"He told her he could not bear it, that it was impossible, that she must belong to him entirely and solely. He asked her to marry him. She was surprised, touched. She understood what a sacrifice such a marriage would be to a man in his position. He was a man of good birth. His request, his vehement insistence on it, made her understand his love as she had not understood it before. Yet she hesitated. For so long had she been accustomed to a life of freedom, of changing /amours/, that she hesitated to put her neck under the yoke of matrimony. She understood thoroughly his character and his aim in marrying her. She knew that as his wife she must bid an eternal farewell to the life she had known. And it was a life that had become a habit to her, a life that she was fond of. For she was enormously vain, and she was a--she was a very physical woman, subject to physical caprices. There are things that I pass over, Domini, which would explain still more her hesitation. He knew what caused it, and again he was tortured. But he persisted. And at last he overcame. She consented to marry him. They were engaged. Domini, I need not tell you much more, only this fact--which had driven him from France, destroyed his happiness, brought him to the monastery. Shortly before the marriage was to take place he discovered that, while they were engaged, she had yielded to the desires of an old admirer who had come to bid her farewell and to wish her joy in her new life. He was tempted, he said, to kill her. But he governed himself and left her.
He travelled. He came to Tunis. He came to La Trappe. He saw the peace there. He thought, 'Can I seize it? Can it do something for me?' He saw me. He thought, 'I shall not be quite alone. This monk--he has lived always in peace, he has never known the torture of women. Might not intercourse with him help me?'
"Such was his history, such was the history poured, with infinite detail that I have not told you, day by day, into my ears. It was the history, you see, of a passion that was mainly physical. I will not say entirely. I do not know whether any great passion can be entirely physical. But it was the history of the passion of one body for another body, and he did not attempt to present it to me as anything else. This man made me understand the meaning of the body. I had never understood it before. I had never suspected the immensity of the meaning there is in physical things. I had never comprehended the flesh. Now I comprehended it. Loneliness rushed upon me, devoured me-- loneliness of the body. 'God is a spirit and those that worship him must worship him in spirit.' Now I felt that to worship in spirit was not enough. I even felt that it was scarcely anything. Again I thought of my life as the life of a skeleton in a world of skeletons. Again the chapel was as a valley of dry bones. It was a ghastly sensation. I was plunged in the void. I--I--I can't tell you my exact sensation, but it was as if I was the loneliest creature in the whole of the universe, and as if I need not have been lonely, as if I, in my ignorance and fatuity, had selected loneliness thinking it was the happiest fate.
"And yet you will say I was face to face with this man's almost frantic misery. I was, and it made no difference. I envied him, even in his present state. He wanted to gain consolation from me if that were possible. Oh, the irony of my consoling him! In secret I laughed at it bitterly. When I strove to console him I knew that I was an incarnate lie. He had told me the meaning of the body and, by so doing, had snatched from me the meaning of the spirit. And then he said to me, 'Make me feel the meaning of the spirit. If I can grasp that I may find comfort.' He called upon me to give him what I no longer had--the peace of God that passeth understanding. Domini, can you feel at all what that was to me? Can you realise? Can you--is it any wonder that I could do nothing for him, for him who had done such a frightful thing for me? Is it any wonder? Soon he realised that he would not find peace with me in the garden. Yet he stayed on. Why? He did not know where to go, what to do. Life offered him nothing but horror. His love of experiences was dead. His love of life had completely vanished. He saw the worldly life as a nightmare, yet he had nothing to put in the place of it. And in the monastery he was ceaselessly tormented by jealousy. Ceaselessly his mind was at work about this woman, picturing her in her life of change, of intrigue, of new lovers, of new hopes and aims in which he had no part, in which his image was being blotted out, doubtless from her memory even. He suffered, he suffered as few suffer. But I think I suffered more. The melancholy was driven on into a gnawing hunger, the gnawing hunger of the flesh wishing to have lived, wishing to live, wishing to--to know.
"Domini, to you I can't say more of that--to you whom I--whom I love with spirit and flesh. I will come to the end, to the incident which made the body rise up, strike down the soul, trample out over it into the world like a wolf that was starving.
"One day the Reverend Pere gave me a special permission to walk with our visitor beyond the monastery walls towards the sea. Such permission was an event in my life. It excited me more than you can imagine. I found that the stranger had begged him to let me come.
"'Our guest is very fond of you,' the Reverend Pere said to me. 'I think if any human being can bring him to a calmer, happier state of mind and spirit, you can. You have obtained a good influence over him.'
"Domini, when the Reverend Pere spoke to me thus my mouth was suddenly contracted in a smile. Devil's smile, I think. I put up my hand to my face. I saw the Reverend Pere looking at me with a dawning of astonishment in his kind, grave eyes, and I controlled myself at once.
But I said nothing. I could not say anything, and I went out from the parlour quickly, hot with a sensation of shame.
"'You are coming?' the stranger said.
"'Yes,' I answered.