The village was still only half awake: here and there the creak of a well-rope, or the sharp smell of newly-kindled wood. But the mists were rising, and soon the sun was warm enough for Heloise to get rid of her cloak. They halted while he dismounted to fold it and strap it to his own saddle: and suddenly it seemed to him that all the grief of the parting was folded up with the cloak, for she straightened her shoulders and cantered ahead, and by the time he came galloping behind her, it was a boy’s face that provoked him, over her shoulder. The smell of the sweet warm grass steeped their bodies through: and when they rode through a lane of crimson hawthorn, he remembered with a tide of rising exaltation that two days from now would be the first of May. They would keep their Vigil of Venus in the woods. What was there in love that it taught a man all the mysteries of the ancient faiths? He looked at the young creature riding ahead of him, with a kind of awe. Was this the Heloise he knew, or had Psyche become Eros, and was he riding with Love himself?
The weather held. It was seven days instead of three before they reined in their horses and sat, their eyes dazzled at the silver of the Loire at Tours: and if Abelard closed his mind to the memory of Paris and the turbulent crowds of his scholars shouting poor Ralph of Beauvais down, he had good reason for it. The days of riding between Paris and the west he had always counted as singularly his own: he was responsible to no one but himself, he felt, and sometimes he would stop in open country and think exultingly that no one in the world, for Guibert mattered no more than his own shadow, could be certain where he was, or lay any claim upon him: he was absolute master of himself. But now, with the madness of May in his blood, and Heloise transmuted in the pregnant stillness of the woods into some wild changeling of laughter and sudden passion, it seemed to him that he was master of space and time. They would halt at a village to buy food, and now and then the two would stop for a meal at a parsonage, and Heloise would carry herself as meek as a shy lad riding to the Schools at the heels of his distinguished uncle: the two would play the whole comedy of timid submission on one side and indulgent sternness on the other, but they soon wearied of it, and could not ride too quickly till the woods again received them into their sun-charmed world. The April rains had left the valley of the Loire bewitched between wood and water: he would lay her in a forest pool to see how golden she was in the brown water, and carry her from it to worship her whiteness on the grass. Their minds burnt with love as their bodies with the sun, they hardly felt the chill shadow of the walls of the Abbey as they rode past Charlemagne’s tower. But when they turned into the Rue de la Scellerie and on to their hostelry under the shadow of St. Gatien, their hearts misgave them. They would ride east no more. To-morrow they must take the northern road, to Paris.
They slept ill. Their upper room in the hostelry was small, and full of stenches after their forest nights. They would have been better in the guest-house at St. Martin’s, Abelard said, but he had shirked the hospitable commotion that his coming would have roused, and the friendly inquisition his nephew would have to face. Heloise turned and tossed and saw the window darken and grow grey again before she slept: and it seemed to her she had only closed her eyes when Abelard’s hands were touching her to waken her. She opened her eyes and looked up at him: but her broken cry of recognition had a poignancy he did not understand. The face looking down at her was no longer the face of the forest god, but the haggard scholar who had been her lover first: and it seemed to her that her heart clave to him, as it had not to the other.
He sat down beside her on the bed, looking at her remorsefully. He was fully dressed.
“I am a brute to wake you, Heloise. But there is a man I want to hear, lecturing at the Cathedral Schools at six. I’d have let you sleep and gone myself, but I did not like the look of them downstairs last night, and I do not want you sleeping here alone. Will you get up and come with me?”
She was already pulling on Berengar’s hose. He sat contentedly, munching an apple, watching her dress.
“Who is he, Peter?”
“Bernard Sylvestris. They don’t talk much of him at Paris yet, but I heard Hildebert speak about him when I rode through Le Mans a week ago. Very young, but as wise as a troll, they say: one of the small dark men that were left over from the first race. Hildebert says he is a poet. And Hildebert should be a judge.”
“Where does he come from?”
