“If I don’t eat them all for my dinner,” said Master Peter. “You’ll have been fed so full at Provins that you’ll have room for nothing when you get back. It’s time you were away, lad. Where are you to meet Hugh with the pony?”
“He said he was coming to Mass at Coincy,” said Thibault. “I’m walking that length. I said I’d serve Mass for old Herluin.” He hesitated. “And, sir, I was to tell you he would be proud if he might give you your dinner.”
Abelard was silent for a moment. “I think I’ll let you do duty for the two of us, Thibault,” he said, with seeming lightness. “I’ll go down to-morrow. All Souls are more my line of country than All Saints.”
Thibault’s face fell. But it was not for him to preach attendance at the sacraments to his god. Besides, he might have known that he would shirk dinner with old Herluin.
“I’ll be getting away, then,” he said. “You’ll cook yourself the trout, won’t you?”
“I’ll cook myself something,” said Abelard. “But I lost the last trout I cooked in the fire. It fell off the stick.”
“Well, there’s two eggs,” said Thibault. “And I’ll cook the trout myself when I get back this evening.”
“Take my cloak off the bed,” said Abelard.” It’s warmer than yours. There’ll be a frost to-night.”
Thibault stooped his head under the low thatch, and came out with it over his arm. “I’m going to ask a calf-skin from my father,” said he, “to make us a pair of boots apiece for the winter.”
“You’ll ask your father for nothing, Thibault, do you hear?” said Abelard, suddenly flushing. “I was shamed to my soul the last time you came home. If I can’t dig, at least I won’t beg.”
Thibault looked at him obstinately. “I’ll beg none,” said he. “But I’m going to ask him for a calf-skin to make us boots, and a barrel of salt herrings against the time the water gets frozen. I cost him a deal more in one week in Paris, I can tell you, than anything I get from him now. And sure the old man might as well make his soul this way as any other.”
Abelard opened his mouth to fiery rejoinder, and shut it again. The look of dumb patience on his face all but broke Thibault’s heart.
“I’ll ask him for nothing, Master Peter,” said he. “But if he chooses to give me this and that, you wouldn’t have me refuse my own father?”
“I don’t know why you stay with me, Thibault,” said Abelard. “But I’d starve in a week if you didn’t. There, lad, get along with you.” He forced himself to smile and turned back with a great show of industry to his stone. “And, Thibault,” he said, but without looking round, “make my excuses to Herluin, and thank him kindly for his hospitality.”
Thibault looked at him for a moment with sorrowful eyes, and disappeared down the track to the river. Thomas walked after him a step or two, but realising that the pace was beyond him, came back and sat by the god of his god.
“And I couldn’t even send the boy away happy for his one holiday,” thought Abelard. “But to be thankful for the offer of a dinner from a little prying, drunken priest. And live on the charity of peasants that think I’m a kind of a wizard, and that fat oaf, Thibault’s father. And none of them sure that I’m not a heretic.” He dropped the chisel on the grass and stood up. He must not let himself think.
Yet what was a man to do in this wilderness but think? He gazed around him, and in spite of himself the tiny dwelling-places that he and Thibault had made, looked at him reproachfully. They were like the little houses that he and Guillaume and Raoul used to build in the valley where the hazel trees grew. He twitched his mind away. Was there any one channel down which it could run, now that half his life was shut off from him, and half the chambers or his brain bolted and shuttered and dark, only that his thoughts at night fluttered in them like bats? Gilles said she was prioress now. Someday perhaps, when she was an old woman, peter they might see one another again. But now, at the mere sight of her handwriting his heart turned over. Last year they had brought the mortuary roll of St. Vitalis to St. Denis, for the brethren to inscribe their sympathy with the bereaved house. The roll had come to St. Denis from Argenteuil: some one at Argenteuil had written half a dozen lines on death. It was not signed, but it was in her script. It had been several nights before he had quiet sleep. Someday she would cease to haunt him. Someday he would be able to think of her as God’s bride, who had been his wild love in just such woods as these. But what was the desire of the flesh beside the desire of the mind?
