Peter Abelard

by Helen Waddell

  “What brings you here so late, Master Peter?” Abelard knew the voice, a decent grunting voice; Jean de Brosson, the cellarer from St. Germain.

  “I walked farther than I thought,” said Abelard, “and I was resting a while before I would go back.”

  Brosson wagged his head.

  “Great clerk, little wit,” said he. “Get in, Master Peter: we’ll leave you as far as the bridge. And if you are too late for the gates, as I doubt you will be, there’s always a bed for you at St. Germain.”

  Abelard hesitated, but the boat was already alongside, and Brosson’s hand held out. It would be churlish to refuse; and there was comfort in the broad-beamed figure that had come upon him out of the loneliness of the night. He sat on a barrel behind Jean, and the boat swung again into midstream.

  “Indeed we’re full late ourselves,” began Brosson, “but I was half the day arguing with yon baillie at Epinay. You know Epinay, this side of Argenteuil?”

  “This side of Argenteuil?” said Abelard slowly. To say the name was a kind of bitter satisfaction to him. “I know Argenteuil.”

  “Well, you ask the Reverend Mother what she thinks of Pierre Quassart,” said Brosson with relish. “One of their vineyards at Ormesson marches with . . .”

  Abelard strove to listen, it would be some distraction from the gnawing in his heart, but will as he would, the voice evaded him, disjointed phrases catching up and making a teasing pattern on his brain. It was as though his mind came to the surface, and was beaten down again. They were past the ghostly army of the reeds. The woods were thick now on either side; they were going on for ever through a tunnel of dark trees, with this frog of Pharaoh giving voice before him; an invisible frog only for the broad line of the back. Then the trees grew thinner, there was a kind of separateness in the light, as though the darkness disintegrated and fell away: and suddenly the moon rose above the heights of St. Cloud.

  It lay before them, the valley of the Seine: at last, a great way off, the island with its towers. The moon rode high, intolerably lovely: some significance strained to him out of this silent aching beauty, and was pelted down by the rain of insignificant speech. Abelard could endure it no longer. He rose to his feet.

  “Steady, man,” said Brosson. “You’ll have us all in the river.”

  “Could you set me ashore here?” said Abelard. “I have a chill on me, I think, with sitting yonder, and I should be glad to warm myself walking.”

  “It will be all hours before you get in,” said Brosson solemnly. “You’d better sit where you are, and make sure of a drink and a warm bed with us at St. Germain. You’ll never get past the gates to-night.”

  “They know me,” said Abelard briefly. “I can get a drink at the Deux Epées. And I’d be better to warm myself with walking first.”

  Brosson, grumbling, turned the nose of the boat inshore.

  “It’s an ague, most like,” said the man beside him, as they watched him go. “I could know him shivering.”

  “He is in poor case for walking, at that rate,” said Brosson. “But, man, you couldn’t turn him.” He blew through his nostrils, and steered back into the current.

  The relief of silence was so great that for a while Abelard walked, not happy, but with the lightness that follows the loosening of a load. The remoteness of the moonlit world seemed to have softened his grief: he walked remembering, and remembering not her only, but a hundred things that they had read together, the strange starlight in her grey eyes when she was thinking, the queer blackness of them when he looked down at her after his kisses. “Illam pulchritudinem aeternam quam amat et ad quam tendit omne quod amat.” They had been reading John Scotus Erigena together. “That eternal Beauty which is beloved by, and towards which reacheth, whatsoever loveth.” That was the first time he had held her in his arms. God knows it was of no set purpose, but at the “ad quam tendit” his hands had gone out in a sudden involuntary outthrust of longing, and had closed on hers. Oh God!

