While I was thus desperately tacking through the bog, children and
cattle began to disperse, until only a pair of girls remained behind.
From these I sought direction on my path. The peasantry in general were
but little disposed to counsel a wayfarer. One old devil simply retired
into his house, and barricaded the door on my approach; and I might beat
and shout myself hoarse, he turned a deaf ear. Another, having given me
a direction which, as I found afterwards, I had misunderstood,
complacently watched me going wrong without adding a sign. He did not
care a stalk of parsley if I wandered all night upon the hills! As for
these two girls, they were a pair of impudent sly sluts, with not a
thought but mischief. One put out her tongue at me, the other bade me
follow the cows, and they both giggled and joggled each other's elbows.
The Beast of Gévaudan ate about a hundred children of this district; I
began to think of him with sympathy.

Leaving the girls, I pushed on through the bog, and got into another
wood and upon a well-marked road. It grew darker and darker. Modestine,
suddenly beginning to smell mischief, bettered the pace of her own
accord, and from that time forward gave me no trouble. It was the first
sign of intelligence I had occasion to remark in her. At the same time,
the wind freshened into half a gale, and another heavy discharge of rain
came flying up out of the north. At the other side of the wood I sighted
some red windows in the dusk. This was the hamlet of Fouzilhic; three
houses on a hillside, near a wood of birches. Here I found a delightful
old man, who came a little way with me in the rain to put me safely on
the road for Cheylard. He would hear of no reward, but shook his hands
above his head almost as if in menace, and refused volubly and shrilly
in unmitigated _patois_.

All seemed right at last. My thoughts began to turn upon dinner and a
fireside, and my heart was agreeably softened in my bosom. Alas, and I
was on the brink of new and greater miseries! Suddenly, at a single
swoop, the night fell. I have been abroad in many a black night, but
never in a blacker. A glimmer of rocks, a glimmer of the track where it
was well beaten, a certain fleecy density, or night within night, for a
tree--this was all that I could discriminate. The sky was simply
darkness overhead; even the flying clouds pursued their way invisibly to
human eyesight. I could not distinguish my hand at arm's-length from the
track, nor my goad, at the same distance, from the meadows or the sky.

Soon the road that I was following split, after the fashion of the
country, into three or four in a piece of rocky meadow. Since Modestine
had shown such a fancy for beaten roads, I tried her instinct in this
predicament. But the instinct of an ass is what might be expected from
the name; in half a minute she was clambering round and round among some
boulders, as lost a donkey as you would wish to see. I should have
camped long before had I been properly provided; but as this was to be
so short a stage, I had brought no wine, no bread for myself, and little
over a pound for my lady friend. Add to this, that I and Modestine were
both handsomely wetted by the showers. But now, if I could have found
some water, I should have camped at once in spite of all. Water,
however, being entirely absent, except in the form of rain, I determined
to return to Fouzilhic, and ask a guide a little farther on my way--"a
little farther lend thy guiding hand."

The thing was easy to decide, hard to accomplish. In this sensible
roaring blackness I was sure of nothing but the direction of the wind.
To this I set my face; the road had disappeared, and I went across
country, now in marshy opens, now baffled by walls unscalable to
Modestine, until I came once more in sight of some red windows. This
time they were differently disposed. It was not Fouzilhic, but
Fouzilhac, a hamlet little distant from the other in space, but worlds
away in the spirit of its inhabitants. I tied Modestine to a gate, and
groped forward, stumbling among rocks, plunging mid-leg in bog, until I
gained the entrance of the village. In the first lighted house there was
a woman who would not open to me. She could do nothing, she cried to me
through the door, being alone and lame; but if I would apply at the next
house there was a man who could help me if he had a mind.

They came to the next door in force, a man, two women, and a girl, and
brought a pair of lanterns to examine the wayfarer. The man was not
ill-looking, but had a shifty smile. He leaned against the doorpost,
and heard me state my case. All I asked was a guide as far as Cheylard.

"_C'est que, voyez-vous, il fait noir_," said he.

I told him that was just my reason for requiring help.

"I understand that," said he, looking uncomfortable; "_mais--c'est--de
la peine_."

I was willing to pay, I said. He shook his head. I rose as high as ten
francs; but he continued to shake his head. "Name your own price then,"
said I.

"_Ce n'est pas ça_," he said at length, and with evident difficulty;
"but I am not going to cross the door--_mais je ne sortirai pas de la
porte_."

I grew a little warm, and asked him what he proposed that I should do.

"Where are you going beyond Cheylard?" he asked by way of answer.

"That is no affair of yours," I returned, for I was not going to indulge
his bestial curiosity; "it changes nothing in my present predicament."

"_C'est vrai, ça_," he acknowledged, with a laugh; "_oui, c'est vrai. Et
d'où venez-vous?_"

A better man than I might have felt nettled.

"Oh," said I, "I am not going to answer any of your questions, so you
may spare yourself the trouble of putting them. I am late enough
already; I want help. If you will not guide me yourself, at least help
me to find some one else who will."

"Hold on," he cried suddenly. "Was it not you who passed in the meadow
while it was still day?"

"Yes, yes," said the girl, whom I had not hitherto recognized; "it was
monsieur; I told him to follow the cow."

"As for you, mademoiselle," said I, "you are a _farceuse_."

"And," added the man, "what the devil have you done to be still here?"

