Valmy was a Darwinist and larded his theories with difficult words from science with, moreover, a quasi-religious fervour, eyes blazing, authoritarian gestures, arms stretched out like posts indicating directions.
But de Hornes refused to be put down by this positivist self-confidence. He went on, ‘All the same, you must agree that this sadness after lovemaking is not simply the weariness that follows exertion but, rather, something like the melancholy at the end of anything enjoyable, that is something psychological…’
‘Agreed,’ said Valmy, ‘but in that case it is due to the vague awareness of the trap which is love. One can understand the selfishness of Nature, only thinking of herself, of reproduction. That is, man feels duped by a mirage which ceases with the cessation of desire, and he is sorrowful.’
‘There is more,’ de Hornes insisted, ‘this sadness is not purely a matter of instinct, it is often very conscious, entirely cerebral.’
Then he returned to his theme: ‘If so many lovers feel the desire to die and more and more die each day, while still in love, it is because love and death are linked by analogies, by underground passages, and communicate. One leads to the other. The one makes the other more acute, more intense. There is no doubt that death is a great stimulant of love. How else can one explain the habit village lovers have of leaning against the cemetery wall to take each others’ hands and lips? And it goes all the way from simple souls to the highest minds. Did not Michelet take his fiancée, the love of his later days, the remontant rose of his October days, to the hill on which the Père-Lachaise is situated, knowing he could more easily talk to her of love among the graves and of eternity in the face of death?
‘There are many other indications that support this idea. A murderer hurries to the whore immediately after he has committed his crime—he needs sensual pleasure because he has seen death… And the taste we have for women in mourning, is that not a similar sign? Not in the case of blondes, who are more beautiful in their black dresses and so ethereally loving, but of all those in the livery of mourning, which makes them arousing, tempting because of the sense of death around them and within them, which one dreams of mingling with love…’
The old lawyer was listening with interest, raising his handsome, pale head, which looked as if it had been moulded out of moonlight. Now it seemed even paler in the twilight of the day’s end. The room was growing darker in the corners, less because night was falling than because of the gloom flowing in from those dubious regions of the mind our conversation had opened up.
Despite the serious talk, our lips had taken on a feverish hue. We were all remembering. De Hornes, with his dreamy voice, had called up ghosts. Within himself each one of us reawakened his loves from the past, moments long gone, distant kisses. Within himself each had a sense of dead leaves, old graves, the dried-up residue of tears. And yet spring was rising through the half-open windows, the scents from the frail garden were importunate…
Valmy, sticking to his natural explanation, replied, ‘These are over-refined decadent fancies, they have nothing to do with instinct or something innate, as you believe. Primitive people know nothing of such subtleties and would despise them. Savages are unaware of them.’
‘Yet as early as the Song of Songs,’ de Hornes observed, ‘love is associated with death: “for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave.” Moreover,’ he added, ‘one day I had an experience which confirmed the mysterious analogies uniting them. It’s a strange story from my past which gives me a kind of chill every time I think of it.
‘When I was twenty-five I had a mistress whom I loved above all for her pale complexion, her air of a beauty struck by tragedy, her slow steps, which always made her look as if she were walking among ruins. She lived alone, separated from her brutal husband. One day her aunt—who had brought her up, like a second mother—came with her sister, who was younger than her. We didn’t see each other for several days. Eventually she sent me a telegram asking me to come to the hotel where her relations were staying. Her aunt was ill and she had stayed with her, could not leave her. But now she wanted to see me, to build up her reserves of courage.
‘I went, but hardly were we together than a great cry was heard and she rushed off. One moment later it was her own voice crying out, calling, calling me, screaming. There is no mistaking the arrival of death. I understood and dashed off after her. On the bed: a woman, already with the pallor of death on her, the whites of her eyes showing, her mouth open, like a dark hole the departure of the soul had left black, and her arms slumped along her sides, as if in surrender. You can visualise the death: in the hotel, alone, instantaneous, with neither help nor farewells. In the hours that followed my mistress seemed to me more noble and grave than ever: she was almost as pale, with the air of a statue standing by a dead woman. Her younger sister, devastated, was silently crying in an armchair. After paying our last respects, someone had to go and carry out the various tasks and obligations connected with the death: registry office, mourning clothes, relations to be informed. My mistress insisted on looking after these things herself; there was comfort for her in these family duties, which she did not want to leave to anyone else. She just asked me to stay with her younger sister, who felt afraid in the hotel suite with the dead body.
‘I spent the twilight hours with her. And this is the strange, incredible part of this story. I tried to console the orphaned girl as best I could. But words are no use, she felt that herself and didn’t speak. She was sitting close beside me in the room next to the one we didn’t dare go back into again… I was going to light the lamp, but she said, ‘No, there’s no point. Don’t leave me.’ And she took my hands, as if to thank me for taking pity on them, for coming to their aid in their loss, for seeing that there was someone there sharing in their grief. Crying made her look like a child and I wiped away her silent tears. For a moment her hands squeezed mine. I certainly had no idea of doing her any harm. She came close to me, leant against my shoulder as if her head had become too heavy from the added weight of all the tears that were coming. Unintentionally some of our hair touched, mingled. What was the terrible madness that suddenly gripped us? There, in the hotel suite invaded by death, with the corpse nearby, her face touched my face… Then I felt her lips placed, as if involuntarily, against my lips, like the mouth of a bottle. Love? Impossible at a moment like that, too sacrilegious, too monstrous! Moreover, night having fallen, merged with the darkness, I was a vague figure, an anonymous form, hardly human. I realised it was nothing to do with me personally. I provided an immediate and necessary way of helping her to blot out her overwhelming grief.