“No one knows. Except that he is a Breton. Some say he is from Carnac or Locmariaquer. Anyhow, they say he is like something would come out of a wood, and that that is why he was nicknamed Sylvestris. It is his great word for the primal chaos, antiqua silva, the ancient wood. Ready? There’s the bell.”
She pulled the hood of her cloak about her head, and they went down the steep stair and out through the courtyard into the Place in front of the cathedral. For a moment they walked in the strange argent light that filled the square as though Tours itself lay beneath the silver water of the Loire: then Abelard turned in at the side of the cathedral, as the last vibration of the great bell died. An aged canon, a pace or two before them, was going down the paved walk to the north door, seemingly to early Mass. Abelard halted in his quick stride.
“Don’t overtake him,” he murmured. “I believe it is Roscelin.”
The old man had reached the steps. He turned and looked back, a bitter withered face, unshaven, with reddish eyebrows going white. He had the air of a very ancient fox slinking home to his covert in the early morning. A spark of recognition gleamed in his eyes, and he came back a step or two to meet them.
“If it is not a phantasma of the morning,” he said in the high elaborate voice of the old rhetorician, “I should say it was my one-time pupil, Peter Abelard.”
“You are too good a nominalist to see phantasmata, Master Roscelin,” said Abelard courteously. “You are well?”
“I am old,” said Roscelin. “But I have my eyes. Though indeed I do not think I have set them on you since you were the height of the lad that is lurking behind you.” A glance like a barb shot at Heloise, who had fallen back a step in due respect. “But Tours is honoured: what brings you so far from Paris, Master Peter?”
“My private affairs,” said Abelard, so pleasantly that it was a moment before the rebuff went home. “And I am now on my way to hear your new Master of the Schools. Hildebert tells me he is as good a Platonist as Bernard of Chartres.” He made to turn towards the cloister, down which two belated scholars were hurrying.
As Abelard spoke, the crafty eyes were perpetually sliding towards Heloise, who stood meekly waiting, her face downcast and partly hidden by Berengar’s hood.
“And Ganymede goes with you?” He stooped forward smiling, to look under the hood.
Heloise smiled back, and raised her head, shy and pleased to be taken notice of. “But my name is not Ganymede, Master Roscelin,” she said, in a piping treble. “My name is Berengar, sister’s son to my uncle Peter.”
The eyes slid from one to the other. “Well, have a care of him, Master Peter,” said Roscelin. “It is a tender youth to be let loose in the streets of Paris.”
Abelard bowed. “He is in my charge,” he said quietly. “And now I shall take my leave of you, Master Roscelin, or I shall be showing small courtesy to Sylvestris. Come, boy.” He swung her round, with no gentle hand, and turned down the cloister, his hand still gripping her shoulder. Roscelin stood looking after them. He was smiling a small secret smile.
They were late. The long vaulted room was crowded, but there was a narrow ledge on one side the embrasure of the door. Abelard set Heloise upon it and stood beside her, half hidden in the shadow. From the cathedra at the further end a low oddly resonant voice was speaking, half chanting. No one had turned to stare at their incoming. Abelard made mental note of it. It was an orator who could so hold his men at six o’clock in the morning.
It was some little time before he himself paid much heed. The encounter with Roscelin had shaken him with o
ne of his swift deadly angers. Ganymede: lurking: so the world looked to a fox, and sure enough, he left the fox’s smell behind him. But gradually the strange voice had its way with him, lulling him the more for the half-unfamiliar Breton accent of the Latin, and the singing note, alternating between verse and prose. Broceliande, he was saying, and the woods of the Ardennes, and Italian Silo, that sees from its high pines the white sails of twin seas. What kind of wizard was the little man, that when he spoke you saw what he saw, yet on those white sails neither your eyes nor his had ever rested? It was rivers now, the waters of Shiloh that go softly, the Tiber that bears Rome upon his shoulders, the Po that rolls towards Venice its imperious way. And now it was the stars. This must be the poem of which Hildebert had spoken, the making of the world from chaos and old night: and still the little figure swung there, gazing out under a penthouse of great brows and a thatch of black hair, his short-sighted eyes rapt and unaware, unless of the vision within.
