Flute and Violin, and Other Kentucky Tales and Romances

by James Lane Allen

"By extinguishing the fires of nature! Why should not faith and nature grow strong together? I have spent my life on the hill-side back yonder, as you know, and I have had leisure enough for studying these monks. I have tried to do them justice. At different times I have almost lived with St. Benedict at Subiaco, and St. Patrick on the mountain, and St. Anthony in the desert, and St. Thomas in the cell. I understand and value the elements of truth and beauty in the lives of the ancient solitaries. But they belong so inalienably to the past. We have outgrown the ideals of antiquity. How can a man now look upon his body as his evil tenement of flesh? How can he believe that he approaches sainthood by destroying his manhood? The highest type of personal holiness is said to be attained in the cloister. That is not true. The highest type of personal holiness is to be attained in the thick of the world's temptations. Then it becomes sublime. It seems to me that the heroisms worth speaking of nowadays are active, not meditative. But why should I say this to you, who as much as any one else have taught me to think thus—I who myself am able to do nothing? But though I can do nothing, I can at least look upon the monastic ideal of life as an empty, dead, husk, into which no man with the largest ideas of duty will ever compress his powers. Even granting that it develops personal holiness, this itself is but one element in the perfect character, and not even the greatest one."

"But do you suppose that these monks have deliberately and freely chosen their vocation? You know perfectly well that often there are almost overwhelming motives impelling men and women to hide themselves away from the world—from, its sorrows, its dangers, its temptations."

"You are at least orthodox. I know that such motives exist, but are they sufficient? Of course there was a time when the cloister was a refuge from dangers. Certainly that is not true in this country now. And as for the sorrows and temptations, I say that they must be met in the world. There is no sorrow befalling a man in the world that he should not bear in the world—bear it as well for the sake of his own character as for the sake of helping others who suffer like him. This way lie moral heroism and martyrdom. This way, even, lies the utmost self-sacrifice, if one will only try to see it. No, I have but little sympathy with such cases. The only kind of monk who has all my sympathy is the one that is produced by early training and education. Take a boy whose nature has nothing in common with the scourge and the cell. Immure him. Never let him get from beneath the shadow of convent walls or away from the sound of masses and the waving of crucifixes. Bend him, train him, break him, until he turns monk despite nature's purposes, and ceases to be a man without becoming a saint. I have sympathy for him. Sympathy! I do not know of any violation of the law of personal liberty that gives me so much positive suffering."

"But why suffer over imaginary cases? Such constraint belongs to the past."

"On the contrary, it is just such an instance of constraint that has colored my thoughts of this abbey. It is this that has led me to haunt the place for years from a sort of sad fascination. Men find their way to this valley from the remotest parts of the world. No one knows from what inward or outward stress they come. They are hidden away here and their secret histories are buried with them. But the history of one of these fathers is known, for he has grown up here under the shadow of these monastery walls. You may think the story one of mediæval flavor, but I believe its counterpart will here and there be found as long as monasteries rise and human beings fall.

"He was an illegitimate child. Who his father was, no one ever so much as suspected. When his mother died he was left a homeless waif in one of the Kentucky towns. But some invisible eye was upon him. He was soon afterwards brought to the boarding-school for poor boys which is taught by the Trappist fathers here. Perhaps this was done by his father, who wished to get him safely out of the world. Well, he has never left this valley since then. The fathers have been his only friends and advisers. He has never looked on the face of a woman since he looked into his mother's when a child. He knows no more of the modern world—except what the various establishments connected with the abbey have taught him—than the most ancient hermit. While he was in the Trappist school, during afternoons and vacations he worked in the monastery fields with the lay-brothers. With them he ate and slept. When his education was finished he became a lay-brother himself. But amid such influences the rest of the story is foreseen; in a few years he put on the brown robe and leathern girdle of a brother of the order, and last year he took final vows, and now wears the white cowl and black scapular of a priest."

"But if he has never known any other life, he, most of all, should be contented with this. It seems to me that it would be much harder to have known human life and then renounce it."

"That is because you are used to dwell upon the good, and strive to better the evil. No; I do not believe that he is happy. I do not believe nature is ever thwarted without suffering, and nature in him never cried out for the monkish life, but against it. His first experience with the rigors of its discipline proved nearly fatal. He was prostrated with long illness. Only by special indulgence in food and drink was his health restored. His system even now is not inured to the cruel exactions of his order. You see, I have known him for years. I was first attracted to him as a lonely little fellow with the sad lay-brothers in the fields. As I would pass sometimes, he would eye me with a boy's unconscious appeal for the young and for companionship. I have often gone into the abbey since then, to watch and study him. He works with a terrible pent-up energy. I know his type among the young Kentuckians. They make poor monks. Time and again they have come here to join the order. But all have soon fallen away. Only Father Palemon has ever persevered to the taking of the vows that bind him until death. My father knew his mother and says that he is much like her—an impulsive, passionate, trustful, beautiful creature, with the voice of a seraph. Father Palemon himself has the richest voice in the monks' choir. Ah, to hear him, in the dark chapel, sing the Salve Regina! The others seem to moderate their own voices, that his may rise clear and uncommingled to the vaulted roof. But I believe that it is only the music he feels. He puts passion and an outcry for human sympathy into every note. Do you wonder that I am so strongly drawn towards him? I can give you no idea of his appearance. I shall show you his photograph, but that will not do it. I have often imagined you two together by the very law of contrast. I think of you at home in New York City, with your charities, your missions, your energetic, untiring beneficence. You stand at one extreme. Then I think of him at the other—doing nothing, shut up in this valley, spending his magnificent manhood in a never-changing, never-ending routine of sterile vigils and fasts and prayers. Oh, we should change places, he and I! I should be in there and he out here. He should be lying here by your side, looking up into your face, loving you as I have loved you, and winning you as I never can. Oh, Madeline, Madeline, Madeline!"

The rapid, broken utterance suddenly ceased.

In the deep stillness that followed, Father Palemon heard the sound of a low sob and a groan.