‘She had wanted the kiss as a narcotic, like morphine or opium, a sure drug… In that way she did find forgetfulness, she was no longer aware, she drifted off, she let herself go in the sweet pleasure of self-abandon… What a terrible scene! I was trembling, I felt ashamed. Did I have no part in it at all?
‘During the days that followed I didn’t dare look at her. But she was calm, showed no sign of remorse, and once more became the enigmatic figure I had known before on the rare occasions when I had met her with her sister. All the time afterwards she displayed the same profound indifference towards me, as if nothing had happened. And, indeed, nothing had happened. Once more love and death had found themselves acting in collusion, linked by their mysterious corridors… It was the proximity of death that was the stimulant…’
De Hornes paused for a moment. The others remained silent. It was as if the little room had expanded as twilight obliterated all detail…
De Hornes went on, speaking quickly, as if to get this memory over with, the long story which had taken too strong a hold on our attention:
‘That’s the way it is, always, everywhere: the word love and the word death end up coming together as if they were the two sides of a mountain. And that’s why I said, “No one has ever truly loved if, at some point or other, he has never had the idea of dying with his mistress,” because the point at which the two
sides meet is the summit, the plateau, the culminating moment. The moment when love and death are one…’
De Hornes fell silent. The gleam faded from his grey eyes, the grey of ashes. No one spoke.
The old lawyer seemed to be meditating. This acceptance of a mystery was anathema to his clear mind, his inductive method. In condescending tones Valmy broke the silence, ‘Oh yes, nature has its forces, its occult purposes.’
No one else spoke. Each one of us was thinking of life, of his own life. The scents of eternal spring were coming up from the frail garden. But now the little room had become sad, completely overtaken by night… and Darkness and Silence combined; and it seemed as if it were Love and Death coming together once more.
Consecrated Boxwood
One year there was great consternation on Palm Sunday in one of the quiet beguinages of Flanders. The hour of the high mass was approaching. The bell in its openwork turret was ringing, so faintly it seemed to drift on the wind like a wisp of sound. A few of the faithful from the surrounding district were already arriving, gentle old women whose woollen mantles also swung like bells. Beguines were starting to leave their little convents, heading for the service.
But in the church the sacristan, Sister Dorothée-des-Anges, was pacing up and down with increasing anxiety. That morning the florist of the district, with whom she had dealt for so long, had not delivered the usual supply of boxwood. And yet she had expressly gone to see him a week previously in order to remind him. He couldn’t have forgotten. What had happened? He or someone in his family must have suffered a misfortune. Sister Dorothée-des-Anges was frustrated, having given up hope that he would come. Yet it was absolutely essential they had branches of boxwood for the ritual ceremony that day and also to supply the beguinage and the faithful of the neighbourhood, who were relying on it.
So she made a drastic decision and hurried over to the mother house in one of the corners of the enclosure where the Grand Mistress resided. She told her that they had been let down and the situation was now urgent, there was only one solution: to send out an order to all the houses to cut the ornamental boxwood that was a traditional feature of the little gardens where, glossy and docile, it fringes the paths, forms the initials of patron saints, Sacred Hearts pierced by a green sword.
The initial response was one of real distress, for the beguines are very attached to their pretty gardens, that satisfy their taste for ingenious arrangements—their design corresponds to the designs of their lace. They too consist of rosettes, slender transitions, open or half-open corollas. Parallel work, meticulous and fragile both: their lace is like white windows encrusted with frost patterns; their little gardens are coloured windows…
They quickly resigned themselves to the loss, out of obedience and in order not to displease God. In the House of the Eight Beatitudes, in the House of the Love of God, in all the important houses of the community the order was carried out without delay. The plants were cut off level with the soil and piled into wicker baskets from the workroom. The harvest from each little garden was sparse, but enough to make it look entirely bare. Then beguines recalled a similar sacrifice they themselves had accepted on the day when their hair was cut off and it made their little gardens even more dear to them. It was as if on that day they too had taken holy orders.
