by Norah Lofts
A mad elation seized me. I snatched again at the bag and when Brother Lawrence again fended me off I struck at him. Taken completely by surprise, he rolled from the palfrey’s back and lay supine on the bleached winter grass by the roadside. Grys turned his head questioningly, saw me and stood steady. The beggars pressed a little closer.
I began to pray as I had never prayed in all my life before. Incoherent, passionate, muddled petitions poured through my mind as I fumbled with the string of the bag and plunged in my hand. And I felt something—a vibration, a connection, a surety—something we have no word for, something I had never felt before when I prayed, something that made me certain that God had heard me and would work His miracle.
The capon came out first. It had been trussed and roasted whole but the skewer had been removed and the flesh was tender, easily broken. Praying, calling, drawing upon God and feeling the deep, calm certainty of His presence, I tore off the leg and thigh of the fowl and held it out to the woman with the two children. She took it, broke it again and held a piece to each child. The gesture was beautiful; it held all the self-abnegation and tenderness in the world. God saw it too; I felt the throb of His perception. I was dizzy with love for her, for all these gaunt, hungry people and for God Who was working this miracle. I heard my own voice, thin, high, exalted, cry:
‘Wait, wait, there will be enough for all.’
It was answered by a low moaning cry with something of despair, of savagery, and yet of patience in it.
Were they conscious of the miracle? I only know that they stood quietly, watching, waiting. No one pushed farther forward, no hand snatched the portion meant for another. Those to whom I proffered the pieces began to eat with ferocity, each solitary and wary.
The fowl was not multiplied in my hands but I was not discouraged. At the end, when all was spent, the miracle would come. I broke the bread and the piece of cheese and distributed them, all the time with a faith which, if it were not the perfect faith commended in Holy Writ, was genuine and vigorous and expectant. I did expect that the last piece of cheese would go on being divided and even when my hands were empty and the bag dangled limp between my fingers I only prayed more urgently and waited. Now, now is the moment when heaven leans towards earth and the veil of sense and reason is rent; now is the moment of the miracle.
Nothing happened. The confidence, the sense of power, the expectancy drained out of me like lifeblood from a mortal wound. I heard a low, despairing ‘Ah-h-h’ sigh through the crowd; saw, through a mist that seemed to redden before my eyes, the pale, thin, disappointed faces. Two or three—one of them the mother of the two children—had received nothing; and nobody had had more than a crumb to tantalise and mock his famine. I had loved them and pitied them and hurt them. A blundering, credulous fool who believed in miracles.
I threw the bag from me. I began to cry. I sobbed out:
‘I am sorry, sorry. I thought there would be enough for all. If God had listened there would have been enough for all.’
Grys turned his patient head at the sound of my voice and I went forward, meaning to lay my face on his smooth warm neck; but Brother Lawrence’s face came up at me from the other side of the horse’s shoulder and glared at me through the mist. His face was full of fear and hatred and fury; the mouth in it opened and he cursed me, using words even the roughest archers speak sparingly, words no monk should know. I looked at him across Grys’s grey shoulder and said, ‘God failed me, I tell you. I’d have done better to ask the devil. God can no longer work even a little miracle …’
And then I died and went straight to hell.
II
I knew where I was before I opened my eyes. I could smell the thick, acrid odour of charring flesh, the greasy smoke of the fire and knew that I was in the place where the damned roast forever and forever upon the devil’s unconsuming grid. And I could hear the wild, jubilant cry of the fiends.
I was not surprised to find myself in hell; I had died with blasphemous words on my lips and rebellion against God in my heart; my sins were unshriven, my soul unhouseled. I was surprised to find that I remembered everything so clearly and that my general feeling was one of calm acceptance. During my lifetime I had several times known, at a vivid description, written or spoken, of hell, an overmastering sense of terror; I did not feel it now. Nor—and this was also surprising—was I repentant. I remember that St. Anthony of Tours, in his Analysis of the Seventeen Worst Pains of Hell, had laid great emphasis upon ‘that agony of mind arising from the consciousness of sin when the time for confession and absolution is past.’
