CHAPTER XXV

Domini had said to herself that she would speak to her husband that

night. She was resolved not to hesitate, not to be influenced from her

purpose by anything. Yet she knew that a great difficulty would stand

in her way--the difficulty of Androvsky’s intense, almost passionate,

reserve. This reserve was the dominant characteristic in his nature. She

thought of it sometimes as a wall of fire that he had set round about

the secret places of his soul to protect them even from her eyes.

Perhaps it was strange that she, a woman of a singularly frank

temperament, should be attracted by reserve in another, yet she knew

that she was so attracted by the reserve of her husband. Its existence

hinted to her depths in him which, perhaps, some day she might sound,

she alone, strength which was hidden for her some day to prove.

Now, alone with her purpose, she thought of this reserve. Would she be

able to break it down with her love? For an instant she felt as if she

were about to enter upon a contest with her husband, but she did not

coldly tell over her armoury and select weapons. There was a heat of

purpose within her that beckoned her to the unthinking, to the reckless

way, that told her to be self-reliant and to trust to the moment for the

method.

When Androvsky returned to the camp it was towards evening. A lemon

light was falling over the great white spaces of the sand. Upon their

little round hills the Arab villages glowed mysteriously. Many horsemen

were riding forth from the city to take the cool of the approaching

night. From the desert the caravans were coming in. The nomad children

played, half-naked, at Cora before the tents, calling shrilly to each

other through the light silence that floated airily away into the vast

distances that breathed out the spirit of a pale eternity. Despite the

heat there was an almost wintry romance in this strange land of white

sands and yellow radiance, an ethereal melancholy that stole with the

twilight noiselessly towards the tents.

As Androvsky approached Domini saw that he had lost the energy which had

delighted her at _dejeuner_. He walked towards her slowly with his head

bent down. His face was grave, even sad, though when he saw her waiting

for him he smiled.

“You have been all this time with the priest?” she said.

“Nearly all. I walked for a little while in the city. And you?”

“I rode out and met a friend.”

“A friend?” he said, as if startled.

“Yes, from Beni-Mora--Count Anteoni. He has been here to pay me a

visit.”

She pulled forward a basket-chair for him. He sank into it heavily.

“Count Anteoni here!” he said slowly. “What is he doing here?”

“He is with the marabout at Beni-Hassan. And, Boris, he has become a

Mohammedan.”

He lifted his head with a jerk and stared at her in silence.

“You are surprised?”

“A Mohammedan--Count Anteoni?”

“Yes. Do you know, when he told me I felt almost as if I had been

expecting it.”

“But--is he changed then? Is he--”

He stopped. His voice had sounded to her bitter, almost fierce.

“Yes, Boris, he is changed. Have you ever seen anyone who was lost,

and the same person walking along the road home? Well, that is Count

Anteoni.”

They said no more for some minutes. Androvsky was the first to speak

again.

“You told him?” he asked.

“About ourselves?”

“Yes.”

“I told him.”

“What did he say?”

“He had expected it. When we ask him he is coming here again to see us

both together.”

Androvsky got up from his chair. His face was troubled. Standing before

Domini, he said:

“Count Anteoni is happy then, now that he--now that he has joined this

religion?”

“Very happy.”

“And you--a Catholic--what do you think?”

“I think that, since that is his honest belief, it is a blessed thing

for him.”

He said no more, but went towards the sleeping-tent.

In the evening, when they were dining, he said to her:

“Domini, to-night I am going to leave you again for a short time.”

He saw a look of keen regret come into her face, and added quickly:

“At nine I have promised to go to see the priest. He--he is rather

lonely here. He wants me to come. Do you mind?”

“No, no. I am glad--very glad. Have you finished?”

“Quite.”

“Let us take a rug and go out a little way in the sand--that way towards

the cemetery. It is quiet there at night.”

“Yes. I will get a rug.” He went to fetch it, threw it over his arm, and

they set out together. She had meant the Arab cemetery, but when they

reached it they found two or three nomads wandering there.

“Let us go on,” she said.

They went on, and came to the French cemetery, which was surrounded by

a rough hedge of brushwood, in which there were gaps here and there.

Through one of these gaps they entered it, spread out the rug, and lay

down on the sand. The night was still and silence brooded here. Faintly

they saw the graves of the exiles who had died here and been given to

the sand, where in summer vipers glided to and fro, and the pariah dogs

wandered stealthily, seeking food to still the desires in their starving

bodies. They were mostly very simple, but close to Domini and Androvsky

was one of white marble, in the form of a broken column, hung with

wreaths of everlasting flowers, and engraved with these words:

ICI REPOSE

JEAN BAPTISTE FABRIANI

_Priez pour lui_.

When they lay down they both looked at this grave, as if moved by a

simultaneous impulse, and read the words.

“Priez pour lui!” Domini said in a low voice.

She put out her hand and took hold of her husband’s, and pressed it down

on the sand.

“Do you remember that first night, Boris,” she said, “at Arba, when

you took my hand in yours and laid it against the desert as against a

heart?”

“Yes, Domini, I remember.”

“That night we were one, weren’t we?”

“Yes, Domini.”

“Were we”--she was almost whispering in the night--“were we truly one?”

“Why do you--truly one, you say?”

“Yes--one in soul? That is the great union, greater than the union of

our bodies. Were we one in soul? Are we now?”

“Domini, why do you ask me such questions? Do you doubt my love?”

“No. But I do ask you. Won’t you answer me?”

He was silent. His hand lay in hers, but did not press it.

“Boris”--she spoke the cruel words very quietly,--“we are not truly one

in soul. We have never been. I know that.”

He said nothing.

“Shall we ever be? Think--if one of us were to die, and the other--the

one who was left--were left with the knowledge that in our love, even

ours, there had always been separation--could you bear that? Could I

bear it?”

“Domini--”

“Yes.”

“Why do you speak like this? We are one. You have all my love. You are

everything to me.”

“And yet you are sad, and you try to hide your sadness, your misery,

from me. Can you not give it me? I want it--more than I want anything

on earth. I want it, I must have it, and I dare to ask for it because I

know how deeply you love me and that you could never love another.”

“I never have loved another,” he said.

“I was the very first.”

“The very first. When we married, although I was a man I was as you

were.”

She bent down her head and laid her lips on his hand that was in hers.

“Then make our union perfect, as no other union on earth has ever been.

Give me your sorrow, Boris. I know what it is.”

“How can--you cannot know,” he said in a broken voice.

“Yes. Love is a diviner, the only true diviner. I told you once what it

was, but I want you to tell me. Nothing that we take is beautiful to us,

only what we are given.”

“I cannot,” he said.

He tried to take his hand from hers, but she held it fast. And she felt

as if she were holding the wall of fire with which he surrounded the

secret places of his soul.

“To-day, Boris, when I talked to Count Anteoni, I felt that I had been a

coward with you. I had seen you suffer and I had not dared to draw near

to your suffering. I have been afraid of you. Think of that.”

“No.”

“Yes, I have been afraid of you, of your reserve. When you withdrew from

me I never followed you. If I had, perhaps I could have done something

for you.”

“Domini, do not speak like this. Our love is happy. Leave it as it is.”

“I can’t. I will not. Boris, Count Anteoni has found a home. But you

are wandering. I can’t bear that, I can’t bear it. It is as if I were

sitting in the house, warm, safe, and you were out in the storm. It

tortures me. It almost makes me hate my own safety.”

Androvsky shivered. He took his hand forcibly from Domini’s.

“I have almost hated it, too,” he said passionately. “I have hated it.

I’m a--I’m--”

His voice failed. He bent forward and took Domini’s face between his

hands.

“And yet there are times when I can bless what I have hated. I do bless

it now. I--I love your safety. You--at least you are safe.”

“You must share it. I will make you share it.”

“You cannot.”

“I can. I shall. I feel that we shall be together in soul, and perhaps

to-night, perhaps even to-night.”

Androvsky looked profoundly agitated. His hands dropped down.

“I must go,” he said. “I must go to the priest.”

He got up from the sand.

“Come to the tent, Domini.”

She rose to her feet.

“When you come back,” she said, “I shall be waiting for you, Boris.”

He looked at her. There was in his eyes a piercing wistfulness. He

opened his lips. At that moment Domini felt that he was on the point of

telling her all that she longed to know. But the look faded. The lips

closed. He took her in his arms and kissed her almost desperately.

“No, no,” he said. “I’ll keep your love--I’ll keep it.”

“You could never lose it.”

“I might.”

“Never.”

“If I believed that.”

“Boris!”

Suddenly burning tears rushed from her eyes.

“Don’t ever say a thing like that to me again!” she said with passion.

She pointed to the grave close to them.

“If you were there,” she said, “and I was living, and you had died

before--before you had told me--I believe--God forgive me, but I do

believe that if, when you died, I were taken to heaven I should find my

hell there.”

She looked through her tears at the words: “Priez pour lui.”

“To pray for the dead,” she whispered, as if to herself. “To pray for

my dead--I could not do it--I could not. Boris, if you love me you must

trust me, you must give me your sorrow.”

The night drew on. Androvsky had gone to the priest. Domini was alone,

sitting before the tent waiting for his return. She had told Batouch and

Ouardi that she wanted nothing more, that no one was to come to the tent

again that night. The young moon was rising over the city, but its light

as yet was faint. It fell upon the cupolas of the Bureau Arabe, the

towers of the mosque and the white sands, whose whiteness it seemed to

emphasise, making them pale as the face of one terror-stricken. The

city wall cast a deep shadow over the moat of sand in which, wrapped

in filthy rags, lay nomads sleeping. Upon the sand-hills the camps were

alive with movement. Fires blazed and smoke ascended before the tents

that made patches of blackness upon the waste. Round the fires were

seated groups of men devouring cous-cous and the red soup beloved of the

nomad. Behind them circled the dogs with quivering nostrils. Squadrons

of camels lay crouched in the sand, resting after their journeys. And

everywhere, from the city and from the waste, rose distant sounds of

music, thin, aerial flutings like voices of the night winds, acrid cries

from the pipes, and the far-off rolling of the African drums that are

the foundation of every desert symphony.

Although she was now accustomed to the music of Africa, Domini could

never hear it without feeling the barbarity of the land from which it

rose, the wildness of the people who made and who loved it. Always it

suggested to her an infinite remoteness, as if it were music sounding

at the end of the world, full of half-defined meanings, melancholy

yet fierce passion, longings that, momentarily satisfied, continually

renewed themselves, griefs that were hidden behind thin veils like the

women of the East, but that peered out with expressive eyes, hinting

their story and desiring assuagement. And tonight the meaning of the

music seemed deeper than it had been before. She thought of it as an

outside echo of the voices murmuring in her mind and heart, and the

voices murmuring in the mind and heart of Androvsky, broken voices some

of them, but some strong, fierce, tense and alive with meaning. And as

she sat there alone she thought this unity of music drew her closer to

the desert than she had ever been before, and drew Androvsky with her,

despite his great reserve. In the heart of the desert he would surely

let her see at last fully into his heart. When he came back in the night

from the priest he would speak. She was waiting for that.

The moon was mounting. Its light grew stronger. She looked across the

sands and saw fires in the city, and suddenly she said to herself, “This

is the vision of the sand-diviner realised in my life. He saw me as I

am now, in this place.” And she remembered the scene in the garden,

the crouching figure, the extended arms, the thin fingers tracing swift

patterns in the sand, the murmuring voice.

