One day Mevr. Cadzand, who was observing him closely, found him completely wretched. It was as if he had suffered a great calamity, he was no longer pale, but white. He sat down at the table but ate almost nothing and didn’t speak. His eyes were reddened, as if he had been crying. Now he kept well out of the way of Ursula’s eyes, as one does of fearsome animals one is afraid of. As he sat down, he had carefully said grace and, above all, made the sign of the cross, very deliberately and emphatically, as if to envelop himself in it, to carry out an exorcism.
His mother understood the struggle that was going on inside him and was delighted that his piety was already winning, and so quickly. That meant he would not fall prey to depravity, but he would have been sufficiently acquainted with passion to know the ecstasy it can bring and would not now dare devote his life to a celibacy with no way out.
This was what his mother was counting on, hoping that this truly providential event would turn out for the best: Hans would definitely be cured of his desire to take holy orders with their harsh law of chastity; on the other hand, it was clear to see that he was pulling himself together, was regaining control of himself… But at the cost of what despair! As if, emerging from a storm, he were aghast at how his soul had been laid waste. Expressions of fear, sadness, horror, dismay, confusion passed across his face one after another or at the same time. He seemed to be threatened, tormented, haunted, suffering in his conscience and in his body all at once.
Mevr. Cadzand was alarmed. ‘Are you ill?’
At once he stood up and left the room, as if she had touched a wound and he had to run to a spring to soothe it. He spent hours by himself, locked in his room. Mevr. Cadzand, keeping a watch for him, heard him walking up and down, talking out loud but no longer practising sermons, as he had done when he was reading Lacordaire and the preachers; there was nothing oratorical about it now, but a level voice, infinitely sad, the sound of a lament, doubtless a prayer, a sick prayer crouched on the ground and trying to get up. It had something of the murmurings of processions of pilgrims on the highroads.
Suddenly his door creaked, his steps echoed on the stairs. A moment later, contrary to all his habits and despite the rain lashing the windows, she heard him go out, without a word to anyone, as if to avoid having to say goodbye, having his resolve weaken in a farewell.
Mevr. Cadzand was alarmed at this unaccustomed departure. She had already seen him at lunchtime, so disturbed, so strange! And that groan in the afternoon, which was still echoing round the corridor like the lingering vibration of a bell…
What had happened? What was going to happen? She knew that Hans was impressionable, highly strung, sometimes prone to sudden decisions. What if his despair at his fall had left him distraught? What if his fear of Ursula, whom he felt too weak to oppose, had caused him to flee? Perhaps he was going to leave, to seek immediate refuge with the Dominicans of Ghent, where it appeared he already had a place reserved? But that would mean that the religious vocation, that she feared so much and that she thought had been permanently ousted by passion, was going to be fulfilled immediately? What unhappiness for her hopes to be dashed just when she imagined them safe at last!
She was seized with panic. Hans! Hans! Where was her son, who had left looking distraught, gone out without reason or purpose, what goal was he heading for as he made his way across the town, where the rain was getting heavier, weeping on the roofs, speckling the flat water of the canals? Overcome with anxiety and fearing some calamity, Mevr. Cadzand could stand it no longer. She threw on a coat over her tea-gown, hurriedly pinned on a hat and, despite the dreadful weather, rushed out as if she had to save her child and every minute counted.
She wandered hither and thither, passing along the canals without daring to look at the water, nor at the dark tunnels under the old bridges, wondering if Hans, in his distress, had decided to drown his despair in it. Then another fear came to haunt her. Perhaps he had decided to leave, to flee the sin and temptation of his home? Immediately she turned off and headed for the station. Hans was not there and during that time no train had left in the direction she feared. Back in the street, Mevr. Cadzand started wandering round again; the rain persisted, soaking her, discolouring the pavement, gathering between the paving stones like fonts full of tears.