What the devil, indeed! But there I was. "The great thing," said I, "is
to make an end of it," and once more proposed that he should help me to
find a guide.

"_C'est que_," he said again, "_c'est que_--_il fait noir_."

"Very well," said I; "take one of your lanterns."

"No," he cried, drawing a thought backward, and again entrenching
himself behind one of his former phrases; "I will not cross the door."

I looked at him. I saw unaffected terror struggling on his face with
unaffected shame; he was smiling pitifully and wetting his lip with his
tongue, like a detected schoolboy. I drew a brief picture of my state,
and asked him what I was to do.

"I don't know," he said; "I will not cross the door."

Here was the Beast of Gévaudan, and no mistake.

"Sir," said I, with my most commanding manners, "you are a coward."

And with that I turned my back upon the family party, who hastened to
retire within their fortifications; and the famous door was closed
again, but not till I had overheard the sound of laughter. _Filia
barbara pater barbarior._ Let me say it in the plural: the Beasts of
Gévaudan.

The lanterns had somewhat dazzled me, and I ploughed distressfully among
stones and rubbish-heaps. All the other houses in the village were both
dark and silent; and though I knocked at here and there a door, my
knocking was unanswered. It was a bad business; I gave up Fouzilhac with
my curses. The rain had stopped, and the wind, which still kept rising,
began to dry my coat and trousers. "Very well," thought I, "water or no
water, I must camp." But the first thing was to return to Modestine. I
am pretty sure I was twenty minutes groping for my lady in the dark; and
if it had not been for the unkindly services of the bog, into which I
once more stumbled, I might have still been groping for her at the dawn.
My next business was to gain the shelter of a wood, for the wind was
cold as well as boisterous. How, in this well-wooded district, I should
have been so long in finding one, is another of the insoluble mysteries
of this day's adventures; but I will take my oath that I put near an
hour to the discovery.

At last black trees began to show upon my left, and, suddenly crossing
the road, made a cave of unmitigated blackness right in front. I call it
a cave without exaggeration; to pass below that arch of leaves was like
entering a dungeon. I felt about until my hand encountered a stout
branch, and to this I tied Modestine, a haggard, drenched, desponding
donkey. Then I lowered my pack, laid it along the wall on the margin of
the road, and unbuckled the straps. I knew well enough where the lantern
was, but where were the candles? I groped and groped among the tumbled
articles, and, while I was thus groping, suddenly I touched the
spirit-lamp. Salvation! This would serve my turn as well. The wind
roared unwearyingly among the trees; I could hear the boughs tossing and
the leaves churning through half a mile of forest; yet the scene of my
encampment was not only as black as the pit, but admirably sheltered. At
the second match the wick caught flame. The light was both livid and
shifting; but it cut me off from the universe, and doubled the darkness
of the surrounding night.

I tied Modestine more conveniently for herself, and broke up half the
black bread for her supper, reserving the other half against the
morning. Then I gathered what I should want within reach, took off my
wet boots and gaiters, which I wrapped in my waterproof, arranged my
knapsack for a pillow under the flap of my sleeping-bag, insinuated my
limbs into the interior, and buckled myself in like a _bambino_. I
opened a tin of Bologna sausage, and broke a cake of chocolate, and that
was all I had to eat. It may sound offensive, but I ate them together,
bite by bite, by way of bread and meat. All I had to wash down this
revolting mixture was neat brandy: a revolting beverage in itself. But
I was rare and hungry; ate well, and smoked one of the best cigarettes
in my experience. Then I put a stone in my straw hat, pulled the flap of
my fur cap over my neck and eyes, put my revolver ready to my hand, and
snuggled well down among the sheepskins.

I questioned at first if I were sleepy, for I felt my heart beating
faster than usual, as if with an agreeable excitement to which my mind
remained a stranger. But as soon as my eyelids touched, that subtle glue
leaped between them, and they would no more come separate. The wind
among the trees was my lullaby. Sometimes it sounded for minutes
together with a steady, even rush, not rising nor abating; and again it
would swell and burst like a great crashing breaker, and the trees would
patter me all over with big drops from the rain of the afternoon. Night
after night, in my own bedroom in the country, I have given ear to this
perturbing concert of the wind among the woods, but whether it was a
difference in the trees, or the lie of the ground, or because I was
myself outside and in the midst of it, the fact remains that the wind
sang to a different tune among these woods of Gévaudan. I hearkened and
hearkened; and meanwhile sleep took gradual possession of my body and
subdued my thoughts and senses; but still my last waking effort was to
listen and distinguish, and my last conscious state was one of wonder at
the foreign clamour in my ears.

Twice in the course of the dark hours--once when a stone galled me
underneath the sack, and again when the poor patient Modestine, growing
angry, pawed and stamped upon the road--I was recalled for a brief while
to consciousness, and saw a star or two overhead, and the lace-like edge
of the foliage against the sky. When I awoke for the third time
(Wednesday, September 25th), the world was flooded with a blue light,
the mother of the dawn. I saw the leaves labouring in the wind and the
ribbon of the road; and, on turning my head, there was Modestine tied
to a beech, and standing half across the path in an attitude of
inimitable patience. I closed my eyes again, and set to thinking over
the experience of the night. I was surprised to find how easy and
pleasant it had been, even in this tempestuous weather. The stone which
annoyed me would not have been there had I not been forced to camp
blindfold in the opaque night; and I had felt no other inconvenience
except when my feet encountered the lantern or the second volume of
Peyrat's "Pastors of the Desert" among the mixed contents of my
sleeping-bag; nay, more, I had felt not a touch of cold, and awakened
with unusually lightsome and clear sensations.

