The Woman and the Priest/Chapter 5
He became aware that some one was knocking at the door.
Paul started as though suddenly awakened from sleep and sprang up from his bed with the confused sensation of one who has to depart on a journey and is afraid of being too late. But directly he tried to stand up he was forced to sit down weakly on his bed again, for his limbs gave way under him and he felt as if he had been beaten all over whilst he lay asleep. Crouched together with his head sunk on his breast, he could only nod faintly in response to the knock. His mother had not forgotten to call him early, as he had requested her on the previous day: his mother was following her own straight path, she remembered nothing of what had happened during the night and called him as though this were just like any other morning.
Yes, it was like any other morning. Paul got up again and began to dress, and gradually he pulled himself together and stood stiff and erect in the garments of his order. He flung open the window, and his eyes were dazzled by the vivid light of the silvery sky; the thickets on the hill-side, alive with the song of birds, quivered and sparkled in the morning sun, the wind had dropped and the sound of the church bell vibrated through the pure air.
The bell called him, he lost sight of all external things, although he sought to escape from the things within him: the scent of his room caused him physical distress and the memories it evoked stung him to the quick. The bell went on calling him, but he could not make up his mind to leave his room and he wandered round it almost in a fury. He looked in the mirror and then turned away, but it was useless for him to avoid it; the image of the woman was reflected in his mind as in a mirror, he might break it in a thousand fragments, but each fragment would still retain that image entire and complete.
The second bell for Mass was ringing insistently, inviting him to come: he moved about here and there, searching for something he could not find, and finally sat down at his table and began to write. He began by copying out the verses which said, "Enter ye in by the narrow gate," etc.; then he crossed them out and on the other side of the paper he wrote:
"Please do not expect me again. We have mutually entangled each other in a net of deception and we must cut ourselves loose without delay, if we want to free ourselves and not sink to the bottom. I am coming to you no more; forget me, do not write to me, and do not try to see me again."
Then he went downstairs and called his mother, and held out the letter towards her without looking at her.
"Take this to her at once," he said hoarsely, "try and give it into her own hands and then come away immediately."
He felt the letter taken out of his hand and hurried outside, for the moment uplifted and relieved.
Now the bell was ringing the third time, pealing out over the quiet village and the valleys grey in the silvery light of the dawn. Up the hilly road, as though ascending from the depths of the valley, came figures of old men with gnarled sticks hanging from their wrists by leather straps, and women whose heads wrapped in voluminous kerchiefs looked too large for their small bodies. When they had all entered the church and the old men had taken their places in front close by the altar rails, the place was filled with the odour of earth and field, and Antiochus, the youthful sacristan, swung his censer energetically, sending out the smoke in the direction of the old men to drive away the smell. Gradually a dense cloud of incense screened the altar from the rest of the little church, and the brown-faced sacristan in his white surplice and the pale-faced priest in his vestments of red brocade moved about as in a pearly mist. Both Paul and the boy loved the smoke and the scent of the incense and used it lavishly. Turning towards the nave, the priest half closed his eyes and frowned as though the mist impeded his sight; apparently he was displeased at the small number of worshippers and was waiting for others to arrive. And in fact a few late comers did enter then, and last of all his mother, and Paul turned white to the lips.
So the letter had been delivered and the sacrifice was accomplished: a deathlike sweat broke out upon his forehead, and as he raised his hands in consecration his secret prayer was that the offering of his own flesh and blood might be accepted. And he seemed to see the woman reading his letter and falling to the ground in a swoon.
When the Mass was ended he knelt down wearily and recited a Latin prayer in a monotonous voice. The congregation responded, and he felt as though he were dreaming and longed to throw himself down at the foot of the altar and fall asleep like a shepherd on the bare rocks. Dimly through the clouds of incense he saw in her glass-fronted niche the little Madonna which the people believed to be miraculous, a figure as dark and delicate as a cameo in a medallion, and he gazed at it as though he were seeing it again for the first time after a long absence. Where had he been all that time? His thoughts were confused and he could not recollect.