To-night she felt deeply expectant, but almost sad, encompassed by the

mystery that hangs in clouds about human life and human relations. What

could be that great joy of which the Diviner had spoken? A woman’s great

joy that starred the desert with flowers and made the dry places run

with sweet waters. What could it be?

Suddenly she felt again the oppression of spirit she had been

momentarily conscious of in the afternoon. It was like a load descending

upon her, and, almost instantly, communicated itself to her body. She

was conscious of a sensation of unusual weariness, uneasiness, even

dread, then again of an intensity of life that startled her. This

intensity remained, grew in her. It was as if the principle of life,

like a fluid, were being poured into her out of the vials of God, as

if the little cup that was all she had were too small to contain the

precious liquid. That seemed to her to be the cause of the pain of

which she was conscious. She was being given more than she felt herself

capable of possessing. She got up from her chair, unable to remain

still. The movement, slight though it was, seemed to remove a veil of

darkness that had hung over her and to let in upon her a flood of light.

She caught hold of the canvas of the tent. For a moment she felt weak as

a child, then strong as an Amazon. And the sense of strength remained,

grew. She walked out upon the sand in the direction by which Androvsky

would return. The fires in the city and the camps were to her as

illuminations for a festival. The music was the music of a great

rejoicing. The vast expanse of the desert, wintry white under the moon,

dotted with the fires of the nomads, blossomed as the rose. After a few

moments she stopped. She was on the crest of a sand-bank, and could see

below her the faint track in the sand which wound to the city gate. By

this track Androvsky would surely return. From a long distance she would

be able to see him, a moving darkness upon the white. She was near to

the city now, and could hear voices coming to her from behind its rugged

walls, voices of men singing, and calling one to another, the twang of

plucked instruments, the click of negroes’ castanets. The city was full

of joy as the desert was full of joy. The glory of life rushed upon her

like a flood of gold, that gold of the sun in which thousands of tiny

things are dancing. And she was given the power of giving life, of

adding to the sum of glory. She looked out over the sands and saw a

moving blot upon them coming slowly towards her, very slowly. It was

impossible at this distance to see who it was, but she felt that it was

her husband. For a moment she thought of going down to meet him, but

she did not move. The new knowledge that had come to her made her, just

then, feel shy even of him, as if he must come to her, as if she could

make no advance towards him.

As the blackness upon the sand drew nearer she saw that it was a man

walking heavily. The man had her husband’s gait. When she saw that she

turned. She had resolved to meet him at the tent door, to tell him what

she had to tell him at the threshold of their wandering home. Her sense

of shyness died when she was at the tent door. She only felt now her

oneness with her husband, and that to-night their unity was to be made

more perfect. If it could be made quite perfect! If he would speak

too! Then nothing more would be wanting. At last every veil would have

dropped from between them, and as they had long been one flesh they

would be one in spirit.

She waited in the tent door.

After what seemed a long time she saw Androvsky coming across the

moonlit sand. He was walking very slowly, as if wearied out, with his

head drooping. He did not appear to see her till he was quite close to

the tent. Then he stopped and gazed at her. The moon--she thought it

must be the moon--made his face look strange, like a dying man’s face.

In this white face the eyes glittered feverishly.

“Boris!” she said.

“Domini!”

“Come here, close to me. I have something to tell you--something

wonderful.”

He came quite up to her.

“Domini,” he said, as if he had not heard her. “Domini, I--I’ve been to

the priest to-night. I meant to confess to him.”

“To confess!” she said.

“This afternoon I asked him to hear my confession, but tonight I could

not make it. I can only make it to you, Domini--only to you. Do you

hear, Domini? Do you hear?”

Something in his face and in his voice terrified her heart. Now she felt

as if she would stop him from speaking if she dared, but that she did

not dare. His spirit was beyond domination. He would do what he meant to

do regardless of her--of anyone.

“What is it, Boris?” she whispered. “Tell me. Perhaps I can understand

best because I love best.”

He put his arms round her and kissed her, as a man kisses the woman he

loves when he knows it may be for the last time, long and hard, with

a desperation of love that feels frustrated by the very lips it is

touching. At last he took his lips from hers.

“Domini,” he said, and his voice was steady and clear, almost hard,

“you want to know what it is that makes me unhappy even in our

love--desperately unhappy. It is this. I believe in God, I love God,

and I have insulted Him. I have tried to forget God, to deny Him, to

put human love higher than love for Him. But always I am haunted by

the thought of God, and that thought makes me despair. Once, when I was

young, I gave myself to God solemnly. I have broken the vows I made. I

have--I have--”

The hardness went out of his voice. He broke down for a moment and was

silent.

“You gave yourself to God,” she said. “How?”

He tried to meet her questioning eyes, but could not.

“I--I gave myself to God as a monk,” he answered after a pause.

As he spoke Domini saw before her in the moonlight De Trevignac. He

cast a glance of horror at the tent, bent over her, made the sign of

the Cross, and vanished. In his place stood Father Roubier, his eyes

shining, his hand upraised, warning her against Androvsky. Then he, too,

vanished, and she seemed to see Count Anteoni dressed as an Arab and

muttering words of the Koran.

“Domini!”

“Domini, did you hear me? Domini! Domini!”

She felt his hands on her wrists.

“You are the Trappist!” she said quietly, “of whom the priest told me.

You are the monk from the Monastery of El-Largani who disappeared after

twenty years.”

“Yes,” he said, “I am he.”

“What made you tell me? What made you tell me?”

There was agony now in her voice.

“You asked me to speak, but it was not that. Do you remember last night

when I said that God must bless you? You answered, ‘He has blessed me.

He has given me you, your love, your truth.’ It is that which makes me

speak. You have had my love, not my truth. Now take my truth. I’ve kept

it from you. Now I’ll give it you. It’s black, but I’ll give it you.

Domini! Domini! Hate me to-night, but in your hatred believe that I

never loved you as I love you now.”

“Give me your truth,” she said.

BOOK V. THE REVELATION

CHAPTER XXVI

They remained standing at the tent door, with the growing moonlight

about them. The camp was hushed in sleep, but sounds of music still came

to them from the city below them, and fainter music from the tents of

the Ouled Nails on the sandhill to the south. After Domini had spoken

Androvsky moved a step towards her, looked at her, then moved back and

dropped his eyes. If he had gone on looking at her he knew he could not

have begun to speak.

“Domini,” he said, “I’m not going to try and excuse myself for what

I have done. I’m not going to say to you what I daren’t say to

God--‘Forgive me.’ How can such a thing be forgiven? That’s part of the

torture I’ve been enduring, the knowledge of the unforgivable nature of

my act. It can never be wiped out. It’s black on my judgment book for

ever. But I wonder if you can understand--oh, I want you to understand,

Domini, what has made the thing I am, a renegade, a breaker of oaths,

a liar to God and you. It was the passion of life that burst up in me

after years of tranquillity. It was the waking of my nature after years

of sleep. And you--you do understand the passion of life that’s in some

of us like a monster that must rule, must have its way. Even you in your

purity and goodness--you have it, that desperate wish to live really and

fully, as we have lived, Domini, together. For we have lived out in the

desert. We lived that night at Arba when we sat and watched the fire

and I held your hand against the earth. We lived then. Even now, when I

think of that night, I can hardly be sorry for what I’ve done, for what

I am.”

He looked up at her now and saw that her eyes were fixed on him. She

stood motionless, with her hands joined in front of her. Her attitude

was calm and her face was untortured. He could not read any thought of

hers, any feeling that was in her heart.

“You must understand,” he said almost violently. “You must understand

or I--. My father, I told you, was a Russian. He was brought up in the

Greek Church, but became a Freethinker when he was still a young man.

My mother was an Englishwoman and an ardent Catholic. She and my father

were devoted to each other in spite of the difference in their views.

Perhaps the chief effect my father’s lack of belief had upon my

mother was to make her own belief more steadfast, more ardent. I think

disbelief acts often as a fan to the faith of women, makes the flame

burn more brightly than it did before. My mother tried to believe

for herself and for my father too, and I could almost think that she

succeeded. He died long before she did, and he died without changing his

views. On his death-bed he told my mother that he was sure there was no

other life, that he was going to the dust. That made the agony of his

farewell. The certainty on his part that he and my mother were parting

for ever. I was a little boy at the time, but I remember that, when he

was dead, my mother said to me, ‘Boris, pray for your father every day.

He is still alive.’ She said nothing more, but I ran upstairs crying,

fell upon my knees and prayed--trying to think where my father was and

what he could be looking like. And in that prayer for my father, which

was also an act of obedience to my mother, I think I took the first step

towards the monastic life. For I remember that then, for the first time,

I was conscious of a great sense of responsibility. My mother’s command

made me say to myself, ‘Then perhaps my prayer can do something in

heaven. Perhaps a prayer from me can make God wish to do something He

had not wished to do before.’ That was a tremendous thought! It excited

me terribly. I remember my cheeks burned as I prayed, and that I was hot

all over as if I had been running in the sun. From that day my mother

and I seemed to be much nearer together than we had ever been before. I

had a twin brother to whom I was devoted, and who was devoted to me.

But he took after my father. Religious things, ceremonies, church music,

processions--even the outside attractions of the Catholic Church, which

please and stimulate emotional people who have little faith--never meant

much to him. All his attention was firmly fixed upon the life of the

present. He was good to my mother and loved her devotedly, as he loved

me, but he never pretended to be what he was not. And he was never a

Catholic. He was never anything.

“My father had originally come to Africa for his health, which needed a

warm climate. He had some money and bought large tracts of land suitable

for vineyards. Indeed, he sunk nearly his whole fortune in land. I told

you, Domini, that the vines were devoured by the phylloxera. Most of

the money was lost. When my father died we were left very poor. We lived

quietly in a little village--I told you its name, I told you that part

of my life, all I dared tell, Domini--but now--why did I enter the

monastery? I was very young when I became a novice, just seventeen. You

are thinking, Domini, I know, that I was too young to know what I was

doing, that I had no vocation, that I was unfitted for the monastic

life. It seems so. The whole world would think so. And yet--how am I

to tell you? Even now I feel that then I had the vocation, that I was

fitted to enter the monastery, that I ought to have made a faithful

and devoted monk. My mother wished the life for me, but it was not only

that. I wished it for myself then. With my whole heart I wished it. I

knew nothing of the world. My youth had been one of absolute purity. And

I did not feel longings after the unknown. My mother’s influence upon me

was strong; but she did not force me into anything. Perhaps my love

for her led me more than I knew, brought me to the monastery door. The

passion of her life, the human passion, had been my father. After he was

dead the passion of her life was prayer for him. My love for her made me

share that passion, and the sharing of that passion eventually led me

to become a monk. I became as a child, a devotee of prayer. Oh!

Domini--think--I loved prayer--I loved it----”

His voice broke. When he stopped speaking Domini was again conscious of

the music in the city. She remembered that earlier in the night she had

thought of it as the music of a great festival.

“I resolved to enter the life of prayer, the most perfect life of

prayer. I resolved to become a ‘religious.’ It seemed to me that by so

doing I should be proving in the finest way my love for my mother. I

should be, in the strongest way, helping her. Her life was prayer for my

dead father and love for her children. By devoting myself to the life of

prayer I should show to her that I was as she was, as she had made me,

true son of her womb. Can you understand? I had a passion for my mother,

Domini--I had a passion. My brother tried to dissuade me from the

monastic life. He himself was going into business in Tunis. He wanted me

to join him. But I was firm. I felt driven towards the cloister then as

other men often feel driven towards the vicious life. The inclination

was irresistible. I yielded to it. I had to bid good-bye to my mother.