With that I shook myself, got once more into my boots and gaiters, and,
breaking up the rest of the bread for Modestine, strolled about to see
in what part of the world I had awakened. Ulysses, left on Ithaca, and
with a mind unsettled by the goddess, was not more pleasantly astray. I
have been after an adventure all my life, a pure dispassionate
adventure, such as befell early and heroic voyagers; and thus to be
found by morning in a random woodside nook in Gévaudan--not knowing
north from south, as strange to my surroundings as the first man upon
the earth, an inland castaway--was to find a fraction of my daydreams
realized. I was on the skirts of a little wood of birch, sprinkled with
a few beeches; behind, it adjoined another wood of fir; and in front, it
broke up and went down in open order into a shallow and meadowy dale.
All around there were bare hill-tops, some near, some far away, as the
perspective closed or opened, but none apparently much higher than the
rest. The wind huddled the trees. The golden specks of autumn in the
birches tossed shiveringly. Overhead the sky was full of strings and
shreds of vapour, flying, vanishing, reappearing, and turning about an
axis like tumblers, as the wind hounded them through heaven. It was wild
weather and famishing cold. I ate some chocolate, swallowed a mouthful
of brandy, and smoked a cigarette before the cold should have time to
disable my fingers. And by the time I had got all this done, and had
made my pack and bound it on the pack-saddle, the day was tiptoe on the
threshold of the east. We had not gone many steps along the lane, before
the sun, still invisible to me, sent a glow of gold over some cloud
mountains that lay ranged along the eastern sky.

The wind had us on the stern, and hurried us bitingly forward. I
buttoned myself into my coat, and walked on in a pleasant frame of mind
with all men, when suddenly, at a corner, there was Fouzilhic once more
in front of me. Nor only that, but there was the old gentleman who had
escorted me so far the night before, running out of his house at sight
of me, with hands upraised in horror.

"My poor boy!" he cried, "what does this mean?"

I told him what had happened. He beat his old hands like clappers in a
mill, to think how lightly he had let me go; but when he heard of the
man of Fouzilhac, anger and depression seized upon his mind.

"This time, at least," said he, "there shall be no mistake."

And he limped along, for he was very rheumatic, for about half a mile,
and until I was almost within sight of Cheylard, the destination I had
hunted for so long.




CHEYLARD AND LUC


Candidly, it seemed little worthy of all this searching. A few broken
ends of village, with no particular street, but a succession of open
places heaped with logs and fagots; a couple of tilted crosses, a shrine
to Our Lady of all Graces on the summit of a little hill; and all this,
upon a rattling highland river, in the corner of a naked valley. What
went ye out for to see? thought I to myself. But the place had a life of
its own. I found a board commemorating the liberalities of Cheylard for
the past year, hung up, like a banner, in the diminutive and tottering
church. In 1877, it appeared, the inhabitants subscribed forty-eight
francs ten centimes for the "Work of the Propagation of the Faith." Some
of this, I could not help hoping, would be applied to my native land.
Cheylard scrapes together halfpence for the darkened souls in Edinburgh,
while Balquhidder and Dunrossness bemoan the ignorance of Rome. Thus, to
the high entertainment of the angels, do we pelt each other with
evangelists, like schoolboys bickering in the snow.

The inn was again singularly unpretentious. The whole furniture of a not
ill-to-do family was in the kitchen: the beds, the cradle, the clothes,
the plate-rack, the meal-chest, and the photograph of the parish priest.
There were five children, one of whom was set to its morning prayers at
the stair-foot soon after my arrival, and a sixth would ere long be
forthcoming. I was kindly received by these good folk. They were much
interested in my misadventure. The wood in which I had slept belonged to
them; the man of Fouzilhac they thought a monster of iniquity, and
counseled me warmly to summon him at law--"because I might have died."
The good wife was horror-stricken to see me drink over a pint of
uncreamed milk.

"You will do yourself an evil," she said. "Permit me to boil it for
you."

After I had begun the morning on this delightful liquor, she having an
infinity of things to arrange, I was permitted, nay requested, to make a
bowl of chocolate for myself. My boots and gaiters were hung up to dry,
and, seeing me trying to write my journal on my knee, the eldest
daughter let down a hinged table in the chimney-corner for my
convenience. Here I wrote, drank my chocolate, and finally ate an
omelette before I left. The table was thick with dust; for, as they
explained, it was not used except in winter weather. I had a clear look
up the vent, through brown agglomerations of soot and blue vapour, to
the sky; and whenever a handful of twigs was thrown on to the fire, my
legs were scorched by the blaze.

The husband had begun life as a muleteer, and when I came to charge
Modestine showed himself full of the prudence of his art. "You will have
to change this package," said he; "it ought to be in two parts, and then
you might have double the weight."

I explained that I wanted no more weight; and for no donkey hitherto
created would I cut my sleeping-bag in two.

"It fatigues her, however," said the innkeeper; "it fatigues her greatly
on the march. Look."

