Heloise nodded. She drew a stool beside his feet, and sat looking into the fire.
“I know,” she said after a pause. “And yet I feel it with a difference. It is as though you had all time behind you as well. So that I can ask you things.”
“What things?”
“I am always asking you things. But to-day——” She hesitated, her eyes on the white wood-ash.
Gilles waited, content to look at her.
“Gilles,” she spoke suddenly, “what will become of Evrard?”
“I think,” he said slowly, “he will do very well. It so happens that there is a school of sorts at Sarzeau, and the priest has little of letters, and I have some influence there. It will not be much of a living, but better than going to feed hogs for the woman’s people. They are farmers. He had thought of that, God help him.”
“He came to see you, then?”
“I went to see him,” said Gilles reluctantly.
Heloise turned her eyes on the motionless bulk in the great chair, a caress of tenderness so profound that now, thought Gilles, it is I who blink like a cat. Then her face hardened.
“Gilles, was he wrong to marry?”
“Canonically, yes.”
“Then is marriage a sin?”
“Not a sin. Only a mistake.” She was looking at him, and the delighted irony in her eyes met the irony in his. “That,” he continued, “is why the canonists regard it so gravely. For one can repent and be absolved of a sin, but there is no canonical repentance for a mistake. Unless indeed in the sense wherein St. Paul said: ‘Such shall have trouble in the flesh: but I spare you.’”
The light danced in her face, and suddenly went out. “But Evrard—it was such a good face, and she—I saw her this morning at her door, all sodden with crying and frightened. And the Archdeacon—my uncle says it was he who first denounced him in chapter—the Archdeacon——” She stopped.
“Has strange bedfellows,” agreed Gilles smoothly.
Heloise had risen, her hands clenched in sudden fury. “Then why? And yet you, you, voted against Evrard.”
“And should vote again to-morrow.” The indulgence had gone from Gilles’ voice and left it cold.
It had its effect. The girl sat down again, as if suddenly spent, gazing into the changing heart of the fire as if she followed there the tortuous working of men’s minds. Gilles reached out his hand and turned the hour-glass.
“Say it, Heloise. Say what you are thinking me.”
She shook her head. “I do not want to say it, because I know it is not true.”
“What is not true?”
“That you are a hypocrite.”
“I am,” said Gilles. “Officially, I am a canon of Notre Dame, and I have the morals, and, what is worse, the appearance, of Silenus.”
Heloise shook her head. “It is not that. You make no pretence at goodness. Not like the Archdeacon. But—you condemned Evrard.”
“Canon law condemned him. So also would it condemn the Archdeacon, if the charges against him were first brought, and then proved. And it is easier to prove marriage than . . . other forms of depravity.”
“And the Church says marriage is a sacrament.”
“And I believe,” said Gilles steadily, “in the Holy Catholic Church.”
Heloise drew a long breath of bewilderment. “Gilles,” she said suddenly, shaking the canonical riddle from her shoulders, “tell me. What do you, yourself, think of marriage?”
Gilles turned from fingering the hour-glass and gazed steadily into the eyes confronting him. His heavy jaw set.
“Marriage, to me, is a compromise with the flesh. The Church in its great wisdom has given its blessing to that compromise, considering it, moreover, as an indulgence that brings its own chastening, and speaking also, as did Ivo of Chartres, of a certain spiritual union, of which I have seen little, and have, I confess, desired less. But the very root of marriage, to me, is the satisfying of a lust of the flesh: and the Church itself declares that the ascetic has chosen the more excellent way. I am no ascetic, but my satisfactions have never had the blessing of the Church upon them. Which is perhaps illogical,” his voice was lightening, “since I have never eaten without a Benedicat.”
“Then is love lust?”
“Its root is lust.”
For a while neither spoke.
“You find that horrible?”
“I do.” Her voice was almost inaudible.
