_Done into English by the Editor_
The Abbé Marignan bore well his title of Soldier of the Church. He
was a tall priest, and spare; fanatical, perpetually in a state of
spiritual exaltation, but upright of soul. His every belief was
settled, without even a thought of wavering. He imagined sincerely that
he understood his God thoroughly, that he penetrated His designs, His
will, His purposes.
As with long strides he promenaded the garden walk of his little
country presbytery, sometimes a question would arise in his mind:
“Why did God create that?” And, mentally taking the place of God,
he searched obstinately for the answer--and nearly always found it.
It would not have been like him to murmur, in an outburst of pious
humility: “O Lord, thy designs are impenetrable!” Rather might he say
to himself: “I am the servant of God; I ought to know the reasons for
what He does, or if I know them not, I ought to divine them.”
To him, all nature seemed created with a logic as absolute as it
was admirable. The “wherefore” and the “because” always corresponded
perfectly. Dawn was made to gladden our waking, the day to ripen the
crops, the rain to water them, the evening to prepare for slumber, and
the night darkened for sleep.
The four seasons met perfectly all the needs of agriculture; and to the
priest it was quite inconceivable that nature had no designs, and that,
on the contrary, all living things were subjects of the same inexorable
laws of period, climate, and matter.
But he did hate woman! He hated her unconscionably, and by instinct
held her in contempt. Often did he repeat the words of Christ, “Woman,
what have I to do with thee?” And he would add, “One might think
that God Himself did not feel quite content with this one work of
his hands!” To him, indeed, woman was the child twelve times unclean
of whom the poet speaks. She was the temptress who had ensnared the
first man, and who constantly kept up her work of damnation--she was a
feeble, dangerous, and mysteriously troublous creature. And even more
than her accursed body did he hate her loving spirit.
He had often felt that women were regarding him tenderly, and even
though he knew himself to be invulnerable, it exasperated him to
recognize that need for loving which fluttered ever-present in their
hearts.
In his opinion, God had created woman only to tempt man and to test
him. She should never be even approached without those defensive
measures which one would take, and those fears which one would harbor,
when nearing a trap. In fact, she was precisely like a trap, with her
lips open and arms extended towards man.
Only toward nuns did he exercise any indulgence, for they were rendered
harmless by their vow. But he treated them harshly just the same,
because, ever-living in the depths of their pent-up and humbled hearts,
he discerned that everlasting tenderness which constantly surged up
toward him, priest though he was.
Of all this he was conscious in their upturned glances, more limpid
with pious feeling than the looks of monks; in the spiritual
exaltations in which their sex indulged; in their ecstasies of love
toward Christ, which made the priest indignant because it was really
woman’s love, carnal love. Of this detestable tenderness he was
conscious, too, in their very docility, in the gentleness of their
voices when they addressed him, in their downcast eyes, and in their
submissive tears when he rudely rebuked them.
So he would shake his cassock when he left the convent door, and stride
off, stretching his legs as if fleeing before some danger.
Now the Abbé had a niece who lived with her mother in a little house
near by. He was determined to make of her a sister of charity.
She was pretty, giddy, and a born tease. When he preached at her, she
laughed; and when he became angry with her, she kissed him vehemently,
pressing him to her bosom, while he would instinctively seek to
disengage himself from this embrace--which, all the same, gave him a
thrill of exquisite joy, awaking deep within his soul that feeling of
fatherhood which slumbers in every man.
Often as they walked together along the footpaths through the fields,
he would talk with her of God, of his God; but she scarcely heard him,
for she was looking at the sky, the grass, the flowers, with a joy
of life which beamed from her eyes. Sometimes she would dart away to
catch some flying creature, crying as she brought it back: “See, my
uncle, how pretty it is; I should like to kiss it.” And that passion to
kiss insects, or lilac flowers, disturbed, irritated, and repelled the
priest, who recognized even in that longing the ineradicable love which
blooms perennial in the heart of woman.
And now one day the sacristan’s wife, who was the Abbé Marignan’s
housekeeper, cautiously told him that his niece had a lover!
He was dreadfully shocked, and stood gasping for breath, lather all
over his face, for he was shaving.
When at length he was able to think and speak, he cried: “It is not
true. You are lying, Mélanie!”
But the peasant woman laid her hand over her heart: “May our Lord judge
me if I am lying, _monsieur le curé_. I tell you she goes out to
him every night as soon as your sister is in bed. They meet each other
down by the river. You need only go there between ten o’clock and
midnight to see for yourself.”
He stopped rubbing his chin and began pacing the room violently, as was
his custom in times of serious thought. When at length he did try to
finish his shaving he cut himself three times, from nose to ear.