Certainly I had died in a state of grievous sin, but now, lying here on the edge of the pit, I was not tormented by any sense of guilt. My mind acknowledged that I had been presumptuous, violent and blasphemous but in my heart I could still think: God abandoned me first; He failed me while I was believing and praying to Him.
At that—as had been my habit on earth when visited by a dubious or unorthodox thought—my hand moved to make the sign over my breast, my lips to mutter, ‘God forgive me!’ But I remembered that here there was no need for that. One of the pains of hell is that God has no cognisance of it.
Then it occurred to me that in this indeterminate moment, while I was not racked by torment, maddened with fear or torn by pangs of ineffectual repentance, I should look about me and see how near the saints and mystics had been in their forecasts of the exact nature of damnation. The whole idea of hell—the description of which had been so terrifying—was, I realised, constructed upon singularly little evidence. Now I would open my eyes and see how it was that a man whose body had been rendered insentient by death and laid away to rot in the cool moist earth could yet, in his actual flesh and bones, suffer the pains of the undying worm, the unquenched fire.
With a considerable effort I opened my eyes and raised my head a little.
Every single thing that had been written about hell was true. It was all in darkness, save where it was lighted by the glow of the pit in which burned a fire the like of which was never seen on earth; it was at once clear and murky, foul and bright. And outlined against the glow, in a black frieze, were the figures of the fiends, leaping and prancing and yelling, raking with long rods in the fire, turning over the bodies of the damned, so that their pains might increase infinitely. Over all there hung the horrible stench of fire, charred flesh, blood.
I closed my eyes and let my head drop back: Presently one of the fiends would notice me and toss me into the fire. And there I should be in the company of all those men and women whose memories had been preserved because of their iniquity. Judas Iscariot, Herod, Pontius Pilate, all wizards and witches and warlocks, all heretics; Crispin of Chalus, whose fire had started during his lifetime because he had denied the possibility of transubstantiation; Peter Abelard, outcast and maimed for love of Héloïse.
At that thought I raised my head again and looked towards the fire. This time I recognised one of the dark figures with the long rods. It was the thin, skeleton-thin, woman whose piteous plight had, in the final issue, been partly responsible for my last earthly action. So she was dead too. Of course she had been dying of hunger when she made that beautiful life-giving gesture and divided the food between her children. What was she doing in hell? That same old feeling of rebellion moved in my heart and, forgetting that I was now far beneath the notice of God, I thought: O God, whatever she had done before, couldn’t that self-denial have been counted to her for virtue?
Then I saw that, to a degree, it had been. For she had been early promoted to fiendship. She was free; she was moving around the edge of the pit, sedulously attending to the business of turning the damned and when the light from the fire leaped and illumined her face I saw that she looked far happier than I remembered. And the children were with her, still clinging to her skirt as she moved through the murk and the glare and the stench.
Perhaps there were degrees in hell; a social order undreamed of by the mystics.
While I watched, the woma
n used her rod vigorously and then threw it aside. She pushed the children back a little and took the hem of her ragged skirt in her hand and stooped over the pit. Then, carrying something which I could not identify, she moved away, drawing the children within the curve of her unencumbered arm. Gentleness, happiness in hell, I thought, amazed.
Her movement had left a clear space in front of me. I could stare straight out towards the other side of the pit. And on the other side I could see Grys—or what was left of him. The lurid light of the fire shone on the white, bloodied bones, sharp, distorted, horrible, and on the silky flow of tail and mane, the gentle, unmolested beauty of his head. His ribs were a cage of horror out of which the writhing, bloody mess of entrails spilled; his haunches and shoulders were stripped of flesh—even the neck against which I had leaned my sorrow.
The sight of him brought me back to my senses. I realised that I was still on earth and that earth has horrors hell never dreams of.