I told you--she was the passion of my life. And yet I hardly felt sad at

parting from her. Perhaps that will show you how I was then. It seemed

to me that we should be even closer together when I wore the monk’s

habit. I was in haste to put it on. I went to the monastery of

El-Largani and entered it as a novice of the Trappistine order. I

thought in the great silence of the Trappists there would be more room

for prayer. When I left my home and went to El-Largani I took with me

one treasure only. Domini, it was the little wooden crucifix you pinned

upon the tent at Arba. My mother gave it to me, and I was allowed to

keep it. Everything else in the way of earthly possessions I, of course,

had to give up.

“You have never seen El-Largani, my home for nineteen years, my prison

for one. It is lonely, but not in the least desolate. It stands on a

high upland, and, from a distance, looks upon the sea. Far off there are

mountains. The land was a desert. The monks have turned it, if not into

an Eden, at least into a rich garden. There are vineyards, cornfields,

orchards, almost every fruit-tree flourishes there. The springs of

sweet waters are abundant. At a short way from the monastery is a large

village for the Spanish workmen whom the monks supervise in the labours

of the fields. For the Trappist life is not only a life of prayer, but a

life of diligent labour. When I became a novice I had not realised that.

I had imagined myself continually upon my knees. I found instead that I

was perpetually in the fields, in sun, and wind, and rain--that was in

the winter time--working like the labourers, and that often when we

went into the long, plain chapel to pray I was so tired--being only a

boy--that my eyes closed as I stood in my stall, and I could scarcely

hear the words of Mass or Benediction. But I had expected to be happy at

El-Largani, and I was happy. Labour is good for the body and better for

the soul. And the silence was not hard to bear. The Trappists have a

book of gestures, and are often allowed to converse by signs. We novices

were generally in little bands, and often, as we walked in the garden of

the monastery, we talked together gaily with our hands. Then the silence

is not perpetual. In the fields we often had to give directions to the

labourers. In the school, where we studied Theology, Latin, Greek, there

was heard the voice of the teacher. It is true that I have seen men

in the monastery day by day for twenty years with whom I have never

exchanged a word, but I have had permission to speak with monks. The

head of the monastery, the Reverend Pere, has the power to loose the

bonds of silence when he chooses, and to allow monks to walk and speak

with each other beyond the white walls that hem in the garden of the

monastery. Now and then we spoke, but I think most of us were not

unhappy in our silence. It became a habit. And then we were always

occupied. We had no time allowed us for sitting and being sad. Domini,

I don’t want to tell you about the Trappists, their life--only about

myself, why I was as I was, how I came to change. For years I was not

unhappy at El-Largani. When my time of novitiate was over I took the

eternal vows without hesitation. Many novices go out again into the

world. It never occurred to me to do so. I scarcely ever felt a stirring

of worldly desire. I scarcely ever had one of those agonising struggles

which many people probably attribute to monks. I was contented nearly

always. Now and then the flesh spoke, but not strongly. Remember, our

life was a life of hard and exhausting labour in the fields. The labour

kept the flesh in subjection, as the prayer lifted up the spirit. And

then, during all my earlier years at the monastery, we had an Abbe who

was quick to understand the characters and dispositions of men--Dom

Andre Herceline. He knew me far better than I knew myself. He knew,

what I did not suspect, that I was full of sleeping violence, that in my

purity and devotion--or beneath it rather--there was a strong strain of

barbarism. The Russian was sleeping in the monk, but sleeping soundly.

That can be. Half a man’s nature, if all that would call to it is

carefully kept from it, may sleep, I believe, through all his life. He

might die and never have known, or been, what all the time he was.

For years it was so with me. I knew only part of myself, a real vivid

part--but only a part. I thought it was the whole. And while I thought

it was the whole I was happy. If Dom Andre Herceline had not died, today

I should be a monk at El-Largani, ignorant of what I know, contented.

“He never allowed me to come into any sort of contact with the many

strangers who visited the monastery. Different monks have different

duties. Certain duties bring monks into connection with the travellers

whom curiosity sends to El-Largani. The monk whose business it is to

look after the cemetery on the hill, where the dead Trappists are laid

to rest, shows visitors round the little chapel, and may talk with them

freely so long as they remain in the cemetery. The monk in charge of the

distillery also receives visitors and converses with them. So does the

monk in charge of the parlour at the great door of the monastery. He

sells the souvenirs of the Trappists, photographs of the church and

buildings, statues of saints, bottles of perfumes made by the monks.

He takes the orders for the wines made at the monastery, and for--for

the--what I made, Domini, when I was there.”

She thought of De Trevignac and the fragments of glass lying upon the

ground in the tent at Mogar.

“Had De Trevignac----” she said in a low, inward voice.

“He had seen me, spoken with me at the monastery. When Ouardi brought in

the liqueur he remembered who I was.”

She understood De Trevignac’s glance towards the tent where Androvsky

lay sleeping, and a slight shiver ran through her. Androvsky saw it and

looked down.

“But the--the--”

He cleared his throat, turned, looked out across the white sand as if

he longed to travel away into it and be lost for ever, then went on,

speaking quickly:

“But the monk who has most to do with travellers is the monk who is

in charge of the _hotellerie_ of the monastery. He is the host to all

visitors, to those who come over for the day and have _dejeuner_, and

to any who remain for the night, or for a longer time. For when I was at

El-Largani it was permitted for people to stay in the _hotellerie_, on

payment of a small weekly sum, for as long as they pleased. The monk of

the _hotellerie_ is perpetually brought into contact with the outside

world. He talks with all sorts and conditions of men--women, of course,

are not admitted. The other monks, many of them, probably envy him. I

never did. I had no wish to see strangers. When, by chance, I met them

in the yard, the outbuildings, or the grounds of the monastery, I seldom

even raised my eyes to look at them. They were not, would never be, in

my life. Why should I look at them? What were they to me? Years went

on--quickly they passed--not slowly. I did not feel their monotony. I

never shrank from anything in the life. My health was splendid. I never

knew what it was to be ill for a day. My muscles were hard as iron.

The pallet on which I lay in my cubicle, the heavy robe I wore day and

night, the scanty vegetables I ate, the bell that called me from my

sleep in the darkness to go to the chapel, the fastings, the watchings,

the perpetual sameness of all I saw, all I did, neither saddened nor

fatigued me. I never sighed for change. Can you believe that, Domini?

It is true. So long as Dom Andre Herceline lived and ruled my life I was

calm, happy, as few people in the world, or none, can ever be. But Dom

Andre died, and then--”

His face was contorted by a spasm.

“My mother was dead. My brother lived on in Tunis, and was successful in

business. He remained unmarried. So far as I was concerned, although the

monastery was but two hours’ drive from the town, he might almost have

been dead too. I scarcely ever saw him, and then only by a special

permission from the Reverend Pere, and for a few moments. Once I visited

him at Tunis, when he was ill. When my mother died I seemed to sink down

a little deeper into the monastic life. That was all. It was as if I

drew my robe more closely round me and pulled my hood further forward

over my face. There was more reason for my prayers, and I prayed more

passionately. I lived in prayer like a sea-plant in the depths of the

ocean. Prayer was about me like a fluid. But Dom Andre Herceline

died, and a new Abbe was appointed, he who, I suppose, rules now at

El-Largani. He was a good man, but, I think, apt to misunderstand men.

The Abbe of a Trappist monastery has complete power over his community.

He can order what he will. Soon after he came to El-Largani--for some

reason that I cannot divine--he--removed the Pere Michel, who had been

for years in charge of the cemetery, from his duties there, and informed

me that I was to undertake them. I obeyed, of course, without a word.

“The cemetery of El-Largani is on a low hill, the highest part of the

monastery grounds. It is surrounded by a white wall and by a hedge of

cypress trees. The road to it is an avenue of cypresses, among which are

interspersed niches containing carvings of the Fourteen Stations of

the Cross. At the entrance to this avenue, on the left, there is a high

yellow pedestal, surmounted by a black cross, on which hangs a silver

Christ. Underneath is written:

“FACTUS OBEDIENS

“USQUE

“AD MORTEM

“CRUCIS.

“I remember, on the first day when I became the guardian of the

cemetery, stopping on my way to it before the Christ and praying. My

prayer--my prayer was, Domini, that I might die, as I had lived, in

innocence. I prayed for that, but with a sort of--yes, now I think

so--insolent certainty that my prayer would of course be granted. Then I

went on to the cemetery.

“My work there was easy. I had only to tend the land about the graves,

and sweep out the little chapel where was buried the founder of La

Trappe of El-Largani. This done I could wander about the cemetery, or

sit on a bench in the sun. The Pere Michel, who was my predecessor, had

some doves, and had left them behind in a little house by my bench. I

took care of and fed them. They were tame, and used to flutter to my

shoulders and perch on my hands. To birds and animals I was always a

friend. At El-Largani there are all sorts of beasts, and, at one time

or another, it had been my duty to look after most of them. I loved all

living things. Sitting in the cemetery I could see a great stretch of

country, the blue of the lakes of Tunis with the white villages at their

edge, the boats gliding upon them towards the white city, the

distant mountains. Having little to do, I sat day after day for

hours meditating, and looking out upon this distant world. I remember

specially one evening, at sunset, just before I had to go to the chapel,

that a sort of awe came upon me as I looked across the lakes. The sky

was golden, the waters were dyed with gold, out of which rose the white

sails of boats. The mountains were shadowy purple. The little minarets

of the mosques rose into the gold like sticks of ivory. As I watched my

eyes filled with tears, and I felt a sort of aching in my heart, and as

if--Domini, it was as if at that moment a hand was laid, on mine, but

very gently, and pulled at my hand. It was as if at that moment someone

was beside me in the cemetery wishing to lead me out to those far-off

waters, those mosque towers, those purple mountains. Never before had I

had such a sensation. It frightened me. I felt as if the devil had come

into the cemetery, as if his hand was laid on mine, as if his voice were

whispering in my ear, ‘Come out with me into that world, that beautiful

world, which God made for men. Why do you reject it?’

“That evening, Domini, was the beginning of this--this end. Day after

day I sat in the cemetery and looked out over the world, and wondered

what it was like: what were the lives of the men who sailed in the

white-winged boats, who crowded on the steamers whose smoke I could see

sometimes faintly trailing away into the track of the sun; who kept the

sheep upon the mountains; who--who--Domini, can you imagine--no, you

cannot--what, in a man of my age, of my blood, were these first, very

first, stirrings of the longing for life? Sometimes I think they were

like the first birth-pangs of a woman who is going to be a mother.”

Domini’s hands moved apart, then joined themselves again.

“There was something physical in them. I felt as if my limbs had minds,

and that their minds, which had been asleep, were waking. My arms

twitched with a desire to stretch themselves towards the distant blue

of the lakes on which I should never sail. My--I was physically stirred.

And again and again I felt that hand laid closely upon mine, as if to

draw me away into something I had never known, could never know. Do not

think that I did not strive against these first stirrings of the nature

that had slept so long! For days I refused to let myself look out from

the cemetery. I kept my eyes upon the ground, upon the plain crosses

that marked the graves. I played with the red-eyed doves. I worked.

But my eyes at last rebelled. I said to myself, ‘It is not forbidden to

look.’ And again the sails, the seas, the towers, the mountains, were as

voices whispering to me, ‘Why will you never know us, draw near to us?

