Here he
got back to his first simple and correct diagnosis of what ailed him:
he was unhappy because he was a man and was forbidden to lead man’s
natural life of love and joy and the fulfilment of life’s natural ends.
Then he reflected that pleasure enjoyed leaves only horror and anguish
behind it; therefore it could not be the flesh that cried out for its
chance of life, but rather the soul imprisoned within the flesh that
longed to escape from its prison. In those supreme moments of love it
had been the soul which had soared upward in a rapid flight, only to
fall back more swiftly into its cage; but that instant of freedom had
sufficed to show it the place to which it would take its flight when
its prison days were ended and the wall of flesh for ever overthrown,
a place of infinite joy, the Infinite itself.
He smiled at last, saddened and weary. Where had he read all these
things? Certainly he must have read them somewhere, for he had no
pretensions to evolve new ideas himself. But it was of no consequence,
the truth is always the same, alike for all men, as all men’s hearts
are alike. He had thought himself different from other men, a voluntary
exile and worthy of being near to God, and perhaps God was punishing
him in this way, by sending him back among men, into the community of
passion and of pain.
He must rise up and pursue his appointed way.
CHAPTER V
He became aware that some one was knocking at the door.
Paul started as though suddenly awakened from sleep and sprang up from
his bed with the confused sensation of one who has to depart on a
journey and is afraid of being too late. But directly he tried to stand
up he was forced to sit down weakly on his bed again, for his limbs
gave way under him and he felt as if he had been beaten all over whilst
he lay asleep. Crouched together with his head sunk on his breast, he
could only nod faintly in response to the knock. His mother had not
forgotten to call him early, as he had requested her on the previous
day: his mother was following her own straight path, she remembered
nothing of what had happened during the night and called him as though
this were just like any other morning.
Yes, it was like any other morning. Paul got up again and began to
dress, and gradually he pulled himself together and stood stiff and
erect in the garments of his order. He flung open the window, and his
eyes were dazzled by the vivid light of the silvery sky; the thickets
on the hill-side, alive with the song of birds, quivered and sparkled
in the morning sun, the wind had dropped and the sound of the church
bell vibrated through the pure air.
The bell called him, he lost sight of all external things, although
he sought to escape from the things within him: the scent of his room
caused him physical distress and the memories it evoked stung him to
the quick. The bell went on calling him, but he could not make up his
mind to leave his room and he wandered round it almost in a fury. He
looked in the mirror and then turned away, but it was useless for him
to avoid it; the image of the woman was reflected in his mind as in a
mirror, he might break it in a thousand fragments, but each fragment
would still retain that image entire and complete.
The second bell for Mass was ringing insistently, inviting him to come:
he moved about here and there, searching for something he could not
find, and finally sat down at his table and began to write. He began by
copying out the verses which said, “Enter ye in by the narrow gate,”
etc.; then he crossed them out and on the other side of the paper he
wrote:
“Please do not expect me again. We have mutually entangled each other
in a net of deception and we must cut ourselves loose without delay, if
we want to free ourselves and not sink to the bottom. I am coming to
you no more; forget me, do not write to me, and do not try to see me
again.”
Then he went downstairs and called his mother, and held out the letter
towards her without looking at her.
“Take this to her at once,” he said hoarsely, “try and give it into her
own hands and then come away immediately.”
He felt the letter taken out of his hand and hurried outside, for the
moment uplifted and relieved.
Now the bell was ringing the third time, pealing out over the quiet
village and the valleys grey in the silvery light of the dawn. Up the
hilly road, as though ascending from the depths of the valley, came
figures of old men with gnarled sticks hanging from their wrists by
leather straps, and women whose heads wrapped in voluminous kerchiefs
looked too large for their small bodies. When they had all entered the
church and the old men had taken their places in front close by the
altar rails, the place was filled with the odour of earth and field,
and Antiochus, the youthful sacristan, swung his censer energetically,
sending out the smoke in the direction of the old men to drive away the
smell. Gradually a dense cloud of incense screened the altar from the
rest of the little church, and the brown-faced sacristan in his white
surplice and the pale-faced priest in his vestments of red brocade
moved about as in a pearly mist. Both Paul and the boy loved the smoke
and the scent of the incense and used it lavishly. Turning towards the
nave, the priest half closed his eyes and frowned as though the mist
impeded his sight; apparently he was displeased at the small number of
worshippers and was waiting for others to arrive. And in fact a few
late comers did enter then, and last of all his mother, and Paul turned
white to the lips.
So the letter had been delivered and the sacrifice was accomplished:
a deathlike sweat broke out upon his forehead, and as he raised his
hands in consecration his secret prayer was that the offering of his
own flesh and blood might be accepted. And he seemed to see the woman
reading his letter and falling to the ground in a swoon.
When the Mass was ended he knelt down wearily and recited a Latin
prayer in a monotonous voice. The congregation responded, and he felt
as though he were dreaming and longed to throw himself down at the foot
of the altar and fall asleep like a shepherd on the bare rocks. Dimly
through the clouds of incense he saw in her glass-fronted niche the
little Madonna which the people believed to be miraculous, a figure
as dark and delicate as a cameo in a medallion, and he gazed at it as
though he were seeing it again for the first time after a long absence.
Where had he been all that time? His thoughts were confused and he
could not recollect.
Then suddenly he rose to his feet and turned round and began to address
the congregation, a thing he only did very occasionally. He spoke
in dialect and in a harsh voice, as though he were scolding the old
men, now thrusting their bearded faces between the pillars of the
altar rails in order to hear better, and the women crouching on the
ground, divided between curiosity and fear. The sacristan, holding the
Mass-book in his arms, glanced at Paul out of his long dark eyes, then
turned them on the people and shook his head, threatening them in jest
if they did not attend.
“Yes,” said the priest, “the number of you who come here grows ever
less; when I have to face you I am almost ashamed, for I feel like a
shepherd who has lost his sheep. Only on Sunday is the church a little
fuller, but I fear you come because of your scruples and not because
of your belief, from habit rather than from need, as you change your
clothes or take your rest. Up now, it is time to awake! I do not expect
mothers of families, or men who have to be at work before the dawn, to
come here every morning, but young women and old men and children, such
as I shall see now when I leave the church, standing at their own doors
to greet the rising sun, all those should come here to begin the day
with God, to praise Him in His own house and to gain strength for the
path they have to tread. If you did this the poverty that afflicts you
would disappear, and evil habits and temptation would no longer assail
you. It is time to awake early in the morning, to wash yourselves and
to change your clothing every day and not only on Sundays! So I shall
expect you all, beginning from to-morrow, and we will pray together
that God will not forsake us and our little village, as He will not
forsake the smallest nest, and for those who are sick and cannot come
here we will pray that they may recover and be able to march forward
too.”
He turned round swiftly and the sacristan did the same, and for a few
minutes there reigned in the little church a silence so intense that
the stone-breaker could be heard at his work behind the ridge. Then a
woman got up and approached the priest’s mother, placing a hand on her
shoulder as she bent down and whispered:
“Your son must come at once to hear the confession of King Nicodemus,
who is seriously ill.”
Roused from her own sad thoughts, the mother raised her eyes to the
speaker. She remembered that King Nicodemus was a fantastic old hunter
who lived in a hut high up in the mountains, and she asked if Paul
would have to climb up there to hear the confession.
“No,” whispered the woman, “his relations have brought him down to the
village.”
So the mother went to tell Paul, who was in the little sacristy,
disrobing with the help of Antiochus.
“You will come home first and drink your coffee, won’t you?” she asked.
He avoided looking at her and did not even answer, but pretended to be
in a great hurry to go to the old man who was ill. The thoughts of both
mother and son dwelt upon the same thing, the letter which had been
delivered to Agnes, but neither spoke of it. Then he hastened away,
and she stood there like a block of wood whilst the sacristan busied
himself in replacing the vestments in the black cupboard.
“It would have been better if I had not told him about Nicodemus until
he had been home and had his coffee,” she said.
“A priest must get accustomed to everything,” replied Antiochus
gravely, poking his head round the cupboard door, and then he added as
though to himself as he turned back to his work inside:
“Perhaps he is angry with me, because he says I am inattentive: but
it’s not true, I assure you it’s not true! Only when I looked at those
old men I felt inclined to laugh, for they did not understand a word of
the sermon. They sat there with their mouths open, but they understood
nothing. I bet you that old Marco Panizza really thinks he ought to
wash his face every day, he who never washes at all except at Easter
and Christmas! And you’ll see that from now on they will all come to
church every day, because he told them that poverty would disappear if
they did that.”
The mother still stood there, her hands clasped beneath her apron.
“The poverty of the soul,” she said, to show that she at least had
understood. But Antiochus only looked at her as he had looked at the
old men, with a strong desire to laugh. Because he was quite sure that
nobody could understand these matters as he understood them, he who
already knew the four gospels by heart and intended to be a priest
himself, which fact did not prevent him from being as mischievous and
inquisitive as other boys.
As soon as he had finished putting everything in order and the priest’s
mother had gone away, Antiochus locked the sacristy and walked across
the little garden attached to the church, all overgrown with rosemary
and as deserted as a cemetery. But instead of going home to where his
mother kept a tavern in one corner of the village square, he ran off to
the presbytery to hear the latest news of King Nicodemus, and also for
another reason.
“Your son scolded me for not paying attention,” he repeated uneasily,
whilst the priest’s mother was busy preparing her Paul’s breakfast.
“Perhaps he won’t have me as sacristan any longer, perhaps he will take
Ilario Panizza. But Ilario cannot read, whereas I have even learnt to
read Latin. Besides, Ilario is so dirty. What do you think? Will he
send me away?”
“He wants you to pay attention, that is all: it is not right to laugh
in church,” she answered sternly and gravely.
“He is very angry. Perhaps he did not sleep last night, on account of
the wind. Did you hear what an awful wind?”
The woman made no reply; she went into the dining-room and placed on
the table enough bread and biscuits to satisfy the twelve apostles.
Probably Paul would not touch a thing, but the mere act of moving about
and making preparations for him, as though he were sure to come in as
merry and hungry as a mountain shepherd, did something to assuage her
trouble and perhaps quiet her conscience, which every moment stung her
more and more sharply, and the boy’s very remark, that “perhaps he
was angry because he did not sleep last night,” only increased her
uneasiness. Her heavy footsteps echoed through the silent rooms as she
went to and fro: she felt instinctively that although apparently _all
was over_, in reality it was all only just beginning. She had well
understood the words he spoke from the altar, that one must awake early
and wash oneself and march forward, and she went to and fro, up and
down, trying to imagine that she was marching forward in very truth.
She went upstairs to put his room in order; but the mirror and the
perfumes still vexed and alarmed her, in spite of the assurance that
everything was now at an end, while a vision of Paul, pale and rigid
as a corpse, seemed to meet her eyes from the depths of that cursed
mirror, to hang with his cassock on the wall and lie stretched lifeless
upon the bed. And her heart was heavy within her, as though some inward
paralysis prevented her breathing.
The pillow-slip was still damp with Paul’s tears and his fevered
anguish of the night, and as she drew it off to replace it with a fresh
one the thought came to her, for the first time in her life:
“But why are priests forbidden to marry?”
And she thought of Agnes’s wealth, and how she owned a large house with
gardens and orchards and fields.
Then suddenly she felt horribly guilty in even entertaining such
thoughts, and quickly drawing on the fresh pillow-slip she went away
into her own room.
Marching forward? Yes, she had been marching since dawn and was yet
only at the beginning of the way. And however far one went, one always
came back to the same place. She went downstairs and sat by the fire
beside Antiochus, who had not moved and was determined to wait there
all day, if needs be, for the sake of seeing his superior and making
his peace with him. He sat very still, one leg crossed over the other
and his hands clasped round his knee, and presently he remarked, not
without a slight accent of reproach:
“You ought to have taken him his coffee into the church, as you do when
he is delayed there hearing the women’s confessions. As it is, he will
be famished!”
“And how was I to know he would be sent for in such a hurry? The old
man is dying, it seems,” retorted the mother.
“I don’t think that can be true. His grandchildren want him to die
because he has some money to leave. I know the old chap! I saw him
once when I went up into the mountains with my father: he was sitting
amongst the rocks in the sun, with a dog and a tame eagle beside him
and all sorts of dead animals all round. That is not how God orders us
to live!”
“What does He order, then?”
“He orders us to live amongst men, to cultivate the ground, and not to
hide our money, but to give it to the poor.”
The little sacristan spoke with a man’s confidence, and the priest’s
mother was touched and smiled. After all, if Antiochus could say such
sensible things it was because he had been taught by her Paul. It was
her Paul who taught them all to be good, wise and prudent; and when
he really wished to he succeeded in convincing even old men whose
opinions were already fixed, and even thoughtless children. She sighed,
and bending down to draw the coffee-pot nearer the glowing embers, she
said:
“You talk like a little saint, Antiochus; but it remains to be seen if
you will do as you say when you’re a man, whether you really will give
your money to the poor.”
“Yes, I shall give everything to the poor. I shall have a great deal of
money, because my mother makes a lot with her tavern, and my father is
a forest keeper and earns pretty well, too. I shall give all I get to
the poor: God tells us to do that, and He Himself will provide for us.
And the Bible says, the ravens do not sow, neither do they reap, yet
they have their food from God, and the lily of the valley is clothed
more splendidly than the king.”
“Yes, Antiochus, when a man is alone he can do that, but what if he has
children?”
“That makes no difference. Besides, I shall never have children;
priests are not allowed to have any.”
She turned to look at him; his profile was towards her, against the
bright background of the open doorway and the courtyard outside; it was
a profile of pure, firm outline and dark skin, almost like a head of
bronze, with long lashes shading the eyes with their large dark pupils.
And as she gazed at the boy she could have wept, but she knew not why.
“Are you quite sure you want to be a priest?” she asked.
“Yes, if that is God’s will.”
“Priests are not allowed to marry, and suppose that some day you wanted
to take a wife?”
“I shall not want a wife, since God has forbidden it.”
“God? But it is the Pope who has forbidden it,” said the mother,
somewhat taken aback at the boy’s answer.
“The Pope is God’s representative on earth.”
“But in olden times priests had wives and families, just as the
Protestant clergy have now,” she urged.
“That is a different thing,” said the boy, growing warm over the
argument; “_we_ ought not to have them!”
“The priests in olden times...” she persisted.
But the sacristan was well-informed. “Yes, the priests in olden times,”
he said, “but then they themselves held a meeting and decided against
it; and those who had no wives or families, the younger ones, were the
very ones who opposed marriage the most strongly. That is as it should
be.”
“The younger ones!” repeated the mother as if to herself. “But they
know nothing about it! And then they may repent, they may even go
astray,” she added in a low voice, “they may come to reason and argue
like the old priest.”
A tremor seized her and she looked swiftly round to assure herself that
the ghost was not there, instantly repenting for having thus evoked it.
She did not wish even to think about it, and least of all in connexion
with _that matter_. Was it not all ended? Moreover, Antiochus’s face
wore an expression of the deepest scorn.
“That man was not a priest, he was the devil’s brother come to earth!
God save us from him! We had best not even think about him!” and he
made the sign of the cross. Then he continued, with recovered serenity:
“As for repenting! Do you suppose that _he_, your son, ever dreams of
repenting?”
It hurt her to hear the boy talk like that. She longed to be able to
tell him something of her trouble, to warn him for the future, yet
at the same time she rejoiced at his words, as though the conscience
of the innocent lad were speaking to her conscience to commend and
encourage it.
“Does he, does my Paul say it is right for priests not to marry?” she
asked in a low voice.
“If _he_ does not say it is right, who should say so? Of course he says
it is right; hasn’t he said so to you? A fine thing it would be to see
a priest with his wife beside him and a child in his arms! And when he
ought to go and say Mass he has to nurse the baby because it’s howling!
What a joke! Imagine your son with one child in his arms and another
hanging on to his cassock!”
The mother smiled wanly; but there passed before her eyes a fleeting
vision of lovely children running about the house, and there was a
pang at her heart. Antiochus laughed aloud, his dark eyes and white
teeth flashing in his brown face, but there was something cruel in his
laughter.