He looked about him in despair. Under the beeches the brown hens walked and scuffled, flicking the yellow and russet leaves this way and that, absorbed and happy: from the pool below came the flat, contented voices of the ducks. He took his staff, and flung into the woods.
As he walked, the tumult in his brain died, leaving the dull, familiar ache. It was almost easier, after all, he thought, to bear the sudden resurrection of remembrance, than this grief without a ripple, without ebb or flow, a kind of dark water that lay sullen at his heart root. For a while in St. Médard he had almost gone mad. He had been so utterly confident, so sure of God: and God had forsaken him, had gone over to the side of Alberic and Ralph and Palestrina; of jealousy and stupidity and hypocrisy. They had tricked and cheated and lied, and they had won. They had destroyed his book that had been his burnt-offering to God, the symbol that he was now and for ever Christ’s philosopher. They had destroyed his book and Alberic was Abel, and God had had respect to his offering, and he was the branded Cain.
Walking heedlessly but rapidly, he had covered more ground than he knew; it was with a shock of surprise that he found himself where the trees thinned on the hill above the valley where Coincy lay. Like a wild duck’s nest, he thought, looking down at it, and his heart softened at the patches of the fields, the tiny roofs. He could have sat there long enough, blessing them, as he had sat watching the antics of Thibault’s yellow ducklings, so small, so eager to live, so pitifully easy to crush. But even as he stood watching, brooding over them in a grim, thwarted tenderness, a small sound came to his ears, high and thin almost as a gnat’s voice. The tiny bell on the church had begun to ring, summoning these tiny souls, hedgers and ditchers and shambling old men and women with child, to sit down with Apostles and Martyrs, St. Ambrose and St. Augustine and the unnumbered manes of the unnamed holy dead. And listening, a great longing took him to go in and sit among them: to feel no more the outcast, the man whom God had rejected and would have no longer to serve Him. It might be that the miracle would happen, that he might receive the Host without such a spring of bitterness in his heart as turned the sacrament to poison.
The village seemed empty as he passed through it: every soul must be in church. He reached the graveyard and passed up the uneven stones to the low door. But there a queer reluctance seized him: he sat down on the stone ledge of the porch to take breathing-space, and courage to go in. The Alleluia was just ending: there was a pause, and Herluin’s hoarse relaxed voice began the Gospel, reading aloud the Beatitudes that are for broken men, for men that are poor in spirit, for men that mourn, for men that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for men that are reviled and all manner of evil spoken against them falsely Rejoice and be exceeding glad for great is your reward in heaven. Well, he was broken enough, he had mourned, he had hungered and thirsted after righteousness, at any rate after truth, there had been evil enough said of him. But he was not blessed. There were some that God rejected, and He had rejected him.
Then fell a silence, then Thibault’s young voice, the boys’ voices following it. “The souls of the just are in the hand of God, and the torment of malice shall not touch them: in the sight of the unwise they seemed to die, but they are in peace.”
He rose and went quietly out of the porch and past the quiet graves. The torment of malice had touched him: the hand of God was not for him. The whole gentleness of the November day, the day that seemed to him more than any other to have Good Frida
y’s peace, dreamt above the world, but not on him. He had no anger now, no bitterness even. He had blasphemed God once, but he blasphemed no more. “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him”—why did they never finish that sentence as Job finished it?—“but I will maintain my ways before Him, . . . My righteousness I holdfast, and I will not let it go.”