Now while all the big houses had immediately sacrificed their boxwood finery, there was a long discussion in a very small house, the House of Mercy that stood at the end of one of the twisting alleys. It was one of the best-kept, dazzling in its cleanliness. The brass on the door shone like that on the stern of the barges on the canals; the widows gleamed, their muslin curtains so fresh they looked like the veils of girls taking their first communion; the plaster pointing of the pink brickwork made white stripes across the façade. It was an abode so patiently cared for it was almost unreal, a little dwelling place preserved under glass which doubtless vanished into thin air every time someone passed by. A fairy-tale house, a dream house. You were amazed whenever a beguine appeared at one of the windows. It was less like seeing a cornet, than catching a glimpse of a soul in flight, linen wings on the way to heaven…
The miracle of such care was due to Sister Monique, who lived there with just two other beguines. With only three of them, perfect tidiness and cleanliness was possible. Sister Monique was scrupulous in this and had managed to instil the taste in her two younger companions. The least hint of dust offended her as if it were a venial sin of the furniture. She was even more strongly opposed to disorder, to neglect that led to dirt or untidiness, to anything that disturbed the immutable order that had given the house a look of eternity, as if it were already outside time, with no trace of corporeality, of life. When, therefore, they too received the command to cut down the box in the garden for the ceremony of Palm Sunday, Sister Monique was initially devastated. But the next minute she had made a decision. She could never bring herself to simply go and destroy her little garden, which was as charming, well-kept, correct, fixed, one might say, as the rest of their house. She quickly found specious arguments against it. She only had a small amount of box, making a Sacred Heart in the central bed. What difference would these few branches make to the great pile gathered from the other gardens of the beguinage? It would be like placing a candle among the stars in the sky. She would not comply—no one would be the worse off. No one would notice. So she told the other two beguines of her firm intention, urging them to keep it absolutely secret. In that way their garden would be saved from the massacre! She had put too much care into ceaseless digging, raking, sowing, planting, watering for someone to require her to lay instant waste to it. It truly was too cruel. It was like asking her to mutilate her own child. And Sister Monique, as she went to mass, full of indignation, felt she could see on the other grass-green doors a cross of blood, as there had been in Judaea for the massacre of the Innocents…
At mass it was very moving. Each of the beguines, in their long white veils, was given a branch of consecrated box from the officiating priest as they entered in procession. They rejoiced, holding the one branch given back from the garden they had sacrificed, happy at the gift to God, and the gift to others, for members of the congregation joined in the procession, gentle old men, women in their mantles, the faithful of the district into whose hands their gardens were scattered. The joy of giving! The priest of the beguinage based his sermon on it. He spoke movingly of the grace of God who had thus put their goodwill to the test. And all had responded to the divine appeal, none of the beguines had shirked their duty, they had all sacrificed the boxwood from their gardens. A sacrifice that was as beautiful as it was symbolic! This Sacred Heart of greenery was also their own heart. And God requires us always to act in that way: to create an everlasting heart for ourselves and then to give it to others!
Sister Monique listened to the sermon with growing agitation. ‘None of the beguines had shirked their duty!’ Of course the priest didn’t know, but God did. All at once she realised how mean a sin she had committed. Beforehand you find good reasons for yourself, you delude yourself with pretexts and lies. It is a ruse of the Fiend who colours over sin, disguising the ugliness of its face. Now she realised what she had done. In the first place she had disobeyed the order of her superior, the Grand Mistress, which was bad enough, but above all she had behaved badly towards God. She had refused to give up the box from her garden to deck the altars. How shameful! To haggle with the Church, to cheat God! Sister Monique saw herself as having committed a great sin. Now the branch of consecrated boxwood she had been given by the officiating priest during the procession burnt her hand with the agony of remorse. She did not dare keep it, take it home with her. She went to place it on the altar to the Virgin Mary, an offering of atonement among the bouquets and silver-gilt vases. She lit a thin taper, that too in atonement, on the wrought-iron hearse with its constant flickering light.
Back at the little House of Mercy the sight of the preserved garden, where the boxwood Sacred Heart still wound its gree
n curves, only increased Sister Monique’s anxiety. Over the next few days she was going to have to hide from all eyes, keep her door closed to all untimely visits, not allow the secret hidden behind it to come to light. She only hoped the two young beguines who lived with her would not let anything slip! She bombarded her companions with instructions, to their great discontent, since they had protested from the start, not wanting to be disobedient. Now they were annoyed at having to share the responsibility and the remorse. A bitter dispute ensued in the course of which they reproached her harshly. Sister Monique reproached herself all the more. Even her garden was no consolation. She looked on it with horror as her tempter, the cause and occasion of her fall. The Fiend had decked himself out in flowers to sully her soul. It was the snake from the Garden of Eden winding its way round her little garden in the form of a Sacred Heart, with all its boxwood scales.
Sister Monique, who was old and had long suffered from a weak heart, spent that Sunday deeply perturbed. She considered herself to be in a state of mortal sin. She also believed her reputation was ruined, for her disobedience would become known throughout the beguinage. She went to bed that evening in great discomfort. And when she did not get up at her usual time the next morning her two companions found her dead in her bed.
When the Grand Mistress came in with the priest and the other beguines, whom they had quickly called to help, they were astounded to see the Sacred Heart still intact in the garden.
‘Sister Monique didn’t give her boxwood!’
The news caused a great scandal. Above all the sacristan, Sister Dorothée-des-Anges, was filled with indignation. All the beguines crossed themselves. This sudden death was a punishment from God. Each one repeated in a horrified voice, ‘She didn’t give her boxwood!’ They were sure she was damned, or at least condemned to a long period in purgatory.
Hans Cadzand's Vocation & Other Stories Page 12