The Wish House and Other Stories (68 page)

‘I am unworthy – unworthy,’ Thomas repeated pitifully.

‘Not you – but – to your own master you stand or fall. And now that my work releases me for awhile, I’ll drink with any philosopher out of any school. And, Thomas,’ he coaxed, ‘a hot bath for me in the infirmary before vespers.’

When the abbot’s perfectly cooked and served meal had ended, and the deep-fringed naperies were removed, and the prior had sent in the keys with word that all was fast in the monastery, and the keys had been duly returned with the word, ‘Make it so till Prime,’ the abbot and his guests went out to cool themselves in an upper cloister that took them, by way of the leads, to the south choir side of the triforium. The summer sun was still strong, for it was barely six o’clock, but the abbey church, of course, lay in her wonted darkness. Lights were being lit for choir-practice thirty feet below.

‘Our cantor gives them no rest,’ the abbot whispered. ‘Stand by this pillar and we’ll hear what he’s driving them at now.’

‘Remember, all!’ the cantor’s hard voice came up. ‘This is the soul of Bernard himself, attacking our evil world. Take it quicker than yesterday, and throw all your words clean-bitten from you. In the loft there! Begin!’

The organ broke out for an instant, alone and raging. Then the voices crashed together into that first fierce line of the
‘De Contemptu Mundi.’
^*

‘
Hora novissima – tempora pessima’ –
a dead pause till the assenting
sunt
broke, like a sob, out of the darkness, and one boy’s voice, clearer than silver trumpets, returned the long-drawn
vigilemus
.

‘
Ecce minaciter, imminet Arbiter’
(organ and voices were leashed together in terror and warning, breaking away liquidly to the
‘Ule supremus’).
Then the tone-colours shifted for the prelude to –
‘Imminet, imminet, ut mala terminet—‘

‘Stop! Again!’ cried the cantor; and gave his reasons a little more roundly than was natural at choir-practice.

‘Ah! Pity o’ man’s vanity! He’s guessed we are here. Come away!’ said the abbot. Anne of Norton, in her carried chair, had been listening too, further along the dark triforium, with Roger of Salerno. John heard her sob. On the way back, he asked Thomas how her health stood. Before Thomas could reply the sharp-featured Italian doctor pushed between them. ‘Following on our talk together, I judged it best to tell her,’ said he to Thomas.

‘What?’ John asked simply enough.

‘What she knew already.’ Roger of Salerno launched into a Greek quotation to the effect that every woman knows all about everything.

‘I have no Greek,’ said John stiffly. Roger of Salerno had been giving them a good deal of it, at dinner.

‘Then I’ll come to you in Latin. Ovid hath it neatly.
“Utque malum late solet immedicabile cancer-”
but doubtless you know the rest, worthy sir.’

‘Alas! My school-Latin’s but what I’ve gathered by the way from fools professing to heal sick women.
“Hocus-pocus
—” but doubtless you know the rest, worthy sir.’

Roger of Salerno was quite quiet till they regained the dining-room, where the fire had been comforted and the dates, raisins, ginger, figs, and cinnamon-scented sweetmeats set out, with the choicer wines, on the after-table. The abbot seated himself, drew off his ring, dropped it, that all might hear the tinkle, into an empty silver cup, stretched his feet towards the hearth, and looked at the great gilt and carved rose in the barrel-roof. The silence that keeps from Compline to Matins had closed on their world. The bull-necked friar watched a ray of sunlight split itself into colours on the rim of a crystal salt-cellar; Roger of Salerno had re-opened some discussion with Brother Thomas on a type of spotted fever that was baffling them both in England and abroad; John took note of the keen profile, and – it might serve as a note for the Great Luke – his hand moved to his bosom. The abbot saw, and nodded permission. John whipped out silver-point and sketch-book.

‘Nay – modesty is good enough – but deliver your own opinion,’ the Italian was urging the infirmarían. Out of courtesy to the foreigner nearly all the talk was in table-Latin; more formal and more copious than monk’s patter. Thomas began with his meek stammer.

‘I confess myself at a loss for the cause of the fever unless – as Varro saith in his
De Re Rustica –
certain small animals which the eye cannot follow enter the body by the nose and mouth, and set up grave diseases. On the other hand, this is not in Scripture.’

Roger of Salerno hunched head and shoulders like an angry cat. ‘Always
that
!’ he said, and John snatched down the twist of the thin lips.