Alas, there were her two forelegs no better than raw beef on the inside,
and blood was running from under her tail. They told me when I started,
and I was ready to believe it, that before a few days I should come to
love Modestine like a dog. Three days had passed, we had shared some
misadventures, and my heart was still as cold as a potato towards my
beast of burden. She was pretty enough to look at; but then she had
given proof of dead stupidity, redeemed indeed by patience, but
aggravated by flashes of sorry and ill-judged light-heartedness. And I
own this new discovery seemed another point against her. What the devil
was the good of a she-ass if she could not carry a sleeping-bag and a
few necessaries? I saw the end of the fable rapidly approaching, when I
should have to carry Modestine. Æsop was the man to know the world! I
assure you I set out with heavy thoughts upon my short day's march.

It was not only heavy thoughts about Modestine that weighted me upon the
way; it was a leaden business altogether. For first, the wind blew so
rudely that I had to hold on the pack with one hand from Cheylard to
Luc; and second, my road lay through one of the most beggarly countries
in the world. It was like the worst of the Scottish Highlands, only
worse; cold, naked, and ignoble, scant of wood, scant of heather, scant
of life. A road and some fences broke the unvarying waste, and the line
of the road was marked by upright pillars, to serve in time of snow.

Why any one should desire to visit either Luc or Cheylard is more than
my much-inventing spirit can suppose. For my part, I travel not to go
anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to
move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come
down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite
underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. Alas, as we get up in life,
and are more preoccupied with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing
that must be worked for. To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a
gale out of the freezing north is no high industry, but it is one that
serves to occupy and compose the mind. And when the present is so
exacting, who can annoy himself about the future?

I came out at length above the Allier. A more unsightly prospect at this
season of the year it would be hard to fancy. Shelving hills rose round
it on all sides, here dabbled with wood and fields, there rising to
peaks alternately naked and hairy with pines. The colour throughout was
black or ashen, and came to a point in the ruins of the castle of Luc,
which pricked up impudently from below my feet, carrying on a pinnacle a
tall white statue of Our Lady, which, I heard with interest, weighed
fifty quintals, and was to be dedicated on the 6th of October. Through
this sorry landscape trickled the Allier and a tributary of nearly equal
size, which came down to join it through a broad nude valley in
Vivarais. The weather had somewhat lightened, and the clouds massed in
squadron; but the fierce wind still hunted them through heaven, and cast
great ungainly splashes of shadow and sunlight over the scene.

Luc itself was a straggling double file of houses wedged between hill
and river. It had no beauty, nor was there any notable feature, save the
old castle overhead with its fifty quintals of brand-new Madonna. But
the inn was clean and large. The kitchen, with its two box-beds hung
with clean check curtains, with its wide stone chimney, its
chimney-shelf four yards long and garnished with lanterns and religious
statuettes, its array of chests and pair of ticking clocks, was the very
model of what a kitchen ought to be; a melodrama kitchen, suitable for
bandits or noblemen in disguise. Nor was the scene disgraced by the
landlady, a handsome, silent, dark old woman, clothed and hooded in
black like a nun. Even the public bedroom had a character of its own,
with the long deal tables and benches, where fifty might have dined, set
out as for a harvest-home, and the three box-beds along the wall. In one
of these, lying on straw and covered with a pair of table-napkins, did I
do penance all night long in goose-flesh and chattering teeth, and sigh,
from time to time as I awakened, for my sheepskin sack and the lee of
some great wood.




OUR LADY OF THE SNOWS

                    _I behold
    The House, the Brotherhood austere--
    And what am I, that I am here?_

                   MATTHEW ARNOLD.


FATHER APOLLONARIS


Next morning (Thursday, 26th September) I took the road in a new order.
The sack was no longer doubled, but hung at full length across the
saddle, a green sausage six feet long with a tuft of blue wool hanging
out of either end. It was more picturesque, it spared the donkey, and,
as I began to see, it would ensure stability, blow high, blow low. But
it was not without a pang that I had so decided. For although I had
purchased a new cord, and made all as fast as I was able, I was yet
jealously uneasy lest the flaps should tumble out and scatter my effects
along the line of march.

My way lay up the bald valley of the river, along the march of Vivarais
and Gévaudan. The hills of Gévaudan on the right were a little more
naked, if anything, than those of Vivarais upon the left, and the former
had a monopoly of a low dotty underwood that grew thickly in the gorges
and died out in solitary burrs upon the shoulders and the summits. Black
bricks of fir-wood were plastered here and there upon both sides, and
here and there were cultivated fields. A railway ran beside the river;
the only bit of railway in Gévaudan, although there are many proposals
afoot and surveys being made, and even, as they tell me, a station
standing ready built in Mende. A year or two hence and this may be
another world. The desert is beleaguered. Now may some Languedocian
Wordsworth turn the sonnet into _patois:_ "Mountains and vales and
floods, heard YE that whistle?"

