Peter Abelard

by Helen Waddell

  “Beloved, beloved, as if any vows could take me from you.” For a while they stood, holding one another. He heard her murmur under her breath, “The gates of hell shall not prevail against us.”

  CHAPTER II

  “Holy Silvester, intercede for her soul.

  Holy Gregory, intercede for her soul.

  Holy Martin, intercede for her soul.

  Holy Alexis, intercede——”

  Heloise, kneeling behind the senior nuns in the infirmary, had ceased to follow the litany. Her eyes were no longer on Godric’s face, that was not any more the face of the small indomitable scholar that she knew, but was a strange old woman’s, carved for death. They were fixed on the hand that held the blessed candle, so tightly that the infirmarian would not take it from her, the small claw-like hand that was alone recognisable and that alone showed any life, for the eyes already gleamed white under the half-closed lids. If Heloise prayed at all, dazed with fatigue and a kind of slow resentment, it was that Godric might die quickly, escape from this long agony of intercession that beat and clamoured round the solitude in which her soul had lived.

  Three days ago they had given her extreme unction, and she was living still; if that could be called life which was only the fluttering of restless hands like the limed wings of a bird, hands athirst for death, struggling to push away the intolerable weight of life. Only when Heloise held them were they still. But last night even her hands lay quiet, and the infirmarian had sent Heloise to bed. She had fallen straight into an abyss of sleep from which the waking had been sheer physical agony. For the waking had come with the nightmare wooden clatter of the tablet in the cloister, under the infirmarian’s breathless hammering, so that the whole convent might come running to watch their sister die. And the nightmare had continued, the flapping of the wide shoes down the cloisters (the sisters may run, Heloise remembered sardonically, only to assist at a death-bed, or from a fire), the flying black gowns like dark birds speeding through the mirk, the grim preparations for the end, already begun when she reached the infirmary and took her place among the frightened, sleepy novices. The dark haircloth was already on the floor with the ghostly outline of the cross stretched out upon it, grey with the ashes that had been kept since Ash Wednesday for just such use as this. They were laying Godric upon it as Heloise knelt down. At the foot or the grave-cloth the Abbess knelt, holding up the crucifix for the blind eyes to see, her massive face graven into grim resolution. Her arm had wearied after a while, and the infirmarian had taken the crucifix from her and held it nearer still; but the deep husky voice, Gilles’ voice, had swept unfaltering through the Creed, through the Penitential Psalms, and now was besieging the whole hierarchy of heaven to intercede with the Most High for this small wraith that was so soon to face Him.

  “Holy Magdalene, intercede for her soul.

  Holy Felicitas, intercede for her soul.

  Holy Agatha——”

  Heloise wrung her hands in a more desperate intercession. And even as her soul cried out, the candle fell, still burning, on the haircloth. A sigh breathed up from the kneeling figures, swaying forward: a scared novice began to sob. But the Abbess had risen, the burning candle caught and held high, her face transfigured.

  “Exibit spiritus eius et revertitur in terram suam: in die illa videbit Dominum creatorem suum.”

  There was a momentary silence: then the strong voice rose again, no longer interminably beseeching, but challenging heaven’s gates like the trumpets of its returning victorious host.

  “Go forth, Christian and holy soul, from this world. Go in peace, in the name of the Father Almighty, who created thee: in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, who died for thee: in the name of the Holy Ghost, who was shed upon thee: in the name of angels and archangels: in the name of principalities and powers and all the strength of heaven: in the name of Cherubim and Seraphim: in the name of the whole human race which is written in the Book of Life: in the name of patriarchs: in the name of apostles and martyrs: in the name of bishops and confessors: in the name of priests and deacons and every order of the Catholic Church: in the name of holy virgins and faithful widows. To-day in the Heavenly Jerusalem let thy place and thy habitation be. Let St. Michael the Archangel receive thee: prince of the army of Heaven. Let the angels come to meet thee on thy way, and bring thee into the City. Let Peter receive thee: he to whom the Lord gave the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven. Go forth in peace, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, who shall give thee light and grant unto thee eternal life, and raise thee up in the resurrection at the last day.

