Gentian Hill

  CHAPTER VII

  1

  They were amazingly happy together. "Like Elisha and the son of the Shulamite woman ust have been after the boy woke up," thought Zachary that same evening. He lay with his arms behind his head, watching the Abbé. The dusk was blue outside the window and ten minutes earlier the candle had been lit. It illumined the Abbé’s bent white head, his absorbed face and his fine hand guiding the quill pen over the paper, but left the rest of the room in shadow.

  Zachary sighed luxuriously. He had eaten a large supper, gone to sleep again and awakened to the most extraordinary sense of well-being. For a brief moment, body, mind, and spirit were so gently at rest, so in tune with the hour and the place, that he felt a sense of liberation that was like that of a floating spirit. The Abbé’s candle flame was like a star, and there were others in the evening sky above the tree tops. The small green room was so high above the world that he might have been drifting among the stars, enclosed within his own airiness like light in a soap bubble. If he had not been so lazy, he could have stretched out his hand and picked the near star like a flower. He shut his eyes, trying to hold the perfection of the moment. But the effort to keep it destroyed it. The soap bubble vanished, and he fell abruptly out of it, down into that sense of utter futility that for earth-bound mortals must need snuff out the heavenly moments almost as soon as they are born. Memories of Newgate flashed over him, and the pangs of indigestion once more attacked him. He had eaten too much again. He turned his head away from the light, fighting a ridiculous desire to cry, and sneezed instead.

  " ‘And the child sneezed seven times and the child opened his eyes,"’ quoted the Abbé, and put the cork in his ink bottle.

  Zachary laughed unsteadily. The two of them had achieved so close a friendship that the thought of one often echoed the thought of the other.

  “I’m not presuming to liken myself to the Prophet Elisha," continued the Abbé, "it’s merely the meager furnishings of this apartment-a bed, a table, a stool, and a candlestick that reminded me of that little chamber on the wall."

  Zachary was visited by a vivid memory of the evening when the Abbé had brought him home here, when he had been very ill indeed. "‘And he shut the door upon them twain and prayed unto the Lord,’ " he said, and somehow he managed to make of the quietly spoken words an expression of gratitude so heartfelt that there would never be any need for another.

  The Abbé got up and touched the boy gently on the shoulder; it was the perfect gesture of acceptance. "I had no idea you were so observant that first night," he said lightly. .

  "I think I’m always observant," said Zachary. "It’s a mistake."

  "Why?"

  "It’s harder, afterwards, to forget."

  "You appear low in your mind," said the Abbé,

  "And a moment ago I was a floating star," said Zachary bitterly.

  "Convalescence," commented the Abbé, and pulled the table, the candle, and the stool beside the bed. "I’ve finished transcribing this story of Stella’s. I’ve translated it into modern English, as simple as I can make it. Easy for her. Would you like to hear it?"

  Zachary flushed with pleasure, yet hesitated. "Ought not she to hear it first?" he asked.

  "It’s as much your story as it is hers."

  "My story?"

  "And mine," said the Abbé, trimming the candlewick. "Now possess your soul in patience, for the first part of this story will be already familiar to you."

  2

  It was the story of the hermit’s rescue from shipwreck by the monks of Torre, familiar and yet strange, because told now from a new angle, told by the hermit himself. He described his fear in the dreadful storm, his prayer for deliverance, and his vow made under the impulse of his fear, just before the waves swept him from the ship and darkness came upon him. He described the awaking from the darkness, to find himself a sick man in the Abbey of Torre. He spoke a little of the suffering of mind and body that he endured at that time, of the great goodness of the monks, and of his slow recovery. Then he described the despair that came upon him when he remembered the vow that he had made. "For I was a man of the world," he wrote, "a great sinner, a man of little faith, and that prayer for deliverance in the storm had been almost the first prayer of my life. How could I endure the loneliness of a hermit’s life, the dereliction and the pain, I who had lived softly all my days, who had known pride of race, honor, and fame, and could know them again if I would? I could not do this thing. It was impossible?

  In much torment of mind, he said, he went walking one day in one of the meadows that stretched between the Abbey and the sea, and weariness overtaking him, he sat upon a rock to rest. The beauty of the world about him, the deep blue sky high spread with silver clouds, the sea, dancing with light, the rippling meadow grass, suddenly became intolerable to him, like a mockery of his distress, and he shut his eyes against the green, the silver, and the blue. But it was the season of larks, and he was not able to stop his ears against their singing. He put his fingers in his ears, but the gesture seemed to him so paltry, so childish, that he removed them again, and in that moment the soaring music seized him, lifted him up. He felt himself transfixed, captured, nailed by his vow to the hard wood of the impossible thing that he had to do. He sat there rigid, as though he were indeed nailed, and fear worse than he had known in the shipwreck put a foul taste in his mouth and sent the sweat trickling down his back; for that had been the fear of death, a thing soon over, and this was the fear of life. He was only forty-five years old, and the impossible life that he had vowed he would live might last for a very long time.

