“I tell you,” said Abelard, “the pony deserves its supper, if it carried that load and yourself all the way from Provins. How ever did you manage it?”
“I walked,” said Thibault. “And honestly, Master Peter, I asked my father for not one thing but a few old parchments he has there in a chest. But my mother had been looking out this and that for weeks, and it was all piled in the loft ready. And she would have me take whatever was left of our dinner, so we needn’t roast the trout. There’s a couple of roast duck, and marchpane, and, Sir, you will not be angry, but my father sends you a little tonneau of wine and asks your blessing. And my mother has sent us sheepskins to line our coats for the winter and a bearskin for your bed—I’ll leave it over the pony, for he’s hot—we came quick at the last. And a cheese. And by the next time I go my father says he will have a goat for us, but most of them are not milking now.”
“Well, I’ve been busy myself,” said Abelard. “You never saw that I’ve been roasting you chestnuts.”
Thibault’s eyes were the eyes of a dog, intolerable with affection.
“I hear a lot of talk,” went on Abelard righteously, “about wine and marchpane and ducks, but that’s all I see of them. I suppose you are as tight as a drum, but my two sides are clapped in. I’m so hungry I’m a pain to myself.”
Thibault, on his knees unpacking, stopped and looked up at the shelf.
“Did you never find the eggs?”
“I went for a long walk,” said Abelard, “longer than I meant. And I am just this moment back, afraid I would get my head in my hands for letting the fire out.” He seized the cheese that had rolled under Thibault’s arm, and cut a half-moon out of it. “It should by rights come last,” he said, “but I can bear myself no longer. Now get out your fowls, Thibault. Both of them. And did you say wine?”
Thibault was too happy for speech. He was busy unroping the little barrel, and Abelard had risen, the segment of cheese in his hand, to reach down their drinking-horns from the wall, when both men suddenly stood still.
“My God,” said Thibault, “what’s that?”
From somewhere near them in the woods a cry had risen, a thin cry, of such intolerable anguish that Abelard turned dizzy on his feet, and caught at the wall.
“It’s a child’s voice,” he said. “O God, are they at a child?”
Thibault had gone outside. The cry came again, making the twilight and the firelit hearth a mockery.
“A rabbit,” said Thibault. He listened. “There’s nothing worrying it. It’ll be in a trap. Hugh told me he was putting them down. Christ!” The scream came yet again.
Abelard was beside him, and the two plunged down the bank.
“Down by the river,” said Thibault. “I saw them playing, God help them, when I was coming home. You know the way they go demented with fun in the evenings. It will have been drumming with its hind paws to itself and brought down the trap.”
Abelard went on, hardly listening. “O God,” he was muttering. “Let it die. Let it die quickly.”
But the cry came yet again. On the right, this time. He plunged through a thicket of hornbeam.
“Watch out,” said Thibault, thrusting past him. “The trap might take the hand off you.”
The rabbit stopped shrieking when they stooped over it, either from exhaustion, or in some last extremity of fear. Thibault held the teeth of the trap apart, and Abelard gathered up the little creature in his hands. It lay for a moment breathing quickly, then in some blind recognition of the kindness that had met it at the last, the small head thrust and nestled against his arm, and it died.
It was that last confiding thrust that broke Abelard’s heart. He looked down at the little draggled body, his mouth shaking. “Thibault,” he said, “do you think there is a God at all? Whatever has come to me, I earned it. But what did this one do?”
Thibault nodded.
“I know,” he said. “Only—I think God is in it too.”
Abelard looked up sharply.
“In it? Do you mean that it makes Him suffer, the way it does us?”
Again Thibault nodded.
“Then why doesn’t He stop it?”
“I don’t know,” said Thibault. “Unless—unless it’s like the Prodigal Son. I suppose the father could have kept him at home against his will. But what would have been the use? All this,” he stroked the limp body, “is because of us. But all the time God suffers. More than we do.”
Abelard looked at him, perplexed.
“Thibault, when did you think of all this?”