  “Lord Jesus Christ, thou good Shepherd, receive thy servant’s soul.”

  There was a stir of rising, whispering, and holy ejaculation, but Heloise knelt in a trance of peace. She could hear the murmur of voices about the grave-cloth, the peremptory voice of the Abbess naming the four sisters of equal seniority with the dead, the little commotion as they lifted the light body to carry it to the stone table for the washing: then from the outside the creak of the well-rope, and in a little while the heavy step of the portress, the buckets of water swaying on either side of her yoke. A little splashed over as she passed, and Heloise dipped her fingers in the pool it made on the uneven flags, and drew them across her hot forehead. Then the group closed round the dead-stone. “Imagine thyself on the dead-stone,” the rule for meditation had said, “figure to thyself this living body of thine turned this way and that, now on thy face, now on thy back—thy hand lifted and dropped again.” She thought of Godric, small and proud, humbled now in the indignity of death, and for the first time tears stung in her eyes. Then, as if in rebuke, the Abbess’s voice, harsh with fatigue but still indomitable:

  “Almighty and everlasting God, who didst deign to breathe into this human body a soul fashioned in Thy likeness . . .” and she slipped sideways on the stone floor, her head fallen on her kind neighbour’s shoulder.

  It was noon when she wakened, alone in the dorter, marvellously refreshed and very hungry. She had a dim memory of stumbling, half-carried, up the stairs, and lurching down on her bed; but it might have been a week ago, so deep was the gulf of sleep into which she had fallen and from which she now climbed. By the movement of feet in the refectory and the chanting of the grace, she guessed that dinner must have begun, if indeed it were not the grace for the ending; and waiting only to splash water on her face, she hurried down the stairs, and stood with bent head before the Abbess’s table, in silent apology for her lateness. The Abbess looked at her over the chicken-bone she was tearing and nodded: a gross woman, thought Heloise, but a mountain.

  The novices were coming backwards and forwards from the kitchen, with the platters and bowls: they would not sit down till the sisters had eaten. Heloise joined them, feeling more ravenous for the good vapour that rose from the steaming bowls of soup. At the lectern a novice was reading the life of St. Pelagia, harlot of Antioch, her voice dragging and running, and sometimes yawning with fatigue, but no one paid any heed. Weary and over-watched as they were, they sat in pleasant lassitude, content to be alive and in a warm September, forgetting while they might that dread awakening at dawn, and the vigils that still lay before them. Above the Abbess’s table a stiff Virgin dandled her child. Beneath her, four places were empty: the sisters would be watching in chapel, where the broken shell that had been Godric lay.

  Reverend Mother struck the table with a wooden mallet. When grace was sung, she stood a moment, her hand lifted to hold their attention.

  “Four of you will go to the chapel and take the place of the sisters now keeping watch. Let the rest of you go to the dorter and lie down on your beds, and let there be no reading or talking, for you had little sleep last night. Let none of you presume to rise till the bell rings for Nones, but let you sleep while you can. It may be we shall have less of this slovenly singing in choir, such as this morning.” She looked at them for a while, her full lips
protruding and her brows scowling. “The four for the vigil until Nones peter will be Gisela, Audere, Constance——”—her eye travelled round the submissive faces. “Heloise, you have watched at night more than any of these, but you have most lately slept and are wakeful enough now by the look of you, let you be the fourth.”

  The four went quietly down the cloister, two by two. At the chapel door, Heloise paused for a moment, to look out through the cloister arches. The September sun, the sun that coloured the grape, seemed to press down upon the quiet grass, brooding above the earth like a dove. But not the Holy Ghost.

  Requiem aeternam donat ei . . .

  she heard the murmur of prayer as the three passed the threshold, and quietly she turned to follow.

  Et lux perpetua luceat ei.

  She paused to cross herself with holy water, and passed up to the choir.

