And the Reverend Pere, Domini, the Reverend Pere, set my feet in the path of my own destruction. On the day after the stranger had arrived the Reverend Pere sent for me to his private room, and said to me, 'Our new guest is in a very unhappy state. He has been attracted by our peace. If we can bring peace to him it will be an action acceptable to God. You will be much with him. Try to do him good. He is not a Catholic, but no matter. He wishes to attend the services in the chapel. He may be influenced. God may have guided his feet to us, we cannot tell. But we can act--we can pray for him. I do not know how long he will stay. It may be for only a few days or for the whole summer. It does not matter. Use each day well for him. Each day may be his last with us.' I went out from the Reverend Pere full of enthusiasm, feeling that a great, a splendid interest had come into my life, an interest such as it had never held before.
"Day by day I was with this man. Of course there were many hours when we were apart, the hours when I was at prayer in the chapel or occupied with study. But each day we passed much time together, generally in the garden. Scarcely any visitors came, and none to stay, except, from time to time, a passing priest, and once two young men from Tunis, one of whom had an inclination to become a novice. And this man, as I have said, began to show himself to me with a tremendous frankness.
"Domini, he was suffering under what I suppose would be called an obsession, an immense domination such as one human being sometimes obtains over another. At that time I had never realised that there were such dominations. Now I know that there are, and, Domini, that they can be both terrible and splendid. He was dominated by a woman, by a woman who had come into his life, seized it, made it a thing of glory, broken it. He described to me the dominion of this woman. He told me how she had transformed him. Till he met her he had been passionate but free, his own master through many experiences, many intrigues. He was very frank, Domini. He did not attempt to hide from me that his life had been evil. It had been a life devoted to the acquiring of experience, of all possible experience, mental and bodily. I gathered that he had shrunk from nothing, avoided nothing.
His nature had prompted him to rush upon everything, to grasp at everything. At first I was horrified at what he told me. I showed it.
I remember the second evening after his arrival we were sitting together in a little arbour at the foot of the vineyard that sloped up to the cemetery. It was half an hour before the last service in the chapel. The air was cool with breath from the distant sea. An intense calm, a heavenly calm, I think, filled the garden, floated away to the cypresses beside the graves, along the avenue where stood the Fourteen Stations of the Cross. And he told me, began to tell me something of his life.
"'You thought to find happiness in such an existence?' I exclaimed, almost with incredulity I believe.
"He looked at me with his shining eyes.
"'Why not, Father? Do you think I was a madman to do so?'
"'Surely.'
"'Why? Is there not happiness in knowledge?'
"'Knowledge of evil?'
"'Knowledge of all things that exist in life. I have never sought for evil specially; I have sought for everything. I wished to bring everything under my observation, everything connected with human life.'
"'But human life,' I said more quietly, 'passes away from this world.
It is a shadow in a world of shadows.'
"'You say that,' he answered abruptly. 'I wonder if you feel it--feel it as you feel my hand on yours.'
"He laid his hand on mine. It was hot and dry as if with fever. Its touch affected me painfully.
"'Is that hand the hand of a shadow?' he said. 'Is this body that can enjoy and suffer, that can be in heaven or in hell--here--here--a shadow?'
"'Within a week it might be less than a shadow.'
"'And what of that? This is now, this is now. Do you mean what you say? Do you truly feel that you are a shadow--that this garden is but a world of shadows? I feel that I, that you, are terrific realities, that this garden is of immense significance. Look at that sky.'
"The sky above the cypresses was red with sunset. The trees looked black beneath it. Fireflies were flitting near the arbour where we sat.
"'That is the sky that roofs what you would have me believe a world of shadows. It is like the blood, the hot blood that flows and surges in the veins of men--in our veins. Ah, but you are a monk!'
"The way he said the last words made me feel suddenly a sense of shame, Domini. It was as if a man said to another man, 'You are not a man.' Can you--can you understand the feeling I had just then?
Something hot and bitter was in me. A sort of desperate sense of nothingness came over me, as if I were a skeleton sitting there with flesh and blood and trying to believe, and to make it believe, that I, too, was and had been flesh and blood.
"'Yes, thank God, I am a monk,' I answered quietly.
"Something in my tone, I think, made him feel that he had been brutal.
"'I am a brute and a fool,' he said vehemently. 'But it is always so with me. I always feel as if what I want others must want. I always feel universal. It's folly. You have your vocation, I mine. Yours is to pray, mine is to live.'
"Again I was conscious of the bitterness. I tried to put it from me.
"'Prayer is life,' I answered, 'to me, to us who are here.'
"'Prayer! Can it be? Can it be vivid as the life of experience, as the life that teaches one the truth of men and women, the truth of creation--joy, sorrow, aspiration, lust, ambition of the intellect and the limbs? Prayer--'
"'It is time for me to go,' I said. 'Are you coming to the chapel?'
"'Yes,' he answered almost eagerly. 'I shall look down on you from my lonely gallery. Perhaps I shall be able to feel the life of prayer.'
"'May it be so,' I said.