Thibault’s face stiffened. “It was that night,” he said, his voice strangled. “The things we did to—to poor Guibert. He——” Thibault stopped. “I could not sleep for nights and nights. And then I saw that God suffered too. And I thought I would like to be a priest.”
“Thibault, do you mean Calvary?”
Thibault shook his head. “That was only a piece of it—the piece that we saw—in time. Like that.” He pointed to a fallen tree beside them, sawn through the middle. “That dark ring there, it goes up and down the whole length of the tree. But you only see it where it is cut across. That is what Christ’s life was; the bit of God that we saw. And we think God is like that, because Christ was like that, kind, and forgiving sins and healing people. We think God is like that for ever, because it happened once, with Christ. But not the pain. Not the agony at the last. We think that stopped.”
Abelard looked at him, the blunt nose and the wide mouth, the honest troubled eyes. He could have knelt before him.
“Then, Thibault,” he said slowly, “you think that all this,” he looked down at the little quiet body in his arms, “all the pain of the world, was Christ’s cross?”
“God’s cross,” said Thibault. “And it goes on.”
“The Patripassian heresy,” muttered Abelard mechanically. “But, O God, if it were true. Thibault, it must be. At least, there is something at the back of it that is true. And if we could find it—it would bring back the whole world.”
“I couldn’t ever rightly explain it,” said Thibault. “But you could, if you would think it out.” He reached out his hand, and stroked the long ears. “Old lop-ears,” he said. “Maybe this is why he died. Come and have your supper, Master Peter. We’ll bury him somewhere near the oratory. In holy ground.”
CHAPTER III
“Men’s sins were forgiven them, long before the Passion: Mary Magdalene, for instance, and the paralytic, to whom Our Lord said, ‘Son, thy sins be forgiven thee.’ What necessity, what reason, what need was there for the Son of God to endure such intolerable anguish, when the divine compassion was able to deliver a man from the evil one, by the sole vision of Himself? When it seems to us both cruel and unjust to demand the blood of the innocent in any kind of bargain, or to find any kind of pleasure that the innocent should be slain, how should God find the death of His Son so agreeable, that thereby He should be reconciled to the world? These, and other thoughts like them, seem to me to raise no small question as to our redemption by the death of Our Lord.”
Gilles groaned aloud. “First the Trinity,” he muttered to himself, “and now the Atonement. That man was born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward.” He laid down Abelard’s close-written sheet on his knee, and his eye travelled to the window. The sun was still low in the east: why, wondered Gilles, should this level light transfigure the earth, beyond any magic of sunrise or sunset? He saw the bare trees of the Terrain beyond the eastern wall of the cloister, the swift grey current of the Seine, and across the narrow strait the Ile Notre Dame with its black piles of wood and turf, the grass between them a strange passionate green. There is more colour, he thought, in November than there is in August, except perhaps in water. The river knows it may be frozen in a week, and it runs ice-grey already. For water dies: the earth never. Those naked trees, indifferent to the fall of the leaf: the life is
more than meat, they say, and the body than raiment: what we have we hold. Perhaps, thought Gilles, it was because he himself was in his November, and the last day of it too, he added with a crooked smile, that the autumn seemed to him richer than any spring, and this pale persistent sunlight had a kind of heroic tenderness. There is no memory in spring, he thought, not even the memory of other springs: but a November day of faint sunlight and emerald moss remembers all things, the wild promise of the January days, snowbroth in February, violets in March, new-mown hay in June, dew-wet mint trodden underfoot on August nights, the harvest moon in September, the hunter’s moon in October. Prudentius, he thought, was the November of the poets: Prudentius remembering
“How many times the rose
Returned after the snows.”
No other poet in the world had that still clarity. It had baffled him always; he could find no metaphor that did not do violence to it, that quality neither of dawn nor noonday nor sunset. He had it now: it was this level light, of the sun near the horizon.
