The Arm and the Darkness Read online

  And then Paul knew that leaders must rely upon this form of adoration and service, even though it was blind and bewildered. It was not given to all men to understand.

  But Arsène, as he painfully made his way home through the tunnel, felt that he was a little closer to the comprehension of the things he had heard the Abbé Mourion say, and that though there was much that would forever remain closed to him, he was in the service of a dream that could not fail mankind.

  CHAPTER XIII

  It was Louis de Richepin’s custom, after the early mass which he attended, and at which he sometimes officiated, to walk in the fresh morning in the Bois.

  The hour would be so early that no one would be abroad but himself, under the spring trees struck deeply in their hearts by the new golden sun. The paths over which he would walk would still be tangled in moist dark shade, heavy with the perfume of the earth, and he would see snails lumbering before him, and the small writhing whiteness of worms. But the birds would be awake, trilling with unbearable sweetness in the boughs of the trees, and the slope of their wings, as they flew, would catch the shining brilliance of the sun, so that they carried a swift and momentary brightness into the bosky shadows. Here and there he saw small flowers in the new green grass, and sometimes, as the gentle wind blew, a scarf of perfume would be drawn invisibly across his face.

  The peace and the silence would sink deeply into a heart that knew so little peace. He would pace slowly and majestically, and his features would become less rigid and more calm. Once or twice he would pause to observe, with strange tenderness, the scurryings of some small animal, or watch the wheeling curve of a wing against the pure sky. Here, he thought that he meditated, but in reality he did not think at all. His mind, always so filled with stern dark shapes, like images of frozen despair or grief, would empty itself, and he knew the blessed surcease from thought.

  He often carried a prayer book with him, one finger in the midst of the pages. He would bend his eyes on the book at intervals, and his lips would move. But his mind and his heart did not absorb them, because, for a little while, he was happy. Along these silent paths, broken into sunlight or into darkness, he thought of nothing at all, not even of the God who pursued him everywhere but here. For here was sanctuary and complete peace.

  On this morning he had brought with him a book he had found in the Cardinal’s library the evening before. His Eminence had watched him take the little book, whose leather cover, from which the gilt had long gone, was flaking away into brown dust.

  “That is a strange book,” said the Cardinal, in a peculiar voice. “I would not advise you to take it.”

  “Why?” asked Louis, with surprise. “It is well read, for the pages are worn and torn. Has Monsieur le Cardinal read it, himself?”

  The Cardinal smiled. He bent his eyes upon the book in his secretary’s hand. He was silent for several long moments.

  “Yes,” he said, at last, “I have read it. Many times. Nevertheless, I do not suggest that you read it, Louis. I do not forbid it.” He paused, and his eyes, changeable and unfathomable like a cat’s eyes, glinted with something very near to malevolence. He drew his brows together, and stared at Louis with a cold but smiling curiosity.

  “Read it, then,” he added. When Louis had left the great chamber, he had paused at the doorway, and had glanced back for some reason he could not understand. The Cardinal was watching him, and his smile had something evil and amused in it.

  It was then, with profound shock, that Louis said to himself: He hates me!

  That look, and that thought, had kept the young priest sleepless that night. He had placed the little thick book upon a table near his austere bed, and the low lamp had burned feebly upon it until dawn. And Louis had lain there, looking at it, and remembering the Cardinal’s eyes.

  He had gotten up, attended mass, and prepared for his morning’s walk in the Bois. The book still lay on the table, and Louis had hesitated. Then, tightening his mouth, he had picked it up and carried it away with him.

  He walked a considerable distance, with the book in his hand, vowing over and over that he would not read it. Now the weight in his hands seemed an evil weight, as if of some pollution, something deadly. But the morning was so peaceful, so brilliant, and so beautiful, that he thought that nothing could hurt him or distress him, no matter what it was.