He halted suddenly, for in this queer silence of the earth, with all the saints intent upon the prayers of the faithful, and all the world droning with devotion like a hive of bees, now if ever it seemed to him that he might speak and God would hear, with only they two left face to face. He stood quiet and grim, his face famed to the quiet sky. All the traditions of his faith, all the memories of his life were forcing him upon his knees, but he would not. His mother’s silent abnegation, the humility of his father’s walk with God, the whole divine consolation of psalmist and prophet pleaded with him in vain. “As far as east is distant from the west, so far hath He removed our transgressions from us.” Let him first be shown wherein he had transgressed. “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him.” He asked for no pity, he asked for justice, the justice that a man would give his fellow, aye, that a lord would give his serf.
And standing there, braced against heaven, the wind that had blown upon him once and been forgotten, breathed upon him again. It came without observation, for the kingdom of God is within: a frail wisp of memory, voiceless as the drift of thistledown, inevitable as sunrise. “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.”
He saw no heavens opened: he saw no Son of Man. For a moment it seemed to him that all the vital forces in his body were withdrawing themselves, that the sight had left his eyes and the blood was ebbing from his heart: he felt the grey breath of dissolution, the falling asunder of body and soul. For a moment: then his spirit leapt toward heaven in naked adoration. Stripped of all human emotion, with no warmth of contrition, with no passion of devotion, but with every power of his mind, with every pulse of his body, he worshipped God.
Hours later, he found himself on the edge of the forest where the road came up from the ford and passed over the hill to Rigny-la-Vanneuse. Instinctively he had left the river for the hills, and had walked mile after mile, skirting the woods, keeping the valley below him. Yet it was no blind ecstasy that had driven him so far: his brain had never worked with so steady a rhythm. It was not so much that the first glory had passed as that it had transmuted itself into a grave clarity: and halting now at the boundary stone, he turned and looked back along the valley, its small, green meadows by the river and the patches of ploughed earth, torn open to be softened by frost and rain. The mist had cleared, and though the sky was still veiled, the veil was translucent.
“‘And now men see not the brightness in the clouds’” said Abelard to himself, “‘but the wind passeth and cleanseth them.’”
It had been so with him. In the long hours of his ceaseless walking, ceaseless thinking, he had been aware of no conscious examining of himself. But as in that definition Gilles had quoted to him of infinity, the years of his intellectual majority had seemed present to him in a single moment of time, with all their implications, the shadows that they cast before and after, above all the years since he had turned his back on the world and as he had thought, sought the Kingdom of God. Every sentence he had written stood out before him, that glorious array of embattled spears, his strong chivalry of all the powers of the soul, of all the strength of the mind, pagan and Christian; Plato and Aristotle fighting side by side with Augustine and Jerome and Origen, for the conquest of the spirit’s Palestine, for the worship of the Father in spirit and in truth. But for whom was the glory of that warfare? He had fought against ignorance, against hypocrisy, against spiritual sloth, against an easy faith that was the faith of gulls and not of men: he had written for his young men, challenging them to doubt, arming them against the deadlier sin of dullness: but did dullness keep a man more insensitive to God than pride?
“If a man desire to understand God, let him prepare himself for that understanding by good life and let him take the way of humility, for by that road alone may a man come nigh that height of intellectual vision.” It sounded reverent enough, but how his heart had swelled as he had written it, in a kind of pomp of abnegation: the pride of that humility was the ceremonial pride of the Roman salute. He had strutted like a beadle in a cathedral procession, forgetting that behind him came the Host.
“I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee; wherefore I do abhor myself.” This very day he had challenged Heaven to show him wherein he had sinned: and Heaven’s answer had been to show him itself. His righteousness he had held fast and would not let it go: it lay about him now, like farmyard trampled snow.