Sixty, when he began to write poetry, and entered the Kingdom of God. Ausonius, too, wrote his best poetry at seventy, after Paulinus broke his heart. It seems, thought Gilles ruefully, to be the condition of eternal life, for saints or for poets. For himself, he had no heart to break: but such as he had, had very nearly broken for this man whose letter lay on his lap: and for the woman whom he was to see that day. Queer, thought Gilles, that one could go through life, tasting it, chewing the sweet and spitting out the bitter, living with one’s stomach and one’s brain: and when one might reasonably think all heat of the blood and folly of impulse were past, to have the heart torn out of your breast for two creatures nearly half a century away.
She was coming to fetch Denise’s two girls: they were to be novices at Argenteuil. Their uncle Raoul, the canon of Nantes, had brought them last night, and had them out with him now to show them Paris. Agatha and Agnes: they were like fawns, Heloise had said, trembling on the edge of a wood: like fawns still, Gilles thought, remembering them hand in hand at the foot of his bed that morning. Though Agatha, when he asked her a question about her reading, had raised her head and gazed straight at him, and with a shock he had found himself looking into Abelard’s eyes. That a man’s ghost should walk in his own lifetime. She was far liker him than his brother Raoul, a stocky comfortable little man. Well, it was easily seen that they worshipped Heloise. Their aunt, they called her. Odd how one jibbed at hearing the ordinary human relations applied to a spirit like hers. Yet once, even to himself, she had been no more than Fulbert’s niece.
At that memory, it seemed to Gilles that he opened a door into an empty house that had been firelit once, and now was naked rafters under the sky. He was living comfortably enough, they said, on one of his farms, with old Grizzel to tend him: his mind gone. Gilles paused a moment to think that life is sadder than any graveyard: that a man is his own burial-place. Queer, queer, to see what can befall a man when he is old. Shipwreck in youth is sorrowful enough, but one looks for storms at the spring equinox. Yet it is the September equinox that drowns. A comfortable doctrine, the perseverance of the saints: a pity that so few of the comfortable doctrines were true.
So at any rate Abelard seemed to think: the comfortable doctrine of the ransom, for instance, and the debt paid once for all. Gilles returned to the neglected sheet upon his knee. “What then is our redemption? We are justified in the blood of Christ and reconciled to God, because by the life and death of His Son He has so bound us to Himself that love so kindled will shrink from nothing for His sake. Our redemption is that supreme devotion kindled in us by the Passion of Christ: this it is that frees us from the slavery of sin and gives us the liberty of the sons of God, so that we do His will from love and not from fear. This is that fire which Our Lord said He had come to kindle upon earth.” He has never written like this, thought Gilles; his words are like burning coals. “It is the goodness of God that leads us to repentance: we grieve to have sinned against God, from love, and not from fear, less because He is just than because He is merciful. We are reconciled to God in that grief: in whatsoever hour the sinner shall grieve, says Ezekiel, he shall be saved: that is, he is made fit to be saved.”
Gilles stroked his chin reflectively. “It is no easy way of holiness,” he thought to himself. “Not saved, but only made fit to be saved. Now, if that had been preached to me in my youth? It is no wonder that he has emptied Paris. Well, Jehan?”
Jehan’s tawny head had come round the door. “The young mistress is below. Am I to bring her up?”
Gilles’ hands shook. “Set a chair for her. Have you the wine cooling?”
“Aye.”
“The Moselle?”
“Aye. Will I bring her some marchpane?”
“No. But a fresh loaf with a good crust on it. You might know better by this time than to affront a good wine with sweet stuff.”
Jehan grunted and the door shut. Gilles thrust the letter under the skin that lay across his bed. Perhaps he need never show it to her, but speak as if Thibault had only brought him word of mouth. For there was still no letter for her: and in this letter no message. Gilles divined the reason. There are some things a man must let be, till he has strength to handle them. But how could she, being a woman, know? That was her foot on the stair, and he was as short of breath as if he had climbed a hill. He heard her come into the room where he had always received her, and pause a little. God help her, it was not his ghost she would see there, but another. Then the door opened, and his heart ceased shaking through him and was quiet. His day had flowered.
