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.