I
Friar Gregory ceased reading, and looked round the little room. A low
truckle-bed occupied one side, two other walls were lined with oaken
book-cases quaintly carved, and on the fourth hung a few articles of
simple clothing. The bookshelves were full of large books, bound,
some in vellum, some in leather. The Friar sat on a wooden chair at a
low table whereon flared a bronze lamp. _Intrate per angustam portam,
quia lata porta est quae ducit ad perditionem._ As he looked up from
the minuscule of the parchment, the guttering flame of the lamp hurt
his tired eyes and a yellow mist surged before them. Little beads of
moisture hung upon the stone wall and the air was close. _Quam angusta
porta, et arcta via est quae ducit ad vitam._ His vision cleared and
his eyes wandered among the books which he knew so well and the pages
of which he had turned so often, and as scholars said, to such good
account: _Homilia Sancti Augustini_, _Origen de Virginitate_, _Divi
Lanfranci Liber de Corpore et Sanguine Domini Nostri_, _Joannis Scoit
de_ _Eucharista_, and the rest of the abstruse works in Theology,
Logic, and Music upon which he had spent the vigour of his manhood.
His eyes were wont to glow with affectionate reverence when they
lighted on the books, the Noble Masters whom he had followed these
thirty years with more zeal and enthusiasm than a lover his mistress.
But to-night the Friar’s spirit was heavy; his eyes ached, his brain
comprehended only with difficulty the sense of the written words; hope
and self-belief seem to have been suddenly extinguished in his breast.
The faith in his labours, which had made them labours of desire to
him, seemed suddenly departed, and his life looking forward, looking
backward, appeared a blank, a desert, a precious period in the endless
and remorseless procession of time, irrevocably wasted in misdirected
effort. This state of mind had come upon him in a moment as it were, or
rather, he had only apprehended it the instant he had raised his eyes
from his book.
He sat motionless a few minutes. Outside, the bell of St. Mary the
Virgin tolled eight o’clock. The Friar sighed and raised his hand to
his head. That day his lecture in the Schools had been exceptionally
well received. Never before had Bradwardine and St. Augustine been so
acutely elucidated in the University, and as he finished his exposition
the scholars had risen to their feet and had clapped and cheered
him. Many learned Doctors and Professors had crowded round to applaud
and congratulate him. Yet the _doctissimus frater_, the _erudissimus
lector_ had lost heart. Learning is a bitter-sweet fruit.
The Friar rose to his feet, and threw open the little lattice window.
The cool night struck on his brow. The moon glowed large and fair over
the city of spires and towers; in the distance the river lay a band of
silver. A light wind stirred the branches of a neighbouring poplar.
A girl passed humming a popular tune, and the distant shout of some
hilarious scholar came through the air like the cry of a lonely ghost.
The Friar breathed deeply of the pure air and loathed the confines of
his narrow room. His eye regarded the great silent moon and glanced
from spire to spire and tower to tower, silvered in the floods of
light that poured from the heavens; his mind suddenly reverted to a
similar scene of his boyhood. He remembered the night when his father
had brought him, after travelling all day, to the monastery where he
was to live henceforth and receive instruction, and how descending the
hill-path they had first sighted the monastery on the other side of the
valley, clothed in a vivid moonlight which revealed every detail of its
exquisite architecture. As it broke upon his vision, it had seemed to
the boy a mystic shrine of God, an exquisite casket wherein the Holy
of Holies had His dwelling in the midst of chaste splendours and mildly
luminous glories. Hence the Friar’s mind wandered back to earlier
memories, to the house built of wattles and mud beneath the little
hill, to the couple of oxen kept in the stall which he used to feed,
to his sisters Peronelle and Alice, and his brothers Robert and Adam,
with whom he used to play in the long water-meadows, and to his mother
feeding, as was her accustomed task, the poultry on the headland. His
eyes grew misty as he thought of them. He remembered the foresters
bringing the dead deer up to the Manor, the shouting villeins driving
the great plough through the furrows, and the festivals at Easter and
Harvest. He called to mind his young days, before Sir John the parish
priest had picked him out and had him instructed in good learning, when
he ran like a greyhound through the wild wood, climbed the trees like
a squirrel, swam like an otter in the swift river, and could shoot
with his bow and play his quarterstaff with any boy in town. Then life
was a real thing, a vivid enjoyment; physical activities and elemental
emotions made up the sum of his careless, happy being.
But now he had drunk deep of learning; he had wandered widely in the
mazes of theology and philosophy. The heedless certainty of those
untrammelled days had gone by for ever; he was now endlessly immersed
in doubt and argument; a subtle logic was his, powerful to destroy but
very weak to build. His learning had brought him to a land of shadows.
Truth and reality, that had environed his youth, now the more escaped
him the more he pursued them.
This was the fruit of many books and of many teachers. He turned from
the window to survey his room. He saw his books piled up in the gloom
of their shelves, his nostrils caught the smell of warm leather and
parchment, and a great loathing of them and the life to which they
belonged rose up in his heart.
Oh for Life, Life, real Life--away from books, away from disputations,
away from endless reflectings and researchings.
Oh for Life, the Life of the free spirit, moving of itself,
uncontrolled, self-expressive.
He glanced once more out of the open window; the moon poured down her
silvery floods. The lamp was dying on the table; the room grew darker
and closer. He took his wallet and staff and went out.