  He opened the book. It fell open at once to a certain page, as if some unseen hand had forcibly turned the pages. The characters were brown and faded. The title had long been obliterated from the cover, and the name of the author. Louis stood in a sun-washed break between two great trees, and read:

  “The desolate heritages of the people! They are heirs to all sadnesses, all sorrows, all anguishes and agonies. They steal hope and faith, furtively, mournfully, as men search ruins for food. They set out with feeble lanterns through a dark land, turning their little lights despairingly over meaningless chaos through which deceitful paths run into nothingness, or into pits or chasms. They cry out in the night in response to echoes which mock them; they bivouack in stony mountains. They find nothing, not even a guidance, in the cold stars. They come upon empty temples whose fallen gods are nameless. They flee from the bellowing of unseen armies. In the shadows, they look for the faces of friends, but they find only bodiless ghosts. They wander in the mists, and cower beneath the storms. The earth is to them an unknown and a wild land, hating them as a far land hates the alien.

  “And then men think in their hearts: We are strangers, and the earth looks at us with loathing. We have no home, neither in the darkness from which we came, nor in the darkness into which we go. We are lost in an eternity which heeds us not, and only our voices and our prayers return to us from the slope of the heavens. In the fugitive dawn there is no light for us. In our death we are alone, and we go into the bottomless abyss without hope, and only with one long last cry.”

  The book seemed to close by itself in Louis’ hands. He stood in the sunlight, but all the tranquil peace had gone from his face. Suddenly, he shuddered, as if struck by an icy wind. He experienced a deep sickness, as though he had fallen a great distance, and he heard the painful beating of his own heart.

  This is ridiculous, he thought to himself, but the thought echoed with a hollow sound all through the labyrinths of his brain. It is an evil thing, this book, he thought again. But I have read evil things before, and I have felt only contempt for them.

  It seemed to him that a malignant laughing whisper blew into his ear: Ah, but never before have I read the things which have lain groaning in my own soul!

  He looked at the book in his hand, and he said aloud, fiercely: “Satan, himself, has given this to me as a test of my faith!”

  Satan! And then, as he stood in the sunlight, he seemed to see the Cardinal’s faintly smiling face, and to hear his voice:

  “My dear Louis, superstition is the realism of the simple, the allegory of the intelligent.”

  He had gazed at Louis with his ironical eyes, and had smiled again.

  More and more sickened, Louis moved out of the sunlight into the cool dusky shadows under the trees. He felt extraordinarily weak and powerless. He sat down on the grass near the pathway. He looked again at the book. Then he shuddered again, and threw the book from him. He covered his face with his hands. He could not endure to look on all this beauty and brightness and peace, which appeared to have taken on itself the glare of anguish.

  Again, the Cardinal’s face rose up before him like a satirical apparition, and Louis said again to himself: He hates me. Now, with horror, he knew the extent of that hatred, which was impersonal yet none the less horrifying. Even he, whom I have served faithfully, hates me, he thought. There is none in all the world who loves me, or who has ever loved me.

  He had another terrible thought, remembering the Cardinal, and remembering that peculiar smile and the last glance. He believes that I am a hypocrite, a liar, a man of weak faith and foolish lies, he said to himself, appalled. That is why he did not
take that foul book from me. He wished me to read it, and see in its pages, as in a mirror, my own face.

  An old black horror took hold upon him, deeper than despondency, nameless and cold and paralyzing. He felt all strength, all life, drain out of his body, and in its place was the dark ichor of dissolution, as though his heart was dying. A thousand, thousand times, he had beaten back this horror, this agony of the soul, and a thousand thousand times, he had believed he had triumphed. Now he knew that he had never won a single battle, in spite of all the tortured prayers, the passionate will to belief, the mystic affirmation like a cry in a whirlwind. He had tried to believe with the simplicities of a peasant, with the naïveté of a child, but he felt some dreadful sense of degradation after these agonized excursions into illiteracy. Litanies and paternosters, repetitions and chants: all these he had tried, in the depths of his torment. But his mind stood aloof, like a pillar of salt in the midst of surging ants, full of disgust.