Then suddenly he rose to his feet and turned round and began to address the congregation, a thing he only did very occasionally. He spoke in dialect and in a harsh voice, as though he were scolding the old men, now thrusting their bearded faces between the pillars of the altar rails in order to hear better, and the women crouching on the ground, divided between curiosity and fear. The sacristan, holding the Mass-book in his arms, glanced at Paul out of his long dark eyes, then turned them on the people and shook his head, threatening them in jest if they did not attend.
"Yes," said the priest, "the number of you who come here grows ever less; when I have to face you I am almost ashamed, for I feel like a shepherd who has lost his sheep. Only on Sunday is the church a little fuller, but I fear you come because of your scruples and not because of your belief, from habit rather than from need, as you change your clothes or take your rest. Up now, it is time to awake! I do not expect mothers of families, or men who have to be at work before the dawn, to come here every morning, but young women and old men and children, such as I shall see now when I leave the church, standing at their own doors to greet the rising sun, all those should come here to begin the day with God, to praise Him in His own house and to gain strength for the path they have to tread. If you did this the poverty that afflicts you would disappear, and evil habits and temptation would no longer assail you. It is time to awake early in the morning, to wash yourselves and to change your clothing every day and not only on Sundays! So I shall expect you all, beginning from to-morrow, and we will pray together that God will not forsake us and our little village, as He will not forsake the smallest nest, and for those who are sick and cannot come here we will pray that they may recover and be able to march forward too."
He turned round swiftly and the sacristan did the same, and for a few minutes there reigned in the little church a silence so intense that the stone-breaker could be heard at his work behind the ridge. Then a woman got up and approached the priest's mother, placing a hand on her shoulder as she bent down and whispered:
"Your son must come at once to hear the confession of King Nicodemus, who is seriously ill."
Roused from her own sad thoughts, the mother raised her eyes to the speaker. She remembered that King Nicodemus was a fantastic old hunter who lived in a hut high up in the mountains, and she asked if Paul would have to climb up there to hear the confession.
"No," whispered the woman, "his relations have brought him down to the village."
So the mother went to tell Paul, who was in the little sacristy, disrobing with the help of Antiochus.
"You will come home first and drink your coffee, won't you?" she asked.
He avoided looking at her and did not even answer, but pretended to be in a great hurry to go to the old man who was ill. The thoughts of both mother and son dwelt upon the same thing, the letter which had been delivered to Agnes, but neither spoke of it. Then he hastened away, and she stood there like a block of wood whilst the sacristan busied himself in replacing the vestments in the black cupboard.
"It would have been better if I had not told him about Nicodemus until he had been home and had his coffee," she said.
"A priest must get accustomed to everything," replied Antiochus gravely, poking his head round the cupboard door, and then he added as though to himself as he turned back to his work inside:
"Perhaps he is angry with me, because he says I am inattentive: but it's not true, I assure you it's not true! Only when I looked at those old men I felt inclined to laugh, for they did not understand a word of the sermon. They sat there with their mouths open, but they understood nothing. I bet you that old Marco Panizza really thinks he ought to wash his face every day, he who never washes at all except at Easter and Christmas! And you'll see that from now on they will all come to church every day, because he told them that poverty would disappear if they did that."
The mother still stood there, her hands clasped beneath her apron.
"The poverty of the soul," she said, to show that she at least had understood. But Antiochus only looked at her as he had looked at the old men, with a strong desire to laugh. Because he was quite sure that nobody could understand these matters as he understood them, he who already knew the four gospels by heart and intended to be a priest himself, which fact did not prevent him from being as mischievous and inquisitive as other boys.
As soon as he had finished putting everything in order and the priest's mother had gone away, Antiochus locked the sacristy and walked across the little garden attached to the church, all overgrown with rosemary and as deserted as a cemetery. But instead of going home to where his mother kept a tavern in one corner of the village square, he ran off to the presbytery to hear the latest news of King Nicodemus, and also for another reason.