He had halted. The rhythm changed into prose, yet if anything more resonant, thought Abelard, than his verse.
“Perfect from the perfect, beautiful from the beautiful, eternal from the eternal: from the intellectual world the sensible world was born: full was that which bore it, and its plenitude fashioned it full.” Since John Scotus Erigena, said Abelard to himself, there has been no philosopher who was a poet also: and he began remembering the close of Erigena’s De Divisione Naturae, his prayer for the coming of the Light that will bring to darkness the false light of the philosophers, and will lighten the darkness of those that know. The memory had carried him into a soundless place, and how long he had been deaf he did not know, till beside him he heard Heloise catch her breath.
“A land there is, a little lap of earth,
Near neighbour to the dawn and the south wind,
The first to feel the sweet new-risen sun,
Nor hurt at all by his primæval fire.
It knoweth but the clemency of heaven,
And in one lap holds the delights of earth.
Amid those happy woods a river flows
That winds and turns again upon itself,
Chiding the roots and warring with the pebbles,
Till with a murmuring of fleeting water
It falls into the levels of the lake.
Here to these water-meadows, flowering fair,
Came man, a while their guest; too brief a guest.”
He heard Heloise give a long sigh: it had its echo in his own heart. If Bernard dreamed of man’s lost Paradise, they two were grieving for their own.
The voice from the shadows halted, troubled. Bernard Sylvestris was hanging over his desk, frowning, aware of some vague trouble in the room, a trouble that had wakened his own eternal questioning.
“Too brief a guest,” he repeated. His head sank on his breast. And again after a long silence, “Too brief a guest.
“But shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, ‘What makest thou?’ Shall the thing framed say of him that framed it, ‘He had no understanding’?
“Yea. The soul cries out upon the body: and I have heard the body cry out upon the soul, to the Creator of them both. ‘Daily the soul complains of me,’ it cried, ‘because I conform to my own nature, and dishonour her daily. But Thou didst fashion me of earth: how can I but smell of it? Had I been cleanly fashioned of things clean, then might she blame me for my filthiness. But now, rather might she cry out on that which made me of such stuff, and yoked us in one yoke.’ Aye, and I have seen the souls of the unborn, huddled by the house of Cancer the Crab, and pure in their simple essence, they shudder at the dull and blind habitations which they see prepared.”
He was shuddering now. The short-sighted eyes wandered over the blur of young bewildered faces turned up to his, as though he sought some understanding. Suddenly he strung himself, as if he had met the challenge of the eyes burning in the shadow of the door.
“‘Dull and blind.’ So dull? So blind? I tell you, let the spirit complain of the flesh no more. It is the prison which makes men free. I tell you, this flesh is the condition of their immortality. For in mastering it does the mortal become immortal, and humanity pass to the proud gods. Let you but look at a man’s eyes! The beasts run downcast, locking at the earth, but the very face of man is witness to his majesty: alone on earth he rears his sacred head to the stars. The Gods themselves, and the sky, and the stars, hold speech with him: he is one with the council of the Fates, aye, and by that same base act of generation, he throws the gauntlet down to Atropos. He shall bring to light the dark causes of things, lost in the mirk: he shall see the windy fields of the air, he shall see the dark silence of the dead. His is the height of heaven, and the breadth of the earth, and the depth of the sea, and he shall know the changing face of things and why they change. He shall subdue the earth and rule upon it, the first of things created, their king and their high priest.”
Again he stopped, his eyes holding those other unseen eyes, his spirit grappling with one mightier and more tormented than his. He was crouching forward now, his hands gripping the outer edge of the desk.
“But the stains: but love, tyrannus amor, the tyrant of our flesh: but the whole ineradicable evil of the ancient wood? So be it. Earth to earth: but be thou heaven’s familiar, and let your eyes depart not from those high places. For when this house of thine falls in ruin about thee, they shall abide thy coming, familiar roofs of home. No unknown stranger shalt thou climb there, where waits thee the place and the banner of thy star.”