  He was near the Quartier now; late as it was, there was still light in the taverns. Not the Deux Epées, he decided: he would see too many that he knew. The Àne Rayé would be emptier, unless of shabby folk. They would let him across the bridge at any hour, and he must get the night spent in some fashion. He could not go back to that house. The inn garden stretched up the hill: indoors smelt stale and rank to him, coming in from the freshness of the autumn night, and some were at the raucous stage of drinking. It irked him to hear their solemn quarrelling, and he took his bottle of Beaune and went out to one of the arbours under the vines. Farther up the garden he could hear low voices, and now and then a laugh that was smothered with a kiss, but he was beyond caring. Let them have their bliss.

  The Beaune was good. He sat there, shivering no longer, listening vaguely to the noises of the September night. The quarrel indoors went on interminably: through it he could hear the quick rattle and the calling of the dice. Down in the Pré aux Clercs by the river they were dancing, and some one was playing the flute, with now and then a burst of singing. It came to him muffled, but gradually beat its way into his consciousness. He knew the tune, they used to dance to it at Nantes. He was too far off to hear the words, but the tune persisted in his brain, and he began humming it under his breath, his mind following it, idly seeking them. He had them now—

  Her mouth was cherry red beneath the tree

  —“Lady, for God, I now go over sea,

  For your hard heart that will not pity me”——

  It had eluded him again. He listened, frowning in concentration: two more bars, and then the chorus swept up to him with a triumphant

  Et joie atent Gerars.

  A good tune for him to be humming that night, but he was past irony. So might a man lie dying, he thought, waiting for the coldness to creep up past his knees, and hear the clatter of dishes and laughter in the room beyond, and neither curse nor bless.

  And joy awaits Gerars.

  Strange, the effect of distance: let you be far enough away, and you heard only the infinite sorrowfulness of a crowd that is making merry, the inarticulateness of men that can wreak their hearts upon a single stave.

  Or a joie Gerars.

  The song was ended. Joy hath now Gerars. Yet, though the voices had fallen silent, the flute played on. How was it that a flute can play no air but it makes it sorrowful? And here where a man had won his heart’s desire, all the dumb longing of the groaning earth was in that final phrase.

  A sudden harsher note jarred through the air. Someone, the man in the far arbour most like, had caught his hand in the strings of a bass-viol. Abelard moved restlessly on his bench. Flutes were sorrowful, but the strings—it was one’s own nerves that the fingers plucked. A woman’s voice spoke a word or two, persuading. Silence fell again. Then the hand began plucking, uncertainly, but even the discords were waking what had better be left asleep. There came half a dozen consecutive notes, the promise of a tune, curiously familiar, and suddenly a voice rose, challenging who would to listen, a glorious outrage on the moonlit peace.

  “So by my singing am I comforted

  Even as the swan by singing makes death sweet,

  For from my face is gone the wholesome red

  And sorrow in my heart is sunken deep.

  For sorrow still increasing,

  And travail unreleasing,

  And strength from me fast flying

  And I for sorrow dying,

  Dying, dying, dying,

  Since she I love cares nothing for my sighing.”

  The dicing had stopped: even the wranglers were silent. Abelard listened, indifferent and remote. Two weeks ago he had written that song, in some other life where he had thought that he knew the agony of love.

  The unseen player plucked a single heavy note; his voice rose again, deeper and more resonant.

  “If she whom I desire would stoop to love me, />
  I should look down on Jove.

  If for one night my lady would lie by me,

  And I kiss the mouth I love,

  Then come death unrelenting,

  With quiet breath consenting,

  I go forth unrepenting,

  Content, content, content,

  That such delight were ever to me lent.”

  Abelard had risen: he was shaking, gripping the table over which he leaned. The silence grew, as if desire itself were dumb. Then the unseen hands were plucking the strings, sharp tortured minors, intolerably sweet.

  “Innocent breasts, when I have looked upon them——”

  O God! O God! Abelard stumbled out of the arbour and down the rough steps to the inn door, threw a handful of coins on the table, had a moment’s glimpse of flickering candle-light and staring faces, and found himself out in the night. Swiftly and noisily as he went, the last words followed him, crying after him, beseeching him,

  “For her mouth, her mouth, her mouth,

  That on her beauty I might slake my drouth.”

