Two Summers in Guyenne: A Chronicle of the Wayside and Waterside

by Edward Harrison Barker

Presently he returned with a bottle under his arm, and then I learnt that the abbot had given orders that I was to pass the night dans la chambre de Monseigneur. The prospect of sleeping in the bishop's bed furnished me with a conscientious reason for not drawing the cork from the second bottle of monastic barley-brew; but my companion, who was more or less in religion, did not give me a chance of refusing, for he drew it himself and filled two glasses.

'Nous allons trinquer,' said he.

We clinked glasses, and talked with greater freedom, although the postulant still spoke under his breath—it was a habit that he had fallen into. We were interrupted by a scuffling outside, and by the opening of the door. A couple of monks in brown frocks were on the threshold. A small gray-bearded brother with a bent back held in one hand a pewter plate and in the other a little basin of the same metal. He was the frère cuisinier, who had returned from salve, and he had come to offer me some vegetable soup and some more macaroni, both of which I declined. Not a word did these Trappists say, but they carried on with the postulant a conversation in dumb show as to what my requirements would be on the morrow. They stroked their noses, rubbed their fingers together, and grimaced so expressively all on my account that I was much amused, and would have liked to laugh outright; but I durst not in such company.

When they had left I took a stroll outside, for as yet I felt no inclination to go to bed, notwithstanding that a bishop had slept upon the same mattress that was waiting for me. Keeping within the convent bounds, where no woman is allowed to set her foot—that troublesome foot whose imprint may be found on most of the paths that lead to a Trappist monastery in the obscure forest of human motives—wandering beyond the buildings, but still within the enclosure, I came to a bit of waste land covered with heather and gorse that overlooked the wooded wilderness towards the west, as a headland bluff overlooks the sea.

The sun had set, and the wild spirits of the storm had drawn a translucent drapery of vapour from the dark thundercloud hovering overhead to where the fringe of the forest broke the blood-stained bar upon the horizon's verge, and this luminous orange-coloured curtain was crossed every moment upwards and downwards by silvery shafts of lightning. Such an effect of sunset combined with storm was like a new revelation of nature, and the sublimity of the spectacle would have held me fast to the patch of wild heath if the rain had not begun to fall in splashes. The long summer day was over, and the night came forth in trouble and with gushing tears. The roar of the thunder grew louder, and the flash of the lightning brightened every minute.

I returned to the monastery, and found the postulant quite anxious to have done with me, and to put me into the bishop's room. He was sleepy—everybody gets sleepy in these country places at about nine o'clock, irrespective of canonical hours, whereas I grow livelier, like a night-bird, as the dusk deepens. All the monks must have been in their cells snoring with the clear conscience which is the gift of the day that has been well filled up when I reluctantly entered the only room in the place that had any pretension to comfort, but which to me was like a prison. I was making an effort to acquire the virtue of resignation, when the postulant spoilt the mood by speaking again of beer. Had he picked up in his wanderings the notion that an Englishman could not live unless he were kept well supplied with beer, or had he formed an exaggerated idea of the seductiveness of the strange but innocent liquor that the Trappists brewed? Whatever his thoughts may have been, he darted away in spite of my endeavour to stop him, and presently reappeared with another black bottle. I knew that he had not obtained it without diplomacy, and that he had made my unquenchable thirst the excuse; but by this time I had perceived that his solicitude was not wholly unselfish. He muttered something about 'charity' as he filled a glass for me, notwithstanding my refusal; then vanished with the bottle. He had promised to wake me at two o'clock for matins.

When left alone, I made an inspection of the bishop's room. It was spacious enough for fifty people to dance in, and the furniture would not have been greatly in the way. The stones which made the floor had no carpet, not even the descente de lit, which in France is considered indispensable even when the floor is of wood. In the corner was a low wooden bedstead with dingy curtains suspended from a rafter, and a paillasse of maize-leaves with a thin wool mattress above it. Coarse hempen sheets and a coloured coverlet completed the bedding. By the side against the wall was a broad prie-Dieu, with a lithograph just above it of the Holy Child bearing the cross. A plain table in the centre without a cloth, a secrétaire with high crucifix attached, another bare table with washing-basin, jug, and folded towel, with a few chairs and several religious prints, made up the furniture.

This room was on the ground-floor, and looked out upon a long covered terrace, with the farmyard immediately beyond. I opened the sashes—I had already prevailed upon the postulant not to fasten the shutters—and, having blown out the candle, I lit my pipe. I suppose if I had had any sense of propriety I should have refrained from smoking in the bishop's room; but what was I to do, a prisoner there at nine o'clock in the evening, and not a bit sleepy? If it had been a fine evening, I do not think I could have resisted the temptation to jump out of the window and to stroll back to the patch of imprisoned moor. First a cat and then a great dog came sneaking along, and I tried to get on friendly terms with them from the window; but they, too, seemed to have renounced the world, with all its pomps and vanities, to conform to the Trappist rule, for each of them looked at me with pity and reproach out of the corner of the eye, and described a wide semicircle, at the risk of getting wet, in order not to be drawn into conversation. But the storm, at all events, had not been silenced; the thunder growled and groaned, and every half-minute the lightning lit up all the stones and puddles of the great farmyard, beyond which my vision was cut off by the roofs of the outbuildings.

Notwithstanding the unpleasantness of being shut up, I felt that if the management of the weather had been left to me I could not have arranged things better for my first night in a Trappist monastery. Here I was in the midst of the desolation of the Double under the same roof with men who were driven into this shelter by the desolation of their souls. Tempest-tossed by the conflict of the spirit and the flesh, wounded, perhaps, by secret griefs and humiliations, strong, perchance, in the eyes of others, while never sure of themselves from one hour to another, putting out upon the same sea again and again only to be thrown back upon the same desert shore, they at length settled down here, and they must have done so with the calm conviction that they had found the medicine to suit their kind of sickness in a life of incessant punishment of self and labour for others.

It was about eleven when I felt tired enough to lie down. I had not been in this position long when something bit me. I thought I knew the enemy, but I dared not whisper its name even to myself, for I was overcome by its condescension. From a bishop to me was a fall in the social scale that ought to have made the most voracious insect tremble on the edge of the precipice. Maybe it did tremble before it yielded to temptation and forgot its dignity.