Читать книгу The Cathedral - J. K. Huysmans - Страница 4

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Durtal had already been living at Chartres for three months.

On his return to Paris from La Trappe he had fallen into a fearful state of spiritual anemia. His soul kept its room, rarely rose, lounged on a couch, was torpid with the tepid langour still lulled by the sleepy mutter of mere lip-service, and prayers reeled off as by a worn-out machine of which the spring releases itself, so that it works all alone with no result, and without a touch to start it.

Sometimes, however, in a rebellious mood he managed to check himself, to stop the ill-regulated clockwork of his prayers, and then he would try to examine himself, to get above himself, and to see in a comprehensive glance the puzzling perspective of his nature.

And facing these chambers of the soul, dim with mist, he was struck by a strange association of the Revelations of Saint Theresa and a tale by Edgar Poe.

Those chambers of the inner man were empty and cold, and like the halls of the House of Usher, surrounded by a moat whence the fog rose, forcing its way in at last and cracking the worn shell of wall. Alone and uneasy, he prowled about the ruined cells, with closed doors that refused ever to open again; thus his walks about his own mind were very limited, and the panorama he could see was strangely narrowed, shrunk close and near to him, almost nothing. And he knew full well that the ruins surrounding the central cell, the Master's Room, were bolted and fastened with rivets that could not be unscrewed, and triple bars—inaccessible. So he restricted himself to wandering in the halls and passages.

At Notre Dame de l'Atre he had ventured further; he had gone into the enclosure round about the abode of Christ; he had seen in the distance the frontiers of Mysticism, and, too weak to go on his road, he had fallen; and now this was to be lamented, for, as Saint Theresa truly remarks, "in the spiritual life, if we do not go forward, we go back." He had, in fact, retraced his steps, and lay half paralyzed, no longer even in the vestibule of his mansion, but in the outer court.

Till this time the phenomena described by the matchless Abbess had been exactly repeated. In Durtal, the Chambers of the Soul were deserted as after a long mourning; but in the rooms that had remained open, phantoms of sins confessed, of buried evil-doing, wandered like the sister of the tormented Usher.

Durtal, like Edgar Poe's unhappy sufferer, listened with horror to the rustle of steps on the stairs, the piteous weeping behind the doors.

And yet these ghosts of departed crimes were no more than indefinite shapes; they never consolidated nor took a definite form. The most persistent miscreant of them all, which had tormented him so long, the sin of the flesh, at last was silenced, and left him in peace. La Trappe had rooted up the stock of those debaucheries. The memory of them, indeed, haunted him still, on his most distressing, most ignoble side; but he could see them pass, his heart in his mouth, wondering that he could so long have been the dupe of such foul delusions, no longer understanding the power of those mirages, the illusions of those carnal oases as he met them in the desert of a life shut up in seclusion, in solitude, and in books.

His imagination could still put him on the rack; still, without merit, without a struggle, by the help of divine grace, he had escaped a fall ever since his return from the monastery.

On the other hand, though he had, to some extent, emasculated himself, though he was exempt from his chief torment, he discerned, flourishing within him, another crop of tares, of which the spread had till now been hidden behind the sturdier growth of other vices. In the first instance, he had believed himself to be less enslaved by sin, less utterly vile; and he was nevertheless as closely bound to evil as ever, only the nature and character of the bonds were different, and no longer the same.

Besides that dryness of the heart which made him feel as soon as he entered a church or knelt down in his room, that a cold grip froze his prayers and chilled his soul, he detected the covert attacks, the mute assaults of ridiculous pride.

In vain did he keep watch; he was constantly taken by surprise without having time even to look round him.

It began under the most temperate guise, the most benign reflections.

Supposing, for instance, that he had done his neighbour a service at some inconvenience to himself, or that he had refrained from retaliating on anybody against whom he believed he had a grievance, or for whom he had no liking, a certain self-satisfaction stole, sneaked into his mind, a certain vain-glory, ending in the senseless conclusion that he was superior to many another man; and then, on this feeling of petty vanity, pride was engrafted—the pride of a virtue he had not even struggled to acquire, the arrogance of chastity, so insidious that most of those who indulge it do not even suspect themselves.