Why will you never understand our meaning? Why will you be ignorant for

ever of all that has been created for man to know?’ Then the pain within

me became almost unbearable. At night I could not sleep. In the chapel

it was difficult to pray. I looked at the monks around me, to most of

whom I had never addressed a word, and I thought, ‘Do they, too, hold

such longings within them? Are they, too, shaken with a desire of

knowledge?’ It seemed to me that, instead of a place of peace, the

monastery was, must be, a place of tumult, of the silent tumult that has

its home in the souls of men. But then I remembered for how long I had

been at peace. Perhaps all the silent men by whom I was surrounded were

still at peace, as I had been, as I might be again.

“A young monk died in the monastery and was buried in the cemetery. I

made his grave against the outer wall, beneath a cypress tree. Some days

afterwards, when I was sitting on the bench by the house of the doves,

I heard a sound, which came from beyond the wall. It was like sobbing.

I listened, and heard it more distinctly, and knew that it was someone

crying and sobbing desperately, and near at hand. But now it seemed

to me to come from the wall itself. I got up and listened. Someone was

crying bitterly behind, or above, the wall, just where the young

monk had been buried. Who could it be? I stood listening, wondering,

hesitating what to do. There was something in this sound of lamentation

that moved one to the depths. For years I had not looked on a woman, or

heard a woman’s voice--but I knew that this was a woman mourning.

Why was she there? What could she want? I glanced up. All round the

cemetery, as I have said, grew cypress trees. As I glanced up I saw one

shake just above where the new grave was, and a woman’s voice said, ‘I

cannot see it, I cannot see it!’

“I do not know why, but I felt that someone was there who wished to see

the young monk’s grave. For a moment I stood there. Then I went to

the house where I kept my tools for my work in the cemetery, and got

a shears which I used for lopping the cypress trees. I took a ladder

quickly, set it against the wall, mounted it, and from the cypress I

had seen moving I lopped some of the boughs. The sobbing ceased. As

the boughs fell down from the tree I saw a woman’s face, tear-stained,

staring at me. It seemed to me a lovely face.

“‘Which is his grave?’ she said. I pointed to the grave of the young

monk, which could now be seen through the gap I had made, descended the

ladder, and went away to the farthest corner of the cemetery. And I did

not look again in the direction of the woman’s face.

“Who she was I do not know. When she went away I did not see. She loved

the monk who had died, and knowing that women cannot enter the precincts

of the monastery, she had come to the outside wall to cast, if she

might, a despairing glance at his grave.

“Domini, I wonder--I wonder if you can understand how that incident

affected me. To an ordinary man it would seem nothing, I suppose. But

to a Trappist monk it seemed tremendous. I had seen a woman. I had done

something for a woman. I thought of her, of what I had done for her,

perpetually. The gap in the cypress tree reminded me of her every time

I looked towards it. When I was in the cemetery I could hardly turn

my eyes from it. But the woman never came again. I said nothing to the

Reverend Pere of what I had done. I ought to have spoken, but I did not.

I kept it back when I confessed. From that moment I had a secret, and it

was a secret connected with a woman.

“Does it seem strange to you that this secret seemed to me to set me

apart from all the other monks--nearer the world? It was so. I felt

sometimes as if I had been out into the world for a moment, had known

the meaning that women have for men. I wondered who the woman was. I

wondered how she had loved the young monk who was dead. He used to sit

beside me in the chapel. He had a pure and beautiful face, such a face,

I supposed, as a woman might well love. Had this woman loved him, and

had he rejected her love for the life of the monastery? I remember one

day thinking of this and wondering how it had been possible for him to

do so, and then suddenly realising the meaning of my thought and turning

hot with shame. I had put the love of woman above the love of God,

woman’s service above God’s service. That day I was terrified of myself.

I went back to the monastery from the cemetery, quickly, asked to see

the Reverend Pere, and begged him to remove me from the cemetery, to

give me some other work. He did not ask my reason for wishing to change,

but three days afterwards he sent for me, and told me that I was to

be placed in charge of the _hotellerie_ of the monastery, and that my

duties there were to begin upon the morrow.

“Domini, I wonder if I can make you realise what that change meant to

a man who had lived as I had for so many years. The _hotellerie_ of

El-Largani is a long, low, one-storied building standing in a garden

full of palms and geraniums. It contains a kitchen, a number of little

rooms like cells for visitors, and two large parlours in which guests

are entertained at meals. In one they sit to eat the fruit, eggs, and

vegetables provided by the monastery, with wine. If after the meal they

wish to take coffee they pass into the second parlour. Visitors who

stay in the monastery are free to do much as they please, but they must

conform to certain rules. They rise at a certain hour, feed at fixed

times, and are obliged to go to their bedrooms at half-past seven in

the evening in winter, and at eight in summer. The monk in charge of the

_hotellerie_ has to see to their comfort. He looks after the kitchen, is

always in the parlour at some moment or another during meals. He visits

the bedrooms and takes care that the one servant keeps everything

spotlessly clean. He shows people round the garden. His duties, you see,

are light and social. He cannot go into the world, but he can mix with

the world that comes to him. It is his task, if not his pleasure, to be

cheerful, talkative, sympathetic, a good host, with a genial welcome for

all who come to La Trappe. After my years of labour, solitude, silence,

and prayer, I was abruptly put into this new life.

“Domini, to me it was like rushing out into the world. I was almost

dazed by the change. At first I was nervous, timid, awkward, and,

especially, tongue-tied. The habit of silence had taken such a hold upon

me that I could not throw it off. I dreaded the coming of visitors. I

did not know how to receive them, what to say to them. Fortunately, as

I thought, the tourist season was over, the summer was approaching. Very

few people came, and those only to eat a meal. I tried to be polite and

pleasant to them, and gradually I began to fall into the way of talking

without the difficulty I had experienced at first. In the beginning I

could not open my lips without feeling as if I were almost committing a

crime. But presently I was more natural, less taciturn. I even, now and

then, took some pleasure in speaking to a pleasant visitor. I grew

to love the garden with its flowers, its orange trees, its groves of

eucalyptus, its vineyard which sloped towards the cemetery. Often I

wandered in it alone, or sat under the arcade that divided it from the

large entrance court of the monastery, meditating, listening to the bees

humming, and watching the cats basking in the sunshine.

“Sometimes, when I was there, I thought of the woman’s face above the

cemetery wall. Sometimes I seemed to feel the hand tugging at mine. But

I was more at peace than I had been in the cemetery. For from the garden

I could not see the distant world, and of the chance visitors none had

as yet set a match to the torch that, unknown to me, was ready--at the

coming of the smallest spark--to burst into a flame.

“One day, it was in the morning towards half-past ten, when I was

sitting reading my Greek Testament on a bench just inside the doorway of

the _hotellerie_, I heard the great door of the monastery being opened,

and then the rolling of carriage wheels in the courtyard. Some visitor

had arrived from Tunis, perhaps some visitors--three or four. It was

a radiant morning of late May. The garden was brilliant with flowers,

golden with sunshine, tender with shade, and quiet--quiet and peaceful,

Domini! There was a wonderful peace in the garden that day, a peace that

seemed full of safety, of enduring cheerfulness. The flowers looked as

if they had hearts to understand it, and love it, the roses along the

yellow wall of the house that clambered to the brown red tiles, the

geraniums that grew in masses under the shining leaves of the orange

trees, the--I felt as if that day I were in the Garden of Eden, and I

remember that when I heard the carriage wheels I had a moment of selfish

sadness. I thought: ‘Why does anyone come to disturb my blessed peace,

my blessed solitude?’ Then I realised the egoism of my thought and that

I was there with my duty. I got up, went into the kitchen and said to

Francois, the servant, that someone had come and no doubt would stay to

_dejeuner_. And, as I spoke, already I was thinking of the moment when

I should hear the roll of wheels once more, the clang of the shutting

gate, and know that the intruders upon the peace of the Trappists had

gone back to the world, and that I could once more be alone in the

little Eden I loved.

“Strangely, Domini, strangely, that day, of all the days of my life, I

was most in love--it was like that, like being in love--with my

monk’s existence. The terrible feeling that had begun to ravage me had

completely died away. I adored the peace in which my days were passed.

I looked at the flowers and compared my happiness with theirs. They

blossomed, bloomed, faded, died in the garden. So would I wish to

blossom, bloom, fade--when my time came--die in the garden--always

in peace, always in safety, always isolated from the terrors of life,

always under the tender watchful eye of--of--Domini, that day I was

happy, as perhaps they are--perhaps--the saints in Paradise. I was happy

because I felt no inclination to evil. I felt as if my joy lay entirely

in being innocent. Oh, what an ecstasy such a feeling is! ‘My will

accord with Thy design--I love to live as Thou intendest me to live! Any

other way of life would be to me a terror, would bring to me despair.’

“And I felt that--intensely I felt it at that moment in heart and

soul. It was as if I had God’s arms round me, caressing me as a father

caresses his child.”

He moved away a step or two in the sand, came back, and went on with an

effort:

“Within a few minutes the porter of the monastery came through the

archway of the arcade followed by a young man. As I looked up at him

I was uncertain of his nationality. But I scarcely thought about

it--except in the first moment. For something else seized my

attention--the intense, active misery in the stranger’s face. He looked

ravaged, eaten by grief. I said he was young--perhaps twenty-six or

twenty-seven. His face was rather dark-complexioned, with small, good

features. He had thick brown hair, and his eyes shone with intelligence,

with an intelligence that was almost painful--somehow. His eyes always

looked to me as if they were seeing too much, had always seen too much.

There was a restlessness in the swiftness of their observation. One

could not conceive of them closed in sleep. An activity that must surely

be eternal blazed in them.

“The porter left the stranger in the archway. It was now my duty to

attend to him. I welcomed him in French. He took off his hat. When

he did that I felt sure he was an Englishman--by the look of him

bareheaded--and I told him that I spoke English as well as French. He

answered that he was at home in French, but that he was English. We

talked English. His entrance into the garden had entirely destroyed

my sense of its peace--even my own peace was disturbed at once by his

appearance.

“I felt that I was in the presence of a misery that was like a devouring

element. Before we had time for more than a very few halting words the

bell was rung by Francois.

“‘What’s that for, Father?’ the stranger said, with a start, which

showed that his nerves were shattered.

“‘It is time for your meal,’ I answered.

“‘One must eat!’ he said. Then, as if conscious that he was behaving

oddly, he added politely:

“‘I know you entertain us too well here, and have sometimes been

rewarded with coarse ingratitude. Where do I go?’

“I showed him into the parlour. There was no one there that day. He sat

at the long table.

“‘I am to eat alone?’ he asked.

“‘Yes; I will serve you.’

“Francois, always waited on the guests, but that day--mindful of the

selfishness of my thoughts in the garden--I resolved to add to my

duties. I therefore brought the soup, the lentils, the omelette, the

oranges, poured out the wine, and urged the young man cordially to

eat. When I did so he looked up at me. His eyes were extraordinarily

expressive. It was as if I heard them say to me, ‘Why, I like you!’ and

as if, just for a moment, his grief were lessened.

“In the empty parlour, long, clean, bare, with a crucifix on the wall

and the name ‘Saint Bernard’ above the door, it was very quiet, very

shady. The outer blinds of green wood were drawn over the window-spaces,

shutting out the gold of the garden. But its murmuring tranquillity

seemed to filter in, as if the flowers, the insects, the birds were

aware of our presence and were trying to say to us, ‘Are you happy as we

are? Be happy as we are.’

“The stranger looked at the shady room, the open windows. He sighed.