"Your son scolded me for not paying attention," he repeated uneasily, whilst the priest's mother was busy preparing her Paul's breakfast. "Perhaps he won't have me as sacristan any longer, perhaps he will take Ilario Panizza. But Ilario cannot read, whereas I have even learnt to read Latin. Besides, Ilario is so dirty. What do you think? Will he send me away?"
"He wants you to pay attention, that is all: it is not right to laugh in church," she answered sternly and gravely.
"He is very angry. Perhaps he did not sleep last night, on account of the wind. Did you hear what an awful wind?"
The woman made no reply; she went into the dining-room and placed on the table enough bread and biscuits to satisfy the twelve apostles. Probably Paul would not touch a thing, but the mere act of moving about and making preparations for him, as though he were sure to come in as merry and hungry as a mountain shepherd, did something to assuage her trouble and perhaps quiet her conscience, which every moment stung her more and more sharply, and the boy's very remark, that "perhaps he was angry because he did not sleep last night," only increased her uneasiness. Her heavy footsteps echoed through the silent rooms as she went to and fro: she felt instinctively that although apparently all was over, in reality it was all only just beginning. She had well understood the words he spoke from the altar, that one must awake early and wash oneself and march forward, and she went to and fro, up and down, trying to imagine that she was marching forward in very truth. She went upstairs to put his room in order; but the mirror and the perfumes still vexed and alarmed her, in spite of the assurance that everything was now at an end, while a vision of Paul, pale and rigid as a corpse, seemed to meet her eyes from the depths of that cursed mirror, to hang with his cassock on the wall and lie stretched lifeless upon the bed. And her heart was heavy within her, as though some inward paralysis prevented her breathing.
The pillow-slip was still damp with Paul's tears and his fevered anguish of the night, and as she drew it off to replace it with a fresh one the thought came to her, for the first time in her life:
"But why are priests forbidden to marry?"
And she thought of Agnes' wealth, and how she owned a large house with gardens and orchards and fields.
Then suddenly she felt horribly guilty in even entertaining such thoughts, and quickly drawing on the fresh pillow-slip she went away into her own room.
Marching forward? Yes, she had been marching since dawn and was yet only at the beginning of the way. And however far one went, one always came back to the same place. She went downstairs and sat by the fire beside Antiochus, who had not moved and was determined to wait there all day, if needs be, for the sake of seeing his superior and making his peace with him. He sat very still, one leg crossed over the other and his hands clasped round his knee, and presently he remarked, not without a slight accent of reproach:
"You ought to have taken him his coffee into the church, as you do when he is delayed there hearing the women's confessions. As it is, he will be famished!"
"And how was I to know he would be sent for in such a hurry? The old man is dying, it seems," retorted the mother.
"I don't think that can be true. His grandchildren want him to die because he has some money to leave. I know the old chap! I saw him once when I went up into the mountains with my father: he was sitting amongst the rocks in the sun, with a dog and a tame eagle beside him and all sorts of dead animals all round. That is not how God orders us to live!"
"What does He order, then?"
"He orders us to live amongst men, to cultivate the ground, and not to hide our money, but to give it to the poor."
The little sacristan spoke with a man's confidence, and the priest's mother was touched and smiled. After all, if Antiochus could say such sensible things it was because he had been taught by her Paul. It was her Paul who taught them all to be good, wise and prudent; and when he really wished to he succeeded in convincing even old men whose opinions were already fixed, and even thoughtless children. She sighed, and bending down to draw the coffee-pot nearer the glowing embers, she said:
"You talk like a little saint, Antiochus; but it remains to be seen if you will do as you say when you're a man, whether you really will give your money to the poor."
"Yes, I shall give everything to the poor. I shall have a great deal of money, because my mother makes a lot with her tavern, and my father is a forest keeper and earns pretty well, too. I shall give all I get to the poor: God tells us to do that, and He Himself will provide for us. And the Bible says, the ravens do not sow, neither do they reap, yet they have their food from God, and the lily of the valley is clothed more splendidly than the king."
