"But I think I spoke without confidence, and I know that that evening I prayed without impulse, coldly, mechanically. The long, dim chapel, with its lines of monks facing each other in their stalls, seemed to me a sad place, like a valley of dry bones--for the first time, for the first time.
"I ought to have gone on the morrow to the Reverend Pere. I ought to have asked him, begged him to remove me from the /hotellerie/. I ought to have foreseen what was coming--that this man had a strength to live greater than my strength to pray; that his strength might overcome mine. I began to sin that night. Curiosity was alive in me, curiosity about the life that I had never known, was--so I believed, so I thought I knew--never to know.
"When I came out of the chapel into the /hotellerie/ I met our guest--I do not say his name. What would be the use?--in the corridor. It was almost dark. There were ten minutes before the time for locking up the door and going to bed. Francois, the servant, was asleep under the arcade.
"'Shall we go on to the path and have a last breath of air?' the stranger said.
"We stepped out and walked slowly up and down.
"'Do you not feel the beauty of peace?' I asked.
"I wanted him to say yes. I wanted him to tell me that peace, tranquillity, were beautiful. He did not reply for a moment. I heard him sigh heavily.
"'If there is peace in the world at all,' he said at length, 'it is only to be found with the human being one loves. With the human being one loves one might find peace in hell.'
"We did not speak again before we parted for the night.
"Domini, I did not sleep at all that night. It was the first of many sleepless nights, nights in which my thoughts travelled like winged Furies--horrible, horrible nights. In them I strove to imagine all the stranger knew by experience. It was like a ghastly, physical effort. I strove to conceive of all that he had done--with the view, I told myself at first, of bringing myself to a greater contentment, of realising how worthless was all that I had rejected and that he had grasped at. In the dark I, as it were, spread out his map of life and mine and examined them. When, still in the dark, I rose to go to the chapel I was exhausted. I felt unutterably melancholy. That was at first. Presently I felt an active, gnawing hunger. But--but--I have not come to that yet. This strange, new melancholy was the forerunner.
It was a melancholy that seemed to be caused by a sense of frightful loneliness such as I had never previously experienced. Till now I had almost always felt God with me, and that He was enough. Now, suddenly, I began to feel that I was alone. I kept thinking of the stranger's words: 'If there is peace in the world at all it is only to be found with the human being one loves.'
"'That is false,' I said to myself again and again. 'Peace is only to be found by close union with God. In that I have found peace for many, many years.'
"I knew that I had been at peace. I knew that I had been happy. And yet, when I looked back upon my life as a novice and a monk, I now felt as if I had been happy vaguely, foolishly, bloodlessly, happy only because I had been ignorant of what real happiness was--not really happy. I thought of a bird born in a cage and singing there. I had been as that bird. And then, when I was in the garden, I looked at the swallows winging their way high in the sunshine, between the garden trees and the radiant blue, winging their way towards sea and mountains and plains, and that bitterness, like an acid that burns and eats away fine metal, was once more at my heart.
"But the sensation of loneliness was the most terrible of all. I compared union with God, such as I thought I had known, with that other union spoken of by my guest--union with the human being one loves. I set the two unions as it were in comparison. Night after night I did this. Night after night I told over the joys of union with God--joys which I dared to think I had known--and the joys of union with a loved human being. On the one side I thought of the drawing near to God in prayer, of the sensation of approach that comes with earnest prayer, of the feeling that ears are listening to you, that the great heart is loving you, the great heart that loves all living things, that you are being absolutely understood, that all you cannot say is comprehended, and all you say is received as something precious. I recalled the joy, the exaltation, that I had known when I prayed. That was union with God. In such union I had sometimes felt that the world, with all that it contained of wickedness, suffering and death, was utterly devoid of power to sadden or alarm the humblest human being who was able to draw near to God.
"I had had a conquering feeling--not proud--as of one upborne, protected for ever, lifted to a region in which no enemy could ever be, no sadness, no faint anxiety even.
"Then I strove to imagine--and this, Domini, was surely a deliberate sin--exactly what it must be to be united with a beloved human being.
I strove and I was able. For not only did instinct help me, instinct that had been long asleep, but--I have told you that the stranger was suffering under an obsession, a terrible dominion. This dominion he described to me with an openness that perhaps--that indeed I believe-- he would not have shown had I not been a monk. He looked upon me as a being apart, neither man nor woman, a being without sex. I am sure he did. And yet he was immensely intelligent. But he knew that I had entered the monastery as a novice, that I had been there through all my adult life. And then my manner probably assisted him in his illusion. For I gave--I believe--no sign of the change that was taking place within me under his influence. I seemed to be calm, detached, even in my sympathy for his suffering. For he suffered frightfully.