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.