“But the rose is lovelier than its root, Heloise. And by your leave, madam, a rose grows better in a dunghill than in a quarry of white Carrara marble. And dies . . .”—he hesitated, and the words came grating—“and dies less soon.”
Heloise turned upon him, her mouth quivering.
“Dies?”
Gilles shook his head. “This also will pass. And marriage—marriage seems to me the effort to make that permanent which is in its nature transient. Nequidquam, nequidquam, in vain, in vain.”
His face had sunk into its heaviest lines of disillusionment.
“Hunger and thirst appeased, there’s profit in’t.
The body’s richer for it: but from this,
All human beauty and the face of men,
Naught but the ghosts of unfulfilled desire
Drifting on every wind.”
The husky voice grating through the heavy Lucretian hexameters had strengthened, till the whole plangent resonance of desire rang in it like a violin. Heloise sat motionless, her eyes unfathomable with pain, fixed on the dreamer’s face. Another listener, unseen in the doorway, the arras clutched in his hand, stood halted, holding his breath.
“Never yet
Hath he possessed her wholly, never yet
Have twain been one.”
Nequidquam, nequidquam. The voice stumbled on the sullen consonants and ceased. Gilles sat forward, his head sunk on his breast, his hands hanging from his knees. With a long sigh Heloise stirred and woke, to meet the eyes of Abelard, still rigid in the shadow of the door.
CHAPTER IV
It was long after sunset, but the crescent moon above Notre Dame was still no more than a glimmering sickle in the harvest glow of the sky. The inner radiance that is the mystery of the light of the Île de France slept on its towers. Abelard, rounding the last bend above the Clos des Vignerons, halted in the stride that had carried him through twenty miles of the Seine valley. Often as he had seen it, this beauty never failed to catch him by the throat. Before him rode the island with its towers, glimmering like some great white-sailed ship that he had seen, bearing into Nantes from the vast spaces of the open Loire, or a wild swan, resting a moment in mid flood. It had the air of a winged victory, stayed of its own volition in its imperious way. “Queen among cities, moon among stars,” his brain was beating out the lovely rhythms, “island of royal palaces: and in that island hath Philosophy her royal and ancient seat, who alone, with Study her sole comrade, holding the eternal citadel of light and immortality, hath set her victorious foot on the withering flower of the fast-aging world.”
The withering flower. The light on the banks had dimmed, the river darkened, but still the island glowed with that unearthly light, as though its fountains were within. Abelard swung down the river road, his blood pulsing in a strange exaltation that was the climax of his mood. Never had he so felt the richness of living as in these last days, never been so joyously aware of the urge of creation. The name of his new book had flashed on him, Sic et Non, and he had stood astonished and charmed at its simplicity and its absoluteness. His scholars were out of Paris, but he had hardly been aware of the emptiness of his days, for he had plunged headlong into a re-reading of the Fathers, and the surge of St. Augustine’s prose rose and fell in his brain. He was drinking little and eating less, but something was wine in his blood, and all the day and half the night reading could not daunt the restlessness that fev
ered him. To-day it had driven him out, but the miles of the Seine valley had only set his pulse beating to a headier rhythm. Paris rode there to greet him, unearthly and proud: but the man who swung down the river-path to enter it came as both conqueror and lover.
The river ran dark below the Petit Pont: Abelard’s countryman’s nostrils twitched as he came through the narrow street between the crowding houses. Thank Heaven the chapter had insisted that Raoul Testart should at least close in his latrines: the river that had been a sheet of silver here ran like a sewer. What sort of creature was man, that he could not live without a heap of ordure? The air grew sweeter as he passed into the wide Parvis, but the light was dim beneath the tall houses, and as he entered his own doorway, he stumbled in the black well of the stairs. It was at once close and chill. Guibert had fried some abomination for his supper: the smell of burnt fat still hung in the air. His own room was heavy with it; his manuscripts lay in a disordered heap on the table, pushed to one side to make room for the platter with its revolting gobbets of flesh congealed upon it. Guibert had long since disappeared. Abelard’s stomach, never a strong one, rose. He took a hasty pull at the flagon, cut himself a hunch of bread and cheese and went over to the window to eat it, the demi-god who had swung through the radiant dusk become an irritable and queasy-stomached scholar.