And he was never aware of the end of these assaults till too late, when they had become definite, and he had forgotten himself and succumbed; and he was in despair at finding that he constantly fell into the same snare, telling himself that the little good he could do must be wiped out of the balance of his life by the outrageous extravagance of this vice.

He was frenzied, he reasoned with the old mad arguments, and cried out at his wits' end—

"La Trappe crushed me! It cured me of sensuality, but only to load me with disorders of which I knew nothing before I submitted to that treatment! It is humble itself, but it puffed up my vanity and increased my pride tenfold—then it set me free, but so weak, so wearied, that I have never since been able to conquer that inanition, never have been fit to enjoy the Mystical Nourishment which I nevertheless must have if I am not to die to God!"

And for the hundredth time he asked himself—

"Am I happier than I was before I was converted?"

And to be truthful to himself he was bound to answer "Yes." He lived on the whole a Christian life, prayed but badly, but at any rate prayed without ceasing; only—only—Alas! How worm-eaten, how arid were the poor recesses of his soul! He wondered, with anguish, whether they would not end like the Manor in Edgar Poe's tale, by crumbling suddenly, one fatal day, into the dark waters of the pool of sin which was undermining the walls.

Having reached this stage of his round of meditations, he was compelled to throw himself on the Abbé Gévresin, who required him, in spite of his coldness, to take the Communion. Since his return from Notre Dame de l'Atre his friendship with the Abbé had become much closer, altogether intimate.

He knew now the inner man of this priest, who, in the midst of modern surroundings, led a purely mediæval life. Formerly, when he rang at his bell, he had paid no heed to the housekeeper, an old woman, who curtsied to him without a word when she opened the door.

Now he was quite friendly with this singular and loving creature.

Their first conversation had arisen one day when he called to see the Abbé, who was ill. Seated by the bedside, with spectacles on the alert at the tip of her nose, she was kissing, one by one, the pious prints that illustrated a book wrapped in black cloth. She begged him to be seated, and then, closing the volume, and replacing her spectacles, she had joined in the conversation; and he had left the room quite amazed by this woman, who addressed the Abbé as "Father," and spoke quite simply of her intercourse with Jesus and the Saints as if it were a natural thing. She seemed to live in perfect friendship with them, and spoke of them as of companions with whom she chatted without any embarrassment.

Then the countenance of this woman, whom the priest introduced to him as Madame Céleste Bavoil, was, strange to say, the least of it. She was thin and upright, but short. In profile, with her strong Roman nose and set lips, she had the fleshless mask of a dead Cæsar; but, seen in front, the sternness of the features was softened into a familiar peasant's face, and melted into the kindliness of an old nun, quite out of keeping with the solemn strength of her features.

It seemed as though with that clean-cut, imperious nose, small white teeth, and black eyes sparkling with light, busy and inquisitive as those of a mouse, under fine long lashes, the woman ought, notwithstanding her age, to have been handsome; it seemed at least as though the combination of these details would have given the face a stamp of distinction. Not so; the conclusion was false to the premises; the whole betrayed the combined effect of the details.

"This contradiction," thought he, "evidently is the result of other peculiarities which nullify the harmony of the more important features; in the first place the thinness of the cheeks and their hue of old wood dotted here and there with freckles, calm stains of the colour of stale bran; then the flat braids of white hair drawn smooth under a frilled cap, and finally the modest dress, a black dress clumsily made, dragging across the bosom, and showing the lines of her stays stamped in relief on the back.

"And perhaps, in her, it is not so much incongruity of features, as a crying contrast between the dress and the face, the head and the body," thought he.

Altogether, as he summed her up, she was equally suggestive of the chapel and the fields. Thus she had something of the Sister and something of the peasant.

