En Route

by J.-K. Huysmans

When the mass was over, he made his way towards his cell to get a tablet of chocolate.

At the top of the stairs M. Bruno, with a large apron round him, was getting ready to clean the steps.

Durtal looked on him with surprise. The oblate smiled and shook hands with him.

"This is an excellent task for the soul," he said, showing his broom; "it recalls modest sentiments which one is too inclined to forget after living in the world."

And he began sweeping vigorously, and collecting into a pan the dust which like pepper filled every crevice in the floor.

Durtal carried his tablet into the garden. "Let us consider," he said to himself as he nibbled it; "supposing I took another walk and tried an unknown part of the wood?" And he felt no wish to do so. "No, placed as I am, I would rather haunt the same spot and not leave the places to which I am accustomed; I am already so little under control, and so easily disturbed, that I do not wish to risk anything by curiosity to see new places." And he went down to the cross pond. He went along the banks, and having reached the end, was astonished to find, a few steps farther, a stream spotted with green pellicules, hollowing its way between two hedges which fenced in the monastery. The fields stretched out beyond, and the roofs of a large farmhouse were visible in the trees, and all round the horizon on hills were forests which seemed to stop the way before the sky.

"I imagined the grounds were larger," he said to himself, retracing his steps; and having reached the end of the cross pond, he gazed on the huge wooden crucifix reared in the air which was reflected in that black mirror. It sank down, seen from behind, trembling in the small waves stirred up by the breeze, and seemed to fall whirling round in that stretch of ink. And as the body of the marble Christ was hidden by the wood, only the two white arms which hung below the tree could be seen, twisted in the blackness of the water.

Seated on the grass, Durtal gazed on the hazy image of the recumbent cross, and thinking of his soul, which, like the pond, was tanned and stained by a bed of dead leaves and a dunghill of sins, he pitied the Saviour whom he was about to invite to bathe Himself there, for it would no longer be the Martyr of Golgotha to whom at all events death came on a hill, His head high, by daylight, in the open air! but it would be by an increase of outrages, the abominable plunging of the crucified body, the head low, by night, into a depth of mud.

"Ah! it would be time to spare Him, in filtering and clarifying me," he cried to himself. And the swan, till then motionless in an arm of the pond, swept over the lamentable image in advancing, and whitened the moving mourning of the waters with its peaceful reflection.

And Durtal thought of the absolution which he would perhaps obtain, and he reopened his prayer-book and numbered his faults; and, slowly, as on the day before, he tapped, in his innermost being, a fountain of tears.