  Two hours later, he came dragging down the Rue des Chantres, his shoulders bent and his eyes on the ground, making for home as blindly as a creature that the hounds have lost, but have hunted wellnigh to death. So tired was he, so broken, that he did not even raise his head to see the candlelight in his high window, he had no heed for the stumbling of his feet on the stair. She heard them, those hopeless, dragging feet: it was her heart they stumbled on, breaking with love and pity. He fumbled at the latch, the door fell open: he came in a step or two and stood, bewildered by the light: she saw his eyes seeking, not yet comprehending, suddenly wild with hope. She was there at the window: he saw the small white oval of her face, the black pools of her eyes. With a little stifled cry, she held out her arms to him: he was on his knees at her feet, his head buried in her lap, his whole body shaking with a terrible tearless sobbing. Closer and closer she held him, her master no longer, her lover wounded to death. The sobbing ceased, but still he knelt, his face pressed against her lap, his arms blindly clutching her; now and then a long shudder quivered through him, like a child worn out with crying. She stooped and took his head and carried it to her breast.

  CHAPTER VI

  “Put another log on the fire, Pierre,” said Gilles. “It is bitter cold. I have no great love for an early Easter. The fast makes one feel the cold.”

  Pierre de Montboissier stooped to the pile on the hearth, flung a log to the back and turned the block of elm on the fire, so that the radiant bark glowed like burning scales. He stood, leaning against the chimney, and looked anxiously at Gilles. He was stooped forward and the old fine hands stretched out to the heat had gone dead and white at the finger-tips.

  “Let me pour you a drink, sir. The fast is not so strict for you. It is not as if it were Good Friday.”

  “You’re a good lad,” said Gilles gratefully. Pierre poured the wine carefully, tilting the bottle by slow degrees. He knew how to handle a wine, that youngster. But why, why was he for the cloister? Were those long legs never to grip the sides of a horse with armoured knee, but sit muffled in petticoats some day on an abbot’s white mule?

  “I shall miss you, Pierre,” he said crossly. He held out his hand for the goblet, scowling up under puckered brows.

  Pierre flushed scarlet with pleasure and embarrassment. He opened his mouth, but only to stammer.

  “It is nonsense,” went on Gilles, ignoring him. “I do not believe that you could not get another couple of months’ leave.” He scowled at the young averted face and the splendid throat, rising out of the ugly cowl. “I have always felt for Charles the Fat, when he cursed the man that ever made Tutilo a monk. By the way, did you ever see the ivory he carved, the diptych at St. Gall?”

  “I did not,” said Pierre. O blessed Gilles, who always spoke of things, and not of sentiment. “But our Abbot told me of it. I think he would sell his soul for it. He wants it copied—you know, the vine leaves and the deer—for a capital in the cloister at Cluny.”

  Gilles nodded. “There has been a good deal of coveting roused by that same diptych in its time. Did you ever hear how the Abbot Salomo tricked the Bishop of Mainz out of it, and got it for St. Gall? It is a good story, but they don’t like to hear it at Mainz.”

  Pierre sat down with a contented sigh. To sit with Gilles was to sit with Time himself, to whom a thousand years were as yesterday. “Hearing you talk,” he said suddenly and without embarrassment, “is the best thing I have got out of Paris.”

  Gilles looked at him with narrowed eyes. “Do not forget,” he said, a little sternly, “that you heard Peter Abelard lecture on ‘I said: ye are gods.’”

  The young face did not redden: it went suddenly expressionless.

  “I have not forgotten,” he said quietly, but Gilles felt a curious hardness in the voice. Quick anger swept over him. He leaned forward, his hands gripping the arms of his chair, his huge frame half out of it, his jowl thrust into Pierre’s face.

  “And who,” said he, “are you to condemn him?”

  The movement was not calculated, but it served. The youngster shrank back, startled out of his frozen mask.