“A priest’s wife would be a funny thing! When they went out for a walk
together they would look from behind like two women! And would she go
and confess to him, if they lived in a place where there was no other
priest?”
“What does a mother do? Who do I confess to?”
“A mother is different. And who is there that your son could marry? The
granddaughter of King Nicodemus, perhaps?”
He began to laugh merrily again, for the granddaughter of King
Nicodemus was the most unfortunate girl in the village, a cripple and
an idiot. But he instantly grew serious again when the mother, forced
to speak by a will other than her own, said softly:
“For that matter, there is some one, Agnes.”
But Antiochus objected jealously: “She is ugly, I don’t like her, and
he does not like her either.”
Then the mother began to praise Agnes, but she spoke almost in a
whisper as though afraid of being overheard by anyone except the boy,
while Antiochus, his hands still clasped round his knee, shook his head
energetically, his lower lip stuck out in disgust like a ripe cherry.
“No, no, I don’t like her—can’t you hear what I say! She is ugly and
proud and old. And besides...”
A step sounded in the little hall and instantly they both were silent
and stood waiting.
CHAPTER VI
Paul sat down at the table, which was laid ready for breakfast, and put
his hat on the chair beside him, and while his mother was pouring out
his coffee he asked in a calm voice:
“Did you take that letter?”
She nodded, pointing towards the kitchen for fear the boy should hear.
“Who is there?” asked Paul.
“Antiochus.”
“Antiochus!” he called, and with one spring the boy was before him, cap
in hand, standing to attention like a little soldier.
“Listen, Antiochus, you must go back to the church and get everything
ready for taking extreme unction to the old man later on.”
The boy was speechless with joy: so _he_ was no longer angry and was
not going to dismiss him and take another boy in his place!
“Wait a moment, have you had anything to eat?”
“He would not have anything to eat; he never will,” said the mother.
“Sit down there,” ordered Paul, “you must eat. Mother, give him
something.”
It was not the first time that Antiochus had sat at the priest’s table,
so he obeyed without shyness, though his heart beat fast. He was aware
somehow that his position had changed, that the priest was speaking to
him in a way different from usual; he could not explain how or why, he
only felt there was a difference. He looked up in Paul’s face as though
he saw him for the first time, with mingled fear and joy. Fear and joy
and a whole throng of new emotions, gratitude, hope and pride, filled
his heart as a nest full of warm fledglings ready to spread their wings
and fly away.
“Then at two o’clock you must come for your lesson. It is time to set
to work seriously with Latin; and I must write for a new grammar, mine
is centuries old.”
Antiochus had stopped eating: now he went very red and offered his
services enthusiastically without inquiring the why or the wherefore.
The priest looked at him with a smile, then turned his face to the
window, through which the trees could be seen waving against the clear
sky, and his thoughts were evidently far away. Antiochus felt again as
if he had been dismissed and his spirits fell; he brushed the crumbs
from the tablecloth, folded his napkin carefully and carried the cups
into the kitchen. He prepared to wash up, too, and would have done it
very well, for he was accustomed to washing glasses in his mother’s
wineshop; but the priest’s mother would not allow it.
“Go to the church and get ready,” she whispered, pushing him away. He
went out immediately, but before going to the church he ran round to
his mother to warn her to have the house clean and tidy as the priest
was coming to see her.
Meanwhile the priest’s mother had gone back into the dining-room, where
Paul was still idling at the table with a newspaper in front of him.
Usually, when he was at home, he sat in his own room, but this morning
he was afraid of going up there again. He sat reading the newspaper,
but his thoughts were elsewhere. He was thinking of the old dying
hunter, who had once confessed to him that he shunned the company of
men because “they are evil itself,” and men in mockery had called him
King, as they had called Christ King of the Jews. But Paul was not
interested in the old man’s confession; his thoughts turned rather to
Antiochus and his father and mother, for he meant to ask the latter
whether they conscientiously realized what they were doing in allowing
the boy to have his own way and carry out his unreasoning fancy for
becoming a priest. But even this was really of little importance: what
Paul actually wanted was to get away from his own thoughts, and when
his mother came into the room he bowed his head over his paper, for he
knew that she alone could divine what those thoughts were.
He sat there with bowed head, but he forbade his lips to frame the
question he longed to ask. The letter had been delivered; what more was
there for him to know? The stone of the sepulchre had been rolled into
its place: but ah! how it weighed upon him, how alive he felt, buried
alive beneath that great stone!
His mother began to clear the table, putting each object back in the
cupboard that served as a sideboard. It was so quiet that the birds
could be heard chirping in the bushes and the regular tap-tap of the
stone-breaker by the roadside. It seemed like the end of the world,
as though the last habitation of living men was this little white
room, with its time-blackened furniture and its tiled flooring, upon
which the green and gold light from the high window cast a tremulous
reflection as of water and made the small place seem like some prison
chamber in the dungeon of a castle.
Paul had drunk his coffee and eaten his biscuits as usual, and now
he was reading the news of the great world far away. Outwardly there
was nothing to show that this day was in any way different from other
days, but his mother would rather he had gone up to his room as was
his custom and shut the door. And why, since he was sitting there,
did he not ask her more about her errand, and to whom she had given
the letter? She went to the kitchen door with a cup in her hand, then
carried it back to the table and stood there.
“Paul,” she said, “I gave the letter into her own hand. She was
already up and dressed, and in the garden.”
“Very well,” he answered, without raising his eyes from the newspaper.
But she could not leave him, she felt she must speak; something
stronger than her will impelled her, something stronger even than the
will of her son. She cleared her throat and fixed her eyes on the
little Japanese landscape painted at the bottom of the cup she was
holding, its colours stained and darkened with coffee. Then she went on
with her tale:
“She was in the garden, for she gets up early. I went straight to her
and gave her the letter: nobody saw. She took it and looked at it; then
she looked at me, but still she did not open it. I said ‘There is no
answer,’ and turned to go away, but she said, ‘Wait.’ Then she opened
the letter as if to show me there was no secret in it, and she turned
as white as the paper itself. Then she said to me, ‘Go, and God be with
you!’”
“That’s enough!” he cried sharply, still without looking up, but his
mother saw the lashes quiver over his downcast eyes and his face turn
as white as that of Agnes. For a moment she thought he was about to
faint, then the blood slowly came back into his face and she breathed
again with relief. Such moments as these were terrible, but they must
be met bravely and overcome. She opened her lips to say something else,
to murmur at least, “See what you have done, how you have hurt both
yourself and her!” but at that instant he looked up, jerking his head
back as though to drive the blood of evil passion from his face, and
glaring angrily at his mother, he said roughly:
“Now that is enough! Do you hear? It’s enough! I absolutely refuse
to hear another word on this matter, otherwise I shall do what you
threatened to do last night: I shall go away.”
Then he got up quickly, but instead of going to his room he left the
house again. His mother went into the kitchen, the cup still in her
trembling hands; she put it down on the table and leaned against the
corner of the fireplace, utterly broken down. She knew now he had gone
away for ever; even if he came back he would no longer be her Paul,
but a poor wretch possessed by his evil passion, one who looked with
threatening eyes at whoever crossed his path, like some thief lying in
wait to commit a crime.
And Paul, indeed, was like one who has fled from home in fear. He had
rushed out to avoid going up to his room, for he had an idea that Agnes
might have got in secretly and be waiting for him there, with her white
face and the letter in her hand. He had escaped from the house in order
to escape from himself, but he was carried away by his passion more
violently than by the wind on the night before. He crossed the meadow
without any definite aim, feeling as though he were some inanimate
thing flung bodily against the wall of Agnes’s house and thrown back
by the rebound as far as the square before the church, where the old
men and the boys and the beggars sit on the low parapet all day long.
Scarce knowing how he had come there, Paul stayed a little while
talking to one or another of them without heeding their replies, and
then descended the steep road that led from the village down to the
valley. But he saw nothing of the road he trod nor the landscape
before his eyes: his whole world had turned upside-down and was a mere
chaos of rocks and ruins, upon which he looked down as boys lie flat on
the ground at the cliff’s edge to gaze over into the depths below.
He turned and climbed up again towards the church. The village seemed
almost deserted; here and there a peach tree showed its ripe fruit
over a garden wall and little white clouds floated across the clear
September sky like a peaceful flock of sheep. In one house a child was
crying, from another came the regular sound of the weaver at his loom.
The rural _guardia_, half-keeper, half-police, who had charge of the
village also, the only public functionary in the place, came strolling
along the road with his great dog on a leash. He wore a mixed costume,
the hunter’s jacket of discoloured velvet with the blue, red-striped
trousers of his official uniform, and his dog was a huge black and red
animal with bloodshot eyes, something between a lion and a wolf, known
and feared by villagers and peasants, by shepherds and hunters, by
thieves and children alike. The keeper kept his beast beside him day
and night, chiefly for fear of him being poisoned. The dog growled when
he saw the priest, but at a sign from his master he was quiet and hung
his head.
The keeper stopped in front of the priest and gave a military salute,
then said solemnly:
“I went early this morning to see the sick man. His temperature
is forty, his pulse a hundred and two. In my poor opinion he has
inflammation of the loins, and his granddaughter wanted me to give him
quinine.” (The keeper had charge of the drugs and medicines supplied
for the parish and permitted himself to go round visiting the sick,
which was exceeding his duty, but gave him importance in his own eyes,
as he imagined he was thus taking the place of the doctor who only came
to the village twice a week.) “But I said, ‘Gently, my girl; in my
humble opinion he does not want quinine, but another sort of medicine.’
The girl began to cry, but she shed no tears; may I die if I judged
wrongly! She wanted me to rush off immediately to call the doctor,
but I said, ‘The doctor is coming to-morrow, Sunday, but if you are
in such a hurry then send a man yourself to fetch him! The sick man
can well afford to pay a doctor to see him die, he has spent no money
during his life.’ I was quite right, wasn’t I?”
The keeper waited gravely for the priest’s approval, but Paul was
looking at the dog, now quiet and docile at his master’s bidding, and
he was thinking to himself:
“If we could only thus keep our passions on a leash!” And then he said
aloud, but in an absent-minded way, “Oh yes, he can wait till the
doctor comes to-morrow. But he is seriously ill, all the same.”
“Well then, if he is seriously ill,” persisted the keeper firmly and
not without contempt for the priest’s apparent indifference, “a man had
better go for the doctor at once. The old fellow can pay, he is not a
pauper. But his granddaughter disobeyed my orders and did not give him
the medicine I myself prepared and left for him.”
“He should receive the Communion first of all,” said Paul.
“But you have told me that a sick person may receive the Communion even
if they are not fasting?”
“Well then,” said the priest, losing patience at last, “the old man did
not want the medicine; he clenched his teeth, and he has them all still
sound, and struck out as if nothing was the matter with him.”
“And then the granddaughter, in my humble opinion,” continued the
keeper indignantly, “has no right to order me, an official, to rush
off for the doctor as though I were a servant! It was not a question
of an accident or anything requiring the doctor’s official presence,
and I have other things to do. I must now go down to the river by the
ford, because I have received information that some benefactor of his
neighbours has placed dynamite in the water to destroy the trout. My
respects!”
He repeated the military salute and departed, jerking his dog up by the
leash. Suddenly sharing its master’s repressed contempt, the animal
stalked off waving its ferocious tail; it did not growl at the priest,
but merely turned its head to give him a parting glance of menace out
of its savage eyes.
Having completed his preparations for carrying extreme unction to the
old man, Antiochus was leaning over the parapet of the piazza under
the shade of the elms, waiting for the priest; and when he saw him
approaching, the boy darted into the sacristy and waited with the
surplice in his hands. The pair were ready in a few minutes, Paul in
surplice and stole, carrying the silver amphora of oil, Antiochus
robed in red from head to foot and holding a brocade umbrella with
gold fringe open over Paul’s head, so that he and his silver amphora
were in shadow whilst the boy himself appeared the more brilliant in
the sunshine in contrast to the black and white figure of the priest.
Antiochus’s face wore a look of almost tragic gravity, for he was
much impressed with his own importance and imagined himself specially
deputed to protect the holy oil. Nevertheless this did not prevent him
from grinning with amusement at the sight of the old men hurriedly
shuffling down from the parapet as the little procession passed, and
the boys kneeling with their faces to the wall instead of towards the
priest. The youngsters jumped up immediately, however, and followed
Antiochus, who rang his bell before each door to warn the people; dogs
barked, the weavers stopped their looms and the women thrust their
heads out of the windows to see, and the whole village was in a tremor
of mysterious excitement.
A woman who was coming from the fountain bearing a jug of water on
her head set down her jug upon the ground and knelt beside it. And
the priest grew pale, for he recognized one of Agnes’s servants, and
a nameless dread seized upon him, so that unconsciously he clasped
the silver amphora tightly between his hands as though seeking there
support.
The attendant crowd of boys grew larger as they approached the old
hunter’s dwelling. This was a two-story cottage built of rough stone
and standing a little back from the road on the side towards the
valley; it had a single unglazed window and in front a small yard of
bare earth enclosed by a low wall. The door stood open and the priest
knew that the old man was lying fully dressed on a mat in the lower
room; so he entered at once, reciting the prayers for the sick, whilst
Antiochus closed the umbrella and rang his bell loudly to drive away
the children as if they were flies. But the room was empty and the mat
unoccupied; perhaps the old man had at last consented to go to bed or
had been carried there in a dying condition. The priest pushed open the
door of an inner room, but that too was empty; so, puzzled, he returned
to the door, whence he saw the old man’s granddaughter limping down the
road with a bottle in her hand. She had been to fetch the medicine.
“Where is your grandfather?” asked Paul, as the girl crossed herself
on entering the house. She glanced at the empty mat and gave a scream,
and the inquisitive boys immediately swarmed over the wall and round
the door, engaging in a free fight with Antiochus, who tried to oppose
their entrance, till Paul himself sternly bade them disperse.
“Where is he? Where is he?” cried the granddaughter, running from
room to room, whereupon one of the boys, the last to join the crowd,
sauntered up with his hands in his pockets and inquired casually, “Are
you looking for the King? He went down there.”
“Down where?”
“Down there,” repeated the boy, pointing with his nose towards the
valley.
The girl rushed down the steep path and the boys after her: the priest
signed to Antiochus to reopen the umbrella and gravely and in silence
the two returned to the church, whilst the villagers gathered together
in wondering groups and the news of the sick man’s flight spread from
mouth to mouth.
CHAPTER VII
Paul was back again in his quiet dining-room, seated at the table and
waited on by his mother. Fortunately there was now something they dare
talk about and the flight of King Nicodemus was being discussed. Having
hastily deposited the silver amphora and other things taken out for the
rite and doffed his red cope, Antiochus had run off to collect news.
The first time he came back it was with a strange report; the old man
had disappeared and his relations were said to have carried him off in
order to get possession of his money.
“They say that his dog and his eagle came down and carried him off
themselves!” corrected some sceptic jestingly.
“I don’t believe in the dog,” said one of the old men, “but the eagle
is no joke. I remember that when I was a boy, one carried off a heavy
sheep from our yard.”
Then Antiochus came back with the further news that the sick man had
been overtaken half-way up to the mountain plateau, where he wished to
die. The last upflickering of his fever lent him a fictitious strength
and the dying hunter walked like a somnambulist to the place where he
longed to be, and in order not to worry him and make him worse, his
relatives had accompanied him and seen him safely to his own hut.
“Now sit down and eat,” said the priest to the boy.
Antiochus obeyed and took his place at the table, but not without first
glancing inquiringly at the priest’s mother. She smiled and signed to
him to do as he was bidden and the boy felt that he had become one of
the family. He could not know, innocent child, that the other two,
having exhausted the subject of the old hunter, were afraid of being
alone together. The mother would see her son’s uneasy wandering eyes
arrested suddenly, as though upon some unseen object, with a stony,
sombre gaze, o’ershadowed by the darkness of his mind, and he in turn
would start from his preoccupation, aware that she was observing him
and divining his inward grief. But when she had placed the meal on the
table she left the room and did not return.
With the bright noonday the wind rose again, but now it was a soft
west wind that scarcely stirred the trees upon the ridge; the room was
flooded with sunshine chequered by the dancing of the leaves outside
the window, and white clouds drifted across the sky like harp-strings
whereon the wind played its gentle music.