“‘How quiet it is here!’ he said, almost as if to himself. ‘How quiet it

is!’

“‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘Summer is beginning. For months now scarcely anyone

will come to us here.’

“‘Us?’ he said, glancing at me with a sudden smile.

“‘I meant to us who are monks, who live always here.’

“‘May I--is it indiscreet to ask if you have been here long?’

“I told him.

“‘More than nineteen years!’ he said.

“‘Yes.’

“‘And always in this silence?’

“He sat as if listening, resting his head on his hand.

“‘How extraordinary!’ he said at last. ‘How wonderful! Is it happiness?’

“I did not answer. The question seemed to me to be addressed to himself,

not to me. I could leave him to seek for the answer. After a moment he

went on eating and drinking in silence. When he had finished I asked him

whether he would take coffee. He said he would, and I made him pass

into the St. Joseph _salle_. There I brought him coffee and--and

that liqueur. I told him that it was my invention. He seemed to be

interested. At any rate, he took a glass and praised it strongly. I

was pleased. I think I showed it. From that moment I felt as if we were

almost friends. Never before had I experienced such a feeling for

anyone who had come to the monastery, or for any monk or novice in the

monastery. Although I had been vexed, irritated, at the approach of a

stranger I now felt regret at the idea of his going away. Presently

the time came to show him round the garden. We went out of the shadowy

parlour into the sunshine. No one was in the garden. Only the bees were

humming, the birds were passing, the cats were basking on the broad path

that stretched from the arcade along the front of the _hotellerie_.

As we came out a bell chimed, breaking for an instant the silence, and

making it seem the sweeter when it returned. We strolled for a little

while. We did not talk much. The stranger’s eyes, I noticed, were

everywhere, taking in every detail of the scene around us. Presently we

came to the vineyard, to the left of which was the road that led to the

cemetery, passed up the road and arrived at the cemetery gate.

“‘Here I must leave you,’ I said.

“‘Why?’ he asked quickly.

“‘There is another Father who will show you the chapel. I shall wait for

you here.’

“I sat down and waited. When the stranger returned it seemed to me that

his face was calmer, that there was a quieter expression in his eyes.

When we were once more before the _hotellerie_ I said:

“‘You have seen all my small domain now.’

“He glanced at the house.

“‘But there seems to be a number of rooms,’ he said.

“‘Only the bedrooms.’

“‘Bedrooms? Do people stay the night here?’

“‘Sometimes. If they please they can stay for longer than a night.’

“‘How much longer?’

“‘For any time they please, if they conform to one or two simple rules

and pay a small fixed sum to the monastery.’

“‘Do you mean that you could take anyone in for the summer?’ he said

abruptly.

“‘Why not? The consent of the Reverend Pere has to be obtained. That is

all.’

“‘I should like to see the bedrooms.’

“I took him in and showed him one.

“‘All the others are the same,’ I said.

“He glanced round at the white walls, the rough bed, the crucifix above

it, the iron basin, the paved floor, then went to the window and looked

out.

“‘Well,’ he said, drawing back into the room, ‘I will go now to see the

Pere Abbe, if it is permitted.’

“On the garden path I bade him good-bye. He shook my hand. There was an

odd smile in his face. Half-an-hour later I saw him coming again through

the arcade.

“‘Father,’ he said, ‘I am not going away. I have asked the Pere Abbe’s

permission to stay here. He has given it to me. To-morrow such luggage

as I need will be sent over from Tunis. Are you--are you very vexed to

have a stranger to trouble your peace?’

“His intensely observant eyes were fixed upon me while he spoke. I

answered:

“‘I do not think you will trouble my peace.’

“And my thought was:

“‘I will help you to find the peace which you have lost.’

“Was it a presumptuous thought, Domini? Was it insolent? At the time

it seemed to me absolutely sincere, one of the best thoughts I had ever

had--a thought put into my heart by God. I didn’t know then--I didn’t

know.”

He stopped speaking, and stood for a time quite still, looking down at

the sand, which was silver white under the moon. At last he lifted his

head and said, speaking slowly:

“It was the coming of this man that put the spark to that torch. It was

he who woke up in me the half of myself which, unsuspected by me, had

been slumbering through all my life, slumbering and gathering strength

in slumber--as the body does--gathering a strength that was tremendous,

that was to overmaster the whole of me, that was to make of me one mad

impulse. He woke up in me the body and the body was to take possession

of the soul. I wonder--can I make you feel why this man was able to

affect me thus? Can I make you know this man?

“He was a man full of secret violence, violence of the mind and violence

of the body, a volcanic man. He was English--he said so--but there must

have been blood that was not English in his veins. When I was with him

I felt as if I was with fire. There was the restlessness of fire in him.

There was the intensity of fire. He could be reserved. He could appear

to be cold. But always I was conscious that if there was stone without

there was scorching heat within. He was watchful of himself and of

everyone with whom he came into the slightest contact. He was very

clever. He had an immense amount of personal charm, I think, at any

rate for me. He was very human, passionately interested in humanity.

He was--and this was specially part of him, a dominant trait--he was

savagely, yes, savagely, eager to be happy, and when he came to live in

the _hotellerie_ he was savagely unhappy. An egoist he was, a thinker,

a man who longed to lay hold of something beyond this world, but who

had not been able to do so. Even his desire to find rest in a religion

seemed to me to have greed in it, to have something in it that was

akin to avarice. He was a human storm, Domini, as well as a human fire.

Think! what a man to be cast by the world--which he knew as they know it

only who are voracious for life and free--into my quiet existence.

“Very soon he began to show himself to me as he was, with a sort of

fearlessness that was almost impudent. The conditions of our two lives

in the monastery threw us perpetually together in a curious isolation.

And the Reverend Pere, Domini, the Reverend Pere, set my feet in the

path of my own destruction. On the day after the stranger had arrived

the Reverend Pere sent for me to his private room, and said to me,

‘Our new guest is in a very unhappy state. He has been attracted by our

peace. If we can bring peace to him it will be an action acceptable

to God. You will be much with him. Try to do him good. He is not a

Catholic, but no matter. He wishes to attend the services in the chapel.

He may be influenced. God may have guided his feet to us, we cannot

tell. But we can act--we can pray for him. I do not know how long he

will stay. It may be for only a few days or for the whole summer. It

does not matter. Use each day well for him. Each day may be his last

with us.’ I went out from the Reverend Pere full of enthusiasm, feeling

that a great, a splendid interest had come into my life, an interest

such as it had never held before.

“Day by day I was with this man. Of course there were many hours when

we were apart, the hours when I was at prayer in the chapel or occupied

with study. But each day we passed much time together, generally in the

garden. Scarcely any visitors came, and none to stay, except, from time

to time, a passing priest, and once two young men from Tunis, one of

whom had an inclination to become a novice. And this man, as I have

said, began to show himself to me with a tremendous frankness.

“Domini, he was suffering under what I suppose would be called an

obsession, an immense domination such as one human being sometimes

obtains over another. At that time I had never realised that there were

such dominations. Now I know that there are, and, Domini, that they can

be both terrible and splendid. He was dominated by a woman, by a woman

who had come into his life, seized it, made it a thing of glory, broken

it. He described to me the dominion of this woman. He told me how she

had transformed him. Till he met her he had been passionate but free,

his own master through many experiences, many intrigues. He was very

frank, Domini. He did not attempt to hide from me that his life had been

evil. It had been a life devoted to the acquiring of experience, of all

possible experience, mental and bodily. I gathered that he had shrunk

from nothing, avoided nothing. His nature had prompted him to rush upon

everything, to grasp at everything. At first I was horrified at what he

told me. I showed it. I remember the second evening after his arrival

we were sitting together in a little arbour at the foot of the vineyard

that sloped up to the cemetery. It was half an hour before the last

service in the chapel. The air was cool with breath from the distant

sea. An intense calm, a heavenly calm, I think, filled the garden,

floated away to the cypresses beside the graves, along the avenue where

stood the Fourteen Stations of the Cross. And he told me, began to tell

me something of his life.

“‘You thought to find happiness in such an existence?’ I exclaimed,

almost with incredulity I believe.

“He looked at me with his shining eyes.

“‘Why not, Father? Do you think I was a madman to do so?’

“‘Surely.’

“‘Why? Is there not happiness in knowledge?’

“‘Knowledge of evil?’

“‘Knowledge of all things that exist in life. I have never sought

for evil specially; I have sought for everything. I wished to bring

everything under my observation, everything connected with human life.’

“‘But human life,’ I said more quietly, ‘passes away from this world. It

is a shadow in a world of shadows.’

“‘You say that,’ he answered abruptly. ‘I wonder if you feel it--feel it

as you feel my hand on yours.’

“He laid his hand on mine. It was hot and dry as if with fever. Its

touch affected me painfully.

“‘Is that hand the hand of a shadow?’ he said. ‘Is this body that

can enjoy and suffer, that can be in heaven or in hell--here--here--a

shadow?’

“‘Within a week it might be less than a shadow.’

“‘And what of that? This is now, this is now. Do you mean what you say?

Do you truly feel that you are a shadow--that this garden is but a world

of shadows? I feel that I, that you, are terrific realities, that this

garden is of immense significance. Look at that sky.’

“The sky above the cypresses was red with sunset. The trees looked black

beneath it. Fireflies were flitting near the arbour where we sat.

“‘That is the sky that roofs what you would have me believe a world of

shadows. It is like the blood, the hot blood that flows and surges in

the veins of men--in our veins. Ah, but you are a monk!’

“The way he said the last words made me feel suddenly a sense of shame,

Domini. It was as if a man said to another man, ‘You are not a man.’ Can

you--can you understand the feeling I had just then? Something hot and

bitter was in me. A sort of desperate sense of nothingness came over me,

as if I were a skeleton sitting there with flesh and blood and trying to

believe, and to make it believe, that I, too, was and had been flesh and

blood.

“‘Yes, thank God, I am a monk,’ I answered quietly.

“Something in my tone, I think, made him feel that he had been brutal.

“‘I am a brute and a fool,’ he said vehemently. ‘But it is always so

with me. I always feel as if what I want others must want. I always feel

universal. It’s folly. You have your vocation, I mine. Yours is to pray,

mine is to live.’

“Again I was conscious of the bitterness. I tried to put it from me.

“‘Prayer is life,’ I answered, ‘to me, to us who are here.’

“‘Prayer! Can it be? Can it be vivid as the life of experience, as

the life that teaches one the truth of men and women, the truth of

creation--joy, sorrow, aspiration, lust, ambition of the intellect and

the limbs? Prayer--’

“‘It is time for me to go,’ I said. ‘Are you coming to the chapel?’

“‘Yes,’ he answered almost eagerly. ‘I shall look down on you from my

lonely gallery. Perhaps I shall be able to feel the life of prayer.’

“‘May it be so,’ I said.

“But I think I spoke without confidence, and I know that that evening I

prayed without impulse, coldly, mechanically. The long, dim chapel, with

its lines of monks facing each other in their stalls, seemed to me a

sad place, like a valley of dry bones--for the first time, for the first

time.

“I ought to have gone on the morrow to the Reverend Pere. I ought to

have asked him, begged him to remove me from the _hotellerie_. I ought

to have foreseen what was coming--that this man had a strength to live

greater than my strength to pray; that his strength might overcome mine.

I began to sin that night. Curiosity was alive in me, curiosity about

the life that I had never known, was--so I believed, so I thought I

knew--never to know.