"Yes," he went on to himself, "that is very near the mark; but that is not all, for she is both less dignified and less common, inferior and yet more worthy. Seen from behind she is more like a woman who hires out the chairs in church than like a nun; seen in front she is conspicuously superior to the natives of the soil. Also it may be noted that when she speaks of the saints she is loftier, quite different; she soars up in a flame of the spirit. But all these hypotheses are in vain," he concluded, "for I cannot judge of her from one brief impression, one rapid view. What is quite certain is that, though she is not in the least like the Abbé, she too is in two halves—two persons in one. He, with the innocent gaze, the pure eyes of a girl at her first Communion, has the sometimes bitter mouth of an old man; she is proud of feature and humble of heart; they both, though by different outward signs and acts, achieve the same result, an identical semblance of paternal indulgence and mature goodness."

And Durtal had gone again and again to see them. His reception was always the same; Madame Bavoil greeted him with the invariable formula: "Here is our friend," while the priest's eyes smiled as he grasped his hand. Whenever he saw Madame Bavoil she was praying: over her stove, when she sat mending, while she was dusting the furniture, as she opened the door, she was always telling her rosary, without pause.

The chief delight of this rather silent woman consisted in talking of the Virgin to whom she had vowed worship; on the other hand she could quote by memory long passages from a mystic and somewhat eccentric writer of the end of the sixteenth century: Jeanne Chézard de Matel, the foundress of the Order of the Incarnate Word, an Institution of which the Sisters display a conspicuous costume—a white dress held round the waist by a belt of scarlet leather, a red cloak and a blood-coloured scapulary on which the name of Jesus is embroidered in blue silk, with a crown of thorns, a heart pierced with three nails, and the words Amor Meus.

At first Durtal thought Madame Bavoil slightly crazy, and while she poured out a passage by Jeanne de Matel on Saint Joseph, he looked at the priest—who gave no sign.

"Then Madame Bavoil is a saint?" he asked one morning when they were alone.

"My dear Madame Bavoil is a pillar of prayer," replied the Abbé gravely.

And one afternoon, when Gévresin was away in his turn, Durtal questioned the woman.

She gave him an account of her long pilgrimages across Europe, pilgrimages that she had spent years in making on foot, begging her way by the roadside.

Wherever the Virgin had a sanctuary, thither she went, a bundle of clothing in one hand, an umbrella in the other, an iron Crucifix on her breast, a rosary at her waist. By a reckoning which she had kept from day to day she had thus travelled ten thousand five hundred leagues on foot.

Then old age had come on, and she had "lost her old powers," as she said; Heaven had formerly guided her by inward voices, fixing the dates of these expeditions; but journeying was no longer required of her. She had been sent to live with the Abbé that she might rest; but her manner of life had been laid down for her once for all: her bed a straw mattress on wooden planks; her food such rustic and monastic fare as beseemed her, milk, honey and bread, and at seasons of penance she was to substitute water for milk.

"And you never take any other nourishment?"

"Never." And then she would add—

"Aha! our friend, you see I am in disgrace up there!" and she would laugh cheerfully at herself and her appearance "If you had but seen me when I came back from Spain, where I went to visit Our Lady of the Pillar at Saragoza! I was a negress. With my large Crucifix on my breast, my gown looking like a nun's—every one asked: 'What can that woman be?' I looked like a charcoal-burner out for a holiday; no white to be seen but my cap, collar and cuffs; all the rest—face, hands and petticoats—quite black."

"But you must have been very dull travelling about alone?"

"Not at all, our friend, the Saints kept me company on the way; they told me at which house I should find a lodging for the night, and I was sure of being well received."

"And you never were refused hospitality?"

"Never. To be sure I did not ask for much; when I was wandering I only begged for a piece of bread and a glass of water, and to rest on a truss of straw in the cow-house."

"And Father Gévresin—how did you first know him?"

"That is quite a long story. Fancy! Heaven, as a punishment, deprived me of the Communion for a year and three months to a day. When I confessed to a priest, I owned to my intercourse with Our Saviour, and the Virgin and the Angels; then he at once treated me as a mad woman, unless he accused me of being possessed by the devil; to conclude, he refused me absolution, and I thought myself happy if he did not slam the little wicket of the confessional roughly in my face at my very first words.