The charm was broken suddenly by a knock at the door and Antiochus ran
to open. A pale young widow with frightened eyes stood on the threshold
and asked to see the priest. By the hand she held fast a little girl,
with small, livid face and a red scarf tied over her untidy black
hair; and, as the child dragged and struggled from side to side in her
efforts to free herself, her eyes blazed like a wild cat’s. “She is
ill,” said the widow, “and I want the priest to read the gospel over
her to drive out the evil spirit that has taken possession of her.”
Puzzled and scared, Antiochus stood holding the door half open: this
was not the time to worry the priest with such matters, and moreover
the girl, who was twisting herself all to one side and trying to bite
her mother’s hand as she could not escape, was truly an object of both
fear and pity.
“She is possessed, you see,” said the widow, turning red with shame. So
then Antiochus let her in immediately and even helped her to push in
the child, who clung to the jamb of the door and resisted with all her
might.
On hearing what was the matter and that this was already the third day
on which the little victim had behaved so strangely, always trying to
escape, deaf and dumb to all persuasions, the priest had her brought in
to him, and taking her by the shoulders he examined her eyes and her
mouth.
“Has she been much in the sun?” he inquired.
“It’s not that,” whispered the mother. “I think she is possessed by
an evil spirit. No,” she added, sobbing, “my little girl is no longer
alone!”
Paul rose to fetch his Testament from his room, then stopped and sent
Antiochus for it. The book was placed open on the table, and with his
hand upon the burning head of the child, clasped tightly in the arms of
her kneeling mother, he read aloud:
“And they arrived at the country of the Gadarenes, which is over
against Galilee. And when he went forth to land, there met him out
of the city a certain man which had devils a long time, and ware no
clothes, neither abode in any house, but in the tombs. When he saw
Jesus he cried out and fell down before him, and with a loud voice
said, ‘What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God most high? I
beseech thee, torment me not.’”
Antiochus turned over the page of the book and his eyes strayed to the
priest’s hand which rested on the table; at the words, “What have I
to do with thee,” he saw the hand tremble, and looking up quickly he
perceived that Paul’s eyes were full of tears. Then, overcome by an
irresistible emotion, the boy knelt down beside the widow, but still
keeping his arm stretched out to touch the book. And he thought to
himself:
“Surely _he_ is the best man in all the world, for he weeps when he
reads the word of God!” And he did not venture to raise his eyes again
to look at Paul, but with his free hand he pulled the little girl’s
skirt to keep her quiet, though not without a secret fear that the
demons who were being exorcised from her body would enter into his own.
The possessed child had ceased throwing herself about and stood up
straight and stiff, her thin brown neck stretched to its full length,
her little chin stuck forward over the knot of her kerchief and her
eyes fixed upon the priest’s face. Gradually her expression changed,
her mouth relaxed and opened, and it seemed as if the words of the
Gospel, the murmuring of the wind and the rustle of the trees on the
ridge were working upon her as a charm. Suddenly she tore her skirt
from Antiochus’s restraining hand and fell on her knees beside him, and
the priest’s hand which had rested upon her head remained outstretched
above it, as his tremulous voice continued reading:
“Now the man out of whom the devils were departed besought him that he
might be with him: but Jesus sent him away, saying, Return to thine
own house and show how great things God hath done unto thee....”
He ceased reading and withdrew his hand. The child was now perfectly
quiet and had turned her face wonderingly towards the boy, and in the
silence that succeeded the Gospel words nothing was audible save the
trees rustling in the breeze and the faint tap-tap of the stone-breaker
by the roadside.
Paul was suffering acutely. Not for one moment had he shared the
widow’s superstition that the girl was possessed by a devil and he
felt, therefore, that he had been reading the Gospel without belief.
The only devil which existed was the one within himself, and this one
would not be driven forth. And yet there had been a moment when he had
felt nearer to God: “What have I to do with thee?” And it seemed to him
that those three believers in front of him, and his own mother kneeling
at the kitchen door, were bowed, not before his power, but before
his utter wretchedness. Yet when the widow bent low to kiss his feet
he drew back sharply: he thought of his mother, _who knew all_, and
feared lest she should misjudge him.
The widow was so overwhelmed with mortification when she raised her
head that the two children began to laugh, and even Paul’s distress
relaxed a little.
“That’s all right, get up now,” he said, “the child is quiet.”
They all rose to their feet and Antiochus ran to open the door, at
which now somebody else was knocking. It was the keeper with his dog on
the leash, and Antiochus burst out instantly, his face beaming with joy:
“A miracle has just happened! He has driven out the devils from the
body of Nina Masia!”
But the keeper did not believe in miracles; he stood a little away from
the door and said:
“Then let us make room for them to escape!”
“They will enter into the body of your dog,” cried Antiochus.
“They cannot enter because they are there already,” replied the keeper.
He spoke in jest, but maintained his usual gravity. On the threshold
of the room he drew himself up and saluted the priest without
condescending even to glance at the women.
“Can I speak to you in private, sir?”
The women withdrew into the kitchen and Antiochus carried the Testament
upstairs. When he came down, although still full of excitement at the
miracle, he stopped to listen to what the keeper was saying:
“I beg your pardon for bringing this animal into the house, but he is
quite clean and he will give no trouble because he understands where
he is.” (The dog, in fact, was standing motionless, with lowered eyes
and hanging tail.) “I’ve come about the matter of old Nicodemus Pania,
nicknamed King Nicodemus. He is back in his hut and has expressed the
wish to see you again and to receive extreme unction. In my humble
opinion...”
“Good heavens!” exclaimed the priest impatiently, but the next instant
he was filled with childish joy at the thought of going up to the
mountain plateau and by physical exertion banishing for a time the
perplexities that tormented him.
“Yes, yes,” he added quickly, “and I shall want a horse. What is the
road like?”
“I will see about the horse and the road,” said the keeper, “that is my
duty.”
The priest offered him a drink. On principle the keeper never accepted
anything from anyone, not even a glass of wine, but on this occasion he
felt that his own civil functions and the priest’s religious functions
were so much each a part of the other that he accepted the invitation;
so he drank, and emptied the last drops of wine on the ground (since
the earth claims her share of whatever man consumes), and expressed his
thanks with a military salute. Then the great dog wagged his tail and
looked up at Paul with an offer of friendship in his eyes.
Antiochus was ready to open the door again and then returned to the
dining-room to await orders. He was sorry for his mother, waiting in
vain for the priest in the little room behind the bar, which had been
specially cleaned up for the occasion and the tray with glasses placed
ready for the guest; but duty before all things and the visit would
obviously be impossible that day.
“What must I prepare?” he asked, imitating the keeper’s solemn tones.
“Shall we take the umbrella?”
“What are you thinking of! I am going on horseback and you need not
come at all. I could take you up behind me, however.”
“No, I will walk, I am never tired,” urged the boy, and in a few
minutes he was ready, with a little box in his hand and his red cope
folded over his arm. As far as he was concerned, he would have liked to
take the umbrella too, but he was obliged to obey superior orders.
Whilst he was waiting for the priest in front of the church all the
ragged urchins who made of the square their regular playground and
battlefield gathered round him curiously without venturing too near,
and regarded the box with respect not unmixed with terror.
“Let’s go nearer,” said one.
“You keep your distance, or I’ll let loose the keeper’s dog at you!”
shouted Antiochus.
“The keeper’s dog? Why, you daren’t go within ten miles of him!” jeered
the urchins.
“Daren’t I?” said Antiochus with magnificent scorn.
“No, you daren’t! And you think you’re as good as the Lord Himself
because you’re carrying the holy oil!”
“If I were you,” advised one open-minded youth, “I should make off with
that box and perform all kinds of sorceries with the holy oil.”
“Be off, you horse-fly! The devil that came out of Nina Masia’s body
has entered into yours!”
“What’s that? The devil?” cried the boys in chorus.
“Yes,” said Antiochus solemnly, “this very afternoon _he_ drove out a
devil from the body of Nina Masia. Here she comes.”
The widow, leading the little girl by the hand, was just coming out of
the presbytery; the boys all rushed to meet her and in one moment the
news of the miracle spread through the village. Then occurred a scene
which recalled that which had taken place on the first arrival of the
priest. The whole population assembled together in the square and Nina
Masia was placed by her mother on the top step before the church door,
where she sat, thin and brown-skinned, with her green eyes and the red
kerchief over her head, looking like some primitive idol set up to be
worshipped by those simple and credulous country folk.
The women began to weep and all wanted to touch the girl. Meanwhile
the keeper had arrived on the scene with his dog, and then the priest
crossed the square on horseback. The crowd immediately collected around
him and made a procession to follow him, but whilst he waved his hand
to them and turned from side to side acknowledging their greetings,
his annoyance at what had happened was even greater than his distress.
When he reached the top of the hill he reined in his horse and seemed
about to speak, then suddenly put spurs to the animal and rode rapidly
down the road. He had a desperate craving to gallop furiously away,
to escape through the valley and lose himself and his whole being
somewhere in that wide horizon spread out before his gaze.
The wind was freshening: the afternoon sun shone warmly on the thickets
and bushes, the river reflected the blue sky and the spray thrown up
by the mill-wheel sparkled like diamonds. The keeper with his dog and
Antiochus with his box descended the hill soberly, fully conscious of
their office, and presently Paul drew rein and rode along quietly.
After crossing the river the road became a mere path and wound upwards
towards the plateau, bordered by stones and low walls, rocks and
stunted trees, and the west wind blew sweet and warm, heavy-laden with
perfume, as though it had gathered all the thyme flowers and wild roses
it had found upon its way and was now strewing them again upon the
earth.
The path wound ever upwards: when they turned round the side of the
hill and lost sight of the village, the world seemed nothing but wind
and stones, and white vapours that on the horizon linked earth and sky
in one. From time to time the dog barked, and the echo in the hills
seemed to bring him answers from other dogs all around.
When they were half-way to their destination the priest offered to
take Antiochus up behind him on the horse, but the boy refused, and
only very unwillingly yielded up the box. And only then did he permit
himself to open a conversation with the keeper; a vain attempt,
however, for the keeper never forgot his own imaginary importance for
one moment. Every now and then he would stop, with a portentous frown,
and drawing the peak of his cap low over his eyes he would inspect the
landscape on every side, as though the whole world belonged to him and
were threatened with some imminent peril. Then the dog would stop too,
rigid on his four paws, snuffing the wind and quivering from ears to
tail. Luckily all was serene on that windy afternoon, the only moving
things in sight being the agile goats climbing on distant rocks, black
silhouettes against the blue sky and rosy clouds.
At last they came to a sort of declivity covered with masses of
granite, a regular waterfall of rocks balanced one upon another with
marvellous precision. Antiochus recognized the place, as he had once
been there with his father, and whilst the priest kept to the path,
which wound some considerable way round, and the keeper followed him
as in duty bound, the boy scrambled down from rock to rock and was the
first to reach the hut of the old hunter.
The hut was a ramshackle erection of logs and boughs surrounded by a
partly natural enclosure of great boulders, against which the old man,
in order to complete this sort of prehistoric fortress, had piled other
stones in large numbers. The sun slanted down into this enclosure as
into a well: the view was completely shut in on three sides, and only
on the right, between two rocks, a silver streak in the blue distance,
might be discerned the sea.
On hearing steps the old man’s grandson thrust his curly black head out
of the hut door.
“They are coming,” announced Antiochus.
“Who are coming?”
“The priest and the keeper.”
The man sprang out, as agile and hairy as his own goats, and swore
roundly at the keeper for always interfering in other people’s business.
“I’ll break all his bones for him!” he growled threateningly, but when
he saw the dog he drew back, while the old man’s dog ran forward to
sniff at and greet the visitor.
Antiochus took charge of the box again and sat down on a stone facing
the opening in the rocks. All around were an immense number of
wild-boar-skins, striped black and grey, and of marten skins flecked
with gold, spread out on the rocks to dry. Inside the hut he could see
the form of the old man lying on a heap of other skins, his dark face,
framed in the white hair and beard, already set in the composure of
approaching death. The priest was bending down to interrogate him, but
the dying man made no reply, and lay with closed eyes and a drop of
blood trembling on his violet lips. A little way off, on another stone,
sat the keeper with his dog stretched at his feet and his eyes also
fixed on the interior of the hut. He was indignant because the dying
man was disobeying the law in not declaring what was his last will
and testament, and as Antiochus turned his mischievous eyes in that
direction he thought somewhat maliciously that the keeper would have
liked to set his dog on the stubborn old hunter as on a thief.
CHAPTER VIII
Inside the hut the priest bent still lower, his hands clasped between
his knees, his face heavy with weariness and displeasure. He too was
silent now: he almost seemed to have forgotten why he was there and
sat listening to the wind as if it were the distant murmur of the sea.
Suddenly the keeper’s dog sprang up barking, and Antiochus heard the
rustle of wings over his head: he looked up and saw the old hunter’s
tame eagle alighting on a rock, with its great wings outspread and
slowly beating the air like an immense black fan.
Inside the hut Paul was thinking to himself:
“And this is death. This man fled from other men because he was afraid
of committing murder or some other great crime. And here he lies now, a
stone amongst stones. So shall I lie in thirty, forty years, after an
exile that has lasted through eternity. And perhaps she will still be
expecting me to-night...”
He started up. Ah, no, he was not dead as he had thought: life was
beating within him, surging up strong and tenacious like the eagle
amongst the stones.
“I must remain up here all night,” he told himself. “If I can get
through this night without seeing her I shall be saved.”
He went outside and sat down beside Antiochus. The sun was sinking in
a crimson sky, the shadows of the high rocks were lengthening over the
enclosure and the wind-tossed bushes, and in the same way as he could
not distinguish objects clearly in the uncertain light without, so Paul
could not tell which of the two desires within him was the strongest.
Presently he said:
“The old man cannot speak now, he is dying. It is time to administer
extreme unction, and if he dies we must arrange for the body to be
moved. It will be necessary...” he added as though to himself, but did
not dare to complete the sentence, “it will be necessary to spend the
night here.”
Antiochus got up and began to make preparations for the ceremony. He
opened the box, pressing the silver fasteners with enjoyment, and
drew out the white cloth and the amphora of oil: then he unfolded his
red cope and put it on—he might have been himself the priest! When
everything was ready they went back into the hut, where the grandson,
on his knees, was supporting the dying man’s head. Antiochus knelt down
on the other side, with the folds of his cope spread out on the ground.
He laid the white cloth over the stone that served as a table, and the
scarlet of his cope was reflected in the silver amphora. The keeper,
too, knelt down outside the hut, with his dog beside him.
Then the priest anointed the old man’s forehead, and the palms of his
hands which had never sought to do violence to anyone, and his feet
which had borne him far from men as from evil itself.
The setting sun shone direct into the hut with a last dazzling
splendour, lighting up Antiochus in his scarlet cope, so that between
the old man and the priest he looked like a live coal amongst dead
cinders.
“I shall have to go back,” thought Paul. “I have no excuse for
remaining here.” Presently he went outside the hut and said: “There is
no hope, he is quite unconscious.”
“Comatose,” said the keeper with precision.
“He cannot live more than a few hours and arrangements must be made
for transporting the body down to the village,” continued Paul; and he
longed to add, “And I must stay here all night,” but he was ashamed of
his untruth.
Moreover he was beginning now to feel the need of walking and a craving
to get back to the village. As night fell the thought of sin began
subtly to attract him again and drew him in with the invisible net of
darkness. He felt it and was afraid; but he kept guard over himself,
and he knew his conscience was awake and ready to uphold him.
“If only I could get through this one night without seeing her I should
be saved!” was his silent cry. If only some one would detain him by
force! If the old man would revive and hold him fast by the hem of his
robe!
He sat down again and cast about for some excuse for delaying his
departure. The sun had now sunk below the edge of the high plateau,
and the trunks of the oaks stood out boldly against the red glow of
the sky like the pillars of some gigantic portico, surmounted by an
immense black roof. Not even the presence of death could mar the peace
of that majestic solitude. Paul was weary and, as in the morning at the
foot of the altar, he would have liked to lie down upon the stones and
fall asleep.
