The Garden of Allah Part 95

"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, pa.s.sionately 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 G.o.d. 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. G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed much time together, generally in the garden. Scarcely any visitors came, and none to stay, except, from time to time, a pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sionate 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 s.h.i.+ning 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, 'pa.s.ses 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 h.e.l.l--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 G.o.d, 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, l.u.s.t, 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 h.e.l.l.'

"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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d. 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 suns.h.i.+ne, 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d--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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d.

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 G.o.d.

"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 s.e.x. 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 a.s.sisted 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 pa.s.sion 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 h.e.l.l. By the depth of that pit I measured the depth of his pa.s.sion 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 G.o.d's creature can have for G.o.d. 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 G.o.d 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 companions.h.i.+p. 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.