I do pray to Almighty God for forgiveness of that thought. He had wrought the miracle for which I had prayed and at first sight of it I recoiled in horrified repudiation. Dear, loving, omniscient Father, forgive me for grudging Grys to Thy poor, as Brother Lawrence grudged the capon.
It was only that I had loved the grey horse and he had been fond of me and his sudden transformation into a mass of bones and filth lying in a pool of blood was horrible and shocking.
The woman came and sat down near me. Still protecting her hands with her skirt, she wrenched the joint into pieces, blew on them to cool them a little, handed each child a share and then fell on her own like a wolf. The meat had been blackened and charred on the outside but was still raw within and as she ate the melted fat, the blood, the very life juices of the palfrey, spurted out and splashed over her hands, her chin, her clothing. The other beggars were following her example and dragging out their portions of meat; the fire burned up more brightly and the fierce Eckering glare lighted the strange, macabre scene.
I had prayed that there should be enough for all and indeed, here was plenty and to spare—I did briefly wonder whether the miracle as I had desired it, the increase of the bag’s contents, would not have been cleaner and neater and less horrible but I put that thought away; even Christ had been content to say, ‘Not as I will but as Thou willest.’
Then it occurred to me to wonder what had happened to Brother Lawrence. I struggled into a sitting position and looked about. I saw no sign of him and after a moment’s searching stare I found my eyes resting again on the woman who sat nearest me. She stopped eating and her hand with the meat in it fell to her lap. I saw confusion and uncertainty come upon her. Perhaps she credited me with some share in the ownership of the horse or was conscious of the way she was eating. I tried to smile at her reassuringly. She stared back unsmiling for a moment and then rose and, walking jerkily, as though moved by some compulsion which she resented, came towards me. As she did so she pulled savagely at the meat and when she reached me had succeeded in tearing it into two parts. She held one out to me without a word—indeed, she held it out with her face averted; she was looking back over her shoulder to see that no one pounced upon her children’s meat during her brief absence.
Even as I leaned away from that dreadful dripping bit of carrion a small quiet voice spoke in my mind, saying that here was a real miracle; that this human creature who had starved through so many yesterdays and knew that hunger awaited her tomorrow, who had borne and must go on bearing the pangs of hunger other than her own—that she should be willing to share this chance-come bit of food was a miracle straight from the hand of God. I saw the glory of her soul shine over her rags and ugliness and filth, making her one with the angels.
I said, ‘I thank you from my heart but my supper awaits me. Keep what you have.’
‘There is plenty for all tonight,’ she said gruffly. ‘And you look hungry.’
‘I can eat later,’ I said. She glanced back at her children who were happily worrying away at their meat like puppies; then she looked at me again. Her hands with their burden of meat dropped to her sides. Her eyes took on a most curious look, sly, wary, apologetic, desperate. And I knew that she wanted to speak about Grys; that she thought that I had refused the meat out of distaste; that I was resentful. But she said nothing, nor did I, and after a second she walked back to her children.
I got to my feet, feeling weak and exhausted. I looked out across the mass of gobbling beggars, the fire, the dreadful remains of Grys. And as before my eyes came back to the woman. She was gnawing her meat again; one of the children, satiated, had dropped his head into her lap and lay sleeping, his fist still clenched about an unsightly bone. And suddenly I thought of a way in which I could answer all those things she had not said and at the same time profit her a little. I moved towards her and leaned down as though to tell her a secret.
‘There is the tongue,’ I said quietly. ‘Smoked over the fire, it would last for a day or two. The tongue—in the horse’s head.’
Bewilderment gave way to understanding. She was radiant again. ‘God bless you, God bless you,’ she said. She shifted the sleeping child, patted the other and shot me one more glowing, grateful look. Then, furtive and crafty as a wolf, she went sidling towards the carcase. I saw her bend, grim, purposeful, over the supine grey head, the head which had nuzzled me softly while I had nibbled the corn grains. Had I been obedient and laid my hand to the bridle instead of the saddlebag, Grys would now have been safe in his stable. And the beggars—the woman and the children among them—would still be hungry! Oh, it was all too hard to understand; too complicated; too puzzling.
