The country opened out before us. The setting sun shone as bright as blood, along the tops of the hills, but the snow in the valleys and hollows was blue and even purple with shadows. On the left of the road, the antennae of the radio station stood up into the clean sky, and far ahead of us lay the red-brick buildings of the College, grouped in an imitation Italy in the midst of the alluvial valley. Beyond that, on the side of the hill were the redder buildings of St. Elizabeth’s convent, past the high bridge over the railroad tracks.
My eyes opened and took all this in. And for the first time in my life I realized that I no longer cared whether I preserved my place in all this or lost it: whether I stayed here or went to the army. All that no longer mattered. It was in the hands of One Who loved me far better than I could ever love myself: and my heart was filled with peace.
It was a peace that did not depend on houses, or jobs, or places, or times, or external conditions. It was a peace that time and material-created situations could never give. It was peace that the world could not give.
The weeks went by, and I wrote some more poems, and continued to fast and keep my Lent. All I prayed was that God should let me know His will—and, if it pleased Him, there was only one other thing I asked for myself besides: if I had to go to the army, I begged Him at least to let me make a retreat with the Trappist monks before I went.
However, the next thing I got from the Draft Board was a notice to present myself for medical examination before the doctors in Olean.
I had not been expecting things to develop that way, and at first I interpreted this to mean that my request for consideration as a non-combatant had simply been ignored. There were three days before the examination, and so I got permission to go down to New York. I thought I might see the Draft Board and talk to them: but that was not possible. In any case, it was not necessary.
So the week-end turned out to be a sort of a festival with my friends. I saw Lax, who was now working for the Neiv Yorker, and had a desk of his own in a corner of their offices where he wrote letters to pacify the people who complained about the humor, or the lack of it, in the pages of the magazine. Then we went out to Long Beach and saw Seymour. And then Seymour and I and Lax all together got in a car and went to Port Washington and saw Gibney.
The next day was St. Patrick’s Day, and the massed bands of all the boys and girls in Brooklyn who had never had an ear for music were gathering under the windows of the New Yorker offices and outside the Gotham Book Mart. And I, an Englishman, wearing a shamrock which I had bought from a Jew, went walking around the city, weaving in and out of the crowds, and thinking up a poem called April, although it was March. It was a fancy poem about javelins and leopards and lights through trees like arrows and a line that said: “The little voices of the rivers change.” I thought it up in and out of the light and the shade of the Forties, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, and typed it on Lax’s typewriter in the New Yorker office, and showed it to Mark Van Doren in a subway station.
And Mark said, of the shamrock I was wearing:
“That is the greenest shamrock I have ever seen.”
It was a great St. Patrick’s Day. That night I got on the Erie train, and since I was so soon, I thought, to go to the army, I paid money to sleep in the Pullman. Practically the only other Pullman passenger was a sedate Franciscan nun, who turned out to be going to St. Elizabeth’s: and so we got off at Olean together and shared a taxi out to Alleghany.
On Monday I prepared to go and be examined for the army. I was the first one there. I climbed the ancient stairs to the top floor of the Olean City Hall. I tried the handle of the room marked for the medical board, and the door opened. I walked in and stood in the empty room. My heart was still full of the peace of Communion.
Presently the first of the doctors arrived.
“You got here early,” he said, and began to take off his coat and hat.
“We might as well begin,” he said, “the others will be along in a minute.”
So I stripped, and he listened to my chest, and took some blood out of my arm and put it in a little bottle, in a water-heater, to keep it cosy and warm for the Wassermann test. And while this was going on, the others were coming in, two other doctors to do the examining, and lanky young farm boys to be examined.
“Now,” said my doctor, “let’s see your teeth.”
I opened my mouth.
“Well,” he said, “you’ve certainly had a lot of teeth out!”
And he began to count them.
The doctor who was running the Medical Board was just coming in. My man got up and went to talk to him. I heard him say:
“Shall we finish the whole examination? I don’t see much point to it.”
The head doctor came over and looked at my mouth.
“Oh, well,” he said, “finish the examination anyway.”
And he sat me down and personally took a crack at my reflexes and went through all the rest of it. When it was over, and I was ready to get back into my clothes, I asked:
“What about it, Doctor?”
“Oh, go home,” he said, “you haven’t got enough teeth.”
Once again I walked out into the snowy street.
So they didn’t want me in the army after all, even as a stretcher bearer! The street was full of quiet, full of peace.
And I remembered that it was the Feast of St. Joseph.
III
THERE WERE STILL ABOUT THREE WEEKS LEFT UNTIL EASTER. Thinking more and more about the Trappist monastery where I was going to spend Holy Week, I went to the library one day and took down the Catholic Encyclopaedia to read about the Trappists. I found out that the Trappists were Cistercians, and then, in looking up Cistercians, I also came across the Carthusians, and a great big picture of the hermitages of the Camaldolese.
What I saw on those pages pierced me to the heart like a knife.