‘Never at rest, John.’ The abbot smiled at the artist. ‘You should break off every two hours for prayers, as we do. St Benedict was no fool. Two hours is all that a man can carry the edge of his eye or hand.’

‘For copyists – yes. Brother Martin is not sure after one hour. But when a man’s work takes him, he must go on till it lets him go.’

‘Yes, that is the Demon of Socrates,’ the friar from Oxford rumbled above his cup.

‘The doctrine leans toward presumption,’ said the abbot.
‘Remember, “Shall mortal man be more just than his Maker?”’

There is no danger of justice;’ the friar spoke bitterly. ‘But at least Man might be suffered to go forward in his art or his thought. Yet if Mother Church sees or hears him move anyward, what says she? “No!” Always “No.”’

‘But if the little animals of Varro be invisible’ – this was Roger of Salerno to Thomas – ‘how are we any nearer to a cure?’

‘By experiment’ – the friar wheeled round on them suddenly. ‘By reason and experiment. The one is useless without the other. But Mother Church—‘

‘Ay!’ Roger de Salerno dashed at the fresh bait like a pike. ‘Listen, sirs. Her bishops – our princes – strew our roads in Italy with carcasses that they make for their pleasure or wrath. Beautiful corpses! Yet if I – if we doctors – so much as raise the skin of one of them to look at God’s fabric beneath, what says Mother Church? “Sacrilege! Stick to your pigs and dogs, or you burn!’”

‘And not Mother Church only!’ the friar chimed in.
‘Every
way we are barred – barred by the words of some man, dead a thousand years, which are held final. Who is any son of Adam that his one say-so should close a door towards truth? I would not except even Peter Peregrinus, my own great teacher.’

‘Nor I Paul of Aegina,’ Roger of Salerno cried. ‘Listen, sirs! Here is a case to the very point. Apuleius affirmeth, if a man eat fasting of the juice of the cut-leaved buttercup –
sceleratus
we call it, which means “rascally”’ – this with a condescending nod towards John – ‘his soul will leave his body laughing. Now this is the lie more dangerous than truth, since truth of a sort is in it.’

‘He’s away!’ whispered the abbot despairingly.

‘For the juice of that herb, I know by experiment, burns, blisters, and wries the mouth. I know also the
rictus
, or pseudo-laughter, on the face of such as have perished by the strong poisons of herbs allied to this ranunculus. Certainly that spasm resembles laughter. It seems then, in my judgment, that Apuleius, having seen the body of one thus poisoned, went off at score and wrote that the man died laughing.’

‘Neither staying to observe, nor to confirm observation by experiment,’ added the friar, frowning.

Stephen the Abbot cocked an eyebrow toward John.

‘How think
you?’
said he.

‘I’m no doctor,’ John returned, ‘but I’d say Apuleius in all these years might have been betrayed by his copyists. They take short-cuts to save ’emselves trouble. Put case that Apuleius wrote
the soul
seems to
leave the body laughing, after this poison. There’s not three copyists in five
(my
judgment) would not leave out the “seems to”. For who’d question Apuleius? If it seemed so to him, so it must be. Otherwise any child knows cut-leaved buttercup.’

‘Have you knowledge of herbs?’ Roger of Salerno asked curtly.

‘Only that, when I was a boy in convent, I’ve made tetters round my mouth and on my neck with buttercup-juice, to save going to prayer o’ cold nights.’

‘Ah!’ said Roger. ‘I profess no knowledge of tricks.’ He turned aside, stiffly.

‘No matter! Now for your own tricks, John,’ the tactful Abbot broke in. ‘You shall show the doctors your Magdalene and your Gadarene Swine and the devils.’

‘Devils? Devils? I have produced devils by means of drugs; and have abolished them by the same means. Whether devils be external to mankind or immanent, I have not yet pronounced.’ Roger of Salerno was still angry.

‘Ye dare not,’ snapped the friar from Oxford. ‘Mother Church makes Her own devils.’

‘Not wholly! Our John has come back from Spain with brand-new ones.’ Abbot Stephen took the vellum handed to him, and laid it tenderly on the table. They gathered to look. The Magdalene was drawn in palest, almost transparent, grisaille, against a raging, swaying background of woman-faced devils, each broke to and by her special sin, and each, one could see, frenziedly straining against the Power that compelled her.

‘I’ve never seen the like of this grey shadow-work,’ said the abbot. ‘How came you by it?’

‘Non nobis!
It came to me,’ said John, not knowing he was a generation or so ahead of his time in the use of that medium.