  It was always dark in the choir: that was why Godric had stumbled and fallen, two years ago. But candles burnt about her now, and a stoup of holy water stood at her head. Godric was more like herself: they had dressed her in her habit, and she was sound asleep. Heloise slipped to her knees at the foot of the bier, and took the service book that Gisela handed her, open at the Commendation of the Dead. Deus immensae pietatis, Audere began, but for a moment Heloise could not echo her, for she was blind with tears. It was not the sight of the dead. Godric had died days and days before, when the last flicker of that shining intelligence had faded out of the eyes and left them blank and staring. It was the sight of the handwriting on the vellum page, the small, perfectly balanced script, with the suspicion of the Irish character still about the r’s. This was the Godric that she knew, and as she looked and stumbled through the prayer, the slow resentment that had smouldered in her during the litany of intercession burnt again. Why did they labour it so, this act of dying? Godric, intent like a small wrinkled toad over her parchment, this was the Godric that mattered, and Heloise’s heart rose in a blind defiance, a Therefore choose life.

  The Deus immensae pietatis, the Diri vulneris perculsi dragged their course. They had begun again the prayer of which she had heard the opening at the washing of the dead, but she was reading mechanically. What her eyes saw was the crabbed page of the book of Alcuin’s Letters that had come from the Abbot of Corbei, the small bent figure in the bed, the bright eyes. “Ah, but they were good days when you and I sat quiet among the bookshelves.” The hours of that forgotten September day passed before her, small and clear and far off like the illuminated border of a page of script. Two years ago, only, for to-day was again the Eve of the Dedication of St. Michael the Archangel: but it belonged to some other life. She saw herself in the bees’ garden, in the shadow of the boxwood hedge, and about her the white parched grass, but the girl that she saw was a stranger. Yet that girl reading there had thought she loved. “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice”—she remembered how it had shivered through her, a blasphemy intolerably sweet. Heloise, watching, found her heart going out to her in an aching protective compassion. If she had died then, had gone out knowing only that crystalline brittle world of first love, that soundless, narrow world where two walk alone, with neither heaven nor hell, not knowing that in love there is moan or cry! Would she hold her there, ignorant and passionate, prison her for ever under that cloudless blue, with the colourless grass at her feet and the river slipping by, time become eternity? For if she chose, it seemed to her, she could call back yesterday.

  Uneasily aware of some strangeness beside her, Gisela turned to look. Heloise was kneeling, her head unbowed, her back taut as a bowstring, every tinge of colour gone from her cheeks and lips, but her eyes fixed, shining, on something very far off. If it was a trance, she must not be touched: it might be, thought Gisela, that she saw some holy thing, St. Michael the Archangel, come to show Godric the way: for was it not the Eve of his Feast? But with it all, she was afraid. Still praying, she leaned forward once more to asperge the dead, and the words of the prayer came more urgently, breaking into Heloise’s consciousness as human voices do when the surge of the sea is still in the ears of the swimmer. “Drive back, we beseech thee, O Lord, the princes and powers of darkness: receive, O Lord, thy creatures, not fashioned by any strange god, but by thee, that art alone the living and the true, for there is none beside thee, O God. . . Remember not their ancient transgressions, nor the drunkenness that was wrought in them by the madness of evil desire: yea, they have sinned, but they have not denied thee.” The colour had come back to Heloise’s face: her voice was audible again, very low but with an under-note of passion. Gisela wondered at it. She could not know that the prayer was offered not for Godric but for another.

  The Commendatio Mortis had come to its end, and the watchers were at the third of the Penitential Psalms, when the chapel door came softly open, and the nave behind them was suddenly bright. The door swung to again, and one of the sisters, pausing only to cross herself with holy water, came uncertainly up the aisle. Her face had the glazed look of one just roused from sleep, and she yawned shamefacedly, holding her long sleeve across her mouth. She took the asperge, sprinkled the dead, and knelt down beside Heloise.

