The Debatable Land Part 5

"Gard Windham."

Father Andrew fell to patting one fat hand on the back of the other, which gripped the umbrella. It was his habit to pat one hand softly over the other whenever he was giving himself advice, or found himself driven to some conclusion which could not be soothed or softened by any more logical method. "Yes, yes. Dear me!" A life probably of unsanctioned origin. It was apt to be the reason for the closed door and the lost key.

They came to the door in the brick wall, and went from the street that murmured sadly with the rain, into the little paved court that murmured sadly with the rain.

Then Father Andrew sat down before the Father Superior, whose black eyes glowed and dreamed, and felt himself like a small particle of dust, happy in its humility.

"It is as you say," said the Superior. "A door is closed behind it.

Consecration is sometimes the more complete."

Father Andrew murmured that it was, and thought of the refectory and a salad he knew of with peppers in it. He was used to thinking of salads when he should not be thinking of them. He was sorry for it, and knew that he had no claim to anything but humility.

"The face promises and threatens," mused the Superior. "How often is it that the highest that is spiritual is based on the strongest that is worldly."

The Superior was a man of symbols and a.n.a.logies, swarthy of skin and large of frame, one whose conceptions came red from their furnace.

Father Andrew's mind was nestled the rather in a certain padded placidity. Moreover, there was the salad, with its peppers. No doubt, if the Superior saw promises of a more than common consecration, and threatenings of peculiar importance in this young person without origin, it was a thing to be expected of the Superior's holy and profound discernment. The Superior's spiritual enterprise was ever extraordinary.

He was of such as had from the beginning fought in the vanguard of the Church, and been her glory and adornment. For himself, Father Andrew discerned little further than to feel that his duty of distributing the brotherhood's charities would be easier if every one had the young person's native a.s.surance. He felt that Providence, clearly with a purpose, had bestowed upon himself such limited insight wherewith to be content. It enabled him at least to admire the Superior without limit.

He went his way to the salad and the peppers, and Gard remained in the house of the Brotherhood of Consolation.

It was a Catholic order, somewhat quiet in its ways. Not many of the brothers were like the Superior, whose faith was a yearning in the blood as fiery as young love, and for whom night-long struggles of prayer appeared to be a normal way of living. For the most part they seemed to be elderly men, keeping the rule without any apparent effort, but rather as something it would be an effort to vary from. Probably they were happier than most, in the shuffle of fate, manage to be. It would be difficult to show they were not. The monastery bell clinked at small intervals of the day and night, and slippered feet were ever going whispering down the corridors on the heels of the sliding moment, to place some office of performance or prayer accurately in its little division of time. And this method and regulation of hours, so old, so grown from measureless experience and minute knowledge of humanity, seemed to be a kind of setting or framework to keep in place, till their times came, the souls for whom atonement was accomplished; or for the others, to keep the saving of their souls in orderly process of accomplishment. The faces of all except the Superior looked something alike. They broke easily into smiles, but laughter seldom went beyond a happy chuckle.

The window of Gard's little cell looked over the court against the face of a dead wall that ended a block of uniform houses. The cloister covered two of the remaining sides, a brick wall ten feet high the fourth, and a thick wooden door led through this into the street. The court was asphalted, except for a strip under the dead wall, where one Brother Francis planted things hopefully every spring, and found entertainment all summer in the ill-advised efforts they made to grow.

It was Francis who taught Gard his Latin accidents, and later the writings of those dignified heathen, Caesar and Tullius Cicero; later still his Greek, in which language appeared the writings of one Herodotus, and of others called "Fathers of the Church," of whom he might disbelieve Herodotus if he chose--an unnecessary distinction; he believed them all fervently. One of his vivid memories was the delivering before brothers Francis and Andrew, with violence and tears, the oration, "Tandem aliquando, Quirites," with indignation because both chuckled without intermission, and would not see the importance of condemning Catiline. Francis had general charge of the monastery school, which was filled and emptied daily through a special door on the avenue.

But the scholars seldom went further than reading and writing, sums and fractions, and the lives of those saints who had had the more interesting adventures; so that, under the Superior's permission, to lead Gard into these high places of learning was a pleasure to which Francis surrendered himself, he feared, with sinful abandonment.