  Once the Cardinal had said to him: “There are some who believe with the heart, and others with the spirit, but only a few with the mind. Nevertheless, those who believe with the mind are the truly great, the rulers of men.”

  I have believed with my heart, and with my soul, he thought, wringing his hands together in his frightful desolation. But never have I believed with my mind.

  He tried to conjure up a conviction of guilt, as a demented man will dash his head against a wall. But he felt no guilt. He felt only the old bottomless emptiness, the old shapeless horror, the old disintegrating despair.

  It was this conflict between his mind and his will-to-believe, that had driven him into the Church. He had gone into the Church because he wished to believe, for in faith he believed he would find at last some peace, some consolation for a world that appeared to hate him, some love in response to the aching hunger of his heart. Many times, he convinced himself that he had found true faith, and he thought at those times that he was happy, because the pain had gone even if no ecstasy accompanied the going. But, most of all, he had found hatred, though he dared not peer down into his own soul to find the reason for this hatred. But his mind suspected it. It suspected that the hatred arose because he had no faith, and felt himself threatened, and so, he must hate others who felt no faith and threatened what little he sometimes had by their affirmation of faithlessness.

  Now, this morning, he could not turn away his eyes from his hatred, and he remembered with what a strange gleaming smile the Cardinal had said to him one day:

  “I have always suspected that the holy men of the Inquisition were atheists.”

  Louis’ frightened mind had become confused then, but now he knew that the confusion was self-induced, in self-defense, for he dared not look deeply into himself.

  “Do not become a fanatic, my dear Louis,” the Cardinal had said on another occasion. “I distrust fanatics, for they are men who hate themselves, and thus hate other men.”

  This had been on the occasion when Louis, with one of his rare but savage bursts of vehemence, had forgotten the respect he owed the Cardinal and had cried out against His Eminence’s policy of placating the Huguenot nobles “for the life and strength of France.” What life and strength would France have, if heresy triumphed? Louis had cried out, his voice shaking with his passion and fury. What did it matter if France became the greatest among nations if the Huguenot pestilence became strong in her midst and her soul perished? Better that France became the least and smallest, rather than the pestilence flourish.

  But when the Cardinal had replied in his cool and serene voice, Louis had been silent. He had wanted to cry out again, but some inexplicable numbness had come over his tongue. Now he knew, and the numbness was no longer inexplicable.

  He had gone back to the old conflict with a grim despair and determination. The Huguenots became an obsession with him. Heresy threatened not only the Church, but himself, his life, his peace. It became a sword at his own throat, held by a laughing and hating and jeering man. His natural severity increased to cruelty and ruthlessness, his natural melancholy to a brooding ferocity. Finally, at length, he deceived himself to the extent that he thought of himself as a passionate soldier of Christ, dedicated to God. His subordinates groaned under his severities, penalties and punishments, and the endless work he imposed upon them. They laughed at him. At length they hated him. He saw their hatred in their meek eyes. And never, even now, could he control the sudden sick plunging of his heart, the sudden frightful sadness, the sudden malaise and bitter hunger, at the sight of hatred for himself in another man’s eyes.

  Increasingly, now, he felt the emptiness of his heart. It was not a weariness of the flesh which oppressed him, though he slept little. It was a lack of feeling, as though part of his spirit were paralyzed. He could feel nothing but hatred and anger, and nameless yearning. But now, even the yearning had become dull, and only the hatred and anger remained, like madmen rioting in an empty house from which all others had fled.

  Only in the Bois, as he walked alone in the morning, did he find even the shadow of peace. It was the peace of negation, when he had the strength to cease from thinking, when he could escape the God in which his mind did not believe in spite of all his struggles, and when the wild and enormous longing of all his life, nameless and formless, ceased to beat him with invisible but crushing wings.

  But now the Bois was lost to him forever, too. He could never walk here again, for he would remember that foul book that looked up at him with his own silent words. He stood up, with a breath that was like a groan, and looked about him as a man looks for an avenue of escape from death.