At a place called La Bastide I was directed to leave the river, and
follow a road that mounted on the left among the hills of Vivarais, the
modern Ardèche; for I was now come within a little way of my strange
destination, the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of the Snows. The sun
came out as I left the shelter of a pine-wood, and I beheld suddenly a
fine wild landscape to the south. High rocky hills, as blue as sapphire,
closed the view, and between these lay ridge upon ridge, heathery,
craggy, the sun glittering on veins of rock, the underwood clambering in
the hollows, as rude as God made them at the first. There was not a sign
of man's hand in all the prospect; and indeed not a trace of his
passage, save where generation after generation had walked in twisted
footpaths, in and out among the beeches, and up and down upon the
channeled slopes. The mists, which had hitherto beset me, were now
broken into clouds, and fled swiftly and shone brightly in the sun. I
drew a long breath. It was grateful to come, after so long, upon a scene
of some attraction for the human heart. I own I like definite form in
what my eyes are to rest upon; and if landscapes were sold, like the
sheets of characters of my boyhood, one penny plain and twopence
coloured, I should go the length of twopence every day of my life.

But if things had grown better to the south, it was still desolate and
inclement near at hand. A spidery cross on every hill-top marked the
neighbourhood of a religious house; and a quarter of a mile beyond, the
outlook southward opening out and growing bolder with every step, a
white statue of the Virgin at the corner of a young plantation directed
the traveller to Our Lady of the Snows. Here, then, I struck leftward,
and pursued my way, driving my secular donkey before me, and creaking in
my secular boots and gaiters, towards the asylum of silence.

I had not gone very far ere the wind brought to me the clanging of a
bell, and somehow, I can scarce tell why, my heart sank within me at the
sound. I have rarely approached anything with more unaffected terror
than the monastery of Our Lady of the Snows. This it is to have had a
Protestant education. And suddenly, on turning a corner, fear took hold
on me from head to foot--slavish, superstitious fear; and though I did
not stop in my advance, yet I went on slowly, like a man who should have
passed a bourne unnoticed, and strayed into the country of the dead. For
there, upon the narrow new-made road, between the stripling pines, was a
mediæval friar, fighting with a barrowful of turfs. Every Sunday of my
childhood I used to study the Hermits of Marco Sadeler--enchanting
prints, full of wood and field and mediæval landscapes, as large as a
county, for the imagination to go a-travelling in; and here, sure
enough, was one of Marco Sadeler's heroes. He was robed in white like
any spectre, and the hood falling back, in the instancy of his
contention with the barrow, disclosed a pate as bald and yellow as a
skull. He might have been buried any time these thousand years, and all
the lively parts of him resolved into earth and broken up with the
farmer's harrow.

I was troubled besides in my mind as to etiquette. Durst I address a
person who was under a vow of silence? Clearly not. But drawing near, I
doffed my cap to him with a far-away superstitious reverence. He nodded
back, and cheerfully addressed me. Was I going to the monastery? Who was
I? An Englishman? Ah, an Irishman, then?

"No," I said, "a Scotsman."

A Scotsman? Ah, he had never seen a Scotsman before. And he looked me
all over, his good, honest, brawny countenance shining with interest, as
a boy might look upon a lion or an alligator. From him I learned with
disgust that I could not be received at Our Lady of the Snows; I might
get a meal, perhaps, but that was all. And then, as our talk ran on, and
it turned out that I was not a pedlar, but a literary man, who drew
landscapes and was going to write a book, he changed his manner of
thinking as to my reception (for I fear they respect persons even in a
Trappist monastery), and told me I must be sure to ask for the Father
Prior, and state my case to him in full. On second thoughts he
determined to go down with me himself; he thought he could manage for me
better. Might he say that I was a geographer?

No; I thought, in the interests of truth, he positively might not.

"Very well, then" (with disappointment), "an author."

It appeared he had been in a seminary with six young Irishmen, all
priests, long since, who had received newspapers and kept him informed
of the state of ecclesiastical affairs in England. And he asked me
eagerly after Dr. Pusey, for whose conversion the good man had continued
ever since to pray night and morning.

"I thought he was very near the truth," he said; "and he will reach it
yet; there is so much virtue in prayer."

He must be a stiff, ungodly Protestant who can take anything but
pleasure in this kind and hopeful story. While he was thus near the
subject, the good father asked me if I were a Christian; and when he
found I was not, or not after his way, he glossed it over with great
good-will.

The road which we were following, and which this stalwart father had
made with his own two hands within the space of a year, came to a
corner, and showed us some white buildings a little farther on beyond
the wood. At the same time, the bell once more sounded abroad. We were
hard upon the monastery. Father Apollinaris (for that was my companion's
name) stopped me.

"I must not speak to you down there," he said. "Ask for the Brother
Porter, and all will be well. But try to see me as you go out again
through the wood, where I may speak to you. I am charmed to have made
your acquaintance."

And then suddenly raising his arms, flapping his fingers, and crying out
twice, "I must not speak! I must not speak!" he ran away in front of me,
and disappeared into the monastery door.

I own this somewhat ghastly eccentricity went a good way to revive my
terrors. But where one was so good and simple, why should not all be
alike? I took heart of grace, and went forward to the gate as fast as
Modestine, who seemed to have a disaffection for monasteries, would
permit. It was the first door, in my acquaintance of her, which she had
not shown an indecent haste to enter. I summoned the place in form,
though with a quaking heart. Father Michael, the Father Hospitaller, and
a pair of brown-robed brothers came to the gate and spoke with me a
while. I think my sack was the great attraction; it had already beguiled
the heart of poor Apollinaris, who had charged me on my life to show it
to the Father Prior. But whether it was my address, or the sack, or the
idea speedily published among that part of the brotherhood who attend on
strangers that I was not a pedlar after all, I found no difficulty as to
my reception. Modestine was led away by a layman to the stables, and I
and my pack were received into Our Lady of the Snows.