A terrible feeling, in the rain, to find oneself wandering, in flight, one’s existence in ruins! To be no more than a soiled leaf from the tree of life, to curl up, a prey to autumn, blown along towards death!
Mevr. Cadzand kept walking, mechanically now, with the impression she had walked to the end of the day and to the end of the world. And thoughts were flying round and round inside her head. What had happened was her fault: she had defied God by trying to keep her son from Him, she was truly selfish and only thought of herself. A mother who dreams of keeping her son with her was asking too much. But above all she was to blame for the recent events: in order to achieve her goal, that is to tear him away from his vocation in the Church, she had tolerated Ursula’s little game. To be frank, she had almost desired and instigated it. Otherwise she would not have employed her, so pretty—too pretty, with those eyes full of intoxicating promise. True, she had considered the danger when she had taken her on, but basically she had just smiled, content with the way chance had arranged things. She had connived at it. It was a grave sin in a mother and now God was punishing her… Hans! Hans! Where was her son? Had she lost her son?
With these thoughts going round and round in her head, she had continued, in the rain, to wander, to meander hither and thither through the maze of the streets of Bruges, the winding alleyways, the silent crossroads. After many twists and turns she found herself, without knowing how she came there, outside the Church of Our Lady. Crows were garlanding the old tower like a flight of lost souls. A bell rang out, inexorably. Every toll fell from the top of the tower, fell into her soul like a stone into a pool, making ripples in her soul, circles of sadness spreading—and of remorse as well.
The church door was not closed. She went in… almost no one in the nave, a few women of the common people praying, in the attitude particular to Flemish piety: arms raised, held out in a cross, unmoving. With their long black mantles they looked like crucified bells.
Everything was frozen, dead, dark. A few lamps cast their light, wrought brass encasing a night-light of red glass. It was like blood burning and it gave the side chapels a cryptlike terror. A vast silence prickled by the raindrops on the stained-glass windows. And a smell of stale incense, of soiled altar cloths, of candles—dead from bewailing themselves—tainted the air, turned one’s stomach.
All at once Mevr. Cadzand heard a noise, the creak of woodwork. Was it one of the choir stalls where some canon had been praying, indistinguishable from the shadow? Or a confessional where the unsuspected penitent was getting up? Indeed, a moment later Mevr. Cadzand saw the figure of a man emerge, darker than the gloom around, approach, kneel down. She almost cried out. She had recognised Hans. Yes! Hans was there! He hadn’t gone away. And the canals… Oh, no, no, the sole inhabitants of the canals were the swans. Hans was alive, Hans was there, close to her. He had been to confession, that was all. He was praying.
His mother was delirious, out of her mind, she could have shouted for joy in the church. She had to force herself not to call out to her son, her son who was found, saved… Hans! Hans!
Now the mystery was cleared up. For the last couple of days she had seen that Hans was regaining control of himself, liberating himself. It was the paleness of the struggle that was over that marked his face now. When he left the house abruptly, it was because he already felt himself victorious. And his sin only lay heavy on him because he had killed it inside himself…
Now he was on his knees, down there, in front of her, doubtless reciting the penitence imposed on him, but pardoned, purified, his calm regained.
His mother waited. When, after a long time, he made the sign of the cross and headed for the door, she left her seat, followed him, accosted him
by the stoup.
‘What, is that you?’ Hans said.
‘Yes. I came to pray as well.’
They left, silent, in the persistent rain, which was now turning to vapour, a fine drizzle, water dust. Hans felt his heart melt with sweetness, the melancholy joy of convalescence, which always seems slightly laden with concern about the future course of the illness of which one thought one was going to die… After a long silence Hans said—it cost him an effort but he was determined to make a request which he knew was questionable but necessary—‘Don’t you think we ought to dismiss Ursula? She’s not a Christian, she’s not the right kind of person for us.’