  And then, as always, when he passed through his private hells of despair and torture, he saw his brother’s face, and his hatred flared up again with ghastly intensity, like the explosion of gunpowder. For his brother had become to him the symbol of the heresy which by its existence threatened the faith and life of Louis de Richepin. Arsène had become the visible sign of his own lovelessness and colossal if mysterious grief, that laughing buffoon, that maker-of-legs, that libertine and adventurer! Louis still did not know that it was his own personal hatred for Arsène which had driven him into a Church that brought him no consolation and no release, which had made him the enemy of all men, and had aroused in him a ruthlessness and inexorableness which was to destroy him. The Cardinal had long suspected this, and he derived much exhilaration in meditation upon the small but personal imponderabilities of individual men which finally shape world destinies. As a hater of mankind himself, but with amusement, the Cardinal never tired of these meditations, which gave him a pleasure beyond concupiscence.

  Clenching his hands, groaning under his breath, Louis paced back and forth under the trees in his black robes, his face appalling in its expression as he contemplated the thought of his brother. Morning sunlight struck into his eyes, which flashed evilly. And so it was that he did not hear the soft thudding of a horse’s approach until the animal actually stood before him, and the rider smiled down at him with timid pleasure and hidden ecstasy.

  He glanced up, and started. A young woman, not more than seventeen years old, sat lightly and gracefully on the back of the great white animal. Her voluminous riding habit of black velvet heightened the translucence of her face and neck, in which all shades of rose and snow raced like delicate shadows. This fragile ebb and flow of soft color was strongest in her sweet curved lips. Under bronze brows as smooth and silken as a butterfly’s wings, her shining eyes were golden and glowing and ardent with youth and life. Her small plumed black hat was tilted to show to best advantage the masses and riotious curls of dark but bright auburn hair, whose shadows burned with deep gold or rich red. She was slight of body, with a waist of astonishing fragility and a bosom arching and proud, yet tender, and her tiny foot rested firmly in the stirrup. Her gloved hand held the reins lightly, the other played lightly with the whip.

  She was all grace, all delicacy, all dainty beauty, though the luminous quality of her coloring seemed more febrile than healt
hy. A light seemed to well through her flesh, an intense light which inspired those who loved her with the fear that one day it might consume that small and lovely body.

  She smiled down upon the young priest, and a wave of bright radiance passed over her face.

  “Good morning, Monseigneur de Richepin!” she cried, softly, and her voice was like the pure trilling of a nightingale.

  The glacial rigidity broke and vanished from Louis’ countenance. He bowed and smiled, a nameless warmth beginning to radiate through him.

  “Good morning, my dear Mademoiselle de Tremblant!” he exclaimed. He approached the horse, and laid his hand on the trembling neck. At a discreet distance, the groom, on his small brown horse, waited, and stared heavily at the trees. “Is it not early for you to be abroad?” continued Louis.

  A curious breathlessness made him pant a little, and a tremor passed over his limbs. The girl let the reins drop upon the horse’s neck, and though her smile had gone, the beautiful welling of tinted shadow increased in her cheeks and lips.

  “I ride every morning,” she answered.

  There was a poignant moment of silence between the young priest and the girl, as they looked into each other’s eyes. Then Louis said, in a voice that shook more than a little:

  “And how is your sister, Mademoiselle Clarisse?”

  “She is much improved, now that Arsène has returned, though he has sent only messages to her. However, he promises to visit her today.”

  At the sound of that hated name, Louis’ features contracted. His hand fell from the horse’s neck. He averted his head. Then, seeing that the girl had slipped her foot from the stirrup, he hastily offered her his hand. She sprang lightly from the animal’s back, and stood beside him. The top of her bright plumed head hardly reached to Louis’ shoulder. For a moment, as they faced each other, they remained unaware that their hands were still intertwined. The green light of the trees heightened the gold of the girl’s eyes.