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.