Music, Gard studied with one Brother Johannes, who played the little organ in the whitewashed chapel, all white except by the altar, where there was a distinction of gilded woodwork, silver candlesticks, and purple cloths, and so cold in winter that one's fingers were numb on the keys. He was an old, bowed-over man, Johannes, with frail, waxen hands, absent-minded, apt to forget his rule and be late, and not understand why the Superior persisted in modifying his discipline. He feared the Superior estimated his sins too lightly, and died in the year '52, when Gard was seventeen. Gard had to play the organ at offices after that, and to go daily three blocks up the avenue to the church of the Sacred Trinity, and take his lesson from Fritz Moselle, a mighty German from Stra.s.sburg, near the Rhine. He learned many things besides harmony and counterpoint of Fritz, who was a cosmopolitan, and believed not in the faith of man or woman; but he believed that art was the one country of the soul, and that in conduct it was the duty of every one to "do as he _verdammt_ please."

"Look you, _kleiner_! In de ma.s.s--yes. Some monk he haf art in him--Gott, yes! He found a place for his soul to live in. He know diese vorldt was a circus, und he vas a lil' boy und can't go. He mus' stay to home. Ach! he feel sad. Und by-and-by he compose music to a circus in hefen, vich vas de ma.s.s you play yesterday. Aber you mus' play de Bach fugue severe. Maybe you make a good monk, but you haf too much luxury in your bones to play de Bach fugue, _hein_? No? Play den, p't.i.t anchorite, und let each of your fingers be von of de Ten Commandments, or Gott! you don' play him not any." The organ at Trinity was quite another matter than the little one which wheezed plaintively in the brotherhood's whitewashed chapel.

Once a week he had to go to the Superior and be examined, and probably read a chapter of St. Augustine. It was a ceremony of indefinite length, for the Superior sometimes fell into a monologue, fervid as St.

Augustine's, while walking to and fro; and Gard used to imagine the room full of spirits and misty angels, listening--all of them--breathless, astonished, and a little frightened; for there could not be any one who was not afraid of the Superior, unless it were the _bonus Deus_, and even He must be astonished. At length the great, swarthy man would lay his hand on Gard's head--a large hand, lean and strong, and vibrating with the throb and blast of the furnace that was in him.

"Oh, Infinite and Tender, if it is needed for the saving of this young soul, send him sorrow and pain, and let his grief be deep." And Gard would come away tingling like the bells of Trinity, which had a chime of twenty, and it made the bell-tower rock to play them hard. He never after lost the impression that those interviews, of all kinds of human experience, probably most resembled death and resurrection, and things likely to happen at the gate of the celestial city. He grew to something over a medium, slim height at this time, had drowsy eyelids, and wakeful gray eyes under them. He laughed with a ba.s.s voice, liked brothers Francis and Andrews, and Fritz Moselle, and worshipped the Superior, but preferred to dodge him. The preference was probably a sin, one which Brother Francis claimed to have prayed for in himself some twenty years without effecting. He discovered that the Superior, Francis, and Fritz Moselle had each severally a distinct point of view, and that you could tell beforehand in what direction their interpretations of anything would point. He found that he liked the organ in Trinity better than Cicero, and watching the throng of men and women, with bright colors in their hats, as he went to and from the brotherhood and Trinity, if not better, at least differently, than either. And in the year '55 he discovered that he was expected presently to take the vows, and awoke to the further fact that the idea filled him with melancholy. It resembled to him a sandy desert, with not an oasis in sight, not a palm-tree against the sky.

The children who followed the piper of Hamelin, the mariners of Odysseus who c.o.c.ked their ears to the sirens, and other harkers to such instrumental enchantment, have reported experiences that are much alike.

They heard, it seems, a high, thin fluting, ineffably sweet, which seemed to imply that just beyond those blue hills, or those white breakers, or a few turns of the next street, there lay an extraordinary region overrun with smiling probabilities; for there, whatever one dreamed of most was more than likely to be found, whether it was sugar-plums, or a girl in the brake with sunny hair, or a sword and shield, and a banner to follow withal.

But when Gard told Father Andrew that he would not take the vows, Father Andrew acted as if it were a new thing, and lifted his fat hands helplessly.

"Good--A--Dear me! That is, I mean why not?"

Then he patted Gard's hand with his soft palm, and chuckled and sighed.

"But it's true," Gard said. "I'll tell you why."

"The blessed--I mean, don't! Tell the Superior." And he scuttled away in alarm, murmuring, "I wish that boy didn't surprise me so."