Meanwhile the keeper had come to a decision on his own account. He
entered the hut and, kneeling down beside the dying man, whispered
something into his ear. The grandson looked on with suspicion and
contempt, then approached the priest and said:
“Now that you have done your duty, depart in peace. I know what has to
be done now.”
At that moment the keeper came outside again.
“He is past speaking,” he said, “but he gave me to understand by a sign
that he has put all his affairs in order. Nicodemus Pania,” he added,
turning towards the grandson, “can you assure us on your conscience
that we may leave here with quiet minds?”
“Except for the holy sacrament of extreme unction, you need not have
come at all. What business have you to meddle in my affairs?” answered
the grandson truculently.
“We must carry out the law! And don’t raise your voice like that,
Nicodemus Pania!” retorted the keeper.
“Enough, enough, no shouting,” said the priest, pointing to the hut.
“You are always teaching that there is only one duty in life, and that
is to do one’s own duty,” said the keeper sententiously.
Paul sprang to his feet, struck by those words. Everything he heard now
seemed meant specially for him, and he thought God was making known His
will through the mouths of men. He mounted his horse and said to the
old man’s grandson:
“Stay with your grandfather until he is dead. God is great and we never
know what may happen.”
The man accompanied him part of the way, and when they were out of
earshot of the keeper he said:
“Listen, sir. My grandfather did give his money into my charge; it’s
here, inside my coat. It is not much, but whatever it is, it belongs to
me, doesn’t it?”
“If your grandfather gave it to you for yourself alone, then it is
yours,” replied Paul, turning round to see if the others were following.
They were following. Antiochus was leaning on a stick he had fashioned
for himself out of the branch of a tree, and the keeper, the glazed
peak of his cap and the buttons of his tunic reflecting the last rays
of the evening light, had halted at the corner of the path and was
giving the military salute in the direction of the hut. He was saluting
death. And from his rocky perch the eagle answered the salute with a
last flap of his great wings before he too went to sleep.
* * * * *
The shades of night crept rapidly up from the valley and soon enveloped
the three wayfarers. When they had crossed the river, however, and had
turned into the path that led up towards home, their road was lit up
by a distant glare that came from the village itself. It looked as if
the whole place were on fire; huge flames were leaping on the summit of
the ridge, and the keepers’ keen sight distinguished numerous figures
moving about in the square in front of the church. It was a Saturday,
and nearly all the men would have returned to their homes for the
Sunday rest, but this did not explain the reason for the bonfires and
the unusual excitement in the village.
“I know what it is!” called Antiochus joyfully. “They are waiting for
us to come back, and they are going to celebrate the miracle of Nina
Masia!”
“Good heavens! Are you quite mad, Antiochus?” cried the priest, with
something akin to terror as he gazed at the hill-side below the
village, over which the bonfires were casting their lurid glare.
The keeper made no remark, but in contemptuous silence he rattled the
dog’s chain and the animal barked loudly. Whereupon hoarse shouts and
yells echoed through the valley, and to the priest in his misery it
seemed as though some mysterious voice were protesting against the way
in which he had imposed on the simplicity of his parishioners.
“What have I done to them?” he asked himself. “I have made fools of
them just as I have made a fool of myself. May God save us all!”
Suggestions for heroic action rushed into his mind. When he reached
the village he would stop in the midst of his people and confess his
sin; he would tear open his breast before them all and show them his
wretched heart, consumed with grief, but burning more fiercely with the
flame of his anguish than the fires of brushwood upon the ridge.
But here the voice of his conscience spoke:
“It is their faith that they are celebrating. They are glorifying God
in thee and thou hast no right to thrust thyself and thy wretchedness
between them and God.”
But from deeper still within him another voice made itself heard:
“It is not that. It is because thou art base and vile and art afraid of
suffering, of burning in very truth.”
And the nearer they came to the village and the men, the more abased
did Paul feel. As the leaping flames fought with the shadows on the
hill-side so light and darkness seemed to fight in his conscience, and
he did not know what to do. He remembered his first arrival in the
village years ago, with his mother following him anxiously as she had
followed the first steps of his infancy.
“And I have fallen in her sight,” he groaned. “She thinks she has
raised me up again, but I am wounded to death.”
Then suddenly he bethought him, with a sense of relief, that this
improvised festival would help him out of his difficulty and avert the
danger he feared.
“I will invite some of them to the presbytery to spend the evening, and
they are sure to stay late. If I can get through this night I shall be
safe.”
The black figures of the men leaning over the parapet of the square
could now be distinguished, and higher up, behind the church, the
flames of the bonfires were waving in the air like long red flags. The
bells were not ringing as on that former occasion, but the melancholy
sound of a concertina accompanied the general uproar.
All at once from the top of the church tower there shot up a silver
star, which instantly broke into a thousand sparks with an explosion
that echoed through the valley. A shout of delight went up from the
crowd, followed by another brilliant shower of sparks and the noise
of shots being fired. They were letting off their guns in sign of
rejoicing, as they did on the nights of the great feasts.
“They have gone mad,” said the keeper, and he ran off at full speed in
advance, the dog barking fiercely as though there were some revolt to
be quelled up there.
Antiochus, on the other hand, felt inclined to weep. He looked at the
priest sitting straight upright on his horse and thought he resembled
some saint carried in procession. Nevertheless, his reflections took a
practical turn:
“My mother will do good business to-night with all these merry folk!”
And he felt so happy that he unfolded the cope and threw it over his
shoulders. Then he wanted to carry the box again, though he would not
give up his new stick, and thus he entered the village looking like one
of the Three Kings.
The old hunter’s granddaughter called to the priest from her door and
asked for news of her grandfather.
“All is well,” said Paul.
“Then grandfather is better, is he?”
“Your grandfather is dead by this time.”
She gave a scream, and that was the only discordant note of the
festival.
The boys had already gone down the hill to meet the priest; they
swarmed round his horse like a cloud of flies, and all went up together
to the church square. The people there were not so numerous as they had
looked from a distance, and the presence of the keeper with his dog had
infused some sort of order into the proceedings. The men were ranged
round the parapet underneath the trees and some were drinking in front
of the little wineshop kept by the mother of Antiochus: the women,
their sleeping infants in their arms, were sitting on the church steps,
and in the midst of them sat Nina Masia, as quiet now as a drowsy cat.
In the centre of the square stood the keeper with his dog, as stiff as
a statue.
On the arrival of the priest they all got up and gathered round him;
but the horse, secretly spurred by its rider, started forward towards
a street on the opposite side from the church, where was the house
of its master. Whereupon the master, who happened to be one of the
men drinking in front of the wineshop, came forward glass in hand and
caught the animal by the bridle.
“Heh, nag, what are you thinking of? Here I am!”
The horse stopped immediately, nuzzling towards its master as if it
wanted to drink the wine in his glass. The priest made a movement to
dismount, but the man held him fast by one leg, while he led horse and
rider in front of the wineshop, where he stretched out his glass to a
companion who was holding the bottle.
The whole crowd, men and women, now formed a circle round the priest.
In the lighted doorway of the wineshop, smiling at the scene, stood
the tall, gipsy-like figure of Antiochus’s mother, her face almost
bronze-coloured in the reflection of the bonfires. The babies had
wakened up startled and were struggling in their mothers’ arms, the
gold and coral amulets with which all, even the poorest, was adorned,
gleaming as they moved. And in the centre of this restless throng,
confused grey figures in the darkness, sat the priest high upon, his
horse, in very truth like a shepherd in the midst of his flock.
A white-bearded old man placed his hand on Paul’s knee and turned
towards the people.
“Good folk,” he said in a voice shaking with emotion, “this is truly a
man of God!”
“Then drink to a good vintage!” cried the owner of the horse offering
the glass, which Paul accepted and immediately put to his lips; but
his teeth shook against the edge of the glass as though the red wine
glowing in the light of the fires were not wine, but blood.
CHAPTER IX
Paul was seated again at his own table in the little dining-room,
lighted by an oil lamp. Behind the ridge, which looked a mountain as
seen from the presbytery window, the full moon was rising in the pale
sky.
He had invited several of the villagers to come in and keep him
company, amongst them the old man with the white beard and the owner
of the horse, and they were still sitting there drinking and joking,
and telling hunting stories. The old man with the white beard, a hunter
himself, was criticizing King Nicodemus because, in his opinion, the
old recluse did not conduct his hunting according to the law of God.
“I don’t want to speak ill of him in his last hour,” he was saying;
“but to tell the truth, he went out hunting simply as a speculation.
Now last winter he must have made thousands of lire by marten skins
alone. God allows us to shoot animals, but not to exterminate them!
And he used to snare them, too, and that is forbidden, because animals
feel pain just as we do, and the hours they lie caught in the snares
must be terrible. Once I myself, with these very eyes, I saw a snare
where a hare had left her foot. Do you understand what that means? The
hare had been caught in the snare and had gnawed the flesh away all
round her foot, and had broken her leg off to get free. And what did
Nicodemus do with his money, after all? He hid it, and now his grandson
will drink it all in a few days.”
“Money is made to be spent,” said the owner of the horse, a man much
given to boasting; “I myself, for instance, I have always spent freely
and enjoyed myself, without hurting anyone. Once at our festival,
having nothing else to do, I stopped a man who sold silk reels and
happened to be passing with a load of his goods; I bought the whole
lot, then I set them rolling about on the piazza and ran after them,
kicking them here and there and everywhere! In one instant the whole
crowd was after me, laughing and yelling, and the boys and young men,
and even some of the older men began to imitate me. That was a game
that’s not forgotten yet! Every time the old priest saw me he used to
shout from ever so far: ‘Hallo, Pasquale Masia, haven’t you any reels
to set rolling to-day?’”
All the guests laughed at the tale, only Paul seemed absent-minded
and looked pale and tired. The old man with the white beard, who was
observing him with reverent affection, winked at his companions to
suggest an immediate departure. It was time to leave the servant of God
to his holy solitude and well-merited repose.
The guests rose from their seats all together and took respectful leave
of their host; and Paul found himself alone, between the flickering
flame of the oil lamp and the calm splendour of the moon that shone in
through the high window, while the sound of the heavy iron-shod shoes
of his departing guests echoed down the deserted street.
It was yet early to go to bed, and although he was utterly worn out and
his shoulders ached with fatigue, as though he had been bearing a heavy
yoke all the day, he had no thought of going up to his own room. His
mother was still in the kitchen: he could not see her from where he
sat, but he knew that she was watching as on _the previous night_.
The previous night! He felt as if he had been suddenly awakened out
of a long sleep, and the distress of his return home from the house
of Agnes, and his thoughts in the night, the letter, the Mass, the
journey up the mountain, the villagers’ demonstration, had all been
only a dream. His real life was beginning again now: he had but to take
a step, a dozen steps, to open the door... and go back to her.... His
real life was beginning again.
“But perhaps she is not expecting me any longer. Perhaps she will never
expect me again!”
Then he felt his knees trembling and terror took hold of him again, not
at the thought of going back to her, but at the thought that she might
have accepted her fate and be already beginning to forget him.
Then he realized that in the depths of his heart the hardest thing to
bear since he came down from the mountain had been this—not knowing
anything about her, her silence, her vanishing out of his life.
This was the veritable death, that she should cease to love him.
He buried his face in his hands and tried to bring her image before his
mind’s eye, then he began to reproach her for those things for which
she might justly have reproached him.
“Agnes, you cannot forget your promises! How can you forget them? You
held my wrists in your two strong hands and said to me: ‘We are bound
to each other for ever, in life and in death.’ Is it possible that you
can forget? You said, you know...”
His fingers gripped at his collar, for he was suffocating with his
distress.
“The devil has caught me in his snare,” he thought, and remembered the
hare who had gnawed off her own foot.
He drew a deep breath, rose from his chair, and took up the lamp. He
determined to conquer his will, to gnaw his own flesh also if thereby
he could only free himself. Now he decided to go up to his room, but as
he moved towards the hall he saw his mother sitting in her accustomed
place in the silent kitchen, and beside her was Antiochus fast asleep.
He went to the door.
“Why is that boy still here?” he asked.
His mother looked at him hesitatingly: she would have preferred not to
answer, but to have hidden Antiochus behind her wide skirts in order
that Paul should not wait up any longer, but go to his room and to bed.
Her faith in him was now completely restored, but she too thought of
the devil and his snares. At this moment, however, Antiochus woke up
and remembered very well why he was still waiting there, in spite of
the fact that the woman had several times asked him to go.
“I was waiting here because my mother is expecting a visit from you,”
he explained.
“But is this a time of night to go paying visits?” protested the
priest’s mother. “Come now, be off with you, and tell her that Paul is
tired and will go and see her to-morrow.”
She spoke to the boy, but she was looking at her son: she saw his
glassy eyes fixed upon the lamp, but his eyelids quivered like the
wings of a moth in a candle.
Antiochus got up with an expression of deep disappointment.
“But my mother is expecting him; she thinks it’s something important.”
“If it was anything important he would go and tell her at once. Come,
be off with you!”
She spoke sharply, and as Paul looked at her his eyes lit up again with
quick resentment: he saw that his mother was afraid lest he should go
out again, and the knowledge filled him with unreasoning anger. He
banged the lamp down on the table again and called to Antiochus:
“We will go and see your mother.”
In the hall, however, he turned and added:
“I shall be back directly, mother; don’t fasten the door.”
She had not moved from where she sat, but when the two had left the
house she went to peep through the half-open door and saw them cross
the moonlit square and enter the wineshop, which was still lighted
up. Then she went back to the kitchen and began her vigil as on the
previous night.
She marvelled at herself to find that she was no longer afraid of the
old priest reappearing; it had all been a dream. At the bottom of her
heart, however, she did not feel at all certain that the ghost would
not come back and demand his mended socks.
“I have mended them all right,” she said aloud, thinking of those she
had mended for her son. And she felt that even if the ghost did come
back she would be able to hold her own with him and keep on friendly
terms.
Complete silence reigned all round. Outside the window the trees shone
silver in the bright moonlight, the sky was like a milky sea, and the
perfume of the aromatic shrubs penetrated even into the house. And the
mother herself was tranquil now, though she hardly knew why, seeing
that Paul might yet fall again into sin; but she no longer felt the
same terror of it. She saw again in her mind’s eye the lashes trembling
on his cheeks, like those of a child about to cry, and her mother’s
heart melted with tenderness and pity.
“And why, oh Lord, why, why?”
She dared not complete her question, but it remained at the bottom of
her heart like a stone at the bottom of a well. Why, oh Lord, was Paul
forbidden to love a woman? Love was lawful for all, even for servants
and herdsmen, even for the blind and for convicts in prison; so why
should Paul, her child, be the only one to whom love was forbidden?
Then again the consciousness of reality forced itself on her. She
remembered the words of Antiochus, and was ashamed of being less wise
than a boy.
“They themselves, the youngest amongst the priests, asked permission to
live chaste and free, apart from women.”
Moreover, her Paul was a strong man, in no wise inferior to his ancient
predecessors. He would never give way to tears; his eyelids would close
over eyes dry as those of the dead, for he was a strong man.
“I am growing childish!” she sobbed.
She felt as if she had grown twenty years older in that one long day
of wearing emotions: each hour that passed had added to the burden she
bore, each minute had struck a blow upon her soul as the hammer of the
stone-breaker struck upon the heaps of broken rock there behind the
ridge. So many things now seemed clear to her, different from on the
previous day. The figure of Agnes came before her, with the proud look
that concealed all she really felt.
“She is strong too,” thought the mother; “she will hide everything.”
Then slowly she rose from her chair and began to cover the fire with
ashes, banking it up carefully so that no sparks could fly out and set
fire to anything near: then she shut the house door, for she knew Paul
always carried a key with him. She stamped about loudly, as though he
could hear her across the square, and believe her firm footsteps to be
an outward sign of her inward assurance.
She felt, however, that this assurance was not so very firm after all.
But then what is really firm in this life? Neither the base of the
mountains nor the foundations of the churches, for an earthquake may
overthrow them both. Thus she felt sure of Paul for the future, and
sure of herself, but always with an underlying dread of the unknown
which might chance to supervene. And when she reached her bedroom she
dropped wearily into a chair, wondering whether it would not have been
better after all to leave the front door open.