His mother understood the internal struggle that had reached its conclusion, his firm resolve not to fall into sin again, the promise to his father confessor. She agreed immediately and said, to set his mind at rest, ‘Yes, Hans, she’ll leave tomorrow.’
Night had already fallen when they returned to the old house in Blinde-Ezelstraat. And when, a little later, Hans retired to his room on the second floor, Mevr. Cadzand, who was keeping watch, heard him turn the key in the door at once.
It was the end of the kisses, the madness, the supreme Act, and silence flowed into the stairs, the corridor, that silence which follows all short celebrations, the pained silence of public parks when the music has ceased, the crowd departed and darkness descends.
Epilogue
The years have passed, Hans is now close to thirty. He still lives with his mother and he has never spoken to her of his vocation again. He is still as pious, as ardent in prayer, as assiduous in attending mass, but he has deemed himself irrevocably lost for Divine Election. True, others who had sinned and repented still entered the white cloisters, the fresh courtyards, the closed cells where the Spirit resides. The scruples which halted him on the threshold seem excessive to those who know nothing of what there had been between God and him. God had chosen him for a high purpose alone and he had proved unworthy of that purpose. God had called him to be a shining light of holiness, a vessel of chastity. The vessel had been cracked by sin and, however well it seemed covered over, something would always filter through. But what if that something should be the very blood of Christ entrusted to it? And if the precious blood were seen to come out in tiny drops, a red condensation perpetuating round the cracked vessel the sweat of the agony in the garden on the Mount of Olives? Nothing could make the vessel intact again. Nothing could stop what happened from having happened. It was beyond remedy. God no longer wanted him, no longer sought him, since he had become a different person.
So Mevr. Cadzand kept her son and will definitely keep him until the end of her life, for henceforward no woman, no love will be able to take him away from her. He emerged from his first sin of the flesh as if from an abyss that was not to be approached again. But despite having kept him, as she so strongly desired, she is unhappy, full of regret, feels at fault for having dared to try and wrest her son from God. She could not overcome God. And today she is more distresed at her apparent victory that she would have been from a defeat. She realises that she has ruined Hans’s life, and even her own. It would have been better to know that her son was happy far away from her than to see him unhappy close to her.
Hans is inconsolable at having failed in his vocation. He has cloistered himself in the old house in Blinde-Ezelstraat, where the life he lives is less that of a layman than of an ecclesiastic; he lives away from the world, like a solitary ascetic, detached from everything and only going out once a day to accompany his mother to eight-o’clock mass.
Thus it was that they were seen passing every morning at the same time (envied by other mothers who had no idea of their situation), as the morning mist cleared, along the old quais, at a funereal pace, and so shut off from everything outside their own selves that even the swans on the canals, sensitive as they are, did not take fright, did not feel the shadow of the couple in black stain their white silence with mourning.
At School
Every year when October returns I recall, almost with terror, the moment when, at the end of the holidays, I would go back to school. A dismal season which, from the depths of the years regards me with the white eyes of a statue on a tomb. Those who went to school in Paris know nothing of this sorrow. Here at least something of the noise of the big city comes in through the doors and windows, something of its pleasures, its music, of its vices too, intoxicating adolescent curiosity—in short something to give you a desire for life.
But out in the provinces the great colleges run by the Church are so gloomy and so grey! Mine was as enclosed as a seminary. And, all around, the dead town grieved in the tear-ridden concert of its bells. There was a central courtyard, a strip of ground as bare as a beach where the ebbing tide has left its sadness. Not even a few trees to liven it up. Alone in its gable was the implacable face of a great clock with hands that came together, parted; the hours, as they were struck, fell on us so plaintively it made them seem dark. It was like a rain of iron and ash. A dreary, invariable existence behind the high walls of the yard blocking out the sun. It was there that my soul fell out of love with life for having learnt too much of death!