What wonderful happiness there was, then, in the world! There were still men on this miserable, noisy, cruel earth, who tasted the marvelous joy of silence and solitude, who dwelt in forgotten mountain cells, in secluded monasteries, where the news and desires and appetites and conflicts of the world no longer reached them.
They were free from the burden of the flesh’s tyranny, and their clear vision, clean of the world’s smoke and of its bitter sting, were raised to heaven and penetrated into the deeps of heaven’s infinite and healing light.
They were poor, they had nothing, and therefore they were free and possessed everything, and everything they touched struck off something of the fire of divinity. And they worked with their hands, silently ploughing and harrowing the earth, and sowing seed in obscurity, and reaping their small harvests to feed themselves and the other poor. They built their own houses and made, with their own hands, their own furniture and their own coarse clothing, and everything around them was simple and primitive and poor, because they were the least and the last of men, they had made themselves outcasts, seeking, outside the walls of the world, Christ poor and rejected of men.
Above all, they had found Christ, and they knew the power and the sweetness and the depth and the infinity of His love, living and working in them. In Him, hidden in Him, they had become the “Poor Brothers of God.” And for His love, they had thrown away everything, and concealed themselves in the Secret of His Face. Yet because they had nothing, they were the richest men in the world, possessing everything: because in proportion as grace emptied their hearts of created desire, the Spirit of God entered in and filled the place that had been made for God. And the Poor Brothers of God, in their cells, they tasted within them the secret glory, the hidden manna, the infinite nourishment and strength of the Presence of God. They tasted the sweet exultancy of the fear of God, which is the first intimate touch of the reality of God, known and experienced on earth, the beginning of heaven. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of heaven. And all day long, God spoke to them: the clean voice of God, in His tremendous peacefulness, spending truth within them as simply and d
irectly as water wells up in a spring. And grace was in them, suddenly, always in more and more abundance, they knew not from where, and the coming of this grace to them occupied them altogether, and filled them with love, and with freedom.
And grace, overflowing in all their acts and movements, made everything they did an act of love, glorifying God not by drama, not by gesture, not by outward show, but by the very simplicity and economy of utter perfection, so utter that it escapes notice entirely.
Outside in the world were holy men who were holy in the sense that they went about with portraits of all the possible situations in which they could show their love of God displayed about them: and they were always conscious of all these possibilities. But these other hidden men had come so close to God in their hiddenness that they no longer saw anyone but Him. They themselves were lost in the picture: there was no comparison between them receiving and God giving, because the distance by which such comparison could be measured had dwindled to nothing. They were in Him. They had dwindled down to nothing and had been transformed into Him by the pure and absolute humility of their hearts.
And the love of Christ overflowing in those clean hearts made them children and made them eternal. Old men with limbs like the roots of trees had the eyes of children and lived, under their grey woolen cowls, eternal. And all of them, the young and the old, were ageless, the little brothers (if God, the little children for whom was made the Kingdom of Heaven.
Day after day the round of the canonical hours brought them together and the love that was in them became songs as austere as granite and as sweet as wine. And they stood and they bowed in their long, solemn psalmody. Their prayer flexed its strong sinews and relaxed again into silence, and suddenly flared up again in a hymn, the color of flame, and died into silence: and you could barely hear the weak, ancient voice saying the final prayer. The whisper of the amens ran around the stones like sighs, and the monks broke up their ranks and half emptied the choir, some remaining to pray.
And in the night they also rose, and filled the darkness with the strong, patient anguish of their supplication to God: and the strength of their prayer (the Spirit of Christ concealing His strength in the words their voices uttered) amazingly held back the arm of God from striking and breaking at last the foul world full of greed and avarice and murder and lust and all sin.
The thought of those monasteries, those remote choirs, those cells, those hermitages, those cloisters, those men in their cowls, the poor monks, the men who had become nothing, shattered my heart.
In an instant the desire of those solitudes was wide open within me like a wound.
I had to slam the book shut on the picture of Camaldoli and the bearded hermits standing in the stone street of cells, and I went out of the library, trying to stamp out the embers that had broken into flame, there, for an instant, within me.
No, it was useless: I did not have a vocation, and I was not for the cloister, for the priesthood. Had I not been told that definitely enough? Did I have to have that beaten into my head all over again before I could believe it?
Yet I stood in the sun outside the dining hall, waiting for the noon Angelus, and one of the Friars was talking to me. I could not contain the one thing that filled my heart:
“I am going to a Trappist monastery to make a retreat for Holy Week,” I said. The things that jumped in the Friar’s eyes gave him the sort of expression you would expect if I had said: “I am going to go and buy a submarine and live on the bottom of the sea.”
“Don’t let them change you!” he said, with a sort of a lame smile. That meant “Don’t go reminding the rest of us that all that penance might be right, by getting a vocation to the Trappists.”
I said: “It would be a good thing if they did change me.”
It was a safe, oblique way of admitting what was in my heart—the desire to go to that monastery and stay for good.
On the morning of the Saturday before Palm Sunday I got up before five, and heard part of a Mass in the dark chapel and then had to make a run for the train. The rain fell on the empty station straight and continuous as a tower.