She stood for a moment without moving, looking at him, and it seemed to him that some spring of mercy in her overflowed and steeped his heart in its strange dew. Laughter used to well in her, he remembered, and the light come and go on her face like the broken lights of running water. It was a still face now: the line from the wings of the nose to the side of the mouth should never have been graven so deep. He had seen it graven in a year, the line that comes from a mouth set not to cry. Thank God, it was less deep now than it had been. But the eyes—it was the eyes that opened the gates of mercy on mankind.
She sighed, a little contented sigh.
“To see you again,” she said, and without moving at all, it seemed to him, she was beside him, lifting his hands to her mouth.
“And very handsome you are in bed,” she went on, creasing her eyes at him.
“I had Jehan shaving me for you at six,” said Gilles complacently.
“But, Gilles, should you be sitting up? Jehan says your sciatica is cruel.”
“I shall die sitting up,” said Gilles. “I will not have him pour my soup over my face as if he were manuring rhubarb. I had two days of it. But I made him haul me up this morning. Did you read your Psalms for the day, Heloise? ‘Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising’? It might well be, for I bellowed like a bull. Jehan there can tell you. Bring the wine here, Jehan. Is it cold enough?”
Jehan grunted, but decanted it carefully enough into a wrought green cup of forest glass.
“Where’s my own cup?” said Gilles.
“Master Simon said you was to drink none,” said Jehan doggedly.
“What?” exploded Gilles. “Tell Master Simon I’m not Dives in Hell yet,” he went on, controlling himself. “And tell him that I had sciatica and drank myself out of it when he was cutting his first tooth. I am surprised you heeded him, Jehan. That’s better. That will do.”
Jehan went out.
“Drink, Heloise.”
She lifted the cup slowly to her lips. “It is a strange wine,” she said. “It is cold and green like well-water, a forest well: and when you drink it, it warms you like a fire, no, more like the molten sun.”
“That was why I chose it for you,” said Gilles. “I have always drunk it, since I knew you, naming your name.”
She turned her eyes on him, accepting him.<
br />
“Where does it come from?”
“Moselle. Is it not a strange thing that a man with a palate like Ausonius should have written a long poem describing every fin on every fish in that dull river, and not a word in all its four hundred and eighty-three hexameters about the vineyards? Maybe, as a Bordeaux man, he thought little or them. Yet a man’s palate should have no patria.”
“Are you sure, Gilles? I think you used to quote me a lovely line, about a vine. Tremit . . . tremit——”
“What did I tell you? ‘Tremit absens!’
“Trembles the absent vine and swells the grape
In thy clear crystal.”
Heloise sighed again, in pure content. She sat, holding up the great cup in her two hands, her eyes on the quick grey river. Something had brought a trouble to them.
“Is it true,” said Gilles abruptly, “that my cousin is drinking herself to death?”
Heloise’s eyes came back in his face.
“She is.”
“She had my palate,” said Gilles. “Well, we are hard to kill. I give her two years. You will be the next Abbess.”
Heloise shook her head.
“Why not? Do not tell me it will be another case of St. Anselm and the crozier and the Nolo episcopari?”
“No,” said Heloise quietly. “I can do the work. They made me Prioress. They might as well make me Abbess. If one’s heart is utterly hollow, no one seems to notice any difference. Is it St. James or Ecclesiastes?—’Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might, for there is no work nor device nor wisdom nor knowledge in the grave whither thou goest.’ That last is something to be thankful for, anyhow,” she added bitterly.
Gilles sat silent. She turned to him impulsively.
“That was foolishly spoken, Gilles. Abelard used to say one found the truth of one’s self with you. There is a kind of satisfaction in doing one’s work. And I try to train the novices, as Godric trained me. But the sisters—I have very little power over them. They go behind me to the Abbess. And you know how it is: there is a little spurt of authority, to give a permission that I have not given. She is like a child. The discipline of the house is like a rotten floor. And all the while Suger at St. Denis bides his time.”
Peter Abelard Page 23