THE MONKS


Father Michael, a pleasant, fresh-faced, smiling man, perhaps of
thirty-five, took me to the pantry, and gave me a glass of liqueur to
stay me until dinner. We had some talk, or rather I should say he
listened to my prattle indulgently enough, but with an abstracted air,
like a spirit with a thing of clay. And truly, when I remember that I
descanted principally on my appetite, and that it must have been by that
time more than eighteen hours since Father Michael had so much as broken
bread, I can well understand that he would find an earthly savour in my
conversation. But his manner, though superior, was exquisitely gracious;
and I find I have a lurking curiosity as to Father Michael's past.

The whet administered, I was left alone for a little in the monastery
garden. This is no more than the main court, laid out in sandy paths and
beds of parti-coloured dahlias, and with a fountain and a black statue
of the Virgin in the centre. The buildings stand around it four-square,
bleak, as yet unseasoned by the years and weather, and with no other
features than a belfry and a pair of slated gables. Brothers in white,
brothers in brown, passed silently along the sanded alleys; and when I
first came out, three hooded monks were kneeling on the terrace at their
prayers. A naked hill commands the monastery upon one side, and the wood
commands it on the other. It lies exposed to wind; the snow falls off
and on from October to May, and sometimes lies six weeks on end; but if
they stood in Eden with a climate like heaven's, the buildings
themselves would offer the same wintry and cheerless aspect; and for my
part, on this wild September day, before I was called to dinner, I felt
chilly in and out.

When I had eaten well and heartily, Brother Ambrose, a hearty
conversible Frenchman (for all those who wait on strangers have the
liberty to speak), led me to a little room in that part of the building
which is set apart for _MM. les retraitants_. It was clean and
whitewashed, and furnished with strict necessaries, a crucifix, a bust
of the late Pope, the "Imitation" in French, a book of religious
meditations, and the "Life of Elizabeth Seton"--evangelist, it would
appear, of North America and of New England in particular. As far as my
experience goes, there is a fair field for some more evangelisation in
these quarters; but think of Cotton Mather! I should like to give him a
reading of this little work in heaven, where I hope he dwells; but
perhaps he knows all that already, and much more; and perhaps he and
Mrs. Seton are the dearest friends, and gladly unite their voices in the
everlasting psalm. Over the table, to conclude the inventory of the
room, hung a set of regulations for _MM. les retraitants:_ what services
they should attend, when they were to tell their beads or meditate, and
when they were to rise and go to rest. At the foot was a notable N. B.:
"_Le temps libre est employé a l'examen de conscience, à la confession,
à faire de bonnes résolutions,"_ etc. To make good resolutions, indeed!
You might talk as fruitfully of making the hair grow on your head.

I had scarce explored my niche when Brother Ambrose returned. An English
boarder, it appeared, would like to speak with me. I professed my
willingness, and the friar ushered in a fresh, young, little Irishman of
fifty, a deacon of the Church, arrayed in strict canonicals, and wearing
on his head what, in default of knowledge, I can only call the
ecclesiastical shako. He had lived seven years in retreat at a convent
of nuns in Belgium, and now five at Our Lady of the Snows; he never saw
an English newspaper; he spoke French imperfectly, and had he spoken it
like a native, there was not much chance of conversation where he dwelt.
With this, he was a man eminently sociable, greedy of news, and
simple-minded like a child. If I was pleased to have a guide about the
monastery, he was no less delighted to see an English face and hear an
English tongue.

He showed me his own room, where he passed his time among breviaries,
Hebrew Bibles, and the Waverley Novels. Thence he led me to the
cloisters, into the chapter-house, through the vestry, where the
brothers' gowns and broad straw hats were hanging up, each with his
religious name upon a board--names full of legendary suavity and
interest, such as Basil, Hilarion, Raphael, or Pacifique; into the
library, where were all the works of Veuillot and Chateaubriand, and the
"Odes et Ballades," if you please, and even Molière, to say nothing of
innumerable fathers and a great variety of local and general historians.
Thence my good Irishman took me round the workshops, where brothers bake
bread, and make cart-wheels, and take photographs; where one
superintends a collection of curiosities, and another a gallery of
rabbits. For in a Trappist monastery each monk has an occupation of his
own choice, apart from his religious duties and the general labours of
the house. Each must sing in the choir, if he has a voice and ear, and
join in the haymaking if he has a hand to stir; but in his private
hours, although he must be occupied, he may be occupied on what he
likes. Thus I was told that one brother was engaged with literature;
while Father Apollinaris busies himself in making roads, and the Abbot
employs himself in binding books. It is not so long since this Abbot was
consecrated, by the way; and on that occasion, by a special grace, his
mother was permitted to enter the chapel and witness the ceremony of
consecration. A proud day for her to have a son a mitred abbot; it makes
you glad to think they let her in.

In all these journeyings to and fro, many silent fathers and brethren
fell in our way. Usually they paid no more regard to our passage than if
we had been a cloud; but sometimes the good deacon had a permission to
ask of them, and it was granted by a peculiar movement of the hands,
almost like that of a dog's paws in swimming, or refused by the usual
negative signs, and in either case with lowered eyelids and a certain
air of contrition, as of a man who was steering very close to evil.