"I believe I should have died of grief if the Lord had not at last had pity on me. One Saturday, when I was in Paris, He sent me to Notre Dame des Victoires, where the Father was in the confessional. He listened to me, he put me through long and severe tests, and then he granted me Communion. I often went to him again as a penitent, and then the niece who kept house for him retired into a convent, and I took her place; and I have been his housekeeper near on ten years now—"

She told her story with many breaks. Since she had ceased to wander about the country, she followed the pilgrimages in Paris in honour of the Blessed Virgin, and she had a list of the most popular sanctuaries: Notre-Dame des Victoires, Notre-Dame de Paris; Our Lady of Good Hope at Saint-Séverin, of Ever-present Help at L'Abbaye au Bois, of Peace at the convent in the Rue Picpus, of the Sick at the church of Saint-Laurent, of Happy Deliverance—a black Virgin from the church of Saint-Etienne des Grès—in the care of the Sisters of Saint-Thomas de Villeneuve, Rue de Sèvres; and outside Paris the shrines in the suburbs: Our Lady of Miracles at Saint-Maur, of the Angels at Bondy, of the Virtues at Aubervilliers, of Good Keeping at Long Pont, and those of Notre-Dame at Spire, at Pontoise, &c.

On another occasion, as he seemed suspicious of the severity of the rule imposed on her by Christ, she replied—

"Remember, our friend, what happened to an illustrious handmaid of the Lord, Maria d'Agreda; being very ill, she yielded to the wishes of her daughters in the faith and sucked a mouthful of chicken, but she was forthwith reproved by Jesus, who said to her: 'I will not have my Spouses dainty.'

"Well, and I should run the risk of a similar reproof, if I attempted to touch a morsel of meat or to drink a drop of coffee or wine."

"And yet," said Durtal to himself as he came away, "it is quite evident that the woman is not mad. She has nothing the matter with her, either hysterical or mental: she is fragile and very thin, but she is scarcely nervous, and in spite of the laconic character of her meals she is in very good health, indeed is never ailing; nay more, she is a woman of good sense and an admirable manager. Up by daybreak, after Communion she soaps and washes all the linen herself, makes the sheets and shirts, mends the Abbé's gowns, and lives with amazing economy, while taking care that her master wants for nothing. Such a sagacious apprehension of the conduct of life has no connection with lunacy or delirium."

He knew too that she would never take any wages. It is true that in the sight of a world which gives its whole mind to legalized larceny this woman's disinterestedness might be enough to prove her insanity; but Durtal, in contradiction to received ideas, did not think that a contempt for money was necessarily allied with madness, and the more he thought of it the more was he convinced that she was a saint, and not a strait-laced saint, but indulgent and cheerful.

What he could positively assert was that she was very good to him; ever since his return from La Trappe she had helped him in every way, encouraging his spirits when she saw him depressed, and going, in spite of his protesting, to look over his wardrobe when she suspected that there might be sutures to operate upon, and buttons to replace.

This intimacy had become even closer since their life in common, all three together, on the occasion of Durtal's accompanying them, at their entreaty, to La Salette. And then suddenly their affectionate familiarity was endangered, for the Abbé Gévresin left Paris.

The Bishop of Chartres died, and his successor was one of Gévresin's oldest friends. On the very day when the Abbé Le Tilloy des Mofflaines was promoted to the episcopal throne, he begged Gévresin to accompany him to Chartres. There was an anxious struggle in the old priest's mind. He was ailing, weary, good for nothing, and at the bottom of his heart longed only never to move; but on the other hand he had not the courage to refuse his poor support to Monseigneur des Mofflaines. He tried to mollify the prelate by his advanced age, but the Bishop would not listen; all he would concede was that, instead of being appointed Vicar-general, the Abbé should be no more than a Canon. Still Gévresin mildly shook his head. Finally the prelate had his way, appealing to his friend's charity, and declaring that he ought to accept the post, in the last resort as a mortification and penance.