All day long he was silent, though almost exploding with indignation
and wrath. To his priestly rage against the power of love was now added
the indignation of a spiritual father, of a teacher, of the guardian of
souls, who has been deceived, robbed, and trifled with by a mere child.
He felt that egotistical suffocation which parents experience when
their daughter tells them that she has selected a husband without their
advice and in defiance of their wishes.
After dinner he tried to read a little, but he could not--he grew more
and more exasperated. When the clock struck ten, he grasped his cane, a
formidable oaken club which he always carried when he went out at night
to visit the sick. With a smile he examined this huge cudgel, gripped
it in his solid, countryman’s fist, and flourished it menacingly in the
air. Then, suddenly, with grinding teeth, he brought it down upon a
chair-back, which fell splintered to the floor.
He opened his door to go out; but paused upon the threshold, surprised
by such a glory of moonlight as one rarely sees.
And as he was endowed with an exalted soul of such a sort as the
Fathers of the Church, those poetic seers, must have possessed, he
became suddenly entranced, moved by the grand and tranquil beauty of
the pale-faced night.
In his little garden, all suffused with the tender radiance, his
fruit-trees, set in rows, outlined in shadows upon the paths their
slender limbs of wood, scarce clothed with verdure. The giant
honeysuckle, clinging to the house wall, exhaled its delicious, honeyed
breath--the soul of perfume seemed to hover about in the warm, clear
night.
He began to breathe deep, drinking in the air as drunkards drink
their wine; and he walked slowly, ravished, amazed, his niece almost
forgotten.
When he reached the open country he paused to gaze upon the broad sweep
of landscape, all deluged by that caressing radiance, all drowned in
that soft and sensuous charm of peaceful night. Momently the frogs
sounded out their quick metallic notes, and distant nightingales added
to the seductive moonlight their welling music, which charms to dreams
without thought--that gossamer, vibrant melody born only to mate with
kisses.
The Abbé moved on again, his courage unaccountably failing. He felt as
though he were enfeebled, suddenly exhausted--he longed to sit down, to
linger there, to glorify God for all His works.
A little farther on, following the winding of the little river, curved
a row of tall poplars. Suspended about and above the banks, enwrapping
the whole sinuous course of the stream with a sort of light transparent
down, was a fine white mist, shot through by the moon-rays, and
transmuted by them into gleaming silver.
The priest paused once again, stirred to the deeps of his soul by a
growing, an irresistible feeling of tenderness.
And a doubt, an undefined disquietude, crept over him; he discerned the
birth of one of those questions which now and again came to him.
Why had God made all this? Since the night was ordained for slumber,
for unconsciousness, for repose, for forgetfulness of everything, why
should He make it lovelier than the day, sweeter than dawn and sunset?
And that star, slow-moving, seductive, more poetic than the sun, so
like to destiny, and so delicate that seemingly it was created to
irradiate things too subtle, too refined, for the greater orb--why was
it come to illuminate all the shades?
Why did not the most accomplished of all singing birds repose now like
the others, instead of singing in the unquiet dark?
Why was this semi-veil cast over the world? Why this sighing of the
heart, this tumult of the soul, this languor of the flesh?
Why this show of charms, never seen by men because they are asleep? For
whose eyes was all this sublime spectacle designed, all this wealth of
poetic loveliness diffused from heaven over the earth?
And the Abbé did not understand it at all.
But there below, at the very edge of the field, under the arching trees
wet with luminous mist, two shadows appeared, walking side by side.
The man was the taller, and had his arm about his sweetheart’s neck;
and from time to time he bent to kiss her forehead. Suddenly they
animated the lifeless landscape, which enveloped their figures like a
divine frame fashioned expressly for them. They seemed, those two, like
a single being, the being for whom was created this tranquil, silent
night. Like a living answer, the answer which his Master had sent to
his question, they moved toward the priest.
Overwhelmed, his heart throbbing, he stood still, and it seemed as
though there spread before him some Biblical scene, like the loves
of Ruth and Boaz, the working out of the Lord’s will in one of those
majestic dramas set forth in the lives of the saints. The verses of the
Song of Songs, the ardent cries, the call of the body--all the glowing
romance of that poem so aflame with tenderness and love, began to sing
itself into his mind.
And he said to himself: “Perhaps God made nights such as this in order
to cast the veil of the ideal over the loves of men.”
He withdrew before this pair who went ever arm in arm. True, it was
his niece; but now he asked himself if he had not been upon the verge
of disobeying God. And, indeed, if God did not permit love, why did he
visibly encompass it with glory such as this?
And he fled, bewildered, almost ashamed, as if he had penetrated into a
temple wherein he had no right to enter.