Then she got up and began to untie her apron string; but it had twisted
into a knot over which she lost patience at last, and went to fetch
a pair of scissors from her work-basket. She found the kitten curled
up asleep inside the basket, and the scissors and reels were all warm
from contact with its tiny body; and somehow the touch of the living
thing made her repent of her impatience, and she went back to the lamp,
and drawing the knot in front of her she succeeded at last in untying
it. With a sigh of relief she slowly undressed, carefully folding her
garments one by one on the chair, first, however, taking the keys
out of her apron pocket and laying them in a row on the table like a
respectable family all asleep. Thus her masters had taught her in her
youth to cultivate order and tidiness, and she still obeyed the old
instructions.
She sat down again, half undressed, her short chemise displaying thin
brown legs that might have been made of wood, and she yawned with
weariness and resignation. No, she would not go downstairs again; her
son should come home and find the door closed, and see from that fact
that his mother had full confidence in him. That was the right way to
manage him, show that you trusted him absolutely. Nevertheless, she
was on the alert, and listened for the least sound; not in the same
way as on the previous night, but still she listened. She drew off her
shoes and placed them side by side, like two sisters who must keep each
other company even during the night, and went on murmuring her prayers
and yawning, yawning with weariness and resignation, and with sheer
nervousness, too.
Whatever could Paul have to say to Antiochus’s mother? The woman had by
no means a good reputation, she lent money on usury and was commonly
supposed to be a procuress too. No, Paul’s mother could not understand
it. Then she blew out the candle, snuffed the smoking wick with her
fingers and got into bed, but could not bring herself to lie down.
Presently she thought she heard a step in her room. Was it the ghost
come back? She was filled with a horrible fear lest he should come up
to the bed and take hold of her; for a moment her blood froze in her
veins, then surged to her heart as a people in tumult rushes through
the streets of its city to the principal square. Then she recovered
herself and was ashamed of her fear, only caused, she was sure, by the
wicked doubts she had entertained of her Paul.
No, those doubts were all ended: never again would she inquire into the
very smallest of his actions; it was her place to keep quietly in the
background, as she was now, in her little room fit only for a servant.
She lay down and drew the bedclothes over her, covering her ears, too,
so that she might not hear whether Paul came home or not; but in her
inner consciousness she _felt_ all the same, she felt that he was not
coming home, that he had been carried off by some one against his will,
as one drawn reluctantly into a dance.
Nevertheless she felt quite sure of him; sooner or later he would
manage to escape and come home. Anyhow, she was resting quietly
under the bedclothes, though not yet asleep, and she had a confused
impression that she was still trying to undo the knot in her apron
string. Then the faint buzzing in her ears beneath the coverlet turned
gradually into the murmuring of the crowd in the square beneath her
window, and farther off still the murmuring of a people who lamented,
and yet whilst lamenting laughed and danced and sang. Her Paul was
there in the midst of them, and above them all in some high, far place,
a lute was being softly played. Perhaps it was God Himself playing to
the dance of men.
CHAPTER X
All day long Antiochus’s mother had been speculating as to what could
be the object of the priest’s visit, for which her boy had prepared
her, but she took good care not to betray by her manner that she was
expecting him. Perhaps he intended making a few remarks on the subject
of usury, and certain other trades which she practised; or because she
was in the habit of lending out—for purely medical purposes, but always
for a small fee—certain very ancient relics which she had inherited
from her husband’s family. Or perhaps he wanted to borrow money, either
for himself or some one else. Whatever it might prove to be, as soon
as the last customer had departed she went to the door and stood there
with her hands in her pockets, heavy with copper coins, looking out to
see whether Antiochus at least were not in sight.
Then immediately she pretended to be busied with shutting the door,
and in fact she did shut the lower half, bending down to fasten the
bolt. She was active in her movements, although tall and stout; but,
contrary to the other women of the place, she had a small head, which
only looked large because of the great mass of black plaits that
encircled it.
As the priest approached she drew herself up and bade him good evening
with much dignity, though her black eyes looked straight into his with
an ardent, languorous gaze. Then she invited him to take a seat in the
room behind the wineshop, and Antiochus’s wistful eyes begged her to
press the invitation. But the priest said good-humouredly:
“No, let us stay here,” and he sat down at one of the long,
wine-stained tables that furnished the little tavern, whilst Antiochus,
resigned to the inevitable, stood beside him, casting anxious glances
round, however, to see if everything was in order and fearful lest any
belated customer should come in to disturb the conference.
Nobody came and everything was in order. The big petroleum lamp threw
an immense shadow of his mother on the wall behind the little bar,
covered with shelves filled with bottles of red, yellow and green
liqueurs, the light falling crudely on the small black casks ranged
along the opposite side of the shop. There was no other furniture
except the long table at which sat the priest, and another smaller one,
and over the door hung a bunch of broom which served the double purpose
of informing passers-by that this was the door of a wineshop and of
attracting flies away from the glasses.
Antiochus had been waiting for this moment during the whole of the
day, with the feeling that some mystery would then be revealed. He was
afraid of some intruder coming in, or that his mother would not behave
as she should. He would have liked her to be more humble, more docile
in the presence of the priest; but instead of that she had taken her
seat again behind the bar, and sat there as composedly as a queen on
her throne. She did not even appear to realize that the man seated
at the tavern table like an ordinary customer was a saint who worked
miracles, and she was not even grateful for the large quantity of wine
which he had been the indirect means of her selling that day!
At last, however, Paul opened the conversation.
“I should have liked to see your husband as well,” he began, resting
his elbows on the table and placing his finger-tips together, “but
Antiochus tells me that he will not be back until Sunday week.”
The woman merely nodded in assent.
“Yes, on Sunday week, but I can go and fetch him, if you like,” broke
in Antiochus, with an eagerness of which neither of the others took the
least notice.
“It is about the boy,” continued Paul. “The time has come when you
must really consider in earnest what you are going to do with him. He
is growing big now and you must either teach him a trade or, if you
want to make a priest of him, you must think very seriously of the
responsibility you are undertaking.”
Antiochus opened his lips, but as his mother began to speak he listened
to her silently, though with a shade of disapproval on his anxious
young face.
The woman seized the occasion, as she always did, to sound the praises
of her husband, also to excuse herself for having married a man much
older than herself:
“My Martin, as your Reverence knows, is the most conscientious man in
the world; he is a good husband and a good father and a better workman
than anyone else. Who is there in the whole village who works as hard
as he does? Tell me that, your Reverence, you who know what sort of a
character the village has got through the idleness of its inhabitants!
I say, then, that if Antiochus wants to choose a trade, he has only to
follow his father’s; that is the best trade for him. The boy is free
to do as he likes, and even if he wants to do nothing (I don’t say
it for vanity), he will be able to live without turning thief, thank
God! But if he wants a trade different from his father’s, then he must
choose for himself. If he wants to be a charcoal-burner, let him be a
charcoal-burner; if he wants to be a carpenter, let him be a carpenter;
if he wants to be a labourer, let him be a labourer.”
“I want to be a priest!” said the boy with quivering lips and eager
eyes.
“Very well then, be a priest,” replied his mother.
And thus his fate was decided.
Paul let his hands fall upon the table and gazed slowly round him.
Quite suddenly he felt it was ridiculous that he should thus interest
himself in other people’s business. How could he possibly solve the
problem of the future for Antiochus when he could not succeed in
solving it for himself? The boy stood before him in ardent expectation,
like a piece of red-hot iron awaiting the stroke of the hammer to mould
it into shape, and every word had the power to either make or mar him.
Paul’s gaze rested on him with something akin to envy, and in the
depths of his conscience he applauded the mother’s action in leaving
her son free to follow his own instincts.
“Instinct never leads us wrong,” he said aloud, following his own train
of thought. “But now, Antiochus, tell me in your mother’s presence the
reason why you wish to be a priest. Being a priest is not a trade, you
know; it is not like being a charcoal-burner or a carpenter. You think
now that it is a very easy, comfortable kind of life, but later on you
will find that it is very difficult. The joys and pleasures allowed to
all other men are forbidden to us, and if we truly desire to serve the
Lord our life is one continuous sacrifice.”
“I know that,” replied the boy very simply. “I desire to serve the
Lord.”
He looked at his mother then, because he was a little ashamed of
betraying all his enthusiasm before her, but she sat behind the bar
as calmly and coldly as when she was merely serving customers. So
Antiochus went on:
“Both my father and mother are willing for me to become a priest; why
should they object? I am very careless sometimes, but that is because I
am still only a boy, and in future I mean to be much more serious and
attentive.”
“That is not the question, Antiochus; you are too serious and attentive
already!” said Paul. “At your age you should be heedless and merry.
Learn and prepare yourself for life, certainly, but be a boy too.”
“And am I not a boy?” protested Antiochus; “I do play, only you don’t
happen to see me just when I am playing! Besides, why should I play if
I don’t feel inclined? I have lots of amusements: I enjoy ringing the
church bells and I feel as if I was a bird up in the tower. And haven’t
I had an amusing time to-day? I enjoyed carrying the box and climbing
up ever so high amongst the rocks, and I got there before you, although
you were riding! I enjoyed coming home again... and to-day I enjoyed...
I was happy,” and the boy’s eyes sought the ground as he added, “when
you drove the devils out of the body of Nina Masia.”
“You believed in that?” asked the priest in a low voice, and
immediately he saw the boy’s eyes look upward, so glorious with the
light of faith and wonder that instinctively he lowered his own to hide
the dark shadow that rested on his soul.
“Only, when we are children we think in one way and everything looks
great and beautiful to us,” continued Paul, much disturbed, “but when
we are grown up things look different. One must reflect very carefully
before undertaking anything important so that one may not come to
repent afterwards.”
“I shall not repent, I’m sure,” said the boy with decision. “Have you
repented? No, and neither shall I repent.”
Paul lifted up his eyes: again he felt that he held in his hands the
soul of this child, to mould it like wax, and that a few careless
touches might deform it for ever. And again he feared and was silent.
All this time the woman behind the bar had listened quietly, but now
the priest’s words began to cause her a certain uneasiness. She opened
a drawer in front of her, wherein she kept her money, and the cornelian
rings and the brooches and mother-of-pearl ornaments pledged by the
village women in return for small loans; and evil thoughts flashed
through the darkest recesses of her mind, like those forlorn trinkets
at the bottom of her drawer.
“The priest is afraid that Antiochus will turn him out of his parish
some time or other,” she was thinking, “or else he is in need of money
and is working off his bad temper first. Now he’ll be asking for a
loan.”
She closed the drawer softly and resumed her tranquil demeanour. She
always sat there in silence and never took part in the discussions
between her customers, even though invited to give her opinion,
especially if they were playing cards. Thus she left her little
Antiochus to face his adversary by himself.
“How is it possible not to believe?” said the boy, between awe and
excitement. “Nina Masia was possessed, wasn’t she? Why, I myself felt
the devil inside her shaking her like a wolf in a cage. And it was
nothing but the words of the Gospel spoken by you that set her free!”
“That is true, the Word of God can achieve all things,” admitted the
priest. Then suddenly he rose from his seat.
Was he going? Antiochus gazed at him in consternation.
“Are you going?” he murmured.
Was this the famous visit? He ran to the bar and made a desperate
sign to his mother, who turned round and took down a bottle from the
shelves. She was disappointed too, for she had hoped for a chance
of lending money to the parish priest, even at a very low interest,
thereby in some way legitimizing her usury in the sight of God. But
instead of that, he had simply come to inform Antiochus that being a
priest was not the same thing as being a carpenter! However, she must
do him honour, in any case.
“But your Reverence is not going away like that! Accept something to
drink, at least; this wine is very old.”
Antiochus was already holding the tray with a glass goblet upon it.
“Then only a little,” said Paul.
Leaning across the bar, the woman poured out the wine, careful not
to spill a drop. Paul raised his glass, within which the ruby liquid
exhaled a perfume like a dusky rose, and after first making Antiochus
taste it, he put it to his own lips.
“Then let us drink to the future parish priest of Aar!” he said.
Antiochus was obliged to lean against the bar, for his knees gave way
under him; that was the happiest moment of his life. The woman had
turned round to replace the precious bottle on the shelf, and, absorbed
in his joy, the lad did not notice that the priest had gone deathly
pale and was staring out of the doorway as though he beheld a ghost.
A dark figure was running silently across the square, came to the
wineshop door, looked round the interior with wide-open black eyes, and
then entered, panting.
It was one of Agnes’s servants.
The priest instinctively withdrew to the far end of the tavern, trying
to hide himself, then came forward again on a sudden impulse. He felt
as if he were revolving round and round like a top, then pulled himself
together and remembered that he was not alone and must be careful not
to excite remark. So he stood still. But he had no desire to hear what
the servant was telling the woman, listening eagerly behind the bar,
his only desire was flight and safety; his heart had stopped beating,
and all the blood in his body had rushed to his head and was roaring in
his ears. Nevertheless the servant’s words penetrated to the utmost
depths of his soul.
“She fell down,” said the girl breathlessly, “and the blood poured from
her nose in a stream, such a stream that we thought she had broken
something inside her head! And she’s bleeding still! Give me the keys
of St. Mary of Egypt, for that is the only thing that can stop it.”
Antiochus, who stood listening with the tray and glass still in his
hands, ran to fetch the keys of an old church, now demolished, which
keys when actually laid on the shoulders of anyone suffering from
hæmorrhage of the nose did to some extent arrest the flow of blood.
“All this is just pretence,” thought Paul, “there is no truth whatever
in the tale. She sent her servant to spy on me and endeavour to lure me
to her house, and they are probably in league with this worthless woman
here.”
And yet deep, deep within him the agitation grew till all his being was
in a tumult. Ah, no, the servant was not lying; Agnes was too proud to
confide in anyone, and least of all in her servants. Agnes was really
ill, and with his inward eye he saw her sweet face all stained with
blood. And it was he himself who had struck her the blow. “We thought
she had broken something inside her head.”
He saw the shifty eyes of the woman behind the bar glance swiftly in
his direction, with obvious surprise at his apparent indifference.
“But how did it happen?” he then asked the servant, but coolly and
calmly, as though seeking to conceal his anxiety even from himself.
The girl turned and confronted him, her dark, hard, pointed face thrust
out towards him like a rock against which he feared to strike.
“I was not at home when she fell. It happened this morning whilst I
was at the fountain, and when I got back I found her very ill. She had
fallen over the doorstep and blood was flowing from her nose, but I
think she was more frightened than hurt. Then the blood stopped, but
she was very pale all day and refused to eat. Then this evening her
nose began to bleed again, and not only that, but she had a sort of
convulsion, and when I left her just now she was lying cold and stiff,
with blood still flowing. I am very nervous,” added the girl, taking
the keys which Antiochus handed to her and wrapping them in her apron,
“and we are only women in the house.”
She moved towards the door, but kept her black eyes on Paul as though
seeking to draw him after her by the sheer power of her gaze, and the
woman seated behind the bar said in her cold voice:
“Why does not your Reverence go and see her?”
He wrung his hands unconsciously and stammered: “I hardly know... it is
too late....”
“Yes, come, come!” urged the servant. “My little mistress will be very
glad, and it will give her courage to see you.”
“It is the devil speaking by your mouth,” thought Paul, but
unconsciously he followed the girl. He had gripped Antiochus by the
shoulder and was drawing him along as a support, and the boy went with
him like a plank of safety upon the waves. So they crossed the square
and went as far as the presbytery, the servant running on ahead, but
turning every few steps to look back at them, the whites of her eyes
gleaming in the moonlight. Seen thus at night, the black figure with
the dark and mask-like face had truly something diabolical about it,
and Paul followed it with a vague sense of fear, leaning on Antiochus’s
shoulder as he walked and feeling like Tobit in his blindness.
On passing the presbytery door the boy tried to open it, and then
Paul perceived that his mother had locked it. He stopped short and
disengaged himself from his companion.
“My mother has locked up because she knew in advance that I should not
keep my word,” he thought to himself; then said to the boy: “Antiochus,
you must go home at once.”
The servant had stopped also, then went on a few steps, then stopped
again and saw the boy returning towards his own home and the priest
inserting his key in his door; then she went back to him.