  “I’m not condemning him.” His voice was sharp with wretchedness. “But—but I worshipped him.” He dropped his head on his hands.

  Gilles sat back, his brief anger spent.

  “I know,” he said, “I know. It is hard to forgive one’s god for becoming flesh.”

  Pierre de Montboissier raised his head. He was flushed with the tears he had kept back, but there was no fear of them now.

  “It is not that,” he said steadily. “St. Augustine himself——. But it is what has happened to his mind. It is heavier, like his face now. And he does not care for any of us. He used now and then to stay and talk when the lecture was over. Hours he would talk, and we would never know we were hungry. You do not know what he was like. His lectures, they were like a great wind that leapt suddenly, and you went with it, the trees tearing and shaking. It was like galloping horses——” he stopped breathless. “And now——”

  “And now?”

  “It is not fair of me to talk of him like this, but you—you know him utterly. He reads his lectures now, old lectures, and yawns reading them, and every now and then he looks at the hour-glass. None of us ever saw the sand run down. Most of us watch for it now. And they bet if he will stay the last grains of sand. He never gives the extra lecture—you know what they call the Extra ordinem. Sometimes it comes back; someone asks a question, and it is like a hawk, you know when the eyelid half closes and suddenly it slides back, and he blazes down at us. But it is oftener to strike than to soar. Even then, just to see him before he stoops——” Pierre’s eyes were shining in his head. They suddenly clouded.

  “But they are not afraid of him now. If you heard them snickering when he comes to the lecture at six, half awake, about . . . about . . .”

  Gilles nodded.

  “They’ve made a song about it,” Pierre went on savagely, like one biting on a tooth.

  “Good argument

  Hath Peter in his head,

  But better argument

  Hath Peter——”

  “I can supply the rhyme,” said Gilles. There was silence between them.

  “God knows,” the boy went on, arguing with himself, “we are spirit and flesh. But to see the spirit becoming flesh before one’s eyes. And his spirit.”

  Again Gilles nodded. “How old are you, Pierre?”

  “Almost twenty-two.”

  “Abelard is thirty-seven. For the seven years of manhood that you have behind you, and the fifteen that are before you till you reach his age, this man never looked on a woman to lust after her.” He was glowering at the young man’s face, content to see it slowly redden. “He was proud enough and arrogant, but lavish—had he ever a penny? When other
men gave the rind of the bacon, he gave all he had. And he would come in here to me famished, because he had forgotten to eat. He came to the age when a man’s passion is fiercest, and he has begun to know how solitary his soul is, but still he was like a man walking in a dream, though I thought I saw signs of his waking. Then one day, in this room, he saw Heloise.”

  Pierre’s head was bent, but the back of his neck, his very ears were crimson.

  “God help the boy,” thought Gilles, in sudden understanding. He waited a moment.

  “He is not the only man,” he went on quietly, “who would think her worth flinging the world away for, and heaven after it.”

  Pierre shivered. He did not look at Gilles, but at his twisting hands.

  “They make songs,” he managed to say at last, croaking, “about her too.”

  “And do you suppose,” said Gilles with a sudden ring of triumph in his voice, “that she cares?”

  Pierre looked at him, startled.

  “How could she not?”

  “You think,” said Gilles slowly, “it is the dove and the hawk? I tell you, you have seen the mating of eagles. And yet,” the ring of triumph left his voice, “I know, I know. Boy, do you think I am not myself afraid? Never have I seen such madness as this. And I wonder sometimes what the end will be.”

  The door opened abruptly.

  “Will you see Master Alberic of Rheims,” said Jehan, “for he came up the stairs after me?”

  “Surely,” said Gilles. He turned his face to the door. Pierre de Montboissier rose from his stool, and stood in the shadow beyond the chimney, watching a large and portly figure come through the door, and pace with dignity down the room.

  “You are welcome, Alberic,” said Gilles. “Man, even if I had not heard it, I would know from the very walk of you that they have made you Master of the Schools at Rheims.”