“When I came out of the chapel into the _hotellerie_ I met our guest--I

do not say his name. What would be the use?--in the corridor. It was

almost dark. There were ten minutes before the time for locking up

the door and going to bed. Francois, the servant, was asleep under the

arcade.

“‘Shall we go on to the path and have a last breath of air?’ the

stranger said.

“We stepped out and walked slowly up and down.

“‘Do you not feel the beauty of peace?’ I asked.

“I wanted him to say yes. I wanted him to tell me that peace,

tranquillity, were beautiful. He did not reply for a moment. I heard him

sigh heavily.

“‘If there is peace in the world at all,’ he said at length, ‘it is only

to be found with the human being one loves. With the human being one

loves one might find peace in hell.’

“We did not speak again before we parted for the night.

“Domini, I did not sleep at all that night. It was the first of many

sleepless nights, nights in which my thoughts travelled like winged

Furies--horrible, horrible nights. In them I strove to imagine all the

stranger knew by experience. It was like a ghastly, physical effort. I

strove to conceive of all that he had done--with the view, I told myself

at first, of bringing myself to a greater contentment, of realising how

worthless was all that I had rejected and that he had grasped at. In

the dark I, as it were, spread out his map of life and mine and

examined them. When, still in the dark, I rose to go to the chapel I was

exhausted. I felt unutterably melancholy. That was at first. Presently

I felt an active, gnawing hunger. But--but--I have not come to that yet.

This strange, new melancholy was the forerunner. It was a melancholy

that seemed to be caused by a sense of frightful loneliness such as I

had never previously experienced. Till now I had almost always felt God

with me, and that He was enough. Now, suddenly, I began to feel that I

was alone. I kept thinking of the stranger’s words: ‘If there is peace

in the world at all it is only to be found with the human being one

loves.’

“‘That is false,’ I said to myself again and again. ‘Peace is only to be

found by close union with God. In that I have found peace for many, many

years.’

“I knew that I had been at peace. I knew that I had been happy. And yet,

when I looked back upon my life as a novice and a monk, I now felt as if

I had been happy vaguely, foolishly, bloodlessly, happy only because

I had been ignorant of what real happiness was--not really happy. I

thought of a bird born in a cage and singing there. I had been as that

bird. And then, when I was in the garden, I looked at the swallows

winging their way high in the sunshine, between the garden trees and the

radiant blue, winging their way towards sea and mountains and plains,

and that bitterness, like an acid that burns and eats away fine metal,

was once more at my heart.

“But the sensation of loneliness was the most terrible of all. I

compared union with God, such as I thought I had known, with that other

union spoken of by my guest--union with the human being one loves. I set

the two unions as it were in comparison. Night after night I did this.

Night after night I told over the joys of union with God--joys which

I dared to think I had known--and the joys of union with a loved human

being. On the one side I thought of the drawing near to God in prayer,

of the sensation of approach that comes with earnest prayer, of the

feeling that ears are listening to you, that the great heart is loving

you, the great heart that loves all living things, that you are being

absolutely understood, that all you cannot say is comprehended, and

all you say is received as something precious. I recalled the joy, the

exaltation, that I had known when I prayed. That was union with God.

In such union I had sometimes felt that the world, with all that it

contained of wickedness, suffering and death, was utterly devoid of

power to sadden or alarm the humblest human being who was able to draw

near to God.

“I had had a conquering feeling--not proud--as of one upborne, protected

for ever, lifted to a region in which no enemy could ever be, no

sadness, no faint anxiety even.

“Then I strove to imagine--and this, Domini, was surely a deliberate

sin--exactly what it must be to be united with a beloved human being. I

strove and I was able. For not only did instinct help me, instinct

that had been long asleep, but--I have told you that the stranger was

suffering under an obsession, a terrible dominion. This dominion he

described to me with an openness that perhaps--that indeed I believe--he

would not have shown had I not been a monk. He looked upon me as a being

apart, neither man nor woman, a being without sex. I am sure he did.

And yet he was immensely intelligent. But he knew that I had entered the

monastery as a novice, that I had been there through all my adult life.

And then my manner probably assisted him in his illusion. For I gave--I

believe--no sign of the change that was taking place within me under his

influence. I seemed to be calm, detached, even in my sympathy for

his suffering. For he suffered frightfully. This woman he loved was a

Parisian, he told me. He described her beauty to me, as if in order to

excuse himself for having become the slave to her he was. I suppose she

was very beautiful. He said that she had a physical charm so intense

that few men could resist it, that she was famous throughout Europe for

it. He told me that she was not a good woman. I gathered that she lived

for pleasure, admiration, that she had allowed many men to love her

before he knew her. But she had loved him genuinely. She was not a very

young woman, and she was not a married woman. He said that she was a

woman men loved but did not marry, a woman who was loved by the husbands

of married women, a woman to marry whom would exclude a man from the

society of good women. She had never lived, or thought of living, for

one man till he came into her life. Nor had he ever dreamed of living

for one woman. He had lived to gain experience; she too. But when he met

her--knowing thoroughly all she was--all other women ceased to exist for

him. He became her slave. Then jealousy awoke in him, jealousy of all

the men who had been in her life, who might be in her life again. He was

tortured by loving such a woman--a woman who had belonged to many, who

would no doubt in the future belong to others. For despite the fact that

she loved him he told me that at first he had no illusions about her. He

knew the world too well for that, and he cursed the fate that had bound

him body and soul to what he called a courtesan. Even the fact that she

loved him at first did not blind him to the effect upon character that

her life must inevitably have had. She had dwelt in an atmosphere of

lies, he said, and to lie was nothing to her. Any original refinement

of feeling as regards human relations that she might have had had become

dulled, if it had not been destroyed. At first he blindly, miserably,

resigned himself to this. He said to himself, ‘Fate has led me to love

this sort of woman. I must accept her as she is, with all her defects,

with her instinct for treachery, with her passion for the admiration

of the world, with her incapability for being true to an ideal, or for

isolating herself in the adoration of one man. I cannot get away from

her. She has me fast. I cannot live without her. Then I must bear the

torture that jealousy of her will certainly bring me in silence. I must

conceal it. I must try to kill it. I must make the best of whatever

she will give me, knowing that she can never, with her nature and her

training, be exclusively mine as a good woman might be.’ This he said to

himself. This plan of conduct he traced for himself. But he soon

found that he was not strong enough to keep to it. His jealousy was a

devouring fire, and he could not conceal it. Domini, he described to me

minutely the effect of jealousy in a human heart. I had never imagined

what it was, and, when he described it, I felt as if I looked down into

a bottomless pit lined with the flames of hell. By the depth of that pit

I measured the depth of his passion for this woman, and I gained an idea

of what human love--not the best sort of human love, but still genuine,

intense love of some kind--could be. Of this human love I thought at

night, putting it in comparison with the love God’s creature can have

for God. And my sense of loneliness increased, and I felt as if I had

always been lonely. Does this seem strange to you? In the love of God

was calm, peace, rest, a lying down of the soul in the Almighty arms. In

the other love described to me was restlessness, agitation, torture, the

soul spinning like an atom driven by winds, the heart devoured as by a

disease, a cancer. On the one hand was a beautiful trust, on the other

a ceaseless agony of doubt and terror. And yet I came to feel as if the

one were unreal in comparison with the other, as if in the one were a

loneliness, in the other fierce companionship. I thought of the Almighty

arms, Domini, and of the arms of a woman, and--Domini, I longed to have

known, if only once, the pressure of a woman’s arms about my neck, about

my breast, the touch of a woman’s hand upon my heart.

“And of all this I never spoke at confession. I committed the deadly sin

of keeping back at confession all that.” He stopped. Then he said, “Till

the end my confessions were incomplete, were false.

“The stranger told me that as his love for this woman grew he found it

impossible to follow the plan he had traced for himself of shutting his

eyes to the sight of other eyes admiring, desiring her, of shutting his

ears to the voices that whispered, ‘This it will always be, for others

as well as for you.’ He found it impossible. His jealousy was too

importunate, and he resolved to make any effort to keep her for himself

alone. He knew she had love for him, but he knew that love would not

necessarily, or even probably, keep her entirely faithful to him. She

thought too little of passing intrigues. To her they seemed trifles,

meaningless, unimportant. She told him so, when he spoke his jealousy.

She said, ‘I love you. I do not love these other men. They are in my

life for a moment only.’

“‘And that moment plunges me into hell!’ he said.

“He told her he could not bear it, that it was impossible, that she must

belong to him entirely and solely. He asked her to marry him. She was

surprised, touched. She understood what a sacrifice such a marriage

would be to a man in his position. He was a man of good birth. His

request, his vehement insistence on it, made her understand his love as

she had not understood it before. Yet she hesitated. For so long had

she been accustomed to a life of freedom, of changing _amours_, that she

hesitated to put her neck under the yoke of matrimony. She understood

thoroughly his character and his aim in marrying her. She knew that as

his wife she must bid an eternal farewell to the life she had known. And

it was a life that had become a habit to her, a life that she was fond

of. For she was enormously vain, and she was a--she was a very physical

woman, subject to physical caprices. There are things that I pass over,

Domini, which would explain still more her hesitation. He knew what

caused it, and again he was tortured. But he persisted. And at last he

overcame. She consented to marry him. They were engaged. Domini, I

need not tell you much more, only this fact--which had driven him from

France, destroyed his happiness, brought him to the monastery. Shortly

before the marriage was to take place he discovered that, while they

were engaged, she had yielded to the desires of an old admirer who had

come to bid her farewell and to wish her joy in her new life. He was

tempted, he said, to kill her. But he governed himself and left her.

He travelled. He came to Tunis. He came to La Trappe. He saw the peace

there. He thought, ‘Can I seize it? Can it do something for me?’ He saw

me. He thought, ‘I shall not be quite alone. This monk--he has lived

always in peace, he has never known the torture of women. Might not

intercourse with him help me?’

“Such was his history, such was the history poured, with infinite detail

that I have not told you, day by day, into my ears. It was the history,

you see, of a passion that was mainly physical. I will not say entirely.

I do not know whether any great passion can be entirely physical. But it

was the history of the passion of one body for another body, and he

did not attempt to present it to me as anything else. This man made me

understand the meaning of the body. I had never understood it before.

I had never suspected the immensity of the meaning there is in physical

things. I had never comprehended the flesh. Now I comprehended it.

Loneliness rushed upon me, devoured me--loneliness of the body. ‘God is

a spirit and those that worship him must worship him in spirit.’ Now I

felt that to worship in spirit was not enough. I even felt that it was

scarcely anything. Again I thought of my life as the life of a skeleton

in a world of skeletons. Again the chapel was as a valley of dry bones.

It was a ghastly sensation. I was plunged in the void. I--I--I can’t

tell you my exact sensation, but it was as if I was the loneliest

creature in the whole of the universe, and as if I need not have been

lonely, as if I, in my ignorance and fatuity, had selected loneliness

thinking it was the happiest fate.