“I am not coming,” he said, turning almost threateningly to confront
her, and looking her straight in the face as though trying to recognize
her true nature through her outward mask; “if you should absolutely
need me, you understand—only if you do absolutely need me—you can come
back and fetch me.”
She went away without another word, and he stood there before his own
door, with his hand on the key as though it had refused to turn in the
lock. He could not bring himself to enter, it was beyond his power;
neither could he go forward in that other path he had begun to tread.
He felt as if he were doomed to stand there for all eternity, before a
closed door of which he held the key.
* * * * *
Meanwhile Antiochus had reached home. His mother locked the door and he
went to wash up the glasses and put them away; and the first glass he
washed in the clean water was the one from which _he_ had drunk. The
boy dried it very carefully with a white cloth, which he passed round
and round inside with his thumb; then he held it up to the flame of the
lamp and examined it with one eye, keeping the other screwed up, which
had the effect of making the glass shine like a big diamond. Then he
hid it away in a secret cupboard of his own with as much reverence as
if it had been the chalice of the Mass.
CHAPTER XI
Paul had gone home too, and was feeling his way upstairs in the dark:
he dimly remembered going up some stairs in the dark like this when he
was a boy, but he could not remember where it had been. Now, as then,
he had the feeling that there was some danger near him which he could
only escape by strict attention to what he was doing. He reached the
landing, he stood before his own door, he was safe. But he hesitated an
instant before opening it, then crossed over and tapped lightly with
the knuckle of his forefinger at his mother’s door and entered without
waiting for a reply.
“It is I,” he said brusquely; “don’t light the candle, I have something
to tell you.”
He heard her turning round in her bed, the straw mattress creaking
under her: but he could not see her, he did not want to see her; their
two souls must speak together in the darkness as though they had
already passed to the world beyond.
“Is it you, Paul? I was dreaming,” she said in a sleepy yet frightened
voice; “I thought I heard dancing, some one playing on the flute.”
“Mother, listen,” he said, paying no attention to her words. “That
woman, Agnes, is ill. She has been ill since this morning. She had a
fall; it seems she hurt her head and is bleeding from her nose.”
“You don’t mean it, Paul? Is she in danger?”
In the darkness her voice sounded alarmed, yet at the same time
incredulous. He went on, repeating the breathless words of the servant:
“It happened this morning, after she got the letter. All day long she
was pale and refused to eat, and this evening she grew worse and fell
into convulsions.”
He knew that he was exaggerating, and stopped: his mother did not
speak. For a moment in the silence and the night there was a deathlike
tension, as though two enemies were seeking each other in the darkness
and seeking in vain. Then the straw mattress creaked again; his mother
must have raised herself to a sitting position in the high bed, because
her clear voice now seemed to come from above.
“Paul, who told you all this? Perhaps it is not true.”
Again he felt that it was his conscience speaking to him through her,
but he answered at once:
“It may be true. But that is not the question, mother. It is that I
fear she may commit some folly. She is alone in the hands of servants,
and I must see her.”
“Paul!”
“I must,” he repeated, raising his voice almost to a shout; but it was
himself he was trying to convince, not his mother.
“Paul, you promised!”
“I know I promised, and for that very reason I have come to tell you
before I go. I tell you that it is necessary that I should go to her;
my conscience bids me go.”
“Tell me one thing, Paul: are you sure you saw the servant? Temptation
plays evil tricks on us and the devil has many disguises.”
He did not quite understand her.
“You think I am telling a lie? I saw the servant.”
“Listen—last night I saw the old priest, and I thought I heard his
footsteps again just now. Last night,” she went on in a low voice, “he
sat beside me before the fire. I actually saw him, I tell you: he had
not shaved, and the few teeth he had left were black from too much
smoking. And he had holes in his stockings. And he said, ‘I am alive
and I am here, and very soon I shall turn you and your son out of the
presbytery.’ And he said I ought to have taught you your father’s trade
if I did not wish you to fall into sin. He so upset my mind, Paul,
that I don’t know whether I have acted rightly or wrongly! But I am
absolutely sure that it was the devil sitting beside me last night,
the spirit of evil. The servant you saw might have been temptation in
another shape.”
He smiled in the darkness. Nevertheless, when he thought of the
fantastic figure of the servant running across the meadow, he felt a
vague sense of terror in spite of himself.
“If you go there,” continued his mother’s voice, “are you certain you
will not fall again? Even if you really saw the servant and if that
woman is really ill, are you sure not to fall?”
She broke off suddenly; she seemed to see his pale face through the
darkness, and she was filled with pity for him. Why should she forbid
him to go to the woman? Supposing Agnes really died of grief? Supposing
Paul died of grief? And she was as wracked with uncertainty as he had
been in the case of Antiochus.
“Lord,” she sighed; then she remembered that she had already placed
herself in the hands of God, Who alone can solve all our difficulties.
She felt a sort of relief, as if she had really settled the problem.
And had she not settled it by entrusting it in the hands of God?
She lay back on her pillow and her voice came again nearer to her son.
“If your conscience bids you go, why did you not go at once instead of
coming in here?”
“Because I promised. And you threatened to leave me if I went back to
that house. I swore...” he said with infinite sadness. And he longed to
cry out, “Mother, force me to keep my oath!” but the words would not
come. And then she spoke again:
“Then go: do whatever your conscience bids you.”
“Do not be anxious,” he said, coming close up to the bed; and he
stood there motionless for a few minutes and both were silent. He had
a confused impression that he was standing before an altar with his
mother lying upon it like some mysterious idol, and he remembered how,
when he was a boy in the Seminary, he was always obliged to go and
kiss her hand after he had been to confession. And something of the
same repugnance and the same exaltation moved him now. He felt that
if he had been alone, without her, he would have gone back to Agnes
long since, worn out by that endless day of flight and strife; but his
mother held him in check, and he did not know whether he was grateful
to her or not.
“Do not be anxious!” Yet all the time he longed and feared that she
would say more to him, or that she would light the lamp and, looking
into his eyes, read all his thoughts and forbid him to go. But she said
nothing. Then the mattress creaked again as she stretched herself in
the bed.
And he went out.
He reflected that after all he was not a scoundrel: he was not going
with any bad motive or moved by passion, but because he honestly
thought that there might be some danger he could avert, and the
responsibility for this danger rested upon him. He recalled the
fantastic figure of the servant running across the moonlit grass, and
turning back to look at him with bright eyes as she said:
“My little mistress will take courage if only you will come.”
And all his efforts to break away from her appeared now base and
stupid: his duty was to have gone to her at once and given her courage.
And as he crossed the meadow, silvery in the moonlight, he felt
relieved, almost happy, he was like a moth attracted by the light. And
he mistook the joy he felt at the prospect of seeing Agnes again in a
few moments for the satisfaction of doing his duty in going to save
her. All the sweet scent of the grass, all the tender radiance of the
moon bathed and purified his soul, and the healing dew fell upon it
even through his clothes of deathlike black.
Agnes, little mistress! In truth, she was little, weak as a child, and
she was all alone, without father or mother, living in that labyrinth
of stone, her dark house under the ridge. And he had taken advantage of
her, had caught her in his hand like a bird from the nest, gripping her
till the blood seemed driven from her body.
He hurried on. No, he was not a bad man, but as he reached the bottom
of the steps that led up to the door he stumbled, and it was sharply
borne in upon him that even the stones of her threshold repulsed him.
Then he mounted softly, hesitatingly, raised the knocker and let it
fall. They were a long time coming to answer the door, and he felt
humiliated standing there, but for nothing in the world would he have
knocked a second time. At last the fanlight over the door was lit up
and the dark-faced maid let him in, showing him at once into the room
he knew so well.
Everything was just as it had been on other nights, when Agnes had
admitted him secretly by way of the orchard; the little door stood
ajar, and through the narrow opening he could smell the fragrance
of the bushes in the night air. The glass eyes in the stuffed heads
of stags and deer on the walls shone in the steady glow of the big
lamp, as though taking careful note of all that happened in the room.
Contrary to custom, the door leading to the inner rooms stood wide
open; the servant had gone through there and the board flooring could
be heard creaking under her heavy step. After a moment a door banged
violently as though blown by a gust of wind, making the whole house
shake, and he started involuntarily when immediately afterwards he
beheld Agnes emerge from the darkness of the inner rooms, with white
face and distorted hair floating in black wisps across it, like the
phantom of a drowned woman. Then the little figure came forward into
the lamplight and he almost sobbed with relief.
She closed the door behind her and leaned against it with bowed head.
She faltered as though about to fall, and Paul ran to her, holding out
his hands, but not daring to touch her.
“How are you?” he asked in a low voice, as he had asked at former
meetings. But she did not answer, only stood trembling all over her
body, her hands pressed against the door behind her for support.
“Agnes,” he continued after a moment’s tense silence, “we must be
brave.”
But as on that day when he had read the Gospel words over the frenzied
girl, he knew that his voice rang false, and his eyes sought the ground
as Agnes raised hers, bewildered, yes, but full of mingled scorn and
joy.
“Then why have you come?”
“I heard that you were ill.”
She drew herself up proudly and pushed back the hair from her face.
“I am quite well and I did not send for you.”
“I know that, but I came all the same—there was no reason why I should
not come. I am glad to find that your maid exaggerated, and that you
are all right.”
“No,” she repeated, interrupting him, “I did not send for you and you
ought not to have come. But since you are here, since you are here, I
want to ask you—why you did it... why?—why?”
Her words were broken by sobs and her hands sought blindly for support,
so that Paul was afraid, and repented that he had come. He took her
hands and led her to the couch where they had sat together on other
evenings, placing her in the corner where the weight of other women of
the family had worn a sort of niche, and seated himself beside her, but
he let go her hands.
He was afraid of touching her; she was like a statue which he had
broken and put together again, and which sat there apparently whole
but ready to fall in pieces again at the slightest movement. So he was
afraid of touching her, and he thought to himself:
“It is better so, I shall be safe,” but in his heart he knew that at
any moment he might be lost again, and for that reason he was afraid
of touching her. Looking closely at her beneath the lamplight, he
perceived that she was changed. Her mouth was half-open, her lips
discoloured and greyish like faded rose-leaves; the oval of her face
seemed to have grown longer and her cheekbones stood out sharply
beneath eyes sunk deep in their livid sockets. Grief had aged her by
twenty years in a single day, yet there was something childlike still
in the expression of her trembling lips, drawn tightly over her teeth
to check her weeping, and in the little hands, one of which, lying
nerveless on the dark stuff of the couch, invited his own towards it.
And he was filled with anger because he dared not take that little
hand in his and link up again the broken chain of their two lives. He
remembered the words of the man possessed with a devil, “What have I to
do with Thee?” and he began to speak again, clasping his hands together
to prevent himself taking one of hers. But still he heard his voice
ring false, and as on that morning in church when he read the Gospel,
and when he carried the sacrament to the old hunter, he knew himself to
be lying.
“Agnes, listen to me. Last night we were both on the brink of
destruction—God had left us to ourselves and we were slipping over the
edge of the abyss. But now God has taken us by the hand again and
is guiding us. We must not fall, Agnes, Agnes,” and his voice shook
with emotion as he spoke her name. “You think I don’t suffer? I feel
as if I were buried alive and that my torments would last through all
eternity. But we must endure for your good, for your salvation. Listen,
Agnes, be brave, for the sake of the love which united us, for God’s
goodwill toward us in putting us through this trial. You will forget
me. You will recover; you are young, with all your life still before
you. When you think of me it will be like a bad dream, as though you
had lost your way in the valley and met some evil creature who had
tried to do you harm; but God has saved you, as you deserved to be
saved. Everything looks black at present, but it will clear up soon and
you will realize that I am only acting for your good in causing you a
little momentary pain now, just as we are sometimes obliged to seem
cruel to those who are ill....”
He stopped, the words froze in his throat.
Agnes had roused herself and was sitting upright in her corner, gazing
at him with eyes as glassy as those in the stags’ heads on the walls.
They reminded him of the women’s eyes in church, fixed on him as he
preached. She waited for his words, patient and gentle in every line of
her fragile form, yet ready to break down at a touch. Then speechless
himself, he heard her low voice as she shook her head slowly.
“No, no, that is not the truth,” she said.
“Then what is the truth?” he asked, bending his troubled face towards
her.
“Why did you not speak like that last night? And the other nights?
Because it was a different kind of truth then. Now somebody has found
you out, perhaps your mother herself, and you are afraid of the world.
It is not the fear of God which is driving you away from me!”
He wanted to cry out, to strike her; he seized her hand and twisted the
slender wrist as he would have liked to twist and stifle the words she
spoke. Then he drew himself up stiffly.
“What then? You think it does not matter? Yes, my mother has discovered
everything and she talked to me like my conscience itself. And have
you no conscience? Do you think it right that we should injure those
who depend on us? You wanted us to go away and live together, and
that would have been the right thing to do if we had not been able to
overcome our love; but since there are beings who would have been cut
off from life by our flight and our sin, we had to sacrifice ourselves
for them.”
But she seemed not to understand, caught only one word, and shook her
head as before.
“Conscience? Of course I have a conscience, I am no longer a child! And
my conscience tells me that I did wrong in listening to you and letting
you come here. What is to be done? It is too late now; why did not God
make you see things clearly at first? I did not go to your home, but
you came to mine and played with me as if I had been a child’s toy. And
what must I do now? Tell me that. I cannot forget you, I cannot change
as you change. I shall go away, even if you will not come with me—I
want to try and forget you. I must go right away, or else...”
“Or else?”
Agnes did not reply; she leaned back in her corner and shivered.
Something ominous, like the dark wing of madness, must have touched
her, for her eyes grew dim and she raised her hand with an instinctive
movement as though to brush away a shadow from before her face. He bent
again towards her, stretching across the couch and his fingers gripping
and breaking through the old material as though it were a wall that
rose between them and threatened to stifle him.
He could not speak. Yes, she was right; the explanation he had been
trying to make her believe was not the truth—it was the truth that was
rising like a wall and stifling him, and which he did not know how to
break down. And he sat up, battling with a real sense of suffocation.
Now it was she who caught his hand and held it as though her fingers
had been grappling-hooks.
“O God,” she whispered, covering her eyes with her free hand, “if there
be a God, He should not have let us meet each other if we must part
again. And you came to-night because you love me still. You think I
don’t know that? I do know, I do know, and that is the truth!”
She raised her face to his, her trembling lips, her lashes wet with
tears. And his eyes were dazzled as by the glitter of deep waters, a
glitter that blinds and beckons, and the face he gazed into was not the
face of Agnes, nor the face of any woman on this earth,—it was the face
of Love itself. And he fell forward into her arms and kissed her upon
the mouth.
CHAPTER XII
The world had ceased for Paul. He felt himself sinking slowly, swept
down by a whirlpool through luminous depths to some dazzling iridescent
place beneath the sea. Then he came to himself again and drew his lips
away from hers, and found himself, like a shipwrecked man upon the
sand, safe though maimed, and shaking with fear and joy, but more with
fear than joy. And the enchantment that he thought had been broken for
ever, and for this very reason had seemed more beautiful and dear, wove
its spell over him afresh and held him again in thrall. And again he
heard the whisper of her voice:
“I knew you would come back to me....”
He wanted to hear no more, just as he had tried not to hear the
servant’s tale in the house of Antiochus. He put his hand over Agnes’s
mouth as she leaned her head upon his shoulder and then gently caressed
her hair, on which the lamplight threw golden gleams. She was so
small, so helpless in his grasp, and therein lay her terrible power to
drag him down to the bottom of the sea, to raise him to the highest
heights of heaven, to make of him a thing without will or desire of
his own. Whilst he had fled through the valleys and the hills she had
remained shut up within her prison-house, waiting in the certainty that
he would come back to her, and he came.
“You know, you know...” She tried to tell him more; her soft breath
touched his neck like a caress, he placed his hand on her mouth again
and with her own she pressed it close. And so they remained in silence
for a while; then he pulled himself together and tried to regain the
mastery over his fate. He had come back to her, yes, but not the same
man she had expected. And his gaze still rested on her gleaming hair,
but as on something far away, as on the bright sparkle of the sea from
which he had escaped.
