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.