  If there could be vouchsafed to him some sign, he thought, some voice or touch or heavenly vision to inform his struggling faith with certainty. A man could not face the impossible in cold blood. There must be some word spoken. Something. He waited and there was nothing at all.

  But the cold iron was still transfixing him and something of its hardness entered into him. Very well, then, let there be nothing; only his vow and the hard wood behind his back.

  He opened his eyes and they were dazzled by a flash of heavenly blue. Bewildered, he shut them and opened them again. What was it? Only a patch of gentian growing there beside the gray rock, like a bit of sky fallen down upon the earth. It must have been there all the time, though he had not noticed it. Gazing stupidly at the flowers he became aware of someone with him, standing beside him. It was Brother Thomas, a very old lay brother who had once cooked for the community. He was too old to do anything now but sit on a bench outside the Abbey walls, his hands on his knees, and blink at the sun like a cat; and occasionally, as now, stroll out into the meadows and take a look at the sea.

  But it was not at the sea that he was looking now but at the patch of gentian, and there began in his throat that strange rumbling that now, in his old age, always preceded the few difficult words that he occasionally spoke.

  " ‘The eternal Word leaped down from heaven out of His mighty throne,"’ he croaked, and turning ’round ambled slowly off towards the Abbey again.

  The other man stayed where he was, staring at the gentians. Down from the height of heaven to the lowest depth of his need had come this Word of assurance. What more did he want? Nothing else. It was enough.

  It continued enough, and supported him through the long, hard weeks of the building of the chapel, and the even harder years of prayer within it. Yet he was glad when some twelve years later he fell ill and the monks of Torre carried him down to the Abbey to die. He was not yet sixty, but he looked an old man, white-haired, with a white beard flowing to his waist.

  For two weeks he lay dying in the Abbey infirmary, but he was no longer absorbed in his devotions, as the monks had expected him to be, but intently watching all that went on around him. From his bed in the corner he watched the lnfirmarian and his assistants at work. He saw sick men and women and little children come and go, watched the brothers bandage them, dose them, advise and comfort them. Many of them had homes to go back to, and f
amilies to care for them, but others, vagabonds, strolling players, traveling tinkers and friendless old men, had not, and these were put to bed in the infirmary and lay there around him, his brothers in pain. And watching all this there swept over the hermit a flood of bitter misery because he himself had never labored with his body for the sick and suffering. Forty-five years of his life had he wasted in consideration only of himself, serving his king and country bravely, it was true, but with an eye to his own fame and honor far more than theirs, and the short span of twelve years that he had given to God only had been spent entirely in prayer. It was true that he had spent himself in prayer for the suffering, for as time had gone on, he had seen his vow to pray for those in peril of storm as something that embraced not only storms at sea, but the storms of sorrow and pain and temptation as well; but with his own hands he had not served them and that to him in his death was a great sorrow.

  Lying awake at night he thought of all the men who perhaps in their dying had felt, or would feel, as he did. He thought of the Crusaders fighting for the Holy Places, with little time for prayer and perhaps no aptitude for tenderness. He thought of the scholars and teachers whose preoccupation with the things of the mind had made them poor bunglers at everything else. He thought of the Infirmarian himself, who had told him one day that, when the time came for him to say the offices with the other brothers, he was often too tired to keep his attention upon the words he said. And then he thought of some tragic lives he knew of in which there had been nothing at all but pain. And for them all he grieved. In one life only had the fighting, the healing, the teaching, the praying, and the suffering held equal and perfect place, and that life could never on earth be lived again. For some dying men, he thought, there would have been comfort in the old belief that a soul comes back to earth again and again, the fighter returning to pray and the teacher to heal. Once he had half believed that himself, but now he could not. Once only had the perfect life been focused in a human body. He had not returned. Why should we? The Word now taught and healed, fought and suffered, through the yielded wills of other men.

  And thinking this, there gradually came to him complete and utter comfort in the thought of the oneness of all men with each other and their God. Of all the illusions which torment the minds of men, one of the worst is the illusion of separateness. Increasingly, through the last week of his life, the hermit knew that. Watching the Infirmarian bathing the sores of a sick child, he knew it was his own hands, lying inert upon the blanket, that were at work; and that, held within his own prayerful soul and one with it, the soul of that wearied and harassed man was pouring itself out in prayer. '

  And then, considering the special avocations of men and women in this world, he perceived another sort of unity between them that was of a more human sort, held within the other that was larger and more Godlike, the unity of temperament and circumstance. He thought of the company of the martyrs described in the Apocalypse, those who ride upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean. The army is one but there are many companies of horsemen within the army. Those who have deeply suffered in some particular way are welded together in an understanding incomprehensible to those who have not so suffered. Young lovers understand each other, and the men of prayers; and their unity is no hindrance to the larger unity, but an enrichment of it, like the gems set in a king’s circlet.

