His voice broke. When he stopped speaking Domini was again conscious of the music in the city. She remembered that earlier in the night she had thought of it as the music of a great festival.
"I resolved to enter the life of prayer, the most perfect life of prayer. I resolved to become a 'religious.' It seemed to me that by so doing I should be proving in the finest way my love for my mother. I should be, in the strongest way, helping her. Her life was prayer for my dead father and love for her children. By devoting myself to the life of prayer I should show to her that I was as she was, as she had made me, true son of her womb. Can you understand? I had a passion for my mother, Domini--I had a passion. My brother tried to dissuade me from the monastic life. He himself was going into business in Tunis.
He wanted me to join him. But I was firm. I felt driven towards the cloister then as other men often feel driven towards the vicious life.
The inclination was irresistible. I yielded to it. I had to bid good- bye to my mother. I told you--she was the passion of my life. And yet I hardly felt sad at parting from her. Perhaps that will show you how I was then. It seemed to me that we should be even closer together when I wore the monk's habit. I was in haste to put it on. I went to the monastery of El-Largani and entered it as a novice of the Trappistine order. I thought in the great silence of the Trappists there would be more room for prayer. When I left my home and went to El-Largani I took with me one treasure only. Domini, it was the little wooden crucifix you pinned upon the tent at Arba. My mother gave it to me, and I was allowed to keep it. Everything else in the way of earthly possessions I, of course, had to give up.
"You have never seen El-Largani, my home for nineteen years, my prison for one. It is lonely, but not in the least desolate. It stands on a high upland, and, from a distance, looks upon the sea. Far off there are mountains. The land was a desert. The monks have turned it, if not into an Eden, at least into a rich garden. There are vineyards, cornfields, orchards, almost every fruit-tree flourishes there. The springs of sweet waters are abundant. At a short way from the monastery is a large village for the Spanish workmen whom the monks supervise in the labours of the fields. For the Trappist life is not only a life of prayer, but a life of diligent labour. When I became a novice I had not realised that. I had imagined myself continually upon my knees. I found instead that I was perpetually in the fields, in sun, and wind, and rain--that was in the winter time--working like the labourers, and that often when we went into the long, plain chapel to pray I was so tired--being only a boy--that my eyes closed as I stood in my stall, and I could scarcely hear the words of Mass or Benediction. But I had expected to be happy at El-Largani, and I was happy. Labour is good for the body and better for the soul. And the silence was not hard to bear. The Trappists have a book of gestures, and are often allowed to converse by signs. We novices were generally in little bands, and often, as we walked in the garden of the monastery, we talked together gaily with our hands. Then the silence is not perpetual. In the fields we often had to give directions to the labourers. In the school, where we studied Theology, Latin, Greek, there was heard the voice of the teacher. It is true that I have seen men in the monastery day by day for twenty years with whom I have never exchanged a word, but I have had permission to speak with monks.
The head of the monastery, the Reverend Pere, has the power to loose the bonds of silence when he chooses, and to allow monks to walk and speak with each other beyond the white walls that hem in the garden of the monastery. Now and then we spoke, but I think most of us were not unhappy in our silence. It became a habit. And then we were always occupied. We had no time allowed us for sitting and being sad. Domini, I don't want to tell you about the Trappists, their life--only about myself, why I was as I was, how I came to change. For years I was not unhappy at El-Largani. When my time of novitiate was over I took the eternal vows without hesitation. Many novices go out again into the world. It never occurred to me to do so. I scarcely ever felt a stirring of worldly desire. I scarcely ever had one of those agonising struggles which many people probably attribute to monks. I was contented nearly always. Now and then the flesh spoke, but not strongly. Remember, our life was a life of hard and exhausting labour in the fields. The labour kept the flesh in subjection, as the prayer lifted up the spirit. And then, during all my earlier years at the monastery, we had an Abbe who was quick to understand the characters and dispositions of men--Dom Andre Herceline. He knew me far better than I knew myself. He knew, what I did not suspect, that I was full of sleeping violence, that in my purity and devotion--or beneath it rather--there was a strong strain of barbarism. The Russian was sleeping in the monk, but sleeping soundly. That can be. Half a man's nature, if all that would call to it is carefully kept from it, may sleep, I believe, through all his life. He might die and never have known, or been, what all the time he was. For years it was so with me.
I knew only part of myself, a real vivid part--but only a part. I thought it was the whole. And while I thought it was the whole I was happy. If Dom Andre Herceline had not died, today I should be a monk at El-Largani, ignorant of what I know, contented.