“Now you are happy,” he whispered. “I am here, I have come back and I
am yours for life. But you must be calm, you have given me a great
fright. You must not excite yourself, nor wander on any account from
the straight path of your life. I shall cause you no more trouble, but
you must promise me to be calm and good, as you are now.”
He felt her hands tremble and struggle between his own; he divined that
she was already beginning to rebel and he held them tightly, as he
would have liked to hold her soul imprisoned.
“Dear Agnes, listen! You will never know all I have suffered to-day,
but it was necessary. I stripped off all the outward shell of me, all
that was impure, and I scourged myself until I bled. But now here I am,
yours, yours, but as God wills that I should be yours, in spirit....
You see,” he went on, speaking slowly and laboriously, as though
dragging his words up painfully from his inmost depths and offering
them to her, “it seems to me that we have loved each other for years
and years, that we have rejoiced and suffered the one for the other,
even unto hatred, even unto death. And all the tempests of the sea and
all its implacable life are within us. Agnes, soul of my soul, what
wouldst thou have of me greater than that which I can give thee, my
soul itself?”
He stopped short. He felt that she did not understand, she could not
understand. And he beheld her ever more detached from him, as life from
death; but for this very reason he loved her still, yea, more than
ever, as one loves life that is dying.
She slowly raised her head from his shoulder and looked him in the face
with eyes grown hostile again.
“Now you listen to me,” she said, “and tell me no more lies. Are we or
are we not going away together as we settled last night? We cannot go
on living here, in this way. That is certain!... That is certain!” she
repeated with rising anger, after a moment of painful silence. “If we
are to live together we must go away at once, this very night. I have
money, you know, it is my own. And your mother and my brothers and
every one else will excuse us afterwards when they see that we only
wanted to live according to the truth. We cannot go on living like
this, no, we cannot!”
“Agnes!”
“Answer me quick! Yes or no?”
“I cannot go away with you.”
“Ah—then why have you come back?... Leave me! Get away, leave me!”
He did not leave her. He felt her whole body shaking and he was afraid
of her; and as she bowed herself over their united hands he expected to
feel her teeth fasten in his flesh.
“Go, go!” she insisted, “I did not send for you! Since we must be
brave, why did you come back? Why have you kissed me again? Ah, if you
think you can play with me like this you are mistaken! If you think
you can come here at night and write me humiliating letters in the day
you are mistaken again! You came back to-night and you will come back
to-morrow night and every night after that, until at last you drive me
mad. But I won’t have it, I won’t have it!”
“We must be pure and brave, you say,” she continued, and her face,
grown old and tragic, became now pale as death; “but you never said
that before to-night. You fill me with horror! Go away, far away,
and go at once, so that to-morrow I can wake up without the terror of
expecting you and being humiliated like this again.”
“O God, O God!” he groaned, bending over her, but she repulsed him
sharply.
“Do you think you are speaking to a child?” she burst out now: “I
am old, and it is you who have made me grow old in a few hours. The
straight path of life! Oh, yes, it would be going straight if we
continued this secret intrigue, wouldn’t it? I should find myself a
husband and you should marry me to him, and then we could go on seeing
each other, you and I, and deceiving every one for the rest of our
lives. Oh, you don’t know me if that is your idea! Last night you said,
‘Let us go away, we will get married and I will work.’ Didn’t you say
that? Didn’t you? But to-night you come and talk to me instead about
God and sacrifice. So now there is an end of it all: we will part. But
you, I say it again, you must leave the village this very night, I
never wish to see you again. If to-morrow morning you go once more into
our church to say Mass I shall go there too, and from the altar steps
I shall say to the people: ‘This is your saint, who works miracles by
day and by night goes to unprotected girls to seduce them!’”
He tried in vain to shut her mouth with his hand, and as she kept
on crying aloud, “Go, go!” he seized her head and pressed it to his
breast, glancing with alarm at the closed doors. And he remembered his
mother’s words and her voice, mysterious in the darkness: “The old
priest sat beside me and said, I will soon turn both you and your son
out of the parish.”
“Agnes, Agnes, you are mad!” he groaned, his lips close to her ear,
whilst she struggled fiercely to escape from him: “Be calm, listen to
me. Nothing is lost; don’t you feel how I love you? A thousand times
more than before! And I am not going away, I am going to stay near you,
to save you, to offer up my soul to you as I shall offer it up to God
in the hour of death. How can you know all that I have suffered between
last night and now? I fled and I bore you with me: I fled like one who
is on fire and who thinks by fleeing to escape the flames which only
envelop him the more. Where have I not been to-day, what have I not
done to keep myself from coming back to you? Yet here I am, Agnes, and
how could I not be here?... Do you hear me? I shall not betray you, I
shall not forget you, I do not wish to forget you! But, Agnes, we must
keep ourselves unsoiled, we must keep our love for all eternity, we
must unite it with all that is best in life, with renunciation, with
death itself, that is to say, with God. Do you understand, Agnes? Yes,
tell me that you understand!”
She fought him back, as though she wanted to break in his breast with
her head, till at last she freed herself from his embrace and sat rigid
and upright, her beautiful hair twisted like ribbons round her stony
face. With tight-shut lips and closed eyes, she seemed to have suddenly
fallen into a deep sleep, wherein she dreamed of vengeance. And he was
more afraid of her silence and immobility than of her frenzied words
and excited gestures. He took her hands again in his, but now all four
hands were dead to joy and to the clasp of love.
“Agnes, can’t you see that I am right? Come, be good; go to bed now and
to-morrow a new life will begin for us all. We shall see each other
just the same, always supposing you desire it: I will be your friend,
your brother, and we shall be a mutual help and support. My life is
yours, dispose of me as you wish. I shall be with you till the hour of
death, and beyond death, for all eternity.”
This tone of prayer irritated her afresh. She twisted her hands
slightly within his and opened her lips to speak. Then, as he set her
free, she folded her hands in her lap and bowed her head and her face
took on an expression of the deepest grief, but now a grief that was
desperate and determined.
He continued to gaze steadfastly at her, as one gazes at the dying, and
his fear increased. He slid to his knees before her, he laid his head
in her lap and kissed her hands; he cared nothing now if he were seen
or heard, he knelt there at the feet of the woman and her sorrow as at
the feet of the Mother of Sorrows herself. Never before had he felt
so pure of evil thought, so dead to this earthly life; and yet he was
afraid.
Agnes sat motionless, with icy hands, insensible to those kisses of
death. Then he got up and began to speak lies again.
“Thank you, Agnes—that is right and I am very pleased. The trial has
been won and you can rest in peace. I am going now, and to-morrow,” he
added in a whisper, bending nervously towards her, “to-morrow morning
you will come to Mass and together we will offer our sacrifice to God.”
She opened her eyes and looked at him, then closed them again. She was
as one wounded to death, whose eyes had opened wide with a last menace
and appeal before they closed for ever.
“You will go away to-night, quite away, so that I shall never see you
again,” she said, pronouncing each word distinctly and decisively, and
he realized that for the moment at least it was useless to oppose that
blind force.
“I cannot go like that,” he murmured: “I must say Mass to-morrow
morning and you will come and hear it, and afterwards I will go away,
if necessary.”
“Then I shall come to-morrow morning and denounce you before all the
congregation.”
“If you do that it will be a sign that it is God’s will. But you won’t
do it, Agnes! You may hate me, but I leave you in peace. Goodbye.”
Even yet he did not go. He stood quite still, looking down at her, at
her soft and gleaming hair, the sweet hair he loved and through which
so often his hands had strayed, and it awoke in him an infinite pity,
for it seemed like the black bandage round a wounded head.
For the last time he called her by her name:
“Agnes! Is it possible that we can part like this?... Come,” he added
after a moment, “give me your hand, get up and open the door for me.”
She got up obediently, but she did not give him her hand; she went
direct to the door through which she had entered the room, and there
she stood still, waiting.
“What can I do?” he asked himself. And he knew very well that there was
only one thing he could do to appease her: to fall at her feet again,
to sin and be lost with her for ever.
And that he would not do, never never more. He remained firm, there
where he stood, and lowered his eyes that he might not meet her
look, and when he raised them again she was no longer there; she had
disappeared, swallowed up in the darkness of her silent house.
* * * * *
The glass eyes of the stags’ and deer’s heads upon the walls looked
down at him with mingled sadness and derision. And in that moment of
suspense, alone in the big melancholy room, he realized the whole
immensity of his wretchedness and his humiliation. He felt himself
a thief, and worse than a thief, a guest who takes advantage of the
solitude of the house that shelters him to rob it basely. He averted
his eyes, for he could not meet even the glassy stare of the heads
upon the wall: but he did not waver in his purpose for one moment, and
even if the death-cry of the woman had suddenly filled the house with
horror, he would not have repented having rejected her.
He waited a few minutes longer, but nobody appeared. He had a confused
idea that he was standing in the middle of a dead world of all his
dreams and his mistakes, waiting till some one came and helped him to
get away. But nobody came. So at last he pushed open the door that led
into the orchard, traversed the path that ran beside the wall and went
out by the little gate he knew so well.
CHAPTER XIII
Once more Paul found himself ascending his own staircase; but now the
danger was past, or at least the fear of danger.
Nevertheless he halted before his mother’s door, deeming that it would
be advisable to tell her the result of his interview with Agnes and of
her threat to denounce him. But he heard the sound of regular breathing
and passed on; his mother had quietly fallen asleep, for henceforth she
was sure of him and felt that he was safe.
Safe! He looked round his room as though he had just returned from a
long and disastrous journey. Everything was peaceful and tidy, and
he moved about on tiptoe as he began to undress, for the sake of not
disturbing that orderliness and silence. His clothes hanging from their
hooks, blacker than their shadows on the wall, his hat above them,
stuck forward on a wooden peg, the sleeves of his cassock falling
limply as though tired out, all had the vague appearance of some dark
and empty phantom, some fleshless and bloodless vampire that inspired
a nameless dread. It was like the shadow of that sin from which he had
cut himself free, but which was waiting to follow him again to-morrow
on his way through the world.
An instant more, and he perceived with terror that the nightmare
obsessed him still. He was not safe yet, there was another night to be
got through, as the voyager crosses a last stretch of turbulent sea.
He was very weary and his heavy eyelids drooped with fatigue, but an
intolerable anxiety prevented him from throwing himself on his bed,
or even sitting down on a chair or resting in any way whatever; he
wandered here and there, doing small, unusual, useless things, softly
opening drawer after drawer and inspecting what there was inside.
As he passed before the mirror he looked at his own reflection and
beheld himself grey of face, with purple lips and hollow eyes. “Look
well at yourself, Paul,” he said to his image, and he stepped back a
little so that the lamplight might fall better on the glass. The figure
in the mirror stepped back also, as though seeking to escape him,
and as he stared into its eyes and noted the dilated pupils he had a
strange impression that the real Paul was the one in the glass, a Paul
who never lied and who betrayed by the pallor of his face all his awful
fear of the morrow.
“Why do I pretend even to myself a security which I do not feel?” was
his silent question. “I must go away this very night as she bade me.”
And somewhat calmer for the resolve he threw himself on his bed. And
thus, with closed eyes and face pressed into the pillow, he believed he
could search more deeply into his conscience.
“Yes, I must leave to-night. Christ Himself commands us to avoid
creating scandals. I had better wake my mother and tell her, and
perhaps we can leave together; she can take me away with her again as
she did when I was a child and I can begin a new life in another place.”
But he felt that all this was mere exaltation and that he had not the
courage to do as he proposed. And why should he? He really felt quite
sure that Agnes would not carry out her threat, so why should he go
away? He was not even confronted with the danger of going back to her
and falling into sin again, for he had now been tried and had overcome
temptation.
But the exaltation took hold of him again.
“Nevertheless, Paul, you will have to go. Awaken your mother and depart
together. Don’t you know who it is speaking to you? It is I, Agnes. You
really believe that I shall not carry out my threat? Perhaps I shall
not, but I advise you to go, all the same. You think you have got rid
of me? And yet I am within you, I am the evil genius of your life. If
you remain here I shall never leave you alone for one single instant; I
shall be the shadow beneath your feet, the barrier between you and your
mother, between you and your own self. Go.”
Then he tried to pacify her, in order to pacify his own conscience.
“Yes, I am going, I tell you! I am going—we will go together, you
within me, more alive than I myself. Be content, torment me no more! We
are together, journeying together, borne on the wings of time towards
eternity. Divided and distant we were when our eyes first met and our
lips kissed; divided were we then and enemies; only now begins our real
union, in thy hatred, in my patience, in my renunciation.”
* * * * *
Then weariness slowly overcame him. He heard a subdued, continuous
moaning outside his window, like a dove seeking her mate: and that
mournful cry was like the lament of the night itself, a night pale with
moonlight, a soft, veiled light, with the sky all flecked with little
white clouds like feathers. Then he became aware that it was he himself
who was moaning; but sleep was already stealing over him, calming his
senses, and fear and sorrow and remembrance faded away. He dreamed
he was really on a journey, riding up the mountain paths towards the
plateau. Everything was peaceful and clear; between the big yellow
elder trees he could see stretches of grass, of a soft green that gave
rest to the eyes, and motionless upon the rocks the eagles blinked at
the sun.
Suddenly the keeper stood before him, saluted, and placed an open book
on his saddle-bow. And he began to read St. Paul’s Epistle to the
Corinthians, taking it up at the precise point where he had left off
the previous night: “The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise and that
they are vain.”
* * * * *
On Sundays Mass was later than on other days, but Paul always went
early to the church to hear the confessions of those women who wished
to attend Communion later. So his mother called him at the usual time.
He had slept for some hours, a heavy dreamless sleep, and when he woke
his memory was a complete blank, he only had a supreme desire to go to
sleep again immediately. But the knocks on his door persisted, and then
he remembered. Instantly he was on his feet, numb with dread.
“Agnes will come to church and denounce me before all the people,” was
his one thought.
He did not know why, but somehow whilst he slept the certainty that she
would carry out her threat had taken firm root in his consciousness.
He dropped down in his chair with trembling knees and a sense of
complete helplessness. His mind was clouded and confused: he wondered
vaguely if it would not be possible even now to avert the scandal—he
might feign illness and not say Mass at all, and thus gain time
in which he might endeavour to pacify Agnes. But the very idea of
beginning the whole thing over again, of suffering a second time all
his misery of the previous day, only increased his mental torment.
He got up, and his head seemed to hit the sky through the glass of his
window, and he stamped his feet on the floor to dispel the numbness
that was paralysing his very blood. Then he dressed, drawing his
leather belt tightly round his waist and folding his mantle round him
as he had seen the hunters buckle on their cartridge-belts and wrap
themselves up in their cloaks before starting out for the mountains.
When at last he flung open his window and leaned out he felt that only
then were his eyes awaking to the light of day after the nightmare of
the dark hours, only then had he escaped from the prison of his own
self to make his peace with external things. But it was a forced peace,
full of secret rancour, and it sufficed for him to draw in his head
from the cool fresh air outside to the warm and perfumed atmosphere of
his room for him to fall back into himself, a prey again to his gnawing
dread.
So he fled downstairs, wondering what he had better tell his mother.
He heard her somewhat harsh voice driving off the chickens who were
trying to invade the dining-room, and the fluttering of their wings as
they scattered before her, and he smelt the fragrance of hot coffee and
the clean sweet scents from the garden. In the lane under the ridge
there was a tinkle of bells as the goats were driven to their pasture,
little bells that sounded like childish echoes of the cheerful if
monotonous chime wherewith Antiochus, up in the church tower, summoned
the people to wake from sleep and come to hear Mass.
Everything around was sweet and peaceful, bathed in the rosy light of
early morning. And Paul remembered his dream.
There was nothing to hinder him from going out, from going to church
and taking up his ordinary life again. Yet all his fear returned upon
him; he was afraid alike of going forward or of turning back. As he
stood on the step of the open door he felt as if he were on the summit
of some precipitous mountain, it was impossible to get any higher
and below him yawned the abyss. So he stood there for unspeakable
moments, during which his heart beat furiously and he had the physical
sensation of falling, of struggling at the bottom of a gulf, in a swirl
of foaming waters, a wheel that turned helplessly, vainly beating the
stream that swept on its relentless course.