"Yes, Antiochus, when a man is alone he can do that, but what if he has children?"
"That makes no difference. Besides, I shall never have children; priests are not allowed to have any."
She turned to look at him; his profile was towards her, against the bright background of the open doorway and the courtyard outside; it was a profile of pure, firm outline and dark skin, almost like a head of bronze, with long lashes shading the eyes with their large dark pupils. And as she gazed at the boy she could have wept, but she knew not why.
"Are you quite sure you want to be a priest?" she asked.
"Yes, if that is God's will."
"Priests are not allowed to marry, and suppose that some day you wanted to take a wife?"
"I shall not want a wife, since God has forbidden it."
"God? But it is the Pope who has forbidden it," said the mother, somewhat taken aback at the boy's answer.
"The Pope is God's representative on earth."
"But in olden times priests had wives and families, just as the Protestant clergy have now," she urged.
"That is a different thing," said the boy, growing warm over the argument; "we ought not to have them!"
"The priests in olden times …" she persisted.
But the sacristan was well-informed. "Yes, the priests in olden times," he said, "but then they themselves held a meeting and decided against it; and those who had no wives or families, the younger ones, were the very ones who opposed marriage the most strongly. That is as it should be."
"The younger ones!" repeated the mother as if to herself. "But they know nothing about it! And then they may repent, they may even go astray," she added in a low voice, "they may come to reason and argue like the old priest."
A tremor seized her and she looked swiftly round to assure herself that the ghost was not there, instantly repenting for having thus evoked it. She did not wish even to think about it, and least of all in connexion with that matter. Was it not all ended? Moreover, Antiochus's face wore an expression of the deepest scorn.
"That man was not a priest, he was the devil's brother come to earth! God save us from him! We had best not even think about him!" and he made the sign of the cross. Then he continued, with recovered serenity:
"As for repenting! Do you suppose that he, your son, ever dreams of repenting?"
It hurt her to hear the boy talk like that. She longed to be able to tell him something of her trouble, to warn him for the future, yet at the same time she rejoiced at his words, as though the conscience of the innocent lad were speaking to her conscience to commend and encourage it.
"Does he, does my Paul say it is right for priests not to marry?" she asked in a low voice.
"If he does not say it is right, who should say so? Of course he says it is right; hasn't he said so to you? A fine thing it would be to see a priest with his wife beside him and a child in his arms! And when he ought to go and say Mass he has to nurse the baby because it's howling! What a joke! Imagine your son with one child in his arms and another hanging on to his cassock!"
The mother smiled wanly; but there passed before her eyes a fleeting vision of lovely children running about the house, and there was a pang at her heart. Antiochus laughed aloud, his dark eyes and white teeth flashing in his brown face, but there was something cruel in his laughter.
"A priest's wife would be a funny thing! When they went out for a walk together they would look from behind like two women! And would she go and confess to him, if they lived in a place where there was no other priest?"
"What does a mother do? Who do I confess to?"
"A mother is different. And who is there that your son could marry? The granddaughter of King Nicodemus, perhaps?"
He began to laugh merrily again, for the granddaughter of King Nicodemus was the most unfortunate girl in the village, a cripple and an idiot. But he instantly grew serious again when the mother, forced to speak by a will other than her own, said softly:
"For that matter, there is some one, Agnes."
But Antiochus objected jealously: "She is ugly, I don't like her, and he does not like her either."
Then the mother began to praise Agnes, but she spoke almost in a whisper as though afraid of being overheard by anyone except the boy, while Antiochus, his hands still clasped round his knee, shook his head energetically, his lower lip stuck out in disgust like a ripe cherry.
"No, no, I don't like her—can't you hear what I say! She is ugly and proud and old. And besides …"
A step sounded in the little hall and instantly they both were silent and stood waiting.
*****