I suddenly remembered Father Simplon’s words when I had told him that I had been chosen to accompany Brother Lawrence. ‘Good,’ he had said, ‘it will be a valuable experience for you.’
A valuable experience, I said to myself; and, limping away in the direction of Gorbalze, I compared the state of mind and body which I had set out with at in which I was returning. If I had really died and been resurrected I could hardly have felt more changed.
III
I arrived back at Gorbalze just at midnight when the bell was ringing for matins; Father Simplon had not gone to bed but was waiting for me in the porter’s lodge with a blanket draped over his shoulders. The sight of him told me that Brother Lawrence had reached home safely (I later learned that he had managed to borrow a horse along the road) and the expression with which I was greeted warned me that the story of my behaviour had lost nothing in the telling.
I think that if on my arrival I had been given food and allowed to go to bed I might, by the morning, have recovered some measure of sanity. I expected rebuke and punishment. A novice does not, with impunity, strike his superior and precipitate a situation which loses his monastery a good palfrey. I expected, as I reeled and stumbled back to Gorbaize, that there was a beating in store for me, a stern rebuke from the chapter and some days on bread-and-water diet. Father Simplon was a great believer in the last-named method of cooling hot heads and hot tempers. I even carried my gloomy anticipations a little farther and visualised some more subtle method of punishment; being forbidden to work on my manuscript or set to perform some task known to be distasteful. I swear that I was prepared to accept such penances in the proper meek spirit, for I had smitten Brother Lawrence and I had been responsible for Grys’s end.
But I had underrated Brother Lawrence’s anger and his cunning. He had made a report about me which had created an atmosphere in which, with very little help from me in my hysterical, exhausted state, far more serious charges flourished.
The first ominous note was struck by Father Simplon when, on his return from matins, he began to question me.
‘And what exactly was your intention when you snatched the bag?’
‘To feed the beggars, Father.’
‘Knowing their numbers and how little food was left?’ I nodded.
‘How then could you hope to carry out your intention?’
‘I hoped,’ I said, ‘f
or a miracle.’
And Father Simplon said, ‘That smacks of heresy.’
Later in my life, on the rare occasions when I remembered the ensuing six days, I tried to be tolerant and to remind myself that most of the men with whom I had then to deal were old, were professionally religious, bringing to matters of doctrine all the interest and passion and prejudice which men of the outer world devote to a number of diffuse ends; were all, or most of them, celibate, a state which I now see is not conducive to cool judgment but rather to hysteria easily provoked and tempers easily exacerbated.
I can forgive them now—can see, in fact, that there was little save stupidity for which to blame them; but when at the end of six days I lay in the punishment cell at Gorbalze, beaten black and blue, empty-bellied, filthy and despondent, I hated them all.
I could see even then that I had managed badly. I had allowed myself to be provoked into making reckless statements on the one hand and endeavouring to explain the inexplicable on the other. My interview with Brother Gaspard who, as steward, was responsible for the business of buying a new horse and who was furious with me, opened with a pious lecture upon the estates of man, during which he informed me that since God had laid starvation upon the beggars it was presumptuous and blasphemous to interfere with that state; and it ended somehow with me shouting that it was very wrong for the monastery to demand the full manorial dues during a time of famine and, further, that the whole economy of our community was in direct opposition to the rule of poverty laid down by our Founder.
But to the sub-prior, who came to me quietly and talked in sympathetic manner, I tried to explain that there was a miracle. Not by the multiplication of small viands, not by the fall of manna from heaven but by the upspring of an idea of killing the palfrey. The sub-prior was smooth, infinitely deceptive; to talk to him after the others was like the ease that follows a bout of toothache. I told him, poor fool that I was, about the other miracle—the woman’s holding out of the meat to me. I told him how, for a moment, she looked like an angel.