‘Why is she so pale?’ the friar demanded.

‘Evil has all come out of her – she’d take any colour now.’

‘Ay, like light through glass. I see.’

Roger of Salerno was looking in silence – his nose nearer and nearer the page. ‘It is so,’ he pronounced finally. ‘Thus it is in epilepsy – mouth, eyes, and forehead – even to the droop of her wrist there. Every sign of it! She will need restoratives, that woman, and, afterwards, sleep natural. No poppy-juice, or she will vomit on her waking. And thereafter – but I am not in my schools.’ He drew himself up. ‘Sir,’ said he, ‘you should be of Our calling. For, by the Snakes of Aesculapius, you
seel’

The two struck hands as equals.

‘And how think you of the Seven Devils?’ the abbot went on.

These melted into convoluted flower- or flame-like bodies, ranging in colour from phosphorescent green to the black purple of outworn iniquity, whose hearts could be traced beating through their substance. But, for sign of hope and the sane workings of life, to be regained, the deep border was of conventionalized spring flowers and birds, all crowned by a kingfisher in haste, atilt through a clump of yellow iris.

Roger of Salerno identified the herbs and spoke largely of their virtues.

‘And now, the Gadarene Swine,’ said Stephen. John laid the picture on the table.

Here were devils dishoused, in dread of being abolished to the Void, huddling and hurtling together to force lodgment by every opening into the brute bodies offered. Some of the swine fought the invasion, foaming and jerking; some were surrendering to it, sleepily, as to a luxurious back-scratching; others, wholly possessed, whirled off in bucking droves for the lake beneath. In one corner the freed man stretched out his limbs all restored to his control, and Our Lord, seated, looked at him as questioning what he would make of his deliverance.

‘Devils indeed!’ was the friar’s comment. ‘But wholly a new sort.’

Some devils were mere lumps, with lobes and protuberances – a hint of a fiend’s face peering through jelly-like walls. And there was a family of impatient, globular devillings who had burst open the belly of their smirking parent, and were revolving desperately towards their prey. Others patterned themselves into rods, chains and ladders, single or conjoined, round the throat and jaws of a shrieking sow, from whose ear emerged the lashing, glassy tail of a devil that had made good his refuge. And there were granulated and conglomerate devils, mixed up with the foam and slaver where the attack was fiercest. Thence the eye carried on to the insanely active backs of the downward-racing swine, the swineherd’s aghast face, and his dog’s terror.

Said Roger of Salerno, ‘I pronounce that these were begotten of drugs. They stand outside the rational mind.’

‘Not these,’ said Thomas the Infirmarian, who as a servant of the monastery should have asked his abbot’s leave to speak. ‘Not
these
– look! – in the bordure.’

The border to the picture was a diaper of irregular but balanced compartments or cellules, where sat, swam, or weltered, devils in blank, so to say – things as yet uninspired by Evil – indifferent, but
lawlessly outside imagination. Their shapes resembled, again, ladders, chains, scourges, diamonds, aborted buds, or gravid phosphorescent globes – some well-nigh star-like.

Roger of Salerno compared them to the obsessions of a churchman’s mind.

‘Malignant?’ the friar from Oxford questioned.

‘“Count everything unknown for horrible,’” Roger quoted with scorn.

‘Not I. But they are marvellous – marvellous. I think—‘

The friar drew back. Thomas edged in to see better, and half opened his mouth.

‘Speak,’ said Stephen, who had been watching him. ‘We are all in a sort doctors here.’

‘I would say then’ – Thomas rushed at it as one putting out his life’s belief at the stake – ‘that these lower shapes in the bordure may not be so much hellish and malignant as models and patterns upon which John has tricked out and embellished his proper devils among the swine above there!’

‘And that would signify?’ said Roger of Salerno sharply.

‘In my poor judgment, that he may have seen such shapes-without help of drugs.’

‘Now who –
who,’
said John of Burgos, after a round and unregarded oath, ‘has made thee so wise of a sudden, my doubter?’

‘I wise? God forbid! Only, John, remember – one winter six years ago – the snowflakes melting on your sleeve at the cookhouse-door. You showed me them through a little crystal, that made small things larger.’

‘Yes. The Moors call such a glass the Eye of Allah,’ John confirmed.

‘You showed me them melting – six-sided. You called them, then, your patterns.’

‘True. Snowflakes melt six-sided. I have used them for diaper-work often.’