Part 49 (1/2)
concluded the abbot with a smile.
”Yes, but you are minimists, you suppress the family and woman, you live on nothing, and expect the only real recompense for your labours after death. How can you make the people in the towns understand that?”
”The social system may thus be summed up, as I think: the masters wish to profit by the workmen, who in their turn desire to be paid as much as possible for as little work as possible. Well, then, there is no way out of that.”
”Exactly, and there is the sad part of it, for socialism in fact arises from kindly ideas, just ideas, and will always run up against egotism and gain, against the inevitable breakers of the sins of man.
”And your little chocolate factory gives you at least some income?”
”Yes; that saves us.”
The abbot was silent for a second; then he went on,
”You know, sir, how a convent is founded. I take for example our Order.
A domain and the lands about it are offered the Order on condition that it peoples them. The Order takes a handful of its monks, and settles them as a swarm on the soil given to it. There its task stops. The grain must spring up of itself, or to put it differently, the Trappists, severed from their mother-house, must gain their livelihood, and suffice for themselves.
”So when we took possession of these buildings we were so poor, that from bread to shoes everything was lacking; but we had no anxiety for the future, for there is no example in monastic history that Providence has not succoured abbeys who trusted in it. Little by little we drew our food from the estate, and we learnt useful trades; now we make our habits and our shoes; we reap our wheat and make our bread; our material existence is therefore a.s.sured, but the taxes crush us; therefore we have founded this factory, of which the report becomes better from year to year.
”In a year or two the building which shelters us, and for want of money we have been unable to repair, will tumble down, but if G.o.d then allows generous souls to come to our aid, perhaps we shall be in a condition to build a monastery, which is the wish of all of us; for indeed this hovel with its rooms in confusion, and its rotunda-chapel, is painful to us.”
The abbot was silent again, then after a pause he said in a low voice, speaking to himself,
”It cannot be denied, a convent which has not the look of a cloister is an obstacle to vocations; the postulant has need--and this is quite natural--to mould himself in surroundings which please him, to encourage himself in a church which wraps him round, in a somewhat sombre chapel; and to obtain that result you want the Romanesque or Gothic style.”
”Ah, yes, indeed. And have you many novices?”
”We have especially many subjects who desire to feel the life of Trappists, but the greater part do not succeed in supporting our way of life. Beside even the question of knowing whether the vocation of the beginners is imaginary or real, we are from the physical point of view clearly fixed after a fortnight's trial.”
”Eating vegetables only must crush the most robust const.i.tutions; I do not even understand how, leading an active life, you can bear it.”
”The truth is that bodies obey where souls are resolute. Our ancestors endured the life of the Trappists very well. We want souls at the present day. I remember that when I made my probation in a Cistercian cloister I had no health, and yet had it been necessary I would have eaten stones!
”Moreover, the rule will soon be softened,” pursued the abbot; ”but in any case there is a country which, if there should be scarcity, a.s.sures us a good number of recruits, Holland.”
And seeing Durtal's look of astonishment, the father said,
”Yes, in that Protestant country mystic vegetation is flouris.h.i.+ng.
Catholicism is all the more fervent that it is, if not persecuted, at least despised, drowned in the ma.s.s of Calvinists. Perhaps this belongs also to the nature of the soil, to its solitary plains, its silent ca.n.a.ls, to the very taste of the Dutch for a regular and peaceable life; but in that little knot of Catholics the Cistercian vocation is always very common.”
Durtal looked at the Trappist as he walked majestic and quiet, his head buried in his hood, his hands pa.s.sed under his cincture.
From time to time his eyes grew bright inside his hood, and the amethyst which he wore on his finger sparkled in brief flames.
No sound was heard; at this hour the monastery was asleep. Durtal and the abbot were walking on the banks of the great pond, where the water was alive, it alone wakeful in the slumber of the woods, for the moon, which shone in a cloudless sky, sowed a myriad of goldfish, and this luminous sp.a.w.n, fallen from the planet, mounted, descended, sparkled in a thousand little points of fire, of which the wind as it blew increased the brightness.
The abbot spoke no longer, and Durtal, who was thinking, intoxicated by the sweetness of the night, groaned suddenly. He had just considered that at this same hour the next day he would be at Paris, and seeing the monastery, whose pale front appeared at the end of a walk as at the end of a dark tunnel, he cried, thinking of all the monks who inhabited it,
”Ah! they are happy!”