Death! It was death that the priests, who were our masters, placed among us from the moment we got back. We came from our homes with our pretty outfits of fresh, new linen. They added the funeral pall, its black velvet with yellow braid. All we wanted to do was to grow up, to learn so that we could finally walk alone, love, conquer the world, live! They taught us to prepare for a good death.
And everything had a taste of death, as if by design, even the walks the boarders took one afternoon every week. We left in a long file, three by three, going at a swift pace through the centre of the town, along the canals with their lifeless water, across the deserted districts round the Cathedral close, to get as quickly as possible to the dismal suburbs where the cemeteries are. Almost every time we encountered a hearse, a large, draped carriage with undertakers wearing black, sinister three-cornered hats. As soon as they left the centre of the town, the horses were set at a trot and the carriage sped along, swaying on the uneven cobbles. How frightening for the poor deceased who might be hurt by the severe jolts! Whichever direction our band of children took, to all parts of the town, we always ended up at cemeteries, which are so desolate in that austere province which had never acquired the art of decorating tombs: none of those bright flowers, those ribbons, all the funerary knick-knacks, those white pearls that look like tears gathered in a bouquet. Nothing but the black tresses of the willows, the geometrical firs, an arrangement betokening inevitability and abandonment.
I had the feeling that we ourselves were being led as a flock to death; the vague feeling a lamb marked with a red cross might have as it is being led to the abattoir. And we went, hurried all the way along the evening road by a tall, bony priest, black as a shepherd’s dog. That is how they spoilt our joy in nature for good. Running water, the wind shaking itself in the corn, birds, wide-open spaces, the sight of the whole sky, the elegant lines of animals, trees with the foliage making a noise like a crowd, nothing delights me, nothing intoxicates me with being alive. All I can see in the countryside is our final resting place.
Death! Even more than on those melancholy walks, we felt it around us during the religious services. Especially at the time of the annual retreat, which took place a few days after school began again in October, as if they could not wait before once more confronting our childhood with Eternity, the only thing that matters.
Generally the retreat was preached by an outside preacher and consisted of four days of sermons, meditations and pious exercises, concluding with general confession and the Eucharist. From the pulpit the priest held forth with gloomy vehemence about the shortness of life, the inevitability of death, the horror of sin; then, after some cautious circumlocution, which some of us understood clearly while others, who had remained more chaste, found rather baffling, he went on to talk about the Sixth and Ninth Commandments. It is above all the traditio
nal sermon on Hell that has remained a cruel memory; every year the preacher dealt with that terrifying subject in the evening, when the church was already submerged in darkness. He painted a tragic picture in red: an abyss suddenly opening up, the eternal inferno, bodies clothed in fire, arms tattooed with burns, lips pleading for a drop of water, a tear from God to refresh them—which will never come. Darkness reigned. Just a few candles were lit with flames which stretched out and shifted in the draught. We were terrified. The red of Hell was around us already. The preacher’s voice could be heard, but he himself had retreated into the gloom, was part of the gloom. It was as if the mouth of darkness had spoken. And it addressed us in the tones of an inquisitor. Each one of us seemed to be marked out, threatened. It said, ‘There is your fate, if you die. You will be clothed in fire. And there are cases of sudden death at all ages.’
And already we were trembling, as if with a shiver of the death throes…
Since we were young, we did not feel very threatened despite these constant reminders of death. However there were often boys who were ill among us. They were taken to the sick-bay, the room whose windows had white cotton curtains, two windows, the last of the tall building running along the courtyard. The sick-bay! What a sad sound the word had! We saw it as the antechamber of eternity. Every time one of us had fallen ill and was confined to bed, we looked at the two high windows in fear and trembling. There was almost always some pale pupil to be seen, with migraine, toothache, wearing a white bandage round his cheeks or forehead. How melancholy it was to see from afar, from down in the yard, young faces with those headbands of rime, those bandages of snow. It was as if war had passed through, you felt they were little wounded soldiers and there was blood under the gauze.
Hans Cadzand's Vocation & Other Stories Page 8