It was his own heart that turned and turned helplessly in the whirlpool
of life. He closed the door and went back into the house, and sat down
on the stairs as his mother had done the previous night. He gave up
trying to solve the problem that tortured him and simply waited for
some one to come and help him.
And there his mother found him. When he saw her he got up immediately,
feeling somehow comforted at once, yet humiliated, too, in the very
depths of his being, so sure was he of the advice she would give him to
proceed upon his chosen way.
But at the first sight of him her worn face grew pale, as though
refined through grief.
“Paul!” she cried, “what are you doing there? Are you ill?”
“Mother,” he said, walking to the front door without turning into the
dining-room, “I did not want to wake you last night, it was so late.
Well, I went to see her. I went to see her....”
His mother had already recovered her composure and stood looking
fixedly at him. In the brief silence that followed his words they could
hear the church bell ringing quickly and insistently as though it were
right over the house.
“She is quite well,” continued Paul, “but she is very excited and
insists that I shall leave the place at once: otherwise she threatens
to come to church and create a scandal by denouncing me before the
congregation.”
His mother kept silence, but he felt her at his side, stern and
steadfast, upholding him, supporting him as she had supported his
earliest steps.
“She wanted me to go away this very night. And she said that... if I
did not go, she would come to church this morning.... I am not afraid
of her: besides, I don’t believe she will come.”
He opened the front door and a flood of golden light poured into the
dark little passage, as though trying to entice him and his mother
out into the sunshine. Paul walked towards the church without turning
round, and his mother stood at the door looking after him.
She had not opened her lips, but a slight trembling seized her again,
and only with an effort could she maintain her outward composure. All
at once she went up to her bedroom and hurriedly dressed for church:
she was going too, and she, too, drew in her belt and walked with firm
steps. And before she left the house she remembered to drive out the
intruding chickens again, and to draw the coffee-pot to the side of the
fire; then she twisted the long end of her scarf over her mouth and
chin to hide the obstinate trembling that would persist in spite of all
her efforts to overcome it.
So it was only with a glance of the eyes that she could return the
greetings of the women who were coming up from the village, and of the
old men already seated on the low parapet round the square before the
church, their black pointed caps standing out in sharp relief against
the background of rosy morning sky.
CHAPTER XIV
Meanwhile Paul had gone into the church.
A few eager penitents were waiting for him, gathered round the
confessional; the woman who had arrived first was already kneeling at
the little grating, whilst the others waited their turn in the benches
close by.
Nina Masia was kneeling on the floor under the holy-water stoup, which
looked as though it were resting on her wicked little head, while
several boys who were early astir were gathered in a circle round her.
Hurrying in with his thoughts elsewhere the priest knocked up against
them, and his anger rose instantly as he recognized the girl, who had
been placed there by her mother on purpose that she might attract
attention. She seemed to be always in his way, at once a hindrance and
a reproach.
“Clear out of this instantly!” he bade them, in a voice so loud that
it was heard all over the church; and immediately the circle of boys
spread itself out and moved a little farther off, with Nina still in
the middle, but they grouped themselves round her in such a way that
she could be seen by every one. The women all turned their heads to
look at her, though without interrupting their prayers for an instant:
she really looked as if she were the idol of the barbaric little
church, redolent of the smell of the fields brought in by the peasants
and flooded with the rosy haze of a country morning.
Paul walked straight up the nave, but his secret anguish grew ever
greater. As he passed, his cassock brushed against the seat where Agnes
usually sat; it was the old family pew, the kneeling-stool in front of
it richly carved, and with his eyes and measured paces he calculated
the distance between it and the altar.
“If I watch for the moment when she rises to carry out her fatal threat
I shall have time to get into the sacristy,” was his conclusion, and he
shivered now as he entered.
Antiochus had hurried down from the belfry to help Paul robe himself,
and was waiting for him beside the open cupboard where his vestments
hung. He had a pale and serious, almost tragic air, as though already
overshadowed by the future career which had been settled for him the
previous evening. But the gravity was transient and a smile flickered
over the boy’s face, just fresh from the wind-swept belfry; his eyes
sparkled with joy beneath their decorously lowered lids, and he had
to bite his lips to check the ready laugh; his young heart responded
to all the radiance, the inspirations, the joyousness of that festal
morning. Then his eyes clouded suddenly as he was arranging the lace of
the alb over the priest’s wrist and he shot a quick look at his master,
for he had perceived that the hand beneath the lace was trembling and
he saw that the beloved face was pallid and distraught.
“Do you feel ill, sir?”
Paul did feel ill, although he shook his head in denial. He felt as
though his mouth were full of blood, yet a tiny germ of hope was
springing up in the midst of his distress.
“I shall fall down dead, my heart will break; and then, at least,
there will be an end of everything.”
He went down into the church again to hear the confessions of the
women, and saw his mother at the bottom of the nave near the door.
Stern and motionless she knelt there, keeping watch over all who
entered the church, over the whole church itself, ready, apparently, to
support and hold it up were it even to collapse upon her head.
But he had no more courage left: only that tiny germ of hope within his
heart, the hope of death, grew and grew till the breath in him stifled
and failed.
When he was seated inside the confessional he felt somewhat calmer;
it was like being in a grave, but at least he was hidden from view
and could look his horror in the face. The subdued whispering of the
women behind the gratings, broken by their little sighs and their warm
breath, was like the rustling of lizards in the long grass on the
ridge. And Agnes was there too, safe in the secret retreat where he had
so often taken her in his thoughts. And the soft breathing of the young
women, the scent of their hair and their gala dress, all perfumed with
lavender, mingled with his distress and further inflamed his passion.
And he gave them all absolution, absolved them from all their sins,
thinking that perhaps before many days had passed he himself would be a
suppliant to them for their compassion.
* * * * *
Then he was seized with the craving to get out, to see whether Agnes
had arrived. But her seat was empty.
Perhaps she was not coming after all. Yet sometimes she remained at the
bottom of the church, kneeling on a chair which her servant brought for
her. He turned to look, but saw only his mother’s rigid figure, and as
he knelt before the altar and began the Mass, he felt that her soul was
bending before God, clothed in her grief as he was clothed in his alb
and stole.
Then he determined not to look behind him again, to close his eyes each
time he had to turn round to give the blessing. He felt as if he were
climbing ever higher up some steep and stony Calvary, and a sensation
of giddiness seized him whenever the ritual obliged him to face the
congregation. Then he closed his eyes to shut out the sight of the
abyss that yawned at his feet; but even through his closed eyelids he
saw the carven bench and the figure of Agnes, her black dress standing
out in relief against the grey wall of the church.
And Agnes was really there, dressed in black with a black veil round
her ivory-white face; her eyes were fixed on her prayer-book, the gilt
clasp of which glittered in her black-gloved hands, but she never
turned a page. The servant with the head of a slave was kneeling on the
floor of the aisle beside the bench, and every now and then she raised
her eyes, like a faithful dog, to her mistress’s face, as though in
silent sympathy with the sad thoughts that possessed her.
And he beheld everything from his place at the altar and hope died
within him; only from the bottom of his heart he told himself it was
impossible that Agnes would carry out her insane threat. He turned the
pages of the Gospel, but his faltering voice could scarcely pronounce
the words; he broke into a sweat of apprehension, and caught hold of
the book as he felt himself fainting.
In a moment he pulled himself together. Antiochus was looking at him,
watching the awful change that came over his face as over the face
of a corpse, keeping close beside him to support him if he fell, and
glancing at the old men by the altar rails to see if they had noticed
the priest’s distress. But nobody noticed it—even his mother remained
in her place, praying and waiting without seeing anything amiss with
her son. Then Antiochus drew still closer to him with a protecting
movement, so that Paul looked round startled, but the boy gave him a
reassuring glance out of his bright eyes, as much as to say:
“I am here, it’s all right, go on——”
And he went on, climbing that steep Calvary till the blood flowed back
into his heart and the tension of his nerves relaxed. But it was the
relaxation of despair, the abandonment to danger, the quiet of the
drowning man who has no more strength to battle with the waves. When he
turned again to the congregation he did not close his eyes.
“The Lord be with you.”
Agnes was there in her place, bent over the page she never turned,
the gilt clasp of the book shining in the dim light. The servant was
crouching at her feet and all the other women, including his mother at
the bottom of the church, were sitting back on their heels on the bare
floor, ready to resume their kneeling position immediately the priest
should move the book.
And he moved the book and went on with the prayers and the slow
gestures of the ritual. And a feeling of tenderness crept into his
despair at the thought that Agnes was bearing him company on his road
to Calvary, as Mary had followed too, that in another moment she would
mount the altar steps and stand beside him once again, having overcome
their transgression, to expiate together as together they had sinned.
How could he hate her if she brought his punishment with her, if her
hatred was only love disguised?
Then came the Communion, and the few drops of wine went down into his
breast like quickening blood; he felt strong, revived, his heart
filled with the presence of God.
And as he descended the steps towards the women the figure of Agnes
in her seat stood out prominent amidst the crowd of bowed heads. She,
too, had bowed her head upon her hands; perhaps she was summoning her
courage before she moved. And suddenly he felt infinite pity for her;
he would have liked to go down to her and give her absolution, and
administer the Communion as to a dying woman. He, too, had summoned his
courage, but his hands shook as he held the wafer to the women’s lips.
* * * * *
Immediately the Communion was ended an old peasant began to intone a
hymn. The congregation sang the verses after him in subdued voices,
and repeated the antiphons twice out loud. The hymn was primitive and
monotonous, old as the earliest prayers of man uttered in forests where
as yet scarcely man dwelt, old and monotonous as the breaking of waves
on a solitary shore; yet that low singing around her sufficed to bring
Agnes’s thoughts back, as though she had been rushing breathless by
night through some primeval forest and had suddenly emerged upon the
seashore, amidst sandhills covered with sweet flowers and golden in the
light of dawn.
Something stirred in the very depths of her being, a strange emotion
gripped her throat; she felt the world turning round with her as
though she had been walking head downwards and now resumed her natural
position.
It was her past and the past of all her race that surged up and took
hold of her, with the singing of the women and the old men, with the
voices of her nurse and her servants, the men and women who had built
and furnished her house, and ploughed her fields and woven the linen
for her swaddling clothes.
How could she denounce herself before all these people who looked up
to her as their mistress and held her even purer than the priest at
the altar? And then she, too, felt the presence of God around her and
within her, even in her passion itself.
She knew very well that the punishment she meant to inflict upon the
man with whom she had sinned was her own punishment too; but now a
merciful God spoke to her with the voices of the old men and women and
the innocent children, and bade her beware of her own self, counselled
her to seek salvation.
As her people round her sang the verses of the hymn, all the days of
her solitary life unrolled themselves before her inward vision. She saw
herself again a little child, then a young girl, then a grown woman in
this same church, on this same seat blackened and worn by the elbows
and knees of her forefathers. In a sense the church belonged to her
family; it had been built by one of her ancestors, and tradition said
that the image of the Madonna had been captured from Barbary pirates
and brought back to the village by a far-away grandfather of hers.
She had been born and brought up amidst these traditions, in an
atmosphere of simple grandeur that kept her aloof from the smaller
people of Aar, yet still in the midst of them, shut in amongst them
like a pearl in its rough shell.
How could she denounce herself before her people? But this very
feeling of being mistress even of the sacred building rendered more
insufferable still the presence of the man who had been her companion
in sin, and who appeared at the altar wearing a mask of saintliness and
bearing the holy vessels in his hands—tall and splendid he stood above
her as she knelt at his feet, guilty in that she had loved him.
Her heart swelled anew with rage and grief as the hymn rose and fell
around her, like a supplication rising from out some abyss, imploring
help and justice, and she heard the voice of God, dark and stern,
bidding her drive His unworthy servant out of His temple.
She grew pale as death and broke into a cold sweat; her knees shook
against the seat, but she bowed no more and with head erect she watched
the movements of the priest at the altar. And it was as though some
evil breath went out from her to him, paralysing him, enveloping him in
the same icy grip that held her fast.
* * * * *
And he felt that mortal breath that emanated from her will, and just as
on bitter winter mornings, his fingers were frozen and uncontrollable
shivers ran down his spine. When he turned to give the benediction
he saw Agnes gazing at him. Their eyes met as in a flash, and like a
drowning man he remembered in that instant all the joy of his life, joy
sprung wholly and solely from love of her, from the first look of her
eyes, the first kiss of her lips. Then he saw her rise from her seat,
book in hand.
“Oh God, Thy will be done,” he stammered, kneeling—and he seemed to be
actually in the Garden of Olives, watching the shadow of an inexorable
fate.
He prayed aloud and waited, and midst the confused sound of the
people’s prayers he thought he could distinguish Agnes’s step as she
moved toward the altar.
“She is coming—she has left her seat, she is between her seat and the
altar. She is coming... she is here—every one is staring at her. She is
at my side!”
The obsession was so strong that the words failed on his lips. He saw
Antiochus, who had already begun to extinguish the candles, suddenly
turn and look round, and he knew for certain that she was there, close
to him, on the chancel steps.
He rose to his feet, the roof seemed to fall down upon his head and
fracture it; his knees scarcely upheld him, but with a sudden effort he
managed to get up to the altar again and take the pyx. And as he turned
to enter the sacristy he saw that Agnes had advanced from her seat to
the railing and was about to mount the steps.
“Oh, Lord, why not let me die?” and he bowed his head over the pyx as
though baring his neck to the sword that was about to strike it. But as
he entered the sacristy door he looked again and perceived Agnes bowed
at the altar railing as she knelt on the lowest step.
* * * * *
She had stumbled at the lowest step outside the railing, and as though
a wall had suddenly risen up before her, she had dropped on her knees.
A thick mist dimmed her sight and she could go no further.
Presently the dimness cleared and she could see the steps again, the
yellow carpet before the altar, the flowers upon the table and the
burning lamp. But the priest had disappeared, and in his place a ray of
sunlight smote obliquely through the dusk and made a golden patch upon
the carpet.
She crossed herself, rose to her feet and moved towards the door. The
servant followed her and the old men, the women and the children turned
to smile at her and bless her with their eyes; she was their mistress,
their symbol of beauty and of faith, so far removed from them and yet
in the midst of them and all their misery, like a wild rose amongst the
brambles.
At the church door the servant offered her holy water on the tips
of her fingers, and then stooped to brush off the dust of the altar
steps which still clung to her dress. As the girl raised herself again
she saw the ashen face of Agnes turned towards the corner where the
priest’s mother had knelt through all the service. Then she saw the
mother sitting motionless on the ground, her head sunk forward on her
breast, her shoulders leaning against the wall as though she had made
a supreme effort to uphold it in a great collapse. Noticing the fixed
gaze of Agnes and the servant, a woman also turned to look, then sprang
quickly to the side of the priest’s mother, spoke to her in a whisper
and raised her face in her hand.
The mother’s eyes were half-closed, glassy, the pupils upturned; the
rosary had dropped from her hand and her head fell sideways on to the
shoulder of the woman who held her.
“She is dead!” shrieked the woman.
And instantly the whole congregation was on its feet and crowding to
the bottom of the church.
Meanwhile Paul had gone back into the sacristy with Antiochus, who
was carrying the book of the Gospel. He was trembling with cold and
with relief; he actually felt as though he had just escaped from a
shipwreck, and he wanted to energize and walk about to warm himself and
convince himself that it had all been a bad dream.
Then a confused murmur of voices was heard in the church, at first
low, then growing quickly louder and louder. Antiochus put his head
out of the sacristy door and saw all the people collected together at
the bottom of the nave, as though there were some obstruction at the
entrance, but an old man was already hastening up the chancel steps and
making mysterious signs.
“His mother is taken ill,” he said.
Paul, still robed in his alb, was down there at one bound and threw
himself on his knees that he might look more closely into his mother’s
face as she lay stretched on the ground, with her head in a woman’s lap
and hemmed in by the pressing crowd.
“Mother, mother!”
The face was still and rigid, the eyes half-closed, the teeth clenched
in the effort not to cry aloud.
And he knew instantly that she had died of the shock of that same
grief, that same terror which he had been enabled to overcome.
And he, too, clenched his teeth that he might not cry aloud when he
raised his head; and across the confused mass of the people surging
round, his eyes met the eyes of Agnes fixed upon him.
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