  “Reverend Mother,” she whispered, “bids you wait for her in the refectory. She sent for me to take your place till Nones.”

  Heloise, perplexed but still half dreaming, rose silently to her feet, stooped above Godric, and went down the nave. Again the door opened, letting in a great glare of warmth and brightness. It closed behind her, and she stood, dazzled, in another world.

  It was close on two o’clock, and in all that sunny place there was no stir. The very pigeons were asleep on the dorter roof. The silence seemed more mysterious in the bright undertide, with only the busy sun afoot, high in the sky, and breathing close to her so many souls asleep, wrapt from him and from all knowledge of the day. She came out from the cloister and stood a moment, leaning with her arms outstretched against the sunbaked wall, letting its warmth steal through her body that was chilled and cramped with long kneeling in the dark. And as suddenly as she had stepped from dark to light, so did she seem to have stepped from death to life. For a moment there in the candlelight it had seemed to her that the years between were blotted out. Now, it seemed, this moment of still intensity of heat and light held for her the quintessence of those years. Beside her, trellised on the wall, almost on a level with her head, there hung a great dark rose; she turned and looked into its strange heart, smiling a half-defiant recognition. Reaching up her hand, she caught it and dragged it from the wall, exulting in the battle with its strong green stem and the great thorns it had. She had it now, though it had torn her hand. Wherefore choose life.

  With a start, she remembered her errand, and bowing her head came back under the arch, to pass down the cloister to the refectory. What had happened to raise Reverend Mother out of her bed in the middle of the afternoon, and why, if she had a charge to give her, had she not bidden Heloise to come to her in her own lodging? It was most likely a mistake of poor Emmelot’s, sleepy as she was: she would look first in the refectory and then go to Reverend Mother’s room, saying nothing of the blunder. O God, this spider’s web of woman’s life, with its small panic fears and caution and obsequiousness! She crushed the rose to her mouth, stifling against it a little weary moan. Suddenly, with no warning, a fit of tearless sobbing shook her; she stood for a moment, her face working, her shoulders shaking with a soundless crying. Only for a moment. Could she not do this for him, who was the heart of her body, the intelligible meaning of her life; forgo for a little while his human nearness, that she might keep his fame? Was it not enough that he desired her with no less longing than her own? Was there any so blessed among women? Her head high and her eyes alight, she came down the cloister as though blown before a wind. Silently she closed the great door into the refectory, and stood gazing down its dim vaulted length. It was as she had thought. There was no one there. An
d then she saw him.

  He was standing in the embrasure of a window, his eyes fixed on the further door. So intent he was, and so silently had she come, that his ear had caught no sound; but the strained expectation of his attitude, the defenceless longing on his face, caught unawares, brought a sob to her throat. He turned and saw heaven opened, as might a damned soul.

  “Beloved,” he began, when at last they spoke; “I though——” he shuddered and could hardly get it out—“I thought for a while it was you that was dead.”

  She looked up, startled.

  “I had ridden out to dine with Abbot Adam, at St. Denis. And at dinner word came from the kitchen—some beggarman that was here for broken meats this morning—that there was someone dead at Argenteuil. They did not know who it might be. But I was sure. I know, I know”—for her eyes were chiding him—“but all last night I was dreaming of you. No, not of you, for I could not find you, but I was wandering all night on strange roads looking for you, standing in strange houses watching for you to come to me. And even here—O beloved, if you knew how I watched that door.”

  “But did they not tell you here?”

  He nodded. “I got away from St. Denis as soon as I decently could. And rode here. I was nearly mad when I got here. But,” he laughed a little, “your portress is a friendly soul. Before I had time to say a word, she was telling me before I was well off my horse how long it took poor Godric (God rest her) to die. Dear heart, forgive me. But I would have seen every one of them dead of the plague and thanked God, if you would but come through that door.”

  She leaned against him, her head against his breast. Suddenly she started up.

  “But Reverend Mother”—then she put down her head again, laughing softly. “So this is what she meant when she sent word that I was to wait for her in the refectory.”