All the way down the line, in the pale, growing day, the hills were black, and rain drenched the valley and Hooded the sleeping valley towns. Somewhere past Jamestown I took out my Breviary and said the Little Hours, and when we got into Ohio the rain stopped.
We changed stations at Gabon, and on the fast train down to Columbus I got something to eat, and in southern Ohio the air was drier still, and almost clearing. Finally, in the evening, in the long rolling hills that led the way in to Cincinnati, you could see the clouds tearing open all along the western horizon to admit long streaks of sun.
It was an American landscape, big, vast, generous, fertile, and leading beyond itself into limitless expanses, open spaces, the whole West. My heart was full!
So when we entered Cincinnati, in the evening, with the lights coming on among all the houses and the electric signs shining on the hills, and the huge freight yards swinging open on either side of the track and the high buildings in the distance, I felt as if I owned the world. And yet that was not because of all these things, but because of Gethsemani, where I was going. It was the fact that I was passing through all this, and did not desire it, and wanted no part in it, and did not seek to grasp or hold any of it, that I could exult in it, and it all cried out to me: God! God!
I went to Mass and Communion the next morning in Cincinnati, and then took the train for Louisville, and waited in Louisville all the rest of the day because I did not have the sense to take a bus to one of the towns near Gethsemani and buy a ride from there to the monastery.
It was not until after night fell that there was a train out to Gethsemani, on the line to Atlanta.
It was a slow train. The coach was dimly lighted, and full of people whose accents I could hardly understand, and you knew you were in the South because all the Negroes were huddled in a separate car. The train got out of the city into country that was abysmally dark, even under the moon. You wondered if there were any houses out there. Pressing my face to the window, and shading it with my hands, I saw the outline of a bare, stony landscape with sparse trees. The little towns we came to looked poor and forlorn and somewhat fierce in the darkness.
And the train went its slow way through the spring night, branching off at Bardstown junction. And I knew my station was coming.
I stepped down out of the car into the empty night. The station was dark. There was a car standing there, but no man in sight. There was a road, and the shadow of a sort of a factory a little distance away, and a few houses under some trees. In one of them was a light. The train had hardly stopped to let me off, and immediately gathered its ponderous momentum once again and was gone around the bend with the flash of a red tail light, leaving me in the middle of the silence and solitude of the Kentucky hills.
I put my bag down in the gravel, wondering what to do next. Had they forgotten to make arrangements for me to get to the monastery? Presently the door of one of the houses opened, and a man came out, in no hurry.
We got in the car together, and started up the road, and in a minute we were in the midst of moonlit fields.
“Are the monks in bed?” I asked the driver. It was only a few minutes past eight.
“Oh, yes, they go to bed at seven o’clock.”
“Is the monastery far?”
“Mile and a half”
I looked at the rolling country, and at the pale ribbon of road in front of us, stretching out as grey as lead in the light of the moon. Then suddenly I saw a steeple that shone like silver in the moonlight, growing into sight from behind a rounded knoll. The tires sang on the empty road, and, breathless, I looked at the monastery that was revealed before me as we came over the rise. At the end of an avenue of trees was a big rectangular block of buildings, all dark, with a church crowned by a tower and a steeple and a cross: and the steeple was as bright as platinum and the whole place was as quiet as midnight and lost in the al
l-absorbing silence and solitude of the fields. Behind the monastery was a dark curtain of woods, and over to the west was a wooded valley, and beyond that a rampart of wooded hills, a barrier and a defence against the world.
And over all the valley smiled the mild, gentle Easter moon, the full moon in her kindness, loving this silent place.
At the end of the avenue, in the shadows under the trees, I could make out the lowering arch of the gate, and the words: “Pax Intrantibus.”
The driver of the car did not go to the bell rope by the heavy wooden door. Instead he went over and scratched on one of the windows and called, in a low voice:
“Brother! Brother!”
I could hear someone stirring inside.
Presently the key turned in the door. I passed inside. The door closed quietly behind me. I was out of the world.
The effect of that big, moonlit court, the heavy stone building with all those dark and silent windows, was overpowering. I could hardly answer the Brother’s whispered questions.
I looked at his clear eyes, his greying, pointed beard.
When I told him I came from St. Bonaventure’s, he said drily:
“I was a Franciscan once.”
We crossed the court, climbed some steps, entered a high, dark hall. I hesitated on the brink of a polished, slippery floor, while the Brother groped for the light switch. Then, above another heavy door, I saw the words: “God alone.”
“Have you come here to stay?” said the Brother.
The question terrified me. It sounded too much like the voice of my own conscience.
“Oh, no!” I said. “Oh, no!” And I heard my whisper echoing around the hall and vanishing up the indefinite, mysterious heights of a dark and empty stair-well above our heads. The place smelled frighteningly clean: old and clean, an ancient house, polished and swept and repainted and repainted over and over, year after year.
“What’s the matter? Why can’t you stay? Are you married or something?” said the Brother.
The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition Page 42