The monks, by special grace of their Abbot, were still taking two meals
a day; but it was already time for their grand fast, which begins
somewhere in September and lasts till Easter, and during which they eat
but once in the twenty-four hours, and that at two in the afternoon,
twelve hours after they have begun the toil and vigil of the day. Their
meals are scanty, but even of these they eat sparingly; and though each
is allowed a small carafe of wine, many refrain from this indulgence.
Without doubt, the most of mankind grossly over-eat themselves; our
meals serve not only for support, but as a hearty and natural diversion
from the labour of life. Yet, though excess may be hurtful, I should
have thought this Trappist regimen defective. And I am astonished, as I
look back, at the freshness of face and cheerfulness of manner of all
whom I beheld. A happier nor a healthier company I should scarce suppose
that I have ever seen. As a matter of fact, on this bleak upland, and
with the incessant occupation of the monks, life is of an uncertain
tenure, and death no infrequent visitor, at Our Lady of the Snows. This,
at least, was what was told me. But if they die easily, they must live
healthily in the meantime, for they seemed all firm of flesh and high in
colour; and the only morbid sign that I could observe, an unusual
brilliancy of eye, was one that served rather to increase the general
impression of vivacity and strength.

Those with whom I spoke were singularly sweet-tempered, with what I can
only call a holy cheerfulness in air and conversation. There is a note,
in the direction to visitors, telling them not to be offended at the
curt speech of those who wait upon them, since it is proper to monks to
speak little. The note might have been spared; to a man the hospitallers
were all brimming with innocent talk, and, in my experience of the
monastery, it was easier to begin than to break off a conversation. With
the exception of Father Michael, who was a man of the world, they showed
themselves full of kind and healthy interest in all sorts of
subjects--in politics, in voyages, in my sleeping-sack--and not without
a certain pleasure in the sound of their own voices.

As for those who are restricted to silence, I can only wonder how they
bear their solemn and cheerless isolation. And yet, apart from any view
of mortification, I can see a certain policy, not only in the exclusion
of women, but in this vow of silence. I have had some experience of lay
phalansteries, of an artistic, not to say a bacchanalian, character; and
seen more than one association easily formed and yet more easily
dispersed. With a Cistercian rule, perhaps they might have lasted
longer. In the neighbourhood of women it is but a touch-and-go
association that can be formed among defenceless men; the stronger
electricity is sure to triumph; the dreams of boyhood, the schemes of
youth, are abandoned after an interview of ten minutes, and the arts and
sciences, and professional male jollity, deserted at once for two sweet
eyes and a caressing accent. And next after this, the tongue is the
great divider.

I am almost ashamed to pursue this worldly criticism of a religious
rule; but there is yet another point in which the Trappist order appeals
to me as a model of wisdom. By two in the morning the clapper goes upon
the bell, and so on, hour by hour, and sometimes quarter by quarter,
till eight, the hour of rest; so infinitesimally is the day divided
among different occupations. The man who keeps rabbits, for example,
hurries from his hutches to the chapel, the chapter-room, or the
refectory, all day long: every hour he has an office to sing, a duty to
perform; from two, when he rises in the dark, till eight, when he
returns to receive the comfortable gift of sleep, he is upon his feet
and occupied with manifold and changing business. I know many persons,
worth several thousands in the year, who are not so fortunate in the
disposal of their lives. Into how many houses would not the note of the
monastery bell, dividing the day into manageable portions, bring peace
of mind and healthful activity of body! We speak of hardships, but the
true hardship is to be a dull fool, and permitted to mismanage life in
our own dull and foolish manner.

From this point of view, we may perhaps better understand the monk's
existence. A long novitiate and every proof of constancy of mind and
strength of body is required before admission to the order; but I could
not find that many were discouraged. In the photographer's studio, which
figures so strangely among the outbuildings, my eye was attracted by the
portrait of a young fellow in the uniform of a private of foot. This was
one of the novices, who came of the age for service, and marched and
drilled and mounted guard for the proper time among the garrison of
Algiers. Here was a man who had surely seen both sides of life before
deciding; yet as soon as he was set free from service he returned to
finish his novitiate.

This austere rule entitles a man to heaven as by right. When the
Trappist sickens, he quits not his habit; he lies in the bed of death as
he has prayed and laboured in his frugal and silent existence; and when
the Liberator comes, at the very moment, even before they have carried
him in his robe to lie his little last in the chapel among continual
chantings, joy-bells break forth, as if for a marriage, from the slated
belfry, and proclaim throughout the neighbourhood that another soul has
gone to God.

At night, under the conduct of my kind Irishman, I took my place in the
gallery to hear compline and _Salve Regina_, with which the Cistercians
bring every day to a conclusion. There were none of those circumstances
which strike the Protestant as childish or as tawdry in the public
offices of Rome. A stern simplicity, heightened by the romance of the
surroundings, spoke directly to the heart. I recall the whitewashed
chapel, the hooded figures in the choir, the lights alternately occluded
and revealed, the strong manly singing, the silence that ensued, the
sight of cowled heads bowed in prayer, and then the clear trenchant
beating of the bell breaking in to show that the last office was over
and the hour of sleep had come; and when I remember, I am not surprised
that I made my escape into the court with somewhat whirling fancies, and
stood like a man bewildered in the windy, starry night.