The loneliness of the room gathered about him: in the dreary reaction after exaltation, Abelard could have groaned aloud. The books looked on him with indifferent faces: his manuscript was a meaningless huddle of words. He would go to Gilles: the thought of the man warmed you like a wine. In a moment he was on the stairs, almost as though something chased him, across the Parvis, through the great arch of the cloister gate, and climbing the familiar stair. His hand on the door, a sudden reluctance seized him, a memory of sensation so violent that for a moment it sickened him: but he thrust it down and, opening the door, drew an involuntary breath of relief. Gilles was alone. The great chair at the hearth was empty, and white ash lay on the stone. Gilles himself stood at the window, craning to catch the last of the light on a page of parchment held close to his eyes. Abelard crossed to him lightly, and stood at his side.
“Humph,” said Gilles, without looking up. He finished his paragraph, laid down the parchment, and turned his eyes on Abelard, a gaze of slow kindliness that wrapped his shivering loneliness like a cloak. He forgot his darkness and discouragement: he could have kissed Gilles’ hands in gratitude.
“I was a fool to stay away,” he blundered out.
“So that was it,” said Gilles.
“I did not know I was doing it. Gilles, do you remember what Marbod of Angers said about a man losing the truth of himself?”
“Juvenal first, I think. But that is a trifle. Well?”
“I find it again, the truth of myself, with you.”
Gilles considered him.
“The pit of your stomach more likely.” He turned from him and went over to the dresser. “By the look of you, you last broke your fast this time yesterday. They stuff this,” he was busy carving a great ham, “in Brittany better than anywhere. And the wine, like your quotation, is from Angers. But I should commend you to eat before you drink.”
Abelard came over meekly for his platter and carried it to the window-seat. In a moment Gilles followed him, with two tankards, and set himself down on the settle.
“It is perhaps no wonder,” he said meditatively, “that Fulbert is concerned for your health.”
Abelard looked up startled. “Fulbert?”
“My good Peter, you have been the god of their idolatry to many young men: but it is a triumph to have captured anything so dry. He talks of nothing else. Hercules for strength, because you carried him out of chapter; but there is nothing pagan that is Christian enough for your handling of him afterwards——”
Abelard moved uncomfortably. “I knew nothing of it,” he said sulkily, “till he slid down beside me in the stalls. And when I lifted him, it was like handling a little dead bird. He came to, pretty quickly; but I did not like to let him walk home alone.”
“And so you carried him?”
“I did not. I only gave him an arm.”
“By this time, you carried him like St. Christopher, and put him in his bed, and even thought to come here and fetch Heloise, and went and sat with him every day till he was about again, meantime, discoursing like St. Augustine and St. Jerome, with the wisdom of the Blessed Gregory thrown in.”
“For heaven’s sake, Gilles—— But you know yourself there is something about him.”
“There is,” said Gilles, “and I shall tease you no longer. I told you you were neglecting him.”
“It is not his conversation,” said Abelard, “for he has none. Is it his innocence?”
“I think myself,” said Gilles, “that he has more of the faculty of admiration than any man I have ever known. He has never ceased to wonder at finding himself a canon of Notre Dame; like Ausonius, when they made him consul. A canon’s stall is a sacred thing to him; he thinks better of himself ever since. And I have never known a man with so small a tincture of letters and so profound a reverence for them. He was always by way of regarding you as a demigod; and now that you have condescended, he goes scarlet and stammers when he speaks of you.”
“You have seen him?”
“He was here yesterday, lonely, for Heloise had gone for a while to Argenteuil. He sent her, for he thought her too much confined in the nursing of him. And he spoke of nothing else, unless indeed it was your scoundrel of a Guibert.”