  During the last hours of his life the hermit was thinking of the men who, in centuries yet to come, would kneel where he had knelt in the Chapel that he had built upon the hill; men of prayer even as he had been, men of the same company. He prayed that they would waste fewer years in the service of self than he had done, and that their hands, as well as their spirits, would be active for their God. He was one with these men in the last hour of his life, and the last movement that he was seen to make was the lifting up of his hands, as though he offered them to another to take and use.

  3

  The Abbé stopped reading and pinched the candlewick again, but Zachary did not speak. It had not seemed to him that the Abbé had been reading some old fairy tale, but telling him about himself. When a man has been telling you his own histoy, you don’t find much to say; reverence keeps you silent.

  “The first chapter was dated," said the Abbé, "the date was 1274; that is, I suppose, roughly about a hundred years after the founding of the Abbey. The hermit continues his story in 1582."

  Zachary opened his mouth to protest. That was more than goo years later. It could not be the same man. Then he shut his mouth again, remembering in what sense it was the same man.

  "That first chapter was of course retrospective," said the Abbé. "The whole story was actually written at the same time, in 1582."

  Then he turned a page and began to read again.

  "I, Brother johan, Infermarian of Torre Abbey at the time of its dissolution, have been a fugitive now for many ‘years," he read. "Yet a fortunate one, for in this small tower room of Cockington Church I have found once more a cell to dwell in. I can earn my bread by the craft of basket making, in which I have taught myself to be proficient, and the faithful, in their goodness, bring me many gifts to help me on my way, candles to burn and wood for my fire, so that I live in a comfort that seems to me at times almost sinful. Yet in these long dark winter evenings, when my work is finished, I sometimes find the time hangs heavy on my hands, and so I tell myself stories like a child, and as a child does, sometimes I write them down and draw little pictures round the margins of my tales. This book that I write in belonged to Brother Simon at the Abbey, and on it he had intended to inscribe a new copy of the psalter. After the king’s men had driven us away from the Abbey, I came back one day and found it still within his desk, and I took it, together with a few pens, pigments, and brushes.

  “I will not write much of the dissolution of our Abbey, for even now. after the passing of so many years, it is ax memory too bitter to dwell upon. The fair church and library despoiled, the children driven from the school and the sick from the infirmary, the brothers sent away into exile-I cannot write of it. Suffice it to say that, of all the White Canons of the Norbertine Order, only I remain here, a fugitive. I might have escaped to a monastery abroad, as many of the brothers did, I might have gone back into the world as others chose to do, but I remained here, and I had three reasons for my choice.

  "The first was the vow that I had taken as a young man. ‘I, Brother Johan, do give myself to the Church of Torre’ I gave myself then not only to God, not only to the church, but to this spot of earth as well, and here I belong until I die. And my second reason is the great love that I have for the men and women who live in the fishing hamlets along the coast and in the villages among the round green hills. They are my children and I cannot leave them either. Living here, I can still go to them when they are in trouble, comfort them, nurse them, teach them, and pray for them. I have now more leisure for prayer, and though I can no longer pray in the Abbey Church, there still remains the Chapel of St. Michael where three centuries ago the hermit lived and prayed for twelve long years. Why do I write of him in this detached and distant way? He has become to me so much a part of myself that at the beginning of this story I wrote of him as though he were indeed myself. It is because of him, too, that I stay here. He is my chief reason for remaining. His spirit that is part of my spirit is also a part of the life of this fair and gracious plot of earth, is in union with all the men and women who live here and will be until the end of time.

  "I became acquainted with his story when I first came to the Abbey as a young novice, for a brief outline of it had been written down by one of the monks after his death, and when I had read the record there came to me instantly the `knowledge that this man was my friend. It was because of my sense of friendship with him that, when the time came for me to take my vows, I took as my name in religion the name that he had taken when he became a hermit-Johan. Then as the years passed, the sense of friendship deepened into a mysterious feeling of identity. My imagination, dwelling
upon the outline of the story, rounded out the bare bones of it into living flesh and blood. And yet was it only imagination? `When I found the gentian that he had carved in the chapel I knew instantly what it commemorated; I saw that patch of living blue beside the gray rock in the meadow, heard the words spoken by old Brother Simon, and there leaped into my heart the same living assurance that had given strength to the hard years of his prayer. And it was the same when I read of his preoccupation with the work going on in the infirmary, when he lay dying there, and of the lifting of his hands. I knew of the reason for both. His hands had been given to me and I must use them as he wished. I ‘told the Father Abbot of the compulsion laid upon me, and he made me Infirmarian.

  "This work was not at first easy for me, for I am naturally a scholar, and I found it hard to give learning the second place in my life, but I was comforted by the knowledge that others would attain to the learning for which I had no leisure, and that in their striving all men are made one. Perhaps there will one day come to this place a servant of

  God who will feel himself caught into union with the two men that I am, and in his life, perhaps, the learning that I missed will find equal place with the healing and the prayer.

  If this is so, may God’s blessing rest upon him, and if he reads this book, may he think of me as his brother and his friend.