But I was weary; and when I had quieted my spirits with Elizabeth
Seton's memoirs--a dull work--the cold and the raving of the wind among
the pines (for my room was on that side of the monastery which adjoins
the woods) disposed me readily to slumber. I was awakened at black
midnight, as it seemed, though it was really two in the morning, by the
first stroke upon the bell. All the brothers were then hurrying to the
chapel; the dead in life, at this untimely hour, were already beginning
the uncomforted labours of their day. The dead in life--there was a
chill reflection. And the words of a French song came back into my
memory, telling of the best of our mixed existence:

    "Que t'as de belles filles,
            Giroflé!
            Girofla!
    Que t'as de belles filles,
    _L'Amour les comptera!_"

And I blessed God that I was free to wander, free to hope, and free to
love.




THE BOARDERS


But there was another side to my residence at Our Lady of the Snows. At
this late season there were not many boarders; and yet I was not alone
in the public part of the monastery. This itself is hard by the gate,
with a small dining-room on the ground floor and a whole corridor of
cells similar to mine upstairs. I have stupidly forgotten the board for
a regular _retraitant_; but it was somewhere between three and five
francs a day, and I think most probably the first. Chance visitors like
myself might give what they chose as a free-will offering, but nothing
was demanded. I may mention that when I was going away Father Michael
refused twenty francs as excessive. I explained the reasoning which led
me to offer him so much; but even then, from a curious point of honour,
he would not accept it with his own hand. "I have no right to refuse for
the monastery," he explained, "but I should prefer if you would give it
to one of the brothers."

I had dined alone, because I arrived late; but at supper I found two
other guests. One was a country parish priest, who had walked over that
morning from the seat of his cure near Mende to enjoy four days of
solitude and prayer. He was a grenadier in person, with the hale colour
and circular wrinkles of a peasant; and as he complained much of how he
had been impeded by his skirts upon the march, I have a vivid fancy
portrait of him, striding along, upright, big-boned, with kilted
cassock, through the bleak hills of Gévaudan. The other was a short,
grizzling, thick-set man, from forty-five to fifty, dressed in tweed
with a knitted spencer, and the red ribbon of a decoration in his
button-hole. This last was a hard person to classify. He was an old
soldier, who had seen service and risen to the rank of commandant; and
he retained some of the brisk decisive manners of the camp. On the other
hand, as soon as his resignation was accepted, he had come to Our Lady
of the Snows as a boarder, and, after a brief experience of its ways,
had decided to remain as a novice. Already the new life was beginning to
modify his appearance; already he had acquired somewhat of the quiet and
smiling air of the brethren; and he was as yet neither an officer nor a
Trappist, but partook of the character of each. And certainly here was a
man in an interesting nick of life. Out of the noise of cannon and
trumpets, he was in the act of passing into this still country bordering
on the grave, where men sleep nightly in their grave-clothes, and, like
phantoms, communicate by signs.

At supper we talked politics. I make it my business, when I am in
France, to preach political good-will and moderation, and to dwell on
the example of Poland, much as some alarmists in England dwell on the
example of Carthage. The priest and the commandant assured me of their
sympathy with all I said, and made a heavy sighing over the bitterness
of contemporary feeling.

"Why, you cannot say anything to a man with which he does not absolutely
agree," said I, "but he flies up at you in a temper."

They both declared that such a state of things was antichristian.

While we were thus agreeing, what should my tongue stumble upon but a
word in praise of Gambetta's moderation? The old soldier's countenance
was instantly suffused with blood; with the palms of his hands he beat
the table like a naughty child.

"_Comment, monsieur?_" he shouted. "_Comment?_ Gambetta moderate? Will
you dare to justify these words?"

But the priest had not forgotten the tenor of our talk. And suddenly, in
the height of his fury, the old soldier found a warning look directed on
his face; the absurdity of his behaviour was brought home to him in a
flash; and the storm came to an abrupt end, without another word.

It was only in the morning, over our coffee (Friday, September 27th),
that this couple found out I was a heretic. I suppose I had misled them
by some admiring expressions as to the monastic life around us; and it
was only by a point-blank question that the truth came out. I had been
tolerantly used both by simple Father Apollinaris and astute Father
Michael; and the good Irish deacon, when he heard of my religious
weakness, had only patted me upon the shoulder and said, "You must be a
Catholic and come to heaven." But I was now among a different sect of
orthodox. These two men were bitter and upright and narrow, like the
worst of Scotsmen, and indeed, upon my heart, I fancy they were worse.
The priest snorted aloud like a battle-horse.

"_Et vous prétendez mourir dans cette espèce de croyance?_" he demanded;
and there is no type used by mortal printers large enough to qualify his
accent.

I humbly indicated that I had no design of changing.

But he could not away with such a monstrous attitude. "No, no," he
cried; "you must change. You have come here, God has led you here, and
you must embrace the opportunity."

I made a slip in policy; I appealed to the family affections, though I
was speaking to a priest and a soldier, two classes of men
circumstantially divorced from the kind and homely ties of life.

"Your father and mother?" cried the priest. "Very well; you will convert
them in their turn when you go home."

I think I see my father's face! I would rather tackle the Gætulian lion
in his den than embark on such an enterprise against the family
theologian.