And now? He stood looking down at the river as it flowed through the quiet land. And something in the still, shining surface of it brought back to him a thing that he had forgotten for more than thirty years. Once when he was a youngster he had gone with his father on pilgrimage to St. Gildas de Rhuis. It was a quiet, shining day with no wind and standing on those terrible cliffs above the point and looking westward, he had seen a strange silver pathway that swept round the headland and out to sea, with no ripple upon it, counter to all the restless fleeing and pursuing of the blue gay-crested waves. His father had stood beside him, so withdrawn into himself that for a long time he had not liked to question him: and when he did, Berengar had answered heavily, with his eyes still upon it, “It is the will of God.” At supper in the guest-house, the old brother who waited on them spoke of the strong current that swept round the coast and was the terror of all craft that made for home: and yet it had suffered St. Gildas to float upon it without oar or sail, and landed him unbroken in his coracle in the cove where his image stood. He saw it now, looking down into the valley, as though the river had transformed itself into that swift current, radiant, implacable and strong, and the green fields into the jabble of the tumbling waves. Well, it had brought his father to a quiet haven: it was to take himself to sea.
A shudder of premonition passed over him. To what end would it carry him, St. Brendan’s Happy Isles, or the sea, shouting on an iron coast? Through what sore discipline of body and soul, through what crucifixion of his pride must he abelard still go, before he saw the Kingdom of God? For a moment his flesh and his heart failed. Then he raised his head and began walking steadily towards home. He was chanting as he walked, the words that had held for him the torment of all longing and now were for ever his. “The souls of the just are in the hand of God, and the torment of malice shall not touch them; in the sight of the unwise they seemed to die, but they are in peace” He had turned to the stronghold of the prisoners of hope.
It was almost sunset when he dropped down into the Arduzon valley, and took the track by the river that led home. The touch of frost that he had promised Thibault was in the air, and he quickened his pace, for he must have the fire lit and some comfort for the boy after his long ride. He would come laden, Abelard well knew, and half shy of showing his spoils, after his sharpness of the morning. He must make amends for that, make much of everything, praise the calf-skin and exult in the little barrel of salted herrings: but if he did not hurry, all the excitement of the arrival would be spoiled: Thibault would find the huts deserted and no fire to welcome him. The last glow was on the trunks of the trees as he came through the hazel copse into the clearing, and again something stirred in his heart, as it had that morning five years ago in Brittany when he reined in on the hillside and looked to Le Palais. So forlorn they were, the little houses with their heavy thatch and low doorways: they had done their best, God knew, to comfort him, and he would have none of them. He looked at them, smiling, and blessed them: then the smile broadened, for he saw the hens sitting reproachfully before their door, that he had shut in absence of mind the last time he went in for firewood. They roused with a drowsy chunnering as he went through them to open it, and lumber
ed sleepily after him: a couple made off round the house with the air of being awake and up for the rest of the night, but a few grains flung inside the smelly little house brought them in, and he closed the door, listening to the soft whirr of wings as one by one they took the short flight to the roost Thomas at sight of him had risen and walked into their own hut: he would have composed himself by now on Thibault’s bed. He could hear the voices of the ducks still down on the river, but they were always late to bed. Time enough to bring them up when he had kindled the fire. Oh, lovely twilight ghost! He knelt a moment on the threshold of the oratory, crying her name towards the dim altar, and came away.
The fire was not long in kindling: the hearthplace was still warm. He blew it for a while so that he might have red embers instead of green wood for the grilling of Thibault’s trout, and then went out to gather chestnuts and set them roasting on the stones that banked in the fire. Thomas sat on the skin that covered Thibault’s bed and observed him. He was just placing the last chestnut when he heard the bridle ring and went out into the dusk. He could hear a hoof pawing soft ground and the pony blowing through its nostrils with an impatient shake of the bit, but there was no sign of Thibault. He went through the hazel copse and looked down. There was the stocky pony halted in the hollow, and Thibault in frantic haste unroping a bundle and stowing it under a clump of furze.
“Greedy gut,” said Abelard. “Making a private larder for yourself, are you?”
Thibault looked up aghast.
“If I was a mule this morning, you’re a donkey now,” said Abelard. “Bring it out of that, man, and I’ll bring up the pony.” He came down and took the little creature by the head and up the steep track, Thibault, bewildered and enchanted, coming after.
Peter Abelard Page 22