He swayed a moment, then dropped on his seat, his arms along the desk in front of him, his eyes closed. Heloise felt Abelard’s hand upon her shoulder: she rose and followed him into the sudden light. In silence they went back to the inn: and still in silence, they took the north road to Paris.
ebreak
BOOK III
PARIS
July—October 1118
CHAPTER I
“It is our custom in our daily speech,” wrote Abelard, “to speak of things as they appear to our bodily senses, rather than as they are in actual fact. So, judging by the sight of our eyes, we say it is a starry sky, or not, or that the sun is hot, or has no heat at all, or that the moon is shining more, or less, or even not at all, when these things, however variable they show to us, are ever in one stay. Is it any wonder, then, that some things have been stated by the Fathers, rather from opinion than from truth? Moreover, many a controversy would find a swift solution if we could be on our guard against the same word used in different senses by different authors.”
The wheels drove heavily. He set down his pen and yawned. The first discovery of argument in one’s own mind had always a glory about it: one could recapture something of it, watching it strike fire from the right audience: but this arguing at two removes, with a goose-quill instead of the human voice, was a dry business. The preface to the Sic et Non must be written: it must lay down the principles for all judicious reading, whether of Holy Writ or of the Fathers: yet when he wrote, he rattled dry peas in the bladder that was his brain. It was a sullen day: there was no sun shining, and the gutters stank most vilely. He had spent most of it indoors, this Octave of St. Peter and St. Paul. He had gone to Mass that morning, in the hope that he might see Heloise, but she was not there, nor Fulbert. The Schools were empty, for the men had gone a week ago, on the 29th of June, and there was nothing to take him out.
He yawned again and came back to his manuscript, turning the pages idly. Whether Adam was created inside Paradise or out: whether Eve alone was seduced or Adam also: whether James, brother of Our Lord, was first Bishop of Jerusalem or not: whether one already baptised may be baptised again or not: whether sin was remitted in the Baptism of John, or not. He scowled as he read. He knew that these had served his purpose well enough, that they proved the contradictory authority of the Fathers: he knew too that he had dealt with weightier things: but none of them, on this perverse
day, would meet his eye. Here were pages on virginity, whether it be prescribed or not: whether any human copulation can be without sin: whether the married priest is to be rejected by his parishioners or not. Undoubtedly he was being happily guided in his sortes. “Whether it is ever lawful for a man to marry her with whom he hath committed fornication.” It caught him fair between the eyes. Well, what had they to say about it? He settled down to read sardonically. St. Ambrose: for any Christian to enter upon marriage with her whom he hath stained with unlawful defilement, was even as the sin of incest. Augustine, on the other hand, that legitimate marriage with good intent may well follow an illicit union, and that true marriage may follow even adultery, if the husband of the first marriage be dead. Gregory the Great, as grim as Ambrose. Council of Châlons, against. Council of Aix-la-Chapelle, against. Ivo of Chartres: that on the whole the Fathers, concerned for the honour of marriage, denounce it: but others, regarding the weakness and folly of their fellows with an instinct of compassion, would fain temper the rigour of the canon. And between their opinions seems to me just such a distance as lies between justice and mercy. Abelard thrust the manuscript from him and was on his feet, snarling in sudden ungovernable fury. Regarding the weakness and folly of their fellows . . . between justice and mercy . . . Let them keep their mercy till they were asked for it. Let them turn their backs like good old bilious Gregory and walk off holding their noses as from the sin of incest. Anything was more tolerable than this insufferable patronage of the saints.
“Neither do I condemn thee; go and sin no more.” He stopped his trampling up and down the room. He did not know where the words had come from; he had been in no humour to call them to his mind, and suddenly they were in him, like a memory in the blood. His rage dropped from him, though a pulse was still beating in his cheek. He sat down, utterly exhausted, and dropped his head on his hands. “And because He would not condemn me,” he thought, “I could lay my head in the dust.”
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