“And yet you will say I was face to face with this man’s almost frantic

misery. I was, and it made no difference. I envied him, even in his

present state. He wanted to gain consolation from me if that were

possible. Oh, the irony of my consoling him! In secret I laughed at it

bitterly. When I strove to console him I knew that I was an incarnate

lie. He had told me the meaning of the body and, by so doing, had

snatched from me the meaning of the spirit. And then he said to me,

‘Make me feel the meaning of the spirit. If I can grasp that I may find

comfort.’ He called upon me to give him what I no longer had--the peace

of God that passeth understanding. Domini, can you feel at all what that

was to me? Can you realise? Can you--is it any wonder that I could do

nothing for him, for him who had done such a frightful thing for me? Is

it any wonder? Soon he realised that he would not find peace with me in

the garden. Yet he stayed on. Why? He did not know where to go, what

to do. Life offered him nothing but horror. His love of experiences was

dead. His love of life had completely vanished. He saw the worldly life

as a nightmare, yet he had nothing to put in the place of it. And in the

monastery he was ceaselessly tormented by jealousy. Ceaselessly his mind

was at work about this woman, picturing her in her life of change, of

intrigue, of new lovers, of new hopes and aims in which he had no part,

in which his image was being blotted out, doubtless from her memory

even. He suffered, he suffered as few suffer. But I think I suffered

more. The melancholy was driven on into a gnawing hunger, the gnawing

hunger of the flesh wishing to have lived, wishing to live, wishing

to--to know.

“Domini, to you I can’t say more of that--to you whom I--whom I love

with spirit and flesh. I will come to the end, to the incident which

made the body rise up, strike down the soul, trample out over it into

the world like a wolf that was starving.

“One day the Reverend Pere gave me a special permission to walk with our

visitor beyond the monastery walls towards the sea. Such permission was

an event in my life. It excited me more than you can imagine. I found

that the stranger had begged him to let me come.

“‘Our guest is very fond of you,’ the Reverend Pere said to me. ‘I think

if any human being can bring him to a calmer, happier state of mind and

spirit, you can. You have obtained a good influence over him.’

“Domini, when the Reverend Pere spoke to me thus my mouth was suddenly

contracted in a smile. Devil’s smile, I think. I put up my hand to

my face. I saw the Reverend Pere looking at me with a dawning of

astonishment in his kind, grave eyes, and I controlled myself at once.

But I said nothing. I could not say anything, and I went out from the

parlour quickly, hot with a sensation of shame.

“‘You are coming?’ the stranger said.

“‘Yes,’ I answered.

“It was a fiery day of late June. Africa was bathed in a glare of

light that hurt the eyes. I went into my cell and put on a pair of blue

glasses and my wide straw hat, the hat in which I formerly used to work

in the fields. When I came out my guest was standing on the garden path.

He was swinging a stick in one hand. The other hand, which hung down by

his side, was twitching nervously. In the glitter of the sun his face

looked ghastly. In his eyes there seemed to be terrors watching without

hope.

“‘You are ready?’ he said. ‘Let us go.’

“We set off, walking quickly.

“‘Movement--pace--sometimes that does a little good,’ he said. ‘If one

can exhaust the body the mind sometimes lies almost still for a moment.

If it would only lie still for ever.’

“I said nothing. I could say nothing. For my fever was surely as his

fever.

“‘Where are we going?’ he asked when we reached the little house of the

keeper of the gate by the cemetery.

“‘We cannot walk in the sun,’ I answered. ‘Let us go into the eucalyptus

woods.’

“The first Trappists had planted forests of eucalyptus to keep off the

fever that sometimes comes in the African summer. We made our way along

a tract of open land and came into a deep wood. Here we began to walk

more slowly. The wood was empty of men. The hot silence was profound.

He took off his white helmet and walked on, carrying it in his hand. Not

till we were far in the forest did he speak. Then he said, ‘Father, I

cannot struggle on much longer.’

“He spoke abruptly, in a hard voice.

“‘You must try to gain courage,’ I said.

“‘From where?’ he exclaimed. ‘No, no, don’t say from God. If there is a

God He hates me.’

“When he said that I felt as if my soul shuddered, hearing a frightful

truth spoken about itself. My lips were dry. My heart seemed to shrivel

up, but I made an effort and answered:

“‘God hates no being whom He has created.’

“‘How can you know? Almost every man, perhaps every living man hates

someone. Why not--?’

“‘To compare God with a man is blasphemous,’ I answered.

“‘Aren’t we made in His image? Father, it’s as I said--I can’t struggle

on much longer. I shall have to end it. I wish now--I often wish that I

had yielded to my first impulse and killed her. What is she doing now?

What is she doing now--at this moment?’

“He stood still and beat with his stick on the ground.

“‘You don’t know the infinite torture there is in knowing that, far

away, she is still living that cursed life, that she is free to continue

the acts of which her existence has been full. Every moment I am

imagining--I am seeing--’

“He forced his stick deep into the ground.

“‘If I had killed her,’ he said in a low voice, ‘at least I should know

that she was sleeping--alone--there--there--under the earth. I should

know that her body was dissolved into dust, that her lips could kiss no

man, that her arms could never hold another as they have held me!’

“‘Hush!’ I said sternly. ‘You deliberately torture yourself and me.’ He

glanced up sharply.

“‘You! What do you mean?’

“‘I must not listen to such things,’ I said. ‘They are bad for you and

for me.’

“‘How can they be bad for you--a monk?’

“‘Such talk is evil--evil for everyone.’

“‘I’ll be silent then. I’ll go into the silence. I’ll go soon.’

“I understood that he thought of putting an end to himself.

“‘There are few men,’ I said, speaking with deliberation, with effort,

‘who do not feel at some period of life that all is over for them, that

there is nothing to hope for, that happiness is a dream which will visit

them no more.’

“‘Have you ever felt like that? You speak of it calmly, but have you

ever experienced it?’

“I hesitated. Then I said:

“‘Yes.’

“‘You, who have been a monk for so many years!’

“‘Yes.’

“‘Since you have been here?’

“‘Yes, since then.’

“‘And you would tell me that the feeling passed, that hope came again,

and the dream as you call it?’

“‘I would say that what has lived in a heart can die, as we who live in

this world shall die.’

“‘Ah, that--the sooner the better! But you are wrong. Sometimes a thing

lives in the heart that cannot die so long as the heart beats. Such is

my passion, my torture. Don’t you, a monk--don’t dare to say to me that

this love of mine could die.’

“‘Don’t you wish it to die?’ I asked. ‘You say it tortures you.’

“‘Yes. But no--no--I don’t wish it to die. I could never wish that.’

“I looked at him, I believe, with a deep astonishment.

“‘Ah, you don’t understand!’ he said. ‘You don’t understand. At all

costs one must keep it--one’s love. With it I am--as you see. But

without it--man, without it, I should be nothing--no more than that.’

“He picked up a rotten leaf, held it to me, threw it down on the ground.

I hardly looked at it. He had said to me: ‘Man!’ That word, thus said by

him, seemed to me to mark the enormous change in me, to indicate that it

was visible to the eyes of another, the heart of another. I had passed

from the monk--the sexless being--to the man. He set me beside himself,

spoke of me as if I were as himself. An intense excitement surged up

in me. I think--I don’t know what I should have said--done--but at that

moment a boy, who acted as a servant at the monastery, came running

towards us with a letter in his hand.

“‘It is for Monsieur!’ he said. ‘It was left at the gate.’

“‘A letter for me!’ the stranger said.

“He held out his hand and took it indifferently. The boy gave it, and

turning, went away through the wood. Then the stranger glanced at the

envelope. Domini, I wish I could make you see what I saw then, the

change that came. I can’t. There are things the eyes must see. The

tongue can’t tell them. The ghastly whiteness went out of his face. A

hot flood of scarlet rushed over it up to the roots of his hair. His

hands and his whole body began to tremble violently. His eyes, which

were fixed on the envelope, shone with an expression--it was like all

the excitement in the world condensed into two sparks. He dropped his

stick and sat down on the trunk of a tree, fell down almost.

“‘Father!’ he muttered, ‘it’s not been through the post--it’s not been

through the post!’

“I did not understand.

“‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

“‘What----’

“The flush left his face. He turned deadly white again. He held out the

letter.

“‘Read it for me!’ he said. ‘I can’t see--I can’t see anything.’

“I took the letter. He covered his eyes with his hands. I opened it and

read:

“‘GRAND HOTEL, TUNIS.

“‘I have found out where you are. I have come. Forgive me--if you can.

I will marry you--or I will live with you. As you please; but I cannot

live without you. I know women are not admitted to the monastery. Come

out on the road that leads to Tunis. I am there. At least come for a

moment and speak to me. VERONIQUE.’

“Domini, I read this slowly; and it was as if I read my own fate. When I

had finished he got up. He was still pale as ashes and trembling.

“‘Which is the way to the road?’ he said. ‘Do you know?’

“‘Yes.’

“‘Take me there. Give me your arm, Father.’

“He took it, leaned on it heavily. We walked through the wood towards

the highroad. I had almost to support him. The way seemed long. I felt

tired, sick, as if I could scarcely move, as if I were bearing--as if I

were bearing a cross that was too heavy for me. We came at last out of

the shadow of the trees into the glare of the sun. A flat field divided

us from the white road.

“‘Is there--is there a carriage?’ he whispered in my ear.

“I looked across the field and saw on the road a carriage waiting.

“‘Yes,’ I said.

“I stopped, and tried to take his arm from mine.

“‘Go,’ I said. ‘Go on!’

“‘I can’t. Come with me, Father.’

“We went on in the blinding sun. I looked down on the dry earth as I

walked. Presently I saw at my feet the white dust of the road. At the

same time I heard a woman’s cry. The stranger took his arm violently

from mine.

“‘Father,’ he said. ‘Good-bye--God bless you!’

“He was gone. I stood there. In a moment I heard a roll of wheels. Then

I looked up. I saw a man and a woman together, Domini. Their faces were

like angels’ faces--with happiness. The dust flew up in the sunshine.

The wheels died away--I was alone.

“Presently--I think after a very long time--I turned and went back to

the monastery. Domini, that night I left the monastery. I was as one

mad. The wish to live had given place to the determination to live. I

thought of nothing else. In the chapel that evening I heard nothing--I

did not see the monks. I did not attempt to pray, for I knew that I

was going. To go was an easy matter for me. I slept alone in the

_hotellerie_, of which I had the key. When it was night I unlocked

the door. I walked to the cemetery--between the Stations of the Cross.

Domini, I did not see them. In the cemetery was a ladder, as I told you.

“Just before dawn I reached my brother’s house outside of Tunis, not far

from the Bardo. I knocked. My brother himself came down to know who was

there. He, as I told you, was without religion, and had always hated my

being a monk. I told him all, without reserve. I said, ‘Help me to go

away. Let me go anywhere--alone.’ He gave me clothes, money. I shaved

off my beard and moustache. I shaved my head, so that the tonsure was

no longer visible. In the afternoon of that day I left Tunis. I was let

loose into life. Domini--Domini, I won’t tell you where I wandered till

I came to the desert, till I met you.

“I was let loose into life, but, with my freedom, the wish to live

seemed to die in me. I was afraid of life. I was haunted by terrors. I

had been a monk so long that I did not know how to live as other men. I

did not live, I never lived--till I met you. And then--then I realised

what life may be. And then, too, I realised fully what I was. I

struggled, I fought myself. You know--now, if you look back, I think you

know that I tried--sometimes, often--I tried to--to--I tried to----”

His voice broke.

“That last day in the garden I thought that I had conquered myself, and

it was in that moment that I fell for ever. When I knew you loved me I

could fight no more. Do you understand? You have seen me, you have lived

with me, you have divined my misery. But don’t--don’t think, Domini,

that it ever came from you. It was the consciousness of my lie to you,

my lie to God, that--that--I can’t go on--I can’t tell you--I can’t tell

you--you know.”

He was silent. Domini said nothing, did not move. He did not look at

her, but her silence seemed to terrify him. He drew back from it sharply

and turned to the desert. He stared across the vast spaces lit up by the

moon. Still she did not move.