It had not occurred to Gard, but evidently he must tell the Superior; and how could the Superior be made to understand about the high fluting, and that it said "Follow, follow," so that one needs must go; and all about the sugar-plums and the girl in the brake, and the banner and sword and shield? And, if not, what was there to tell the Superior, more than to make a bare statement of his rooted ingrat.i.tude, his incorrigibly evil nature, and his resolve to go? Probably there was not another such case in the history of orders, and he would be excommunicated. He knew the Superior had meant him to be peculiarly consecrated, and, because he had no origin back of the Foundlings'

Hospital, had thought him a soul only the better fitted to be seized and sent heavenward powerfully. What right had he to interfere with the Superior's great purpose? Nevertheless, he set his mouth and knocked on the familiar door.

The Superior was pacing the room, as his habit was. It was a long, gray-walled room, containing a few chairs, a picture of the Annunciation, a writing-table with a crucifix over it, a bookcase with, by Gard's frequent counting, one hundred and twelve books, leaving out the controversial pamphlets. It was flooded with light from three large windows. The floor was uncarpeted.

Gard entered on the subject promptly.

"I've found I can't take the vows, father. I'm afraid you'll never forgive me."

The Superior stopped short; a spasm of pain crossed his face. Gard thought, "Now it's coming."

"Do I seem to you unforgiving?" he said, sadly. "Do you know, that sin of mine was pointed out to me thirty years ago, when I was your age. I imagined it was conquered. I'm afraid I have not watched for it of late years."

Gard was dumb with surprise. The Superior resumed his pacing.

"I have been hoping that you would come to me in this way of your own will. You will think it best, then, to leave the brotherhood--at least for a time? Have you any plans?"

"I would play in some church, father. There is Fritz Moselle."

"Moselle? Yes, your teacher. A curious instance. I remember him. Made up of a thousand fragments, shivered pieces of gla.s.s, from what have been faiths and systems of philosophy, and have had, perhaps, in their time a certain fragile beauty. He probably uses such terms as 'art' and 'cosmopolitanism' in connection with it. A curious, modern type. You will learn by observing such." There was a pause. Gard began to collect himself.

"When I said for a time," went on the Superior. "I meant that my hopes and your issues are in His hands, where they belong. You will write to me if you are in need."

He stood still a moment.

"There is one result of experience for one soul and another for another.

'As often as I have gone forth among men I have returned home less a man,' saith St. Thomas a Kempis; but the spirit of our time does not speak in this way. I suppose"--smiling--"it is only the young men who really hear what the spirit of the time says."

He put his hands on Gard's bowed head, and there was a long silence.

Then Gard stammered something, and presently--somehow--got away and stood in the corridor alone. His eyes were full of blinding tears, and yet there was a sense of wild relief. The interview was over, and he had never seen the Superior so mild, so politely talkative.

The parting with the rest of the brotherhood was more of an ordeal.

Brothers Andrew and Francis kissed his cheek and turned away. It seemed to him they looked suddenly old, and gray, and broken.

The cold, white corridor was full of ghosts of his own past hours and days staring reproachfully. He pa.s.sed out through the cloister court, carrying his little bundle under his arm. The asphalt was wet with the mist. Francis's flower-bed had only a few crooked, brown, uncannily-shaped stalks, like dry mummies' hands thrust through the mould and clutching blindly. He opened the door in the brick wall of the court. The hinge was worn and the gate had been sagging lately. It grated as he closed it behind him.

Chapter VII

Introducing Moselle and Mavering

It was yet early in the afternoon. There was a hint of the sun overhead, a semi-luminous s.p.a.ce in the thin mist, though the pavements were still wet. The two opposite currents of flowing humanity on the avenue mingled and jostled and dodged, with haste and with leisure, with good-humor and petulance.

The avenue as far as Trinity, and Gard in his black robe, knew each other very well. The policeman had nodded to him kindly for years, and of late had taken to touching his helmet. The avenue did not appear to see anything peculiar about him now, but it came to him with a shock, so that he knew of a certainty that the relations between them were quite changed. The policeman touched his helmet, the man at the newspaper booth his hat, but that was a mistake. Properly, he ought to stop and tell them it was a mistake, that he had put off consecration, declined reverence, and cast his lot with them and the avenue's democracy.