“Nonsense, Pierre,” I laughed. “What foolishness is this?”
“Si, si, si, monsieur! It is true,” he insisted vehemently, “every word. I swear it. He would not burn the monastery, that German; and so to-night and for one hundred years the monks sing and march in procession for him.”
“Go find a garage!” I ordered in disgust. The idea of Belgian monks holding service for a German was absurd. Chauffeur tales, I had found, while often interesting, were not always true. “Pierre must think me a fool indeed to tell me such a stupid falsehood,” I thought, as I went grumblingly up the street.
Dusk and the gray rain fell together, covering the gray city with an impenetrable shroud. Ghostly walls and empty balconies, bricks, ashes, gaunt wooden fences to hide the worst of the ruins; a stray dog which snapped as he ran past; women with black shawls over their bent heads hurrying along the street; a file of stodgy German Landsturm plodding through the rain—these things I saw as I walked through the city where Lipsius had taught, the city which had been the home of learning and art and the seat of Catholic piety for more than five centuries, the city whose ruin is one of many eternal blots on the ’scutcheon of Germany.
I climbed up past the tall stately hill called Mont César—a height on which local legend says Cæsar built a camp and a fortress—where the dour, unbeautiful monastery of Mont César broods over the wrecked city.
The pater hospitalis, Jan Heynderyckx, greeted me with grave pleasure. He was not old, yet the beard which just touched the breast of his Benedictine habit was almost white, his eyes were gray and tired, and his skin, in the fluttering candlelight, was like the vellum of mediæval manuscripts. I had an odd fancy that his face was a perfect transcript of his life, limned by the hands of life and death, fear, ecstasy, hope, ambition, love, and hate. He bowed me into a small reception room at the right of the arched door and went for sherry and tobacco. Far away, from the chapel, came the faint thunder of bass voices chanting a service. It echoed and re-echoed through the hollow halls, roaring and subsiding like distant waves. The monks were singing litanies for the murdered city.
The room where I sat was curious; little larger than a closet. On the four walls hung old oil paintings of fathers-superior of the Benedictine order: Dom Pothier, Dom Schmitt, Dom Egbert—sombre, saintly men whose bones long since were dust. But over the wooden mantel opposite me hung a framed photograph. It amused and fascinated me—that one touch of modernity in the bleak monastic hall—and I stared at it dreamily.
“Ah, the photograph, monsieur?” The monk had entered quietly and stood beside me. He, too, gazed at the picture, while his hands poured the wine and set forth Turkish cigarettes. “To your good health, monsieur le Délégué. The photograph?” He took a huge pinch of snuff, flourished his handkerchief, and breathed noisily. “You may look at it if you wish.”
“A thousand thanks, brother,” I answered indifferently, rising and going toward the little frame. The monk followed me, catching up a flickering candle and holding it close to the glass for me to see the better.