“I’ll go--I’ll go!” he muttered.

And he stepped forward. Then Domini spoke.

“Boris!” she said.

He stopped.

“What is it?” he murmured hoarsely.

“Boris, now at last you--you can pray.”

He looked at her as if awe-stricken.

“Pray!” he whispered. “You tell me I can pray--now!”

“Now at last.”

She went into the tent and left him alone. He stood where he was for a

moment. He knew that, in the tent, she was praying. He stood, trying

to listen to her prayer. Then, with an uncertain hand, he felt in his

breast. He drew out the wooden crucifix. He bent down his head, touched

it with his lips, and fell upon his knees in the desert.

The music had ceased in the city. There was a great silence.

BOOK VI. THE JOURNEY BACK

CHAPTER XXVII

The good priest of Amara, strolling by chance at the dinner-hour of

the following day towards the camp of the hospitable strangers, was

surprised and saddened to find only the sand-hill strewn with debris.

The tents, the camels, the mules, the horses--all were gone. No servants

greeted him. No cook was busy. No kind hostess bade him come in and stay

to dine. Forlornly he glanced around and made inquiry. An Arab told him

that in the morning the camp had been struck and ere noon was far on

its way towards the north. The priest had been on horseback to an

neighbouring oasis, so had heard nothing of this flitting. He asked its

explanation, and was told a hundred lies. The one most often repeated

was to the effect that Monsieur, the husband of Madame, was overcome by

the heat, and that for this reason the travellers were making their way

towards the cooler climate that lay beyond the desert.

As he heard this a sensation of loneliness came to the priest. His

usually cheerful countenance was overcast with gloom. For a moment

he loathed his fate in the sands and sighed for the fleshpots of

civilisation. With his white umbrella spread above his helmet he stood

still and gazed towards the north across the vast spaces that were

lemon-yellow in the sunset. He fancied that on the horizon he saw

faintly a cloud of sand grains whirling, and imagined it stirred up by

the strangers’ caravan. Then he thought of the rich lands of the Tell,

of the olive groves of Tunis, of the blue Mediterranean, of France, his

country which he had not seen for many years. He sighed profoundly.

“Happy people,” he thought to himself. “Rich, free, able to do as they

like, to go where they will! Why was I born to live in the sand and to

be alone?”

He was moved by envy. But then he remembered his intercourse with

Androvsky on the previous day.

“After all,” he thought more comfortably, “he did not look a happy man!”

And he took himself to task for his sin of envy, and strolled to the inn

by the fountain where he paid his pension.

The same day, in the house of the marabout of Beni-Hassan, Count Anteoni

received a letter brought from Amara by an Arab. It was as follows:

“AMARA.

“MY DEAR FRIEND: Good-bye. We are just leaving. I had expected to be

here longer, but we must go. We are returning to the north and shall

not penetrate farther into the desert. I shall think of you, and of your

journey on among the people of your faith. You said to me, when we sat

in the tent door, that now you could pray in the desert. Pray in the

desert for us. And one thing more. If you never return to Beni-Mora, and

your garden is to pass into other hands, don’t let it go into the hands

of a stranger. I could not bear that. Let it come to me. At any price

you name. Forgive me for writing thus. Perhaps you will return, or

perhaps, even if you do not, you will keep your garden.--Your Friend,

DOMINI.”

In a postscript was an address which would always find her.

Count Anteoni read this letter two or three times carefully, with a

grave face.

“Why did she not put Domini Androvsky?” he said to himself. He locked

the letter in a drawer. All that night he was haunted by thoughts of

the garden. Again and again it seemed to him that he stood with Domini

beside the white wall and saw, in the burning distance of the desert, at

the call of the Mueddin, the Arabs bowing themselves in prayer, and

the man--the man to whom now she had bound herself by the most holy

tie--fleeing from prayer as if in horror.

“But it was written,” he murmured to himself. “It was written in the

sand and in fire: ‘The fate of every man have we bound about his neck.’”

In the dawn when, turning towards the rising sun, he prayed, he

remembered Domini and her words: “Pray in the desert for us.” And in the

Garden of Allah he prayed to Allah for her, and for Androvsky.

Meanwhile the camp had been struck, and the first stage of the journey

northward, the journey back, had been accomplished. Domini had given the

order of departure, but she had first spoken with Androvsky.

After his narrative, and her words that followed it, he did not come

into the tent. She did not ask him to. She did not see him in the

moonlight beyond the tent, or when the moonlight waned before the coming

of the dawn. She was upon her knees, her face hidden in her hands,

striving as surely few human beings have ever had to strive in the

difficult paths of life. At first she had felt almost calm. When she had

spoken to Androvsky there had even been a strange sensation that was not

unlike triumph in her heart. In this triumph she had felt disembodied,

as if she were a spirit standing there, removed from earthly suffering,

but able to contemplate, to understand, to pity it, removed from earthly

sin, but able to commit an action that might help to purge it.

When she said to Androvsky, “Now you can pray,” she had passed into a

region where self had no existence. Her whole soul was intent upon this

man to whom she had given all the treasures of her heart and whom she

knew to be writhing as souls writhe in Purgatory. He had spoken at last,

he had laid bare his misery, his crime, he had laid bare the agony of

one who had insulted God, but who repented his insult, who had wandered

far away from God, but who could never be happy in his wandering, who

could never be at peace even in a mighty human love unless that love was

consecrated by God’s contentment with it. As she stood there Domini had

had an instant of absolutely clear sight into the depths of another’s

heart, another’s nature. She had seen the monk in Androvsky, not

slain by his act of rejection, but alive, sorrow-stricken, quivering,

scourged. And she had been able to tell this monk--as God seemed to be

telling her, making of her his messenger--that now at last he might pray

to a God who again would hear him, as He had heard him in the garden of

El-Largani, in his cell, in the chapel, in the fields. She had been able

to do this. Then she had turned away, gone into the tent and fallen upon

her knees.

But with that personal action her sense of triumph passed away. As her

body sank down her soul seemed to sink down with it into bottomless

depths of blackness where no light had ever been, into an underworld,

airless, peopled with invisible violence. And it seemed to her as if

it was her previous flight upward which had caused this descent into a

place which had surely never before been visited by a human soul. All

the selflessness suddenly vanished from her, and was replaced by a

burning sense of her own personality, of what was due to it, of what had

been done to it, of what it now was. She saw it like a cloth that had

been white and that now was stained with indelible filth. And anger came

upon her, a bitter fury, in which she was inclined to cry out, not only

against man, but against God. The strength of her nature was driven into

a wild bitterness, the sweet waters became acrid with salt. She had been

able a moment before to say to Androvsky, almost with tenderness, “Now

at last you can pray.” Now she was on her knees hating him, hating--yes,

surely hating--God. It was a frightful sensation.

Soul and body felt defiled. She saw Androvsky coming into her clean

life, seizing her like a prey, rolling her in filth that could never be

cleansed. And who had allowed him to do her this deadly wrong? God. And

she was on her knees to this God who had permitted this! She was in the

attitude of worship. Her whole being rebelled against prayer. It seemed

to her as if she made a furious physical effort to rise from her knees,

but as if her body was paralysed and could not obey her will. She

remained kneeling, therefore, like a woman tied down, like a blasphemer

bound by cords in the attitude of prayer, whose soul was shrieking

insults against heaven.

Presently she remembered that outside Androvsky was praying, that she

had meant to join with him in prayer. She had contemplated, then, a

further, deeper union with him. Was she a madwoman? Was she a slave?

Was she as one of those women of history who, seized in a rape, resigned

themselves to love and obey their captors? She began to hate herself.

And still she knelt. Anyone coming in at the tent door would have seen a

woman apparently entranced in an ecstasy of worship.

This great love of hers, to what had it brought her? This awakening of

her soul, what was its meaning? God had sent a man to rouse her

from sleep that she might look down into hell. Again and again, with

ceaseless reiteration, she recalled the incidents of her passion in the

desert. She thought of the night at Arba when Androvsky blew out the

lamp. That night had been to her a night of consecration. Nothing in

her soul had risen up to warn her. No instinct, no woman’s instinct, had

stayed her from unwitting sin. The sand-diviner had been wiser than she;

Count Anteoni more far-seeing; the priest of Beni-Mora more guided by

holiness, by the inner flame that flickers before the wind that blows

out of the caverns of evil. God had blinded her in order that she might

fall, had brought Androvsky to her in order that her religion, her

Catholic faith, might be made hideous to her for ever. She trembled all

over as she knelt. Her life had been sad, even tormented. And she had

set out upon a pilgrimage to find peace. She had been led to Beni-Mora.

She remembered her arrival in Africa, its spell descending upon her,

her sensation of being far off, of having left her former life with its

sorrows for ever. She remembered the entrancing quiet of Count Anteoni’s

garden, how as she entered it she seemed to be entering an earthly

Paradise, a place prepared by God for one who was weary as she was

weary, for one who longed to be renewed as she longed to be renewed.

And in that Paradise, in the inmost recess of it, she had put her hands

against Androvsky’s temples and given her life, her fate, her heart into

his keeping. That was why the garden was there, that she might be led to

commit this frightful action in it. Her soul felt physically sick. As

to her body--but just then she scarcely thought of the body. For she was

thinking of her soul as of a body, as if it were the core of the body

blackened, sullied, destroyed for ever. She was hot with shame, she was

hot with a fiery indignation. Always, since she was a child, if she

were suddenly touched by anyone whom she did not love, she had had an

inclination to strike a blow on the one who touched her. Now it was as

if an unclean hand had been laid on her soul. And the soul quivered with

longing to strike back.

Again she thought of Beni-Mora, of all that had taken place there. She

realised that during her stay there a crescendo of calm had taken place

within her, calm of the spirit, a crescendo of strength, spiritual

strength, a crescendo of faith and of hope. The religion which had

almost seemed to be slipping from her she had grasped firmly again. Her

soul had arrived in Beni-Mora an invalid and had become a convalescent.

It had been reclining wearily, fretfully. In Beni-Mora it had stood up,

walked, sung as the morning stars sang together. But then--why? If this

was to be the end--why--why?

And at this question she paused, as before a great portal that was shut.

She went back. She thought again of this beautiful crescendo, of this

gradual approach to the God from whom she had been if not entirely

separated at any rate set a little apart. Could it have been only in

order that her catastrophe might be the more complete, her downfall the

more absolute?

And then, she knew not why, she seemed to see in the hands that were

pressed against her face words written in fire, and to read them slowly

as a child spelling out a great lesson, with an intense attention, with

a labour whose result would be eternal recollection:

“Love watcheth, and sleeping, slumbereth not. When weary it is not

tired; when straitened it is not constrained; when frightened it is

not disturbed; but like a vivid flame and a burning torch it mounteth

upwards and securely passeth through all. Whosover loveth knoweth the

cry of this voice.”

The cry of this voice! At that moment, in the vast silence of the

desert, she seemed to hear it. And it was the cry of her own voice. It

was the cry of the voice of her own soul. Startled, she lifted her face

from her hands and listened. She did not look out at the tent door, but

she saw the moonlight falling upon the matting that was spread upon

the sand within the tent, and she repeated, “Love watcheth--Love

watcheth--Love watcheth,” moving her lips like the child who reads with

difficulty. Then came the thought, “I am watching.”

The passion of personal anger had died away as suddenly as it had come.

She felt numb and yet excited. She leaned forward and once more laid her

face in her hands.

“Love watcheth--I am watching.” Then a moment--then--“God is watching

me.”