“You see,” said Abelard, “it is not easy to know what to talk about. And when he asked me what Guibert paid for his fish——”
“It is a careful soul,” said Gilles. “The tears stood in his eyes when he told me what your house-keeping cost you. He could feed you, he says, on a quarter of the sum, and you would be as sleek as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.”
Abelard sighed. “I never seem to have any money,” he said ruefully, “and I never have anything fit to eat. There’s the wine, of course. And books. But old William never had more than a quarter of my scholars, and he lived like a bishop, before he was one.”
“It is that locust you have. And you are like enough to have less, now that Guibert has fallen in with Bele Alys.”
“Bele Alys? I thought she was out of a song.”
“You would,” said Gilles patiently. “And so she is. That song was made for her when she first came to Paris.”
“It’s a good tune,” said Abelard. “Main se leva Bele Alys”—he stopped his humming abruptly. “I wonder—but it could hardly have been.”
“What?”
“About two weeks ago I was looking out one night, late. And I saw two in the shadow at the steps. I did not know they were living creatures till they moved, and the moon shone on her face. And then they came together again, and——” He hesitated, but the silence into which he spoke accepted him. “It seemed to me, watching them, as if they made all the things that we contend for, nothing. And then it struck for midnight, and the woman darted away like a swallow, and who was it but that lank cat of a Guibert sidling across the square.”
“And so you mocked him?”
“And myself too.”
“You need not have done that,” said Gilles, “if the woman was Bele Alys.”
“A scullion and a harlot,” said Abelard bitterly. “And for a while——”
“Well?”
“It seemed to me as though . . . as though they had immortality.”
“And so they had. Do you remember Boethius’ definition of eternity, ‘to hold and possess the whole fullness of life in one moment, here and now, past and present and to come’? That is what Bele Alys gives to a man when he takes her in his arms. Until she wearies.”
Abelard listened, bemused. “Gilles,” he said suddenly, “I do not believe a word of it. It is you who are t
he sorcerer. There is no woman living could give a man that.”
“Bele Alys has, to many men,” said Gilles soberly. “Though not all of them, perhaps, have recalled it in the language of Boethius. But—man, you saw it for yourself.”
“Not with that hound,” said Abelard obstinately.
“It is grace, not merit,” said Gilles gravely. “Yet another point in which she has something of the divine nature. She will sell herself, when she chooses, for a king’s ransom—if she wants the money: and she will give herself, when she chooses, for charity. Like enough, your mongrel looked up at her with the eyes haunting out of that scraped face of his——”
“Don’t I know it!” said Abelard. “The drunken, lecherous hound. But he can sit in the corner mouthing that flute of his with those eyes gazing at you over it and the tune plucking at you like a hand in your breast, till I have hurled things at him. It’s either that, or throw back your head and howl like a dog yourself.”
“Blessed are the poor in spirit,” said Gilles drily. “Well, she will soon weary of him. But meantime, look to your purse.”
Abelard shrugged. “Most of the year’s fees are gone already,” he said bitterly. “Now that I think of it, I have half a mind to go for the summer back to Brittany.”
Gilles sat silent, his mouth pursed, frowning to himself. Still frowning, he rose, and went to sit down in his familiar chair beside the hearth. When he spoke, it was as a man who has come to a decision and does not know whether or not he mislikes it.
“Fulbert,” he said harshly, “is wishful that you should give up your separate lodging and live with him. He bade me say that he has room for Guibert also, for he knows that you must have a man about you, and his old Grizzel, though bearded, is a woman, and enough to do in the kitchen. So that you will still have Guibert to fetch and carry for you, but no outgoings of money nor false marketing.” He talked on, as if not to observe the rigour that had crept on the younger man’s face. “There is a great room that looks to the Seine near the top of the house; it is draughty with windows, but there would be room for yourself and your books. He does not any more climb so high, with the stiffness of his knees.”
Peter Abelard Page 3
